PART III INTERVENING IN SIBERIA

I

CERTAIN fragments of scene and speech come back to me with a peculiar insistence, as I write this third portion of my book. I have no hesitation in setting them down as I do, I think accurately enough, if not word for word. I remember them well because they had impressed me. That is the secret of memory. I have forgotten much, but there are scenes I cannot forget, fragments of speech that still ring in my ear, and I shall remember them always; at least, till I have finally pinned them to paper.

The Admiral and I, and a few others—interesting types, I can assure you—travelled to Siberia, where we engaged in a series of comic opera attempts to wipe out the Russian revolution. By now, “Intervention” has been relegated to the shelf of history. But I cannot but remember it, not merely as an adventure in futility, as admittedly it was, but as an ever-shifting, changing sense of being alive. For the experience of love is inseparable from its background. Alone it does not exist. It is a modulation of impressions, an interplay of “atmospheres,” a quickening of the fibres of that background into throbbing tissues of an elusive, half-apprehended beauty.

It was raining heavily when we arrived in Vladivostok, and the port, as we surveyed it from the boat, looked grey and hopeless, like the Russian situation. A flat had been allotted us, a bare, unfurnished flat in a deserted house standing in a grim and desolate by-street; and there the Admiral made his temporary headquarters. It poured all day long, and it seemed, indeed, as though the rain, playing havoc with the town, would never cease, even as the misery and blundering in Russia would never cease, and that our efforts were not wanted and could do no good.

That night I entertained General Bologoevski at dinner at the famous restaurant ‘Zolotoy Rog’—nicknamed by British sailors the ‘Solitary Dog.’ He had travelled with us all the way from England, seemingly under vague instructions from some Allied War Office, and had attached himself to our party of his own accord. As we sat down, the head waiter came up to us and respectfully informed the General that by order of the Commander-in-Chief Russian officers were not admitted into restaurants. The General protested feebly, stressing his hunger as a reason for remaining, whereon the head waiter suggested, in an undertone, that the obvious alternative was to remove the epaulets.

“What! Remove my epaulets! I, a Russian officer? Never!” he protested.

Whereon a brain-wave struck him. “I know,” said he, looking round the restaurant. It was nearly empty. And instantly he compromised by putting on his mackintosh. “Now,” said he, “in my English Burberry they will take me for an English officer. Ah!” he smiled, and then added his invariable English phrase: “It is a damrotten game, you know.” And, after a momentary contemplation: “I give dem h-h-hell!”

I ordered chicken soup. The General talked loosely about the Siberian situation. About five minutes after I had ordered soup the waiter returned without being called and very amiably volunteered the information that the soup would be served immediately. When, three-quarters of an hour later, I asked the waiter about the soup, he repeated “Immediately,” but the word now somehow failed to inspire in us the same confidence. The General talked of the Siberian situation for about an hour and a quarter, when we observed that the soup had not been served. I again called the waiter.

“What about that soup?” I asked.

“I am afraid, sir,” said the waiter, “you will have to wait a while, for soup is a troublesome thing to prepare nowadays.”

“How long?”

“About three-quarters of an hour.”

General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. I gathered that there was a General Horvat who had formed an All-Russia Government, and that there was also a Siberian Government, defying General Horvat on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other, and that there were various officer organizations grouped about this or the other government, and some rather inclined to be on their own, all looking forward to a possible intervention by the Allies. After an hour or so had elapsed I interrupted General Bologoevski by observing that the soup had not yet been served, and I called a waiter who was passing and told him to fetch the waiter who had been serving us.

“He has gone to bed,” came the answer, “and I am on the night shift.”

“Oh!” And I inquired about the soup.

“Soup?” said the new waiter, evidently disowning all responsibility for his predecessor, and after some hesitation he promised us some soup in about three-quarters of an hour. General Bologoevski then continued about the situation. He spoke for an intolerably long time, stopping only once or twice to inquire about the soup and whether it was coming. The clock in the corner chimed midnight, and then one. I was now devilishly hungry, and the General looked misused and maltreated. I shouted for the waiter, who with eyes closed slumbered in a standing posture in the distant corner of the room. “What about that soup?” I repeated in excited tones when the waiter showed signs of recovering consciousness.

“Soup?” he asked. “Well, you see you can’t have soup nowadays ... unless you choose to wait——”

“Wait!” I said.

“Three-quarters of an hour or so,” he said.

Whereupon the General rose. He rose in a threatening manner. It seemed to me that the General’s manner of rising was deliberately remonstrative, a protest undisguised.

“General!” I shouted, as he ran across to his hat and sword. “Come back and have something. A chicken cutlet. General!”

But he was gone. I sat alone at my table and waited for the cutlet. As I looked before me I observed sitting at a distant table a man with a familiar face. I could not believe it. My heart leapt within me. I dashed from my chair.

“Nikolai Vasilievich!”

“Andrei Andreiech!”

“Is it possible? Is it really you?”

Nikolai Vasilievich was kissing me on both cheeks, in confirmation of his identity.

“Well, I never thought that you were here! I never thought that you could be here, Nikolai Vasilievich.”

“I am here,” said Nikolai Vasilievich sadly.

“And who else is here, who else, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

“All,” sighed Nikolai Vasilievich.

“All! How do you mean all?”

“All.”

“Fanny Ivanovna here?”

“Yes, she is here.”

“Nina?”

“Yes, she is here.”

“And Pàvel Pàvlovich?”

“Yes, both Pàvel Pàvlovichi are here.”

“And Eberheim?”

“Yes, he is here too ... they’re all here.”

“You don’t say so!... And Čečedek?”

“All here—all.”

“And Vera?”

“Yes.”

“And Sonia?...”

“Yes, all—my wife and all.”

“Which wife, Nikolai Vasilievich?”

“How do you mean? I only have one—Magda Nikolaevna.”

“Oh, you haven’t married Zina then?”

“No, but she is here. They are all here—all her family ... Uncle Kostia ... all.”

“How are they all? Tell me, Nikolai Vasilievich ... the grandfathers dead, I suppose?”

“Oh no, both here. But I don’t think—nobody thinks—they can last very long now, either of them.”

“Oh, they’re alive. That’s good.... And so Magda Nikolaevna is here too—with Čečedek, of course.”

“Yes, and Eisenstein.”

“She has married Čečedek?”

“No, she has married no one—except me, of course. But I expect it won’t be very long now till I get a divorce.”

My voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “Why are they all here, Nikolai Vasilievich?” I asked.

“Andrei Andreiech, don’t ask me. Why is it that they followed me here all the way from Petrograd? And when I had to go over to Japan just for a fortnight on a matter of business ... well, they all followed me there ... all ... every one of them!... You see, they are, so to speak, economically dependent on me. That is why I suppose they follow me about wherever I go. We are inseparable—financially. We are a chain. Russia being what she is to-day—disjointed, with neither railway nor postal communication that you can rely on, they simply have to be where I am if they are to get money out of me. I quite understand their position. So they follow me, you see....”

“Nikolai Vasilievich!” And I shook him long and warmly by the hand.

We sat together long into the morning, and Nikolai Vasilievich complained of his lot. The mines, it seemed, were still the chief deterrent to his happiness. His family, he said, had decided to leave Petrograd and go east because their house, which, strictly speaking, belonged to them no longer, had, since the Bolshevik revolution, been invaded by a host of undesirable people and there was hardly a room left in the house that they could call their own. Another reason which prompted them to leave the capital was that the Bolshevik authorities had restricted individuals from drawing on their current accounts in the banks; and what was more important still, Nikolai Vasilievich had really nothing left in the bank to draw upon. So he had naturally turned to his other source of income—the gold-mines in Siberia. He had poured considerable money into these gold-mines in the past, in the hope that some day they would make him very wealthy. For years and years they had a way of ever being on the eve of making him wealthy, yet always some minor, unforeseen incident occurred which temporarily postponed the realization of his hopes. The gold-mines were about to begin to pay, when war broke out and temporarily affected the output. Then in the war he perceived the opportunity of placing them on a military footing. The governor, a friend of his, had promised to assist him, when unhappily the revolution came and the governor was arrested and dismissed. Kerenski’s time was the most trying time of all. For then the miners began to call committee-meetings and talk as to what they would do when they seized the mines; but they confined their revolutionary schemes to a violent expression as to what they would do, in the meantime doing nothing, either in the taking over of the mines or in the working of them. With the Bolshevik revolution things began to move, and the men seized the mines. At first the news was a great shock to Nikolai Vasilievich, for he knew that there were many families dependent on him. Then he perceived that he could actually buy the gold from the men at exactly the same price as it had cost him to produce it. He was much relieved, and for the first time in his life he was actually doing good business.

