We answered yes.
"Now which Sister will come with me? Marie Ivanovna,I think it would interest you. No danger, except a stray shrapnel or two. Will you come?"
There leapt upon us then, with an agitation that seemed to silence the very battery itself, Trenchard's voice:
"No.... No ... Marie. No, it's dangerous. Semyonov says so. Your first day...."
He spoke in English, his voice trembling. I turned to see his face white, his eyes wide open and at the same time blind; he passionately addressed himself to Marie Ivanovna and to her alone.
But she turned impatiently.
"Why, of course, Doctor. I'm ready at once."
Trenchard put his hand on her arm.
"You are not to go—Marie, do you hear? I have a right ... I tell you, you are not to go!"
"Don't be so stupid, John," she shook off his arm. "Please, Doctor, I'm ready."
Semyonov turned to Trenchard with a smile: "Mr. (they all called him Mr. now), it will be quite well ... I will look after her."
"You ... you" (Trenchard could not control his voice), "you can't prevent shrapnel—bullets. You don't care, you...."
Semyonov's voice was sharp: "I think it better that Sister Marie Ivanovna should come with me. You understand, the rest of you.... We shall meet at dusk."
Trenchard only said "Marie ..." then turned away from us. Anna Petrovna, who had said nothing during this scene and had, indeed, seemed to be oblivious of it, plunged with her heavy clumsy walk across the road to the Red Cross house. The Doctor and Marie Ivanovna disappeared behind the trench. I was, as was always my case with Trenchard, both sympathetic and irritated. It was difficultfor him, of course, but what did he expect the girl to do? Could he have supposed for a single moment that she would remain? Could it be possible that he knew her so little as that? And why make a scene now before Semyonov when he obviously could do nothing? I knew, moreover, with a certainty that was almost ironic in its clarity, that Marie Ivanovna did not love, did not, perhaps, even care for him. By what moment in Petrograd, a moment flaming with their high purposes and the purple shadows of a Russian "white night," had she been entranced into some glorious vision of him? On the very day that followed, she had known, I was convinced, her mistake. At the station she had known it, and instead of the fine Sir Galahad "without reproach" of the previous night she saw some figure that, had she been English born, would have appeared to her as Alice's White Knight perchance, or at best the warm-hearted Uncle Toby, or that most Christian of English heroes—Parson Adams. I could imagine that life had been so impulsive, so straightforward, so simple a thing to her that this sudden implication in an affair complicated and even dishonest caused her bitter disquiet. Looking back now I could trace again and again the sudden flashes, through her happiness, of this distress.
He perhaps should have perceived it, but I could understand that he could not believe that his treasure had at last after all these years been given to him for so brief a moment. He could not, he would not, believe it. Well, I knew that his eyes must very soon be opened to the truth....
As I turned to see him sitting on the stretcher with his back to me, his head hanging a little as though it were too heavy for his neck, his back bent, his long arms fallen loose at his sides, I thought that Alice's White Knight he, in solemn truth, presented.
He had a talent for doing things to his uniform. His cap, instead of being raised in front, was flat, his jacket bulged out above his belt, and the straps on his boot had broken from their holdings. He filled the pockets of his trousers, in moments of absent-minded absorption, with articles that he fancied that he would need—sometimes food, black bread and sausage, sometimes a large pocket-knife, a folding drinking glass, a ball of string, a notebook. These things protruded, or gave his clothes a strange bulky look, fat in some places, thin in others. As I saw him his shoulder-blades seemed to pierce his coat: I could fancy with what agitation his hands were clenched.
We sat down, the three of us together, and again the battery leapt upon us. Now the sun was hot above the trees and the effect of the noise behind us was that we ourselves, every two or three minutes, were caught up, flung to the ground, recovered, breathless, exhausted, only to be hurled again!
How miserable we were, how lost, how desolate, Trenchard hearing in every sound the death of his lady, Audrey Vassilievitch dreaming, I fancy, that he had been caught in some cage out of which he would never again escape. I, sick, almost blind with headache, and yet exasperated, irritated by the emptiness of it all. If only we might run down that hill! There surely we should find....
At the very moment when the battery had finished as it seemed to me its work of smashing my head into pulp the wagon arrived.
"Now," I thought to myself as I climbed on to the straw, "I shall begin to be excited!" We, all three of us, kneeling on the cart, peered forward into the dim blue afternoon. We were very silent—only once Trenchard said to me, "Perhaps we shall find her down here: where we're going. What do you think, Durward?"
"I'm afraid not!" I answered. "But still she'll be all right. Semyonov will look after her!"
"Oh! Semyonov!" he answered.
How joyful we were to leave our battery behind us. As the trees closed around it we could fancy its baffled rage. Other batteries now seemed to draw nearer to us and the whole forest was filled with childish quarrelling giants; but as we began to bump down the hill out of the forest stranger sounds attacked us. On either side of us were cornfields and out of the heart of those from under our very feet as it seemed there were explosions of a strange stinging metallic kind—not angry and human as the battery had been, but rather like some huge bottle cracking in the sun. These huge bottles—one could fancy them green and shining somewhere in the corn—cracked one after another; positively the sound intensified the heat of the sun upon one's head. There were too now, for the first time in our experience, shrapnel. They were not over us, but ran somewhere on our right across the valley. Their sound was "fireworks" and nothing more—so that alarm at their gentle holiday temper was impossible. Brock's Fireworks on a Thursday evening at the Crystal Palace, oneself a small boy sitting with both hands between one's knees, one's mouth open, a damp box of chocolates on one's lap, the murmured "Ah ..." of the happy crowd as the little gentle "Pop!" showed green and red against the blue night sky. Ah! there was the little "Pop!" and after it a tiny curling cloud of smoke in the air, the whole affair so gentle, so kind even. There! sighing overhead they go! Five, six little curls of smoke, and then beneath our very horses' feet again a huge green bottle cracking in the sun!
And with all this noise not a living soul to be seen! We had before us as we slowly bumped down the hill a fair view. The river was hidden from us, but there was a little hamlet guarded happily by a green wood; there was a line of fair hills, fields of corn, and the long dusty white road. Not a soul to be seen, only our bumping cart and, now and then, against the burning sky those little curling circles of smoke. The world slumbered....
Suddenly from the ditch at the side of the road a soldier appeared, spoke to our driver and disappeared again.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"He says, your Honour, that we must hasten. We may be hit."
"Hit here—on this road?"
"Tak totchno."
"Well, hurry then."
I caught a little frightened sigh behind me from Andrey Vassilievitch, whom the events of the day had frozen into horror-stricken silence. We hurried, bumping along; at the bottom of the hill there was a farmhouse. From behind it an officer appeared.
"What are you doing there? You're under fire.... Red Cross? Ah yes, we had a message about you. Dr. Semyonov?... Yes. Please come this way. Hurry, please!"
We were led across the farmyard and almost tumbled into a trench at the farther end of it.
