And still he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He despised himself for it. Perhaps he should leave right away …
The company (so small but so dynamic, and already disappointed in this dubious colonel, but what could you expect from the conformist monarchists of the imperial army?), the company rode over him in full cry.
“They can’t give us victories, so they fob us off with an insulting present instead—the right to graft the imperial standard onto the national flag!”
“Symbolizing the union of Tsar and people! Where’s their sense of humor!”
“You can bet the rosy-cheeked cops won’t be sent to the front.”
“The lower orders are getting more and more exasperated. This crowd will never be forgiven by the people!”
Strange, really. So few of them, yet so quick to second one another. He wondered about Vera. She was with them so much, she must share these ideas. It was a contagious disease—there was no resisting it if you came too close.
“It’s gotten to the point where schoolboys are tearing the royal arms off their caps.”
“We’ve crossed some sort of fateful divide and are moving steadily toward the denouement!”
“Gorky’s magazine is quite right. It’s time to stop being afraid of what in police parlance is called ‘disorder.’ ”
“The holders of power take fright very easily! They may look unassailably strong … In 1905 we saw how cowardly they really are!”
“In the long run the worse things are, the better! Even a catastrophe will get us somewhere! Anything’s better than rotting away in this shameful fashion!”
“Meek acceptance, that’s what’s shameful! If serfdom has not rotted Russia to the core, things are about to happen!”
“Something must happen! It can’t go on like this much longer!”
At which Minervin took the floor, raising an admonitory finger. Drip, drip, drip …
“Whoever clashes with the people will fall into the abyss!”
And his oratorical self-assurance, his whiter than white collar, his meticulously knotted tie, his unbroken record as a deputy, were no impediment, indeed they encouraged him in his belief that he was the summit, in the lead, at the cutting edge of that “people” which would clash with the government and hurl it into the abyss.
Ah, but if the people meant the infantry—here was Colonel Vorotyntsev, who had seen two full complements pass through his regiment, who in his free and easy way persisted in asking personal questions, even in the intervals between forward charges, who had learned and committed to his capacious memory six hundred, eight hundred, maybe a thousand faces, characters, life stories … Whereas Minervin—how many infantrymen had Minervin known? They rattled on about the government’s culpability—but oh, how easy they found it to tongue-wag soldiers down the road to death. How simple everything looked from a Petersburg apartment!
A jolt. He was free. Free from the unbearable constraints, the bewitchment. He felt ready to insult them on their own ground. No more apologies. He had regained his freedom. He spoke loudly, challengingly addressing the whole gathering.
“You, gentlemen, keep repeating that Russia is ruled by the thickest of the thick, that its ministers are all idiots, that we desperately need better ones. But let’s be frank about it: the last thing ‘society’ wants is good ministers in Russia. If good ministers came on the scene tomorrow ‘society’ would hate them even more than the bad ones!”
He no longer felt shy, no longer shrank. If he was flushed—it was with passion.
They were taken aback, but recovered quickly.
“Good ones? When did Russia ever have good ministers? Name them!”
That one had not sunk in on them. But, determined to get his own back for his humiliation, he refused to be diverted, and launched a frontal attack on “society’s” opinions, unafraid of its jeers.
“No, I won’t list the good ones, but there was one great one! We had one great Russian statesman, and which of you in educated Russian society noticed and acknowledged it? He was abused and reviled more than Goremykin or Stürmer. And he departed as he had come—unrecognized, unappreciated, indeed anathematized.”
The ladies and gentlemen were nonplussed, but they had not yet lost all hope that this colonel was not a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, that he was just muddleheaded. But whom did he have in mind? Surely not …? He couldn’t possibly mean …?
“Yes, Stolypin!” With a sweep of his hand Vorotyntsev demolished their hopes and his own social reputation. His voice rang out a challenge.
