“Good God!” I cried and grasped Nikolai Vasilievich by the arm as the curtain fell upon the second act. “How can there be such people, Nikolai Vasilievich? Think of it! They can’t do what they want. They can’t get where they want. They don’t even know what they want. They talk, talk, talk, and then go off and commit suicide or something. It is a hysterical cry for greater efforts, for higher aims—which to themselves, mind you, are vague and unintelligible—and a perpetual standstill. It’s like Faust in Gounod’s opera who takes the hand of Marguerite in prison and cries, ‘We flee! We flee!’ while making no visible effort to quit the middle of the stage. Why can’t people know what they want in life and get it? Why can’t they, Nikolai Vasilievich?”
Nikolai Vasilievich sat still and silent and very sad. He shook his head gravely and his face darkened.
“It’s all very well,” he said slowly, “to talk. Life is not so simple. There are complications, so to speak, entanglements. It cuts all ways, till … till you don’t know where you are. Yes, Andrei Andreiech. …”
He sighed and paused before he spoke again.
“Chekhov,” he said at last, “is a great artist. …”
I walked home with them to their dacha along the dark and muddy road—it had been raining while we were in the theatre—Nina clinging to my arm.
III
It was on one of those long, happy evenings which it had now become my custom to spend regularly at their large, luxurious flat in the Mohovaya in St. Petersburg, that I was further initiated into the domestic affairs of the Bursanov family.
They had been sitting silently for a time. Nina seemed sad; Sonia and Vera sulky. It was twilight, but no one had thought of switching on the light. No one would dance. I played the piano for a while, and then stopped.
“What is the matter, Nina?” I asked.
She was silent, and then said in her childish open manner, “Oh, Papa and Fanny Ivanovna.”
“What have they done?”
“They are always quarrelling, always, always, always.”
I paused, hating to appear intrusive.
“You know,” she said in that half humorous, half serious way she had of speaking, and then paused a little, and then decided to have it out.
“Papa and Fanny Ivanovna are not … legally married.”
“I know,” I said.
“How did you know?”
“I suspected it.”
“Did Vera tell you?”
“I didn’t!” cried Vera in loud protest. She was fourteen, but tried to look two years older, and indeed succeeded. “I’d never dream of telling such a thing.”
She was shocked and angry at the unjust accusation so provokingly flung at her. It had seemed to me for some time past that there was no love wasted between Vera and her two elder sisters. Vera was different.
“We can’t stand this any longer,” said Sonia. “I am sick to death of their quarrelling. Day and night, day and night. … If they’d only stop at least when we have guests. But no, they are worse than ever then.”
I could bear her out there—that is, if I were really classed as a guest. For I was, rather, what Nikolai Vasilievich called “svoy chelovek,” one of the family, so to speak, and in my presence Nikolai Vasilievich and Fanny Ivanovna certainly let themselves go. They were like cat and dog. There was no mercy shown, no gallantry displayed. Nikolai Vasilievich gibed at her, imitating her murderous Russian with a malicious skill that set the room shrieking with laughter. Fanny Ivanovna, her white face flushing in patches of unwholesome pink, would writhe with pain, and, having gathered her forces, give back as good as she got. Nikolai Vasilievich would snatch out some isolated word that she had mispronounced and, adding some pepper of his own, would fling it into the audience of friends and strangers that he had asked to dinner, and so pluck out the sting at her expense.
“I’m sick of home,” Sonia said. “I shall run away.”
“How can you run away?”
“I’ll marry and run away.”
“No one will marry her,” said Vera from her perch in the far corner.
Nina sat mute, wearing her natural expression, half serious, half ironic.
“What do they quarrel about?”
Nina looked up at Sonia. “Shall I tell?”
“Of course.”
“Aha!” Vera cried maliciously. “Aha!”
“You shut up!” said Sonia.
Nina looked vaguely at the window.
“Papa wants to marry again.”
The rustle of Fanny Ivanovna’s approach was heralded through the air.
She appeared.
“Andrei Andreiech!” she cried. She always greeted me in this way, with acclamation. “How d’you do!”
“How dark! Nina! Vera! Sonia! Why don’t you light up the elektrichno!”
“How many times, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Sonia sternly, “have I told you that it is not elektrichno, but elektrichestvo?”
“Ach! It’s all the same.”
“It’s not all the same, Fanny Ivanovna.”
“Andrei Andreiech! What news?”
“None, I am afraid, Fanny Ivanovna.”
“Has Nikolai Vasilievich come?”
“You know he never comes,” said Sonia, “and yet you always keep supper waiting.”
“I’m tired of waiting for Papa,” Nina said petulantly, lying back on the sofa and swinging her pretty legs.
“He is later and later every day,” came from Vera’s perch. “Fanny Ivanovna, I’m hungry.”
Sonia was really angry. “I would rather he didn’t come at all, than just come to sleep here. Let him
