“Who is it?” she asked. The figure pushed past her, slipping into their own little hall.
“But you can’t come in like that,” she said, turning round on him.
“Shut the door!” he whispered. “Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi.... Shut the door.”
She recognised him then. He was the policeman from the corner of their street, a man whom they knew well. He had always been a pompous little man, stout and short of figure, kindly so far as they knew, although they had heard of him as cruel in the pursuit of his official duties. They had once talked to him a little and he explained: “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, God knows,” he had said, “of myself, but a man likes to do his work efficiently—and there are so many lazy fellows about here.”
He prided himself, they saw, on a punctilious attention to duty. When he had to come there for some paper or other he was always extremely polite, and if they were going away he helped them about their passports. He told them on another occasion that “he was pleased with life—although one never knew of course when it might come down upon one—”
Well, it had come down on him now. A more pitiful object Vera had never seen. He was dressed in a dirty black suit and wore a shabby fur cap, his padded overcoat was torn.
But the overwhelming effect of him was terror. Vera had never before seen such terror, and at once, as though the thing were an infectious disease, her own heart began to beat furiously. He was shaking so that the fur cap, which was too large for his head, waggled up and down over his eye in a ludicrous manner.
His face was dirty as though he had been crying, and a horrid pallid grey in colour.
His collar was torn, showing his neck between the folds of his overcoat.
Vera looked out down the stairs as though she expected to see something. The flat was perfectly still. There was not a sound anywhere. She turned back to the man again, he was crouching against the wall.
“You can’t come in here,” she repeated. “My sister and I are alone. What do you want?... What’s the matter?”
“Shut the door!... Shut the door!... Shut the door!...” he repeated.
She closed it. “Now what is it?” she asked, and then, hearing a sound, turned to find that Nina was standing with wide eyes, watching.
“What is it?” Nina asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” said Vera, also whispering. “He won’t tell me.”
He pushed past them then into the dining-room, looked about him for a moment, then sank into a chair as though his legs would no longer support him, holding on to the cloth with both hands.
The sisters followed him into the dining-room.
“Don’t shiver like that!” said Vera, “tell us why you’ve come in here?”...
His eyes looked past them, never still, wandering from wall to wall, from door to door.
“They’re after me...” he said. “That’s it—I was hiding in our cupboard all last night and this morning. They were round there all the time breaking up our things.... I heard them shouting. They were going to kill me. I’ve done nothing—O God! what’s that?”
“There’s no one here,” said Vera, “except ourselves.”
“I saw a chance to get away and I crept out. But I couldn’t get far.... I knew you would be good-hearted... good-hearted. Hide me somewhere—anywhere!... and they won’t come in here. Only until the evening. I’ve done no one any harm.... Only my duty....”
He began to snivel, taking out from his coat a very dirty pocket-handkerchief and dabbing his face with it.
The odd thing that they felt, as they looked at him, was the incredible intermingling of public and private affairs. Five minutes before they had been passing through a tremendous crisis in their personal relationship. The whole history of their lives together, flowing through how many years, through how many phases, how many quarrels, and happiness and adventures had reached here a climax whose issue was so important that life between them could never be the same again.
So urgent had been the affair that during that hour they had forgotten the Revolution, Russia, the war. Moreover, always in the past, they had assumed that public life was no affair of theirs. The Russo-Japanese War, even the spasmodic revolt in 1905, had not touched them except as a wind of ideas which blew so swiftly through their private lives that they were scarcely affected by it.
Now in the person of that trembling, shaking figure at their table, the Revolution had come to them, and not only the Revolution, but the strange new secret city that Petrograd was... the whole ground was quaking beneath them.
And in the eyes of the fugitive they saw what terror of death really was. It was no tale read in a story-book, no recounting of an adventure by some romantic traveller, it washerewith them in the flat and at any moment....
It was then that Vera realised that there was no time to lose—something must be done at once.
“Who’s pursuing you?” she asked, quickly. “Where are they?”
He got up and was moving about the room as though he was looking for a hiding-place.
“All the people.... Everybody!” He turned round upon them, suddenly striking, what seemed to them, a ludicrously grand attitude. “Abominable! That’s what it is. I heard them shouting that I had a machine-gun on the roof and was killing people. I had no machine-gun. Of course not. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I had one. But there they were. That’s what they were shouting! And I’ve always done my duty. What’s one to do? Obey one’s superior officer? Of course, what he says one does. What’s life for?... and then naturally one expects a reward. Things were going well with me, very well indeed—and then this comes. It’s a degrading thing for a man to hide for a day and a night in a cupboard.” His teeth began to chatter then so that he could scarcely speak. He seemed to be shaking with ague.
He caught Vera’s hand. “Save me—save me!” he said. “Put me somewhere.... I’ve done nothing disgraceful. They’ll shoot me like a dog—”
The sisters consulted.
