How could Nellie be safe and well without them, the four of them? He wrote to her by every morning post.
‘If you want proper envelopes and paper, they’re in the right-hand drawer of my desk,’ he said to Dolly.
‘I know they are.’
‘It’s locked, but you’ve only got to ask me.’
‘I know.’
‘In case you want to write to Mother.’
‘Do you mean to ask her why she went away, or to ask her when she’s coming back?’
‘You don’t need to ask either.’
‘I shan’t need the paper,’ said Dolly, ‘because I don’t think I ought to write. I can only write properly in Russian, in any case.’
‘Why not, Dolly? Surely you don’t think she did the wrong thing?’
‘I don’t know whether she did or not. The mistake she probably made was getting married in the first place.’
‘Is that what you’re going to put in your letter?’
‘I told you it would be better if I didn’t write one.’
Obviously for a few days at least, perhaps for a few weeks, something would have to be done by way of looking after the children. Annushka had been removed from him, and by her own consent was totally under the doting protection of the cook and kitchen-maid, but he needed help with Ben, and still more with Dolly. With an impulse to avoid the English chaplaincy and the English community for as long as possible, Frank thought of the Kuriatins. Their home was always open to him.
Arkady Kuriatin was a merchant of the second grade. The dues he paid weren’t high enough to allow him to export; all his trade was within the Russian empire. He dealt in timber, wood pulp and paper, and Frank had done business with him for some time. Arkady had children – how many, Frank couldn’t say, because extra ones, perhaps nephews and nieces, perhaps waifs, or even hostages, seemed to come and go. His wife, Matryona Osipovna, was always at home. Frank had heard her say, ‘What is there better outside than in?’ Nellie had always admitted Mrs Kuriatin’s kindness, but couldn’t be doing with her. It was true that she had recommended Nellie to be sure that Dolly and Annushka always had their eyes washed out with their own urine, as this would preserve their bright glances.
Kuriatin had no telephone. Like most of the second-grade merchants he maintained an elaborate pretence, which, however, was a reassurance as well as a pretence, of keeping up the old ways. Sometimes he would indulge himself with the latest improvement. He had a motor-car, a 6-cylinder 50 horse-power Wolseley, of which he was proud, for there were only fifteen hundred cars or so in Moscow. But there was no electric light in his house, and you could not telephone him there.
Fortunately, he chose to live in an unpretentious street – though the house was large – not far from the Press, and Frank was able to go round there in the middle of the morning. He knocked at the outer street door, although he was perfectly well aware that unless it was a special occasion, and the Kuriatins were giving a dinner there would be no one in the front rooms at all. He waited, and, as he expected, a ferocious looking servant in a peasant smock appeared round the side of the house, with the air of a gaoler paid to discourage charitable visitors. He could not pretend not to recognize Frank, but shouted, as though to the deaf, the master was away.
‘I’ll see Mrs Kuriatin,’ said Frank.
To the right, as you went in, was a vast salon, the shutters closed, the chandeliers wrapped in canvas, the furniture hidden like corpses under white cotton shrouds, the whole floor covered for protection with spread-out sheets of the Trade Messenger. On the left the door was shut, but Frank knew it was the dining room. Here, when Kuriatin played host, the table clinked and clashed with imported silver and glass and the fierce servants were forced out of their smocks and felt boots and into black coats, shoes, and white gloves. The minor gentlefolk who had accepted the Kuriatins’ hospitality were not likely ever to invite them in return, but Kuriatin seemed smilingly to relish this impoliteness. As soon as the guests had gone, the family migrated to where they really lived, children, servants, dependents and relations on top of one another, in a couple of low-ceilinged, smoky rooms at the very back of the house.
Mrs Kuriatin, who had been lying on a shabby ottoman, flung down her cigarette and heaved herself towards him.
‘Ah, Frank Albertovich, if you had come yesterday, when I was feeling poorly, I should not have been able to receive you.’
