William Gerhardie - Futility

We entered a large dirty waiting-room where crowds of petitioners awaited their turn with a patience that bordered on spiritual resignation: after the Russian manner they all desired to see the head man personally, whose life was consequently spent in interviews. A nasty dirty little woman with a nasty dirty little child, pointing at me with a dirty finger, was saying to her howling offspring, in an attempt to pacify her next-of-kin, “Is that your daddy, is he? Is that your daddy?”

The General was an elusive person, a wily man, a master in the art of compromise. He was the idol of the Allies. He was one of those few who could so wangle things, so balance favours, as to please at once all the multitudinous Allies and even curry favour with a large majority of Russians. His habitual procedure was this. If an Ally asked him, for example, for the allotment of a certain building, he always promised without reserve. Then the Russian organization in possession of that building would at once cry out in protest; and he immediately assured them that they would be allowed to keep the building: the whole matter, he explained, was a mere misunderstanding. Then the Russian organization stayed, and when the Ally came to take the building over they referred the Ally to the General. And when the Ally came to him and asked for explanation, the General, with a charming smile, would say, “Well, you see that building is not really suitable for your use. I will find you a better one.” Then the Ally waited. He must have time, the General said; and actually he played on time, on “evolution.” And in the meantime there was a coup d’état; or the Russian organization went bankrupt; or the particular Allied representative who had been worrying him was replaced by another, with whom the General would begin again at the beginning; or the Allied troops were about to be withdrawn; or the city was recaptured by the Soviets; or there was a fire and the correspondence was buried in the flames. He was a man who had no use whatever for “free will” and played entirely on “predestination.” The General listened to Nikolai Vasilievich’s emotional narrative in a friendly manner, and smiling pleasantly he rose and shook hands, as if to show that the interview was at an end, saying, “You may rest assured that it will be quite all right. Call again one of these days.”

Nikolai Vasilievich went out, beaming. “Well,” he said, “it seems settled.” I tendered my heartiest congratulations.

Then “one of these days” we called upon the General a second time. Nikolai Vasilievich laid great stress on the dastardly action of the Czechs — that nation just then being out of court with the government at Omsk — but the General merely said, “Wait till the Supreme Ruler returns from Perm. I can do nothing without the Supreme Ruler.”

Nikolai Vasilievich then waited for the return of the Supreme Ruler; and presently we called again. The General’s manner, as he received us, was considerably less sunny than it had been on the two previous occasions. “You have been here before,” he greeted Nikolai Vasilievich. “You must have patience and wait.”

“Wait?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich in a tone of secret terror, the terror of a man who had been doing naught else all his life — and knew its meaning.

“Yes, I advise you to wait. Have patience.”

“How long?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.

“How do I know?” the General replied. “Wait — and you will see.”

Now, was it that Nikolai Vasilievich had waited long enough and seen nothing? Was it that in the circumstances he thought it sounded too much like a mockery? Or was it the explosion of that brewing restlessness that he had gathered in the years of intermittent waiting: the last puff of ineffectual remonstrance before his final sinking into hopeless resignation? But suddenly Nikolai Vasilievich went wild. I had never seen him in that state before. He abused the General in immoderate terms. He accused him first of turning honest people into Bolsheviks; then of being in the pay of Moscow. He threatened to lead a rebellion against the Kolchak State. Nikolai Vasilievich ceased to be a man and became an incarnation: Man having lost his patience: Humanity gone wild in the waiting. He thundered forth at the adversary, and his ruined hopes were the woes of Humankind. Then, coming to the end of his intellectual resources, but far from having yet exhausted his spiritual wrath, he made reference to the Day of Judgment. The door into the chancery flew open, and the Chief of Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and heads of various departments dashed upon the scene, wondering what on earth had happened; and shouting loudly Nikolai Vasilievich hurled abuse upon the Chief-of-Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and the heads of various departments. And then in the waiting-room he went for a stray Admiral, a petitioner like himself, and hurled abuse at him as well.

“All right,” the General said at length. “All right. If you won’t be reasonable, I shall have to resort to the recognized procedure. Guard!” And he ordered them to take Nikolai Vasilievich away. Nikolai Vasilievich still raged and fluttered, and the guards came up to him with signs of deference and indecision. “Come on, sir,” they persuaded him, “he really means it.” And taking him each under one arm, they dragged him out into the open.

We walked back to the train.

“What those people will not realize,” I took it up to humour him, “is that you can’t live on nothing. Waiting doesn’t feed you, and waiting doesn’t clothe you; and when you have a family—”

“Of course, one can borrow,” said Nikolai Vasilievich.

“Yes, of course,” I agreed.

Fanny Ivanovna greeted him with “Well, Nikolai, is it all arranged?”

A fiendish look came on his face, as though he said, “The hell it is!” and all the more fiendish because he did not say it.

She sighed conspicuously. And her sigh gave him a nervous shudder. A look of hate came into his steel-grey eyes. “She even sighs offensively,” he said to me, “as though she meant to charge me with the necessity of doing so.”

“Nikolai!” she cried, “don’t let yourself go before strangers. What will Andrei Andreiech think of you! You know I am not to blame because the mines won’t pay. And you ought to remember that I advised you to sell them long ago, and if you had listened to me then we shouldn’t have been in this plight. Well, well, it’s no use quarrelling now. We’ve got to wait, that’s all.”

The ironic fascination of the situation at this point proved irresistible. “There’s an English proverb,” I supplied: “ ‘All things come to him who waits.’ ”

“Hm!” said Nikolai Vasilievich.

“And there’s another one: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ ”

“Excellent proverbs!” he said dryly.

Kniaz popped his head out from behind the paper, like a mouse, and added, “There’s our own Russian proverb, too: ‘The slower you drive the farther you get.’ ”

“You, Kniaz, had better read your paper,” retorted Nikolai Vasilievich acidly. “What does it say in there?”

I stood at the window of the stationary train and watched the sinking landscape dissolve in the gathering gloom about us. Why did the winter air seem so acutely strange, as if charged with something, a kind of tenderness, a warm, transfiguring love…? Nikolai Vasilievich came to my side and watched, his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Pigs in the ditches,” he brooded, “pigs in offices, everywhere.… A town of pigs. That General … oh! what a pig.…”

VI

THE “AFFILIATION” OF EISENSTEIN INTO OUR “society” was a tribute to his own unflagging perseverance. It so happened that while in Vladivostok the Admiral had been in urgent need of a dentist, and quite by accident he tumbled against Eisenstein, who had set up a practice there. The Admiral, though he loathed all Jews, was yet favourably impressed by Eisenstein because on his first visit to him he heard Eisenstein engage in a vigorous cursing of his Chinese servant. He liked to see a man who knew how to put “these people” in their places, a man who knew how to assert his own authority, a man who did not talk about “equality” and such-like tosh (discordant with his sentiment), “utopia,” “socialism,” and that sort of thing, you know, that has made the world, etc. etc. There was altogether too much Bolshevism abroad, and the vigorous action of the dentist with his Chink appealed to him unspeakably.