Futility by William Gerhardie Page B

She made fun of me. She had been making fun of me all the time, even while we were bending with such a serious mien over the chart and diagram. And I perceived that her serious look, her interest in the scheme a while ago, was all deliberately put on to commit me more deeply to the exposition of my scheme in order to make more fun of me afterwards.
    She laughed. She burst with merriment.
    “Nina!”
    She laughed still more. She was convulsed; she could barely speak, and the tears came into her eyes.
    Then she opened the door into the corridor and called out:
    “Sonia! Sonia!”
    “Nina!” I cried in remonstrance.
    “Vera!” she called. “Papa! Fanny Ivanovna! Kniaz! Pavl Pavlch!”
    I had to realize, to my deep shame and anguish, that they were all at home, as they entered the room one by one. My face grew crimson.
    Nina held out the chart and the diagram at arm’s length andexplained, it seemed to me wilfully misrepresenting the whole thing, mating individuals in a preposterous fashion, so that Sonia would cry out:
    “But Čečedek does not
want
to marry Fanny Ivanovna!”
    And Fanny Ivanovna, colouring highly, would exclaim:
    “What—what’s that?”
    “They more or less belong to the same race,” said Nina. “Is that the idea?” She turned to me with assumed innocence.
    And Sonia cried again, “But Zina doesn’t
want
to live with the dentist-Jew!”
    “I take it that she’ll have to. You can’t have it all ways, you know, in such a complicated scheme.” And then with a side look at me, “Am I right?”
    “And why should Čečedek subsidize anybody?”
    “Why?” said Nina, with a look at me.
    “You’re making a farce of it!” I cried in utter desperation.
    “It’s you who are making a farce of it,” Nina cried. “Papa, he is laughing at us!”
    Fanny Ivanovna walked out of the room in what seemed to me a defiant manner. I seemed to hear a solitary “Hm!”
    Nikolai Vasilievich, with the diagram in his hand and trailing the chart in a degrading manner along the floor, so that I burnt with shame for my neat and able work of the night before, led me aside and said in a very earnest tone of voice, addressing me as “Young man”:
    “You know we are always glad to have you here, but to make fun of our family difficulties … to make fun … to make fun …” (he was getting a little heated) “of our family difficulties into which you, as our guest, were unavoidably initiated … is, I consider, tactless and indelicate.” And he tore up first the chart and then the diagram into a thousand fragments and flung them into the great big stove in the corner of the room.
    “Nikolai Vasilievich!” I cried. “I assure you I only wanted to help.”
    “Oh, look here,” said Nikolai Vasilievich impatiently, turning on his heels, “please stop these unbecoming jokes. They’re not even funny.” And they all left me.
    But I went into the corridor and caught Nina by the hand and dragged her back into the room and did what is known as “giving her a bit of my mind.” I was so wild that I did not know how to begin. “Very well,” I cried at last, “I shall leave you all to stew in your own juice!”
    “Very well,” she said.
    “And I shall never come again.”
    “Very well,” she said.
    And it seemed that to whatever I said in my excitement, she answered coldly and indifferently as she sat there, looking at me coldly and indifferently, “Very well,” until it irritated me beyond endurance, and I cried:
    “
Very well!
But do you silly people realize how utterly laughable you all are? Oh, my God! Can’t you see yourselves!’ (I could not see myself.) “But can’t you see that you have been lifted out of Chekhov?… Oh, what would he not have given to see you and use you!”
    “He’s dead,” she said.
    “But there are others. Oh, no, my dear, you are not safe. What’s there to prevent some mean, unscrupulous scribbler who cares less for people than for his art, from writing