“We were sent a man of integrity! A man incapable of compromise! A man sure that his cause was right! And that there was still plenty of sound sense in Russia, if you just listened! Above all, a man who knew how to act, how to break the logjam, instead of just babbling away. If he had a plan he acted on it! If he exerted his strength he got things moving! What he saw was the future, what he offered was the new. So—did you recognize him at the time? It was his boldness, his devotion to Russia, above all his wisdom that upset society. The ‘Stolypin necktie’ gibe stuck—people failed to see that there was a lot more to his premiership than the rope.”
Witty, though—"Stolypin necktie.” What was a necktie if not a symbol? Minervin adjusted his own, contemplated an annihilating tirade. Or should he try irony? Or just ignore it?
What could he say, though? It was as though a shell burst had dug an impassable hole between them. If this was the sort of colonel that got called a rebel, what could the rest of the officer corps, the non-rebels, be like? And if Stolypin was accepted as the epitome of Russia, could that country, which lacked a past anyway, be said to have a future? Did it deserve to be dragged out of the mire? Alas for Russian society! Unhappy the lot of progressive persons in that uncouth country!
So that was that, and they could have called it a day, gone their separate ways, never to meet again, except that they were not in a club, not in the street, but in Andrei Ivanovich’s apartment, and some respectable solution had to be found. Except that after what had been said, even simple politenesses were hard to utter.
Vorotyntsev, however, felt relieved, though it worried him a little to see Vera looking pale and frightened.
The situation was saved by Andrei Ivanovich in person. He had apparently been in the room, standing behind Vorotyntsev, long enough to hear his speech. He now walked around the table, to the places vacated by the children, sat down without ceremony, letting one hand dangle over a chair back and pushing an empty cup away with the other. He was no longer the booming, the thunderous orator, calling on the people to make sacrifices, he was very quiet, very diffident … He looked uncertainly at Minervin, at the lecturer, at the ladies … Then spoke again in that deep throbbing voice that seemed to bring out all the bubbles of warmth clinging to the walls of his chest.
“Do you know … I had a remarkable encounter with Stolypin once in the Second Duma … I’d seen him many a time, of course, I’d heard him say ‘You don’t scare me,’ and ‘What you want are great upheavals,’ and it all seemed plain enough, just another suppressor, a power maniac, a careerist—we never measured him by any other yardstick. I myself strongly condemned his agrarian reform bill in the Duma—said it was a bureaucratic ploy, that it would cause discord in every rural community, and in the family, that it threatened to destroy the ancient foundations … I was also the first in 1911 to sign the motion opposing Stolypin’s policy on the western zemstvos. But I had to appeal to him on several occasions to show clemency to certain people—and he always did. A friend of mine, also a zemstvo doctor, had been banished by administrative order from Voronezh province for ‘propaganda among the peasantry.’ To be honest, he really had carried on propaganda, or putting it more simply, hadn’t concealed his Liberationist ideas from his patients. But my pride wouldn’t let me abandon a friend to rough justice—after all, I was a Duma deputy. So I up and wrote a letter to Stolypin.”
Andrei Ivanovich told his story apologetically, and seemed s
urprised at himself. (Even now—eight years after the event. Meeting Stolypin at that time was tantamount to treason. He must have kept it quiet.)
“Well, he invited me to come and see him. I went. Gritting my teeth, full of hostility. We met in a small room in the ministerial suite, just the two of us. Not in the white glare of the Duma chamber, where every line in your face is etched deeper by the light from the chandeliers, and we ourselves and every sound we utter become so much more important, but in a little room, with a single desk. Stolypin was not a bit stiff, not on his dignity, not at all onstage, he was just tired, worn out, in fact. ‘So you’re a zemstvo doctor?’ he said, ‘I never knew!’ He was smiling and he looked so kind, so gentle, I just couldn’t resist him. He made such a good impression, in fact the best possible impression!”
His eyes moved around to Vorotyntsev, he gave him a good-natured grin, and went on, still sounding surprised.