It wasn't until I felt some one touch my shoulder that I realised my position. We were sitting, the three of us, in a slanting fashion with our backs to the earthworks of the trench. To our right, under an improvised round roof, a little dried-up man like a bee, with his tunic open at theneck and a beard of some days on his chin, was calling down a telephone.
Next to me on the left a smart young officer, of a perfect neatness and even dandiness, was eating his supper, which his servant, crouching in front of him, ladled with a spoon out of a tin can. Beyond him again the soldiers in a long line under the farm wall were sewing their clothes, eating, talking in whispers, and one of them reading a newspaper aloud to himself.
A barn opposite us in ruins showed between its bare posts the green fields beyond. Now and then a soldier would move across the yard to the door of the farm, and he seemed to slide with something between walking and running, his shoulders bent, his head down. The sun, low now, showed just above the end of the farm roof and the lines of light were orange between the shadows of the barn. All the batteries seemed now very far away; the only sound in the world was the occasional sigh of the shrapnel. The farmyard was bathed in the peace of the summer evening.
The Colonel, when he had finished his conversation with some humorous sally that gave him great pleasure, greeted us.
"Very glad to see you, gentlemen.... Two Englishmen! Well, that's the Alliance in very truth ... yes.... How's London, gentlemen? Yes,golubchik, that small tin—the grey one. No,durak, thesmallone. Dr. Semyonov sent a message. Pray make yourselves comfortable, but don't raise your heads. They may turn their minds in this direction at any moment again. We've had them once already this afternoon. Eh, Piotr Ivanovitch (this to the smart young officer), that would have made your Ekaterina Petrovna jump in her sleep—ha, ha, ha—oh, yes, but I can see her jumping.... Hullo, telephone—Give it here!That you, Ivan Leontievitch? No ... very well for the moment.... Two Englishmen here sitting in my trench—truth itself! Well, what about the Second 'Rota'? Are they coming down?...Yeh Bogu, I don't know! What do you say?..."
The young officer, in a very gentle and melodious voice, offered Trenchard, who was sitting next to him, some supper.
"One of these cutlets?"
Trenchard, blushing and stammering, refused.
"A cigarette, then?"
Trenchard again refused and Piotr Ivanovitch, having done his duty, relapsed into his muffled elegance. We sat very quietly there; Trenchard staring with distressed eyes in front of him. Andrey Vassilievitch, very uncomfortable, his fat body sliding forward on the slant, pulling itself up, then sliding again—always he maintained his air of importance, giving his cough, twisting the ends of his moustache, staring, fiercely, at some one suddenly that he might disconcert him, patting, with his plump little hands, his clothes.
The shadows lengthened and a great green oak that hung over the barn seemed, as the evening advanced, to grow larger and larger and to absorb into its heart all the flaming colours of the day, to press them into its dark shadow and to hide them, safe and contented, until another morning.
I sat there and gradually, caught, as it seemed to me, into a world of whispers and half-lights, I slipped forward a little down into the dark walls of the trench and half-slumbered, half clung still to the buzzing voice of the Colonel, the languid replies of the young officer. I felt then that some one was whispering to me that my real adventure was about to begin. I could see quite plainly, like a road up which I had gone, the events of the day behind me. I saw the ride under the stars, the cold red dawn. Marie Ivanovna standing beneath my cart, the sudden battery and the desolate hours of waiting, the wounded men stumbling out of the forest, the ride down the hill and the green bottles bursting in the sun, the sudden silences and the sudden sounds, my own weariness and discomfort and loneliness and now Something—was it the dark green oak that bent down and hid the world for me?—whispered, "You're drawing near—you're close—you're almost there.... In a moment you will see ... you will see ... you will see...."
Somewhere the soldiers were singing, and then all sounds ceased. We were standing, many of us, in the dark, the great oak and many other giant trees were about us and the utter silence was like a sudden plunge into deep water on a hot day. We were waiting, ready for the Creature, breathless with suspense.
"Now!" some one cried, and instantly there was such a roar that I seemed to be lifted by it far into the sky, held, rocked, then dropped gently. I woke to find myself standing up in the trench, my hands to my ears. I was aware first that the sky had changed from blue into a muddy grey, then that dust and an ugly smell were in my eyes, my mouth, my nose. I remembered that I repeated stupidly, again and again: "What? what? what?" Then the grey sky slowly fell away as though it were pushed by some hand and I saw the faint evening blue, with (so strange and unreal they seemed) silver-pointed stars. I caught my breath and realised that now the whole right corner of the barn was gone. The field stretched, a dark shadow, to the edge of the yard. In the ground where the stakes of the barn had been there was a deep pit; scattered helter-skelter were bricks, pieces of wood, and over it all a cloud of thin fine dust that hovered and swung a little like grey silk. The line of soldiers was crouched back into the trench as though ithad been driven by some force. From, as it appeared, a great distance, I heard the Colonel's voice: "Slava Bogu, another step to the right and we'd not have had time to say 'good-bye.'... Get in there, you ... with your head out like that, do you want another?" I was conscious then of Andrey Vassilievitch sitting huddled on the ground of the trench, his head tucked into his chest.
"You're not hurt, are you?" I said, bending down to him,
He got up and to my surprise seemed quite composed. He was rubbing his eyes as though he had waked from sleep.
"Not at all," he answered in his shrill little voice. "No.... What a noise! Did you hear it, Ivan Andreievitch?"
Did I hear it? A ridiculous question!
"But I assure you I was not alarmed," he said eagerly, turning round to the young officer, who was rather red in the face but otherwise unruffled. "The first time that one has been so close to me. What a noise!"
Trenchard searched in his pockets for something.
"What is it?" I asked.
"My handkerchief!" he answered. "So dusty after that. It's in my eyes!"
He tumbled on to the ground a large clasp pocket-knife, a hunk of black bread, a cigarette-case and some old letters. "I had one," he muttered anxiously. "Somewhere, I know...."
I heard the Colonel's voice again. "No one touched! There's some more of their precious ammunition wasted.... What about your Ekaterina, Piotr Ivanovitch—Ho, ho, ho!... Here,golubchik, the telephone!... Hullo! Hullo!"
For myself I had the irritation that one might feel had a boy thrown a stone over the wall, broken a window and run away. Moreover, I felt that again I had missed—IT.Always round the corner, always just out of sight, always mocking one's clumsy pursuit. And still, even now, I felt no excitement, no curiosity. My feet had not yet touched the enchanted ground....
The trench had at once slipped back into its earlier composure. The dusk was now creeping down the hill; with every stir of the breeze more stars were blown into the sky; the oak was all black now like a friendly shadow protecting me.
"There'll be no more for a while," said the Colonel. He was right. There was stillness; no battery, however distant, no pitter-patter of rifle fire, no chattering report of the machine guns.
Men began to cross the yard, slowly, without caution. The dusk caught us so that I could not see the Colonel's face; a stream that cut the field, hidden in the day, was now suddenly revealed by a grinning careless moon.
Then a soldier crossed the yard to us, told us that Dr. Semyonov wished us to start and had sent us a guide; the wagons were ready.
