Byzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Read online

  Whether it was the work I had been doing, or the effects of the cocaine I was, I admit, inspired by Kolya’s words. He said in poetry all that I had been thinking. He inspired me to dreams of even greater intensity. I saw us, the Poet and the Scientist, changing the whole world. Those marching futurists were only bragging journeymen. They had little in common with this wonderful individual.

  ‘I should like to read your poems,’ I said.

  Kolya laughed. ‘You can’t read them. Sit down. Drink some more absinthe. I burned all my poems this winter. They were simply not up to standard. They were in imitation of Baudelaire and Laforgue. There was no point in adding second-rate verse to the mountain already immersing our city. I shall wait for the War to end, or for the Revolution to come, or for Armageddon or the Apocalypse. Then I shall write again.’

  He seated himself upon a great divan in the centre of the room and reached for the bottle. ‘Would you have the last of the wine?’

  ‘If there is no more … ‘ I put a hand over the top of my glass.

  ‘Enjoy it. Why shouldn’t you? If this war continues, if the Apocalypse really comes, then we’ll have no more absinthe anyway, merely the wormwood itself, if we are lucky.’ A black sleeve extended towards me, a black glove clutched the neck of the Terminus flask. Yellow liquid poured up to the rim of the slender goblet. ‘Drink it, my scientist friend. To the poetry you will inspire.’

  ‘And to the science you will inspire.’ I was fired by his mood. I drank.

  Hippolyte vanished and, tut-tutting, emerged, it seemed only moments later, in a fairly ordinary, if somewhat dandified outfit, and said that he was ‘going down to the Tango’ to find some company. He was bored, he said. Kolya wished him an amiable farewell. Then, pausing by the door, Hippolyte said: ‘You’d better let me know when you want me home.’

  ‘Whenever you like, my dear!’ Kolya was casual. ‘Dimitri Mitrofanovitch and myself will be discussing matters of science.’

  Hippolyte scowled, hesitated again, then left.

  A moment passed. He was back. ‘I might go on somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘Just as you like, Hippolyte.’ Kolya turned questioningly to me. ‘Would you like to visit The Scarlet Tango? Or are you bored with such places?’

  I suspected The Scarlet Tango would be like the bohemian cafés I had frequented in Odessa, where cocaine was always available. I must have seemed eager when I replied that I did not think I would be bored.

  Kolya said to Hippolyte, ‘We’ll see you there in an hour or two.’

  The door slammed. Kolya sighed. ‘Beauty is cheap in Peter, these days, Dimka. But it seems always to be accompanied by bad manners. It’s a pleasure to meet a scholar for a change.’

  I was fascinated by this black-clad ghost, this Russian Hamlet. I had relaxed completely. Doubtless the absinthe made me reveal, almost at once, the nature of my quest.

  ‘You are a sniffer!’ He was amused. ‘Well, well, the good things of life are spreading amongst the people. The Revolution is with us, after all!’

  ‘I should point out,’ I said with some dignity, ‘that I am a rather unusual student at the Polytechnic, and an unpopular one. My experience of life has not been entirely of the schoolroom.’

  He apologised with grave good manners. ‘And where were you, before the Polytechnic?’

  ‘In Kiev,’ I said, ‘where I flew my own machine.’

  ‘And so young? Where’s the aeroplane now?’

  ‘It was not an aeroplane as such. It was an entirely new design. It was reported in the papers.’ ‘And you flew to Peter?’

  I laughed. ‘I crashed. I still need time to perfect the design. But perfect it I shall.’

  ‘And after that? Where did you go?’

  ‘To Odessa for a while. I had already gained some practical engineering experience. In Odessa I developed a liking for cocaine and the pleasures of the flesh.’

  I must have seemed a little naïve to him, but he did not show it.

  Since then, I told him, I had given up such vices and was concentrating on my studies. I mentioned my new problems. I was determined to succeed in spite of all. To this end I had begun to use a stimulant again. My work was proceeding well on all fronts. I had developed theories which would astonish any true scientist. I did not expect them to impress the staid and orthodox hacks currently teaching at the Institute. I had hoped to get more cocaine from Sergei Andreyovitch.

  ‘You are not a friend of Seryozha’s?’

  ‘An acquaintance, that is all.’

  ‘So your interest is in “la neige” rather than the place from which it falls?’ He smiled kindly.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, it will be nothing to find you some. Particularly with the War on. God knows how they can supply all the warriors, poets and scientists with what they need to get them through this conflict and famine. You’re not interested in morphine?’

