Chapter 2

"I am so busy, I have my whole week planned ahead for almost every second. You see I am at the studio every morning including Saturday and have several lessons a week in the afternoon. New Years I dined at the La Beaumes. There was just the immediate family and we were twenty-three at table." (These were part of a French branch of the relatives of Nelka on her mother's side.)

Paris 1900.

"I can understand people with no sentiment, but I will not tolerate people who scoff at it."

"I am so glad to have the Russian church here. I go every Sunday."

Paris 1900.

"I don't have a minute to spare. This is what I wanted and the life though very full is easy and tranquil. The free reality of thought is delightful and wonderful. I do not include freedom of expression. I wonder how much I fool myself? It is not an intolerance which wishes to promote self but which is limited and dead to a variation of its own species because it lacks the consciousness of its own incompleteness. A man who does not wish to dominate and emphasize his will upon his surroundings, including people, is not a whole man. My Russian is getting on. I will be very glad when I have mastered the language, then I am going to begin Italian."

As a child Nelka did not speak Russian and only started studying it when grown up. When she later went to Russia she still was very weak in the language and only gradually picked it up with practice, but eventually knew it very well.

Paris 1900.

"How madly busy all the little people are, bussing over the planet, and for what? How nice it is to go to sleep. I am going to bed. P.S. I think it is an intellectual crime to wear long skirts in the streets."

Paris 1900.

"One must be earnest or else laugh at everything and end in despair. I am so satisfied with my present condition that I think it would be foolish to upset it all after so short a time. I am just beginning to feel the peaceful reaction of it all and I dread the idea of getting roused again before having fully got hold of myself. The total change I felt necessary proved a salvation and that complete absence of all reminders of the past year is the only thing wherein I can get quiet. I do not want to go over what I have felt. Suffice it to say that I want to stay just as I am until after next winter when I will feel like going back to America without regret. I do not feel equal to any more emotions."

Paris 1900.

"I do not understand the 'variety of perfection.' I think it is impossible and therefore absurd to try to preface for this life, well up on our own inheritance, as you say. There has been too much practical research and study and not enough character building, the result: total lack of balance and maniacs. Anything better that would admit of more possibility of collectedness of peaceful contemplation of the possibility of perfecting the least act with the whole of oneself. The least act is worth it. How does one live now? Scattered over the universe, over the time. There are no whole people except a few who keep their entirety within the arbitrary limitations of prejudice and habitual notions of which they are possessed. The other: they are fragments, cranks and nonentities. One more thing, I do not think that a nation can be judged by its great men. Great men belong to humanity, to the century, to anything but not to their country. I think intelligence and capacity is never local, and it is the average and the habit of life that determines the country."

Paris 1900.

"I do not think that anything is likely to happen to me except perhaps softening of the brain and that would happen anywhere. I have seen no one to whom it is likely that I will lose my heart, so I am quite safe."

Paris 1900.

"I do find everything so funny, and people so funny, not individuals, but as a whole, by funny I mean queer. The senseless mode of existence, the superfluous education: these artificial restrictions. It is especially the artificiality of so many things. Who is going to do away with it all? I don't understand anything and I know there is no use trying to build up an understanding on rules."

That summer Nelka went for a month's visit to Denmark to her friends Count and Countess Moltke.

Glorupvej, Denmark 1900.

"We were still two days on the steamer getting to Bremen and then we changed trains and boats about fifteen times in 24 hours getting here. But once here it is beyond all words in delight. The place is perfectly beautiful. I cannot describe it to you. It is so quiet, so far away from everything. Beautiful forests that we drive through, deer all over, swans, fountains and all so old. I lead a most regular of lives. Everyone is exact to the minute, for meals and everything. I feel that it is a very great opportunity I am having to be here in Denmark and see all this new country. It is so interesting and I enjoy it so much. It was very sweet of Louisette to ask me."

Glorupvej, Denmark 1900.