“What are we to do?” asked Nina. “We can’t let him go out to be killed.”
“No. But if we keep him here and they come in and find him, we shall all be involved.... It isn’t fair to Nicholas or Uncle Ivan....”
“We can’t let him go out.”
“No, we can’t,” Vera replied. She saw at once how impossible that was. Were he caught outside and shot they would feel that they had his death for ever on their souls.
“There’s the linen cupboard,” she said.
She turned round to Nina. “I’m afraid,” she said, “if you hide here, you’ll have to go into another cupboard. And it can only be for an hour or two. We couldn’t keep you here all night.”
He said nothing except “Quick. Take me.” Vera led him into her bedroom and showed him the place. Without another word he pressed in amongst the clothes. It was a deep cupboard, and, although he was a fat man, the door closed quite evenly.
It was suddenly as though he had never been, Vera went back to Nina.
They stood close to one another in the middle of the room, and talked in whispers.
“What are we going to do?”
“We can only wait!”
“They’ll never dare to search your room, Vera.”
“One doesn’t know now... everything’s so different.”
“Vera, youarebrave. Forgive me what I said just now.... I’ll help you if you want—”
“Hush, Nina dear. Not that now. We’ve got to think—what’s best....”
They kissed very quietly, and then they sat down by the table and waited. There was simply nothing else to do.
Vera said that, during that pause, she could see the little policeman everywhere. In every part of the room she found him, with his fat legs and dirty, streaky face and open collar. The flat was heavy, portentous with his presence, as though it stood with a self-important finger on its lips saying, “I’ve got a secret in here.Sucha secret. You don’t know whatI’vegot....”
They discussed in whispers as to who would come in first. Nicholas or Uncle Ivan or Bohun or Sacha? And supposing one of them came in while the soldiers were there? Who would be the most dangerous? Sacha? She would scream and give everything away. Suppose they had seen him enter and were simply waiting, on the cat-and-mouse plan, to catch him? That was an intolerable thought.
“I think,” said Nina, “I must go and see whether there’s any one outside.”
But there was no need for her to do that. Even as she spoke they heard the steps on the stairs; and instantly afterwards there came the loud knocking on their door. Vera pressed Nina’s hand and went into the hall.
“Kto tam... Who’s there?” she asked.
“Open the door!... The Workmen and Soldiers’ Committee demand entrance in the name of the Revolution.”
She opened the door at once. During those first days of the Revolution they cherished certain melodramatic displays.
Whether consciously or no they built on all the old French Revolution traditions, or perhaps it is that every Revolution produces of necessity the same clothing with which to cover its nakedness. A strange mixture of farce and terror were those detachments of so-called justice. At their head there was, as a rule, a student, often smiling and bespectacled. The soldiers themselves, from one of the Petrograd regiments, were frankly out for a good time and enjoyed themselves thoroughly, but, as is the Slavonic way, playfulness could pass with surprising suddenness to dead earnest—with, indeed, so dramatic a precipitance that the actors themselves were afterwards amazed. Of these “little, regrettable mistakes” there had already, during the week, been several examples. To Vera, with the knowledge of the contents of her linen-cupboard, the men seemed terrifying enough. Their leader was a fat and beaming student—quite a boy. He was very polite, saying “Zdrastvuite,”and taking off his cap. The men behind him—hulking men from one of the Guards regiments—pushed about in the little hall like a lot of puppies, joking with one another, holding their rifles upside down, and making sudden efforts at a seriousness that they could not possibly sustain.
Only one of them, an older man with a thick black beard, was intensely grave, and looked at Vera with beseeching eyes, as though he longed to tell her the secret of his life.
“What can I do for you?” she asked the student.
“Prosteete... Forgive us.” He smiled and blinked at her, then put on his cap, clicked his heels, gave a salute, and took his cap off again. “We wish to be in no way an inconvenience to you. We are simply obeying orders. We have instructions that a policeman is hiding in one of these flats.... We know, of course, that he cannot possibly be here. Nevertheless we are compelled...Prosteete.... What nice pictures you have!” he ended suddenly. It was then that Vera discovered that they were by this time in the dining-room, crowded together near the door and gazing at Nina with interested eyes.
“There’s no one here, of course,” said Vera, very quietly. “No one at all.”
“Tak Tochno(quite so),” said the black-bearded soldier, for no particular reason, suddenly.
“You will allow me to sit down?” said the student, very politely. “I must, I am afraid, ask a few questions.”
“Certainly,” said Vera quietly. “Anything you like.”
