Nelka Part 11

So we went to the Captain and complained about the heat. He said he was sorry he had nothing better but that the whole boat was at our disposal and we could arrange ourselves wherever we wished. So after looking everything over, we finally decided to sleep on top of the chartroom. We climbed up there with a couple of blankets and settled for the night under the stars. This was not bad but only the sparks from the funnel kept raining down on us most of the time. But we got used to this and stayed that way most of the trip. The captain was American as well as the mate but the crew was of all nationalities, the cook being a Turk. However it did not look as though the trip would last only five days as the boat was very slow. We stopped on our way at Biserta on the African coast and had a day ash.o.r.e. The day after we left Biserta at lunch time, I smelled smoke, so I told Nelka I would go and investigate. The moment I came out on deck the alarm bells started off and I saw the middle of the s.h.i.+p aflame.

While I went on deck, Nelka had gone to our cabin, and when she entered she also heard the alarm. So picking up the two cats and a life belt, she hurried on deck. I likewise picked up the two dogs and a life belt.

The captain was hollering from the bridge to lower the boats as the s.h.i.+p would blow up because of the oil. In a few minutes one of the boats was already bobbing on the water and the cook in his white cap was in it. However, all who were available were fighting the fire, mostly with sand and finally we got it under control. All was fine, only the fire did some damage in the engine room and for more than a day we drifted while they were making repairs.

Then we resumed our way to Barcelona where we were to unload some of the wheat we were carrying. When we got there the Spanish authorities would not allow us to go ash.o.r.e for, as we were Russians, they decided that we may be communists. So they even posted a policeman to see that we would not sneak off. This might not have been so bad, but in the unloading a mistake was made. The forward hull was emptied and as a result the s.h.i.+p sank by the stern and got stuck in the mud bottom. It took us a whole week to extricate ourselves and all that time we had to just sit on that boat.

By the time we finally got to Ma.r.s.eille we had been traveling for three weeks.

We settled in Menton where we remained for several years. I worked in a French Real Estate office. We also played at Monte Carlo and were quite proficient. Nelka used to say that this was the only honest and "above board" business.

In the summer of 1927 we received the news that Nelka's Uncle Herbert Wadsworth had died suddenly from a heart attack. Once again Nelka had a severe blow and sorrow and once more she had lost a close person without having seen him. That fall we finally sailed for America with our friends Count and Countess Pushkin. We all settled in Cazenovia where Count Pushkin and I started a furniture carving business which we kept up for about three years, until the start of the depression.

While living on the Riviera our animal family had grown to 8 dogs and 5 cats, all picked up or abandoned. The little crippled Djedda was still with us and the most cherished of our pets. We brought the whole menagerie with us to America.

In 1930 when the depression was well under way, we once again sailed back to France and this time were there for three years--part of the time in the South and part near Paris. My father died at that time and in 1934 we returned to America.

On arrival, we went directly to Ashantee to visit Nelka's Aunt Martha, who had been quite ill for sometime after a car accident. We arrived on a Sat.u.r.day. The next Tuesday Aunt Martha died. This was again a terrible shock for Nelka. Once again death had struck suddenly and this time her last close relative was gone. Both Aunt Susie and Uncle Herbert had died without Nelka being with them and now Aunt Martha dies only three days after we had returned.

Aunt Martha left Ashantee to Nelka and her cousin Lutie Van Horn. So unexpectedly we found ourselves here and remained. At first we thought that we would sell the property but the depression was on and it was not possible to do so.

Thus we stayed and stayed. I did some farming and we still had the remnants of her aunt's horse business, but these were difficult years for us.

I think that while this prolonged stay might have been difficult and materially complicated, this time was not wasted, as Nelka pointed out, from a moral point of view. It was a time of consolidation of our points of view, of our beliefs and conceptions.

And so we stayed here from 1934 until today, and until Nelka pa.s.sed away in December 1963--a long stay of close to thirty years.

Nelka had had a very varied, very diversified and unusual life. A life which was one of highly emotional feelings. I think characteristic of Nelka was her highly emotional expression of loyalty and devotion, an emotion, which dominated most of her life and all of her actions.