At that instant, whence I know not, for the first time that day, excitement leapt upon me.
Events had hitherto passed before me like the shadowed film of a cinematograph; it had been as though some one had given me glimpses of a life, an adventure, a country with which I should later have some concern but whose boundaries I was not yet to cross. Now, suddenly, whether it was because of the dark and the silence I cannot say, I had become, myself, an actor in the affair. It was not simply that we were given something definite to do—we had had wounded during the morning—it was rather that, as in the children's game we were "hot," we had drawn in a moment close to some one or something of whose presencewe were quite distinctly aware. As we walked across the yard into the long low field, speaking in whispers, watching a shaft of light, perhaps some distant projector that trembled in pale white shadows on the horizon, we seemed to me to be, in actual truth, the hunters of Trenchard's dream.
Never, surely, before, had I known the world so silent. Under the hedges that lined the field there were soldiers like ghosts; our own wagons, with the sanitars walking beside them, moved across the ground without even the creak of a wheel. Semyonov was to meet us in an hour's time at a certain crossroad. I was given the command of the party. I was now, in literal truth, breathlessly excited. My heart was beating in my breast like some creature who makes running leaps at escape. My tongue was dry and my brain hot. But I was happy ... happy with a strange exaltation that was unlike any emotion that I had known before. It was in part the happiness that I had known sometimes in Rugby football or in tennis when the players were evenly matched and the game hard, but it was more than that. It had in it something of the happiness that I have known, after many days at sea, on the first view of land—but it was more than that. Something of the happiness of possessing, at last, some object which one has many days desired and never hoped to attain—but more, too, than that. Something of the happiness of danger or pain that one has dreaded and finds, in actual truth, give way before one's resolution—but more, again, than that. This happiness, this exultation that I felt now but dimly, and was to know more fully afterwards (but never, alas, as my companions were to know it) is the subject of this book. The scent of it, the full revelation of it, has not, until now, been my reward; I can only, as a spectator, watch that revelation as it came afterwards to others more fortunate than I. But what Iwrite is the truth as far as I, from the outside, have seen it. If it is not true, this book has no value whatever.
We were warned by the soldier who guarded us not to walk in a group and we stole now, beneath a garden-wall, white under the moon, in a long line. I could hear Trenchard behind me stumbling over the stones and ruts, walking as he always did with little jerks, as though his legs were beyond his control. We came then on to the high road, which was so white and clear in the moonlight that it seemed as though the whole Austrian army must instantly whisper to themselves: "Ah, there they are!" and fire. The ditch to our right, as far as I could see, was lined with soldiers, hidden by the hedge behind them, their rifles just pointing on to the white surface of the land. Our guide asked them their division and was answered in a whisper. The soldiers were ghosts: there was no one, save ourselves, alive in the whole world....
Then a little incident occurred. I was walking in the rear of our wagons that I might see that all were there. I felt a touch on my arm and found Andrey Vassilievitch standing in the middle of the road. His face, staring at me as though I were a stranger, expressed desperate determination.
"Come on," I said. "We've no time to waste."
"I'm not coming," he whispered back. His voice was breathless as though he had been running.
"Nonsense," I answered roughly, and I put my hand on his arm. His body trembled in jerks and starts.
"It's madness ... this road ... the moon.... Of course they'll fire.... We'll all be killed. But it isn't ... it isn't ... I can't move...."
"Youmustmove.... Come, Andrey Vassilievitch,you've been brave enough all day. There's no danger, I tell you. See how quiet everything is. Youmust...."
"I can't.... It's nothing ... nothing to do with me.... It's awful all day—and now this!"
I thought of Marie Ivanovna early in the morning. I looked down the road and saw that the wagons were slowly moving into the distant shadows.
"Youmustcome," I repeated. "We can't leave you here. Don't think of yourself. And nothing can touch you—nothing, I tell you."
"I'll go back, I must. I can't go on."
"Go back? How can you? Where to? You can't go back to the trench. We shan't know where to find you." A furious anger seized me; I caught his arm. "I'll leave you, if you like. There are other things more important."
I move away from him. He looked down the long road, looked back.
"Oh, I can't ... I can't," he repeated.
"What did you come for?" I whispered furiously. "What did you think war was?... Well, good-bye, do as you please!"
As I drew away I saw a look of desperate determination in his eyes. He looked at me like a dog who expects to be beaten. Then what must have been one of the supreme moments of his life came to him. I saw him struggle to command, with the effort of his whole soul, his terror. For a moment he wavered. He made a hopeless gesture with his hand, took two little steps as though he would run into the hedge amongst the soldiers and hide there, then suddenly walked past me, quickly, towards the wagons, with his own absurd little strut, with his head up, giving his cough, looking, after that, neither to the right, nor to the left.
In silence we caught up the wagons. Soon, at somecross-roads, they came to a pause. The guide was waiting for me. "It would be better, your Honour," he whispered, "for the wagons to stay here. We shall go now simply with the stretchers...."
We left the wagons and, some fifteen of us, turned off down a lane to the left. Sometimes there were soldiers in the hedges, sometimes they met us, slipping from shadow to shadow. Always we asked whether they knew of any wounded. We found a wounded soldier groaning under the hedge. One leg was soaked in blood and he gave little shrill desperate cries as we lifted him on to the stretcher. Another soldier, lying on the road in the moonlight, murmured incessantly: "Bojé moi! Bojé moi! Bojé moi!" But they were all ghosts. We alone, in that familiar and yet so unreal world, were alive. When a stretcher was filled, four sanitars turned back with it to the wagons, and we were soon a very small party. We arrived at a church—a large fantastic white church with a green turret that I had seen from the opposite hill in the morning. Then it had seemed small and very remote. I had been told that much firing had been centring round it, and it seemed now for me very strange that we should be standing under its very shadow, its outline so quiet and grave under the moon, with its churchyard, a little orchard behind it, and a garden, scenting the night air, close at hand. Here in the graveyard there was a group of wounded soldiers, in their eyes that look of faithful expectation of certain relief. Our stretchers were soon full.
We were about to turn back when suddenly the road behind us was filled with shadows. As we came out of the churchyard an officer stepped forward to meet us. We saluted and shook hands. He seemed a boy, but stood in frontof his men with an air as though he commanded the whole of this world of ghosts.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
We explained.
"Well, if you'll excuse me, you'd better make haste. An attack very shortly ... yes. I should advise you to be out of this. Petrogradsky Otriad? Yes ... very glad to have the pleasure...."
We left him, his men a grey cloud behind him, and when we had taken a few steps he seemed, with his young air of importance, his happy serious courtesy, to have been called out of the ground, then, with all his shadows behind him, to have been caught up into the air. These were not figures that had anything to do with the little curling wreaths of smoke, the bottles cracking in the sun, our furious giants of the morning.
"Ah,Bojé moi, Bojé moi!" sighed the wounded.... It was impossible, in such a world of dim shadow, that there should ever be any other sound again.
