Aunt Teresa and Berthe sighed in unison, and gave vent to condolences. Captain Negodyaev gave a nervous little cough, and blowing his nose with his scented handkerchief read Natàsha’s letter. All attempts at punctuation omitted, she wrote:
Dear Papa you are probably very lonely without mammy she is often ill but we take care of her I want very much to go to you mammy has written you a letter for your birthday but has lost it we’ll send it along when we find it I have rabbits two grey ones they had kiddies but the rats have eaten them probably will soon eat us too. Natàsha.
And while he read Natàsha’s letter Aunt Teresa interrupted him, like a deacon in church, with exclamations of beatific wonder, and Berthe’s voice came like a second fiddle in practically the same melody of acclaim. One could see that Aunt Teresa had at once taken a liking to the little girl.
‘How old is Natàsha?’ she asked.
‘Seven,’ he said.
‘But don’t you want to see her awfully?’
Of course he did. But how? How?
Aunt Teresa took the tenderest interest in Natàsha.
‘There are ways and means,’ she said. And remembering how she had contrived to bring away her husband in the midst of the greatest of all wars, I understood that indeed there must be ways and means.
Captain Negodyaev looked spiritually intoxicated. ‘How strange! Only yesterday my life seemed grey and dull and hopeless, and today — it’s like a dream come true. These rooms, after living for months on end in a railway coach. These rooms! — He too’—he pointed to his batman Vladislav—‘is pleased, I bet.’
‘Yes, there is no doubt,’ said Vladislav, ‘these are good rooms. But a long way off the French!’
‘Go along, that will do,’ said Captain Negodyaev sternly. ‘Gone dotty from too much happiness, I expect. Take no notice of him’—he turned to us with a propitiatory smile. ‘Yes, I’d do anything to have Natàsha here. Anything.’
‘What of your daughter Màsha? Would she also come?’ It seemed as though my aunt was not too keen on Ippolit.
‘Hardly. Màsha is grown up and lives with her husband. She loves her husband.’
‘Anyway, we’ve room enough here for Natàsha and your wife. George’—she turned to me quietly—‘you will telephone General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski and ask him for an interview tomorrow morning.’
25
THE GENERAL HAD SENT WORD BY HIS AIDE-DE-CAMP son that he had reserved 11 o’clock for Aunt Teresa and myself; and Aunt Teresa’s carriage had been ordered for 10.30. But at a quarter to eleven Aunt Teresa, finally attired, discovered that she had mislaid her bag, and while she was looking for it Beastly had arrived from Omsk, quite unexpectedly, accentuating the general commotion.
‘A letter from your brother Lucy!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.
‘No time till I come back from the General,’ she warned him off. ‘Besides, they’ve lost my bag for me.’
Because just before losing the bag she had had ‘words’ with Berthe, she now blamed Berthe for having lost it.
‘But it isn’t I who lost the bag!’ Berthe exclaimed excitedly.
‘All the same, you upset me,’ retorted my aunt.
‘But you’ve lost it yourself!’
‘Ah! if Constance were here!’
‘We had better look for it,’ said Berthe appeasingly.
Beastly’s Anglo-Saxon common-sense, directed towards advising other people how to manage their own silly business, was sometimes too much for Aunt Teresa. Now when she had lost her bag, he thus consoled her, ‘Well, my dear lady, there’s nothing to get excited about; the house isn’t on fire, you know, you’ve only got to find the damned thing: now where the deuce have you put it?’
‘Ah, enfin! if I knew I wouldn’t be looking for it!’ wailed my aunt in accents of astonishment and anguish.
Beastly only nodded his head in that crude sardonic manner of the British sergeant who tells an obviously hopeless recruit who has mislaid his kit or possibly got hold of the wrong end of the rifle: ‘No wonder we’re winnin’!’
At last the bag was found, hanging on the back of a chair that everybody had been gazing at. The victoria with the two meagre mares and the disreputable coachman Stepàn drew up to the porch. Aunt Teresa and I stepped inside, and we drove off to the General’s train.
The General’s special train stood on the viaduct, in a commanding military position, as if holding a pistol at the head of the city. Almost opposite lay the train of the Chinese High Commissioner, an amiable gentleman upon whom I had already had occasion to call, and who had treated me to excellent port on that occasion. As we mounted the train we were at once invaded by an official and military atmosphere. A personnel of experts received us — experts in coups d’état. The tall officer on duty escorted us to the aide-de-camp, the General’s son, and the aide-de-camp conducted us into the carpeted interior of the General’s private office. Behind his writing-table sat the General himself, dark, wiry, with a stiff black moustache and closely cropped hair turning grey. With the General was a gentleman whom I at once recognized as Dr. Murgatroyd, an English newspaper correspondent. The General rose with the customary precision of Russian officers, and clicking his spurs introduced himself: ‘Lieutenant-General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski,’ and politely enquired of what service he could be to us. He wore very high heels, and scented his hands and handkerchief without cease with eau-de-Cologne.
‘I have come,’ said Aunt Teresa, sinking by his desk into an arm-chair, ‘about a Russian officer who lives with us at present, whose wife and little daughter — a charming child — are starving, I’m afraid, in Novorossiisk.’
‘Quite. Quite,’ said General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski.
‘I so want to get them over here. The father, Captain Negodyaev, is so wretchedly unhappy.’
‘Quite.’
‘I know you feel as I do in the matter.’ Aunt Teresa wrinkled her nose a little — how becoming!
‘Quite,’ said he, surveying her with interest. He stroked his stiff moustache, then sprayed some more eau-de-Cologne over his hands and martial chest bestrewn with decorations. And the oft-heard rumour flashed across my brain again that he had been a constable who had obtained a commission in the war, and had since, while nobody was looking, promoted himself to a General. He seemed much interested in Aunt Teresa’s person — more so than in the subject of her call — and enquired how it was: she was not Russian — and yet, and yet?… And Aunt Teresa plunged with eagerness into her triumphant past and told him all. She was English, born of English parents (her mother was a Spaniard though) — in Manchester, it seemed. But she had been brought up in Russia, where she had also lived her youth and early married life, among the dear old Russian aristocracy, now so unhappily dislodged from their secure positions. Ah! didn’t she remember the old days!
And the Galìtzins! And the Troubetzkòys! And the Yusùpov-Sumaròkov-Elstons! And the Princess Tènisheva! And the Belosèlski-Belozèrskis! And the Most Illustrious Princess Suvòrov! Ah! she knew them all! And the Viceroy of the Caucasus Count Ilaryòn Vorontzòv-Dàshkov! The Dàshkovs and the Pàshkovs — she knew them all. Aunt Teresa exchanged glances with the General, glances of intimate melancholy reminiscence. The General, who must have been a gendarme constable in those days, perhaps guarding the very street in which some of these aristocrats resided, smiled sadly, a little timidly; but the contrast must also have reminded him of his present undisputed hegemony, of his commanding military position, as he sat in his luxurious armoured train, with the town at his mercy; and so his smile, besides shyness and awkwardness, conveyed a tinge of satisfaction. And in answer to her question if he knew the Troubetzkòys he said (with a beatific look which was to cover such a point-blank question): ‘Ah! who didn’t know them!’