It was then that they decided to leave Petrograd for Siberia, and his families, dependents and hangers-on naturally all followed him. He travelled with Fanny Ivanovna, Sonia, Nina, Baron Wunderhausen, Kniaz, Eberheim and the book-keeper Stanitski. His wife was in the same train, but in a different carriage, and she insisted on having Vera with her, for she was not well, and Čečedek was merely a man. Eisenstein followed her. At times it seemed as if he had lost sight of them; but he invariably turned up by the next train in every town they halted. Eberheim was a great trouble. He suffered terribly. At several wayside stations they had to take him out and put him into hospital. Sometimes there was no hospital, only a doctor. Sometimes there was no doctor, and Zina’s father attended to him as best he could. Eisenstein too was helpful. On more than one occasion Zina’s family—the largest family of all—and Magda Nikolaevna’s party, had gone on not knowing that Nikolai Vasilievich’s party had remained behind; and Nikolai Vasilievich thought that he would never see them again. But they had discovered his absence and waited for him in the next town along the line, before proceeding farther. The two old grandfathers stood the journey very well on the whole, considering their advanced age and the hardships of the trip. What made it very unpleasant for Nikolai Vasilievich was that the various parties who were financially dependent on him were not on speaking terms with one another. He was besieged with notes requesting private interviews, and there were violent disputes which he was called upon to settle. When at length he had arrived at the headquarters of his gold-mines, he learnt that the Czecho-Slovak troops in their recent offensive against the Bolsheviks had recaptured the mines, shot the miners’ leaders, imprisoned many other miners, and then handed the mines back to his manager; whereon the miners killed the manager and refused to resume work. Mr. Thomson, his consulting-engineer, despairing of the situation, had returned to England. And Nikolai Vasilievich perceived that his recent scheme of purchasing the gold from the men had been completely knocked on the head.

He was now considering another scheme that had been suggested to him by a number of financiers in the Far East, which involved the active co-operation of two influential generals—to organize and dispatch a punitive expedition to the gold-mines in order to compel the miners to restart work. This somewhat complicated scheme had necessitated a trip to Tokio to interest another Russian general who was there in the scheme; and all the families, no doubt thinking that he was trying to escape from his responsibilities, followed him to Tokio, thus unnecessarily increasing his expenses. He had had great difficulty in finding accommodation for his family in Vladivostok; but for Fanny Ivanovna, Sonia, Nina, Vera, Baron Wunderhausen and himself he had procured the ground floor of a little house. All the others had also settled down in Vladivostok. And the Baron would, no doubt, find it difficult to evade military service.

“And how are you?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich. “I wondered if you would be coming with the Admiral. We half expected that you would. Well, what do you think of it?”

“Think of it!” I said. “Why, we are the men of the hour. You should have seen the deputations, proclamations, speeches, hailing him as the new Lafayette. He said to-day, jokingly of course, that he would have to work out a time-table for seeing people. Dictators, say, from 7 to 10; supreme rulers between 10 and 1; prime ministers could be admitted between 2 and 5. Then till seven he would be free to cabinet ministers of the rank and file. Supreme commanders-in-chief could come from 8 to 1. And so forth, down to common general officers commanding. Yes, it was hardly an exaggeration....”

Nikolai Vasilievich smiled one of his kindly smiles. “Do you think it will be all right?” he asked.

“Rather!” I replied irrelevantly. “It’s the climax of his career. He has been called upon by four joint deputations representing, I think, four separate All-Russia Governments whose heads conferred on him the title of ‘Supreme Commander-in-Chief of All the Armed Military and Naval Forces operating on the Territory of Russia,’ or something of this sort. And he made a speech to them; said that Foch was wrong and Douglas Haig was wrong, and all those muddle-headed politicians! The war was to be won on the Eastern Front.”

“I too think it will be won on the Eastern Front,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “It ought to, anyhow.”

“Why?”

“Well, because the Eastern Front has unquestionably the greater resources in mineral wealth. The gold-mines ought to be cleared of the enemy before anything else if you want to win the war.”

“Yes,” said I with an assumed and exaggerated pensiveness, “that is unquestionably the case.”

We arranged to meet again to-morrow, as we descended arm in arm the shabby flight of steps, and it was decided that Nikolai Vasilievich should call for me and drive me home to see the family.

The rain had ceased. We parted at the cross-roads.

When I turned into my bedroom I beheld the Admiral and a little dark-haired man, aquiline featured, sitting on my bed and talking like two conspirators. The dark-haired little man then rose with the precision common to Russian officers, and shook hands. He was, I learnt afterwards, Admiral Kolchak.

It was very late that night when I fell asleep. I was thinking of my meeting on the morrow with the family, with Nina. I pictured to myself her image as I last remembered it. And, interlacing with these thoughts, there was the thought of the gallant Admiral in the bedroom opposite, tucked away between his heavy blankets, his teeth in a glass of water on the table at his side—no presentable sight!—seeing visions of a Napoleonic ride athwart the great Siberian plain, at the head of his vast new armies marching onward to take their stand on the re-established Eastern Front.

Then in the small hours of the morning he was wakened by the noise of a dog that ran through the half-open door of his bedroom in pursuit of a cat. I heard the Admiral strike a match, then jump out of bed and fumble with his stick under the bed and cupboards and chest of drawers, evidently looking for the animals. I went in to him and offered my services in the chase.

“Can you see the dog?” came the Admiral’s sturdy voice from under a cupboard.

“I’m looking for the cat, sir.”

“Cat! Where did that come from?”

“I saw it run into your room after a rat.”

“Nonsense!”

“I did, sir, and the dog ran in after the cat.”

We fumbled with our sticks.

“I don’t believe there was a rat,” said the Admiral.

“There was, sir. I saw it myself.”

“I don’t mind the dog so much. Cats I hate. But I can’t stick the rat. Why did you tell me?”

I did not answer this.

“Can’t find them, sir,” I said, rising.

“They’ve gone, I hope,” said the Admiral.

“They’ve hidden themselves somewhere, I think.”

“Damn them! I shan’t be able to sleep all night.”

“Good night, sir,” said I.

The Admiral could not sleep. I heard him get out of bed and fumble with his stick beneath the furniture. I think the uncertainty of the whereabouts of the animals disturbed his peace of mind. Then I heard him creep into bed, and all was still. I could just hear the rain drum against the window-pane; and I thought that by now the cat had probably eaten up the rat.

II

Nikolai Vasilievich was to call for me after lunch. At lunch there were many guests, and the conversation was necessarily political. I was impatient, for Nikolai Vasilievich might call at any moment; and the entire scheme of “Intervention” seemed to me, in my mood of acute expectancy, singularly unimportant. I watched the Admiral who in his serious, deliberate way looked straight into his principal guest’s eyes and listened very earnestly and nodded with approval, while the guest, a Russian General, was talking arrant nonsense. In that stiff and martial attitude common to a certain type of Russian officer (who assumes it as it were in proof of grim determination) the guest was saying: “All these complaints about arrests and executions by the loyal troops—I decline to take them seriously. In the present wavering state of mind of the population you can’t guarantee that there won’t be people who will complain because the sun shines in the daytime only and not at night as well.”

The Admiral gave an emphatic nod; and at a glance I could see that he had classed his guest as a “good fellow.” The Admiral, I may explain, divided the world into two big camps: the humanity that he called “good fellows,” and the humanity that he called “rotters”—and there you are! Simple. (As a matter of fact, he used a substitute for this last word, but I am afraid the original is unprintable.) But while the guest was being engaged by General Bologoevski, a quiet silver-haired British Colonel took the opportunity of telling the Admiral in his quiet silvery manner the conclusion he in his quiet silvery mind had quietly arrived at after interviewing for many months innumerable Russian officers. “I am afraid,” said he, “that whenever you come to examine very carefully a Russian officer’s scheme for the restoration and salvation of his country, it invariably boils down to giving him a job.”

And at a glance I could see that the Admiral had classed the fellow as a “rotter.”

I forget the substance of the conversation of that lunch, which stands out in my memory merely on account of its coincidence with the day on which I met the family; but I remember how a remark of General Bologoevski’s, that he understood the Bolshevik commissaries never washed, lit up the Admiral’s face with ominous glee, and one could guess at sight that he condemned the Bolshevik commissaries.

About two o’clock Nikolai Vasilievich called for me. We drove uphill, the driver flogging his two horses with unwarranted zeal. The day was bright, but the roads were muddy from the flood overnight. As we arrived, another cab drove up at the porch, and from it emerged Fanny Ivanovna and Kniaz. Kniaz made an insincere attempt to pay the cabfare; but when Fanny Ivanovna said “It’s all right, I have some money,” Kniaz said “Very well,” and replaced the empty purse in his pocket....

And for the next few minutes the three-roomed lodging of the little house was the scene of a happy reunion.

Nina alone was absent from the household. Fanny Ivanovna was much annoyed and tackled Sonia on the subject.

“How do I know where she is?” Sonia remonstrated. Then she smiled and I felt that she knew all right; and then immediately she grew angry, and I felt that after all, perhaps, she did not know.

“We have no means of knowing, Fanny Ivanovna,” said Baron Wunderhausen.

“Pàv’l Pàvlch,” she said, “please don’t annoy me. You annoy me with your inconsequent talk, and I have asked you not to meddle ... and to wash your neck.”

“He’s like Uncle Kostia!” Vera cried. “Has a bath once a year—whether clean or dirty.” She was pretty, growing prettier.

Baron Wunderhausen only shrugged his shoulders.

Then the door opened and Nina slipped into the room. I was staggered by her looks. To my mind she was irresistible. When she saw me she stopped dead.

“Where have you come from?” she asked.

I explained confusedly, and a minute later she dismissed me and my arrival as a thing entirely commonplace, and turned to the others.

“Nina,” said Fanny Ivanovna sternly, “where have you been? I insist on your telling me.”

“And I won’t tell,” said Nina curtly.

“Nina,” I took it up, jokingly but with a sneaking sense of secretive authority resting on our “engagement” of four years ago, “where have you been? I too insist on your telling me.”

