Petya had firm convictions, formed in early youth; Nina had practically none, so she naturally started thinking as he did. He could not tolerate whatever was the conventional thing to do, and loathed high society, and especially Guards officers and jurists, if only because of the way they looked upon women. When he agreed to get married in church it was probably the only time in his life that he had waived his principles—simply because the ceremony was unavoidable. It was a torment for him to have to make his confession (still, a sympathetic progressive priest asked only two or three formal questions) and take communion. Nina herself, all of seventeen years old, refused communion, saying, “I don’t believe that’s the body and blood of Christ!” (“Nina love,” her mother said reprovingly, “nobody believes nowadays, but they still take communion!”) Nina didn’t believe in the sacrament of marriage either, but the ceremony itself allured her, enchanted her, it was really like discovering a new life, the happiest day in a woman’s life.
There the bridegroom’s concessions to convention ended. He refused to pay the customary newlyweds’ visits. He refused to join in such “romantic nonsense” as visiting the burial places of ancestors. He did not like his wife’s sentimental reminiscences, did not like the stately home on the Volkhov and regarded the family estate itself as a crime, so that Nusya renounced her share of her inheritance. (Petya, however, even rebelled against working on the land with his hands, against all ties with the land, disliked farming as something in which incalculable forces might suddenly intrude—hail, drought, who knows what—and your expert calculations went for nothing.)
There were other, transient grievances in Nusya’s young life in Petersburg. At twenty and even twenty-one she wanted—why not?—to dance a little. But she never had dance frocks or pumps, and the first time her parents gave her money for clothes her husband took it as a (nonreturnable) loan for a good cause. Nor did she have time for the concerts and lectures she had dreamt of: she was hard at work all day and in the evenings, multiplying and dividing for the mineralogists, entering the figures in a card file, often getting into a muddle and always bored, sitting at home all day as if in an office, with a relentlessly demanding husband. Relentlessly—but affectionately. And at the slightest sign of displeasure on her husband’s face Nusya was ready to sacrifice anything. She grew accustomed to, happy with a life lived to please her husband. “Forgive me, Nusya my dear, for giving you such a hard time of it. It’s only for a while. Someday things will get a bit easier and we’ll go everywhere.” But life went by, and that “someday” never came. Petya was never still for a moment. Even at a student ball he was in charge of collecting subscriptions to some fund or other, and on their first voyage to France he was too busy learning French to look at the sea—so how could he possibly have time left for his wife? One Christmas she escaped to a fancy-dress ball, but where was the girl she had once been? She was no longer good at party games, or quick-witted in conversation, and although she wore a charming Japanese costume she did not attract attention. She had looked forward to evenings spent discussing serious books with her husband, but even that was not to be. “You might at least educate me!” she implored: she felt very much in need of firm guidance. But her young husband retorted that he respected her too much as an individual to force his own views on her. “You must work it out for yourself.”
What other views were there? How could she “work it out”? She simply accepted her husband’s views anyway.
Obodovsky was invited to stay at the Mining Institute after he graduated, but he felt cramped there and refused. He was offered a post in the Donbass, which by then had all the urban amenities, but said no, because working there would be too comfortable. He was a born pioneer and felt the lure of the new. They went out to the Golovin mine in the wilds of Siberia, and as if that was not taxing enough, the “Socialist” mine started up shortly afterward at Cheremkhovo, where after working for one year every worker received gratis a share in the mine and its administration. This was an extraordinary scheme for 1904, and the socialist character of the enterprise was concealed from the government by disguising it as a joint-stock company. As they left for Siberia, Petya donated seven hundred of the one thousand rubles given him as a moving allowance to some social cause, without even asking his wife whether she needed anything. The one human character trait he never understood, and was repelled by, was stinginess. At the Golovin mine he sometimes went for months on end without salary while helping to pay the enterprise’s debts, or else he was paid and used the money to settle with the workers. As for the Socialist mine—it was an abyss that simply swallowed money, while the coal proved to be of poor quality and no one would buy it. Petya had such hard going at the Socialist colliery that at thirty-two he was going gray, his heart missed beats, and he had attacks of “nerves” which sometimes reduced him to helpless sobbing.
