Futility

by William Gerhardie

  I learnt that Nikolai Vasilievich had just discovered that his book-keeper Stanitski, at the instigation of his house-agent, had these last five years been falsifying the books and robbing him wholesale. When the discovery was made the house-agent had vanished into the darkness whence he had emerged. But as I entered I was very nearly knocked down by Nikolai Vasilievich dashing after Stanitski, the book-keeper, as he was flying down the stairs. He caught him by the tail of his overcoat and dragged him back into his study. He had him standing, stiff and awkward and ashamed, before his desk, while he himself reclined in his arm-chair.

  Nikolai Vasilievich did not shout, as Stanitski, who knew his master intimately, had, no doubt, expected him to do. He spoke quietly and even sadly; and it was the sadness of his speech that penetrated Stanitski’s Slavic nature to the heart. “How could you have cheated me like that, Ivan Sergeiech—me who have trusted you?”

  And Stanitski became emotional. “Nikolai Vasilievich!” he exclaimed with his hands joined together and the whites of his eyes turned heavenward. “Nikolai Vasilievich! God in Heaven knows I have not been helping myself to your money, as you seem to think, recklessly. But since I took a little—and I have a wife, children, dependents—I had to do what the house-agent told me. I was in his hands, at the mercy of a blackguard and a robber. Nikolai Vasilievich: I often felt I wanted to warn you of this rascal. But I was in his hands … since I took myself. But I took in measure, Nikolai Vasilievich, conscientiously, with my eyes on God.…”

  The old man sobbed bitter tears. He felt that fate had dealt him a cruel blow, unjustifiably cruel, in return for his moderation.

  What could be done to him? Baron Wunderhausen, who now, as Soma’s husband, lived with the family, suggested handing the man over to the Bolshevik militia. But Nikolai Vasilievich only waved his hand. I think it was the family aspect of the old man’s position that penetrated Nikolai Vasilievich to the heart. He sat there at his desk, brooding darkly, while Stanitski, gently, like a cat, felt his way out of the flat.

  Fanny Ivanovna sighed conspicuously.

  “An optimistic gentleman—Stanitski,” I remarked. “What a belief in the kindliness of things! What a claim on the favour of Providence!”

  “And, as it happens, he is not far wrong in his calculations,” said the Baron with a bitterness which showed that he, as son-in-law, was dissatisfied with the management of the family’s finances. “I call this state of things disgraceful.”

  “God have mercy upon us!” whispered Fanny Ivanovna, almost ironically.

  “An optimist,” I digressed aloud, “is a fool, since he can’t see what awaits him—disillusionment. But he is wise without knowing it, since, however bad the present, he remains an optimist as to the future, and so his present seems never quite so bad to him as it really is.”

  “Say it again,” breathed Nina.

  “A fool,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “is an optimist. He is optimistic about himself, optimistic about his folly. I’m an optimist!”

  He stood up, his hands in his trouser pockets, and gazed at the window. Twilight was falling swiftly. Nina, perched up on the sofa, sat silent, her head bent.

  “What’s the good of being miserable?” I said to her.

  “As though I deliberately chose to be miserable!” To console herself, she took an apple.

  “Optimists that we are!” sighed Fanny Ivanovna.

  “Warranting considerable pessimism,” supplied the Baron.

  “It is easier to hope,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “and be disappointed, it is easier to hope knowing that one will be disappointed, than not hope at all.”

  “Why don’t the writers—the novelists—why don’t they write about this, this real life,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “this real drama of life, rather than their neat, reasoned, reasonable and—oh! so unconvincing novels?”

  “This philosophizing won’t help us,” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly. “We ought to do things. I want to do things. This moment I am teeming over with energy. I could do and settle things to-day, square up our affairs, and start life afresh.… But …”

  The Baron looked at him. “Well?”

  “But—” A gesture at the window indicated the obstacle. “What can I do with this? What can anybody do? All is tumbling, going to ruin. In a month or so all business will stop, works will close down. The rouble will be valueless. There will be nothing.…” “Now don’t lose courage, Nikolai,” said Fanny Ivanovna hopefully. “We shall pull through; somehow we shall; and then on the other side of the grave we shall be safe.”

  “Her most optimistic moment in life!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich.

  “It’s a surprising thing what the human soul will stand, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “I can venture only this explanation; it is habit. You see, the cup is ever filled to the brim, but—lo! the miracle! the cup expands. No trouble. None!… And here we are.”

  “Life gets you,” came from the window; “sooner or later it gets you all the same.”

  “I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot think that it’s all in vain. There must be … perhaps a larger pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know? Shall we ever know the reason?”

  “Philosophy!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “when we awaken on the other side of death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their shoulders and will say, ‘We don’t know. It is beyond us. Do you not know?’ … And we shall never know. Never.…”

  “How awfully funnily your mouth moves when you speak,” said Nina, who had been listening to me attentively.

  “Frightfully!”

  “There is no proof,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “that death is the end. But there is no proof, as yet, that death is not the end.”

  “So there is no proof of anything?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.

  “No.”

