Futility Read online

  “And what about the girls?” I asked. “What did they think of Moscow and their mother?”

  “Andrei Andreiech!” she pleaded with all the fervour of a woman at a disadvantage. “A mother is a mother to her children, always, whatever she has been or is. She can plead love and sympathy and unhappiness with success. But the sudden changes certainly affected the children’s characters.

  “One evening on their return from Moscow, when we had guests to dinner, Nina, who was only eight, said:

  “ ‘Do you know, Papa, Mama says that Fanny Ivanovna is just a lap-dog you cuddle on your knee for a while and then chase away.’

  “How that stabbed me … to the very heart!… But Nikolai was kind to me. I looked after him. I worshipped him. He would come to me in the evening and say:

  “ ‘Fanny, I don’t know what I would do without you.’ And then he would think of what he could say to comfort me, and unconscious of my happiness (happiness, Andrei Andreiech, because I trusted him implicitly) he would say:

  “ ‘When the children grow up we will get a divorce, Fanny.’

  “ ‘Never mind the divorce,’ I would say. ‘So long as my people in Germany don’t know, it is all I want. I am happy, Nikolai, really. I know that I am your real wife. Let the children grow up first. We must think first of the children. Always, Nikolai.’

  “And then I would find myself returning to the question of divorce involuntarily. You see, in my secret heart I wanted his divorce so much. And I would say again:

  “ ‘We must not think of the divorce, Nikolai;’ just to make him repeat his promise.

  “ ‘When the children grow up we will, Fanny. I will get a divorce then.’

  “And the children, as I say, were such a pride and consolation to me. There were moments when I looked at them and thought I wanted no divorce. Those were my best moments … when I thought that … that I did not really care whether he got it at all. Sonia and Nina were the compensation.”

  “What about Vera?” I asked.

  Fanny Ivanovna paused suddenly. She looked as if she were going to reveal an unspeakable secret, but then decided not to.

  “Oh, Vera … she always lived with the mother. Nikolai Vasilievich hates her.… She is different.”

  There was another pause.

  “We lived like that eleven years,” she said, and stopped.

  “And now?” I asked, and was horrified at my disastrous question.

  “And now,” she said, her face quivering with emotion, “… he wants to marry … a young girl of … sixteen.…” She burst into tears.

  She sobbed hysterically, and I stood there, helpless, filled with pity and an eagerness to help, and not knowing how to do it—saying:

  “Fanny Ivanovna … Fanny Ivanovna … don’t cry.…”

  Then I tried to think of what was usually done on such occasions. I rushed for a glass of water.

  When she had drunk it and wiped her tear-stained face with her little lace handkerchief, she continued, breathing heavily:

  “He came to me one evening in April and said:

  “ ‘Fanny, I must talk to you very seriously.’

  “ ‘And what might it be that you want to talk to me about so seriously, du alter Schimmel?’ I said, and followed him happily into his study, thinking that he wished to consult me about some business transaction. He often consulted me on his affairs.

  “ ‘Sit down, Fanny,’ he said, and I was astonished at his seriousness. I sat down and he seemed to be waiting till I was comfortably settled in my chair.

  “ ‘Fanny,’ he said, ‘—don’t be frightened—I’ve got to marry Zina.’

  “Zina, Andrei Andreiech, was a girl in Sonia’s school and Sonia’s class, of Sonia’s age. Seventeen, Andrei Andreiech. I laughed. I could see that he was joking. I thought of the date. It was April—not the first but the twenty-first—yes, I remember perfectly.

  “ ‘Don’t laugh,’ he said. ‘I am perfectly serious. I must. I have thought of it all. I fought against it. I have thought of every possible way that I could settle it. There is no other way. I can’t, Fanny. It is love, this time, real love. There is nothing that you can say that I have not thought of. There is nothing that you can say that will alter my decision.…’

  “ ‘Nikolai! You are mad! Du bist verrückt!’ I cried. ‘Wahnsinnich!’

