I was sorry to part with the old man. There was a quality about him that made him almost human. Later in the journey I had a letter from him. “We have had a good voyage, so far,” he wrote, “with only two days’ rough weather, when we were skirting a typhoon, or a similar storm.…”
And now I was alone on board the old ocean liner, as she steamed away carefully past the bright, foam-washed breakwaters of Colombo’s sunlit coast, and bulged into the open sea.
I was in bed on deck, on the point of going to sleep. Suddenly the dream of Nina, like a wave from nowhere, flowed upon my brain. I was still awake that second: I caught the dream as if with both my hands. I smiled broadly to myself. I had caught a dream!..
The sea was like a mirror of black glass. I listened to the nocturnal silence. Now and then a wilful dolphin would splash the surface of the water; then everything was still. The liner glided noiselessly across the sea.
Towards Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai.… I had vague fears of being “late.” In my emotional anxiety the East itself appeared emotionally coloured. The eastern night was veiled with sorrow. It was a night of Why? I discovered pathos in the animation of the Peking streets at night. Even as I write I can see Canton with its narrow, crowded streets sheltering beneath the dripping, overlapping roofs of shops, and feel the sombre enigmatic calm of their interior, the lethargic stare of Chinese merchants seated on the floor, and the thudding of the rain upon the roof; and I can see the dull and yellow water of the rivers, the swarming multitudes of lives upon the quays, the sampans crowding the canals; and I recall again the din of Mukden, the stretch of ancient muddy soil receding from my sight as I watched it from the window of the train, the fall of evening, and the melancholy of the ages. And I was made to feel that I was in another age, another world, that somewhere I must have dreamt this, or perhaps had known it ere I was born on earth, that deep in the recesses of my memory was an imprint of this peculiar light, this noise and din, this languid stillness of the East.
III
FINALLY I ARRIVED AT VLADIVOSTOK. THE MOMENT I set my foot on the platform I flew by well-known streets and curves and turnings to their house. I remember I felt in the manner of Tristan at the end of the last act: very sure, impatient, overwhelmed with love. I felt that I would just fly into the room and cry “Isolde!” and she would fly into my arms—“Tristan!” And then, immediately, we would get busy with the love duet.
I knocked at the window, and I felt that they should hear the throbbing of my heart. I knocked again, and then the blind behind the window was tampered with, and there was Sonia peering at me through the glass. Her frown developed into a radiant smile and her voice rang through the building:
“Andrei Andreiech!”
She ran away and then came to the door, half opened it, and said, “Andrei Andreiech, we aren’t dressed yet; but come into the drawing-room … wait, let me run away first.”
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning. She ran away, and I went into the drawing-room. Everything was exactly as I had left it. The canary in the cage went on with his usual “Chic!.. cherric!..” hopping to and fro. The sun was shining brightly through the window. It was one of those glorious autumn days that are like the unfolding days of spring.
“We shall be ready in ten minutes,” Sonia shouted from the adjoining room.
I waited ten minutes, and another ten minutes. Then the door opened and Sonia, radiant, came in. “Nina will be ready in ten minutes,” she said.
“No, she won’t be ready!” came Nina’s voice — a discontented voice.
“Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz have gone out shopping,” Sonia said.
“How is Nikolai Vasilievich?” I asked.
“He is probably at the office … or else with Zina.”
“How are the mines?”
She only waved her hand.
“Hopeless?”
“Oh, he hopes—we all hope, of course.…”
“Well then,” said I, “… we must hope.”
Then Vera, radiant and marvellously pretty, came in. “Nina will come in five minutes,” she said.
“Not in five but in ten minutes,” came Nina’s voice, this time a whimsical voice.
I sat on the old sofa, and Sonia and Vera both stared at me in a curious manner, wondering, no doubt, why the dickens I had arrived.
Then the door of the adjoining room flew open, and Nina flitted in, shook hands without looking at me and flitted over to the window.
I still sat on the old sofa, of which the spring had burst, and no one spoke. It was a somewhat silly situation.
“That spring I am sitting on is burst,” I said at length.
“Oh, Vera burst it,” Nina said.
“It’s a lie!” Vera flared. “You know yourself you burst it last night when you jumped about with Ward.”
“No, it’s Vera,” Nina said.
“It’s a lie! a lie! a lie!”
“It really doesn’t matter in the least who burst it,” I intervened. “I noticed that the spring was burst because I happened to be sitting on it … otherwise everything seems to be very much the same.”
We sat still for a little while. Then Nina turned to me impulsively and said, “And you haven’t seen the three sisters!”
I stared at her with blank expression.
She ran out, and returning quickly, thrust three tiny kittens on my lap. The old cat followed her into the room and looked up at me suspiciously.
“This is Sonia. This is Nina. This is Vera,” she explained.
For a while we admired the “three sisters”; then with the same swift motion, she grabbed the kittens in her hands and carried them away. The old cat followed her back into the adjoining room.
Again there was silence. The canary in the cage went on: “Chic!.. cherric!..”
“And Andrei Andreiech always goes on with his ‘Chic!.. cherric!..’ ” said Nina.
“Which Andrei Andreiech?”
She pointed at the canary.
“What do you mean?”
“We call him Andrei Andreiech.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just so … there is something of you about him … something … unsubstantial.”
“Nina, come for a walk,” I said.
I helped her on with her coat.
We went by the Aleutskaya, bathed in sunshine, switched off down the Svetlanskaya and turned into a park overhanging the sea. Autumn stood at the door with its sombre moods of hopes frustrated, of joys gone, and aims blown to the wind, like leaves of autumn.
“Why did you come?” she said. “Why? I never asked you.”
“You told me that you love me,” I said.
“I never loved you.”
“Why did you lie then?” I cried.
“Go to the devil!” she answered, and turned her face away.
“I have been three months on the way … three months. Good God, Nina, travelling three months to come and see you — and there!..”
“It was an unusually long journey. You must have been moving very slowly.”
“There!” I went on protestingly, “I chuck Oxford, come all the way to Vladivostok, spend three months on the journey … because … because I love you, and you—”
“You have a speck of soot on your nose,” she remarked.
“Nina!” I cried laughing, my heart all weeping tears. “Nina!”