“I felt that this way I could easily slip up, betray my principles, but I couldn’t help giving him a friendly smile in return.”
Not many people had such a becoming smile as Shingarev. When he smiled you wouldn’t swap him for anybody.
“I couldn’t keep a note of goodwill out of my voice. I answered frankly—yes, my friend did have Liberationist ideas, but he was by no means an extremist, he couldn’t possibly call for any sort of upheaval.”
A smile that melted himself and his listeners. How could anyone fail to respond?
“He gave his promise. And kept it. My friend was allowed to go home.”
“Exceptions only prove the rule,” Minervin reminded him curtly.
“Another time”—Shingarev was not to be put off—"I approached him about Pyanykh, an SR member of the Duma, tried for murder, to try to get the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He refused at first—Pyanykh had planted a bomb in a priest’s house, and he didn’t want to interfere with the court, but he arranged a reprieve just the same. And there was yet another occasion. Ten Voronezh peasants were condemned to death for murdering a landowner. I turned to him again: two of them had confessed, but they weren’t all murderers, the others were innocent. He said, ‘You don’t realize what sort of people you’re pleading for. If we don’t keep murderers in check by terror they’ll cut the throat of everybody who wears a frock coat, including you and me. If they should seize power you would be one of the first to be executed.’ He got out a diagram and showed it to me. ‘Look at this, it shows that while all that talk is going on in the Duma the number of murders, especially of constables, watchmen, and landowners, is mounting from day to day. Terrorist acts are on the increase—and I have to answer for it.’ In spite of which he telegraphed orders to Voronezh to reopen the inquiry.”
His guileless face promised all doubters a candid reply.
“Since then, I’ve sometimes been uneasily aware that even the very best parliaments can be too clumsy, too full of sound and fury. Take the British and French parliaments, as we saw them this spring. Our dream is to be like them. But when you consider it, we all get too embittered, we all say harsh things we don’t really mean. There must surely be some better way … some more humane way of trying to persuade even our most savage opponents.”
There might or might not be such a utopia somewhere, but Minervin merely wiped his pince-nez and let this pass.
Somehow, a film seemed to be forming over the ditch dug by Vorotyntsev’s bombshell.
Another ring. The telephone this time. Shingarev hurried out, and the others listened hard. This time it was Pavel Nikolaevich!
But Shingarev came back looking embarrassed: he asks us not to wait for him any longer, he can’t possibly come, something urgent has arisen. He hinted that it had to do with Protopopov.
With Protopopov, that traitor? Well, well. The whole company was on tenterhooks.
While the telephone call was going on, yet another voice, the musical female voice heard earlier, was addressing Minervin, quite forcefully, behind Vorotyntsev’s back.
Not wanting to sit with his back to her, he looked around. A small, rather ordinary-looking woman in a dark gray English two-piece. She held her small head erect and motionless. Her dark hair was tousled, or untidily combed. And she was putting Minervin in his place.
Everybody here of course knew everybody else! No introductions were made. Vorotyntsev was the only new face.
He stood up abruptly, took a step, his spurs jingled as he clicked his heels and—although he had not kissed other hands in this room—bent over Professor Andozerskaya’s hand. Just because he felt like it.
She raised her small hand and held it out to him. With a smile. Her eyes sparkled with frank approval.
She had heard the explosion!
*
* *
Siberian regiments, famed in song and story,
bristling with bayonets, marching to glory.
Let the world know!
Over the bridges and Warsaw is ours!
Proud Polish beauties pelt us with flowers!
Let the world know!
[22]
A man who has long endured hardship and dangers, however accustomed he is to them, however firmly he shuts his mind to thoughts of a different lot, is gradually sapped without even realizing it by an instinctive urge to relax, a yearning for sympathetic attention and appreciation of his services. Even a little boy who spends the whole day scrambling about in trees and paddling in streams for crayfish looks for recognition and admiration at the family table in the evening. And the most dogged and tight-lipped of workers after a day, a week, a month of slog and frost expects at least one person, his wife, to show understanding and concern. A sense of physical and spiritual deprivation gnaws even more damagingly at the vitals of a soldier at the front, who cannot even be sure that his life will be prolonged from one day to the next.