Pyotr Obodovsky was so constructed that not only did he never evade responsibility, as Russians are so often inclined to do, but whenever he saw a duty (even when it was not directly his own) he rushed to perform it, plunge in and swim against the tide. He knew that he could master anything, organize anything more quickly and neatly and effectively than the next man. Other people were also quick to sense this, and joined in pushing him into the most difficult situations. At any meeting or congress of engineers, any committee of experts, Obodovsky inevitably came forward with his projects and those projects captivated all present, so that he was called a spellbinder, and wherever he went was elected to bureaus, committees—and called on to implement his own proposals. Wherever he appeared—in the Irkutsk Social Assembly (a club for intellectuals) or the Geographical Society—as soon as the speeches were over he felt bound to rise, to contest and amend what had been said, after which he could not escape election!
The well-off and enterprising world of engineers, lawyers, and merchants in Irkutsk appreciated Obodovsky and were ready to accept him as one of their own, but he never felt at home with them, could not fall in with their free and easy, pleasure-loving ways. They all spent money freely, caroused, gambled recklessly; the wives of Irkutsk engineers had forty new frocks a year made for them and even ordered Paris models—whereas in some years Nusya couldn’t have a new dress at all. The Obodovskys, forever paying back money borrowed by the Socialist colliery, were so hard up that they often went hungry, and in the Social Assembly, with engineers and lawyers noisily dining around them, sat silently with anguished bellies, pretending to acquaintances that they had just dined at home.
But Nusya had genuinely reconciled herself to their fate, got used to it and even seemed to like it: to live as they did was like preserving their youth indefinitely. “I don’t want to get rich! I don’t want a life of habit!” She came to realize clearly that she and her husband would never know financial ease, or peace of mind, or leisure, or amusements, and she no longer coveted such things. The whole business of her life was to be his wife. And if he was taking dynamite to Irkutsk for the colliery, and declaring his freight so that proper precautions could be observed was likely to take too long, they just carried it with them into a passenger carriage. Nusya would sit on the lethal box, draping her skirt over it to hide its fearful contents from the conductor’s eye. And ride over the bumps in this position.
But their tender affection for each other had never wavered from their honeymoon on. Petya had been a virgin when he married, had lived an immaculate life ever since, and had never known any other woman. “I asked nothing from you that I couldn’t offer myself.” When he went off to jail his confident parting words were: “You are my wife—which is as much as to say that you are me!” They vowed that whichever of them outlived the other would take the wedding ring from the dead partner’s finger, and thenceforward wear two of them.
It was Obodovsky’s destiny to choose paths peculiar to himself, paths that drained his strength and sometimes endangered his life. When in 1905 the revolution overtook Obodovsky in Irkutsk, his destiny confronted him with a knife-edge choice. To all
appearances the day so long desired and prayed for by all the most honorable martyrs of the muted generations seemed to have dawned for Russia. Absolutely nobody could get on with his ordinary work or sit it out at home, everybody was helplessly swept along with the marching, shouting, voting, when the ordinary bonds between particles of humanity snapped and every single one felt, joyfully and fearfully, free to move independently of matter as a whole, felt an imperative need to move, making no attempt to imagine the shape of things afterward. Obodovsky, who even before had never been at rest, was bound to spin, to whirl ten times as fast! The shock waves in the world about him propelled him inexorably to the forefront, to the summit. The difference between him and innumerable other orators and deputies was that he did not abandon his normal work.
Even after his arrest his characteristic of always becoming prominent and of running not only his own life but the lives of all around him never waned. He was elected headman in every communal cell, in the New Isolation Prison, and again by fellow prisoners in transit to the Aleksandrovskoye Central Jail. Since the prison regime was then so lenient he could achieve a great deal, and spent whole days helping his fellow prisoners to arrange their lives, obtain exemptions and amenities, and keep in contact with the outside world. Even in the Central Jail he was called upon to make a plan of the prison so that the cost of repairs could be estimated, and secretly made a copy, which was afterward circulated among prisoners as an aid to escape.
