Targatt. There was a second servant’s room above the flat, and Targatt rather reluctantly proposed that they should get in a girl to help Hilda; but Nadeja said, no, she didn’t believe Hilda would care for that; and the room would do so nicely for Paul, her younger brother, the one who was studying to be a violinist.

            Targatt hated music, and suffered acutely (for a New Yorker) from persistently recurring noises; but Paul, a nice boy, also with long-lashed eyes, moved into the room next to Hilda’s, and practised the violin all day and most of the night. The room was directly over that which Targatt now shared with Nadeja—and of which all but the space occupied by his shaving-stand had by this time become her exclusive property. But he bore with Paul’s noise, and it was Hilda who struck. She said she loved music that gave her Heimweh, but this kind only kept her awake; and to Targatt’s horror she announced her intention of leaving at the end of the month.

            It was the biggest blow he had ever had since he had once—and once only—been on the wrong side of the market. He had no time to hunt for another servant, and was sure Nadeja would not know how to find one. Nadeja, when he broke the news to her, acquiesced in this view of her incapacity. “But why do we want a servant? I could never see,” she said. “And Hilda’s room would do very nicely for my sister Olga, who is learning to be a singer. She and Paul could practise together—”

            “Oh, Lord,” Targatt interjected.

            “And we could all go out to restaurants; a different one every night; it’s much more fun, isn’t it? And there are people who come in and clean—no? Hilda was a robber—I didn’t want to tell you, but…”

            Within a week the young Olga, whose eyelashes were even longer than Paul’s, was settled in the second servant’s room, and within a month Targatt had installed a grand piano in his own drawing-room (where it took up all the space left by Nadeja’s divan), so that Nadeja could accompany Olga when Paul was not available.

              

 

 III.
 
 

            Targatt had never, till that moment, thought much about Nadeja’s family. He understood that his father-in-law had been a Court dignitary of high standing, with immense landed estates, and armies of slaves—no, he believed they didn’t have slaves, or serfs, or whatever they called them, any longer in those outlandish countries east or south of Russia. Targatt was not strong on geography. He did not own an atlas, and had never yet had time to go to the Public Library and look up his father-in-law’s native heath. In fact, he had never had time to read, or to think consecutively on any subject but money-making; he knew only that old man Kouradjine had been a big swell in some country in which the Bolsheviks had confiscated everybody’s property, and where the women (and the young men too) apparently all had long eyelashes. But that was all part of a vanished fairy-tale; at present the old man was only Number So-much on one Near East Relief list, while Paul and Olga and the rest of them (Targatt wasn’t sure even yet how many there were) figured on similar lists, though on a more modest scale, since they were supposedly capable of earning their own living. But were they capable of it, and was there any living for them to earn? That was what Targatt in the course of time began to ask himself.

            Targatt was not a particularly sociable man; but in his bachelor days he had fancied inviting a friend to dine now and then, chiefly to have the shine on his mahogany table marvelled at, and Hilda’s Wiener-schnitzel praised. This was all over now. His meals were all taken in restaurants—a different one each time; and they were usually shared with Paul, Olga, Serge (the painter) and the divorced sister, Katinka, who had three children and a refugee lover, Dmitri.

            At first this state of affairs was very uncomfortable, and even painful, for Targatt; but since it seemed inevitable he adjusted himself to it, and buried his private cares in an increased business activity.

            His activity was, in fact, tripled by the fact that it was no longer restricted to his own personal affairs, but came more and more to include such efforts as organizing an exhibition of Serge’s pictures, finding the funds for Paul’s violin tuition, trying to make it worth somebody’s while to engage Olga for a concert tour, pushing Katinka into a saleswoman’s job at a fashionable dress-maker’s, and persuading a friend in a bank to recommend Dmitri as interpreter to foreign clients. All this was difficult enough, and if Targatt had not been sustained by Nadeja’s dogged optimism his courage might have failed him; but the crowning problem was how to deal with the youngest brother, Boris, who was just seventeen, and had the longest eyelashes of all. Boris was too old to be sent to school, too young to be put into a banker’s or broker’s office, and too smilingly irresponsible to hold the job for twenty-four hours if it had been offered to him. Targatt, for three years after his marriage, had had only the vaguest idea of Boris’s existence, for he was not among the first American consignment of the family. But suddenly he drifted in alone, from Odessa or Athens, and joined the rest of the party at the restaurant. By this time the Near East Relief Funds were mostly being wound up, and in spite of all Targatt’s efforts it was impossible to get financial aid for Boris, so for the first months he just lolled in a pleasant aimless way on Nadeja’s divan; and as he was very particular about the quality of his cigarettes, and consumed a large supply daily, Targatt for the first time began to regard one of Nadeja’s family with a certain faint hostility.

            Boris might have been less of a trial if, by the time he came, Targatt had been able to get the rest of the family on their legs; but, however often he repeated this attempt, they invariably toppled over on him. Serge could not sell his pictures, Paul could not get an engagement in an orchestra, Olga had given up singing for dancing, so that her tuition had to begin all over again; and to think of Dmitri and Katinka, and Katinka’s three children, was not conducive to repose at the end of a hard day in Wall Street.

            Yet in spite of everything Targatt had never really been able to remain angry for more than a few moments with any member of the Kouradjine group. For some years this did not particularly strike him; he was given neither to self-analysis nor to the dissection of others, except where business dealings were involved. He had been taught, almost in the nursery, to discern, and deal with, the motives determining a given course in business; but he knew no more of human nature’s other mainsprings than if the nursery were still his habitat. He was vaguely conscious that Nadeja was aware of this, and that it caused her a faint amusement. Once, when they had been dining with one of his business friends, and the latter’s wife, an ogling bore, had led the talk to the shop-worn question of how far mothers ought to enlighten their little girls on—well, you know… Just how much ought they to be taught? That was the delicate point, Mrs. Targatt, wasn’t it?—Nadeja, thus cornered, had met the question with a gaze of genuine bewilderment. “Taught? Do they have to be taught! I think it is Nature who will tell them—no? But myself I should first teach dressmaking and cooking,” she said with her shadowy smile. And now, reviewing the Kouradjine case, Targatt suddenly thought: “But that’s it! Nature does teach the Kouradjines.