“Hm,” I said significantly.
“I thought: Why are we all moving?”
“You have not far to seek for motives,” said I. “I presume there are motives in each case.”
“Motives!” he cried. “That is the very point. There are no motives. The motives are naught. It is the consequences. Where are we going? Why are we going? Look: we are moving. Going somewhere. Doing something. The train rushes through Siberia. The wheels are moving. The engine-drivers are adding fuel to the engines. Why? Why are we here? What are we doing in Siberia? Where are we heading for? Something. Somewhere. But what? Where? Why?”
I think I must have misunderstood Uncle Kostia’s subtle thoughts. Or was it that my commission was continually in my mind? But I asked him:
“Is it that you are doomed by your sense of inutility, Uncle Kostia?”
His eyes flashed. He spoke impatiently: “My inutility! Your inutility! What the devil does it matter whose inutility? Is your Admiral very utile, may I ask? What I was saying was that we all behaved as if we were actually doing things, boarding this Trans-Siberian Express as if in order to do something at the end of the journey, while actually the journey is in excess of anything we are likely to achieve.”
But I thought I would keep him to the point, that is to say, my point. “Then would you rather not travel in this train, Uncle Kostia?”
An anxious look came into his eyes.
“Why? I like travelling in this train. I am comfortable.”
“But the futility of it?”
“Oh!” groaned Uncle Kostia at my stupidity. “Can’t you understand that it is the very fact of this physical futility that inflates me with a sense of spiritual importance?”
I looked at him with a blank expression.
“When I am at home—I mean anywhere at a standstill—I am wretched intolerably. I write and I think—” He stopped.
“What?”
“What am I writing for: what on earth am I thinking for?”
“So you have doubts?”
“Yes, at moments I am seized by misgivings: what is it all for? I ask.”
“I see.”
“Now it is different. We are moving, apparently doing something, going somewhere. One has a sense of accomplishing something. I lie here in my coupé and I think: It is good. At last I am doing something. Living, not recording. Living! Living! I look out of the window, and my heart cries out: Life! Life! and so living, living vividly, I lapse into my accustomed sphere of meditation, and then before I know exactly where I am I begin to meditate: Where are we all going to? Isn’t our journey the kernel of absurdity? And so, by contrast, as it were, I gain a sense of the importance of meditation.… That is how we deceive ourselves, Andrei Andreiech.”
“And you can do it in spite of being conscious of the deception involved?”
“I have been unconscious of it,” he said, “until you forced me into introspection.”
Then, after a pause, I was tickled into inquiring:
“Why don’t you—er—publish some of it, eh, Uncle Kostia?”
Uncle Kostia grabbed his beard into his fist and looked at me with pity rather than with scorn and made a movement as if he was going to spit out of sheer disgust, but evidently thought better of it. “You have a front of brass,” he said. “I cannot penetrate it.”
“Look here, Uncle Kostia,” I cried impatiently, “you must be reasonable and think of poor Nikolai Vasilievich. He can’t go on supporting everybody.”
“He hasn’t said anything, has he?” he asked anxiously.
“No … but …” I paused to enable him to say the obvious.
“He wouldn’t,” said Uncle Kostia. “He is wonderful. I admire him.”
I returned to my coupé. It was evening now and the lights were lit. Dismal forests stretched over hundreds of versts. I lay back and the ideas let loose by Uncle Kostia set to work in my mind. And I thought: Where are we heading? Why? What is it all for? And then I thought of the war with its hysterical activity; I pictured soldiers boarding trains, to return to the front; the loading of ships with war matériel; the rush in the Ministry of Munitions. I thought of the Germans seething with energy in just the same way; and I contrasted in my mind this hustling activity, this strained efficiency with the pitiable weakness in the intellectual conception of the conflict, and I understood that the man had been essentially right, that our journeys were in excess of our achievements. Our life was an inept play with some disproportionately good acting in it. Then, as I dreamed away, I heard Fanny Ivanovna talking to somebody in the adjoining coupé. I pulled my door open and I could now hear her voice distinctly. I listened. I was vastly tickled. I wondered to whom it was that she was telling her autobiography. Then I heard occasional expressions of assent in Sir Hugo’s trim and careful Russian. I leaned forward, the incarnation of attention.