She had moved over to Nina, and they stood side by side. But she could not think of Nina, she could not think even of the policeman in the cupboard.... She could think only of that other house on the Quay where, perhaps even now, this same scene was being enacted. They had found Wilderling.... They had dragged him out.... Lawrence was beside him.... They were condemned together.... Oh! love had come to her at last in a wild, surging flood! Of all the steps she had been led until at last, only half an hour before in that scene with Nina, the curtains had been flung aside and the whole view revealed to her. She felt such a strength, such a pride, such a defiance, as she had not known belonged to human power. She had, for many weeks, been hesitating before the gates. Now, suddenly, she had swept through. His death now was not the terror that it had been only an hour before. Nina’s accusation had shown her, as a flash of lightning flings the mountains into view, that now she could never lose him, were he with her or no, and that beside that truth nothing mattered.
Something of her bravery and grandeur and beauty must have been felt by them all at that moment. Nina realised it.... She told me that her own fear left her altogether when she saw how Vera was facing them. She was suddenly calm and quiet and very amused.
The student officer seemed now to be quite at home. He had taken a great many notes down in a little book, and looked very important as he did so. His chubby face expressed great self-satisfaction. He talked half to himself and half to Vera. “Yes... Yes... quite so. Exactly. And your husband is not yet at home, Madame Markovitch....Nu da....Of course these are very troublesome times, and as you say things have to move in a hurry.
“You’ve heard perhaps that Nicholas Romanoff has abdicated entirely—and refused to allow his son to succeed. Makes things simpler.... Yes.... Very pleasant pictures you have—and Ostroffsky—six volumes. Very agreeable. I have myself acted in Ostroffsky at different times. I find his plays very enjoyable. I am sure you will forgive us, Madame, if we walk through your charming flat.”
But indeed by this time the soldiers themselves had begun to roam about on their own account. Nina remembers one soldier in especial—a large dirty fellow with ragged moustache—who quite frankly terrified her. He seemed to regard her with particular satisfaction, staring at her, and, as it were, licking his lips over her. He wandered about the room fingering things, and seemed to be immensely interested in Nicholas’s little den, peering through the glass window that there was in the door and rubbing the glass with his finger. He presently pushed the door open and soon they were all in there.
Then a characteristic thing occurred. Apparently Nicholas’s inventions—his little pieces of wood and bark and cloth, his glass bottles, and tubes—seemed to them highly suspicious. There was laughter at first, and then sudden silence. Nina could see part of the room through the open door and she watched them as they gathered round the little table, talking together in excited whispers. The tall, rough-looking fellow who had frightened her before picked up one of the tubes, and then, whether by accident or intention, let it fall, and the tinkling smash of the glass frightened them all so precipitately that they came tumbling out into the larger room. The big fellow whispered something to the student, who at once became more self-important than ever, and said very seriously to Vera:
“That is your husband’s room, Madame, I understand?”
“Yes,” said Vera quietly, “he does his work in there.”
“What kind of work?”
“He is an inventor.”
“An inventor of what?”
“Various things.... He is working at present on something to do with the making of cloth.”
Unfortunately this serious view of Nicholas’s inventions suddenly seemed to Nina so ridiculous that she tittered. She could have done nothing more regrettable. The student obviously felt that his dignity was threatened. He looked at her very severely:
“This is no laughing matter,” he said. He himself then got up and went into the inner room. He was there for some time, and they could hear him fingering the tubes and treading on the broken glass. He came out again at last.
He was seriously offended.
“You should have told us your husband was an inventor.”
“I didn’t think it was of importance,” said Vera.
“Everything is of importance,” he answered. The atmosphere was now entirely changed. The soldiers were angry—they had, it seemed, been deceived and treated like children. The melancholy fellow with the black beard looked at Vera with eyes of deep reproach.
“When will your husband return?” asked the student.
“I am afraid I don’t know,” said Vera. She realised that the situation was now serious, but she could not keep her mind upon it. In that house on the Quay what was happening? What had, perhaps, already happened?...
“Where has he gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t he tell you where he was going?”
“He often does not tell me.”
“Ah, that is wrong. In these days one should always say where one is going.”
He stood up very stiff and straight. “Search the house,” he said to his men.
Suddenly then Vera’s mind concentrated. It was as though, she told me “I came back into the room and saw for the first time what was happening.”
“There is no one in the rest of the flat,” she said, “and nothing that can interest you.”
“That is for me to judge,” said the little officer grimly.
“But I assure you there is nothing,” she went on eagerly. “There is only the kitchen and the bath-room and the five bedrooms.”
“Whose bedrooms?” said the officer.
“My husband’s, my own, my sister’s, my uncle’s, and an Englishman’s,” she answered, colouring a little.
“Nevertheless we must do our duty.... Search the house,” he repeated.
“But you must not go into our bedrooms,” she said, her voice rising. “There is nothing for you there. I am sure you will respect our privacy.”
“Our orders must be obeyed,” he answered angrily.
“But—” she cried.
“Silence, Madame,” he said, furiously, staring at her as though she were his personal, deadly enemy.
“Very well,” said Vera proudly. “Please do as you wish.”