So it was only to be expected that on his first visit to relatives in Petersburg, Obodovsky immediately stumbled upon the summons issued by the League of Liberation to all progressives to attend an open-air concert at Pavlovsk in order to protest against the war, and (this was after the sinking of the Russian fleet at Tsushima) of course he went along, taking Nusya with him. People wearing caps or head scarves were not allowed in to listen to the band, only respectable persons had gathered—and this made it all the more impressive when this respectable audience interrupted the music by stamping its feet and shouting, “Enough blood! Down with the war,” Pyotr shouting with them fit to burst. The musicians fled from the platform, and the audience began barricading themselves behind piled-up benches, with the police trying to disperse them. Once again, Obodovsky kept it up longer than anybody, and when they were all running away into the park he could not bear to run with them. White with anger, he took Nusya’s arm and led her, not away from the soldiers lined up there, but, with slow triumphal steps, the length of the front rank. He walked before the hateful ranks white in the face, biting his lip, his head proudly high. The bugle had sounded, the officer had turned around to order his men to fire in the air, but was flustered and worried that the defenseless couple might be too near the volley. (Although Nusya was afraid, she did not try to pull her husband along more quickly. If he had made up his mind to it she was ready to die with him.) “You are taking a risk! Think of your lady! Go away as quickly as possible!” the officer begged. Petya answered sharply, as though the soldiers were under his command: “I shall go away when I see fit!” So husband and wife, slowly, and more slowly still, walked on to the gates. And there was no volley.
In emigration, in Paris, they lived in a seventh-story attic, poorer than the students around them, unable even to take a horse tram, saving the fare for food. And there a telegram from Siberia reached them, saying that one partner had defaulted and that repayment of a thousand rubles owed by the Socialist colliery had fallen due. Much as they loathed Nusya’s mother’s “estate” it was to her they had to turn.
Yes, being a revolutionary is easier if you come from the gentry, not from some other class.
Life in emigration—half starved, always hunting for work, anchorless, making puerile attempts to put on plays (Petya was a hopeless actor), joining in nonparty socials, fraternal labor exchanges, and mutual aid funds, living in a self-contained Russian colony in England without knowing a word of English—for Nusya this was the easiest and happiest time of her life.
The squabbles, the melancholia, the idle dreams of émigré existence were not for the Obodovskys. Petya had fled to Europe as a revolutionary and a wanted man, but once there he wished (with the approval of Kropotkin, whom he regarded not as a party leader but as one who could teach him how to live) to work as an engineer, yet not in the service of foreigners, but for Russia, while remaining abroad. Fortunately, he was sufficiently well known in Russian engineering circles, and was offered the right sort of work: surveying European ports and writing a monograph on them, organizing a floating exhibition of Russian goods and an industrial exhibition at Turin. He worked from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., and when he had waited a whole year for his wages was told that “our credit is exhausted, and your services are no longer needed.” His speeches on an industrial program for Russia were applauded, but for lack of funds nothing that he had written was published in his own country, and his words remained unheard and unheeded in Russia.
Obodovsky’s anger with his fellow countrymen made him sick to his stomach, and as in his youth he was threatened by some sort of nervous collapse. His indignation with Russia was such that he thought of settling permanently in Argentina.
But, mysteriously, the work a man must do awaits him in the place where he was born, and nowhere else. Obodovsky’s ancestry was Polish, but he recognized no connection with Poland and lived wholly for Russia.
So as soon as news came that he was no longer wanted by the law, the Obodovskys scraped together a few francs in small loans and sped home.
Yet although life in Russia was somewhat brighter, though the gloom seemed to be lifting and the cruel times unlikely to return, Nusya was somehow not at all eager to go back beneath the oppressive vaults of the fatherland. Where life would never again be as free of responsibilities as it had been in emigration.
Nusya had a presentiment—and others prophesied—that a terrible end awaited them both in their homeland.