She looked at me with the expression that comes over people who are about to put out their tongue at you, and said:

“And I won’t tell.”

“And how do you find us?” Fanny Ivanovna asked. “Have we grown older? I think I have grown older. And Nikolai Vasilievich, too. And Kniaz.”

“No,” I lied. And assuredly the lie pleased her.

“And the children are just the same?”

“The children are just the same,” I agreed. “A bouquet. Three pretty kittens.”

Vera purred like one.

“But you haven’t much room here, have you?” I observed.

“What can we do?” she asked. “The town is packed with refugees. We can’t find anything better.”

“À la guerre comme à la guerre,” remarked the Baron.

“Still, it is more comfortable than living in an hotel. Sonia, Nina and Vera sleep here on the sofa and the bed we drag out from the other room. The adjoining room is Nikolai Vasilievich’s and mine. The third is Pàv’l Pàvlch’s, the Baron’s. The others have remained at the hotel—I mean Kniaz and Eberheim. I don’t care what Magda Nikolaevna does, but I think she has now found a house. And Uncle Kostia and the rest of them will probably settle at his sister’s, the Olenins. Kniaz comes here for his meals and spends the day with us ... though lately”—she smiled—“he has been going out hunting.”

“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 gold-mines.

“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 fox-trots to krokoviaks, 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 side-long 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 fox-trot.

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 gold-mines. 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 gold-mines altogether.

Afterwards he came up to me and said in a weary undertone: “You know, it will be very dull to-night—nothing but Russian dance music. Honestly, it would only spoil your evening if you went.”

“Don’t take any notice of him,” cried the three sisters simultaneously. “It will be very jolly. He’s only thinking of himself.”

“Nikolai!” cried Fanny Ivanovna. “What nonsense! You’ve already promised me to come. You’re their father and it’s your duty to take your children out. I refuse to go alone with them.”

As I entered the brilliantly illuminated ball-room, the three sisters, each claimed by an Allied officer, were fox-trotting, in defiance of the congregation. Nikolai Vasilievich, wearing a dinner-jacket, looked very angry, very lonely and very bored; and Fanny Ivanovna looked ominously triumphant.

“Poor Nikolai Vasilievich!” I said when Fanny Ivanovna and I were alone. “That dinner-jacket of his looks miserable and frightened as though it felt the outrage of being dragged into this mock festivity. It seems to say: ‘What have I done?’”

“Doesn’t matter. He is better where he is.

“He would only be with that girl of his if I had not insisted on his coming with us,” she added by way of after-thought.

“Zina?”

“Ach! Andrei Andreiech! It makes me so ill, so angry to think of it.”

Then Nikolai Vasilievich, ludicrously festive, strolled up to us.

“Well,” he muttered, yawning into his white-cuffed hand.

“Jolly dance,” I said.

“For those who dance,” he retorted in a voice as though I had foully and grievously betrayed him.

Then the music ceased abruptly. The three sisters, scantily and deliciously attired, glided up, and were met with an involuntary critical examination from the eyes of Fanny Ivanovna, who effected a few, to all appearance needless, pulls at their evening-gowns.

“I could hardly recognize Nina with her hair like this,” I remarked aloud.

With sylphine litheness, she slid between me and Baron Wunderhausen to the drawing-room.

“Really, I don’t like the way you’ve done your hair,” I said. “There’s nothing at the front.”

Instantly she vanished to the dressing-room; and in her absence the Baron tackled me again about a billet in Persia or Mesopotamia. I expressed a mild surprise. “Have we not come here to help the Russian national cause?” I asked. “Is that then of no interest to you?”

“You know,” he said nonchalantly, “nothing will come of it.”

“Why?”

“The Czechs are such awful swine. They’re all Bolsheviks.”

And then added, “And the Americans, too, are Bolsheviks. President Wilson. Nothing will come of it all.”

And, involuntarily, the conversation at lunch surged back to my mind. I thought this equalled it in point of sheer “constructive statesmanship.” And then Nina, now in her original coiffure, returned.

We sat under dusty imitation palm-trees, my sleeve every now and then touching her shapely naked girlish arms; till Nikolai Vasilievich came up and gave us supper, insisting on paying for it all himself. I thought of the poor, long-suffering mines who would eventually have to square all this, as I surveyed the debris on the table-cloth, while Nikolai Vasilievich paid the waiter.

When the music, after the due interval, broke out into a resounding waltz, we all flocked back into the ball-room.

General Bologoevski, who had turned up at the eleventh hour, stood at my side, and we admired Nina, who now fulfilled a carelessly contrived engagement. “What eyes! What calves! What ankles!” he was saying. “Look here, why in heaven don’t you marry her?...”

Driving through the dark and muddy streets, I sat on the folding seat; the car was packed with members of the family. Tucked away in the corner opposite, like a purring kitten, was Nina. We began to part provisionally at their gate; but they asked me to come in. We had cold ham and tinned salmon and tea with sweets. There was a certain subdued agitation about my presence in the household at this hour, and once I heard Fanny Ivanovna’s shrill voice from the adjoining room explain excitedly to Sonia: “You needn’t drag the bed into the drawing-room till Andrei Andreiech is gone.”

I had been going for an hour or so. We had said “good night” innumerable times. Nina clung to me whimsically, ignoring Nikolai Vasilievich’s desire to be rid of me. They all came out into the tiny hall and added to the difficulty of my withdrawal. Nina fastened my great sheepskin overcoat, which appealed to her by reason of its many straps. I was to come again to-morrow night to supper, and the day after, and every, every day....

III

My tangled memories of Siberia come to me to-day largely as a string of dances, dinners, concerts, garden-parties, modulated by the atmosphere of weather and the seasons of the year, with the gathering clouds of the political situation looming always in the background. And I remember, in particular, the Admiral’s first thé dansant. As he ran through my provisional list of guests he frowned and growled a little. “What are all these women?” he asked.

“You should see them, Admiral,” smiled General Bologoevski.

“Good-looking?”

The General kissed his finger-tips.

“And who is Fanny Ivanovna?”

“A German.”

A shadow came across his face. “I’m damned if I want any Huns in my house,” he growled; but gave in grudgingly.

Through inadvertence on somebody’s part, the officers of the U.S. Flagship arrived half an hour before time—an incident which taxed my capacity for consuming liquor to the utmost pitch. They had also overdone their kindness by sending us two jazz bands instead of one, with the result that their almost simultaneous employment in the two adjoining rooms reserved for dancing proved an experience unsatisfactory to the ear. As the Hawaian string-band flowed and quivered in a languid, plaintive waltz, the adjoining brass-band fairly knocked sparks out of it by bursting into an intoxicating one-step.

Some two hours earlier I had met Vera in the street. She had been to see their dressmaker about the frock in which now, radiant but bashful, she appeared. Almost immediately, the family was followed by the Zina-Uncle Kostia wing, and by Magda Nikolaevna and Čečedek. But they would not speak to one another. Nikolai Vasilievich had been to see me in the morning about bringing Zina; and now he tried to dance with her. But both were awkward and bashful, and the experiment proved unsatisfactory; while Fanny Ivanovna looked on at them sarcastically. Nina whispered to me as we one-stepped: “After them! Go after them!” her triangular, fur-bordered hat bobbing up into my face in the excitement. And as we overtook them: “Oh, my God!”

Stepping like a duck, Zina would not turn unless warned beforehand, and even then only half the circle; and Nikolai Vasilievich, exasperated by his futile efforts, asked impatiently: “Are you dancing in goloshes? Have you rubber soles on your shoes? Or what is it?”

They gave it up at last and stood by the wall, in everybody’s way, shamefaced and pitiful; and Zina looked as though she regretted her insistence on coming to this dance.

“Will you dance?” said I.

“I’ve never danced before,” said she. “But I don’t mind trying.” She looked up at her lover. Evidently their experiment did not count. Nikolai Vasilievich smiled feebly.

And, as a preliminary, she stepped on my toe....

My next dance was with Magda Nikolaevna, a beautiful woman enough, but so delicate and with such an elaborate concoction of accessories by way of dress that the chief sensation yielded from the dance with her was one of infinite precaution.

As a pièce de résistance, I danced with a little niece of Uncle Kostia, Olya Olenin. She was stout and round, like a football, and we banged into people and against walls carelessly and with the harmlessness of a football.

“To-day I have grown ten years older,” confided Nikolai Vasilievich, as I came up to him. “I shall not forget it.”

“You take it much too seriously,” I said.

“I blame myself for being such a fool as to have listened to her. I didn’t want to come.”

“Nikolai Vasilievich, really!”

“Oh, please don’t take it that way. It was charming of you to ask us. I like your Admiral ... and that other officer, his assistant, who says ‘Splendid! Splendid!’”

“Sir Hugo,” I supplied.

Then Uncle Kostia, spectacled, and with the air of a profound philosopher taking stock of his impressions, joined us. “I’ve been talking to your Admiral,” he said.

“Well?”

“Fine-looking man. Combines the manner of Napoleon I with the mind, I think, of Napoleon III. Wants to get to Moscow. But what he’ll do when he gets there (if he gets there), curiously enough doesn’t seem to have occurred to him! The simplicity of the scheme is touching. All right, let’s assume he gets there and plants a constitutional Russian government and retains an Allied army to support it. Will he keep the Allied troops there indefinitely? And when at last they go, what’s to prevent the government from collapsing like a pack of cards at the hands of a population inevitably resentful of foreign interference? Then there’s your country. You think your country will support you. But it will be divided.”

