The night before, I had taken them to Kusivitski’s concert. People had been staring enviously at me, as if to ask: “Who are those three pretty kittens?” I felt absurdly like a proud papa. The music was excruciating. During the piano solo I clung to my chair: I could scarcely sit still. “Scriabin,” I burst out as the music stopped, “is a persistent knocking at the door—but the door doesn’t open. Still, as we might know in any case that there is nothing behind the door, that doesn’t greatly matter, does it? It’s the knocking that is a human necessity. And what a desperate knocking it is!”
Nina looked at me with that trick she had of assuming innocence and said: “Which door?”
And it flashed across my mind that, whereas Sonia played the piano with an agreeable touch of feeling, Nina’s hammering was shrill and disagreeable, while, musically, Vera was still an unknown quantity.
But the pianist had resumed.
“What is this?” Nina asked.
“A foxtrot,” I replied, very superior.
I sat on the small seat facing the three sisters, as Professor Metchnikoff trotted homeward through the sombre streets. The night was warm and humid. By the street lamps I could see their faces. When she was silent Nina looked so wise. Perhaps she seemed wiser than she actually was. All this—the war, the revolution—she had overlooked: and it did not exist. Scriabin—she had overlooked him. And he did not exist. But she was there, watchful. …
The day after was like the day before. They sat there listless—Fanny Ivanovna, Kniaz and the three sisters. The three sisters always sat in some extraordinary positions, on the backs of sofas and easy chairs, and Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz sat in very ordinary positions. Nikolai Vasilievich alone was always absent; and I think there was a sort of feeling running through us all that he at least was busy, doing something. But in more sceptical moods I know I was inclined to question dubiously whether he too was getting anywhere for all the semblance of activity that his mysterious absence involved. I remember the silhouette of Nina’s profile at the window. I can feel the tension of the silence that hung over the room, the suspense of waiting—of indefinite waiting for indefinite things. In the hush that had crept upon us I could fancy I could sense acutely the disturbing presence of the things my eye could not behold: the gilded domes radiant in the fading sunlight, the many bridges thrown across the widespread stream; and in the stillness I was made to feel as if by instinct the throbbing pulse of Petrograd. The leaden waves splashed gently against the granite banks; and the air was full of that yearning melancholy call of life that yet reminds one—God knows why—of the imminence of death; and in the sky there was the promise of a white night.
IV
Petrograd looked thoroughly nasty on that cold November morning. There was the drizzling snow, and it was still dark as I walked home with Uncle Kostia. We had been at the Finland Station to see off two of Uncle Kostia’s nieces who were going abroad. It was , and Uncle Kostia looked pessimistic. “Do you remember all those student-revolutionaries, the heroes of our young intelligentsia, who had been persecuted by the old regime? Well,”—he pointed from the bridge that we were traversing to the Bolshevik craft that had arrived from Kronstadt overnight—“this is more than they bargained for. More than they bargained for.”
We walked on.
“They are malcontents again—but on the other side! Truth is fond of playing practical jokes of this sort. My God! how elusive it is. It is wonderful how beneath our hastily made-up truths, the truths of usage and convenience, there runs independently, often contrariwise, a wider, bigger truth. Can’t you feel it? The pseudo-reason of unreason. The lack of reasonable evidence in reason. Issues, motives being muddled up. This ethical confusion, and the blind habitual resort to bloodshed as a means of straightening it out. More confusion. Honour is involved. Bloodshed as a solution. More honour involved in the solution. More bloodshed. That idiotic plea that each generation should sacrifice itself for the so-called benefit of the next! It never seems to end. … Oh, how the pendulum swings! Wider and wider, and we are shedding blood generation after generation. For what? For whom? … For future generations! My God, what fools we are! Fools shedding blood for the sake of future fools, who will do as much!”
“But what are you to do? What?” I persisted.
Uncle Kostia was evasive. “You see,” he said at last, “subtleties of the mind, if pursued to their logical conclusions, become crudities. Let us cease our conversation at this point.”
Barricades appeared in the streets. Bridges were being suspended. Lorries of joyriding proletarians became familiarly conspicuous, as I walked on towards the Bursanovs.
I found the household in a state of wild excitement. However, the event had no connection with the Revolution. In fact, with continual domestic revolutions in their own home, the much ado about the political revolution appeared, particularly to the three sisters, a foolish affectation.
I learnt that Nikolai Vasilievich had just discovered that his bookkeeper Stanitski, at the instigation of his house-agent, had these last five years been falsifying the books and robbing him wholesale. When the discovery was made the house-agent had vanished into the darkness whence he had emerged. But as I entered I was very nearly knocked down by Nikolai Vasilievich dashing after Stanitski, the bookkeeper, as he was flying down the stairs. He caught him by the tail of his overcoat and dragged him back into his study. He had him standing, stiff and awkward and ashamed, before his desk, while he himself reclined