My excitement had never left me; I had had no doubt, during this last half-hour, that I was on the Enchanted Ground of the Enemy, so stray and figurative had been my impressions all day. Now they were all gathered into this half-hour and the whole affair received its climax. "Ah," I thought to myself, "if I might only stay here now I should draw closer and closer—I should make my discovery, hunt him down. But just when I am on the verge I must leave it all. Ah, if I could but stay!"
Nevertheless we hastened. The world, in spite of the ghosts, was real enough for us to be conscious of that attack looming behind us. We found our wagons, transferred our wounded, then hurried down the road. We found the cross-roads and there, waiting for us, Semyonov and MarieIvanovna. Standing in the moonlight, commanding, as it seemed to me, all of us, even Semyonov, she was a very different figure from the frightened girl of the early morning. Now her life was in her eyes, her body inflamed with the fire of the things that had come to her. So young in experience was she, so ignorant of all earlier adventure, that she could well be seized, utterly and completely, by her new vision ... possessed by some vision she was.
And that vision was not Trenchard. Seeing her, he hurried towards her, with a glad cry:
"Ah, you are safe!"
But she did not notice him.
"Quick, this way!... Yes, the stretchers here.... No, I have everything.... At once. There is little time!"
The wounded were laid on the stretchers in the square of the cross-roads. Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna bandaged them under the moonlight and with the aid of electric-torches. On every side of me there were little dialogues: "No ... not there. More this way. Yes, that bandage will do. It's fresh. Hold up his leg. No,durak, under the knee there.... Where's the lint?... Turn him a little—there—like that.Horosho, golubchik.Seitchass! No, turn it back over the thigh. Now, once more ... that's it. What's that—bullet or shrapnel?... Take it back again, over the shoulder.... Yes, twice!"
Once I caught sight of Trenchard, hurrying to be useful with the little bottle of iodine, stumbling over one of the stretchers, causing the wounded man to cry out.
Then Semyonov's voice angrily:
"Tchort! Who's that?... Ah, Meester! of course!"
Then Marie Ivanovna's voice: "I've finished this, Alexei Petrovitch.... That's all, isn't it?"
These voices were all whispers, floating from one side of the road to the other. The wounded men were lifted back on to the wagons. We moved off again; Semyonov, Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and I were now sitting together.
We left the flat fields where we had been so busy. Very slowly we began to climb the hill down which I had come this afternoon. Behind me was a great fan of country, black now under a hidden moon, dead as though our retreat from it, depriving it of the last proofs of life, had flung it back into non-existence. Before us was the black forest. Not a sound save the roll of our wheels and, sometimes, a cry from one of the wounded soldiers, not a stir of wind....
I looked back. Without an instant's warning that dead world, as a match is set to a waiting bonfire, broke into flame. A thousand rockets rose, soaring, in streams of light into the dark sky; the fields that had been vapour ran now with light. A huge projector, the eye, as it seemed to me, of that enemy for whom I had all day been searching, slowly wheeled across the world, cutting a great path across the plain, picking houses and trees and fields out of space, then dropping them back again. The rockets were gold and green, sometimes as it seemed ringed with fire, sometimes cold like dead moons, sometimes sparkling and quivering like great stars. And with this light the whole world crackled into sound as though the sky, a vast china plate, had been smashed by some angry god and been flung, in a million pieces, to earth. The rifle-fire rose from horizon to horizon like a living thing. Now the shrapnel rose, breaking on the dark sky in flashes of fire. Suddenly some house was burning! The flames rose in a column, breaking into tongues that advanced and retreated, climbed and fell again. In the farthest distance other houses had caught and their glow trembled in faint yellow light fading intoshadow when the projector found them. With a roar at our back our own cannon began; the world bellowed and shook and trembled at our feet.
We reached the top of the hill. I caught one final vision, the picture seeming to sway with all its lights, its shadows, its giant eye that governed it, its colours and its mist, like a tapestry blown by wind. I saw in our wagon, their faces lighted by the fire, Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna. Semyonov knelt on the wooden barrier of the cart, his figure outlined square and strong. She was kneeling behind him, her hands on his shoulders. Her face was exultant, victorious. She seemed to me the inspirer of that scene, to have created it, to hold it now with the authority of her gaze.
Behind her Trenchard was in shadow.
We were on the hill-top, the cannon, as it seemed, on every side of us. We hung for a moment so, the sky flaming up to our feet. Then we had fallen down between the woods, every step muffling the sounds. Everything was dark as though a curtain had been dropped.
Semyonov turned round to me.
"Well," he said, "there's your battle.... You've been in the thick of it to-day!"
I saw his eyes turned to Marie Ivanovna as though already he possessed her.
I was suddenly tired, disappointed, exhausted.
"We've not been in the thick of it," I answered. "We have missed it—all day we have missed it!"
I tried to settle down in my wagon. "I beg your pardon," I said irritably to Trenchard, "but your boot is in my neck!"
But this is not my story. If I have hitherto taken the chief place it is because, in some degree, the impressions of Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna, Andrey Vassilievitch must, during those first days, have run with my own. We had all been brought to the same point—that last vision from the hill of the battle of S—— and from that day we were no longer apprentices.
I now then retire. What happened to myself during the succeeding months is of no matter. But two warnings may be offered. The first is that it must not be supposed that the experiences of myself, of Trenchard, of Nikitin in this business found their parallel in any other single human being alive. It would be quite possible to select every individual member of our Otriad and to prove from their case that the effect of war upon the human soul—whether Russian or English—was thus and thus. A study, for example, might be made of Anna Petrovna to show that the effect of war is simply nothing at all, that any one who pretends to extract cases and contrasts from the contact of war with the soul is simply peddling in melodrama. Anna Petrovna herself would certainly have been of that opinion. Or one might select Sister K—— and prove from her case that the effect of war was to display the earthly failings and wickedness of mankind, that it was a punishment hurled by an irate God upon an unrepentant people and that any one whosaw beauty or courage in such a business was a sham sentimentalist. Sister K—— would take a gloomy joy in such a denunciation. Or if one selected the boy Goga it would be simply to state that war was an immensely jolly business, in which one stood the chance of winning the Georgian medal and thus triumphing over one's schoolfellows, in which people were certainly killed but "it couldn't happen to oneself"; meals were plentiful, there were horses to ride, one was spoken to pleasantly by captains and even generals. Moreover one wore a uniform.
Or if Molozov, our chief, were questioned he would most certainly say that war, as he saw it, was mainly a business of diplomacy, a business of keeping the people around one in good temper, the soldiers in good order, the generals and their staffs in good appetite, the other Red Cross organisations in good self-conceit, and himself in good health. All these things he did most admirably and he had, moreover, a heart that felt as deeply for Russia as any heart in the world; but see the matter psychologically or even dramatically he would not. He had his own "nerves" and on occasion he displayed them, but war was for him, entirely, a thing of training opposed to training, strategy opposed to strategy, method and system opposed to method and system. For our doctors again, war was half an affair of blood and bones, half an affair of longing for home and children. The army doctors contemplated our voluntary efforts with a certain irony. What could we understand of war when we might, if we pleased, return home at any moment? Why, it was simply a picnic to us.... No, they saw in it no drama whatever.