The officer walked past her with his head up, and the soldiers followed him, their eyes malicious and inquisitive and excited. The sisters stood together waiting. Of course the end had come. They simply stood there fastening their resolution to the extreme moment.
“I must go with them,” said Vera. She followed them into her bedroom. It was a very little place and they filled it, they looked rather sheepish now, whispering to one another.
“What’s in there?” said the officer, tapping the cupboard.
“Only some clothes,” said Vera.
“Open it!” he ordered.
Then the world did indeed stand still. The clock ceased to tick, the little rumble in the stove was silenced, the shuffling feet of one of the soldiers stayed, the movement of some rustle in the wall paper was held. The world was frozen.
“Now I suppose we shall all be shot,” was Vera’s thought, repeated over and over again with a ludicrous monotony. Then she could see nothing but the little policeman, tumbling out of the cupboard, dishevelled and terrified. Terrified! what that look in his eyes would be! That at any rate she could not face and she turned her head away from them, looking out through the door into the dark little passage.
She heard as though from an infinite distance the words:
“Well, there’s nobody there.”
She did not believe him of course. He said that whoever he was, to test her, to tempt her to give herself away. But she was too clever for them. She turned back and faced them, and then saw, to the accompaniment of an amazement that seemed like thunder in her ears, that the cupboard was indeed empty.
“There is nobody,” said the black-bearded soldier.
The student looked rather ashamed of himself. The white clothes, the skirts, and the blouses in the cupboard reproached him.
“You will of course understand, Madame,” he said stiffly, “that the search was inevitable. Regrettable but necessary. I’m sure you will see that for your own satisfaction....”
“You are assured now that there is no one here?” Vera interrupted him coldly.
“Assured,” he answered.
But where was the man? She felt as though she were in some fantastic nightmare in which nothing was as it seemed. The cupboard was not a cupboard, the policeman not a policeman....
“There is the kitchen,” she said.
In the kitchen of course they found nothing. There was a large cupboard in one corner but they did not look there. They had had enough. They returned into the dining-room and there, looking very surprised, his head very high above his collar was Markovitch.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
“I regret extremely,” said the officer pompously. “I have been compelled to make a search. Duty only... I regret. But no one is here. Your flat is at liberty. I wish you good-afternoon.”
Before Markovitch could ask further questions the room was emptied of them all. They tramped out, laughing and joking, children again, the hall door closed behind them.
Nina clutched Vera’s arm.
“Vera.... Vera, where is he?”
“I don’t know,” said Vera.
“What’s all this?” asked Nicholas.
They explained to him but he scarcely seemed to hear. He was radiant—smiling in a kind of ecstasy.
“They have gone? I am safe?”
In the doorway was the little policeman, black with grime and dust, so comical a figure that in reaction from the crisis of ten minutes before, they laughed hysterically.
“Oh look! look!...” cried Nina. “How dirty he is!”
“Where have you been?” asked Vera. “Why weren’t you in the cupboard?”
The little man’s teeth were chattering, so that he could scarcely speak....
“I heard them in the other room. I knew that the cupboard would be the first place. I slipped into the kitchen and hid in the fireplace.”
“You’re not angry, Nicholas?” Vera asked. “We couldn’t send him out to be shot.”
“What does that matter?” he almost impatiently brushed it aside. “There are other things more important.” He looked at the trembling dirty figure. “Only you’d better go back and hide again until it’s dark. They might come back....”
He caught Vera by the arm. His eyes were flames. He drew her with him back into her little room. He closed the door.
“The Revolution has come—it has really come,” he cried.
“Yes,” she answered, “it has come into this very house. The world has changed.”
“The Czar has abdicated.... The old world has gone, the old wicked world! Russia is born again!”
His eyes were the eyes of a fanatic.
Her eyes, too, were alight. She gazed past him.
“I know—I know,” she whispered as though to herself.
“Russia—Russia,” he went on coming closer and closer, “Russia and you. We will build a new world. We will forget our old troubles. Oh, Vera, my darling, my darling, we’re going to be happy now! I love you so. And now I can hope again. All our love will be clean in this new world. We’re going to be happy at last!”
But she did not hear him. She saw into space. A great exultation ran through her body. All lost for love! At last she was awakened, at last she lived, at last, at last, she knew what love was.
“I love him! I love him... him,” her soul whispered. “And nothing now in this world or the next can separate us.”
“Vera—Vera,” Nicholas cried, “we are together at last—as we have never been. And now we’ll work together again—for Russia.”
She looked at the man whom she had never loved, with a great compassion and pity. She put her arms around him and kissed him, her whole maternal spirit suddenly aware of him and seeking to comfort him.
At the touch of her lips his body trembled with happiness. But he did not know that it was a kiss of farewell....
