She helped me to bed and out of my uniform. I fell asleep so heavily that if the next day had not been Sunday I should have missed school. I awoke with a hangover. A sense of depression was relieved when I discovered in one of the top pockets of my uniform jacket a screw of paper filled with two grams of the finest cocaine. A little of this snuffed into both nostrils and I was a new man. I was too late for breakfast, as a smiling, head-shaking Madame Zinovieff informed me, so I took one of my books on electrical engineering and enjoyed a glass or two of weak tea at a nearby café. I read the chapter on the Lundell Protected Ventilated Six-Pole Motor which even by that time was outmoded. The trouble with textbooks is that they tend to reflect what their writers learned twenty years before. This was for me, however, light reading compared to the abstractions I had been absorbing through most of the week. The chapter gave me some ideas for a development of the conventional hoisting-motors then coming into use on some battleships; this in turn led me to theorise about aeroplanes which could be launched from ships without needing a conventional runway. In that little café in Viborgskaya behind the Finland Station on a spring morning in 1916 I invented the modern aircraft carrier. It was nothing more than an exercise. When I had made my sketches and worked out all the mechanics involved, I crumpled up the paper and threw it away. Later I would return to the idea and make better plans, but it will give my readers some hint of how prolific I had become, how casually I had learned to treat advanced conceptions. I returned home for lunch and spent the afternoon studying the specifications of Waygood and Otis Electrical lifts with Rosenbusch Controllers, with a view to the building of an hydraulically operated deck which could be lowered when not in use and raised when the planes came in to land. I also developed a method of mooring airships at sea, also by means of electrical winches, so that the dirigibles could be towed until needed, then carry out bombing raids far beyond their expected range.
If I had taken my plans to the War Office or the Admiralty at that time, the whole course of the War would have changed. Russia would have emerged stronger and triumphant, a leader in modern military and engineering science, the greatest Power of her day. The British-converted tractors, the ‘tanks’, would have been as nothing compared to our airship-bombers and aircraft-carriers. I think I already guessed not only that the people who ran the ministries were corrupt or conservative, but that they were actively interested in making a separate peace with Germany. Had they been able, they would have capitulated eighteen months before the Bolsheviks gave away vast areas of our country. These were not recovered for years, in many cases not until after the Second World War when the old Russian boundaries were restored. In 1916 green and pink areas on the map represented the two largest empires the world has known. The Russians almost lost theirs through the agency of the Duma and the Jews. The British lost theirs through laziness, self-contempt and an exaggerated idea of the ability of savages to understand the principles of Christian decency. Two Empires have been destroyed forever. Only a few vestiges of their culture remain in corners of the world as yet uncorrupted by sentimental liberalism and a wish to placate at any cost the wily, unscrupulous Oriental.
SEVEN
NOW I REACHED the most intense period of my whole creative life. During the week, I attended lectures. I read books years in advance of what was being taught on the official syllabus. In the early evenings I took the steam-tram home and made my own notes. Then, at around eight or nine at night and with some gesticulating and lip-pursing from Madame Zinovieff, I would join Kolya at his flat or at one of the cabarets we favoured. He would recite endless poetry in French, English, Russian and abominable German. I would tell him how a Zeppelin was constructed, or the principle allowing the tank to function, or how electricity is generated. I believe he sometimes paid as much attention to my lectures as I paid to his poetry. I had become a sort of mascot of the New Age for him, but he was always polite and never at any time was he rude and he would never allow anyone to offend me. At The Scarlet Tango and The Wandering Dog bohemian artists, foreigners, criminals, and the crème de la crème of revolutionaries who would soon be serving with Kerenski or Lenin, all met together to talk, to listen to music, to find sexual companionship and sometimes to fight. This particular admixture of experience was ideal for me. I at last discovered a source of women and Marya Varvorovna was forgotten. They were prepared to treat love as cheerfully as my Katya had treated it. I had male admirers and was flattered, but did not succumb to them. There were many girls or older ladies who found it exciting to quote the pornographic ravings of Mandelstam and Baudelaire at me, then take me to their wonderful beds. There I could lie upon silk. There I could wash myself with warm, perfumed water. I became increasingly self-confident again. I found it was possible to reduce the amount of my reading. Now there was hardly a field in which I was not profoundly conversant.
By the time the Summer Vacation came I was ready for a holiday. With Kolya, Hippolyte, a girl who called herself ’Gloria’, after the English fashion (though she was Polish), and a couple of ’poets’, we visited the Summer Gardens and broad quays of the Neva, took the rare steamer up the river, enjoyed picnics on the banks, or lunches at those magnificent wooden establishments on several floors, not unlike Swiss ski-lodges, which catered for the steamer-trade and by now were pleased to welcome any sort of customer.
Empty of the haut-monde, St Petersburg filled up with wounded soldiers and sailors, with nurses on leave from the Front who sought consolation in the arms of healthy civilians (there were all too few of us left). This wealth of femininity even distracted agitators like Lunarcharsky, who became Commissar of Education under Lenin, or Onipko, the notorious anarchist, who had helped spark the abortive 1905 revolution. For obvious reasons these were ineligible for the army. Happily, Kolya had few intimates in this latter group, though the proprietor of The Wandering Dog (one Boris Pronin who saw himself as a kind of Russian Rudolphe Salis, of Chat Noir fame), seemed only too pleased to welcome these incendiaries, bombs and all!
I should make it clear here that I was no hypocrite. I aired my own views frequently and often found others who supported me, particularly amongst the ‘Pan-Slavic’ group. Even those who disagreed seemed to treat me with the best possible humour. If I had not had the lesson of my father, I might have been caught up in their infantile enthusiasm for destruction and change. I drank absinthe in the company of beautiful whores. My compatriots were revolutionaries, vagabonds, poets. They nicknamed me The Professor or The Mad Scientist and bought me more wine and listened to me as few have listened to me since. These same people were to survive the Revolution only at the expense of their humour, their irony, their very souls. They became the grey men of Lenin and his successors. Some died early - Blok and Grin - and did not live to see the destructive consequences of their foolish hopes. Most, like Mandelstam, were to see all their visions decay, all their hope fade, all their courage and generosity become a weapon turned against them to insult and degrade them. This was, indeed, the last year of their Revolution, that year of 1916, for their enthusiasm lay in the dream of Utopia, not in the reality which was to trap me as much as it trapped them. I was lucky to escape. Some (Mayakovski, for instance) escaped only through suicide.