“I disagree,” said Nikolai Vasilievich. “I’d much rather, for example, the gold-mining area was occupied by English troops, or even by the Japanese, than by the Russians. I know what I am talking about. I am a typical Russian myself. There are honest men in Russia, and there are clever men in Russia; but there are no honest clever men in Russia. And if there are, they are probably heavy drinkers.”

Uncle Kostia “pooh-poohed” this sweeping charge; but Nikolai Vasilievich continued:

“To take my book-keeper Stanitski. Andrei Andreiech knows him. Dishonest as you make them. And still I am obliged to keep him on. Why? Because if I took an honest man he would make such a hash of all the books that I wouldn’t know where I was at all.”

“But do you know where you are with a dishonest book-keeper, Nikolai Vasilievich?” said Uncle Kostia with that keen spasmodic interest that highly abstract men have of taking, periodically, in practical affairs, almost as a relief from themselves. “I am a man of letters, no business man in any sense; still it would seem to me——”

“To be candid,” said the other, “it doesn’t matter much either way just now. Till we can get the gold-mines back there is no doing any business. I get money in advance occasionally. He sees to the paying of the interest, which is paid out of the same money, and puts it down in the books. For the present that is all.”

“Hm!... Still, I should do something about that,” said Uncle Kostia, “if I may presume to give advice in these matters.”

“When we get the gold-mines there will be time enough to act,” Nikolai Vasilievich answered somewhat gruffly. “I only mentioned it as an illustration of the political situation we have to contend with. The foreigners here must laugh at our methods!”

“Why? They’re only muddling up our issues.”

“The idea,” I attempted to amend Uncle Kostia’s proposition, “is that the Allied troops should help to raise and train Russian cadres and so lay the foundation for a new Russian Army which, in its turn, would make it possible to rebuild the State. It’s not an invasion by foreign troops. You may rest your mind in peace on that point.”

“Oh!... Oh!... If that’s the idea,” said Uncle Kostia in augmented tones, “then I am doubly alarmed; for I can guess the elements which will form the backbone of this new White Russian Army—monarchists altogether too brainless to realize that theirs is a lost cause.”

“Most of them, I think, would favour a Constitutional Monarchy,” proffered Nikolai Vasilievich.

“A constitutional monarchy in Russia,” retorted Uncle Kostia, “would invariably be more monarchical than constitutional.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “do have a drink.”

I could see Sir Hugo’s ruddy, weather-beaten face, as he served Fanny Ivanovna with her ice-cream; and as I came up to her I overheard her say to him in German: “I think the Bolsheviks are bound to be beaten soon because it is impossible to do any trade while they are in power.”

“Splendid!” said Sir Hugo somewhat inconsequently. “Splendid!”

“We simply can’t recover our mines, and Nikolai Vasilievich——”

She stopped....

She danced heavily; and as I turned her each time, revolved a few times of her own momentum. She sought to direct me by sheer strength of will. “Who is steering, Fanny Ivanovna? You or me?” I asked in exasperation.

“I am sorry, Andrei Andreiech,” she answered. “I do it unintentionally.”

The Baron asked me for the third time about Persia or Mesopotamia; but the Admiral’s approach frightened him away.

We watched Kniaz, who was shaking hands cordially with everybody as he took his leave. “That Kniaz of yours looks as if one day he’d been unspeakably astonished—and remained so ever since.”

“Look at General Bologoevski, sir, dancing with that painted woman.”

The Admiral’s face drew out and darkened. “That man,” said he, “is the biggest fool in the Russian Army.” He pondered. “The Russian men are no damned good. But the women are splendid! What about that Czech concert to-night? You can bring your women if you like into the box. Don’t want the men. Ha! ha! ha! Look at old Hugo talking to the young girls!”

“I’ll ask the three sisters....”

“Those three there sitting on the window-sill?”

“Yes.... And Fanny Ivanovna,” I added.

“All right. Let’s have the Hun.

“Well, Nikolai Vasilievich,” he turned to his guest. “I hear you know English very well. Where have you picked it up?”

“No, no,” blushed Nikolai Vasilievich; and said in Russian, “Your English spelling is so difficult. In English you spell a word ‘London’ and pronounce it ‘Birmingham.’”

“Ha! ha! ha! ha!” laughed the Admiral loudly, but with dignity; and then asked, “Are you comfortable in Vladivostok? Can you get all the food you want for your family? I hope you will tell me if there is anything I can do?”

“I am very grateful,” bowed the Russian.

“Now mind you don’t forget to ask....”

Nikolai Vasilievich, as things went, did not forget; nor did he wait to be asked twice. On the spot he said that he understood the Admiral was shortly travelling by special train up-country, and all he, Nikolai Vasilievich, requested was one modest coupé in that special train, as it was urgent that he should see a certain Russian general at Omsk, relative to the forthcoming punitive expedition to his gold-mines.

The Admiral returned the classic answer: “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Will you kindly introdooce me to the young lady yonder?” said a very smart, stiff-collared U.S. naval officer. He looked in the direction of the window-sill.

“Which one?”

The next moment he was dancing with Nina.

“Who’s that officer?” asked General Bologoevski.

“Ward.”

“What eyes! What calves! What ankles!” he sighed again. “Look here, really, why in the world don’t you marry her?”

“And now,” said I, “it’s my turn,” as the waltz subsided on the last three beats.

“Tell me,” whined Nigger voices, “why nights are lonesome,” and the cymbals beat the pulse; “tell me why days are blue....” And we moved rhythmically to the incantation, stooping, jerking gently, swaying smoothly, like plants in the water. When the song ceased it was immediately encored. And when the bands went, a handful of us, those who had enjoyed it most, lingered for a while. I and Nina, the Baron and his painted lady, Vera and Holdcroft, danced to the husky gramophone; and Sonia sat on the window-sill and stared at Holdcroft with unmitigated admiration.

And in the evening I called for them in our car and took them to the concert. We arrived a little late because at a point in the journey our progress had been impeded by a car that blocked the road. Inside was a drunken gentleman who was being urged by the chauffeur to pay his fare. “Don’t want to pay,” the gentleman responded.

“Then get out!”

“Don’t want to get out.”

“Get out, you——”

“Who’re you talking to?” came from within. “Don’t you know I’m an officer?”

“Officer. There’s a lot of you here, we know your kind.... Get out!”

“Don’t want to get out.”

“Then kindly pay your fare.”

“Don’t want to pay.”

At length our chauffeur succeeded in disentangling our car. “I’m always so frightened for the children. Awful language these drunkards use,” said Fanny Ivanovna.

The theatre, as we entered the box, was a gallery of distinguished generals, admirals and Allied high commissioners; and the orchestra was sending forth the plaintive strains of the familiar Czecho-Slovak marching song.

I sat next to Nina, and the Admiral was in the other corner, half screened from the public view by the dusty curtain. To the great delight of Sonia and Fanny Ivanovna, there was the Overture to Tannhäuser; and as the initial pilgrims’ chorus was being repeated in its last resort, the conductor urging the executants to ever greater efforts, and the trombones blazed away their utmost perturbation, a chuckle of glee and satisfaction spread over the Admiral’s fine-set face. “There’s more discipline in an orchestra like this,” said he, “than in a battalion of Marines,” and clapped his hands uproariously.

The concert over, the Admiral dispatched me first in his car with the family and waited for me to return for him. Driving home through the warm and starry night, Fanny Ivanovna praised the immaculate politeness of Sir Hugo; but added afterwards, “He’s frightfully nervous, and keeps fiddling with something or other all the time.”

“And keeps saying ‘Splendid! Splendid!’” added Nina.

“There’s something curious about his mind, too,” she said.

“Ah! you’ve discovered that!” I laughed. “It’s a grasp of the inessential, a passion for detail and exactitude unexcelled in creation. You don’t know him. To-day, for instance, I met him on the landing, before lunch. ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Full of work?’ Now it had seemed to me that he said ‘Full of drink?’ and naturally enough I said, ‘No, not at this hour, sir.’ ‘At what hour do you start, pray?’ he began, and thinking he was talking about cocktails, I said, ‘Oh, just before dinner.’ ‘Hm!’ he said. ‘Just before dinner. I shall have to look into that.’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said, ‘I think I must have heard you wrong. Do you mind telling me again what you said?’ ‘Hm!’ he said, ‘I’ve been talking to you on this landing for the last three minutes on the basis of my original inquiry, and you now ask me what it was I said. I said—I think these were the exact words I used—I said: “Hello!” I said. “Full of work?”’ ‘Full of work?’ I cried, ‘and I thought you said “Full of drink.’ ‘Full of drink,’ he said, ‘full of drink indeed. Good morning to you!’ And he went his way.”

The car had pulled up.

“Good night, Andrei Andreiech, and thank you very, very much.”

“Good night,” smiled the three sisters.

The Admiral was bucked as we drove home. I knew that he was fond of young girls. On the other hand, he liked mature women. He praised the girls. I breathed to him that they had praised him.

The Admiral smiled one of his most adorable smiles.

“Fanny Ivanovna,” I said, “was struck by your appearance.”

The gallant Admiral blushed like a girl.

“There is something in having an appearance,” he said at last.

He looked out into the dark and silent night. Some minutes later he said, with conviction, “She’s a good woman, that Fanny Ivanovna.”