I have no idea at all what Lawrence did during the early days of that week. He has never told me, and I have never asked him. He never, with the single exception of the afternoon at the Astoria, came near the Markovitches, and I know that was because he had now reached a stage where he did not dare trust himself to see Vera—just as she at that time did not trust herself to see him....
I do not know what he thought of those first days of the Revolution. I can imagine that he took it all very quietly, doing his duty and making no comment. He had of course his own interest in it, but it would be, I am sure, an entirely original interest, unlike any one else’s. I remember Dune once, in the long-dead days, saying to me, “It’s never any use guessing what Lawrence is thinking. When you think it’s football it’s Euripides, and when you think it’s Euripides it’s Marie Corelli.” Of all the actors in this affair he remains to me to the last as the most mysterious. I know that he loved Vera with the endurance of the rock, the heat of the flame, the ruthlessness of a torrent, but behind that love there sat the man himself, invisible, silent, patient, watching.
He may have had Semyonov’s contempt for the Revolutionary idealist, he may have had Wilderling’s belief in the Czar’s autocracy, he may have had Boris Grogoff’s enthusiasm for freedom and a general holiday. I don’t know. I know nothing at all about it. I don’t think that he saw much of the Wilderlings during the earlier part of the week. He himself was a great deal with the English Military Mission, and Wilderling was withhisparty whatever that might be. He could see of course that Wilderling was disturbed, or perhaps indignant is the right word. “As though you know,” he said, “some dirty little boy had been pullin’ snooks at him.” Nevertheless the Baroness was the human link. Lawrence would see from the first—that is, from the morning of the Sunday—that she was in an agony of horror. She confided in nobody, but went about as though she was watching for something, and at dinner her eyes never left her husband’s face for a moment. Those evening meals must have been awful. I can imagine the dignity, the solemn heavy room with all the silver, the ceremonious old man-servant and Wilderling himself behaving as though nothing at all were the matter. To do him all justice he was as brave as a lion, and as proud as a gladiator, and as conceited as a Prussian. On the Wednesday evening he did not return home. He telephoned that he was kept on important business.
The Baroness and Lawrence had the long slow meal together. It was almost more than Jerry could stand having, of course, his own private tortures to face. “It was as though the old lady felt that she had been deputed to support the honour of the family during her husband’s absence. She must have been wild with anxiety, but she showed no sign except that her hand trembled when she raised her glass.”
“What did you talk about?” I asked him.
“Oh, about anything! Theatres and her home, when she was a girl and England.... Awful, every minute of it!”
There was a moment towards the end of the meal, when the good lady nearly broke down. The bell in the hall rang and there was a step; she thought it was her husband and half rose. It was, however, the Dvornik with a message of no importance. She gave a little sigh. “Oh, I do wish he would come!... I do wish he would come!” she murmured to herself.
“Oh, he’ll come,” Lawrence reassured her, but she seemed indignant with him for having overheard her. Afterwards, sitting together desolately in the magnificent drawing-room, she became affectionately maternal. I have always wondered why Lawrence confided to me the details of their very intimate conversation. It was exactly the kind of thing he was most reticent about.
She asked him about his home, his people, his ambitions. She had asked him about these things before, but to-night there was an appeal in her questions, as though she said:
“Take my mind off that other thing. Help me to forget, if it’s only for a moment.”
“Have you ever been in love?” she asked.
“Yes. Once,” he said.
“Was he in love now?”
“Yes.”
“With some one in Russia?”
“Yes.”
She hoped that he would be happy. He told her that he didn’t think happiness was quite the point in this particular case. There were other things more important—and, anyway, it was inevitable.
“He had fallen in love at first sight?”
“Yes. The very first moment.”
She sighed. So had she. It was, she thought, the only real way. She asked him whether it might not, after all, turn out better than he expected.
No, he did not think that it could. But he didn’t mind how it turned out—at least he couldn’t look that far. The point was that he was in it, up to the neck, and he was never going to be out of it again.
There was something boyish about that that pleased her. She put her plump hand on his knee and told him how she had first met the Baron, down in the South, at Kieff, how grand he had looked; how, seeing her across a room full of people, he had smiled at her before he had ever spoken to her or knew her name. “I was quite pretty then,” she added. “I have never regretted our marriage for a single moment,” she said. “Nor, I know, has he.”
“We hoped there would he children....” She gave a pathetic little gesture. “We will get away down to the South again as soon as the troubles are over,” she ended.
I don’t suppose he was thinking much of her—his mind was on Vera all the time—but after he had left her and lay in bed, sleepless, his mind dwelt on her affectionately, and he thought that he would like to help her. He realised, quite clearly, that Wilderling was in a very dangerous position, but I don’t think that it ever occurred to him for a moment that it would be wise for him to move to another flat.
