Like so many other people in Russia, Fanny Ivanovna believed that England has three great outstanding writers: Byron, Shakespeare, and Oscar Wilde.
“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! I have had a terrible row with Cecedek. It’s all that Baron Wunderhausen. He made love to Nina. …”
I remember that at these words I sat up in my chair.
“… in French, Andrei Andreiech!”
“ ‘I hate talking of such things in Russian,’ he said, thinking he would impress her. But she wouldn’t listen.”
My body relaxed in the chair.
“If there’s one thing that Nina simply cannot stand, it is being made love to … above all in French! He came to me after that and said:
“ ‘Fanny Ivanovna, it came over me like that … overnight! …’
“ ‘Oh, then it will go out overnight,’ I said. ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich, please don’t talk of it to me.’ But he turned to me and said in a secretive whisper:
“ ‘Fanny Ivanovna, if you will help me to win her heart I will be your greatest friend on earth.’ And then, after the manner of a doctor, ‘And now tell me all your troubles. We’ll see what we can do.’
“ ‘Pàvel Pàvlovich,’ I cried, ‘Sie sind verrückt. My troubles are my private affairs and concern no one but myself. Good night.’
“So he complained of me to Magda Nikolaevna; and, would you believe it! she sent Cecedek to tell me that she will not allow me to hamper her daughters’ happiness, that she doesn’t want them to die old maids, like me—me! if you please—that I am unfit to look after them, and so on, and so on. Andrei Andreiech, they are sixteen, fifteen and fourteen! But I can guess the true cause. She wants to marry Cecedek and she naturally doesn’t want her daughters to live with her as this would make her appear her own age, to say nothing of the danger of his falling in love with one of them. They are so pretty.”
“But why need they live with her at all?”
“Ah,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “She said emphatically that she will not have them live with their father if that’s the way he carries on. She is afraid it will corrupt their morals.”
“But doesn’t she continue to draw an allowance from Nikolai Vasilievich?”
“She does. But ever since she met Cecedek, who is preposterously rich, she has lost her faith in Nikolai Vasilievich’s mines—indeed says so openly. This distresses Nikolai very much indeed. I don’t know why it is that he attaches such importance to her faith in the mines, unless it is because he acquired those goldmines in her time. Of course, she is anxious for her daughters’ future. She feels that their chances are getting spoiled with her own life and that of Nikolai Vasilievich becoming muddled up. I don’t doubt that she loves her daughters and means well.
“So now our Baron is again after Sonia, but really after the mines, if you ask me.” She laughed a little, privately, to herself, and then said, “I wish he’d wash his neck. …
“Soon, very soon, Andrei Andreiech, I shall leave them. It will be hard … intolerably hard. But my mind is made up. I am not such a fool, Andrei Andreiech, as not to know when my time is up. And then I have a little pride still left in me. It is now merely a matter of the mines. I am ready. I have begun to pack. I have written home to Germany. But I couldn’t post the letter. Not yet. … Andrei Andreiech: what have I to live for? Will you tell me: what? … Only when I am gone from them perhaps the children will say: ‘She has been good to us. She has loved us like a mother’ … and then, perhaps, I shall not have lived in vain. …”
I went home by the silent river. The Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was like a weary watchman. The Admiralty Needle seemed lost in the white mist. I sat down on a stone seat of the embankment and rested. The broad milky river was so mysteriously calm in the granite frame of the quays. I sat and wondered; then my thoughts began to drift; and I was lost in this half light, this half dream, this unreal half existence. …
Part II
The Revolution
I
Then I went to Oxford, and when the war broke out I joined the Navy. But just before the revolution, Admiral Butt, who had gone on a special mission to Russia, applied for my “Anglo-Russian” services.
I still remember very vividly the morning following on my arrival in Petrograd, when I had to meet the Admiral for the first time at the British Embassy. I ascended the broad staircase with its worn red carpet to the Chancery. Very perfect young men, very perfectly dressed, were conversing in very perfect intonations about love among monkeys. It struck me as delightfully human for diplomats. When I descended, the Admiral had not yet arrived. I talked to Yuri, the hall-porter, a clean-shaven individual of uncertain nationality, violently pro-British, and speaking several languages all very badly. Every now and then the great heavy door would open—it was snowing heavily outside—and some man or woman would come in and inquire if this was the Military District Staff. “It is the British Embassy,” replied Yuri proudly. And he explained the error. The Military District Staff was 4 Palace Square; the Embassy 4 Palace Quay. In peacetime people did come in occasionally and inquire if this was the Military District Staff; but since war had been declared they seemed to be doing little else. I pondered over the possibility of Yuri, unable