“Russian women are so much more interesting and fascinating,” I babbled, “than other women.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But she’s a Boche.”

“Unfortunately,” I sighed.

The Admiral yawned. “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t mind the Germans. What I can’t stick are the dirty Bolsheviks.”

“Russian girls,” I continued, “are far more interesting and clever than other girls.”

“All girls,” the Admiral replied, “are stupid.”

IV

Much of my experiences must now appear in the nature of a farce. This is not my fault. A good deal of life is a hilarious farce, and yet, as in the case of the affiliation of Nikolai Vasilievich’s family, it all comes about in the proper constitutional way, through a string of human motives. For a week or so Nikolai Vasilievich kept on applying to the Admiral for a coupé in his train to Omsk, in the teeth of implacable refusals. Then, after much opposition from the Admiral, and a passionate, though somewhat vague attempt on the part of Nikolai Vasilievich to identify his personal misfortunes with that of “honest” Russia, and the doings of the Czechs, the miners, and the punitive expedition whose disinterestedness he had begun to doubt, with that of international Bolshevism, this was conceded. But on hearing of this step, Fanny Ivanovna at once concluded that Nikolai Vasilievich was trying to escape from her—a suspicion she always entertained—and she immediately applied to see the Admiral in person and asked for two additional coupés, to accommodate her and the three sisters. The Admiral was a sailor and a gentleman. He promised her two coupés.

I forget which wing of the family was the next to apply. I remember that every day that week our waiting-room was crowded with petitioners. The Admiral said No. He found himself saying No innumerable times each day. Now it is an intrinsic part of the Russian character that it does not accept No for No. It is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Its institutions are all a negation of that principle. And what is more, it refuses to confine that fact to within the Russian border. It regards it in the light of worldwide application, assuming that it is indeed nothing less than human nature.

The Admiral still said No. He held that it was not human nature but just Russian nature, and as an illustration of his point he meant to show that when an Englishman says No he does mean No. But none of them would understand the Admiral’s interpretation of No. They had all grown up with the idea that No meant Yes after an adequate amount of pressure and insistence. The pressure was of various kinds, according to the age, sex and nature of the applicant. There were tears, entreaties. There were questions, such as the “object” of the Allies in Siberia, since they monopolized the best trains and refused to help the Russians in their primary needs. There were direct questions which it was thought must needs shatter the impregnability of the Admiral’s No, such as, for instance: Did the Admiral wish to starve them, as he evidently did, by cutting them adrift from Nikolai Vasilievich, the bread-winner?

The Admiral still said that No was No, and would they please understand it? They all replied that No was not the point, the point being: What were they to do without Nikolai Vasilievich? Whereon the Admiral replied that when he said a thing he meant it, this being the sterling value of British character. But they persisted all the same, treating him as if he were just human like the rest of them. Then the Admiral became a little angry. It annoyed him that they should fail to understand the primary fact that an Englishman was not a Russian and that hence any laxity that held good in Russian character did not hold good in that of a native of the British Isles. But the Russians hammered on in spite of all; till the Admiral was heartily amused that they should indeed know no better than to think that he would give in just because they persisted, for, the ignorance of human nature that, he thought, such a belief implied—a quaint and childish ignorance—began to fascinate him. He looked at them and looked at them again, as they poured forth their woes ... and marvelled. Indeed, their touching innocence fascinated him so much that finally he felt he wanted to humour them, as one is inclined to humour quaint, unreasonable children who know no better. And it was by way of humouring them that the Admiral gave way. No (for once only) was to mean Yes. They thanked him cordially. He sighed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. The Russian character had won the day.

That night we started on our trip along the great, now pitiably disorganized Siberian track. It was a lovely night in late autumn. The Admiral’s special train had been brought over on the main line; and the General and I, both somewhat under the influence of liquor, walked arm in arm up and down the platform; and the General, in an overflow of feeling, spoke piteously of his ruined soul, his wasted life, and how he felt, and what he felt, and why he felt it. The Admiral and Sir Hugo had already settled down in the drawing-room of the coach, and were drinking. As the train moved, we too stepped into the carriage and threw ourselves back on our cushions; and the General’s hand stretched for the bottle. But I lay back musingly in the dark carriage, thinking of all things and none in particular, in that agreeable half-conscious way that is known to precede slumber, as the train rattled on its way to Omsk.

Two carriages behind us was Nikolai Vasilievich with a substantial proportion of his family, all bound for Omsk. When I closed my eyes I could see Nina, and my drowsy thoughts would linger: “She is à moi.... Tucked away in that compartment with her sisters.... À moi.... Now they were undressing for the night.... À moi.... At a handstretch. Always there. But there was no hurry. O life ... leisurely life ...!”

I was wakened by the General, and we went and joined the Admiral and Sir Hugo. It seemed that they were both what is known as “lit up.”

“You’re drunk,” the Admiral greeted me.

“And so are you,” I said.

“I know I am, damn you!”

And we were all very jolly and sang “Stenka Razin,” the Russian robber song, while the train rattled westward. And the General’s eyes were moist with tears: he was happy in his melancholy. And, tearfully emotional, he crept to the Admiral, and clinging to his neck tried to kiss him.

“Go away!” cried the Admiral in the manner of an innocent young girl about to be accosted; and then in a more manly tone:

“Damn your eyes!”

And then the General leaned back with that exaggerated leisure peculiar to his condition, and sang a Russian gipsy song. He spoke of the good old pre-war days. He sighed, sighed deeply. Now everything seemed to have gone wrong, no doubt because his wife who ran him was not here to look after him. But he expected her to come and then all would be well. If he was in a muddle, if he was in debt, as he invariably was, he merely turned to his creditors and said, “I don’t understand all this. Wait till my wife arrives. It’s a damrotten game, you know, without my wife. My wife she is a clever woman. She will put it all right with you. My wife she is a dragoon.”

In the night the train stopped at a wayside station and seemed as though it would never start again. The Admiral then sent out the General to find out what was the matter, and Sir Hugo, who attributed the cause to “bad staff work,” proffered the suggestion of “negotiating” with the station-master. But the General said he thought the station-master was a most “damrotten fellow,” in the case of which type he usually relied on “elemental” measures. Accordingly he drew out his pistol and threatened to shoot the station-master like a dog unless he cleared the line immediately. The station-master, used to these methods, took no heed of the warning, but said that he would lodge a vigorous protest through the usual channels. Whereon the General replaced the pistol in his pouch, remarking that life was a “damrotten game.”

What a trip!...

In the morning I observed the Admiral talking to Fanny Ivanovna in his deliberate manner, looking into her eyes. And the impression I received was that the Admiral thought Fanny Ivanovna was a “good fellow.” But the three sisters, bashful though they were when he spoke to them in English, had somehow overlooked him; though Nina once remarked, “How awfully funnily his mouth protrudes when he looks at you so seriously. I feel so shy because I feel he does.”

“Now with all this English influence behind him Nikolai Vasilievich ought to be able to find out something definite about his mines at Omsk,” Fanny Ivanovna confided to me. “And there is no doubt this time we’re travelling in comfort. The children are so pleased. You know, they are so childish. Any change like this amuses them.” And then, in a lowered voice: “Anything like that—love—I assure you, they know absolutely nothing about. They’re such children!”

“But Sonia’s married!” I remonstrated.

“Ach! how that angers me! And to whom, to whom! He can’t even wash his neck. It’s all that mother!”

And so we covered verst after verst, as our luxurious train, freshly painted, beautifully furnished, admirably kept, rushed through a stricken land of misery. On our choice engines we moved like lightning, or perchance stood long hours at lonely wayside stations, the glamour of innumerable electric lights within our carriages presenting to a community of half-starving refugees the gloating picture of the Admiral and his “staff” at dinner.

And so we arrived at Lake Baikal, that crystal sea imprisoned in a frame of snow-capped mountains. We stopped our train and lingered on the rocks, drank in the harmony of a strange light, glassy water, snow, fir, and perfect quietude; and when at last we said good-bye to Lake Baikal, that proudest of lakes, a gale fearful and furious had blown in upon this serenity of beauty and lashed huge waves in the inky blackness of the night.

On went the train, rushing and swaying through the windy space of the fields.

What a trip! How we argued and wrangled the long journey through! Sometimes we would almost come to blows; for the ordinary Russian does not argue: he shouts, and his opponent, to score his point, shouts louder and quicker. The Russian General combined intellectual vagueness with an emotional temperament; and, contriving to identify his country with his class, he discovered that his country had been grievously insulted by me. All was over between us. He would never speak to me again.

But that evening, after dinner, we sat together over a bottle of whisky, and the General became emotional. “You are young and foolish,” he said, “and you probably don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t. But you love Russia. Tell me you love Russia; don’t you? We both love Russia. She’s been degraded and trampled on; but she is a fine country. She will arise. She must arise. And we both love Russia.” He cried. “Tell me you love Russia. Tell me you love her. We Russians are lazy, drunken, good-for-nothing swine; but we are good people, aren’t we? It’s a holy land. It’s a holy people. Look at her.” He gazed out of the window.

I rose and stood by him, and we looked at Russia, whirling past. Then I left him. When I returned, the General was still lying on the sofa, but his melancholy had vanished and he was spitting at the ceiling, probably for want of anything better to do.

