The art of living is the ability to subordinate minor motives to major ones. And it is an unsatisfactory art. You must make up your mind what you want, and when you have made up your mind what you want, you might as well, for the difference it makes to you, have never had a mind to make up. For the consequences have a way of getting out of hand and laying out the motives indiscriminately. And then you with your intent and will seem rather in the way. That is the truth.… (But it would serve us right if we thought so!) Since childhood I had more or less earmarked my future, and the circumscription did not really take in Nina. I had in those early days conceived a novel that, oh! was to knock all existing novels flat. This novel was to be my goal in life, and then later on the novel was to follow my real life, a life of augmented splendour and achievement. Pending that achievement, there was, of course, that other life, essentially out of focus with the novel, not really life at all, a transitory, irritating phase not meriting attention. The novel was begun — invariably begun. The quite indefinably peculiar atmosphere of it seemed to defy the choice of language. For I happen to belong to that elusive class of people knowing several languages who, when challenged in one tongue, find it convenient to assure you that their knowledge is all in another. And I am one of those uncomfortable people whose national “atmosphere” had been somewhat knocked on the head — an Englishman brought up and schooled in Russia, and born there, incidentally, of British parents (with a mixed un-English name into the bargain!), and here I am. The war claimed me. And then, the war over, I looked at the novel. Heaven! How it had shrunk. I had contrived to overlook real life since it was out of focus with my novel, and now I found that it was just the novel that was out of focus with real life. Nothing more than that. But what a discovery! I had lived these years like an automaton, giving scarcely any heed to the life about me but vaguely cherishing the “masterpiece,” and I found that I had really lived unconsciously and was alive, while the “masterpiece” had stifled and was dead. It must have been at this point that the thought of Nina came to me identified with the idea of living as against recording. She would come to me in dreams. I was walking with some people, and she was walking with some other people. And then we met, and the people she was with stopped to talk to the people I was with, and she looked at me, a little bashful, “repentance” written on her face, as if to say, “I am waiting”—but never said a word. And in my sleep the “truth” would dawn on me: “So all this other … was mere whimsicality? Oh yes, of course! I should have understood her.”
And in my waking hours, that were like dreams, involuntarily I would find myself asking General Bologoevski, whom I always went to see in town, if he “understood her.” But the General understood nothing. “I know why you are always coming here,” he once remarked. “It is because I know her, because you want to talk to me of her.… And you have reason to. My God! what eyes! What calves! What ankles! Look here: why in the world don’t you marry her?”
I had come to his hotel a while ago, which he had chosen on account of the “nice little women there,” as he explained, and overtook him in the act of making amorous advances to the pretty chamber-maid who was giggling loudly in his bedroom. “English women,” he confided to me, “always let themselves go with foreigners. They’re somehow ashamed with their own countrymen. However.”
We went downstairs. “Yes,” he sighed, “things are getting a little difficult just now. All I’ve got is ten pounds. And when those are gone I won’t know where to turn to. And there’s that motor-cycle I’ve bought, and they are pressing me for payment. I give dem h-h-hell! But it is all a damrotten game, you know. The only consolation is that it really is a good motor-cycle — a fine big thing. But there seems no one I could borrow from.”
“But you will ride in taxis, General,” I gently reprimanded him.
“Well, what is ten pounds?” he asked. “Whether I ride in taxis or go by ’bus, it’s all one. It won’t last in any case. No: all my hope is in the claim I’ve lodged with the Russian Embassy. I understand it’s now only a question of the Allies recognizing General Wrangel before the claim is paid. But come, I’ll introduce you to that Russian Colonel there. He’s been to Vladivostok and knows your friends, no doubt — Nina. Come.”
We shook hands, and then compared experiences. “And do you remember that good-looking girl, Nina Bursanova?” at length I ventured.
The Colonel thought hard, and then said:
“No, I don’t remember.”
Silence. The subdued hum of London was like the burden note of a distant organ. Two other Russian Colonels and a Captain, all of the Denikin Army, sauntered up, and the General called the waiter and stood liqueurs and cigars all round. The faint sounds of a hidden orchestra reached our ears and set a match to the emotions stored away in my subconscious warehouse.… The tepid air within, surrounded by the cold outside, the shaded lights contrasted by the dark of night without, the easy atmosphere of crowded, dazzling excitement, enshrouded by the loneliness of space, and our intimate seclusion within this gay tumultuousness — these things spoke. And the soft music told me that life is, and that she was all this that it meant.…
No more novels! Life, I thought, was worth all the novels in the world. And life was Nina. And Nina was life. And, by contrast, the people I encountered seemed pretentious and insincere. The women in particular were unreal. They talked of things that did not interest them with an affected geniality. They pretended a silly superiority or else an unconvincing inferiority. They said “Really?” and “Indeed?” and “How fascinating!” and “How perfectly delightful!” Nina was not like that. My three sisters were not like that. They were real. They would laugh when they liked; they would say exactly what they thought; and they would say nothing if there was nothing to be said. Nina was so childish in her ways, and yet so very wise. She bit. She took water in her mouth and blew it out straight at your face, and threw herself on the sofa recklessly and stretched herself across, head downward.… She would never quite grow up. And by contrast, Oxford with its sham clubs and sham societies appeared a doll’s house, a thing stationary and extinct of life, while the world, the Outside World, was going by. And I asked myself: What am I waiting for?
In fine, it was Tristan pining for Isolde — with the important variation that Tristan journeyed to Isolde for the reason that Isolde failed to come to Tristan. One evening, very suddenly, I left England and set out back to the Far East.
II
I TRAVELLED WITH SIR HUGO AND THE RUSSIAN General, and we took the eastern route. I had recognized Sir Hugo’s gait as he came my way one day in crowded Piccadilly, but stopped in front of a shop window. And when I came up I saw Sir Hugo gazing at long rows of D.S.O.’s and O.B.E.’s displayed behind the window. He was going out as professional adviser — to Siam, I think, he said — or some such-like place, and we arranged to leave together. And then the General who was going out to Wrangel’s Army in Constantinople joined us. He was to get off at Port Said.
On board next morning I showed the General an alarming Reuter message from Constantinople. The French Government, it ran, had ordered the disbandment of General Wrangel’s Army, offering to transport the refugees back to Russia or to Brazil, but General Wrangel declined the offer, refused the invitation to go to Paris, and demanded the return of his arms and munitions which the French had already sold to Georgia, where they had fallen into Bolshevik hands. Money, gold and silver valuables and jewels had been stolen from the steamer in which General Wrangel was staying. Important military documents regarding the campaign in the Crimea had also been stolen.