  ‘I’ve never indulged myself with the distillation of poppies. The world of dreams is not an escape for me. I intend to impose my dreams upon the world.’

  He was pleased by this turn of phrase. He poured me the dregs of the absinthe. ‘I hope you will not disapprove of me if I say I have injected the occasional dose. When I have needed to retreat from society. The drugs can be complementary, you know.’

  I did not fully realise then what I know today: cocaine is a stimulant, but morphine is a killer. I have never made use of depressants. It is not a very large step from the world of sleeping hallucinations to the cold world of Death; from Heaven on Earth, as it were, to the genuine article. The road away from Hell, as the Poles say, is the road that leads there.

  I sipped the last of the absinthe. ‘I must point out that I do not use the drug for pleasure. I need it to keep my brain alive and my body working.’

  ‘Are you not afraid you’ll go mad with so much work?’

  ‘It is possible, but I have the necessary control.’

  ‘Inspiration and madness are very similar, I think.’ He crossed to the cabinet where he kept his drinks and opened a porcelain dish whose lid was in the shape of a white pierrot peering at a half-moon. ‘I have some here. I think it is good quality. These days one must be careful. So many customers. As a consequence, so many rogues who will dilute the crystals with anything which comes to hand. You must be careful. In Odessa, before the War, you would not have known such dangers, eh?’

  ‘There are a few crooks in Odessa,’ I joked.

  ‘So I have heard.’

  He was bringing me alive again, as Shura had brought me alive. More. For Kolya was a sophisticated man of letters, a theatre critic, a writer of essays in the thick journals, a man of taste, dignity and discrimination, who recognised intelligence and creativity. I was to discover that he saw himself more as a publicist of talent than as a talent in his own right. He was one of those great and necessary people who encourage others to aspire to do their best, whatever that best may be.

  His whole name was Count Nicholai Feodorovitch Petroff and he was related to the famous Mikhishevski family, one of the chief aristocratic Petersburg clans, whose ancestral estates were in my native Ukraine. Nicholai Feodorovitch had visited rural Ukraine occasionally but had no experience of the cities or of that particular shore. He knew the Crimean coast well, however. ‘It is even warmer. We should go there,’ he said, ‘this summer. If the War ends.’ I enjoyed the fantasy. I asked if he had not stayed even briefly in Kiev or Odessa. He laughed. ‘I find them both attractive as ideas, Dimka, but that is all. The dark, romantic Jew has always intrigued me as a character, you know. I have every sympathy with Shylock. Haven’t you? Or even poor Fagin, who is the liveliest of Dickens’s characters? Or the noble Isaac in Ivanhoe?’

  I was familiar with none of these English books then. Of course I had seen reference to them in my set of Pearson’s. The English were inclined to take a tolerant attitude to Jews. One of their most honoured writers, in those days, was Israel Zangwill, and they had, as we all know, a Jew as the
ir Prime Minister. My friend continued in praise of the English poet Shelley, whose character Ahaseurus in Hellas inspired Kolya a great deal, he said, if only for the single speech he was fond of quoting:

  What has thought

  To do with time, or place, or circumstance,

  Wouldst thou behold the future? ask and have!

  Knock and it shall be opened—look, and lo!

  The coming age is shadowed on the past

  As on a glass.

  Politeness made me refrain from telling Kolya what I thought of such high-sounding rubbish. The English have many virtues. They are excellent engineers and practical scientists. As story-tellers they give their novels good, strong, exciting plots. But as poets they have done more damage to the world than any others. The ideas of Byron and Shelley have probably caused more young men to lose their lives in hopeless, idiotic, romantic causes than the ideas of Karl Marx. Romanticism is the disease of the Modern Age. It is the direct result of increased leisure amongst a certain class. If one does not believe me, one has only to look around at the so-called hippies and ‘dropouts’ who always complain of poverty yet find time to bargain with me for coats worth twice the price I am charging, and pay in the end with money donated to them by the State!

  Perhaps, as some say, the world is no more decadent now than it always was. But what the so-called decadents of my days in St Petersburg had was a sense of style; of taste, of social position and, indeed, a good education.

  Education, of course, can also confuse. Nicholai Feodorovitch was a great Slav, a true Slav, a believer in the Slavic Renaissance, but his love of romantic verse was also his blind-spot, for he was morbidly philosemitic, as so many of his heroes had been. Even as we left the apartment, on our way to The Scarlet Tango, he put an arm around my uniformed shoulder and quoted some nonsense from Byron about ‘tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast’. I owe the lines (for I would not otherwise remember them) to Miss Cornelius, who was educated at the Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, where only the very best pupils are accepted.