“He would come to me in the evening and say, ‘Fanny, I don’t know what I would do without you.…’
“He came to me one one evening in April and said, ‘Fanny, I must speak to you very seriously.…’
“ ‘It is love, this time, real love. I thought that I had loved, I had loved, you, Fanny, but this is the love that comes once only, to which you yield gloriously, magnificently, or you are crushed and broken and thrust aside.…’
I felt my heart beat violently within me. I waited for Sir Hugo’s detailed cross-examination; but indeed there was little of it. Only once, when Fanny Ivanovna referred to Nikolai Vasilievich’s wife did Sir Hugo stop her with an apology, to inquire “Which wife?”
The train rushed through the autumn night; the windows now were black and revealed nothing. Interlacing with the din, squeal and rattle of the wheels, now and then my ear would catch familiar fragments of the monologue.
“ ‘Nikolai!’ I cried. ‘Du bist verrückt … wahnsinnich!…’
“I cried and he cried with me.…
“ ‘Think of the children, Nikolai! They are your children.…’
“I said to him: ‘I shall wait till you pay me off. I shall not leave otherwise.’ ”
I felt indeed I was on the summits of existence. Why should I be treated to such stupendous depths of irony? There beyond the clouds the gods were laughing, laughing voluptuously. I could not sit still. With all my heart I craved to have a peep, if only at Sir Hugo’s face. I thought I’d give my life to know what was his verdict on the situation. Noiselessly I stole into the corridor, and bending forward with infinite precaution, I peeped at the interior of the coupé. They sat next each other. Under the shaded light projected the ruddy weather-beaten face of Sir Hugo. Sir Hugo looked—how shall I describe it?—he looked as if he thought it was a case of damned bad staff work.
The train rushed on, noisily swaying through the silence of the night. I went back to my coupé, and passing Uncle Kostia’s kennel I overheard the finale of what must have been a frantic theological discussion between Uncle Kostia and the General. The General, drunk, his fundamental principles of faith all uprooted and scattered in disorder about the coupé, furious, with hair dishevelled, cried out to Uncle Kostia:
“Well, is there a God, or is there no God?”
“How do I know?” snapped Uncle Kostia angrily. “Go away!”
V
WHEN THE TRAIN ARRIVED AT OMSK, THE NEW régime of Kolchak had been established. The Admiral was distinctly pleased with the change; for he no longer believed in granting the Russian people a Constituent Assembly because he had grounds for thinking that the Russian people, if given this opportunity, would take advantage of it and elect a government other than that of Kolchak. And the Admiral was rather fond of little Kolchak, whose interpretation of democracy was that of denying the people the choice of government until such time as by some vague, mysterious, but anyhow protracted, system of education he hoped their choice would fall upon his own administration. We lived in our train, a verst or thereabouts from the station—a thoroughly unwholesome place; and the Admiral diverted most of his time by th
rowing empty tobacco tins at the pigs that dwelt in the ditches around the train. “You have no conception what a pig a pig really is,” he said, “till you see an Omsk pig.”
“Splendid!” said Sir Hugo. “Splendid!”
“There she goes again!” yelled the Admiral, and hit an old big sow with a Navy Cut tobacco tin.
“Splendid effort!” said Sir Hugo. “Splendid effort!”
“I give dem h-h-hell!” roared General Bologoevski. “Damrotten pigs!” But, as usual, his threat remained an empty one.
But while most of us were very much at sea as to why exactly we had arrived at Omsk, Nikolai Vasilievich seemed immune from doubt. Nikolai Vasilievich, suspicious of the punitive expedition, had arrived at the seat of the anti-Bolshevik Administration to seek redress and compensation in regard to his gold-mines. I think it was chiefly for my British uniform that Nikolai Vasilievich asked me to accompany him on his visit to the General at the General Staff, before whom he was going to lay his case. I noticed that Nikolai Vasilievich had always had a curious habit of establishing some connexion between his personal grievance and some powerful outside influence, as, for example, the general question of Allied intervention; and he insisted that he and we and intervention were really all one affair, and that hence a favourable solution of his financial difficulties was all part and parcel of that scheme which aimed at the defeat of Bolshevism.
