The big black window-panes still stare at you indecently; that’s why somebody throws a bottle through them. The gramophone shoots painful memories through my feverish brain. Now she is dancing with them.… They are playing rugger with a crumpled piece of paper on the floor. Oh! the pictures. Somebody has set a match to the imitation palm-tree. Good job! And somebody else has poured a bottle of whisky into the piano. Uproarious shouts. A fat, flabby Major stands on the table, shouting “Charing Cross. All change here!” and then begins to sell the furniture by auction and imitate a Bolshevik speaker all in the same breath. I am dragged up on the table. Shouts of “Speech! Speech!” My mouth begins to move but the voice seems to be coming out of an empty barrel; both I and they seem some one else. The table begins to sway like a ship — a pendulum — and I feel that I am being supported on my legs only by some outward spirit. Les disques. The juice of my soul. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I laugh feebly but awfully funnily, as I am being carried out under the arms. My room. Never, never.… Oh!.. The bed is a merry-go-round, a spindle. I dash out on to the floor. The floor revolves the other way. Damn! Somebody ties a wet handkerchief round my head, and says, “You’re a brick.…” Nina. Les disques.… Youth.… Your splendid, wonderful youth.…”
XI
THAT EVENING I CALLED ON THEM TO SAY good-bye, for we were leaving on the morrow. The occasion coincided with the release of Nikolai Vasilievich from prison, following on the seizure of the fortress by the Japanese. Already through the windows there gazed the evening of early spring. The church bells on that Easter Sunday, the most festal day in the year, rang dolefully through the Christian city seized by a heathen yellow race, and spoke of better days.
There had been another night of firing. The headquarters of the Russian Zemstvo had been fiercely bombarded in the night. Then when at last the building was stormed by Japanese troops they found, to their amazement, that there was no one there. General Bologoevski, who had been attached of late to the Russian Staff, discovered on the morrow that he had lost yet another government overnight. Down came the red flag and up went the flag of the Rising Sun. Russian prisoners tied to their Korean colleagues were being led through the streets on a rope, like cattle. Then, these lives wasted, this damage done, “their honour satisfied,” as said the Nippon officers, they turned to the scattered government and invited them to return to their shattered offices and resume their interrupted duties. And Nikolai Vasilievich, released from prison, was inclined to think that the little Nippons were, on the whole, good fellows.
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.’