‘Let’s be glad that didn’t happen, Matryona Osipovna.’
A number of young children were milling about, the tribe of Kuriatin, all of them well-grown, but broad, rather than tall, as though they had adapted themselves to the shape of the room where they spent so much of their time. Two very old women who nodded appeasingly were probably poor relations. One woman he knew – she was the wife of one of Kuriatin’s partners, or rather accomplices, in the timber business; the other, in black silk, he didn’t know.
‘This is my sister, Varya,’ cried Mrs Kuriatin. ‘Her husband couldn’t accompany her, he died not long ago.’ Frank took the sister’s hand. It was difficult not to feel that he was on a visit to a harem. The air was thick with the smell of lamp-oil and cigarettes from the Greek-tended tobacco gardens of the Black Sea. Mrs Kuriatin now varied her sentence of welcome to: ‘If you had come yesterday you would not have been able to see me, and I should not have been able to help you in your trouble.’
Frank looked round the crowded room.
‘You’re among friends here, Frank Albertovich, and my sister and I are as one person. They say, if Vera slips, Varya falls.’
‘Well, let’s not call it trouble,’ said Frank, ‘it’s only that as a friend, I’m asking you to do something out of friendship.’ Mrs Kuriatin was more than ready. He explained that he did not want Dolly (‘That angel!’ Mrs Kuriatin exclaimed, rather to his surprise) and Ben to have to be at home by themselves after school. He wondered if, perhaps for a few days only, he hoped, they could come to the Kuriatins instead. He would be able to call round and take them away himself when the Press closed at five o’clock.
Mrs Kuriatin and her sister both shook their heads at the idea of a few days. Out of sheer tenderness of heart they liked every emergency to go on as long as possible. But at least the difficult time had started, and a messenger must be sent at once to Dolly’s school and to Ben’s, so that they could come that very afternoon. Mitya (Mrs Kuriatin’s eldest, referred to as though, like the Crown Prince, his movements must be known to everybody) was coming home early this afternoon, because a special present had been sent to him, for Shrove Tuesday. As to the others – she looked round her with an air of doubtful proprietorship – yes, all, or most, would be there to welcome Dolly and Ben.
Frank sincerely thanked her, and asked her, out of civility, what Mitya’s present was. It was a tame bear-cub, or perhaps not tamed, sent down from the North. The prices of ordinary brown bear fur, for rugs and coats, had gone down terribly since they had put proper heating into the Trans-Siberian railway. Still, this one’s mother had been shot for sport by one of Arkady’s business contacts and generously he had ordered them to box up the cub and put it on the train for Moscow. They knew it had arrived alive, they had been notified from the Yaroslavl station. Only of course it must be fetched. The words, spoken in chorus by Mrs Kuriatin and her sister, gave Frank an uneasy sensation.
When he was a boy he had sometimes been to New Year treats, in Moscow and out in the country, where a performing bear was brought in as an entertainment. There was usually an argument with the door keeper and another with the cook when the animal was brought in through the kitchen. It wore a collar and underneath the bright lights, looked drowsy. First it shifted a little from foot to foot, as though to put them down was painful, then it gave, after a good deal of prompting, what was said to be an imitation first of a Cossack dance, then of an old peasant carrying a heavy load and falling down on the ground, then, as it was led out of the room, of an English governess simpering and looking round over her shoulder at t
he men. The fur under its collar was worn away, perhaps from doing this particular trick so often. Sometimes it was rewarded with an orange, but, as a joke, the bear-man would take the orange away so that everyone could enjoy its disappointment.
Frank had never been much amused by the dancing bear, nor, as far as he could see, was anyone else. This was only a cub, though. When he got back to Reidka’s he told Selwyn what he had arranged, largely for the relief of repeating it aloud. At least he can’t make it have anything to do with Tolstoy, he thought. But it turned out that at the New Year Lev Nicolaevich had himself taken the part of the performing bear, wearing a skin which had been lined with canvas. According to Selwyn, this enabled him to give a more spiritual turn to the whole occasion.