Nevertheless how are we to be assured that these others, Anna Petrovna, Sister K——, Goga, the Doctors had not their own secret view? The subject here is simply the attitude of certain private persons with whom I was allowed some intimacy ... for the rest one has no right to speak.
There comes then the second difficulty, namely: that of Nikitin, Andrey Vassilievitch, Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna one can only present a foreign point of view. Of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch, at least, I was the friend, but however deeply a Russian admits an Englishman into friendship he can, to the very last, puzzle, confuse, utterly surprise him. The Russian character seems, superficially, with its lack of restraint, its idealism, its impracticality, its mysticism, its material simplicities, to be so readily grasped that the surprise that finally remains is the more dumbfounding. Perhaps after all it is the very closeness of our resemblance the one to the other that confuses us. It is, perhaps, that in the Russians' soul the East can never be reconciled to the West. It is perhaps that the Russian never reveals his secret ideal even to himself; far distant is it then from his friend. It may be that towards other men the Russian is indifferent and towards women his relation is so completely sexual that his true character is hidden from her. Whatever it be that surprise remains. For to those whom Russia and her people draw back again and again, however sternly they may resist, this sure truth stands: that here there is a mystery, a mystery that may never be discovered. In the very soul of Russia the mystery is stirring; here the restlessness, the eagerness, the disappointment, the vision of the pursuit is working; and some who are outside her gates she has drawn into that same search.
I am not sure whether I may speak of Nikitin as my friend. I believe that no one in our Otriad save Trenchard could make, with truth, this claim. But for his own reasons or, perhaps, for no reason at all, he chose me on twooccasions as his confidant, and of these two occasions I can recall every detail.
We returned that night from S—— to find that the whole Otriad had settled in the village of M——, where I myself had been the night before. We were all living in an empty deserted farmhouse, with a yard, a big orchard, wide barns and a wild overrun garden. We were, I think, a little disappointed at the very languid interest that the history of our adventures roused, but the truth was that the wounded had begun to arrive in great numbers and there was no time for travellers' stories.
A dream, I know, yesterday's experiences seemed to me as I settled down to the business that had filled so much of my earlier period at the war. Here, with the wounded, I was at home—the bare little room, the table with the bottles and bandages and scissors, the basins and dishes, the air ever thicker and thicker with that smell of dried blood, unwashed bodies, and iodine that is like no other smell in the world. The room would be crowded, the sanitars supporting legs and arms and heads, nurses dashing to the table for bandages or iodine or scissors, three or four stretchers occupying the floor of the room with the soldiers who were too severely wounded to sit or stand, these soldiers often utterly quiet, dying perhaps, or watching with eyes that realised only dreams and shadows, the little window square, the strip of sky, the changing colours of the day; then the sitting soldiers, on ordinary of a marvellous and most simple patience, watching the bandaging of their arms and hands and legs, whispering sometimes "Bojé moi! Bojé moi!" dragging themselves up from their desperate struggle for endurance to answer the sanitars who asked their name, their regiments, the nature of their wounds. Sometimesthey would talk, telling how the thing had happened to them:
"And there, your Honour, before I could move, she had come—such a noise—eh, eh, a terrible thing—I called out 'Zemliac. Here it is!' I said, and he...."
But as a rule they were very quiet, starting perhaps at the sting of the iodine, asking for a bandage to be tighter or not so tight, sometimes suddenly slipping in a faint to the ground, and then apologising afterwards. And in their eyes always that look as though, very shortly, they would hear some story so marvellous that it would compensate for all their present pain and distress. There would be the doctors, generally two at a time—Semyonov, unmoved, rough apparently in his handling of the men but always accomplishing his work with marvellous efficiency, abusing the nurses and sanitars without hesitation if they did not do as he wished, but never raising his soft ironic voice, his square body of a solidity and composure that nothing could ruffle, his fair beard, his blue eyes, his spotless linen all sharing in his self-assured superiority to us all; one of the Division doctors, Alexei Ivanovitch, a man from Little Russia, beloved of us all, whether in the Otriad or the army, a character possessing it seemed none of the Russian moods and sensibilities, of the kindest heart but no sentimentality, utterly free from self-praise, self-interest, self-assertion, humorous, loving passionately his country and, with all his Russian romance and even mysticism, packed with practical common sense; another Division doctor, a young man, carving for himself a practice out of Moscow merchants, crammed with all the latest inventions and discoveries, caring for nothing save his own career and frankly saying so, but a lively optimist whose belief in his own powers was quite refreshing in its sincerity.
In such a place and under such conditions Semyonov had at the earlier period been master of us all. The effect of his personality was such that we had, every one of us, believed him invincible. The very frankness of his estimate of the world and ourselves as the most worthless and incompetent bundle of rubbish, caused us to yield completely to him. We believed that he rated himself but little higher than the rest of us. Hewassuperior but only because he saw so clearly with eyes purged of sentiment and credulity. We, poor creatures, had still our moments of faith and confidence. I had never liked him and during these last days had positively hated him. I did not doubt that he was making the frankest love to Marie Ivanovna and I thought he was influencing her.... Trenchard was my friend, and what an infant indeed he seemed against Semyonov's scornful challenge!
But now, behold, Semyonov had his rival! If Semyonov cared nothing for any of us, Nikitin, it was plain enough, cared nothing for Semyonov. From the very first the two men had been opponents. It seemed as though Nikitin's great stature and fine air, as of a king travelling in disguise from some foreign country, made him the only man in the world to put out Semyonov's sinister blaze. Nikitin was an idealist, a mystic, a dreamer—everything that Semyonov was not. It is true that if we mattered nothing at all to Semyonov, we also mattered nothing at all to Nikitin, but for Nikitin there were dreams, visions, memories and hopes. We were contented to be banished from his attention when we were aware that happier objects detained him. We might envy him, we could not dislike him.
Semyonov never sneered at Nikitin. From the first he left him absolutely alone. The two men simply avoided one another in so far as was possible in a company so closely confined as ours. From the first they treated one another with a high and almost extravagant politeness. As Nikitin spoke but seldom, there was little opportunity for the manifestation of what Semyonov must have considered "his childishly romantic mind," and Nikitin, on his side, made on no single occasion a reply to the challenge of Semyonov's caustic cynicism.
But if Nikitin was an idealist he was also, as was quite evident, a doctor of absolutely first-rate ability and efficiency. I was present at the first operation that he conducted with us—an easy amputation. Semyonov was assisting and I know that he watched eagerly for some slip or hesitation. It was an operation that any medical student might have conducted with success, but the first incision of the knife showed Nikitin a surgeon of genius. Semyonov recognised it.... I fancied that from that moment I could detect in his attitude to Nikitin a puzzled wonder that such an artist could be at the same time such a fool.
