Futility (2 page)

This, it seems to me, is the most striking quality of Mr. Gerhardie’s book: that he has (even in this, his first venture) enough of the true novelist’s “objectivity” to focus the two so utterly alien races to which he belongs almost equally by birth and bringing-up—the English and Russian; to sympathize with both, and to depict them for us
as they see each other
, with the play of their mutual reactions illuminating and animating them all.

There are lots of other good things in the book; indeed, it is so surprisingly full of them that one wonders at the firmness of the hand which has held together all the fun, pathos and
irony of the thronged sprawling tale, and guided it resolutely to an inevitable conclusion. “It takes genius to make an ending” Nietzsche said; and, perhaps partly for that reason, the modern novelist seems often to have decided that it is the trifle most conveniently dispensed with.

Mr. Gerhardie’s novel is extremely modern; but it has bulk and form, a recognizable orbit, and that promise of more to come which one always feels latent in the beginnings of the born novelist. For all these reasons—and most of all for the laughter, the tears, the strong beat of life in it—I should like to hand on my enjoyment of the book to as many other American readers as possible.

E
DITH
W
HARTON
.

FUTILITY

[The “I” of this book is not me.]

AND THEN IT STRUCK ME THAT THE ONLY THING TO do was to fit all this into a book. It is the classic way of treating life. For my ineffectual return to Vladivostok is the effectual conclusion of my theme. And the harbour has been strangely, knowingly responsive. It has sounded the note of departure, and the tall stone houses of the port seem to brood as I walk below, and “set the tone.” And because of this and the sense that I am marking time till the big steamer comes and bears me home to England I am eagerly retrospective.…

When the
Simbirsk
, of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, had at last completely vanished, carrying away the three sisters to Shanghai, I came back to my room at the hotel. I had just moved in there. It was a bare and dingy room in a small and shabby hostel. A bed was eventually provided, but in lieu of bed-sheets I was to lie on a dirty table-cloth which was to serve again as table-cloth next morning when I had my breakfast. “Is this sheet clean?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the boy-attendant.

“Quite clean?”

“Quite.”

“Sure nobody slept on it?”

“Nobody. Only the boss.”

Big drops like tears fell on the window-pane and instantly made room for others. A ruined writing-table stood in the corner. I sat down. I fingered a typically Russian pen with a no
less typically Russian nib, such as one is likely to encounter in almost any Russian government department, and dipping it repeatedly into ink that was like syrup, I made a bold beginning.

When night came I lay there on the table-cloth, hungry and worried by enormous hungry bugs that bit like dogs, and thought of Nina, Sonia, Vera, Nikolai Vasilievich and his unconventional family. In the morning the rain ceased.

I paced the country, now in the embrace of autumn. I wandered in remote places by the sea, in the abandoned park that used to be a park essentially for lovers, and thought of them. Here the foliage was more dense, the corners more secluded, the disorder more magnificent. I sat on an old bench that had names and initials cut out with a penknife, under the trees turning gold and auburn, and shivered in the sharp autumn wind that sent the fallen yellow leaves whirling down the alley. And the vast sea of Russian life seemed to be closing over me.…

IT WAS SOMEWHAT IN THE MANNER OF AN IBSEN drama with retrospective revelations that I was initiated into the complicated affairs of the Bursanov family. I had been asked to call by the three sisters, all speaking simultaneously—a charming bouquet, the queen among whom I recognized only too well, and I called on them one evening in mid-summer at their
datcha
, at a sea-side place ten versts from Petersburg, a little bashful perhaps for I had not been invited by their elders; and I was met by the “bouquet” in the hall of the little wooden
structure that hung out above the sea. They sprang out to me successively, introducing themselves in order of age.

“Sonia!”

“Nina!”

“Vera!”

They were then sixteen, fifteen and fourteen. I think I had told them that day when I had first spoken to them that I could not for the life of me distinguish one from the other, and had deliberately mixed up their names. It was, of course, poor fun, but they, then almost children, had seemed grateful for it and giggled, possibly for want of anything better.

I was led into a room full of people whose relationship I did not yet comprehend. By the presiding posture over the samovar I thought that I could recognize the mother, and I walked up to her, and she put me at my ease, talking Russian, I noticed, with an unmistakably German accent.

“You don’t any of you resemble your mother very much,” I told Nina afterwards.

“She is not our mother,” Nina said. “She is … Fanny Ivanovna.”

I should not have thought that that youngish-looking, rather short but handsome man, well dressed but somewhat sluggish in his bearing, was their father, by the negligent, almost contemptuous manner in which his daughters treated him. But Nina called out “Papa!” and he turned round, and then I saw that she had his eyes, those steel-grey eyes softened by a charming, disquieting, sidelong look that was hers to give; and every now and then she would look straight into your eyes—anybody’s eyes—down into your very soul, bathing her soul in your soul, causing you to feel as though you were indeed “the only man who really mattered in the world.”

And Fanny Ivanovna pestered the life out of Nikolai
Vasilievich (that was their father) by always asking silly questions, and Nikolai Vasilievich would look bored and sullen and would wave his hand at her as if she were a pestering fly and say:

“Drop it!”

Or he would imitate in an unkindly manner the preposterous way in which Fanny Ivanovna talked Russian. “
Elektrichno!
How often have I told you that it’s
elektrichestvo
?”

“It’s all the same,” said she.

Then the three sisters insisted on dancing the one-step and the hesitation-waltz, at that time just coming into vogue abroad, while Nikolai Vasilievich was ordered to play some wretched tune on the piano over and over again. And I thought to myself: What a bouquet!