8
The bear-cub at the Kuriatins’ was disappointingly small, and its head looked rather large for its body and seemed to weigh it down. The skin was very loose, as though the cub had not quite grown into it. The dense fur, dark, golden and ginger, grew at all angles, except along the spine which was neatly parted, and on the glovelike paws and hind feet. The protruding claws looked as if they were made of metal, and the bear itself was a dangerous toy. Both front and back legs were bent in an inward curve. The total effect was confused and amateurish, openly in need of protection for some time yet. Planting its feet on the ground in a straight line required thought from the bear, and was not always successful. When Mitya Kuriatin hit it with a billiard cue it turned its torpedo-shaped head from side to side and then fell over.
‘Is that all it can do?’ asked his sister Masha. ‘You said it would dance.’
Mitya, humiliated in front of the English guests with whom he had intended to cut a dash, and by the presence of an animal when at the age of thirteen he would have so much preferred something mechanical, shouted ‘Well then, music!’ Masha went to the pianola, which Kuriatin had bought in Berlin with the idea that it would save the trouble of having his children taught to play the piano. Perhaps rightly, they took very little interest in it, and although they knew how to start and stop it they did not know how to change the music rolls. Now when Masha turned the switch the idiot contrivance began half way through. Masha flung herself across the brocaded piano stool and pressed the key down to loudest. The bear withdrew to the farthest corner of the room. Turning round with a loud scratching of claws on the floorboards beyond the carpet, it faced all comers.
‘It won’t dance, it won’t do anything, it’s imbecile.’
They tried throwing cold water over it. The bear sneezed and shook itself, then tried to lick up the sparkling drops on the surface of its fur.
‘It’s thirsty,’ said Dolly coldly. After glancing at it for a moment she and Ben stood together in isolation behind one of the curtains.
‘What are you two talking about?’ Mitya called out.
‘We’re saying that you should give it something to drink.’
‘Yes, it’s one of God’s creatures,’ said the treacherous Masha.
Mitya blundered out of the room, and came back with a bottle of vodka and a pale blue saucer of fine china with a gilt rim.
‘Where did you get those?’ asked Dolly.
‘From the dining room. It’s all laid out for some reception or other.’
‘Are you allowed in there?’ said Ben.
‘My father’s in Riga. I’m the master here!’ Mitya’s face was red with senseless excitement. He poured the vodka into the saucer and, slopping it over, carried it to the bear’s far corner. For the first time its mouth opened and its long dark tongue came out. It tilted its head a little and licked the saucer dry. Mitya poured again, and this time screwing its head round the other way, the little animal drank again.
‘Dance now,’ shouted Mitya.
The bear got on to its hind legs and was as tall, suddenly, as Mitya, who retreated. Losing its perilous balance it held out its paws like small hands and reeled on to the carpet where its claws gave it a better hold, while a gush of urine sprayed across the pattern of red and blue. For some reason one of its ears had turned inside out, showing the lining of paler skin. It rolled over several times while the dark patch spread, then sidled at great speed out of the door. All the children laughed, Dasha and Ben as well, they were all laughing and disgusted together, the laughter had taken possession of them, broke them in half and squeezed the tears out of their eyes.
‘It’s gone into the dining room.’
Then they were silent and only Mitya went on grossly laughing as they followed clinging to each other to the front of the house and heard a tearing and rending, then a crash like the splintering of ice in the first spring thaw as the bear, and they could see it now reflected in the great mirrors on every wall, lumbered from end to end of the table making havoc among glass and silver, dragging at the bottle of vodka which stood in each place, upending them like ninepins and licking desperately at what was spilled. The service door flew open and the doorman, Sergei, came in, crossed himself, and without a moment’s hesitation snatched up a shovel, opened the doors of the white porcelain stove and scooped out a heap of red-hot charcoal which he scattered over the bear. The tablecloth, soaked in spirits, sent up a sheet of flame. The bear screamed, its screams being like that of a human child. Already alight, it tried to protect its face with its front paws. Mitya was still doubled up with laughter when from the passage outside could be heard the roar of Kuriatin, pleased with himself because he had come home early as his wife had implored him. ‘Devils, do I have to let myself into my own house?’ He was at the door. ‘Why is that bear on fire? I’ll put it out of its misery. I’ll spatter its brains out. I’ll spatter the lot of you.’