I began to feel in Nikitin a very lively interest. I had from the first been conscious of his presence, his distinction, his attitude of patient expectation and continuously happy reminiscence; but I felt now for the first time a closer, more personal interest. From the first, as I have said on an earlier page, his relationship to Andrey Vassilievitch had puzzled me. If Nikitin were not of the common race of men, most assuredly was Andrey Vassilievitch of the most ordinary in the world. He was a little man of a type in no way distinctively Russian—a type very common in England, in America, in France, in Germany. He was, one would have said, of the world worldly, a man who, with a sharp business brain, had acquired for himself houses, lands, food, servants, acquaintances. Upon these achievements he would pride himself, having worked with his own hand tohis own advantage, having beaten other men who had started the race from the same mark as himself. He would be a man of a kindly disposition, hospitable, generous at times when needs were put plainly before him, but yet of little imagination, conventional in all his standards, readily influenced outside his business by any chance acquaintance, but nevertheless having his eye on worldly advantage and progress; he would be timid of soul, playing always for safety, taking the easiest way with all emotion, treading always the known road, accepting day by day the creed that was given to him; he would be, outside his brain, of a poor intelligence, accepting the things of art on the standard of popular applause, talking with a stupid garrulity about matters of which he had no first-hand knowledge—proud of his position as a man of the world, wise in the character and moods of men of which, in reality, he knew nothing. Had he been an Englishman or a German, this would have been all and yet, because he was a Russian, this was not even the beginning of the matter.
I had, as I have already said, in earlier days known him only slightly. I had once stayed for three days in his country-house and it was here that I had met his wife. Russian houses are open to all the world and, with such a man as Andrey Vassilievitch, through the doors crowds of men and women are always coming and going, treating their host like the platform of a railway station, eating his meals, sleeping on his beds, making rendezvous with their friends, and yet almost, on their departure, forgetting his very name.
My visit had been of a date now some five years old. I can only remember that his wife did not make any very definite impression upon me, a little quiet woman, of a short figure, with kind, rather sleepy eyes, a soft voice, and the air of one who knows her housewifely business to perfection and has joy in her knowledge. "Not interesting," I would have judged her, but I had during my stay no personal talk with her. It was only after my visit that I was told that this quiet woman was the passion of Andrey Vassilievitch's life. He had been over thirty when he had married her; she had been married before, had been treated, I was informed, with great brutality by her husband who had left her. She had then divorced him. Praise of her, I discovered, was universal. She was apparently a woman who created love in others, but this by no marked virtues or cleverness; no one said of her that she was "brilliant," "charming," "fascinating." People spoke of her as though here at least there was some one of whom they were sure, some one too who made them the characters they wished to be, some one finally who had not surrendered herself, who gave them her love but not her whole soul, keeping always mystery enough to maintain her independence. No scandal was connected with her name. I heard of Nikitin and others as her friends, and that was all. Then, quite suddenly, two months before the beginning of the war, she died. They said that Andrey Vassilievitch was like a lost dog, wished also at first to talk to all who had known her, wearying her friends with his reminiscences, his laments, his complaints—then suddenly silent, speaking to no one about her, at first burying himself in his business, then working on some committee in connexion with one of the hospitals, then, as it appeared on the impulse of a moment, departing to the war.
I had expected to find him a changed man and was, perhaps, disappointed that he should appear the same chattering feather-headed little character whom I had known of old. Nevertheless I knew well enough that there was more here than I could see, and that the root of the matter wasto be found in his connexion with Nikitin. In our Otriad, friendships were continually springing up and dying down. Some one would confide to one that so-and-so was "wonderfully sympathetic." From the other side one would hear the same. For some days these friends would be undivided, would search out from the Otriad the others who were of their mind, would lose no opportunity of declaring their "sympathy," would sit together at table, work together over the bandaging, unite together in the public discussions that were frequent and to a stranger's eye horribly heated. Then very soon there would come a rift. How could that Russian passionate longing for justified idealism be realised? Once more there were faults, spots on the sun, selfishness, bad temper, narrowness, what you please. And at every fresh disappointment would my companions be as surprised as though the same thing had not happened to them only a fortnight ago.
"But only last week you liked him so much!"
"How could I know that he would hold such opinions? Never in my life have I been more surprised."
So upon these little billows sailed the stout bark of Russian idealism, rising, falling, never overwhelmed, always bravely confident, never seeking for calm waters, refusing them indeed for their very placidity.
But in the midst of these shifting fortunes there were certain alliances and relationships that never changed. Amongst these was the alliance of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch. Friendship it could not be called. Nikitin, although apparently he was kindly to the little man, yielded him no intimacy. It seemed to us a very one-sided business, depending partly upon Andrey Vassilievitch's continual assertions that Nikitin was "his oldest friend and the closest friend of his wife," that "Nikitin was one of themost remarkable men in the world," that "only his intimate friends could know how remarkable he was"; partly too upon the dog-like capacity of Andrey Vassilievitch to fetch and carry for his friend, to put himself indeed to the greatest inconvenience. It was pathetic to see the flaming pleasure in the man's eyes when Nikitin permitted him to wait upon him, and how ironically, upon such an occasion, would Semyonov watch them both!
In spite of Nikitin's passivity he did, I fancied, more than merely suffer this unequal alliance. It seemed to me that there was behind his silence some active wish that the affair should continue. I should speak too strongly if I were to say that he took pleasure in the man's company, but he did, I believe, almost in spite of himself, secretly encourage it. And there was, in spite of the comedy that persistently hovered about his figure and habits, some fine spirit in Andrey Vassilievitch's championship of his hero. How he hated Semyonov! How he lost no single opportunity of trying to bring Nikitin forward in public, of proving to the world who was the greater of the two men! Something very single-hearted shone through the colour of his loyalty; nothing, I was convinced, could swerve him from his fidelity. That, at least, was until death.
There arose then in these days of the wounded at M——a strange relationship between myself and Nikitin. Friendship, I have said, I may not call it. Nikitin afterwards told me it was my interest in the study of human character that led to his frankness—as though he had said, "Here is a man who likes to play a certain game. I also enjoy it. We will play it together, but when the game is finished we separate." Although discussions as to the characters of one or another of us were continuous and, to an Englishman at any rate, most strangely public, I do not think that the Russians in our Otriad were really interested in human psychology. One criticised or praised in order to justify some personal disappointment or pleasure. There was nothing that gave our company greater pleasure than to declare in full voice that "So-and-so was a dear, most sympathetic, a fine man." Public praise was continuous and the most honest and spontaneous affair; if criticism sometimes followed with surprising quickness that was spontaneous too; all the emotions in our Otriad were spontaneous to the very extreme of spontaneity. But we were not real students of one another; we were content to call things by their names, to call silence silence, obstinacy obstinacy, good temper good temper, and leave it at that.
No one, I think, really considered Nikitin at all deeply. They admired him for his "quiet" but would have liked him better had he shared some of their frankness—and that was all.
