It did not matter, anyhow, I thought, as I was putting on my coat (slowly while no one watched me, but if she had appeared I would have hastened my withdrawal). I knew that she would watch me from the window, and at the door there stood that beautifully proportioned nag “Professor Metchnikoff,” waiting for me. My heart leapt within my breast at the agreeable thought of how I would step into the victoria and drive off swiftly with a dramatic conclusiveness.
I dashed down the staircase. I stood beneath the porch. But where in heaven was “Professor Metchnikoff”?
And I beheld where he was.
I had often seen our wily Tartar coachman Alexei shake his little head, as I lavished praise on the shape of “Professor Metchnikoff,” and heard him say that the animal was “unreliable.” I had never believed him. Well, did I now?
I beheld a curious spectacle. The little wily Alexei, big-bottomed in accordance with the best traditions, sat helpless on his soft broad box-seat and flapped his reins in a hopeless fashion, producing with his lips an entreating but ineffectual sound, as Professor Metchnikoff, composed and dignified, retreated backward toward the tramlines at the cross-roads.
I ran to his rescue, and taking Professor Metchnikoff by the bridle I led him forward. I looked up as I did so. Thank God, Nina was not at the window. I then left Professor Metchnikoff, who stood quite quiet, and stepped into the carriage. No sooner had I done so than Professor Metchnikoff resumed his steady and dignified retreat. The coachman, strapped tightly in his cushioned clothes, was helpless as a doll. I glanced at the house, and lo! on the balcony above Nina’s window there stood Sonia, Nina, Vera, Kniaz, Fanny Ivanovna, Nikolai Vasilievich, and Baron Wunderhausen, looking down at me and laughing.
I glanced up at them and crimsoned, and then in a fury I leant forward and hit Professor Metchnikoff across the back with my walking-stick. Professor Metchnikoff halted for a moment, as if considering what to do, and then decided in favour of a retirement. And, seated in the open carriage, I retreated steadily to the accompaniment of laughter from the balcony. Despite the coachman’s frantic efforts to the contrary, I vanished backward very slowly out of sight — when suddenly the fiendish nag jerked forward and trotted home as though nothing had ever been the matter.
XI
HOW OFTEN THEN I DREAMED OF THOSE WHITE nights of Petersburg, those white mysterious sleepless nights.…
Fanny Ivanovna was alone, and we sat together on the open balcony and talked about her troubles in the white night. We sat listless. We felt a strange tremor. We waited for the night, for twilight; but they were not. Heaven had come down over earth. It was one splash of humid, milk-white, pellucid mist. We could see everything before us clearly to the minutest detail. The street with its tall buildings tried hard to fall asleep, but could not: it, too, suffered from insomnia; and the black window-panes of the sleepless houses were like tired eyes of great monsters. Now and then a man would pass beneath us, his steps resounding sharp and loud upon the pavement. Curiously, he had no shadow. Then he was gone, and there was not a soul in the street.
A horrible dream crept over us.… And to rouse ourselves from its increasing domination, we talked. Talking with her, as ever, meant listening. “I have passed the tragic stage, Andrei Andreiech,” she said. “Now I don’t care. I am almost accustomed to my position.”
I tried to put a word in. “I suggest, Fanny Ivanovna, that you all break loose, disentangle yourselves from one another, and then begin at the beginning.”
But she talked on into the night, heedless of my remarks.
“I am only waiting till Nikolai Vasilievich can pay me off; then I shall return to Germany. I am indeed quite optimistic. I am now at the laughing stage. You see, our life can hardly be called a comedy, for if it were produced on the stage no one would believe it was real. No real people could be so silly. It is a farce, Andrei Andreiech. You were right when you made a farce of it then with your chart and diagram and things, do you remember?”
“I honestly wished to help,” I remonstrated.
But she laughed appreciatively, as if to say that she had noted with approval my attempt to pull her leg.
She talked in fragments. “Yes, Andrei Andreiech, you will find — it is indeed a curious thing — that girls who are brought up in such unnatural surroundings as you would think scarcely contributive to the development of the moral virtues, are often the very girls who have the strictest possible conception of morality. What they have seen around them has only had the effect of putting them upon their guard. They are morally inoculated. I haven’t the slightest hesitation in allowing them to read any books they like. They can read Verbitskaya and Artsibashev and Lappo-Danilevskaya and the rest of them if they please. You in England are fortunate indeed. You have serious, moral writers who think of the good of the race and really teach you something positive, constructive and worth while. You have Byron and Oscar Wilde.…”
Like so many other people in Russia, Fanny Ivanovna believed that England has three great outstanding writers: Byron, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde.
“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! I have had a terrible row with Čečedek. It’s all that Baron Wunderhausen. He made love to Nina.…”
I remember that at these words I sat up in my chair.
“… in French, Andrei Andreiech!
“ ‘I hate talking of such things in Russian,’ he said, thinking he would impress her. But she wouldn’t listen.”
My body relaxed in the chair.
“If there’s one thing that Nina simply cannot stand, it is being made love to … above all in French! He came to me after that and said:
“ ‘Fanny Ivanovna, it came over me like that … overnight!..’
“ ‘Oh, then it will go out overnight,’ I said. ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich, please don’t talk of it to me.’ But he turned to me and said in a secretive whisper:
“ ‘Fanny Ivanovna, if you will help me to win her heart I will be your greatest friend on earth.’ And then, after the manner of a doctor, ‘And now tell me all your troubles. We’ll see what we can do.’
“ ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich,’ I cried, ‘Sie sind verrückt. My troubles are my private affairs and concern no one but myself. Good night.’
“So he complained of me to Magda Nikolaevna; and, would you believe it! she sent Čečedek to tell me that she will not allow me to hamper her daughters’ happiness, that she doesn’t want them to die old maids, like me — me! if you please — that I am unfit to look after them, and so on, and so on. Andrei Andreiech, they are sixteen, fifteen and fourteen! But I can guess the true cause. She wants to marry Čečedek and she naturally doesn’t want her daughters to live with her as this would make her appear her own age, to say nothing of the danger of his falling in love with one of them. They are so pretty.”
“But why need they live with her at all?”
“Ah,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “She said emphatically that she will not have them live with their father if that’s the way he carries on. She is afraid it will corrupt their morals.”
“But doesn’t she continue to draw an allowance from Nikolai Vasilievich?”
“She does. But ever since she met Čečedek, who is preposterously rich, she has lost her faith in Nikolai Vasilievich’s mines — indeed says so openly. This distresses Nikolai very much indeed. I don’t know why it is that he attaches such importance to her faith in the mines, unless it is because he acquired those gold-mines in her time. Of course, she is anxious for her daughters’ future. She feels that their chances are getting spoiled with her own life and that of Nikolai Vasilievich becoming muddled up. I don’t doubt that she loves her daughters and means well.