William Gerhardie - Futility

Fanny Ivanovna and he, alone in the house, were about to have tea. The canary in the cage seemed livelier at the approach of spring. The cat was growing fatter. The samovar could not be made to work. Nikolai Vasilievich, dressed up in a morning-coat, put on white leather gloves and blackened them considerably as he grappled inefficiently with the large insurgent samovar that blew up columns of black smoke in the little hall; while Fanny Ivanovna, as usual, shouted advice to him from the adjoining room that really only served to annoy him.

“Sit down, Andrei Andreiech,” she said, “he won’t be long. Well, Nikolai,” she shouted, “can you manage it? Andrei Andreiech is waiting for his tea.”

“Shut up!” came his angry voice amid angry, recalcitrant hissing.

“Nikolai! Please! What will Andrei Andreiech think of you?”

There was no kulich , no paskha . But Fanny Ivanovna had done up the table as well as she could for the occasion; and there was something pathetic about the poor results she had attained compared with the lustre of pre-war Easter-week in Petersburg. We sat at table, and no one spoke. Nikolai Vasilievich was sad. Was he sad because he had returned from prison to something that was only prison in a mitigated form? Was it that the suspense had been too long, that he had succumbed in the waiting? Was it that he had suddenly, secretly, for no particular reason, on the eve of great changes, lost faith in the recovery of his mines? Or was it just reaction, the unexpectedness of his release? How much the one, how much the other, who can tell? The emotion of the soul is an elusive thing. There is a subtlety about the moods that bears no introspection. These nights in early spring in Vladivostok are so intolerably sad that oft-times one might weep for no other reason than that life was passing untouched, unrealized, a drudgery with but a gleam of beauty.… Only later in the evening it transpired from his conversation that he hesitated. He hesitated what to do. His mind was in a state of perplexity and doubt. His finances were coming to an end. Should they all follow Baron Wunderhausen to Yokohama on the off-chance that he has secured some post there? But he remembered that the Baron was not a baron, and not even Wunderhausen, and he felt that he would be safer not to count on him. They might follow the Admiral to England, as the Russian General was doing; or remain with Eisenstein in Vladi, who was beginning to succeed as a dentist here — there was a dearth of them — and wait till the mines materialize? Perhaps he had better wait. Things seemed to be moving now at last, and perhaps there was more hope now than there had been hitherto.

After supper the Admiral and Sir Hugo came to say good-bye. Also, gradually, the family collected. The room was now full of people. The talk, as ever, lapsed into politics. The Russians have a habit of suspecting the “Allies” of unheard-of calumnies, so much so in fact that even the surprising attitude of innocence adopted by the allied representatives, who sincerely know no better, seems a fairer statement of the true position. The incentive to bloodshed in this miserable Russian business, as in fact the incentive to all murder, is not so much a matter of wanton wickedness as wanton ignorance: a metaphysical confusion of motive: a chaos of the mind: a matter of muddled ethics. It is an integral part of Russian hospitality that they blackguard an “ally” to his face for the “calumnious machinations” practised by his Government in foreign affairs. The amusing thing about it is that this blackguarding is so deplorably inconsistent. One is apt to be shouted down for the “betrayal” of Kolchak, the “annexation” of the Caucasus, and the starvation by blockade by one’s host, who will have it that all these diabolical acts have been deliberately designed by Mr. Lloyd George in order to “humiliate” Russia for her early exit from the war. But really all this angry denunciation is almost meant as a compliment: to show how much they like you personally despite your racial blackguardism, which they take for granted. Thus accosted, one is apt to become heated, stick up for the Government of one’s country, and overstate facts. The room becomes a bear-garden.

Eisenstein opened the attack. “Your allied diplomats,” he said, “are hopeless. Some months ago I had occasion to see one of these worthy representatives of the diplomatic corps on behalf of a number of Jews that were in danger of being massacred by Kolchak’s officers. The diplomat, my client, by the way, was a marvellous linguist, a wonderful specimen of humanity. There he sat before me, maintaining a most distressing silence in twenty-eight foreign languages. ‘I beg of you to intercede,’ I said, ‘to prevent their being massacred. I entreat you, sir, to protest.’

“ ‘My dear Mr. Eisenstein,’ he said at last, ‘how can I protest — before they are killed? I want facts to go upon. I cannot act before I have facts. Facts, Mr. Eisenstein, facts!’

“ ‘Sir,’ I cried, ‘you will have deadly facts, if you are satisfied to wait at all.’

“ ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I am not going to risk my reputation for flimsy rumours of this kind. I have been a diplomat now for thirty-six years, and never once in my career, sir, have I said anything that … well, could be misconstrued … to mean something. And I am certainly not going to revise my methods now.’ And that was all I got out of him.”

“You Allies,” said Uncle Kostia, “have no sense of humour. I’m a sedentary worker, a man of letters, no fighting man in any sense. I sit in my room all day and watch your intervention through the window, so to speak. And it amuses me to see how you are fussing over us and always in the wrong direction, running about like clowns in a circus. A naval gentleman of yours will arrive at the port, fresh and raw from the high seas, and will be moved to request enlightenment from his more experienced colleagues on this rather elementary question: ‘Who is Kolchak? Is he a Bolshevik?’ He will be corrected in his erroneous supposition; and then, a week later, he will begin to dabble in Russian politics and will undertake brief excursions along the coast and fire now and then, somewhat promiscuously, at groups of villagers, whom in his simplicity he believes to be Bolsheviks — boom — boom — boom — boom! He will set them flying in all directions, perhaps kill a cow or so. After such a trip he will return to port, cheery and in good spirits; and after some little while the scattered villagers will return to their village, consume the cow, and resume their interrupted occupations.… Wonderful minds you have! You will prop up some half-witted general and send in stores of clothing and munitions. And the fruit of it? The Bolshevik divisions wearing British uniforms with royal buttons, and the Bolshevik minority in Moscow nationally strengthened in the face of foreign enemies. I sit at my window, writing, reading, and the news dribbles through: ‘Omsk fallen. Kolchak shot. Allies packing up.’ It seems … silly.”

“Quite,” said the book-keeper Stanitski. It was a curious thing that the book-keeper Stanitski should not have been seen in Nikolai Vasilievich’s household till the absence of finances in the firm of Nikolai Vasilievich provided him with nothing to record. Nikolai Vasilievich still went to his office every afternoon to talk things over with Stanitski and possibly to keep up the feeling that he was still a business man; and sometimes Zina would come and see him at his office. Stanitski was glad of these visits; for he would then drop the paper he had been reading — there was absolutely nothing to do — and take part in their conversation. As business gradually dribbled down to nothing, one felt that the book-keeper Stanitski was becoming less of an employee and more of a friend and hanger-on. He was absolutely indispensable to Nikolai Vasilievich, for Stanitski was an optimist.