  “And again I tried to think that he was joking. But Nikolai is obstinate as a mule. Obstinacy runs in the family. His grandmother was like that. Nina has it from her father. Obstinacy! What a terrible vice! There is no reason, no meaning in obstinacy beyond further obstinacy. It’s a disease. There is no strength, no character about it. The weakest thing on earth is so often obstinate. Take Nikolai. A weak and sloppy man, and such a mule!” She paused. “Perhaps I like to think that it is obstinacy. I cannot bear, Andrei Andreiech, to think that it is love.

  “ ‘Nikolai!’ I cried, and laughed. I really felt it was funny. ‘Think of yourself! Look at yourself in the glass. Romeo! Look at your grey hairs and those wrinkles! (Those dear, dear wrinkles. He had acquired them in my time, and so I had an absurd conviction that they should be mine.) ‘You’re fifty-three and she is a girl of sixteen.’

  “‘Seventeen’, he said, as though it mattered.

  “ ‘Seventeen!’ I cried. ‘Ha! ha! ha! I tried to laugh, but it had no effect on him. I expect, too, that my laughter lacked real merriment. ‘O mein Gott, mein Gott, mein Gott!’

  “ ‘It is love,’ he said very seriously. ‘It has come late, but still it has come at last, and I am proud—don’t laugh—I am proud that at my age I should be capable of such 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.…’

  “ ‘Du bist verrückt, Nikolai,’ I repeated. ‘Wahnsinnich.…

  “And then I thought of my people. And then I cried.…”

  She fumbled for her handkerchief. She sobbed again. Again I dashed for a glass of water, this time doing the job gallantly, efficiently, as though I had been doing that sort of thing all my life.

  She was bent on going on.

  “I cried and he cried with me and tried to console me, but I only thought of what I could say to stop him from taking this mad, disastrous step.

  “He said, ‘I know it is terrible, heartbreaking for you, Fanny, and the children.…’

  “The children, Andrei Andreiech—I had forgotten them! I who had sacrificed everything for them, divorce and everything else, I had never given them a thought in my disaster. I took it up, Andrei Andreiech, promptly—I even admit somewhat dishonestly—for I was thinking more of myself, of me. Me! me! me! I had lived with him for eleven years!

  “ ‘Think of your children,’ I cried. ‘Think of your children, Nikolai. They are yours. They are not my children, and yet I have sacrificed my life and my honour for them.’

  “I tried to shame him, but I had to realize that indeed nothing could shame him. I mean, he was already ashamed to his full capacity, conscious of unpardonable sin, conscious of being a bad man, the very worst man—had admitted it all to himself … and was satisfied, as though this confession to himself had cleansed him of his wickedness and he had come out of it, clean, sanctified. That’s what I couldn’t stand, Andrei Andreiech. That he should have told himself that so good and wise and indeed well versed was he in his own wickedness, that there could be no crime, no sin, of which we others could accuse him of which he had not already in his goodness and wisdom accused himself, and so forgiven himself and started clear, afresh, with our lives all wrecked and ruined—that’s what I can’t forgive him. That’s what Nina can’t forgive him. But imagine our consternation when he tells us that he had never really expected our forgiveness when he had made up his mind to marry Zina, his mind evidently having been made up in spite of that knowledge. Why, it would be far better if he had not realized how he had sinned than to plume himself on being a sinner u
navoidably and bowing to his fate so readily that you almost suspected that, after the manner of his race, he had bribed it heavily to please him. I am afraid I am overstraining this point, Andrei Andreiech. But it is, after all, the point.

  “At last I sprang upon him. ‘What do you propose to do, Nikolai? What do you want us to do? Speak, tell me!’

  “He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Live on as we have been living, you looking after the children. What if I am married to Zina? I can still come home every night to you and the children. It changes nothing.’