It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room directly under Nikitin. The work had a peculiar and really unanalysable fascination for me. It was perhaps the directness of contact that pleased me. I suppose one felt that here at any rate one was doing immediate practical good, relieving distress and agony that must, by some one, be immediately relieved; and, at any rate, in the first days at M—— when the press of wounded was terrific (we treated, in one day and night, nine hundred wounded soldiers) there could be no doubt of the real demand for incessant tireless work. But there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a definite personality. One wasresolved to cripple its power because one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent, the lovers of truth and beauty; but that resolve, although it never altered, seemed (the nearer one approached the citadel) in some way to be farther and farther removed from the real question. Germany was of no importance, and the ruin that Germany was wreaking was of no importance compared with the histories of the individual souls that were now in the making. Here were we: Nikitin, Trenchard, Sister K——, Molozov, myself and the others—engaged upon our great adventure. Across the surface of the world, at this same instant, out upon the same hunt, seeking the same answer to their mystery, were millions of our fellows. Somewhere in the heart of the deep forest the enemy was hiding. We would defeat him? He would catch us unawares? He had some plot, some hidden surprise? What should we find when we met him?... We hated Germany, God knows, with a quiet, unresting, interminable hatred, but it was not Germany that we were fighting.
And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be the same man again. "No, your Honour," one soldier said to me. "It isn't my arm.... That is nothing,Slava Bogu... but life isn't so real now. It is half gone." He would explain no more.
Since the battle of S——, I had been restless. I wanted to be back there again and this work was to me like talkingto travellers who had come from some country that one knew and desired.
In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell ever larger and larger, with its burden of bloody rags and soiled bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn almost in half, faces mangled for life, hands battered into pulp, legs hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, passed and rose again in endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one ... in those early morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.
There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else, before or since, that attacked one on those early mornings. It was not a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like a cold hand pressing upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the blood seemed to stop in its course, one's heart beat feebly, and things were dim before one's eyes. One was stupid and chose one's words slowly, looking at people closely to seewhether one really knew them, even unsure about oneself, one's history, one's future; neither hungry, tired, nor thirsty, neither sad nor joyful, neither excited nor dull, only with the cold hand upon one's brow, catching (with troubled breath) the beating of one's heart.
In normal times the night-duty was of course taken in rotation, but during the pressure of these four days we had to snatch our rest when we might.
About midnight on the fifth day the procession of wounded suddenly slackened, and by two o'clock in the morning had ceased entirely. The two nurses went to bed leaving Nikitin, myself, and some sleepy sanitars alone. The little room was empty of all wounded, they having been removed to the tent on the farther side of the road. The candles had sunk deep into the bottles and were spluttering in a sea of grease. The room smelt abominably, the blood on the floor had trickled in thin red lines into the cracks between the boards, and the basins with the soiled bandages overflowed. There was absolute silence. One sanitar, asleep, had leaned, still standing, over a chair, and his shadow with his heavy hanging head high above the candle against the wall.
Nikitin, seeming gigantic in the failing candlelight, stood back against the window. He did not keep, as did Semyonov, perfect neatness. A night of work left him with his hair on end, his black beard rough and disordered; his shirtsleeves were turned up, his arms stained with blood, and in his white apron he looked like some kingly butcher. I was tired, the cold headache was upon me. I wished that I could go, but I knew that both he and I must stay until eight o'clock. While there was work to do nothing mattered, but now in the silence the whole world seemed as empty and foul as a drained and stinking tub.
Nikitin looked at me.
"You're tired," he said.
"No, I'm not tired," I answered. "I shouldn't sleep if I went to bed. But I've got a headache that is not a headache, I smell a smell that isn't a smell, I'm going to be sick—and yet I'm not going to be sick."
"Come outside," he said, "and get rid of this air." We went out and sat down on a wooden bench that bordered the yard. Before us was the high-road that ran from the town of S—— into the very heart of the Carpathians. As the cold grey faded we could catch the thin outline of those mountains, faint, like pencil-lines upon the sky now washed with pink, covered in their nearer reaches by thick forests, insubstantial, although they were close at hand, like water or long clouds. We could see the road, white and clear at our feet, melting into shadow beyond us, and catching in the little misty pools the coloured reflection of the morning sky.
The air was very fresh; a cock behind me welcomed the sun; the cold band withdrew from my forehead.
Nikitin was silent and I, silent also, sat there, almost asleep, happy and tranquil. It seemed to me very natural to him that he should neither move nor speak, but after a time he began to talk. I had in that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I was listening to some history. I know that I did not sleep and yet even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours. I know that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact. And yet it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist of all that slumber Nikitin's voice, soft, measured,itself like an echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated—but to my heart rather than to my brain. Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard in the train.... And now as I sit here, in so different a place, amongst men so different, those other two come back to me, happy ghosts. Yes, happy I know that one at least of them is!
Like water behind glass, like music behind a screen, Nikitin's voice comes back to me—dim but so close, mysterious but so intimate. Ah, the questions that I would ask him now if only I might have those morning hours over again!
"You're a solemn man altogether, Durward. Perhaps all Englishmen seem so to us, and it may be only your tranquillity, so unlike our moods and nerves by which we kill ourselves dead before we're half way through life.... I had an English tutor for a year when I was a boy. He didn't teach me much: 'all right' and 'Tank you' is the only English I've kept, but I think of him now as the very quietest man in all the universe. He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods and tempers killed him when he was just over forty.... We have a proverb, 'In the still marshes there are devils,' and we admire and fear quiet men because they have something that we have not. And I like the way that you watch us, Durward. Your friend Trenchard does not watch us at all and one could be his friend. For you one has quite another feeling. It is as though I had something to give you that you really want. Why should I not give it you? My giving it will do me no harm, it may even yield me pleasure. You will not throw it away. You are an Englishman and will not for a moment's temper or passion reveal secrets.And there are no secrets. What I tell you you may tell the world—but I warn you that it will neither interest them nor will they believe it.... There is, you see, no climax to my story. I have no story, indeed; like an old feldscher in my village who hates our village Pope. 'Why, Georg Georgevitch,' I say, 'do you hate him? He is a worthy man.' 'Your Honour,' he says, 'there is nothing there; a fat man, but God has the rest of him—I hate him for his emptiness.' I'm in a humour to talk. I have, in a way, fulfilled the purpose that my English tutor created in me. I've grown a sort of quiet skin, you know, but under that skin the heart pounds away, the veins swell to bursting. I'm a fool behind it all—just a fool as every Russian is a fool with more in hand than he knows how to deal with. You don't understand Russia, do you? No, and I don't and no one does. But we can all talk about her—and love her too, if you like, although our sentiment's a bad thing in us, some say. But for us not to talk—for one of us to be silent—do you know how hard that is?... And through it all how I despise myself for wishing to tell them! What business is it of theirs? Then this war. Can you conceive what it is doing to Russians? If you have loved Russia and dreamed for her and had your dreams flung again and again to the ground and trampled on—and now, once more, the bubbles are in the sky, glittering, gleaming ... do we not have to speak, do you think? Must it not be hard, when before we have not been able to be silent about women and vodka, to be silent now about the dearest wish of our heart? We have come out here, all of us, to see what we will find. I have come because I want to get nearer to something—I had brought something in my heart about which I had learnt to be silent. 'That is enough!' I thought, 'there can be nothing else about which I can wish to talk; but now, suddenly, like that crucifix on the hillock by the road that the sun has just touched, there is something more. And now here we are nothing ... two souls come together out of space for an hour ... and it doesn't matter what I say to you, except that it's true and the truth will be something for you. Here's what I've come to the war with ... my little bit of possession, if you like, that I've brought with me, as we've all brought something. Will you understand me? Perhaps not, and it really doesn't matter. I know what I have, what I want, but not what I am. So how should you know if I do not? And I love life, I believe in God. I wish to meet Death. One can be serious without being absurd at an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things.... Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about us. You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at it during at least half the week.
