He was dragged, like a resisting malefactor, struggling, to the piano, and made to play his one and only waltz. The Baron claimed Vera. Nina came automatically into my arms. I recaptured some of her familiar fragrance, as we danced between the sofa and round the table, dodging sundry chairs. Sonia stood demurely at the wall, abandoned by her husband in favour of a younger sister, but affecting an unconvincing moue of mirth. Then, owing to the shortness and simplicity of the tune, Nikolai Vasilievich’s technique broke down.
“I want to talk to you on this very serious question of transferring to the English Service.” The Baron had come up to me again. And I resorted to the classic answer of doubting whether there was “any vacancy.” “It doesn’t matter where,” he said. “In Persia, or perhaps in Mesopotamia. I can’t serve here any longer.”
We sat silent in the heated room of the little wooden house creaking in the wind, and I felt lost and hidden amid all this sun and fir and solitude around us. Nikolai Vasilievich drank his tea and wondered if the Bolsheviks would hand him back his house and money at the bank, and if the Czechs, as obviously they ought, would compensate him for his loss on the gold-mines. He had great hopes, he said, of the punitive expedition; but there was one aspect — a moral one — that disturbed him greatly. He wondered whether the punitive expedition would turn out to be quite honest and would not do him out of his interests in the gold-mines altogether.
Afterwards he came up to me and said in a weary undertone: “You know, it will be very dull to-night — nothing but Russian dance music. Honestly, it would only spoil your evening if you went.”
“Don’t take any notice of him,” cried the three sisters simultaneously. “It will be very jolly. He’s only thinking of himself.”
“Nikolai!” cried Fanny Ivanovna. “What nonsense! You’ve already promised me to come. You’re their father and it’s your duty to take your children out. I refuse to go alone with them.”
As I entered the brilliantly illuminated ball-room, the three sisters, each claimed by an Allied officer, were fox-trotting, in defiance of the congregation. Nikolai Vasilievich, wearing a dinner-jacket, looked very angry, very lonely and very bored; and Fanny Ivanovna looked ominously triumphant.
“Poor Nikolai Vasilievich!” I said when Fanny Ivanovna and I were alone. “That dinner-jacket of his looks miserable and frightened as though it felt the outrage of being dragged into this mock festivity. It seems to say: ‘What have I done?’ ”
“Doesn’t matter. He is better where he is.
“He would only be with that girl of his if I had not insisted on his coming with us,” she added by way of after-thought.
“Zina?”
“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! It makes me so ill, so angry to think of it.”
Then Nikolai Vasilievich, ludicrously festive, strolled up to us.
“Well,” he muttered, yawning into his white-cuffed hand.
“Jolly dance,” I said.
“For those who dance,” he retorted in a voice as though I had foully and grievously betrayed him.
Then the music ceased abruptly. The three sisters, scantily and deliriously attired, glided up, and were met with an involuntary critical examination from the eyes of Fanny Ivanovna, who effected a few, to all appearance needless, pulls at their evening-gowns.
“I could hardly recognize Nina with her hair like this,” I remarked aloud.
With sylphine litheness, she slid between me and Baron Wunderhausen to the drawing-room.
“Really, I don’t like the way you’ve done your hair,” I said. “There’s nothing at the front.”
Instantly she vanished to the dressing-room; and in her absence the Baron tackled me again about a billet in Persia or Mesopotamia. I expressed a mild surprise. “Have we not come here to help the Russian national cause?” I asked. “Is that then of no interest to you?”
“You know,” he said nonchalantly, “nothing will come of it.”
“Why?”
“The Czechs are such awful swine. They’re all Bolsheviks.”
And then added, “And the Americans, too, are Bolsheviks. President Wilson. Nothing will come of it all.”
And, involuntarily, the conversation at lunch surged back to my mind. I thought this equalled it in point of sheer “constructive statesmanship.” And then Nina, now in her original coiffure, returned.
We sat under dusty imitation palm-trees, my sleeve every now and then touching her shapely naked girlish arms; till Nikolai Vasilievich came up and gave us supper, insisting on paying for it all himself. I thought of the poor, long-suffering mines who would eventually have to square all this, as I surveyed the debris on the tablecloth, while Nikolai Vasilievich paid the waiter.
When the music, after the due interval, broke out into a resounding waltz, we all flocked back into the ball-room.
General Bologoevski, who had turned up at the eleventh hour, stood at my side, and we admired Nina, who now fulfilled a carelessly contrived engagement. “What eyes! What calves! What ankles!” he was saying. “Look here, why in heaven don’t you marry her?…”
Driving through the dark and muddy streets, I sat on the folding seat; the car was packed with members of the family. Tucked away in the corner opposite, like a purring kitten, was Nina. We began to part provisionally at their gate; but they asked me to come in. We had cold ham and tinned salmon and tea with sweets. There was a certain subdued agitation about my presence in the household at this hour, and once I heard Fanny Ivanovna’s shrill voice from the adjoining room explain excitedly to Sonia: “You needn’t drag the bed into the drawing-room till Andrei Andreiech is gone.”
I had been going for an hour or so. We had said “good night” innumerable times. Nina clung to me whimsically, ignoring Nikolai Vasilievich’s desire to be rid of me. They all came out into the tiny hall and added to the difficulty of my withdrawal. Nina fastened my great sheepskin overcoat, which appealed to her by reason of its many straps. I was to come again to-morrow night to supper, and the day after, and every, every day.…
III
MY TANGLED MEMORIES OF SIBERIA COME TO ME to-day largely as a string of dances, dinners, concerts, garden-parties, modulated by the atmosphere of weather and the seasons of the year, with the gathering clouds of the political situation looming always in the background. And I remember, in particular, the Admiral’s first thé dansant. As he ran through my provisional list of guests he frowned and growled a little. “What are all these women?” he asked.
“You should see them, Admiral,” smiled General Bologoevski.
“Good-looking?”
The General kissed his finger-tips.
“And who is Fanny Ivanovna?”
“A German.”
A shadow came across his face. “I’m damned if I want any Huns in my house,” he growled; but gave in grudgingly.
Through inadvertence on somebody’s part, the officers of the U.S. Flagship arrived half an hour before time — an incident which taxed my capacity for consuming liquor to the utmost pitch. They had also overdone their kindness by sending us two jazz bands instead of one, with the result that their almost simultaneous employment in the two adjoining rooms reserved for dancing proved an experience unsatisfactory to the ear. As the Hawaiian string-band flowed and quivered in a languid, plaintive waltz, the adjoining brass-band fairly knocked sparks out of it by bursting into an intoxicating one-step.
Some two hours earlier I had met Vera in the street. She had been to see their dressmaker about the frock in which now, radiant but bashful, she appeared. Almost immediately, the family was followed by the Zina-Uncle Kostia wing, and by Magda Nikolaevna and Čečedek. But they would not speak to one another. Nikolai Vasilievich had been to see me in the morning about bringing Zina; and now he tried to dance with her. But both were awkward and bashful, and the experiment proved unsatisfactory; while Fanny Ivanovna looked on at them sarcastically. Nina whispered to me as we one-stepped: “After them! Go after them!” her triangular, fur-bordered hat bobbing up into my face in the excitement. And as we overtook them: “Oh, my God!”