Nelka Part 3

I am not afraid of anything. I am ready for anything. The truth is the only thing worth caring about. Not the great universal truths that one can search and cherish while living in a ma.s.s of lies but just the truthfulness of one's life and everyday actions. Try to call things what they are and it is a perfect realm of ever increasing delight, for everything around us is lies from beginning to end. But in general everything is lies and the ambitions are all false and the education is no better than the shoes that are put on Chinese female feet to stunt and deform them. What a sweet and perfect simile. How did I happen to fall on it?"

Sofia 1900.

"I am thinking seriously of working just about twice as much as I did last winter. If one would do anything the least in art one must give oneself to it 24 hours and live these 24 hours double. There is no art but good art and what is not best is not art at all. I hate pretense. It only exists among people who know nothing. I know nothing in any line but I would rather remain a nullity studying with serious intentions than profit of or repose upon some meaningless accidental achievement. Of all traits presumption is the most insufferable. Oh, how one is anxious to put one's finger in pies one is completely incapable of understanding."

After her stay in Bulgaria, Nelka return to Paris to finish her studies before returning to America.

Paris 1901.

"Oh how stimulating this place is and how much study and achievement there is. What a lecture I heard. It was more helpful to me than anything I can remember for a long while. And what a book I have got! A complete resignation without losing energy on one's work at hand that is what one may strive for. Energy and conviction and elan are not usually resigned to all obstacles and resignation is often la.s.situde. I feel resignation so necessary and at the same time I have such infinite faith in the power of 'il faut' (one must). The worst thing I am afraid of is to become tired in the way I mean. I think it is more hopeless than disgust and disillusion."

Paris 1900.

"Where can I read something holding your point of view which would be more within my range of understanding than Hegel? I can't understand free will as independent of our physical being and I don't see how will can be something different from a kind of complicated reflex. I am afraid there is no help for it. I will have to inform myself somehow. Anyway my head always seems clearer over here. I wish I could be so in America. You would not believe how waked up I can get. I believe it is in the air. There is something both stimulating and relaxing in the moral atmosphere that I feel only here."

After her stay in Paris and Bulgaria, Nelka returned to America and stayed either with her aunt Miss Blow or with her aunt Mrs.

Wadsworth: in the summer in Cazenovia or Ashantee, in winter in Washington where her Aunt Martha had a large house which had just been built and occupied for the first time in 1900. Her aunt kept up a very active social life and while Nelka stayed through all this social activity she never liked it. She kept in close contact with the varied European emba.s.sies and especially the Russian emba.s.sy, where she enjoyed the influence of the European atmosphere.

Ashantee, November 1901.

"I do not want to complicate the interpretations of my condition and I want above all things to cease dwelling so selfishly upon it.

There is no need of looking for unaccountable voids, longings and the like. I have been unhappy and shattered ever since Mama died. My own nature gives me much to contend with and I want to get away from it all. I am unfit for anything but concentration, and I am not made for the world I live in. If I am not married by the time I am twenty-seven, I am determined to go into a convent or our Red Cross.

I may change my mind many times but this is my last word for the present. I have a contempt, when not pity, for the lives of most of the people I see around me and mine is among the most selfish and aimless. I do not wish to read or think or study. And as for 'consciously living for a true world view,' I want to run away from every form of consciousness."

Ashantee 1901.

"You speak in your letter of forming an unconscious totality of feeling and tendency out of their necessarily limited experiences, and of not living independently of the deposit of human struggle and thump. Certainly one should perhaps profit by the last but I cannot imagine acquiring anything: conviction, principle, or any att.i.tude of mind except by simple experience. I think we may experience in an ordinary life all that is necessary to build a sufficient and adequate world view. And what I read means nothing to me except where I can compare it with my own experience or consider it in relation to my own experience. I do not think that I can have a proper world view until I am old enough to have had time to experience life and I don't want to go ahead of my experience in reading."

Ashantee, November 1901.

"Kitty and I have just come in from a long disagreeable day in Rochester where we are having clothes made. It is extremely painful to me, but all this kind of thing just pushes me more in the opposite direction and makes me firmer in my fast maturing resolution. I am exceedingly blue. In fact, it is only occasionally that I am not so, and, as in the light of the world I have an unusual amount of things to make me the contrary, it must mean surely that I am not of the world and I wish, wish, wish that I were out of it."

Ashantee, December 1901.

"I am going to try and be reasonable and as mildly satisfactory as I may be and avoid extremes and keep hold of myself, as the only possible justification of my points of view and ideas, for no one will agree with them, and one cannot claim any merit in these, when the result offered is not better than anyone else."

"I will never be influenced by anyone until I see someone who masters intelligently, calmly and practically situations as they occur. I have a great deal in myself to fight and the powerful helping influence has been Mama and the warnings I have had from witnessing things that went wrong. I think the more one lives and the more one thinks, the simpler things get. The greatest of all dangers seems to me to fool oneself. Really this seems to me to be the only hopeless plight and there comes to a certain fascination in trying to say things plainly to oneself. Nothing is as strong as plain truth about a thing, and the moment one shirks it one is lost."

One can see that back in America she was again distressed, discontented and uncertain. She had lost the tranquility and the a.s.surance which she had while in Europe. It seems to me that for some reason or other this feeling of unsatisfaction was always much greater in America than in Europe and here she was always disturbed.