Anything she did or undertook was primarily motivated by emotion rather than by reason, but once decided upon she carried out her actions with great determination and great will power.

Her first overwhelming emotional feeling was a patriotic nationalistic feeling for Russia, and a mystic devotion to the person of the Emperor and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Then her next emotional feeling was the attachment and deep loyalty for her family and her kin.

But in Russia she had no relatives and all her family was American.

Because of that there seemed always to be a conflict of feelings, attachments and loyalties, a conflict which dominated a great part of her life, at least the first part of it. I think in many respects this conflict of feelings was upsetting and painful and she suffered a great deal from the frustrations that these feelings often brought about.

Because of these conflicting feelings and attachments Nelka was restless and went back and forth between Europe and America always seeking a solution and a way of life. I think these conflicting feelings and the deep attachment to her family were the main reasons why for so long she had not married. She just was afraid to create or add a new attachment.

Pretty, with a lovely figure, always very feminine, with a brilliant mind and a sparkling personality, a great sense of humor, broad and diversified education, an understanding of art and good taste, cosmopolitan in her experiences and speaking four languages--Nelka had tremendous success both with men and with women.

The friends she had were always deeply devoted friends who kept their friends.h.i.+p through years or through life and were always under the spell of her personality.

Her overwhelming personality and charm naturally attracted men and about thirty men of every nationality had at one time or another asked her in marriage. When she was twenty-two, during her four months visit in Bulgaria, five men proposed to her.

But she never agreed, first because just marriage for the sake of marriage had no attraction for her, and because of her emotional attachments she was afraid to create a new one. She also once told my mother that she would never marry unless she had a complete and overwhelming feeling, and that she had not yet found.

Throughout these years and because of these conflicting feelings, I think she was disturbed and in many ways not happy. There was too much conflict of feelings. Also her philosophically inclined mind was always searching and seeking--searching a religious understanding of life, always questioning the reasons for this or that problem of life. Her Aunt Susan Blow, who was a great student of philosophy, contributed much in a way to Nelka's emotional seekings. But how often in later years Nelka lamented the fact that she had not utilized fully the wisdom and the knowledge that her aunt could have given her in her philosophical understandings. Nelka was seeking by herself, trying to unravel the questions which bothered her through her own thinking.

But from a rational point of view some of her feelings and emotions were very devastating for her own existence and her own serenity. And her deep attachment to the family was also a source of pain and suffering because of its acuteness. There was not much family left but for those who remained, Nelka gave a full measure of love and devotion. The loss of those close to her were blows which did not heal easily and caused deep pain. The death of her little dog Tibi likewise gave a nearly exaggerated frustration and grief. Just like everything else in her life, Nelka's grief was complete. She in everything understood and accepted only completeness. Nothing in her life meant anything if it was only partial. She could never settle for 50%, always seeking totality, only completeness, and this of course is a tremendous strain on one's person. That strain I think showed itself in Nelka for many years of her life and only towards the later part of it she seemed to acquire some stability of feeling and emotional impulse. There was a reason for that of which I will speak later.

A friend of hers once said about her, "She was a tremendous personality and such force."

Like all humans she had her weaknesses, but these weaknesses were in a way her force, for by sheer will power, by determination or by uncompromising dedication, she was able to control or overcome her weaknesses. Not many are able to do that.

She had many friends in all walks of life and in different countries of many nationalities, but always the reaction was the same--a complete spell of attraction and fascination and generally a long lasting friends.h.i.+p--which once established, was never broken. And that because of that tremendous personality.

Around 1885 lived a young Russian girl, Marie Bashkirtzeff. She wrote some prose and poetry and did some painting. She lived and died very young from TB on the French Riviera in Nice. Not particularly pretty, nor particularly striking, she had nevertheless a tremendous personality. In fact so striking that the city of Nice after her death created a Museum Bashkirtzeff where were kept her paintings, her writings and her personal things. The French author Francois Coppee said of Marie Bashkirtzeff: "Je l'ai vue une fois, je l'ai vue une heure, je ne l'oublirais jamais." (I saw her once, I saw her one hour--I shall forget her never.)