Frank, quietly removing Dolly and Ben from the uproar, would have liked to know where Mrs Kuriatin had been all this time and why Sergei, half idiotic as he was, hadn’t thrown water at the wretched animal instead of red-hot cinders. This was the only one of his questions that the children could answer. Sergei had known that bears were lovers of water. Water would never have stopped a bear.
‘You told us you thought we could go there every day after school,’ said Ben, ‘as long as we were reasonably quiet.’
‘I don’t think that now.’
‘What will you say?’
‘I shall go round to Arkady Kuriatin’s office tomorrow and offer to pay for some, not much, of the damage.’
‘Will you ask him what happened to the bear?’ asked Dolly.
‘No.’
‘Its face was burning.’
‘I shan’t ask him.’
At Kuriatin’s absurdly old-fashioned counting-house, almost next door to his home, as though he wanted to keep watch over both at once, Frank was told once again, this time by a clerk, that the master was out. ‘I haven’t seen him all day, Frank Albertovich.’
The clerks still used pen and ink and were allowed a fixed number of nibs every week. Their calculations were done on an abacus, whose black and white beads clicked at great speed, fell silent, and then started to click again.
‘Well, I’ve something to say to him, but I shan’t take long.’
‘What am I to say if I’m asked why I admitted you?’ said the clerk.
‘Say you haven’t seen me all day.’
Not long ago Frank had found that the floor of the machine-room at Reidka’s needed strengthening, and Kuriatin had agreed to supply the wood for the new joists. Four days before Frank was due to take delivery, he sent a message that he was ill and couldn’t discuss business. Two days later he was surprised that Frank didn’t know that he’d given up supplying timber as there was no profit in it for an honest man, and the next day he was said to have gone on a pilgrimage. A week later he was back, but sent word that he couldn’t see Frank either then or perhaps ever, because of certain misunderstandings between himself and Frank’s father. As to the wood, that was in one of the store houses. That very evening, meeting Frank by chance in the steamroom of the Armenian baths, Kuriatin, very much the worse for drink, embraced him tearfully and a
sked his forgiveness for having been unable to fulfil the order. The next morning he said sharply that he could have made the delivery some time ago if the percentage tax had been paid to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and, of course, something allowed for Grisha, Grigory Rasputin, who was certainly in regular receipt of bribes, though never from Kuriatin, who avoided Petersburg and conducted his business in cash. When the cash was put into his hands he went through it minutely to make sure that there were no 1877 notes, or 100 rouble notes issued in 1866. Neither of these were legal tender. Probably he would have rather been paid in poultryfood, or benzine. Finally, Frank had got his timber, only a few hours later than he had actually allowed for. His calculations had not been far out.
Kuriatin’s private office was as dark as the rest of the establishment, and not much more comfortable. On seeing Frank, he opened his arms wide. He was wearing a black kaftan from which came a strong, healthy human odour. An unfortunate incident? The children left to themselves? Damage? Broken china, pissed carpet, fire, destruction, twenty-three and a half bottles of the best vodka? Did Frank think his credit wasn’t good enough to bear a little loss, a little trifle? Did he think there was some shortage of tablecloths? All that he’d had to do, on returning, was to dismiss Sergei and some of the women servants, give Mitya a beating, hire sledges, tell the guests when they arrived not even to take off their overcoats and galoshes and drive off with the lot of them to Krynkin’s Restaurant.
‘I was wondering where your wife could have been at the time,’ said Frank. ‘I understood that she would be with the children.’
The Beginning of Spring Page 6