A heavy test to her feelings of loyalty for Russia came with the advent of the Russo-j.a.panese war in 1904. America was in those days very pro-j.a.panese and Nelka suffered in her feelings while living in Washington. Finally, in a feeling of exasperation, she left Washington in 1904 and returned to Paris. Here she studied at the French Red Cross to qualify as a nurse. She also resumed her painting studies. For medical practice she worked at a children's dispensary.

Denmark 1903.

"The trip is such a complicated one (back to Paris) with such indefinite changes and waits that I feel sure it would not be right to go alone despite my mature years, and so there is nothing to do."

(She was 25 years old.)

Paris 1904.

"I have painted a portrait of myself, grinning from ear to ear, which you probably would not like, but it is the best I think I have done.

It was for the Salon with Julien's great approval but it was refused with eight thousand other masterpieces. It is a fearful blow to me but salutary for my soul no doubt and this being my holy week I am going to try to benefit from the disappointment and chagrin. I must go and study now. I am doing 5 hours a day of concentrated study."

"I am having an attack of 'anti.' I am getting to feel further and further away. I like Denmark. I am very much interested in the country, the people, the language. I think the difference between countries, the national characteristics so curious. This is such a beautiful place. It grows upon me more and more. The park is lovely with deer, hares and pheasants all around."

Paris, 1904.

"I go to the dispensaire every morning. I have got so much into it that I cannot get out. I enjoy it so much that I only remember once in a great while that I am be doing a little good in it as well.

This war makes me feel terribly unhappy for many reasons, I cannot explain. I have an unreasoning longing to be in Russia and doing something. It seems such a useless ridiculous war and so much loss.

I cannot understand the way people view things. The loss of life and suffering just make me sick. I see no dignity or sense in anything but quiet and peace. The more importance one attaches to a question, the more pitiful and absurd it seems. What matters externally?"

Paris 1904.

"I feel old and addled. I am still dispensing with rage and interest.

I was given a number of girls to give an ill.u.s.tration lesson in bandaging this morning. We have had a number of interesting cases lately. I shall be sorry to leave them."

(She was 26 years old, working at the French dispensary.)

Paris 1904.

"I have always before undertaken too much and accomplished less. I do not think it is what one studies but the way one studies anything which amounts to anything. As I have often said before, I have more faith in what I think in spite of myself, in the preferences that I discover in myself, than in those things which I consciously investigate. About the affections, I don't know. The affections I have seem stable enough to me and I feel an ultimate capacity for a larger order."

After completing her Red Cross studies in Paris and receiving a diploma which granted her the status of an apprentice nurse, Nelka made arrangements to go to Russia. This was not an easy undertaking.

Nelka had few connections in Russia; her knowledge of the language was limited, her knowledge as a nurse likewise limited, and it took a great deal of determination to carry her plan through.

The war at the moment was coming to an end with the defeat of Russia and a revolutionary movement was afoot. The front thousands of miles away made transportation of the wounded lengthy and difficult, and, long after the hostilities had come to an end, a steady stream of wounded continued to arrive in the capital.

It was a trying and difficult time for Nelka. She was deeply upset by the tragic events of the lost war and the grumblings of the revolution.

She got in touch with some friends in Russia to help make necessary arrangements. A friend of her mother's, Mr. Pletnioff, made all preliminary arrangements to have her accepted in the Kaufman community of sisters under the leadership of Baroness Ixkull, a very cultivated and capable person.

Also the Bakhmeteffs were at that time in St. Petersburg and they too helped make arrangements. Despite the fact that Nelka was then 26 years old, she did not feel that she should travel alone and was trying to find someone who was going to Russia from Paris. A friend who was to go had to put off her trip and so recommended Nelka to a friend of hers, a Madame Sivers, with whom she went and with whom later she became quite a friend.

When she arrived she went at first to stay with Mr. and Mrs.

Bakhmeteff.

Early in 1905 she wrote from St. Petersburg, upon her arrival:

"Yesterday already I saw Madame Hitrovo, Veta, Rurik and Veta's son"

(my grandmother, my mother and my uncle).

This was the first time that I saw Nelka. The Bakhmeteffs gave a luncheon at the Hotel de France where they were staying to meet Nelka. As it was a family affair with no outsiders, my mother took me along. I was then about seven years old. A child of seven is not generally impressed by a grown up person, but Nelka made a tremendous impression on me when I first saw her: an impression which never left me throughout life. From that day on she meant something to me, and that something grew and grew in my feelings for her with time and years.

The Russian Red Cross had a number of sister "Communities" who were managed by ladies of the Russian society. The one Nelka joined was the Kaufman community under the able management of Baroness Ixkull.

Nelka wrote from St. Petersburg in 1905:

"Baroness Ixkull seems an awfully clever, energetic and altogether charming person. I think although the Bakhmeteffs highly approve, they are afraid she is just on the edge of being a little 'advanced,'

which to such arch conservatives as they, seems all wrong. The extremes are very great. You see Pletnioff is somewhat liberal, but nothing in the sense that the word is used abroad and Mr. Bakhmeteff is for the strictest adherence to middle age regime. Between the two I must find the just milieu. Anyway everyone is in a certain sense conservative just now. For the moment I can only tell you of my delight at being here. I suppose the Const.i.tution had to come but surely autocracy is the only ideal Government and I am sorry that the nation was not equal to it."