On the next day, Thursday, Lawrence did not return until the middle of the afternoon. The town was, by now, comparatively quiet again. Numbers of the police had been caught and imprisoned, some had been shot and others were in hiding; most of the machine-guns shooting from the roofs had ceased. The abdication of the Czar had already produced the second phase of the Revolution—the beginning of the struggle between the Provisional Government and the Council of Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies, and this was proceeding, for the moment, inside the walls of the Duma rather than in the streets and squares of the town. Lawrence returned, therefore, that afternoon with a strange sense of quiet and security.
“It was almost, you know, as though this tommy-rot about a White Revolution might be true after all—with this jolly old Duma and their jolly old Kerensky runnin’ the show. Of course I’d seen the nonsense about their not salutin’ the officers and all that, but I didn’t think any fellers alive would be such dam fools.... I might have known better.”
He let himself into the flat and found there a death-like stillness—no one about and no sound except the tickings of the large clock in the drawing-room.
He wandered into that horribly impressive place and suddenly sat down on the sofa with a realisation of extreme physical fatigue. He didn’t know why he was so tired, he had felt quite “bobbish” all the week; suddenly now his limbs were like water, he had a bad ache down his spine and his legs were as heavy as lead. He sat in a kind of trance on that sofa, he was not asleep, but he was also, quite certainly, not awake. He wondered why the place was so “beastly still” after all the noise there had been all the week. There was no one left alive—every one dead—except himself and Vera... Vera... Vera.
Then he was conscious that some one was looking at him through the double-doors. At first he didn’t realise who it was, the face was so white and the figure so quiet, then, pulling himself together, he saw that it was the old servant.
“What is it, Andre?” he asked, sitting up.
The old man didn’t answer, but came into the room, carefully closing the door behind him. Lawrence saw that he was trembling with fright, but was still endeavouring to behave with dignity.
“Barin! Barin!” he whispered, as though Lawrence were a long way from him. “Paul Konstantinovitch! (that was Wilderling). He’s mad.... He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Oh, sir, stop him, stop him, or we shall all be murdered!”
“What is he doing?” asked Lawrence, standing up.
“In the little hack room,” Andre whispered, as though now he were confiding a terrible secret. “Come quickly...!”
Lawrence followed him; when he had gone a few steps down the passage he heard suddenly a sharp, muffled report.
“What’s that?”
Andre came close to him, his old, seamed face white like plaster.
“He has a rifle in there...” he said. “He’s shooting at them!” Then as Lawrence stepped up to the door of the little room that was Wilderling’s dressing-room, Andre caught his arm—.
“Be careful, Barin.... He doesn’t know what he’s about. He may not recognise you.”
“Oh, that’s all right!” said Lawrence. He pushed the door open and walked in. To give for a moment his own account of it: “You know that room was the rummiest thing. I’d never been into it before. I knew the old fellow was a bit of a dandy, but I never expected to see all the pots and jars and glasses there were. You’d have thought one wouldn’t have noticed a thing at such a time, but you couldn’t escape them,—his dressing-table simply covered,—white round jars with pink tops, bottles of hair-oil with ribbons round the neck, manicure things, heaps of silver things, and boxes with Chinese patterns on them, and one thing, open, with what was mighty like rouge in it. And clothes all over the place—red silk dressing-gown with golden tassels, and red leather slippers!
“I don’t remember noticing any of this at the moment, but it all comes back to me as soon as I begin to think of it—and the room stank of scent!”
But of course it was the old man in the corner who mattered. It was, I think, very significant of Lawrence’s character and his unEnglish-English tradition that the first thing that he felt was the pathos of it. No other Englishman in Petrograd would have seen that at all.
Wilderling was crouched in the corner against a piece of gold Japanese embroidery. He was in the shadow, away from the window, which was pushed open sufficiently to allow the muzzle of the rifle to slip between the woodwork and the pane. The old man, his white hair disordered, his clothes dusty, and his hands grimy, crept forward just as Lawrence entered, fired down into the side-street, then moved swiftly back into his corner again. He muttered to himself without ceasing in French, “Chiens! Chiens!... Chiens!” He was very hot, and he stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then he saw Lawrence.
“What do you want?” he asked, as though he didn’t recognize him.
Lawrence moved down the side of the room, avoiding the window. He touched the little man’s arm.
“I say, you know,” he said, “this won’t do.”
Wilderling smelt of gunpowder, and he was breathing hard as though he had been running desperately. He quivered when Lawrence touched him.
“Go away!” he said, “you mustn’t come here.... I’ll get them yet—I tell you I’ll get them yet—I tell you I’ll get them—Let them dare... Chiens... Chiens...” He jerked his rifle away from the window and began, with trembling fingers, to load it again.
Lawrence gripped his arm. “When I did that,” he said, “it felt as though there wasn’t an arm there at all, but just a bone which I could break if I pressed a bit harder.”
“Come away!” he said. “You damn fool—don’t you see that it’s hopeless?”
“And I’d always been so respectful to him....” he added in parenthesis.
