“Life gets you,” came from the window; “sooner or later it gets you all the same.”
“I don’t know what it’s for, why, or who wants it. It seems so unnecessary, useless, even silly. And yet I cannot think that it’s all in vain. There must be … perhaps a larger pattern somewhere in which all these futilities, these shifting incongruities are somehow reconciled. But shall we know? Shall we ever know the reason?”
“Philosophy!” jeered Nikolai Vasilievich mildly.
“Perhaps,” I said, “when we awaken on the other side of death and ask to be told the reason, they will shrug their shoulders and will say, ‘We don’t know. It is beyond us. Do you not know?’ … And we shall never know. Never.…”
“How awfully funnily your mouth moves when you speak,” said Nina, who had been listening to me attentively.
“Frightfully!”
“There is no proof,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “that death is the end. But there is no proof, as yet, that death is not the end.”
“So there is no proof of anything?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.
“No.”
“Thank you,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
The Baron bowed.
Then Nikolai Vasilievich passed into the hall and put his coat on. As it was time for me to go, we went out together. I remember there was something hopeless about that night, a sense of dread about the political and economic chaos, that seemed to harmonize with Nikolai Vasilievich’s state of mind. I think it may be that he found a kind of ghastly pleasure in the thought that if he was miserable, if destitution stared him in the face, the whole world also seemed to be tumbling about him into decay and ruin. As we crossed the Palace Square we were challenged by a soldier who had emerged from behind a pile of firewood dumped before the Winter Palace. He stepped forward with fixed bayonet and demanded money, while pointing his bayonet at my breast; he held his finger on the trigger. He was considerably drunk. Neither of us happened to have any money. “Got any cigarettes, Comrades?” he asked.
Neither of us had cigarettes.
“And I,” explained the drunken soldier, “go about, you know, letting the guts out of the bourgouys.”
“That’s right, Comrade,” ventured Nikolai Vasilievich. “Kill them all, the dirty dogs!”
“I will,” said the soldier cheerily, and stalked off into the night, while we went our way.
Nikolai Vasilievich only shook his head and sighed and shook his head and sighed. He muttered something, but the wind that overtook us carried off his words. I could just catch “… my house … the mines …”
PART III. INTERVENING IN SIBERIA
I
CERTAIN FRAGMENTS OF SCENE AND SPEECH come back to me with a peculiar insistence, as I write this third portion of my book. I have no hesitation in setting them down as I do, I think accurately enough, if not word for word. I remember them well because they had impressed me. That is the secret of memory. I have forgotten much, but there are scenes I cannot forget, fragments of speech that still ring in my ear, and I shall remember them always; at least, till I have finally pinned them to paper.
The Admiral and I, and a few others — interesting types, I can assure you — travelled to Siberia, where we engaged in a series of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian revolution. By now, “Intervention” has been relegated to the shelf of history. But I cannot but remember it, not merely as an adventure in futility, as admittedly it was, but as an ever-shifting, changing sense of being alive. For the experience of love is inseparable from its background. Alone it does not exist. It is a modulation of impressions, an interplay of “atmospheres,” a quickening of the fibres of that background into throbbing tissues of an elusive, half-apprehended beauty. It was raining heavily when we arrived in Vladivostok, and the port, as we surveyed it from the boat, looked grey and hopeless, like the Russian situation. A flat had been allotted us, a bare, unfurnished flat in a deserted house standing in a grim and desolate by-street; and there the Admiral made his temporary headquarters. It poured all day long, and it seemed, indeed, as though the rain, playing havoc with the town, would never cease, even as the misery and blundering in Russia would never cease, and that our efforts were not wanted and could do no good.
That night I entertained General Bologoevski at dinner at the famous restaurant ‘Zolotoy Rog’—nicknamed by British sailors the ‘Solitary Dog.’ He had travelled with us all the way from England, seemingly under vague instructions from some Allied War Office, and had attached himself to our party of his own accord. As we sat down, the head waiter came up to us and respectfully informed the General that by order of the Commander-in-Chief Russian officers were not admitted into restaurants. The General protested feebly, stressing his hunger as a reason for remaining, whereon the head waiter suggested, in an undertone, that the obvious alternative was to remove the epaulets.
“What! Remove my epaulets! I, a Russian officer? Never!” he protested.
Whereon a brain-wave struck him. “I know,” said he, looking round the restaurant. It was nearly empty. And instantly he compromised by putting on his mackintosh. “Now,” said he, “in my English Burberry they will take me for an English officer. Ah!” he smiled, and then added his invariable English phrase: “It is a damrotten game, you know.” And, after a momentary contemplation: “I give dem h-h-hell!”
I ordered chicken soup. The General talked loosely about the Siberian situation. About five minutes after I had ordered soup the waiter returned without being called and very amiably volunteered the information that the soup would be served immediately. When, three-quarters of an hour later, I asked the waiter about the soup, he repeated “Immediately,” but the word now somehow failed to inspire in us the same confidence. The General talked of the Siberian situation for about an hour and a quarter, when we observed that the soup had not been served. I again called the waiter.
“What about that soup?” I asked.
“I am afraid, sir,” said the waiter, “you will have to wait a while, for soup is a troublesome thing to prepare nowadays.”
“How long?”
“About three-quarters of an hour.”
General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. I gathered that there was a General Horvat who had formed an All-Russia Government, and that there was also a Siberian Government, defying General Horvat on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other, and that there were various officer organizations grouped about this or the other government, and some rather inclined to be on their own, all looking forward to a possible intervention by the Allies. After an hour or so had elapsed I interrupted General Bologoevski by observing that the soup had not yet been served, and I called a waiter who was passing and told him to fetch the waiter who had been serving us. “He has gone to bed,” came the answer, “and I am on the night shift.”
“Oh!” And I inquired about the soup.
“Soup?” said the new waiter, evidently disowning all responsibility for his predecessor, and after some hesitation he promised us some soup in about three-quarters of an hour. General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. He spoke for an intolerably long time, stopping only once or twice to inquire about the soup and whether it was coming. The clock in the corner chimed midnight, and then one. I was now devilishly hungry, and the General looked misused and maltreated. I shouted for the waiter, who with eyes closed slumbered in a standing posture in the distant corner of the room. “What about that soup?” I repeated in excited tones when the waiter showed signs of recovering consciousness.