The ravishing experiment over, it was suggested at dinner that we should all go to the local theatre to see Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
.

“Very well,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “but Nikolai Vasilievich must come with us. That is the condition.”

Nikolai Vasilievich frowned.

“You’ll be too many in the box as it is.”

“We can take two boxes,” I suggested.

“There is no excuse, Nikolai,” cried Fanny Ivanovna. And a dark shadow flitted across the handsome face of Nikolai Vasilievich. But still I did not understand.

It was not till the end of the second act of the
Three Sisters
that I had an inkling, my first intuition, that all was not well with the Bursanov family.

You know the manner of Chekhov’s writing. You know the people in his plays. It seems as though they had all been born on the line of demarcation between comedy and tragedy—in a kind of No Man’s Land. Fanny Ivanovna and the three sisters
watched the play with intense interest, as if the
Three Sisters
were indeed their own particular tragedy. I sat behind Nina, and watched with that stupid scepticism that comes from too much happiness. To me, buoyant and impatient, the people in the play appeared preposterous. They annoyed me. They distressed me intensely. Their black melancholy, their incredible inefficiency, their paralysing inertia, crept over me. How different, I thought, were those three lovable creatures who sat in our box. How careless and free they were in their own happy home. The people in the play were hopeless.

“Good God!” I cried and grasped Nikolai Vasilievich by the arm as the curtain fell upon the second act. “How can there be such people, Nikolai Vasilievich? Think of it! They can’t do what they want. They can’t get where they want. They don’t even know what they want. They talk, talk, talk, and then go off and commit suicide or something. It is a hysterical cry for greater efforts, for higher aims—which to themselves, mind you, are vague and unintelligible—and a perpetual standstill. It’s like Faust in Gounod’s opera who takes the hand of Marguerite in prison and cries, ‘We flee! We flee!’ while making no visible effort to quit the middle of the stage. Why can’t people know what they want in life and get it? Why can’t they, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

Nikolai Vasilievich sat still and silent and very sad. He shook his head gravely and his face darkened.

“It’s all very well,” he said slowly, “to
talk
. Life is not so simple. There are complications, so to speak, entanglements. It cuts all ways, till … till you don’t know where you are. Yes, Andrei Andreiech.…” He sighed and paused before he spoke again.

“Chekhov,” he said at last, “is a great artist.…”

I walked home with them to their
datcha
along the dark
and muddy road—it had been raining while we were in the theatre—Nina clinging to my arm.

IT WAS ON ONE OF THOSE LONG, HAPPY EVENINGS which it had now become my custom to spend regularly at their large, luxurious flat in the Mohovaya in St. Petersburg, that I was further initiated into the domestic affairs of the Bursanov family.

They had been sitting silently for a time. Nina seemed sad; Sonia and Vera sulky. It was twilight, but no one had thought of switching on the light. No one would dance. I played the piano for a while, and then stopped.

“What is the matter, Nina?” I asked.

She was silent, and then said in her childish open manner, “Oh, Papa and Fanny Ivanovna.”

“What have they done?”

“They are always quarrelling, always, always, always.”

I paused, hating to appear intrusive.

“You know,” she said in that half humorous, half serious way she had of speaking, and then paused a little, and then decided to have it out.

“Papa and Fanny Ivanovna are not … legally married.”

“I know,” I said.

“How did you know?”

“I suspected it.”

“Did Vera tell you?”

“I didn’t!” cried Vera in loud protest. She was fourteen, but
tried to look two years older, and indeed succeeded. “I’d never dream of telling such a thing.”

She was shocked and angry at the unjust accusation so provokingly flung at her. It had seemed to me for some time past that there was no love wasted between Vera and her two elder sisters. Vera was different.

“We can’t stand this any longer,” said Sonia. “I am sick to death of their quarrelling. Day and night, day and night.… If they’d only stop at least when we have guests. But no, they are worse than ever then.”

I could bear her out there—that is, if I were really classed as a guest. For I was, rather, what Nikolai Vasilievich called
“svoy chelovek,”
one of the family, so to speak, and in my presence Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna certainly let themselves go. They were like cat and dog. There was no mercy shown, no gallantry displayed. Nikolai Vasilievich gibed at her, imitating her murderous Russian with a malicious skill that set the room shrieking with laughter. Fanny Ivanovna, her white face flushing in patches of unwholesome pink, would writhe with pain, and, having gathered her forces, give back as good as she got. Nikolai Vasilievich would snatch out some isolated word that she had mispronounced and, adding some pepper of his own, would fling it into the audience of friends and strangers that he had asked to dinner, and so pluck out the sting at her expense.

“I’m sick of home,” Sonia said. “I shall run away.”

“How can you run away?”

“I’ll marry and run away.”

“No one will marry her,” said Vera from her perch in the far corner.

Nina sat mute, wearing her natural expression, half serious, half ironic.

“What do they quarrel about?”

Nina looked up at Sonia. “Shall I tell?”

“Of course.”

“Aha!” Vera cried maliciously. “Aha!”

“You shut up!” said Sonia.

Nina looked vaguely at the window.

“Papa wants to marry again.”

The rustle of Fanny Ivanovna’s approach was heralded through the air.

She appeared.

“Andrei Andreiech!” she cried. She always greeted me in this way, with acclamation. “How d’you do!”

“How dark! Nina! Vera! Sonia! Why don’t you light up the
elektrichno
!”

“How many times, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Sonia sternly, “have I told you that it is not
elektrichno
, but
elektrichestvo
?”