Wilderling hissed at him, saying no words, just drawing in his breath.
“I’ve got two of them,” he whispered suddenly. “I’ll get them all.”
Then a bullet crashed through the window, burying itself in the opposite wall.
After that things happened so quickly that it was impossible to say in what order they occurred. There was suddenly a tremendous noise in the flat.
“It was just as though the whole place was going to tumble about our ears. All the pots and bottles began to jump about, and then another bullet came through, landed on the dressing-table, and smashed everything. The looking-glass crashed, and the hair-oil was all over the place. I rushed out to see what was happening in the hall....”
What “was happening” was that the soldiers had broken the hall door in. Lawrence saw then a horrible thing. One of the men rushed forward and stuck Andre, who was standing, paralysed, by the drawing-room door, in the stomach. The old man cried out “just like a shot rabbit,” and stood there “for what seemed ages,” with the blood pouring out of his middle.
That finished Lawrence. He rushed forward, and they would certainly have “stuck” him too if someone hadn’t cried out, “Look out, he’s an Englishman—anAnglichanin—I know him.”
After that, for a time, he was uncertain of anything. He struggled; he was held. He heard noises around him—shouts or murmurs or sighs—that didn’t seem to him to be connected with anything human. He could not have said where he was nor what he was doing. Then, quite suddenly, everything cleared. He came to himself with a consciousness of that utter weariness that he had felt before. He was able to visualise the scene, to take it all in, but as a distant spectator. “It was like nothing so much as watching a cinematograph,” he told me. He could do nothing; he was held by three soldiers, who apparently wished him to be a witness of the whole affair. Andre’s body lay there, huddled up in a pool of drying blood, that glistened under the electric light. One of his legs was bent crookedly under him, and Lawrence had a strange mad impulse to thrust his way forward and put it straight.
It was then, with a horrible sickly feeling, exactly like a blow in the stomach, that he realised that the Baroness was there. She was standing, quite alone, at the entrance of the hall, looking at the soldiers, who were about eight in number.
He heard her say, “What’s happened? Who are you?...” and then in a sharper, more urgent voice, “Where’s my husband?”
Then she saw Andre.... She gave a sharp little cry, moved forward towards him, and stopped.
“I don’t know what she did then,” said Lawrence. “I think she suddenly began to run down the passage. I know she was crying, ‘Paul! Paul! Paul!’... I never saw her again.”
The officer—an elderly kindly-looking man like a doctor or a lawyer (I am trying to give every possible detail, because I think it important)—then came up to Lawrence and asked him some questions:
“What was his name?”
“Jeremy Ralph Lawrence.”
“He was an Englishman.”
“Yes.”
“Working at the British Embassy?”
“No, at the British Military Mission.”
“He was officer?”
“Yes.”
“In the British Army?”
“Yes. He had fought for two years in France.”
“He had been lodging with Baron Wilderling?”
“Yes. Ever since he came to Russia.”
The officer nodded his head. They knew about him, had full information. A friend of his, a Mr. Boris Grogoff, had spoken of him.
The officer was then very polite, told him that they regretted extremely the inconvenience and discomfort to which he might be put, but that they must detain him until this affair was concluded—“which will be very soon” added the officer. He also added that he wished Lawrence to be a witness of what occurred so that he should see that, under the new regime in Russia, everything was just and straightforward.
“I tried to tell him,” said Lawrence to me, “that Wilderling was off his head. I hadn’t the least hope, of course.... It was all quite clear, and, at such a time, quite just. Wilderling had been shooting them out of his window.... The officer listened very politely, but when I had finished he only shook his head. That was their affair he said.
“It was then that I realised Wilderling. He was standing quite close to me. He had obviously been struggling a bit, because his shirt was all torn, and you could see his chest. He kept moving his hand and trying to pull his shirt over; it was his only movement. He was as straight as a dart, and except for the motion of his hand as still as a statue, standing between the soldiers, looking directly in front of him. He had been mad in that other room, quite dotty.
“He was as sane as anything now, grave and serious and rather ironical, just as he always looked. Well it was at that moment, when I saw him there, that I thought of Vera. I had been thinking of her all the time of course. I had been thinking of nothing else for weeks. But that minute, there in the hall, settled me. Callous, wasn’t it? I ought to have been thinking only of Wilderling and his poor old wife. After all, they’d been awfully good to me. She’d been almost like a mother all the time.... But there it was. It came over me like a storm. I’d been fighting for nights and days and days and nights not to go to her—fighting like hell, trying to play the game the sentimentalists would call it. I suppose seeing the old man there and knowing what they were going to do to him settled it. It was a sudden conviction, like a blow, that all this thing was real, that they weren’t playing at it, that any one in the town was as near death as winking.... And so there it was! Vera! I’d got to get to her—at once—and never leave her again until she was safe. I’d got to get to her! I’d got to get to her! I’d got to get to her!... Nothing else mattered. Not Wilderling’s death nor mine either, except that if I was dead I’d be out of it and wouldn’t be able to help her. They talk about men with one idea. From that moment I had only one idea in all the world—I don’t know that I’ve had any other one since. They talk about scruples, moralities, traditions. They’re all right, but there just are moments in life when they simply don’t count at all.... Vera was in danger—Well, that was all that mattered.