Vorotyntsev, who was always tightly geared to the job in hand, had not realized until now how strong his yearning for these things had become. But the moment he stretched out on a bunk in an ordinary—to him utterly extraordinary!—civilian carriage on the Kiev–Moscow train, he had begun to feel an upsurge of this yearning. At home in Moscow, where it would have been most natural to appease his need, trivial distractions crept in, and there was no chance of sharing his most intimate feelings. In the train he had given Fyodor Kovynev a peep at the outermost edge of his thoughts. He had wondered, on the way to Petersburg, whether he would find people concerned enough, demanding enough, understanding enough for him to become the center of searching and grateful attention, to sit center stage and let himself talk and talk, suffering all over again the pain of his experience, yet delighted to feel his bones relieved of the ache long suffered in silence, to see military setbacks turned to good purpose, transformed by the ready understanding of this friendly company.
And then, in the fifth-floor apartment on Monetnaya Street, the very company he was hoping for seemed to have assembled, intent on hearing what he had to say, and on questioning him—but perhaps they asked questions only out of politeness, and there was indeed no real reason for them to listen, since party politics was their sole interest. As he listened to them the desire to pour out his most secret and saddest thoughts waned. These, after all, were people who before war came had ridiculed soldiers, and would not want to give them a hearing. While Vorotyntsev, in addition to his courses at the Academy, had been learning artillery tactics, and horsemanship, and acrobatics on horseback, these people had regarded the word “patriot” as a badge of shame. Somewhere, perhaps, on a different floor on a different street, those before whom he had hoped to lay the whole tangle of his anxieties were even now assembled. The trick was to find them.
But, of course, every private certainty is diminished by voicing it, telling it to others. Only between close friends, and sotto voce, can it be transmitted accurately.
So that Vorotyntsev would have done better to say nothing at all on this occasion. But, for one thing, it would have been impolite to deny them when they were
all expecting something—and with Shingarev there, how could he possibly have done so? He and Shingarev had made a start and stopped short—but Shingarev was the one to whom he could open his heart. Shingarev’s pensive reminiscence of Stolypin had been very moving. His guilelessly sensitive features, his unguarded gaze said that he was eager to learn. The sudden squabble about Stolypin had helped Vorotyntsev to pluck up his courage—he was in the mood now to challenge his company, not to ask their indulgence, but to fling in their faces the reality about matters on which, in their inordinate militancy, their thick-skinned unawareness, they passed judgment so lightly. Vera too had never been told properly, and he had no intention of telling her things individually. These thoughts, however, would not have taken shape so firmly but for the arrival of the little woman professor with the lace collar but with a masculine crease on her small forehead—and a steadily approving gaze for the colonel.
The lady professor, for no obvious reason, had prevailed, though they had not exchanged a word, and she had asked nothing. Her mere presence made Vorotyntsev feel at ease, at home, needed: here and now was where he should be telling his story. This was where he was most wanted!
Meanwhile they had all taken their places in readiness. Pavel Nikolaevich was no longer expected, but Minervin stayed on to hear the colonel.
Where should he start? What should he tell them about? Things which in his days in the trenches were of supreme importance, crying out for attention, might here, in this enlightened Kadet society, look trivial, evidence perhaps of an inability to take a broader view. Seen from here, the war was so long, so monotonous, and the ebb and flow of battle so kaleidoscopic, that it could only be envisaged in the most general outline. But if you generalized, made it more coherent and more detached, there would be nothing much left—they probably knew it all from the papers anyway.
The colonel, though, was fresh from the Romanian front. The only one still active—the others were at a standstill. So how were things there?
November 1916 Page 48