“Hunting!” I exclaimed, looking at the Prince’s well-shaved chin.
Kniaz passed his fingers between his skinny neck and his stiff collar in a nervous gesture and giggled feebly.
“He’s bought a gun,” said Nina.
“You should see the gun!” Vera cried.
Fanny Ivanovna smiled; and as we settled down to tea Nikolai Vasilievich chaffed Kniaz in his timid, deferential manner. “I went out hunting with him once. It’s a comedy! We see a hare. Kniaz pulls the trigger once—misfire. Pulls at it again—misfire. Pulls at it a third time—and the gun misfires for the third time. When he had pulled the trigger a fourth time there was a terrible explosion; a blaze of fire burst forth from the muzzle; the butt end hit him violently in the shoulder. And when the smoke had gradually dispersed we saw that the hare had evidently escaped undamaged. His instrument of murder was the only victim; and there I saw Kniaz looking at his gun: the trigger and most of the front piece had blown off in the concussion. But there he stood, still holding the instrument in his hands, puzzled beyond words.”
Nikolai Vasilievich looked at Kniaz and smiled kindly, as though to make up by it for any pain that his recital may have caused him.
Nina stretched a plate of sweets to me.
I looked at her interrogatively.
“With your tea,” she said.
“There is no sugar,” said Nikolai Vasilievich apologetically.
“I want to speak to you very seriously,” said Baron Wunderhausen, “about transferring to the English Service.”
“Now that Andrei Andreiech has arrived,” said Fanny Ivanovna gaily, “we shall be able to get sugar and everything from the English.”
“The English are all right,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “I always did have confidence in the English. If the English once begin a job you may be sure they’ll see it through. And if the first step is taken and the mining area is liberated, the war will soon be over.”
“I want to speak to you about my special qualifications for transferring to the English Service. I was born and educated—”
“Pàv’l Pàvlch,” cried Fanny Ivanovna, “please don’t interrupt. I want you, Andrei Andreiech, to translate an English letter Nikolai Vasilievich has received from his former mining-engineer, Mr. Thomson. Our English is not quite sufficient, though I’ve understood parts of it.”
I took the letter. Mr. Thomson, writing from an obscure address in Scotland, stated that the afterwar conditions prevailing in the west of Europe had frankly disappointed him, and solicited an invitation to be reinstated in his former post as consulting-engineer in Nikolai Vasilievich’s goldmines.
“It’s such a pity,” Fanny Ivanovna sighed. “Mr. Thomson is such a nice man. And now it seems he is so badly off. It must be terrible for his wife and children.”
“Well,” said Nikolai Vasilievich, “I say this: it’s no use Mr. Thomson coming out here at present, while the mines are still in Bolshevik hands. And I don’t want to hold out false hopes to Mr. Thomson, for one can never quite be sure what may happen in Siberia yet. But between ourselves, I may tell you that now that the English have arrived and—well, that this punitive expedition to the mines has been arranged, we have good reason to feel optimistic.”
“Well, let’s hope, let’s hope,” said Fanny Ivanovna.
But the three sisters looked as if they didn’t care a hang about Mr. Thomson, the English, the mines or anybody else.
“Are you going to the dance?” said Nina.
“Which dance?”
“The Russian one—at the Green School.”
“But it will be Russian dances all the time.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Russian music, too.”
“We can dance foxtrots to krakowiaks, one-steps to march music, slow waltzes to anything you like. You must come.”
I knew I was going, but I liked to be asked, and I resisted lingeringly, to prolong the pleasure.
Of course I was going. Who could have resisted this sliding sidelong look; this shining semicircle of white teeth that revealed itself with each full smile; this lithe, sylphine young body?
The three sisters affected a stationary foxtrot.
The passions were aroused.
“Nikolai Vasilievich! Papa!”
He was dragged, like a resisting malefactor, struggling, to the piano, and made to play his one and only waltz. The Baron claimed Vera. Nina came automatically into my arms. I recaptured some of her familiar fragrance, as we danced between the sofa and round the table, dodging sundry chairs. Sonia stood demurely at the wall, abandoned by her husband in favour of a younger sister, but affecting an unconvincing moue of mirth. Then, owing to the shortness and simplicity of the tune, Nikolai Vasilievich’s technique broke down.
“I want to talk to you on this very serious question of transferring to the English Service.” The Baron had come up to me again. And I resorted to the classic answer of doubting whether there was “any vacancy.”
“It doesn’t matter where,” he said. “In Persia, or perhaps in Mesopotamia. I can’t serve here any longer.”
We sat silent in the heated room of the little wooden house creaking in the wind, and I felt lost and hidden amid all this sun and fir and solitude around us. Nikolai Vasilievich drank his tea and wondered if the Bolsheviks would hand him back his house and money at the bank, and if the Czechs, as obviously they ought, would compensate him for his loss on the goldmines. He had great hopes, he said, of the punitive expedition; but there was one aspect—a moral one—that disturbed him greatly. He wondered whether the punitive expedition would turn out to be quite honest and would not do him out of his interests in the goldmines altogether.
Afterwards he came up to me and said in a weary undertone: “You know, it will be very dull tonight—nothing but Russian dance music. Honestly, it would only spoil your evening if