We entered a large dirty waiting-room where crowds of petitioners awaited their turn with a patience that bordered on spiritual resignation: after the Russian manner they all desired to see the head man personally, whose life was consequently spent in interviews. A nasty dirty little woman with a nasty dirty little child, pointing at me with a dirty finger, was saying to her howling offspring, in an attempt to pacify her next-of-kin, “Is that your daddy, is he? Is that your daddy?”
The General was an elusive person, a wily man, a master in the art of compromise. He was the idol of the Allies. He was one of those few who could so wangle things, so balance favours, as to please at once all the multitudinous Allies and even curry favour with a large majority of Russians. His habitual procedure was this. If an Ally asked him, for example, for the allotment of a certain building, he always promised without reserve. Then the Russian organization in possession of that building would at once cry out in protest; and he immediately assured them that they would be allowed to keep the building: the whole matter, he explained, was a mere misunderstanding. Then the Russian organization stayed, and when the Ally came to take the building over they referred the Ally to the General. And when the Ally came to him and asked for explanation, the General, with a charming smile, would say, “Well, you see that building is not really suitable for your use. I will find you a better one.” Then the Ally waited. He must have time, the General said; and actually he played on time, on “evolution.” And in the meantime there was a coup d’état; or the Russian organization went bankrupt; or the particular Allied representative who had been worrying him was replaced by another, with whom the General would begin again at the beginning; or the Allied troops were about to be withdrawn; or the city was recaptured by the Soviets; or there was a fire and the correspondence was buried in the flames. He was a man who had no use whatever for “free will” and played entirely on “predestination.” The General listened to Nikolai Vasilievich’s emotional narrative in a friendly manner, and smiling pleasantly he rose and shook hands, as if to show that the interview was at an end, saying, “You may rest assured that it will be quite all right. Call again one of these days.”
Nikolai Vasilievich went out, beaming. “Well,” he said, “it seems settled.” I tendered my heartiest congratulations.
Then “one of these days” we called upon the General a second time. Nikolai Vasilievich laid great stress on the dastardly action of the Czechs—that nation just then being out of court with the government at Omsk—but the General merely said, “Wait till the Supreme Ruler returns from Perm. I can do nothing without the Supreme Ruler.”
Nikolai Vasilievich then waited for the return of the Supreme Ruler; and presently we called again. The General’s manner, as he received us, was considerably less sunny than it had been on the two previous occasions. “You have been here before,” he greeted Nikolai Vasilievich. “You must have patience and wait.”
“Wait?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich in a tone of secret terror, the terror of a man who had been doing naught else all his life—and knew its meaning.
“Yes, I advise you to wait. Have patience.”
“How long?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.
“How do I know?” the General replied. “Wait—and you will see.”
Now, was it that Nikolai Vasilievich had waited long enough and seen nothing? Was it that in the circumstances he thought it sounded too much like a mockery? Or was it the explosion of that brewing restlessness that he had gathered in the years of intermittent waiting: the last puff of ineffectual remonstrance before his final sinking into hopeless resignation? But suddenly Nikolai Vasilievich went wild. I had never seen him in that state before. He abused the General in immoderate terms. He accused him first of turning honest people into Bolsheviks; then of being in the pay of Moscow. He threatened to lead a rebellion against the Kolchak State. Nikolai Vasilievich ceased to be a man and became an incarnation: Man having lost his patience: Humanity gone wild in the waiting. He thundered forth at the adversary, and his ruined hopes were the woes of Humankind. Then, coming to the end of his intellectual resources, but far from having yet exhausted his spiritual wrath, he made reference to the Day of Judgment. The door into the chancery flew open, and the Chief of Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and heads of various departments dashed upon the scene, wondering what on earth had happened; and shouting loudly Nikolai Vasilievich hurled abuse upon the Chief-of-Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and the heads of various departments. And then in the waiting-room he went for a stray Admiral, a petitioner like himself, and hurled abuse at him as well.
“All right,” the General said at length. “All right. If you won’t be reasonable, I shall have to resort to the recognized procedure. Guard!” And he ordered them to take Nikolai Vasilievich away. Nikolai Vasilievich still raged and fluttered, and the guards came up to him with signs of deference and indecision. “Come on, sir,” they persuaded him, “he really means it.” And taking him each under one arm, they dragged him out into the open.
