“But this is life, Ivan Andreievitch! I stay here, I send him away because I cannot bear to see Nicholas suffer. And I do not care for Nicholas. Do you understand that? I never loved him, and now I have a contempt for him—in spite of myself. Uncle Alexei has done that. Oh yes! He has made a fool of Nicholas for months, and although I have hated him for doing that, I have seen, also, what a fool Nicholas is! But he is a hero, too. Make him as noble as you like, Ivan Andreievitch. You cannot colour it too high. He is the real thing and I am the sham. … But oh! I do not want to live with him any more, I am tired of him, his experiments, his lamentations, his weakness, his lack of humour—tired of him, sick of him. And yet I cannot leave him, because I am soft, soft without bones, like my country, Ivan Andreievitch. … My lover is strong. Nothing can change his will. He will go, will leave me, until he knows that I am free. Then he will never leave me again.
“Perhaps I will get tired of his strength one day—it may be—just as now I am tired of Nicholas’s weakness. Everything has its end.
“But no! he has humour, and he sees life as it is. I shall be able always to tell him the truth. With Nicholas it is always lies. …”
She suddenly sprang up and stood before me.
“Now, do you think me noble?” she cried.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Ah! you are incorrigible! You have drunk Dostoevsky until you can see nothing but God and the muzhik! But I am alive, Ivan Andreievitch, not a heroine in a book! Alive, alive, alive! Not one of your Lisas or Annas or Natashas. I’m alive enough to shoot Uncle Alexei and poison Nicholas—but I’m soft too, soft so that I cannot bear to see a rabbit killed … and yet I love Sherry so that I am blind for him and deaf for him and dead for him—when he is not there. My love—the only one of my life—the first and the last—”
She flung out her arms:
“Life! Now! Before it is too late! I want it, I want him, I want happiness!”
She stood thus for a moment, staring out to the sea. Then her arms dropped, she laughed, fastening her cloak—
“There’s your nobility, Ivan Andreievitch—theatrical, all of it. I know what I am, and I know what I shall do. Nicholas will live to eighty; I also. I shall hate him, but I shall he in an agony when he cuts his finger. I shall never see Sherry again. Later, he will marry a fresh English girl like an apple. … I, because I am weak, soft putty—I have made it so.”
She turned away from me, staring desperately at the wall. When she looked back to me her face was grey.
She smiled. “What a baby you are! … But take care of yourself. Don’t come on Monday if it’s bad weather. Goodbye.”
She went.
After a bad, sleepless night, and a morning during which I dozed in a nightmareish kind of way, I got up early in the afternoon, had some tea, and about six o’clock started out.
It was a lovely evening; the spring light was in the air, the tufted trees beside the canal were pink against the pale sky, and thin layers of ice, like fragments of jade, broke the soft blue of the water. How pleasant to feel the cobbles firm beneath one’s feet, to know that the snow was gone for many months, and that light now would flood the streets and squares! Nevertheless, my foreboding was not raised, and the veils of colour hung from house to house and from street to street could not change the realities of the scene.
I climbed the stairs to the flat and found Vera waiting for me. She was with Uncle Ivan, who, I found to my disappointment, was coming with us.
We started off.
“We can walk across to the Bourse,” she said. “It’s such a lovely evening, and we’re a little early.”
We talked of nothing but the most ordinary things; Uncle Ivan’s company prevented anything else. To say that I cursed him is to put it very mildly. He had been, I believe, oblivious of all the scenes that had occurred during the last weeks. If the Last Judgement occurred under his very nose, and he had had a cosy meal in front of him, he would have noticed nothing. The Revolution had had no effect on him at all; it did not seem strange to him that Semyonov should come to live with them; he had indeed fancied that Nicholas had not “been very well” lately, but then Nicholas had always been an odd and cantankerous fellow, and he, as he told me, never paid too much attention to his moods. His one anxiety was lest Sacha should be hindered from her usual shopping on the morrow, it being May Day, when there would be processions and other tiresome things. He hoped that there was enough food in the house.
“There will be cold cutlets and cheese,” Vera said.
He told me that he really did not know why he was going to this meeting. He took no interest in politics, and he hated speeches, but he would like to see our Ambassador. He had heard that he was always excellently dressed. …
Vera said very little. Her troubles that evening must have been accumulating