On we went. Two days before we had left Irkutsk. The train rushed and roared and rattled. It was a weather that breeds pessimists. I stood looking out upon the steppes, these immense, monotonous Siberian plains, dull and melancholy in the rain, when Zina came to me and said her mother wished to see me privately. As I entered her coupé the old lady was drinking tea. She bade me sit down.

“It’s about Uncle Kostia,” she began. She sighed, and there was a prolonged pause. “Cleverness! Wisdom!... Oh, I don’t know, Andrei Andreiech. God in heaven knows”—she crossed herself—“that we are groping in the dark and none of us know what we are about or what’s what, and I am an old ignorant, sinful woman. But if you ask me, Andrei Andreiech, I’d just as soon have a fool as a wise man. Take Uncle Kostia. Such a clever man—and what’s the good of it? I am stupid, dotty in my old age, but really I don’t see where all his cleverness is leading to. And I say it is time he did something and gave up living upon others. Zina tells me she can’t keep on asking Nikolai Vasilievich for money, and I really do think it is time Uncle Kostia began to work ... and published something. I thought perhaps you could get the Admiral to place him on some paper—propaganda of some sort. It isn’t that one is sorry to keep Uncle Kostia. He is clever, they all say. Heaven knows he has lived on his brother long enough, and one was never sorry to give him all he wanted since the man is clever, you understand, and writes. But now there is nothing to give ... since there is nothing, you see? I don’t want to appear obdurate or unfeeling; but I thought perhaps you could talk it over with Uncle Kostia. I know he likes you and he might listen to you.”

I went, promising to do what I could.

When I knocked at the door of Uncle Kostia’s coupé it was late in the afternoon. The train rushed, and the dreary monotonous steppes receded, whirling past. Twilight was falling within and without. The candles had not yet been lit. Then the door of the coupé was pulled open and revealed Uncle Kostia sitting on the sofa, laboriously rubbing his eyes. I inquired if I had disturbed him. He assured me that I had not. He sprinkled some eau de Cologne on his hands and rubbed his face—a substitute for washing—then made room for me on the sofa, and rubbing his eyes with his fists he yawned widely and looked at the window. The melancholy of the Siberian plain must have communicated itself to both of us. For a time we sat in silence, contemplating the unspeakable disorder of the coupé. I was about to frame an adequate sentence to open conversation when he preceded me.

“There!” he said, and struck his forehead with his palm. “And I am called a clever man. Andrei Andreiech, I have been thinking. I have been thinking a good deal these last days.” He stopped abruptly.

“What have you been thinking about, Uncle Kostia?” I asked.

“That’s just the trouble,” he said, “I can’t tell you.”

I waited.

“I don’t know myself,” he explained.

I still waited.

“I have been thinking of this and that and the other, in fact, of one thing and another—precious but elusive thoughts, Andrei Andreiech. Beautiful emotions. A kaleidoscope of the most subtle colours, if I may so express myself. And, Andrei Andreiech, it has taught me a great truth. It has taught me the futility of writing.”

“But now really, Uncle Kostia,” I remonstrated.

“Don’t interrupt me,” said Uncle Kostia. “It is a truth that only ten per cent, if that, of the substance of our thoughts and feelings can be transferred on paper. It can’t be done, Andrei Andreiech—and that’s all there is to it.

“And when I think what a fool I have been, writing all these years, toiling, slaving at a desk like a clerk—when I ought to have been thinking, only thinking.”

“But, Uncle Kostia——” I began.

“Andrei Andreiech, it’s no use. How can I write down what I think? The subtlety, the privacy, the exquisite intimacy, the thousand and one inexplicable impulses that prompt and make up thought and stir emotion.... Andrei Andreiech, how can I? Think! how can I? Oh, you are hopeless ... hopeless!... To-day I have been thinking. It will seem nothing to you if I tell you; it will seem nothing to me if I tell it; but, believe me, it was something infinitely deep, infinitely complex, infinitely beautiful just when I thought of it—without the labour of exertion.”

“What was it, Uncle Kostia?” I inquired.

“It was vague,” he said evasively.

“Oh, come, Uncle Kostia?”

“How can I tell? I know too much.”

I was aware of the unpleasant shrinking of ideas when set down on paper. So I persisted:

“Come on, Uncle Kostia! out with it!”

“Well,” said Uncle Kostia, and his face became that of a mystic. “I thought, for instance—I wonder if you will understand me?—I thought: Where are we all going?”

“Hm,” I said significantly.

“I thought: Why are we all moving?”

“You have not far to seek for motives,” said I. “I presume there are motives in each case.”

“Motives!” he cried. “That is the very point. There are no motives. The motives are naught. It is the consequences. Where are we going? Why are we going? Look: we are moving. Going somewhere. Doing something. The train rushes through Siberia. The wheels are moving. The engine-drivers are adding fuel to the engines. Why? Why are we here? What are we doing in Siberia? Where are we heading for? Something. Somewhere. But what? Where? Why?”

I think I must have misunderstood Uncle Kostia’s subtle thoughts. Or was it that my commission was continually in my mind? But I asked him:

“Is it that you are doomed by your sense of inutility, Uncle Kostia?”

His eyes flashed. He spoke impatiently: “My inutility! Your inutility! What the devil does it matter whose inutility? Is your Admiral very utile, may I ask? What I was saying was that we all behaved as if we were actually doing things, boarding this Trans-Siberian Express as if in order to do something at the end of the journey, while actually the journey is in excess of anything we are likely to achieve.”

But I thought I would keep him to the point, that is to say, my point. “Then would you rather not travel in this train, Uncle Kostia?”

An anxious look came into his eyes.

“Why? I like travelling in this train. I am comfortable.”

“But the futility of it?”

“Oh!” groaned Uncle Kostia at my stupidity. “Can’t you understand that it is the very fact of this physical futility that inflates me with a sense of spiritual importance?”

I looked at him with a blank expression.

“When I am at home—I mean anywhere at a standstill—I am wretched intolerably. I write and I think——” He stopped.

“What?”

“What am I writing for: what on earth am I thinking for?”

“So you have doubts?”

“Yes, at moments I am seized by misgivings: what is it all for? I ask.”

“I see.”

“Now it is different. We are moving, apparently doing something, going somewhere. One has a sense of accomplishing something. I lie here in my coupé and I think: It is good. At last I am doing something. Living, not recording. Living! Living! I look out of the window, and my heart cries out: Life! Life! and so living, living vividly, I lapse into my accustomed sphere of meditation, and then before I know exactly where I am I begin to meditate: Where are we all going to? Isn’t our journey the kernel of absurdity? And so, by contrast, as it were, I gain a sense of the importance of meditation.... That is how we deceive ourselves, Andrei Andreiech.”

“And you can do it in spite of being conscious of the deception involved?”

“I have been unconscious of it,” he said, “until you forced me into introspection.”

Then, after a pause, I was tickled into inquiring:

“Why don’t you—er—publish some of it, eh, Uncle Kostia?”

Uncle Kostia grabbed his beard into his fist and looked at me with pity rather than with scorn and made a movement as if he was going to spit out of sheer disgust, but evidently thought better of it. “You have a front of brass,” he said. “I cannot penetrate it.”

“Look here, Uncle Kostia,” I cried impatiently, “you must be reasonable and think of poor Nikolai Vasilievich. He can’t go on supporting everybody.”

“He hasn’t said anything, has he?” he asked anxiously.

“No ... but....” I paused to enable him to say the obvious.

“He wouldn’t,” said Uncle Kostia. “He is wonderful. I admire him.”

I returned to my coupé. It was evening now and the lights were lit. Dismal forests stretched over hundreds of versts. I lay back and the ideas let loose by Uncle Kostia set to work in my mind. And I thought: Where are we heading? Why? What is it all for? And then I thought of the war with its hysterical activity; I pictured soldiers boarding trains, to return to the front; the loading of ships with war matériel; the rush in the Ministry of Munitions. I thought of the Germans seething with energy in just the same way; and I contrasted in my mind this hustling activity, this strained efficiency with the pitiable weakness in the intellectual conception of the conflict, and I understood that the man had been essentially right, that our journeys were in excess of our achievements. Our life was an inept play with some disproportionately good acting in it. Then, as I dreamed away, I heard Fanny Ivanovna talking to somebody in the adjoining coupé. I pulled my door open and I could now hear her voice distinctly. I listened. I was vastly tickled. I wondered to whom it was that she was telling her autobiography. Then I heard occasional expressions of assent in Sir Hugo’s trim and careful Russian. I leaned forward, the incarnation of attention.

* * * * *

“He would come to me in the evening and say, ‘Fanny, I don’t know what I would do without you....’

* * * * *

“He came to me one evening in April and said, ‘Fanny, I must speak to you very seriously....’

* * * * *

“‘It is love, this time, real love. I thought that I had loved, I had loved, you, Fanny, but this is the love that comes once only, to which you yield gloriously, magnificently, or you are crushed and broken and thrust aside....’”

* * * * *

º1 a

I felt my heart beat violently within me. I waited for Sir Hugo’s detailed cross-examination; but indeed there was little of it. Only once, when Fanny Ivanovna referred to Nikolai Vasilievich’s wife did Sir Hugo stop her with an apology, to inquire “Which wife?”

The train rushed through the autumn night; the windows now were black and revealed nothing. Interlacing with the din, squeal and rattle of the wheels, now and then my ear would catch familiar fragments of the monologue.