“The officer said something to Wilderling. I heard Wilderling answer: “You’re rebels against His Majesty.... I wish I’d shot more of you!” Fine old boy, you know, whatever way you look at it.
“They moved him forward then. He went quite willingly, without any kind of resistance. They motioned to me to follow. We walked out of the flat down the stairs, no one saying a word. We went out on to the Quay. There was no one there. They stood him up against the wall, facing the river. It was dark, and when he was against the wall he seemed to vanish,—only I got one kind of gesture, a sort of farewell, you know, his grey hair waving in the breeze from the river.
“There was a report, and it was as though a piece of the wall slowly unsettled itself and fell forward. No sound except the report. Oh, he was a fine old boy!
“The officer came up to me and said very politely:
“‘You are free now, sir,’ and something about regretting incivility, and something, I think, about them perhaps wanting me again to give some sort of evidence. Very polite he was.
“I was mad, I suppose, I don’t know. I believe I said something to him about Vera, which of course he didn’t understand.
“I know I wanted to run like hell to Vera to see that she was safe.
“But I didn’t. I walked off as slowly as anything. It was awful. They’d been so good to me, and yet I wasn’t thinking of Wilderling at all....”
Markovitch on that same afternoon came back to the flat early. He also, like Lawrence, felt the strange peace and tranquillity of the town, and it seemed inevitably like the confirmation of all his dearest hopes. The Czar was gone, the Old Regime was gone, the people, smiling and friendly, were maintaining their own discipline—above all, Vera had kissed him.
He did not go deeper into his heart and see how strained all their recent relations must have been for this now to give him such joy. He left that—it simply was that at last he and Vera understood one another, she had found that she cared for him after all, and that he was necessary to her happiness. What that must mean for their future life together he simply dared not think.... It would change the world for him. He felt like the man in the story from whom the curse is suddenly lifted....
He walked home through the quiet town, humming to himself. He fancied that there was a warmth in the air, a strange kindly omen of spring, although the snow was still thick on the ground, and the Neva a grey carpet of ice.
He came into the flat and found it empty. He went into his little room and started on his inventions. He was so happy that he hummed to himself as he worked and cut slices off his pieces of wood, and soaked flannel in bottles, and wrote funny little sentences in his abominable handwriting in a red notebook.
One need not grudge it him, poor Markovitch. It was the last happy half-hour of his life.
He did not turn on his green-shaded lamp, but sat there in the gathering dusk, chipping up the wood and sometimes stopping, idly lost in happy thoughts.
Some one came in. He peered through his little glass window and saw that it was Nina. She passed quickly through the dining-room, beyond, towards her bedroom, without stopping to switch on the light.
Nina had broken the spell. He went back to his table, but he couldn’t work now, and he felt vaguely uneasy and cold. He was just going to leave his work and find theRetchand settle down to a comfortable read, when he heard the hall door close. He stood behind his little glass window and watched; it was Vera, perhaps... it must be... his heart began eagerly to beat.
ItwasVera. At once he saw that she was strangely agitated. Before she had switched on the light he realised it. With a click the light was on. Markovitch had intended to open his door and go out to her, smiling. He saw at once that she was waiting for some one.... He stood, trembling, on tiptoe, his face pressed against the glass of the pane.
Lawrence came in. He had the face, Markovitch told me many weeks afterwards, “of a triumphant man.”
They had obviously met outside, because Vera said, as though continuing a conversation:
“And it’s only just happened?”
“I’ve come straight from there,” Lawrence answered.
Then he went up to her. She let herself at once go to him and he half carried her to a chair near the table and exactly opposite Markovitch’s window.
They kissed “like people who had been starving all their lives.” Markovitch was trembling so that he was afraid lest he should tumble or make some noise. The two figures in the chair were like statues in their immobile, relentless, unswerving embrace.
Suddenly he saw that Nina was standing in the opposite doorway “like a ghost.” She was there for so brief a moment that he could not be sure that she had been there at all. Only her white, frightened face remained with him.
One of his thoughts was:
“This is the end of my life.”
Another was:
“How could they be so careless, with the light on, and perhaps people in the flat!”
And after that:
“They need it so much that they don’t care who sees—Starved people....”
And after that:
“I’m starved too.”
He was so cold that his teeth were chattering, and he crept back from his window, crept into the farthest farthest corner of his little room, and crouched there on the floor, staring and staring, but seeing nothing at all.