William Gerhardie - Futility

“When I entered the station,” I said, “I saw piles of dead bodies lying on the steps on which rich red blood trickled down all the way; and on top of all that handsome boy, with the back of his scalp blown off. They were shot at by machine-guns as they were being driven down the stone staircase in the station, and their boots had been removed and appropriated by their executioners. One man three hours afterwards was still breathing heavily. He lay on the steps, bleeding, and covered by other bleeding bodies. Another man in the pile was but slightly hit. He lay alone in the pile of dead, with a curious mob and sight-seeing soldiery walking about him, shamming death. After three hours he rose and walked away, but was caught and shot.”

“Horrible!” she said. “It’s shameful! The Whites kill the Reds, the Reds kill the Whites … and nobody is any the farther. If people would only realize that killing is the first thing they shouldn’t do.”

“The proposition would appear self-evident. But it seems as if the one idea of the Kolchakites is bloodshed to suppress bloodshed; and that this also happens to be the idea of the Bolsheviks; and that the Kolchakites are shocked at it.”

“Why can’t human beings settle things by conference?”

“They must be human beings for that, Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Sir Hugo surely—”

“Sir Hugo’s chief preoccupation at a conference is to commit another allied gentleman into saying ‘Yes’ on any given point, and then by a series of masterful, elaborate and elusive thrusts of speech to commit him into saying ‘No’; and then to point out the contradiction. It is what Sir Hugo calls ‘displaying the good old fighting spirit.’ His attention is essentially devoted to the careful recording of documents that find their way into our office accidentally, documents which in themselves he regards as inessential and unimportant. And the Admiral hates Sir Hugo’s love of detail and exactitude which seems bent on proving to him very clearly and precisely the uncertainty and vagueness of his own position.”

She sighed.

“It is a consolation,” said she, “to think that there are other useless people in the world besides ourselves.…”

The snow still fell in heaps as I walked home, and it grew markedly colder, and one felt the onset of winter; while prisoners, it was said, were being killed in prison — noiselessly — out of consideration for the Allies in the city.

VIII

WHO CAN CONVEY AT ALL ADEQUATELY THAT sense of utter hopelessness that clings to a Siberian winter night? Wherever else is there to be found that brooding, thrilling sense of frozen space, of snow and ice lost in inky darkness, that gruesome sense of never-ending night, and black despair and loneliness untold, immeasurable? Add to this the knowledge of a civil war fumbling in the snow, of people ill-fed, ill-clothed and apathetic, lying on the frozen ground, cold and wretched and diseased. A snowstorm is blowing furiously; the wooden house groans and yells in the night; the tin roof squeals in agony, fearful lest it be cast to the winds; and the storm now howls like a beast, now sobs like a child, now dies away, gathering for another outburst.…

The house was lit and warm and comfortable. It was the Admiral’s house. But the Admiral was away, and in his absence I had conceived it possible to give a dinner-party. The arrangement of the guests at table had been a delicate but delicious business. I had placed Fanny Ivanovna at the side of Magda Nikolaevna. I had seated Nikolai Vasilievich side by side with Eisenstein. I had sprinkled some of Zina’s sisters amongst the three sisters. And there was Sir Hugo, who talked in French about the Russian situation to Zina’s mother (who feared God, and knew no French); and it was evident, moreover, as he talked that his daily paper was not the Daily Herald but rather the Morning Post .

The table was littered with bottles of the very best wine, procured from the Admiral’s private cellar, and the expression of my guests became, as they do become under the influence of wine, more impulsive and less amenable to the control of the will. Their will seemed, as the feast proceeded, to become less and less amenable to the authority of the conscience. Kniaz had been drinking cocktails wholesale. He had never tasted one before, and found that his life had been wasted. “They are exquisite,” he said.

“They are,” Sir Hugo said. “They induce one to forget their price.… Oh, no, no! I didn’t mean it in that way, Prince. Do have another cocktail.”

I sat still among my guests, strangely flushed, and the vast sea of Russian life seemed to be closing over me. I saw Fanny Ivanovna talking to Magda Nikolaevna, somewhat timidly perhaps and with undue reserve, but still talking! Eisenstein was gleaming with silent satisfaction as he surveyed “the family.” He felt, I think, that he was one of it at last, and now he was all right. Nikolai Vasilievich on more than one occasion addressed Eisenstein as “Moesei Moeseiech” in an amiable if not familiar sotto voce . Zina’s mother spoke very eagerly to Sir Hugo about the persecution of the Russian priesthood by the Bolsheviks, but much of her eloquence was lost upon him. Sir Hugo’s knowledge of her language, in spite of his long residence in Russia, was inexplicably remote. When he was asked if he could talk Russian well, he would say “Moderately.” But, as a matter of fact, his ability to express himself in Russian was, I think, confined to hailing a cab in that language by crying out the word “Izvozchik,” and then, seated therein, muttering the word “Poshol!” which he usually mispronounced as “Push off”—both words happily meaning literally the same thing and so adequately similar in sound as to serve his purpose.

General Bologoevski, on my left, was holding forth on the situation.

“Looks pretty hopeless,” I remarked.

“Not a bit of it,” rejoined the General.

“But they are retreating everywhere.”

“On purpose,” said the General.

“But whatever for?”

“Well, there was a conference of generals … I presume … who have decided it. I think it a good thing myself.”

“Why?”

“Well … we’ll entrap them.”

“I am most pessimistic.”

“I am perfectly optimistic — quite certain of victory.”

“Why, General?”

“Denikin.”

“He is advancing very slowly.”

“Ah, but he is about to enter Great Russian territory.”

“Well, what’s there in that?”

“Why,” he explained, “the Great Russians are the only real decent Russians. I am a Great Russian myself.”

I nodded with significance, as if to indicate that this made all the difference in the situation.

Then, once again, Fanny Ivanovna sat silent. Perhaps she thought of her position, insecure and unconventional, disused, no longer wanted; and of her instincts so discordant with her life, her instincts that had always been on the side of respectability, the purity of home life, the sanctity of marriage, and the very things, in fact, that had always been denied her: so much so that in her unstable, questionable position she had yet been stringently insistent on this aspect of their life, and always in her heart was reminded that she had no title to enforce that law, no claim, beyond a doleful craving for the decencies of usage and convention. Perhaps the presence of Nikolai Vasilievich’s two other wives had served to remind her of the painful irony of her life; perhaps the wine affected her with melancholy as it had affected me. Perhaps she pondered on her broken life, her sacrifices that had gone unnoticed; or pictured to herself her eventual return to Germany, the cruel astonishment of those for whom she too had sacrificed her life. And it may have occurred to her, as a belated afterthought in life, that possibly she had been “sat upon” too often and too much.