I think as far as personality is concerned, this applied likewise to Nelka. As I said before, I saw her for the first time when I was but seven years old. The impression I got then never left me throughout my life and only grew and developed with time and age.

We were married for 45 years and my love and devotion to her date back from that encounter at seven. In other words a span of 60 years--a lifetime. A lifetime during which everything was centered around this one person.

I think one can say that she had been both very happy and very unhappy in her life, at least this was the balance of her feelings during the first half of her life. During that period she experienced great happiness in her relations.h.i.+p with her mother and with other members of her family, in the devotion and loyalty she had to them.

She also experienced happiness in her endeavors in her school work, in her interests in life and for life. The happiness she may have derived from the realization of things well done and accomplished.

But also there was great, overwhelming unhappiness and sorrow, because of the unusually hard way in which she accepted the loss of those who were close to her. Few probably felt such losses as acutely as she did and this caused pain and anguish. Then there also was unhappiness in the contradiction and the division of feelings, between two countries, two backgrounds, two ideologies, two attachments. This constant division brought with it many heartaches, many disappointments.

And then the second half of her life was the one she pa.s.sed with me. I can only hope that I may have given her at least a measure of the happiness which she so much deserved. Again there were disappointments, frustrations and heartaches as there are in every life and existence. But gradually, with age she seemed to acquire a greater calm in her feelings, she seemed to mellow in her intensity, she seemed to find greater reconciliation within her own beliefs and thoughts and find a greater calm of the soul and a greater satisfaction in her beliefs than she had before that.

She always felt that the turning point in her life, as well as in mine, started from the time we were in Constantinople and when we saw a distant aunt of mine, Princess Gorchakoff.

She was a student of Theosophy and also seemed to have the calm and serenity which comes from the study of that philosophy. Undoubtedly she had a good deal of influence on Nelka and started us on a new way of thinking. Out of this encounter developed gradually all the changes of beliefs and att.i.tudes which brought about such a fundamental and radical change in all the outlooks which Nelka had held hitherto and which she was now discarding.

I think I can say that towards the end she had acquired great moral calm, satisfaction and serenity. She was not perplexed or afraid of the uncertainties of one's beliefs, of the imminence of death or of the questions of the hereafter.

Doubt, uncertainty, perplexity and an unresolved search seemed to have been supplanted by a feeling of calm and confidence. A great thing for anyone to have and to be able to have the moral fort.i.tude to face such a change and to accept it graciously.

And the change was radical and complete in every phase of her life:

From a framework of an organized Church, the change to a live internal belief in the teachings of Christ and an effort to carry this out in the aspects of everyday living, in reality of application and not in dogma.

From a conservative, ultra conservative aristocratic, nearly feudal system of absolute monarchy, an understanding that this had become obsolete and had no value except perhaps in it purely external beauty--to a realistic approach of a form of Christian socialism and the brotherhood not only of man but of all living creatures.

From an accepted habit of meat eating to complete ethical vegetarianism as a regard to the sanct.i.ty of all life. A complete Reverence of Life.

From an intolerance towards the beliefs of others to a complete understanding of the others point of view. A tolerance towards others, accepting from them only as much as the given person can understand in the given time and his mental and moral development, and no more. But at the same time expecting to see that person exercise in practice the full measure of that understanding and belief.

From a pride and satisfaction at her aristocratic origin, an admission that this had no value and that the only thing that counted was the "aristocracy of the spirit."

From a worry of having to put a new fur collar on her winter coat to a refusal to wear any fur as being the product of animal slaughter or the product of the trap, producing protracted agony to the animals.

From a lack of understanding, if not indifference, to animals and dogs in particular, an intense devotion, love and work for all animals and for dogs in particular.

From an interest and partic.i.p.ation in medicine, a complete reversal in her att.i.tude towards it because of the vivisectional basis of most of it. As a result, an ardent and militant anti-vivisectionist.

A complete change all along the line.