* * *
EVEN THE DISTANT PINE WAVES TO ITS OWN COPSE.
* * *
[25]
Olda Andozerskaya hotly resented it when people seemed to connect her, because of her appearance or the company she kept, with the clan of old (or more or less old) maids, unmarried because they had failed to find a husband. She was unmarried at thirty-seven, but for quite a different reason. On principle. They had not been able to change their lives—she could have done so a hundred times, but had found no one worth doing it for. Intelligent people understood, but for the stupid majority the absence of a ring on her finger meant that she was a failure. She shied away from unattached women, avoided even sitting by them, let alone associating with them and courting comparison.
It was, though, the same with women in general. She had, in her lifetime, met a handful of interesting women, all old, but the great majority were so colorless, so far from being her equals, that they could not interest her or affect her in any way at all.
She knew Vera Vorotyntsev from the Public Library, but couldn’t quite understand her function there. If you are master of your subject, you know what books the library has, which ones you need to take out, and surely need not entrust the search to someone called a “bibliographer.” Though not in her first youth Vera was still (just) too young to have joined the accursed clan, but nothing else about her inclined Andozerskaya to show friendliness. And on this occasion, the young person would have done better to stop flitting anxiously around and keeping such a sharp eye on the colonel, as if she was his wife instead of his sister.
The colonel, of course, was married, but Andozerskaya’s position excused her from paying such very close attention to the dividing line between married and single men, and allowed her not to attach exaggerated importance to such accidental matters as a marriage in the past.
Olda Orestovna had come on some little matter concerning a book, and should have left long ago. The evening had expired anyway. But the moment she had entered, when she had seen only the colonel’s broad shoulders, but not yet his face, and heard only a few words fro
m him, she was full of admiration. Then he turned around, and she saw his weather-beaten, sunburned face, fresh from the trenches, saw the white and gold of the George Cross and the crimson Order of St. Vladimir, heard him chiding the assembled Kadets, contradicting them in a way not usually heard in such company. At first Olda Orestovna was just slightly amused, then she was carried away by it, and felt the stirrings of an urge to join in and be a bit naughty herself. True, the company had broken up, but the colonel was still sitting there, and she was ready to exert herself just for him. Simply to show him how much alike they were.
Meanwhile, she kept up a conversation with the Obodovskys. This dialogue, though unexciting, was not without interest. It was more a matter of studying your interlocutor than of trying to convince him. The infinite variety the endless shades of opinion, the inexhaustible permutations of a limited number of components never ceased to amuse and delight her. The variety, the uniqueness of people’s beliefs was so obvious, from one moment to the next obliterating any dividing line between groups—only fanatics or knaves could insist that people were divisible into parties. People let themselves be divided into parties only because they had not thought enough, or didn’t care enough, or were not mature enough. The characteristics, or principles, that united or divided people were clearly something more than their opinions.
This engineer—revolutionary and patriot—had exhibited yet another configuration of elements, peculiar but not contradictory. And he expressly rejected all political parties. Good for him.
Andozerskaya was also endowed with a greater than normal receptivity, which enabled her, while listening to whatever was said, and without relaxing her part in the conversation, to form and store up conclusions from what her eyes told her. So, without effort and for no special reason, Olda Orestovna drew her own conclusions from the mild serenity of the wife sitting beside her restless and vehement husband, from the affectionate way in which they touched each other and the affectionate words they exchanged, and felt that she could sum up the story of the Obodovskys’ long, smooth, and unblemished married life, which had never been disrupted by an explosion of unreasoning passion or disturbed by subterranean fires. This semblance of fulfillment seemed to Olda Orestovna a deprivation. The impoverishment of those who believe too soon, with too little experience, that they have discovered and achieved everything. Men, absorbed in their work, can easily find in their wives a whole, unique, eternally serene, self-contained world, its boundaries drawn for as long as life lasts, and their wives may accept their uniqueness as mutual recognition that both have chosen aright. Perhaps they have.
November 1916 Page 53