  “Thank you,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

  The Baron bowed.

  Then Nikolai Vasilievich passed into the hall and put his coat on. As it was time for me to go, we went out together. I remember there was something hopeless about that night, a sense of dread about the political and economic chaos, that seemed to harmonize with Nikolai Vasilievich’s state of mind. I think it may be that he found a kind of ghastly pleasure in the thought that if he was miserable, if destitution stared him in the face, the whole world also seemed to be tumbling about him into decay and ruin. As we crossed the Palace Square we were challenged by a soldier who had emerged from behind a pile of firewood dumped before the Winter Palace. He stepped forward with fixed bayonet and demanded money, while pointing his bayonet at my breast; he held his finger on the trigger. He was considerably drunk. Neither of us happened to have any money. “Got any cigarettes, Comrades?” he asked.

  Neither of us had cigarettes.

  “And I,” explained the drunken soldier, “go about, you know, letting the guts out of the bourgouys.”

  “That’s right, Comrade,” ventured Nikolai Vasilievich. “Kill them all, the dirty dogs!”

  “I will,” said the soldier cheerily, and stalked off into the night, while we went our way.

  Nikolai Vasilievich only shook his head and sighed and shook his head and sighed. He muttered something, but the wind that overtook us carried off his words. I could just catch “… my house … the mines …”

  PART III

  INTERVENING IN SIBERIA

  I

  CERTAIN FRAGMENTS OF SCENE AND SPEECH come back to me with a peculiar insistence, as I write this third portion of my book. I have no hesitation in setting them down as I do, I think accurately enough, if not word for word. I remember them well because they had impressed me. That is the secret of memory. I have forgotten much, but there are scenes I cannot forget, fragments of speech that still ring in my ear, and I shall remember them always; at least, till I have fi
nally pinned them to paper.

  The Admiral and I, and a few others—interesting types, I can assure you—travelled to Siberia, where we engaged in a series of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian revolution. By now, “Intervention” has been relegated to the shelf of history. But I cannot but remember it, not merely as an adventure in futility, as admittedly it was, but as an ever-shifting, changing sense of being alive. For the experience of love is inseparable from its background. Alone it does not exist. It is a modulation of impressions, an interplay of “atmospheres,” a quickening of the fibres of that background into throbbing tissues of an elusive, half-apprehended beauty. It was raining heavily when we arrived in Vladivostok, and the port, as we surveyed it from the boat, looked grey and hopeless, like the Russian situation. A flat had been allotted us, a bare, unfurnished flat in a deserted house standing in a grim and desolate by-street; and there the Admiral made his temporary headquarters. It poured all day long, and it seemed, indeed, as though the rain, playing havoc with the town, would never cease, even as the misery and blundering in Russia would never cease, and that our efforts were not wanted and could do no good.

  That night I entertained General Bologoevski at dinner at the famous restaurant ‘Zolotoy Rog’—nicknamed by British sailors the ‘Solitary Dog.’ He had travelled with us all the way from England, seemingly under vague instructions from some Allied War Office, and had attached himself to our party of his own accord. As we sat down, the head waiter came up to us and respectfully informed the General that by order of the Commander-in-Chief Russian officers were not admitted into restaurants. The General protested feebly, stressing his hunger as a reason for remaining, whereon the head waiter suggested, in an undertone, that the obvious alternative was to remove the epaulets.

  “What! Remove my epaulets! I, a Russian officer? Never!” he protested.

  Whereon a brain-wave struck him. “I know,” said he, looking round the restaurant. It was nearly empty. And instantly he compromised by putting on his mackintosh. “Now,” said he, “in my English Burberry they will take me for an English officer. Ah!” he smiled, and then added his invariable English phrase: “It is a damrotten game, you know.” And, after a momentary contemplation: “I give dem h-h-hell!”

  I ordered chicken soup. The General talked loosely about the Siberian situation. About five minutes after I had ordered soup the waiter returned without being called and very amiably volunteered the information that the soup would be served immediately. When, three-quarters of an hour later, I asked the waiter about the soup, he repeated “Immediately,” but the word now somehow failed to inspire in us the same confidence. The General talked of the Siberian situation for about an hour and a quarter, when we observed that the soup had not been served. I again called the waiter.

  “What about that soup?” I asked.

  “I am afraid, sir,” said the waiter, “you will have to wait a while, for soup is a troublesome thing to prepare nowadays.”

  “How long?”

  “About three-quarters of an hour.”

  General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. I gathered that there was a General Horvat who had formed an All-Russia Government, and that there was also a Siberian Government, defying General Horvat on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other, and that there were various officer organizations grouped about this or the other government, and some rather inclined to be on their own, all looking forward to a possible intervention by the Allies. After an hour or so had elapsed I interrupted General Bologoevski by observing that the soup had not yet been served, and I called a waiter who was passing and told him to fetch the waiter who had been serving us. “He has gone to bed,” came the answer, “and I am on the night shift.”

  “Oh!” And I inquired about the soup.