* * * * *

“‘Nikolai!’ I cried. ‘Du bist verrückt ... wahnsinnich! ...’

* * * * *

“I cried and he cried with me....

* * * * *

“‘Think of the children, Nikolai! They are your children....’

* * * * *

“I said to him: ‘I shall wait till you pay me off. I shall not leave otherwise.’”

* * * * *

I felt indeed I was on the summits of existence. Why should I be treated to such stupendous depths of irony? There beyond the clouds the gods were laughing, laughing voluptuously. I could not sit still. With all my heart I craved to have a peep, if only at Sir Hugo’s face. I thought I’d give my life to know what was his verdict on the situation. Noiselessly I stole into the corridor, and bending forward with infinite precaution, I peeped at the interior of the coupé. They sat next each other. Under the shaded light projected the ruddy weather-beaten face of Sir Hugo. Sir Hugo looked—how shall I describe it?—he looked as if he thought it was a case of damned bad staff work.

The train rushed on, noisily swaying through the silence of the night. I went back to my coupé, and passing Uncle Kostia’s kennel I overheard the finale of what must have been a frantic theological discussion between Uncle Kostia and the General. The General, drunk, his fundamental principles of faith all uprooted and scattered in disorder about the coupé, furious, with hair dishevelled, cried out to Uncle Kostia:

“Well, is there a God, or is there no God?”

“How do I know?” snapped Uncle Kostia angrily. “Go away!”

V

When the train arrived at Omsk, the new régime of Kolchak had been established. The Admiral was distinctly pleased with the change; for he no longer believed in granting the Russian people a Constituent Assembly because he had grounds for thinking that the Russian people, if given this opportunity, would take advantage of it and elect a government other than that of Kolchak. And the Admiral was rather fond of little Kolchak, whose interpretation of democracy was that of denying the people the choice of government until such time as by some vague, mysterious, but anyhow protracted, system of education he hoped their choice would fall upon his own administration. We lived in our train, a verst or thereabouts from the station—a thoroughly unwholesome place; and the Admiral diverted most of his time by throwing empty tobacco tins at the pigs that dwelt in the ditches around the train. “You have no conception what a pig a pig really is,” he said, “till you see an Omsk pig.”

“Splendid!” said Sir Hugo. “Splendid!”

“There she goes again!” yelled the Admiral, and hit an old big sow with a Navy Cut tobacco tin.

“Splendid effort!” said Sir Hugo. “Splendid effort!”

“I give dem h-h-hell!” roared General Bologoevski. “Damrotten pigs!” But, as usual, his threat remained an empty one.

But while most of us were very much at sea as to why exactly we had arrived at Omsk, Nikolai Vasilievich seemed immune from doubt. Nikolai Vasilievich, suspicious of the punitive expedition, had arrived at the seat of the anti-Bolshevik Administration to seek redress and compensation in regard to his gold-mines. I think it was chiefly for my British uniform that Nikolai Vasilievich asked me to accompany him on his visit to the General at the General Staff, before whom he was going to lay his case. I noticed that Nikolai Vasilievich had always had a curious habit of establishing some connexion between his personal grievance and some powerful outside influence, as, for example, the general question of Allied intervention; and he insisted that he and we and intervention were really all one affair, and that hence a favourable solution of his financial difficulties was all part and parcel of that scheme which aimed at the defeat of Bolshevism.

We entered a large dirty waiting-room where crowds of petitioners awaited their turn with a patience that bordered on spiritual resignation: after the Russian manner they all desired to see the head man personally, whose life was consequently spent in interviews. A nasty dirty little woman with a nasty dirty little child, pointing at me with a dirty finger, was saying to her howling offspring, in an attempt to pacify her next-of-kin, “Is that your daddy, is he? Is that your daddy?”

The General was an elusive person, a wily man, a master in the art of compromise. He was the idol of the Allies. He was one of those few who could so wangle things, so balance favours, as to please at once all the multitudinous Allies and even curry favour with a large majority of Russians. His habitual procedure was this. If an Ally asked him, for example, for the allotment of a certain building, he always promised without reserve. Then the Russian organization in possession of that building would at once cry out in protest; and he immediately assured them that they would be allowed to keep the building: the whole matter, he explained, was a mere misunderstanding. Then the Russian organization stayed, and when the Ally came to take the building over they referred the Ally to the General. And when the Ally came to him and asked for explanation, the General, with a charming smile, would say, “Well, you see that building is not really suitable for your use. I will find you a better one.” Then the Ally waited. He must have time, the General said; and actually he played on time, on “evolution.” And in the meantime there was a coup d’état; or the Russian organization went bankrupt; or the particular Allied representative who had been worrying him was replaced by another, with whom the General would begin again at the beginning; or the Allied troops were about to be withdrawn; or the city was recaptured by the Sovets; or there was a fire and the correspondence was buried in the flames. He was a man who had no use whatever for “free will” and played entirely on “predestination.”

The General listened to Nikolai Vasilievich’s emotional narrative in a friendly manner, and smiling pleasantly he rose and shook hands, as if to show that the interview was at an end, saying, “You may rest assured that it will be quite all right. Call again one of these days.”

Nikolai Vasilievich went out, beaming. “Well,” he said, “it seems settled.” I tendered my heartiest congratulations.

Then “one of these days” we called upon the General a second time. Nikolai Vasilievich laid great stress on the dastardly action of the Czechs—that nation just then being out of court with the government at Omsk—but the General merely said, “Wait till the Supreme Ruler returns from Perm. I can do nothing without the Supreme Ruler.”

Nikolai Vasilievich then waited for the return of the Supreme Ruler; and presently we called again. The General’s manner, as he received us, was considerably less sunny than it had been on the two previous occasions. “You have been here before,” he greeted Nikolai Vasilievich. “You must have patience and wait.”

“Wait?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich in a tone of secret terror, the terror of a man who had been doing naught else all his life—and knew its meaning.

“Yes, I advise you to wait. Have patience.”

“How long?” asked Nikolai Vasilievich.

“How do I know?” the General replied. “Wait—and you will see.”

Now, was it that Nikolai Vasilievich had waited long enough and seen nothing? Was it that in the circumstances he thought it sounded too much like a mockery? Or was it the explosion of that brewing restlessness that he had gathered in the years of intermittent waiting: the last puff of ineffectual remonstrance before his final sinking into hopeless resignation? But suddenly Nikolai Vasilievich went wild. I had never seen him in that state before. He abused the General in immoderate terms. He accused him first of turning honest people into Bolsheviks; then of being in the pay of Moscow. He threatened to lead a rebellion against the Kolchak State. Nikolai Vasilievich ceased to be a man and became an incarnation: Man having lost his patience: Humanity gone wild in the waiting. He thundered forth at the adversary, and his ruined hopes were the woes of Humankind. Then, coming to the end of his intellectual resources, but far from having yet exhausted his spiritual wrath, he made reference to the Day of Judgment. The door into the chancery flew open, and the Chief of Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and heads of various departments dashed upon the scene, wondering what on earth had happened; and shouting loudly Nikolai Vasilievich hurled abuse upon the Chief-of-Staff, the Aide-de-camp, and the heads of various departments. And then in the waiting-room he went for a stray Admiral, a petitioner like himself, and hurled abuse at him as well.

“All right,” the General said at length. “All right. If you won’t be reasonable, I shall have to resort to the recognized procedure. Guard!” And he ordered them to take Nikolai Vasilievich away. Nikolai Vasilievich still raged and fluttered, and the guards came up to him with signs of deference and indecision. “Come on, sir,” they persuaded him, “he really means it.” And taking him each under one arm, they dragged him out into the open.

We walked back to the train.

“What those people will not realize,” I took it up to humour him, “is that you can’t live on nothing. Waiting doesn’t feed you, and waiting doesn’t clothe you; and when you have a family——”

“Of course, one can borrow,” said Nikolai Vasilievich.

“Yes, of course,” I agreed.

Fanny Ivanovna greeted him with “Well, Nikolai, is it all arranged?”

A fiendish look came on his face, as though he said, “The hell it is!” and all the more fiendish because he did not say it.

She sighed conspicuously. And her sigh gave him a nervous shudder. A look of hate came into his steel-grey eyes. “She even sighs offensively,” he said to me, “as though she meant to charge me with the necessity of doing so.”

“Nikolai!” she cried, “don’t let yourself go before strangers. What will Andrei Andreiech think of you! You know I am not to blame because the mines won’t pay. And you ought to remember that I advised you to sell them long ago, and if you had listened to me then we shouldn’t have been in this plight. Well, well, it’s no use quarrelling now. We’ve got to wait, that’s all.”

The ironic fascination of the situation at this point proved irresistible. “There’s an English proverb,” I supplied: “‘All things come to him who waits.’”

“Hm!” said Nikolai Vasilievich.

“And there’s another one: ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’”

“Excellent proverbs!” he said dryly.

Kniaz popped his head out from behind the paper, like a mouse, and added, “There’s our own Russian proverb, too: ‘The slower you drive the farther you get.’”

“You, Kniaz, had better read your paper,” retorted Nikolai Vasilievich acidly. “What does it say in there?”

I stood at the window of the stationary train and watched the sinking landscape dissolve in the gathering gloom about us. Why did the winter air seem so acutely strange, as if charged with something, a kind of tenderness, a warm, transfiguring love ...? Nikolai Vasilievich came to my side and watched, his hands in his trouser pockets.

