Perhaps I was young and absurd. But was I absurd? What was wrong with my proposition?
What thoughtful mind would accuse me of absurdity if it only cared to look at the thing squarely? The people were helpless — children.
Of course, I would have to do it all tactfully, slowly, discreetly. But really, was it not a worthy mission? To arbitrate; to settle things. I felt as President Wilson must have felt years later when he was laying down the principles of a future League of Nations.…
I stood before Nina the following day, bursting with the desire to lay it all down before her all in a heap, as it were, but holding myself back with an effort, conscious of the danger of precipitate action. “Let us sit down, Nina,” I said, fingering a large folded sheet of paper. I held another even larger sheet, rolled up under my arm. “You see, Nina, we young people must help the old people out of their muddles. They are obviously unfit to help themselves.”
“I have done what I could,” she answered. “I have been down to Moscow, but of course I admit I only acted as Fanny Ivanovna’s envoy.”
“Exactly. You have failed?”
“I didn’t enjoy plenipotentiary powers, as they call it.”
“Quite so. Now listen to me, Nina.” And I proceeded to lay before her the principles on which I said I was going to reshape their lives: each one would have to give up something for the benefit of the whole, and each one would similarly receive a compensation of some kind in that future life of theirs: in short, as I had mapped it out the night before. I now unfolded my chart and diagram, and she bent over them and our heads nearly touched as we went into this complicated question very thoroughly and seriously indeed. I could barely suppress the look of pride that every now and then would steal over my face. I explained and propounded with something of the insolence of a creator, an artist and a prophet, and she listened to me, all absorbed in my scheme, following the diagram, I thought, with marvellous intuition.
“Ah, yes. I understand,” she murmured. “That’s good. This couldn’t be better. Ah, there you kill two birds with one stone … oh, three birds!”
Then Nina rose.
“Well, what d’you think of it!” I said with undisguised triumph in my look. And looking at me with a quaint and sudden seriousness that astonished me immensely (to the detriment of my triumphant look), she answered:
“All this is very well, but … pray what business is it all of yours!”
I expostulated. I told her how eager I had been to help. But she laughed. She made fun of me. She had been making fun of me all the time, even while we were bending with such a serious mien over the chart and diagram. And I perceived that her serious look, her interest in the scheme a while ago, was all deliberately put on to commit me more deeply to the exposition of my scheme in order to make more fun of me afterwards.
She laughed. She burst with merriment.
“Nina!”
She laughed still more. She was convulsed; she could barely speak, and the tears came into her eyes.
Then she opened the door into the corridor and called out:
“Sonia! Sonia!”
“Nina!” I cried in remonstrance.
“Vera!” she called. “Papa! Fanny Ivanovna! Kniaz! Pavl Pavlch!”
I had to realize, to my deep shame and anguish, that they were all at home, as they entered the room one by one. My face grew crimson.
Nina held out the chart and the diagram at arm’s length and explained, it seemed to me wilfully misrepresenting the whole thing, mating individuals in a preposterous fashion, so that Sonia would cry out:
“But Čečedek does not want to marry Fanny Ivanovna!”
And Fanny Ivanovna, colouring highly, would exclaim:
“What — what’s that?”
“They more or less belong to the same race,” said Nina. “Is that the idea?” She turned to me with assumed innocence.
And Sonia cried again, “But Zina doesn’t want to live with the dentist-Jew!”
“I take it that she’ll have to. You can’t have it all ways, you know, in such a complicated scheme.” And then with a side look at me, “Am I right?”
“And why should Čečedek subsidize anybody?”
“Why?” said Nina, with a look at me.
“You’re making a farce of it!” I cried in utter desperation.
“It’s you who are making a farce of it,” Nina cried. “Papa, he is laughing at us!”
Fanny Ivanovna walked out of the room in what seemed to me a defiant manner. I seemed to hear a solitary “Hm!”
Nikolai Vasilievich, with the diagram in his hand and trailing the chart in a degrading manner along the floor, so that I burnt with shame for my neat and able work of the night before, led me aside and said in a very earnest tone of voice, addressing me as “Young man”:
“You know we are always glad to have you here, but to make fun of our family difficulties … to make fun … to make fun …” (he was getting a little heated) “of our family difficulties into which you, as our guest, were unavoidably initiated … is, I consider, tactless and indelicate.” And he tore up first the chart and then the diagram into a thousand fragments and flung them into the great big stove in the corner of the room.
“Nikolai Vasilievich!” I cried. “I assure you I only wanted to help.”
“Oh, look here,” said Nikolai Vasilievich impatiently, turning on his heels, “please stop these unbecoming jokes. They’re not even funny.” And they all left me.
But I went into the corridor and caught Nina by the hand and dragged her back into the room and did what is known as “giving her a bit of my mind.” I was so wild that I did not know how to begin. “Very well,” I cried at last, “I shall leave you all to stew in your own juice!”
“Very well,” she said.
“And I shall never come again.”
“Very well,” she said.
And it seemed that to whatever I said in my excitement, she answered coldly and indifferently as she sat there, looking at me coldly and indifferently, “Very well,” until it irritated me beyond endurance, and I cried:
“Very well! But do you silly people realize how utterly laughable you all are? Oh, my God! Can’t you see yourselves!’ (I could not see myself.) “But can’t you see that you have been lifted out of Chekhov?… Oh, what would he not have given to see you and use you!”
“He’s dead,” she said.
“But there are others. Oh, no, my dear, you are not safe. What’s there to prevent some mean, unscrupulous scribbler who cares less for people than for his art, from writing you up? One doesn’t often come across such incomparable material. I feel I am almost capable of doing it myself. I’ll write up such a Three Sisters as will knock old Chekhov into a cocked hat. It’s so easy. You just set down the facts. The only handicap that I’m aware of is that you are all of you so preposterously improbable that no one would believe that you were real. This is, in fact, the trouble with most modern literature. No fiction is good fiction unless it is true to life, and yet no life is worth relating unless it be a life out of the ordinary; and then it seems improbable like fiction.”
She did not answer, but by her face I could see that now she was angry.
“I wanted to help you, and this is the thanks I get.…”
And feeling that I must make my exit dramatically conclusive, I said, “And now I’m going”; and then on reflection added, “and I shall never come again.”
I lingered for a moment, to give her an opportunity of stopping me. But she did not avail herself of it; and so I left the room. Once or twice I stopped in the corridor to listen if she was coming, when I intended to continue my dramatic exit. But she did not come.