"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend's house in Petrograd. He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration, but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man whom I would ever care to know. I had been at this time five years in Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon. I was a successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own actions, would not die. How I wished for it to die! I thought of the day when I should be without it as the day of liberation, of freedom. That had become my idea, I must tell you, the dominating idea of my life: that I should kill my idealism, laugh at the belief in God, lose faith in every one and everything, andthen simply enjoy myself—my work which I loved and my pleasure which I should love when my idealism had died.... Sometimes during those years I thought that it was dying. Women helped to kill it, I believed, and I knew many women, desperately persistently laughing at them, leaving them or being left by them; and then, in spite of myself, bitterly, deeply disappointed. Something always saying to me: 'I am God and you cannot hide from me.' 'I am God and I will not be hidden.'
"And on this night, about five years ago, at the house of a friend, I met Andrey Vassilievitch. We left the house together, and because it was a fine night, walked down the Nevski. There at the corner of the Morskaia, because he was a nervous man who wished to be well with every one in the world and because he had nothing especial to say, he asked me to dinner, and I, because it was a fine night and there had been good wine, said that I would go.
"The next day I cursed my folly. I do not know to this day why I did not break the engagement, it would have been sufficiently easy, but break it I did not and a week later, reluctantly, I went. Do you know how houses and streets of which you have observed nothing, afterwards, called out by some important event, leap into detail? That night I swear that I saw nothing of that little street behind the Mariinsky Theatre. It was a fine 'white night' at the end of May and the theatre was in a bustle of arrivals because it was nearly eight o'clock. Not at all the hour of Russian dinner, as you know, but Andrey Vassilievitch always liked to be as English as possible. I tell you that I saw nothing of the street and yet now I know that at the door of the littletrakteerthere were two men and a woman laughing, that anisvotchikwas drawn up in front of a high white block of flats, asleep, his head fallen on his breast, that thewonderful light, faintly blue and misty like gauze hung down from the sky, down over the houses, but falling not quite on to the pavement which was hard and ugly and grey. The little street was very silent and quiet and had, like so many Petrograd streets, a decorous intimacy with the eighteenth century ghosts thronging its air....
"Afterwards, how I was to know that street, every stone and corner of it! It seems wonderful to me now that I trod its pavement that night so carelessly. My destination was a square little house at the corner on the right. Andrey Vassilievitch boasted a whole house to himself, a rare pride in our city, as you know. When I was inside the doors I knew at once that it was not Andrey Vassilievitch's house at all. Some stronger spirit than his was there. Knowing him, I had expected to find there many modern things, some imitation of English manners, some bad but expensive pictures, a gramophone, a pianolo, a library of Russian classics in our hideous modern bindings, a billiard-room—you know the character. How quiet this little house was. In the little square hall an old faded carpet, a grandfather's clock and two eighteenth century prints of Petrograd. All the rooms were square, so Russian with their placid family portraits, their old tables and chairs, not beautiful save for their fidelity, and old thumbed editions of Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov in the bookshelves. Clocks, old slow clocks, all telling different time, all over the house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all those odd family things that Russians collect, china of the worst period, brass trays, large candlesticks, musical boxes, anything you please. Only in the dining-room there was some attempt at modernity. Bad modern furniture, on the walls bad copies of such things as Somoff's 'Blue Lady,' Vrubel's 'Pan' and one of Benoit's 'Peter the Great' water-colours.Beyond this room the house was of eighty years ago, muffled in its old furniture, speaking with the voice of its old clocks, scented with the scent of its musk and lavender, watched by the contented gaze of the old family portraits.
"Alexandra Pavlovna, Andrey Vassilievitch's wife, was waiting for us. Has it happened to you yet that your life that has been such and such a life is in the moment of a heart-beat all another life? You have passed an examination, you are suddenly ill, you break your back by a fall, or more simply than all of these, you enter a town, see a picture, hear a bar of music.... The thing's done: all values changed: what you saw before you see no longer, what you needed before you need no longer, what you expected before you expect no longer.... Alexandra Pavlovna was not a beautiful woman. Not tall, with hair quite grey, eyes not dark nor light—sad though. When she smiled there was great charm but so it is true of many women. Her complexion was always pale and her voice, although it was sweet to those who loved her, was perhaps too quiet to be greatly remarked by strangers. I have known men who thought her an ordinary woman.... She had much humour but did not show it to every one. She was as still as that cloud there above the hill, full of colour; like, that is, to those who loved her; seen from another view, as perhaps that cloud may be, there was nothing wonderful.... Nothing wonderful, but so many loved her! There was never, I think, a woman so greatly beloved. And you may judge by me. I had led a life in which after my work women had always played the chief part, and as the months passed and I had grown proud I had vowed that women must be exceptional to please me. I had felt the eye of the world upon me. 'You'll see no ordinary women in Victor Leontievitch's company' I heard them say, and I was proud thatthey should say it. From the first instant of seeing Alexandra Pavlovna I loved her and I loved her in a new, an utterly new way. For the first time in my life I did not think of myself as a traveller who, passing for many years through countries that did not greatly interest him, feels his aches and pains, his money troubles, his discomforts and little personal irritations. Then suddenly he crosses the border and the new land so possesses him that he is only a vessel for its beauty, to absorb it, to hold it, to carry the burden of it in safety.... I crossed the border. For four years after that I pursued that enchanted journey. Why did I love her? Who can say? Andrey Vassilievitch adored her with an utter devotion and had done so since the first moment of meeting her. I have known many others, women and men, who felt that devotion. On that first evening we were very quiet—only another woman, a cousin of hers. After dinner I had half an hour's talk with her. I can see her—ah! how I can see you, my dear!—sitting back a little in her chair, resting, her hands folded very quietly in her lap, her eyes watching me gravely. I felt like a boy who has come into the world for the first time. I could not talk to her—I stammered over the simplest things. But I was conscious of a deep luxurious delight. I did not, as I had done before, lay plans, say that this-and-this would be so if I did this-and-this, I did not consciously try to influence or direct her. I felt no definite sensual attraction, did not say, as I had always done with other women, 'It is the hair, the eyes, the mouth.' If I thought at all it was only 'This is better than anything that I have known before; I had never dreamt of anything like this.'