  “ ‘Nein, besten Dank!’ I said. ‘No, thank you, blagadaru vas! I will return to Germany as soon as you give me the money—provide for me for life. I will not leave otherwise.’ ”

  In her great tragedy she was still a sound business woman.

  VI

  SHE WAS SILENT FOR SOME TIME.

  “Andrei Andreiech, does she love him? Cannot live without him? ‘Don’t you believe it,’ I told Nikolai Vasilievich. ‘She will leave you as soon as she has robbed you of your money.’

  “ ‘Then I shall come back to you,’ he said.

  “ ‘Thank you for nothing,’ I said. ‘I shan’t want you then.’

  “Andrei Andreiech, it is all his money. It is really comic, but they all believe him to be preposterously rich. A house-owner in Petersburg! Gold-mines in Siberia! A millionaire! Zina’s people keep telling her, ‘Stick to him, stick to him, don’t let him go. These gold-mines in Siberia, these millions, this house in the Mohovaya!’ That’s all, in fact, they are after. Why won’t his wife give him his divorce and be done with him? Because she believes in the gold-mines. Why does Baron Wunderhausen always hang about here? Why does he run after Nina, Vera, and Sonia? The goldmines again, and the house in the Mohovaya.”

  “What of me!” I cried in horror. “I come here every evening, Fanny Ivanovna, and stay till late in the night.”

  “Oh, you are different.”

  “I shall have to stop coming now.”

  “You may as well dismiss at once from your mind any suspicion of an ulterior motive,” said Fanny Ivanovna, rising to the occasion. “They are worth nothing, anyhow … both the goldmines in-Siberia and the house in the Mohovaya.”

  “Worthless! You don’t mean it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do the gold-mines pay nothing?”

  “Andrei Andreiech, I have lived with Nikolai Vasilievich now for over eleven years. I don’t remember their ever paying a copeck. They may have paid before my time. But I doubt it. Nikolai Vasilievich, though, is constantly pouring money into them, every month, every year, to keep them going. And this, Andrei Andreiech, what with the money he has to fork out for his wife and Eisenstein and what we spend ourselves and what he gives Zina and her people, who are very poor, and”—she blushed—“what he sends my own people in Germany, and his own sisters and cousins and several other friends and dependents … why, Andrei Andreiech, it takes all he can scrape together.…”

  “But the house in the Mohovaya?”

  “Precisely. He has been compelled to mortgage the house to be able to manage at all … and keep the other thing going.”

  I whistled under my breath. I remember how Baron Wunderhausen had grasped me by the arm one day as he spoke with enthusiasm of Nikolai Vasilievich.

  “Rich as Croesus,” he had said.

  Well, I felt sorry for him.…

  I heard a little nervous cough and a rustle, and a harmless little old man, like a mouse, whom I had not noticed in the room before, rose and walked out.

  I was horrified.

  “Fanny Ivanovna,” I cried, “that man has heard everything you’ve said.”

  “Oh, Kniaz!” she said with undisguised contempt. “He’s heard it all before.”

  I felt that this startling news rather took the gilt off the confession. I had flattered myself on being the first, in fact the only one.

  “He’s heard it many times,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “Every now and then I feel that I absolutely must confess it all to somebody … no matter who it is.”

  “I thought,” I said a little reproachfully, “that you had told nobody, Fanny Ivanovna.”

  “Andrei Andreiech!” she cried in her tone of appeal to my sense of justice, “I haven’t spoken of it to any one for more than two weeks. If you hadn’t come here to-day, I don’t know.… I really think I should have confessed it to the hall-porter. You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand,” I said, but I could not help feeling misused and mishandled. I almost begrudged her the gallantry of my dash for water—two separate dashes, to be exact—when I remembered that they must have been carried out by other men before me, the confession to-night being, of course, an exact replica of the confessions that had preceded it, Lord knows how many times, like a melodrama with its laughter and hysterics occurring always at the proper interval as it is produced each night. And I was led to revise my recently adopted theory that I was indeed a born confidant by virtue of my understanding personality, tempting strange women into thrilling, exhilarating confessions of their secrets. Rather did I feel the victim of a lengthy and tedious autobiography inflicted on me under false pretences.