  “Soup?” said the new waiter, evidently disowning all responsibility for his predecessor, and after some hesitation he promised us some soup in about three-quarters of an hour. General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. He spoke for an intolerably long time, stopping only once or twice to inquire about the soup and whether it was coming. The clock in the corner chimed midnight, and then one. I was now devilishly hungry, and the General looked misused and maltreated. I shouted for the waiter, who with eyes closed slumbered in a standing posture in the distant corner of the room. “What about that soup?” I repeated in excited tones when the waiter showed signs of recovering consciousness.

  “Soup?” he asked, “Well, you see you can’t have soup nowadays … unless you choose to wait—”

  “Wait!” I said.

  “Three-quarters of an hour or so,” he said.

  Whereupon the General rose. He rose in a threatening manner. It seemed to me that the General’s manner of rising was deliberately remonstrative, a protest undisguised.

  “General!” I shouted, as he ran across to his hat and sword. “Come back and have something. A chicken cutlet. General!”

  But he was gone. I sat alone at my table and waited for the cutlet. As I looked before me I observed sitting at a distant table a man with a familiar face. I could not believe it. My heart leapt within me. I dashed from my chair.

  “Nikolai Vasilievich!”

  “Andrei Andreiech!”

  “Is it possible? Is it really you?”

  Nikolai Vasilievich was kissing me on both cheeks, in confirmation of his identity.

  “Well, I never thought that you were here! I never thought that you could be here, Nikolai Vasilievich.”

  “I am here,” said Nikolai Vasilievich sadly.

  “And who else is here, who else, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

  “All,” sighed Nikolai Vasilievich.

  “All! How do you mean all?”

  “All.”

  “Fanny Ivanovna here?”

  “Yes, she is here.”

  “Nina?”

  “Yes, she is here.”

  “And Pàvel Pàvlovich?”

  “Yes, both Pàvel Pàvlovichi are here.”

  “And Eberheim?”

  “Yes, he is here too … they’re all here.”

  “You don’t say so!… And Čečedek?”

  “All here—all.”

  “And Vera?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sonia?…”

  “Yes, all—my wife and all.”

  “Which wife, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

  “How do you mean? I only have one—Magda Nikolaevna.”

  “Oh, you haven’t married Zina then?”

  “No, but she is here. They are all here—all her family … Uncle Kostia … all.”

  “How are they all? Tell me, Nikolai Vasilievich … the grandfathers dead, I suppose?”

  “Oh no, both here. But I don’t think—nobody thinks—they can last very long now, either of them.”

  “Oh, they’re alive. That’s good.… And so Magda Nikolaevna is here too—with Čečedek, of course.”

  “Yes, and Eisenstein.”

  “She has married Čečedek?”

  “No, she has married no one—except me, of course. But I expect it won’t be very long now till I get a divorce.”

  My voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “Why are they all here, Nikolai Vasilievich?” I asked.

  “Andrei Andreiech, don’t ask me. Why is it that they followed me here all the way from Petrograd? And when I had to go over to Japan just for a fortnight on a matter of business … well, they all followed me there … all … every one of them!… You see, they are, so to speak, economically dependent on me. That is why I suppose they follow me about wherever I go. We are inseparable—financially. We are a chain. Russia being what she is to-day—disjointed, with neither railway nor postal communication that you can rely on, they simply have to be where I am if they are to get money out of me. I quite understand their position. So they follow me, you see.…”

  “Nikolai Vasilievich!” And I shook him long and warmly by the hand.

  We sat together long into the morning, and N
ikolai Vasilievich complained of his lot. The mines, it seemed, were still the chief deterrent to his happiness. His family, he said, had decided to leave Petrograd and go east because their house, which, strictly speaking, belonged to them no longer, had, since the Bolshevik revolution, been invaded by a host of undesirable people and there was hardly a room left in the house that they could call their own. Another reason which prompted them to leave the capital was that the Bolshevik authorities had restricted individuals from drawing on their current accounts in the banks; and what was more important still, Nikolai Vasilievich had really nothing left in the bank to draw upon. So he had naturally turned to his other source of income—the gold-mines in Siberia. He had poured considerable money into these gold-mines in the past, in the hope that some day they would make him very wealthy. For years and years they had a way of ever being on the eve of making him wealthy, yet always some minor, unforeseen incident occurred which temporarily postponed the realization of his hopes. The gold-mines were about to begin to pay, when war broke out and temporarily affected the output. Then in the war he perceived the opportunity of placing them on a military footing. The governor, a friend of his, had promised to assist him, when unhappily the revolution came and the governor was arrested and dismissed. Kerenski’s time was the most trying time of all. For then the miners began to call committee-meetings and talk as to what they would do when they seized the mines; but they confined their revolutionary schemes to a violent expression as to what they would do, in the meantime doing nothing, either in the taking over of the mines or in the working of them. With the Bolshevik revolution things began to move, and the men seized the mines. At first the news was a great shock to Nikolai Vasilievich, for he knew that there were many families dependent on him. Then he perceived that he could actually buy the gold from the men at exactly the same price as it had cost him to produce it. He was much relieved, and for the first time in his life he was actually doing good business.