He called on his lady friends, hospitable dwellers in quiet Moscow lanes, and most sweetly mocked them and their husbands for their halfway thinking and backwardness, for the habit of judging everything by their own parochial standards. And he now flaunted his newspaper erudition, just as he once had with the Apocrypha and Orphic texts.
It was said that he had left a new young passion behind in Switzerland, half-finished business, a half-written book, and that he would merely dip himself into the stormy whirlpool of the fatherland, and then, if he came up unharmed, would flit off to his Alps again and be seen no more.
He was for the Bolsheviks and often mentioned two left SR names6 as being of one mind with him: the journalist writing under the pseudonym of Miroshka Pomor, and the essayist Sylvia Coterie.
Alexander Alexandrovich grumblingly reproached him:
“It’s simply dreadful how low you’ve sunk, Nikolai Nikolaevich! These Miroshkas of yours. What a pit! And then you’ve got this Lydia Could-be.”
“Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich corrected. “And it’s Sylvia.”
“Well, it’s all the same. Could-be or Potpourri, we won’t stick at words.”
“Sorry, but all the same it’s Coterie,” Nikolai Nikolaevich patiently insisted. He and Alexander Alexandrovich exchanged such speeches as:
“What are we arguing about? It’s simply a shame to have to demonstrate such truths. It’s like ABC. The main mass of people have led an unthinkable existence for centuries. Take any history book. Whatever it’s called, feudalism, or serfdom, or capitalism and factory industry, the unnaturalness and injustice of such an order have long been noted, and the revolution has long been prepared that will lead the people towards the light and put everything in its place.
“You know that a partial renovation of the old is unsuitable here, what’s needed is to break it radically. Maybe that will cause the building to collapse. Well, what of it? Just because it’s frightening, it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. It’s a question of time. How can you argue against that?”
“Eh, that’s not the point. I’m not talking about that, am I?” Alexander Alexandrovich would get angry and the argument would flare up.
“Your Potpourris and Miroshkas are people without conscience. They say one thing and do another. And then, too, where’s the logic here? There’s no coherence. No, wait, I’ll show you right now.”
And he would start looking for some magazine with a contrary article, pulling open his desk drawers and slamming them shut, and rousing his eloquence with this noisy fussing about.
Alexander Alexandrovich liked to be hampered by something when he talked, so that the impediment would justify his mumbling pauses, his hems and haws. Loquaciousness would come over him while he was searching for something he had lost, for instance, when he was looking for his second galosh in the semidarkness of the front hall, or when he was standing on the bathroom threshold with a towel over his shoulder, or as he was passing a heavy platter across the table, or while he was pouring glasses of wine for his guests.
Yuri Andreevich listened to his father-in-law with delight. He adored the old Moscow singsong speech he knew so well, with the Gromekos’ soft, slightly guttural
Alexander Alexandrovich’s upper lip with its trim little mustache protruded slightly over the lower one. The bow tie stood out on his chest in the same way. There was something in common between the lip and the tie, and it lent Alexander Alexandrovich a certain touching, trustfully childish quality.
Late at night, just before the guests’ departure, Shura Schlesinger appeared. She came straight from some meeting, in a jacket and worker’s visored cap, walked into the room with resolute strides, shook everyone’s hand in turn, and in the same motion abandoned herself to reproaches and accusations.
“Hello, Tonya. Hello, Sanechka. Anyhow it’s swinishness, you must agree. I hear from everywhere, he’s here, the whole of Moscow is talking about it, and I’m the last to learn it from you. Well, to hell with you. Obviously, I don’t deserve it. Where is he, the long-awaited one? Let me through. You’re standing around him like a wall. Well, hello! Good for you, good for you. I’ve read it. I don’t understand a thing, but it’s brilliant. You can see it straight off. Hello, Nikolai Nikolaevich. I’ll come back to you at once, Yurochka. I must have a big, special talk with you. Hello, young people. Ah, Gogochka, you’re here, too? Goosey Goosey Gander, whither do you wander?”
The last exclamation referred to the Gromekos’ distant relation Gogochka, a zealous admirer of all the rising powers, who for being silly and laughter-prone was known as Goosey, and for being tall and skinny—the Tapeworm.
“So you’re all eating and drinking here? I’ll catch up with you right away. Ah, ladies and gentlemen! You know nothing, you suspect nothing! What’s going on in the world! Such things are happening! Go to some real local meeting with nonfictional workers, with nonfictional soldiers, not out of books. Try to make a peep there about war to a victorious conclusion. You’ll get your victorious conclusion!7 I was just listening to a sailor! Yurochka, you’d go out of your mind! Such passion! Such integrity!”
Shura Schlesinger was interrupted. They all shouted with no rhyme or reason. She sat down beside Yuri Andreevich, took him by the hand, and, bringing her face close to his, so as to outshout the others, shouted without raising or lowering her voice, as through a speaking trumpet:
“Come with me some day, Yurochka. I’ll show you the people. You must, you must touch the earth, remember, like Antaeus. Why are you goggling your eyes? It seems I surprise you? I’m an old warhorse, an old Bestuzhevist,8 didn’t you know, Yurochka? I’ve known preliminary detention, I’ve fought at the barricades. Of course! What did you think? Oh, we don’t know the people! I’ve come straight from there, from the thick of them. I’m setting up a library for them.”
She had already taken a drop and was obviously getting tipsy. But Yuri Andreevich also had a clamor in his head. He did not notice how Shura Schlesinger turned up at one end of the room and he at the other, at the head of the table. He was standing and, by all tokens, beyond his own expectations, speaking. He did not obtain silence all at once.
“Ladies and gentlemen … I want … Misha! Gogochka! … But what else can I do, Tonya, when they don’t listen? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say a couple of words. Something unheard-of, something unprecedented is approaching. Before it overtakes us, here is my wish for you. When it comes, God grant that we do not lose each other and do not lose our souls. Gogochka, you can shout hurrah afterwards. I haven’t finished. Stop talking in the corners and listen carefully.