  How shall ye flee away and be at rest!

  The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,

  Mankind their country—Israel but the grave!

  A sentimental streak of this sort is often the attribute of a dandy. It is as if they allow themselves one weakness. With some it is a liking for dogs or horses to whom they are inordinately kind. Nicholai Feodorovitch had a weakness for Jews: the very people who were at that moment scheming the destruction of him and all his caste. That was one of the ironic tragedies of life. I have noticed similar ironies wherever I have gone about the world. Even the Wandering Jew himself could not have witnessed as much as I have witnessed in my day.

  The Scarlet Tango was not far from St Catherine’s Catholic Church. It was in a sidestreet mainly occupied by little jewellers and confectioners. It was part beer-hall, part bohemian café of the kind one used to find in Montmartre, full of dazzling mirrors and crystal lamps, crowded with circular tables and gilded metal chairs on which sat young men and women chiefly distinguished by their bright clothes, their pale faces and their intensely glittering eyes; make-up was in use with both sexes. Both sexes smoked cigarettes, often of European brands, in long holders. Upon a stage at one side, a negro four-piece orchestra played the latest syncopated jungle tunes: the rag, the cake-walk, the coon-dance and the slow-drag. Was there a war in progress? Were there bread-shortages? Was light becoming as scarce a commodity as fresh meat or hope? H.G. Wells’s time-traveller visiting The Scarlet Tango might have believed that the world was at its happiest and most prosperous. Copies of outrageous revolutionary and artistic journals were being openly read: Truth, Freedom, New Worlds, Apollon and Cosmic Manifesto. The place had much of the atmosphere of Esau’s, though on a larger, grander and more elegant scale. Its atmosphere of friendliness, laughter and argument attracted me as I had been attracted before. There were famous names to be found here. Names associated with all that was called ‘the Russian explosion’ in the arts. It was an explosion as welcome to me as the bombs which fell on Notting Hill during the Second World War.

  At the time, helped by Kolya’s absinthe and his enthusiasm for what he called Modern Experience, I developed at least an ability to parrot the names of their pantheon: Stanislavski, Diaghileff, Kandinski, Malevitch and Chagall, Blok, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Rabinovitch and others. Kolya, of course, could quote them all, could name pictures, even hum tunes if tunes they were. He had enjoyed the company of Sergei Andreyovitch largely because of the latter’s ability to interpret modern music. ‘But like most ballet dancers he had only a limited imagination. You will find that a dancer has about six things he or she can do well: a good leap, perhaps, or a pas-de-deux or perhaps one of those writhing movements they favour so much. And they do them over and over again, in every ballet, whether “free” or choreographed with rigid discipline.’ I had to take his word for it. Ballet is another art which has never much attracted me. My experience of ballet-dancers has not been particularly happy. Their egos are such that they are quickly gratified with praise. Their talent becomes as stultified as their muscles if they do not exercise. There were a good many dancers to be found at The Scarlet Tango.

  Later, we went on, full of absinthe, arm-in-arm, to another, less impressive place called The Wandering Dog, where Kolya had friends with whom he seemed more intimate and relaxed. My own recollections are vague. I had become almost incapably drunk. Doubtless I made a horrible fool of myself. I recall a small, not very pleasant young Jew lisping lines about Ossian and Scotland, moon and blood. Though in Russian, they might as well have been English, they were so derivative. A few lines remain with me, for they are the lines which always come out whenever I am inebriated (which is rarely, these days):

  I am reminded of the hills

  Where Russia finishes suddenly

  Above a black and barren sea …

  If ever I was going to develop a taste for modern poetry, I would have done so in Kolya’s company. Very late into the first night I found myself on the doorstep of my lodgings watching a carriage jogging off back towards the twinkle of the city while I fumbled for the bell. I was admitted by a desolate Madame Zinovieff who exclaimed about the state of my uniform and then, realising I was drunk, cried out that she had betrayed me and let me fall into bad company. I explained to her I had been dining with a famous Count and this, of course, mollified her a little. When I could not recall his name, she began to mutter and complain. She was not angry with me, but she had promised Mr Parrot I would come to no harm. She was responsible for my moral welfare. I assured her this was a unique occasion. I had had to accept the Count’s invitation. It would have been bad manners to have done otherwise.

  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 involve
d, 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.

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