"What you write in answer to my saying that I like 'whole soulness': it is precisely the whole soulness which is not a conscious conquest that I like. I appreciate the merit of the last but it is not that which attracts me, which also reminds me that I want to tell you that I have come to the firm, clear and definite conclusion that a person that loves is not necessarily loving, nor a person that gives necessarily generous. A loving person may never love and a generous person may never give, and the practice of either quality does not indicate an impulse. One can conceive, accept and appropriate the idea of generosity, lovingness, etc., etc., and act it, but that is not the thing. I hate all effort which has for its aim the creation of self, the conscious creation. I like the self to become through slavery to the best natural impulses and through sacrifice brought in one's affections. Seeing that we do depend on each other, it seems to me admissible that the surrender of self, which continues to be with me the highest of everything, should allow of a direct object as its means. I used to have a holy respect of the majority. Now, when I see how many imbeciles go to make up that majority I am no longer afraid to throw over any precept that has filtered into my head, and if ever there was a revolutionist in thought, it is I. Foolish beliefs and hobbies have become adorned with so much that appeals to the sense of the beautiful that one clings even to that, but then that is another element which can envelop rational things as well. Of course all cannot help but be well, but then I am sure that the present condition is quite off the track and I have no respect for anything but pain, joy and sacrifice which are the only realities. Life makes standards and standards don't make life."

Glorupvej 1900.

"I can tolerate wrong and weakness and everything else but that search for self and above all that pompous blowing of a horn before such empty things, such big sounding ambitions, that mock glory, that swelling in noble pride upon such fictitious hallucinations, that poor mesquin grandness. It is exasperating. I hate ambition to achieve. However, I suppose I am very foolish. I am a mass of vanity and self-seeking in my own way, but it is a great pleasure to cry down. I get roused sometimes on things that are not my business and I have felt very much inclined to express my opinion about some thing, but I suppose I had better not."

"My life I think is molded on circumstance and on the best of my instinct and judgment which may be faulty but which in every special instance seems the safest to me. To remind oneself constantly that one's life is made up of days prevents one from taking most things 'au tragique' and makes existence passable enough."

Paris 1900.

"Life is so short. The only peace is in remembering how short life is. I work so hard at my painting. My efforts alone deserve some results, but it is slow in forthcoming. This week however there is an improvement. I get up before seven every day and go to bed at nine and drink eight glasses of milk a day. I hope you are pleased. Some emotion, more extremeness, some craziness, some feeling, really I think it is necessary. I do not see any satisfaction in anything but intense feeling. Intense feeling which may come even in the quietest of lives and which does not depend upon external events. It is astonishing how easy it is to be tolerant of people's personalities, however unsympathetic to one, and how very easy also to be intolerant of their point of view."

"There is nothing so disastrous as to be fooled by the appreciation where it is not deserved. How I wish I could do any one thing well."

Paris 1900.

"I hope it is a satisfaction to you to know how well pleased I am here and that I am absolutely content. I think I will indulge myself and get a jewel with your Xmas present. 'The Perfect One' loves to deck out in gems! I have been reading an essay on Tolstoi and I am took with an attack of asceticism, unequaled by any heretofore. This, following my last sentence, is charmingly typical of my character, is it not? There is one girl here who really might be very nice. She is eyed as being somewhat emancipated by the household I think, but I think it is only Youthful freshness of a first departure and inexperience in calculating the impression she makes on the style of her audience."

At the end of the same year Nelka went for four months to Sofia, Bulgaria where she stayed with the Russian Minister Mr. Bakhmeteff, my uncle and Madame Bakhmeteff who was an American and Nelka's godmother.

She enjoyed very much that stay in Bulgaria and had a very interesting and pleasant time and great success. From Sofia she wrote a number of letters which reflect both the interest of her stay there as well as the continued constant searching so typical of her youth, and perhaps of her whole life.

Sofia 1900.

"How can I tell you how I feel at being here. It is an entirely new world. So interesting and so beautiful! No one could be lovelier to me than Madame Bakhmeteff. She comes in to my room every two minutes and asks me if I have anything under the sun and seems so pleased to have me here. It is really delightful. I have a sitting room next to my bedroom all to myself, filled with every book that I have been longing to get hold of. Everything is so picturesque. I was delighted with Denmark but how different this is. There is something I respond to in that orderly, cold atmosphere, but I think there is more that I respond to in the Orient. How much more simple and less complicated the life is here. I was almost stopped at the Hungarian and Servian frontier because I had no passport. By the merest chance I had a very old one in my bag which was absolutely invalid but which, added to my absolute refusal to leave the train, got me by the three frontiers in the end. I called a Turk and a Servian who were in the same compartment to my rescue and for an hour or more carried on a heated discussion in every language. I am going to ride every day much to my delight. The diplomatic corps have to depend almost entirely on each other and it is very interesting being thrown with people of so many different nationalities. I have been living so fully it seems to me for the last three or four years and still always a crescendo. I don't know why I always write so much about myself--egotistical youth--but how I realize my youth. Even while youth itself makes my head whirl, I stand back within myself and say almost sadly--it is youth. It is sad in a way because I know that the reaction of great interest upon me is youth, and not the interest."