“Pigs in the ditches,” he brooded, “pigs in offices, everywhere.... A town of pigs. That General ... oh! what a pig....”

VI

The “affiliation” of Eisenstein into our “society” was a tribute to his own unflagging perseverance. It so happened that while in Vladivostok the Admiral had been in urgent need of a dentist, and quite by accident he tumbled against Eisenstein, who had set up a practice there. The Admiral, though he loathed all Jews, was yet favourably impressed by Eisenstein because on his first visit to him he heard Eisenstein engage in a vigorous cursing of his Chinese servant. He liked to see a man who knew how to put “these people” in their places, a man who knew how to assert his own authority, a man who did not talk about “equality” and such-like tosh (discordant with his sentiment), “utopia,” “socialism,” and that sort of thing, you know, that has made the world, etc. etc. There was altogether too much Bolshevism abroad, and the vigorous action of the dentist with his Chink appealed to him unspeakably.

“This clamouring for allowing men from below to come up to the top and not imposing individuals of the old governing class from above,” he said. “All damned well to talk like that, but in the meantime is anarchy to be allowed to continue unchecked? Apparently so.”

“Orright! Orright!” said Eisenstein.

This seemed the only word he knew in English. But it did not baffle him in the least; indeed he preferred to converse in English by means of its continual solitary use to any reasonable conversation in Russian; and when the Admiral spoke Russian to him he still replied, “Orright! Orright!” The Admiral had found him an amazing dentist. The Admiral’s teeth and dentistry seemed the subject he was least interested in of all. He talked politics and finance. At intervals strange men and women of a strong Hebrew strain would run into the room, and Eisenstein, leaving the Admiral with his mouth wide open and cotton-wool stuck under his tongue, would exchange queries in a quick and agitated manner with these dark intruders. The Admiral would hear such phrases as “What is the yen to-day? How much is the dollar?” And if the Admiral chanced to touch the question of finance, Eisenstein would pounce upon him with inquiries: “Do you want dollars? How many dollars? Or can I sell you francs?” Or suddenly he would ask the Admiral to recommend his being made a British subject. Where was the difficulty? He could always change his name Eisenstein to Ironstone, which, he believed, sounded jolly well in English.

In a crisis he would suddenly drop his instruments on the floor and rely upon his naked hands, which by the way, he never washed between his clients. He was always one of two things: either extremely optimistic, when he said that the most violent pain was nothing; or very pessimistic, when he said that nothing could be done to alleviate the pain. Sometimes he was extremely indolent and said that nothing was required to be done and all was well; and sometimes violently enthusiastic for huge undertakings, for the most drastic and sweeping reforms, for extracting all the remaining teeth in the Admiral’s mouth and substituting gold all over, and all sorts of crowns and bridges of his own invention that ran into four-figure dollars and were evidently going to hang loose in the Admiral’s mouth. All the while he would talk and inflict his own political views on his clients, which were that the English were both fools and clever knaves: the apparent contradiction did not disturb him in the least; and if the Admiral showed any inclination to contradict some amazing insinuation, he would just press the needle a little and manipulate it on the nearest nerve in the tooth and so silence all opposition. He would talk of the exchange at Vladivostok and of how easy it was to make money, and when asked how to do it he would say you had only to turn one currency into another, whether yen, dollars, sterling or roubles, and a vast fortune was assured you, evidently quite irrespective of the order of turnover, or the particular currency, or the amount employed, or the rate at which the transactions were being effected. He would talk all the while, never stopping the whole time the client was there; and then at the finish stick a piece of saturated cotton-wool into any hole in any tooth, take no heed of your protests, and tell you to come again any time, any day—when he would keep you waiting for whole hours at a stretch. He would see you out, shouting in the passage in reply to any question you might have put: “Orright! Orright!” as he closed the door upon you; and then turn to the next patient.

He attended to the Admiral’s teeth twice in Vladivostok, and then hearing through a third person that the Admiral was not quite satisfied with the finality of his work, he left the coast and joined the Admiral on his own initiative at Omsk (in order to evade military service at the Base), and now stated that he was a member of the Admiral’s party. He was followed by Baron Wunderhausen, now a second lieutenant in Kolchak’s Army, who arrived in Omsk and asked the Admiral to take him on as his interpreter. This was conceded. The young Baron, who said that he was anxious to help, displayed a curious lack of judgment, or if his aim was flattery, a curious ignorance of the art. He held that Russia was a “feminine” nation, which should be controlled and directed by a “masculine” nation like England; and that Great Britain should raise, equip, and officer an army of Buriats, Khirghiz, Kalmucks, and other native races in order to conquer Russia. As for himself, the Baron wanted to wash his hands of the whole business, to get into the British Army, to renounce his Russian nationality, and get a post somewhere in Persia or Mesopotamia. It seemed more and more as one lived longer that to get White Russia on her legs was like trying to get a featherbed to stand on end.

Occasionally we would visit the front, and the Admiral would interfere in everything. He would look and shake his head: the pace and method of extermination would appear to him thoroughly inadequate. We stood behind a gunner who kept on firing at a tree, as such; apparently for no other reason.

“What are you firing at?” the Admiral asked.

The man pointed at the tree.

“Are there any Reds behind?”

The man shrugged his shoulders. The question to him seemed immaterial.

“Have you got a telephone there?”

The man shook his head.

“But what are you aiming at?”

He pointed at the tree.

It transpired that four regiments composing the division had gone over to the enemy that very morning. Of the division there remained just fourteen men, the Commander and his divisional headquarters, comprising about three hundred officers. We saw the Commander in his office and asked him what he thought he would do. He said that he would wait; he thought the men might return.

“Who are you counting on,” said the Admiral sarcastically, “God?”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” sighed the Commander, “we have no one else to count upon.”

And the Admiral felt shamed.

But the men, it seems, did not return. They ran as fast as their legs would carry them over to the Bolshevik lines, and the Bolsheviks, thinking that they were being attacked by overwhelming numbers, fled in disorder....

The Admiral was gloomy. The wind cut us in the face in our rapid drive. Slowly and gradually afternoon evolved into evening.

“That Peking and Tientsin News,” I broke the silence, “seems to be somewhat pro-Bolshevik.”

“It’s always pro-Something,” the Admiral grunted.

He looked out of the window of the car on the vast snow-covered plains stretching all around us and brooded darkly.

“Some people,” said he, “think snow beautiful. I think it idiotic.”

Although technically the presence of Nikolai Vasilievich’s family on our train was but a temporary measure, yet it was recognized by all, through that deeper human instinct that defies illusion, that there was an element of permanence about it that would give points to the oak tree. Of course, the Admiral could always have cleared his train of the family by subjecting them to a prolonged machine-gun fire; but, as with soldiers, diplomats and politicians, the personal morality of sailors is much above their national morality. Need I say that they remained? The motive of their journey was that Nikolai Vasilievich was perpetually compelled to see some General in some town along the line about his gold-mines, for his gathering suspicions concerning the integrity of the punitive expedition had now been amply justified. And then, as time went on, the motive, as motives do, dissolved into a habit. But the relations between the Zina-Uncle Kostia wing and that of Fanny Ivanovna and the three sisters, and similarly, the relations between Fanny Ivanovna and Magda Nikolaevna, were far from satisfactory. At wayside stations and impromptu halts in fields and glades and valleys, when we all left the train and hastened to take exercise, there had been awkward situations; and when the three sisters had occasion to pass Zina or any of her little sisters they never failed to put out their tongues at them—presumably as a sign of disapproval of Nikolai Vasilievich’s approval of them.

We parted with them as we got back to Vladivostok; but they continued coming to our parties; and the rumour spread that Fanny Ivanovna was, as they say, bien vue at the Admiral’s “Court.” Only once, the very haughty wife of an insignificant officer, newly landed at the port, sounded the alarm: “A Problem has arisen in Society! Can we receive a German, or can we not?” But the problem, like so many problems, died its death without solution.

VII

It was the day after General Gaida’s unsuccessful rising. “They’ve gone out for a walk with those three American naval officers,” Fanny Ivanovna told me when I called. “Just the two of us, as usual,” she added somewhat bitterly. Kniaz, seated in the corner, audibly confirmed her statement, as it were, by sucking sweets. There was an acute scent of eau-de-Cologne in the room.

“How charming!” I exclaimed, bending forward to examine a tiny little jumper that she was knitting.

“Oh, that’s for my godchild.”

“Who?”

“Oh, the little girl I christened. Madame Olenin’s little daughter. She’s just three weeks old to-day. A dear little thing.”

“Another niece for Uncle Kostia, what! They do turn them out in that family. Zina has more cousins than any girl alive!”

“Well,” said Fanny Ivanovna, “the little thing can’t help being her cousin. And Madame Olenin is really very nice. What does it matter after all if she’s her aunt? I respect her all the same, and she did so want me to be the godmother, and the little girl is called Fanny after me.”

The canary hopping to and fro punctuated the swift movement of her accustomed fingers.

“My dear Andrei Andreiech,” she burst out in answer to my question as to when Nikolai Vasilievich would be back, “there was a time when I knew all about his movements. But that time is over. I feel more and more as we live longer that my hold on him is weakening. And I feel with every day it’s getting weaker and weaker, and he is slipping away from me, and I am powerless to stop him. And soon I shall cease to bother altogether. He can stay there all night if he pleases.”