millionaire! Zina’s people keep telling her, ‘Stick to him, stick to him, don’t let him go. These gold-mines in Siberia, these millions, this house in the Mohovaya!’ That’s all, in fact, they are after. Why won’t his wife give him his divorce and be done with him? Because she believes in the gold-mines. Why does Baron Wunderhausen always hang about here? Why does he run after Nina, Vera, and Sonia? The goldmines again, and the house in the Mohovaya.”
“What of me!” I cried in horror. “I come here every evening, Fanny Ivanovna, and stay till late in the night.”
“Oh, you are different.”
“I shall have to stop coming now.”
“You may as well dismiss at once from your mind any suspicion of an ulterior motive,” said Fanny Ivanovna, rising to the occasion. “They are worth nothing, anyhow … both the goldmines in-Siberia and the house in the Mohovaya.”
“Worthless! You don’t mean it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do the gold-mines pay nothing?”
“Andrei Andreiech, I have lived with Nikolai Vasilievich now for over eleven years. I don’t remember their ever paying a copeck. They may have paid before my time. But I doubt it. Nikolai Vasilievich, though, is constantly pouring money into them, every month, every year, to keep them going. And this, Andrei Andreiech, what with the money he has to fork out for his wife and Eisenstein and what we spend ourselves and what he gives Zina and her people, who are very poor, and”—she blushed—“what he sends my own people in Germany, and his own sisters and cousins and several other friends and dependents … why, Andrei Andreiech, it takes all he can scrape together.…”
“But the house in the Mohovaya?”
“Precisely. He has been compelled to mortgage the house to be able to manage at all … and keep the other thing going.”
I whistled under my breath. I remember how Baron Wunderhausen had grasped me by the arm one day as he spoke with enthusiasm of Nikolai Vasilievich.
“Rich as Croesus,” he had said.
Well, I felt sorry for him.…
I heard a little nervous cough and a rustle, and a harmless little old man, like a mouse, whom I had not noticed in the room before, rose and walked out.
I was horrified.
“Fanny Ivanovna,” I cried, “that man has heard everything you’ve said.”
“Oh,
Kniaz
!” she said with undisguised contempt. “He’s heard it all before.”
I felt that this startling news rather took the gilt off theconfession. I had flattered myself on being the first, in fact the only one.
“He’s heard it many times,” said Fanny Ivanovna. “Every now and then I feel that I absolutely must confess it all to
somebody
… no matter who it is.”
“I thought,” I said a little reproachfully, “that you had told nobody, Fanny Ivanovna.”
“Andrei Andreiech!” she cried in her tone of appeal to my sense of justice, “I haven’t spoken of it to any one for more than two weeks. If you hadn’t come here to-day, I don’t know.… I really think I should have confessed it to the hall-porter. You don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” I said, but I could not help feeling misused and mishandled. I almost begrudged her the gallantry of my dash for water—two separate dashes, to be exact—when I remembered that they must have been carried out by other men before me, the confession to-night being, of course, an exact replica of the confessions that had preceded it, Lord knows how many times, like a melodrama with its laughter and hysterics occurring always at the proper interval as it is produced each night. And I was led to revise my recently adopted theory that I was indeed a born confidant by virtue of my understanding personality, tempting strange women into thrilling, exhilarating confessions of their secrets. Rather did I feel the victim of a lengthy and tedious autobiography inflicted on me under false pretences.
I heard the sound of the outer door closing on the old
Will Murray Lester Dent Kenneth Robeson