“Oh, Fanny Ivanovna, please!” they entreated her. “She is our mother, Fanny Ivanovna. We can’t have our mother waiting on the landing. After all, she’s our mother.”
“After all,” said Fanny Ivanovna, putting a terrible meaning of her own into these simple words, “after all I am the mistress of this house. True, I have been thrown into the mud and trampled on, told I am not wanted, done away with, about to be thrown into the street like a dog, but while I am here I am the mistress of this flat. After all, I am!” she cried out, almost in tears.
“Very well, then, I will never speak to you again,” said Nina.
The three sisters again vanished on the landing, and whispers were renewed, and Fanny Ivanovna resumed her needlework, her agile fingers, it seemed to me, moving quicker than was their custom.
“The lap-dog …” she whispered, turning her face to me. “The German governess.… Andrei Andreiech, why should I? Why should I?…”
When at last the three sisters returned from the landing, such depressing silence descended upon the room that I thought I would do well to follow the example of the two Pàvel Pàvlovichi and go home. There was no one to see me out this time. As I reached the lower steps of the broad winding staircase I heard the faint sound of a woman weeping. Then I could see a dark silhouette between the large glass double-doors leading out into the dim street. It was also dim in the vestibule. As I came nearer I saw that it was Magda Nikolaevna Bursànova.
My first impulse was to dash upstairs for a glass of water. But the sobs died away at my approach.
It was still raining heavily.
I raised my hat.
“I have sent the porter for a cab,” she said, wiping her tears hurriedly. “I don’t know if he’ll get one now. It’s raining terribly.”
And as we waited, before I knew where I was, she too began her confession.
“You must have heard of me very often,” she said in her gentle, musical voice. She was a very gentle-mannered woman and in her youth she must have been curiously like Nina. She even had, I thought, the sidelong look. “I am sure,” she said, “I shouldn’t like to hear all that you have, no doubt, been told about me.”
Then she added:
“I know you. Nina has spoken of you. But there is one thing, Andrei — I don’t know your—”
“Andrei Andreiech.”
“There is one thing, Andrei Andreiech, that I want to know. Why, why can’t we put our heads together and decide something, help each other, instead of standing on our silly dignities? Heaven knows that we are in a muddle. Heaven knows that we have all of us sinned in our own small way, Andrei Andreiech. I came. I wanted to see her, to arrange things, to have it all out. I want to marry and leave them. I want Nikolai to give me a divorce. Then I will leave them alone. They can all do just as they please. I bear no one any malice. I came, and I was not admitted.… Into my own house, my own flat. It was my flat, Andrei Andreiech. I chose it. I bought the things and arranged them. There isn’t a single thing in here that wasn’t mine. When all is said and done, they are my children, Andrei Andreiech. And I have to wait outside like some low hawker — a tatarin—on the landing … not admitted.…” She was about to sob again, but then thought better of it and replaced her handkerchief.
“But, Andrei Andreiech, to send my own daughter to me to Moscow as a kind of emissary to ask me on no account to grant Nikolai Vasilievich a divorce, so that he should be unable to marry again — I call that low, low.… All this time she has wanted a divorce — reproached me, in fact, for standing in the way. What has it to do with me? If Nikolai really wanted a divorce, how could I have prevented him from getting it?”
“He would lose the children,” I explained.
“Why should he lose the children?” she asked.
“It’s the Russian law.”
Magda Nikolaevna laughed. “Are you a law student?”
“No.”
“I thought not.”
“Why?”
She laughed again. She had, I noticed, a very wicked laugh.
“Andrei Andreiech, you are very, very young, and believe everything you hear. If I am in the wrong and he is in the right, is it likely, I ask you, that under any conceivable law Nikolai should lose the children? It is the one who is in the wrong that loses the children. If Nikolai does not want a divorce because he does not want to lose the children, he knows that he is in the wrong.”
“So you think that is the reason he doesn’t want a divorce?” I said, and then added, “Of course I knew that.”
“Ah, but you didn’t know why he would lose the children by a divorce. If you are logical you must admit that it is so. It’s either so, or—”
“Or?”
“Or Nikolai simply did not want a divorce.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps he didn’t want it.” She shrugged her shoulders and laughed wickedly. “You see, you can’t have it both ways. Either he didn’t want a divorce because he didn’t want to lose the children, in which case he obviously admits that he is in the wrong. Or,” she laughed wickedly, “he merely says so to Fanny Ivanovna, who is stupid and knows no better, because he does not want a divorce … so as not to marry her.”
“But he does want a divorce,” I said.
“Now,” said Magda Nikolaevna. “I suppose you know why he wants it now?”
I nodded, and she nodded in answer — I thought rather significantly. I remembered that it had always been her wish to read for the Bar, but her own life had been too busy and complicated by legal proceedings to admit of the leisure necessary for the pursuit of her hobby.
“You know only half the story, young man,” she said. “You know, for instance, that I ran away with Eisenstein. But you don’t know why I ran away with Eisenstein.”
“I am sure I don’t want to,” I said, “if that is not being very rude.”
“Half-truths are more dangerous than lies,” said she. Here the porter returned with a cab.
She searched in her little bag for a coin, but I anticipated her.
“But you must,” she said. And dragging me after her under the raised hood of the cab and seated therein comfortably she was about to begin a long story, but suddenly checked herself.
“It’s rather absurd,” she said and then laughed softly, which for the moment made her seem to me again curiously like Nina, “that I should be telling you why I ran away with Eisenstein at a time when I ought to be telling you why I have just run away from him.”
“I am going to marry,” she said.
“Yes?”
“An Austrian, Čečedek. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Andrei Andreiech,” she said suddenly, as we sat under the dripping roof, bouncing softly over the cobble-stones, “why don’t you go in for law? It’s so interesting.”
And glad of a change of subject I told her why I did not propose to read law. But as we turned on to the Liteiny and began ascending the convex bridge, she bent eagerly towards me and told me in great detail why she had run away with Eisenstein and why she was now running away from him.
IX
IT WAS A DAY, I REMEMBER, OF A PECULIAR warmth and fragrance, when you could feel that winter has become spring. I was strolling down the Nevski, and upon the wide, lighted splendour of this queen of streets I ran into Nikolai Vasilievich, with a pretty flapper on his arm.
“Andrei Andreiech!”
“Nikolai Vasilievich!”
And we shook hands warmly.