  I heard the sound of the outer door closing on the old Prince.

  “Kniaz,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “is also one of those who live on Nikolai Vasilievich. He always comes here. Never misses a day. Sits, reads, eats, and then goes. And all without uttering a word. When he borrows money from Nikolai Vasilievich he naturally opens his mouth, and then shuts it until the next occasion.”

  The old Prince was one of those quiet nonentities who enter unasked and leave unhindered almost any Russian home; and no one is likely to object to their coming because no one is likely to notice them. They have a face, a name, a manner so ordinary that you cannot remember them, ever. They are so colourless, so blank that they seem scarcely to exist at all. I think Goncharov speaks of them somewhere, but I would not be sure of it. “Kniaz” was like that. His name was some very ordinary name, and it even seemed odd that he should not have a more exclusive name for his title. But no one cared. No one, to be sure, knew what his name was. His imya otchestvo was Pàvel Pàvlovich, like the Baron’s, and so he was called by all but Fanny Ivanovna, who called him “Kniaz,” sarcastically—a Prince without a copeck to his title! I only remember that he was always very neatly dressed, shaved regularly and wore a very stiff and sharp collar which seemed to torture his dry and skinny neck.

  “Kniaz has some shares,” she explained, “in a limited company, but they are worthless—always have been—and never paid any dividends. Never so long as anybody can remember.”

  “Has he always lived on you, then?”

  “He lived on his brother when he was alive. He had great expectations from his brother. But his brother died and left him more shares, quite a number of shares, in the same limited company. Whom the brother lived on when he was alive, Lord only knows!”

  “Did they get their shares from their father?”

  “Their uncle.”

  “Did he get any dividends?”

  “Nikolai says no. But he seems to have put all his money into them.”

  “And now I suppose you invite Kniaz to come and live with you?” I asked.

  “He comes of his own accord.”

  “You don’t object to his coming?”

  “No one would tell him even if they did. It’s not a Russian habit to object to any one who comes to your house. It isn’t much good objecting either. They’ll come anyhow. But never mind.”

  “Extraordinary man,” said I. “What does he propose to do? Has he any plan?”

  “He believes in the shares.”

  “Have you ever tried to disillusion him?”

  “I wouldn’t be so heartless,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

  “And the girls?”

  “For them money does not exist. They are sublimely indifferent to it.”

  “And Nikolai Vasilievich?”

  “Nikolai
Vasilievich believes in the mines. Kniaz helps him to sustain that belief in return for Nikolai’s faith in the shares. The money Kniaz borrows from Nikolai Vasilievich he regards merely as an advance on his future dividends.”

  “And does Nikolai Vasilievich regard it in that light?” I asked.

  “He pretends he does. But he always says: ‘Never mind, if only the mines begin to pay all will be well, Pàvel Pvlovich.’ ”

  “And the ‘family,’ Fanny Ivanovna,” I cried, “I mean his wife and her family, his fiancée and her family, you and your family, his sisters and cousins, Kniaz and the others and their families—do they believe in the mines?”

  “More firmly than Nikolai. If, in fact, one fine day Nikolai turned a sceptic in matters mining, they would, I am sure, suspect him of shamming poverty to prevent them from getting their legitimate share.”

  “Fanny Ivanovna,” I sighed, “good night.”

  “I know it is amusing,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t real life, our life, my life. Then I would find it a trifle more amusing.”

  I hailed a driver who slumbered in his sleigh on the corner of the Mohovaya and the Pantilemenskaya. As I drove home across the frozen river, on which the moon spread its yellow light, I thought of the Bursanovs’ muddled fife, and then Chekhov’s Three Sisters dawned upon my memory.