We walked back to the train.
“What those people will not realize,” I took it up to humour him, “is that you can’t live on nothing. Waiting doesn’t feed you, and waiting doesn’t clothe you; and when you have a family—”
“Of course, one can borrow,” said Nikolai Vasilievich.
“Yes, of course,” I agreed.
Fanny Ivanovna greeted him with “Well, Nikolai, is it all arranged?”
A fiendish look came on his face, as though he said, “The hell it is!” and all the more fiendish because he did not say it.
She sighed conspicuously. And her sigh gave him a nervous shudder. A look of hate came into his steel-grey eyes. “She even sighs offensively,” he said to me, “as though she meant to charge me with the necessity of doing so.”
“Nikolai!” she cried, “don’t let yourself go before strangers. What will Andrei Andreiech think of you! You know I am not to blame because the mines won’t pay. And you ought to remember that I advised you to sell them long ago, and if you had listened to me then we shouldn’t have been in this plight. Well, well, it’s no use quarrelling now. We’ve got to wait, that’s all.”
The ironic fascination of the situation at this point proved irresistible. “There’s an English proverb,” I supplied: “ ‘All things come to him who waits.’ ”
“Hm!” said Nikolai Vasilievich.
“And there’s another one: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ ”
“Excellent proverbs!” he said dryly.
Kniaz popped his head out from behind the paper, like a mouse, and added, “There’s our own R
ussian proverb, too: ‘The slower you drive the farther you get.’ ”
“You, Kniaz, had better read your paper,” retorted Nikolai Vasilievich acidly. “What does it say in there?”
I stood at the window of the stationary train and watched the sinking landscape dissolve in the gathering gloom about us. Why did the winter air seem so acutely strange, as if charged with something, a kind of tenderness, a warm, transfiguring love…? Nikolai Vasilievich came to my side and watched, his hands in his trouser pockets.
“Pigs in the ditches,” he brooded, “pigs in offices, everywhere.… A town of pigs. That General … oh! what a pig.…”
VI
THE “AFFILIATION” OF EISENSTEIN INTO OUR “society” was a tribute to his own unflagging perseverance. It so happened that while in Vladivostok the Admiral had been in urgent need of a dentist, and quite by accident he tumbled against Eisenstein, who had set up a practice there. The Admiral, though he loathed all Jews, was yet favourably impressed by Eisenstein because on his first visit to him he heard Eisenstein engage in a vigorous cursing of his Chinese servant. He liked to see a man who knew how to put “these people” in their places, a man who knew how to assert his own authority, a man who did not talk about “equality” and such-like tosh (discordant with his sentiment), “utopia,” “socialism,” and that sort of thing, you know, that has made the world, etc. etc. There was altogether too much Bolshevism abroad, and the vigorous action of the dentist with his Chink appealed to him unspeakably.
“This clamouring for allowing men from below to come up to the top and not imposing individuals of the old governing class from above,” he said. “All damned well to talk like that, but in the meantime is anarchy to be allowed to continue unchecked? Apparently so.”
“Orright! Orright!” said Eisenstein.
This seemed the only word he knew in English. But it did not baffle him in the least; indeed he preferred to converse in English by means of its continual solitary use to any reasonable conversation in Russian; and when the Admiral spoke Russian to him he still replied, “Orright! Orright!” The Admiral had found him an amazing dentist. The Admiral’s teeth and dentistry seemed the subject he was least interested in of all. He talked politics and finance. At intervals strange men and women of a strong Hebrew strain would run into the room, and Eisenstein, leaving the Admiral with his mouth wide open and cotton-wool stuck under his tongue, would exchange queries in a quick and agitated manner with these dark intruders. The Admiral would hear such phrases as “What is the yen to-day? How much is the dollar?” And if the Admiral chanced to touch the question of finance, Eisenstein would pounce upon him with inquiries: “Do you want dollars? How many dollars? Or can I sell you francs?” Or suddenly he would ask the Admiral to recommend his being made a British subject. Where was the difficulty? He could always change his name Eisenstein to Ironstone, which, he believed, sounded jolly well in English.
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