Sofia 1900.

"You speak of danger; I don't see where danger is. The worst evil is prejudice. Without prejudice and without too much drive for worldly attainments, I don't see much danger. I am satisfied as far as I myself am concerned. Every moment is exciting and the regret or irritation I feel against many existing conditions is not wholly disagreeable. This is youth, and when I am older I will jog along at a slower rate. I am not like you, or like almost anyone I know, but I admire and respect those most whom I resemble the least. I am one mass of contradictions to myself, perhaps, supremely self-centered."

Sofia 1900.

"The freedom I have, good or bad, does not depend on the external conditions of one's life. I have enough sense of what is practical to keep in certain lines. No conditions on earth would hamper me mentally and I want to get life-proof through living."

"How I hate business! More and more I am beginning to think less and less of what one accomplishes materially in this life. What does it matter? I think it is less help to be able to help those about one a little materially and be more or less a nonentity as an individual than to be able to mean something as a person with a heart and comprehension. There are some beautiful things in this life that everything organized tries to make hideous and monstrous and I would always say 'gather ye roses while ye may.' I think that every one has almost a right to some happiness and a certain indulgence and the 'droit de temperament,' means something and need not always be selfish. If you do not think this, then there is only the other extreme of austere abnegation of self for any cause however trivial. Nature is the only guide and I don't believe Nature is bad. Of course the curse of freedom will allow one for a long time to distort and vilely modify natural instincts, but at least one can fly from the too palpable artificial. Dear Poodie, don't sigh. I only let off steam in words--that is safe. I am still a slave to this disgusting civilization and always your very devoted 'Perfect One', that is to be, or might have been, Nelka."

Sofia 1900.

"I really ought not to talk because I don't give myself the trouble to put my thoughts on general things in order and in every comment I always have the desire to embrace everything. I follow my own thoughts but love the immediate point and my brain is not in the proper condition to command its own vagaries."

Sofia 1900.

"What a delightful and full summer I have had. I can only reiterate that I am satisfied. I have had so much. Given my nature and my life, more than anyone I know. I may be mistaken in everything but I never doubt my application when I am about to act. Perhaps I will some day, but I don't think so. I have learned a certain 'science de la vie,' meaning this time the artificial, irrational life that is practiced and that I despise. Apart from this I have my own notion of real life and that is my own luxury. When I write so it sounds so big and so out of place for a girl, I always regret saying anything. If what I think means anything it will be shown in my life and so far my life is only a selfish, soft existence, so perhaps that is all I mean. I don't know that I love many things with conviction, but I know I have a contempt with conviction for many things."

"I have stopped looking at life as written with a big L. Regarding it only as an indefinite term of years is much less appalling; it does not lessen the joys and does lessen the sorrows and disappointments. The method now is to catch every minute and stretch it for all it is worth."

"You say I am not adaptive. It is difficult to s'entendre on what that means. Many sides I am, to my detriment. Too many sides for it seems to me I can fit into almost any opening with equal interest. And I find very few environments wholly uncongenial. I am not conscious of exacting in my nature any particular strain or line but what irritates and antagonizes me in any environment is the presumption on the part of the creator of that environment that theirs is the only world-view. I suppose the really strongest thing in me is an instinctive spirit of contradiction, for I always rise spontaneously against anything and everything that is proclaimed to me as being so. This is perhaps rather sweeping but it is more or less so. People influence me never by what they tell me but by the general impression they make on me and that I see them make on other people. I believe what I just wrote is nonsense. I only mean to say that I am only intolerant of intolerance. I think the ordinary rules of good behavior demand a certain amount of tolerance and with that any milieu is possible. I am sure of a few things but these few things are very firmly fixed in my mind. Nothing surprises me."

Sofia, 1900.

"I know there is a certain fundamental something in me that will make me apply the same reasoning to everything and I am never worried about any question. In fact I don't know what it is to have a question in mind--that which might be one is simply left out. I cannot say I know myself of course, but I know more of myself than anyone else does and I am certainly more severe. I do not recognize a good thing in me. I believe I am level headed and more or less reasonable, but that is not my merit. Any sanity of judgment I have comes from Mama. Whatever good there may be is due entirely to her. 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 mass 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 élan are not usually resigned to all obstacles and resignation is often lassitude. 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 embassies and especially the Russian embassy, 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 attitude 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 assurance 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.