by Hugh Walpole
“I was in Polchester when the war broke out. The town received it rather as though a first-class company had come from London to act in the Assembly Rooms for a fortnight. It was dramatic and picturesque and pleasantly patriotic. They see it otherwise now, I fancy. I seemed at once to think of Russia. For one thing I wanted desperately to help, and I thought that in England they would only laugh at me as they had always done. I am short-sighted. I knew that I should never be a soldier. I fancied that in Russia they would not say: ‘Oh, John Trenchard of Polchester.... He’s no good!’ before they’d seen whether I could do anything. Then of course I had read about the country — Tolstoi and Turgeniev, and a little Dostoevsky and even Gorki and Tchekov. I went quite suddenly, making up my mind one evening. I seemed to begin to be a new man out of England. The journey delighted me.... I was in Moscow before I knew. I was there three months trying to learn Russian. Then I came to Petrograd and through the English Embassy found a place in one of the hospitals, where I worked as a sanitar for three months. I did not leave England until November, so that I have been in Russia now just six months. It was in this hospital that I met Miss Krassovsky — Marie Ivanovna. From the first moment I loved her, of course. And she liked me. She was the first woman, since my mother, who had really liked me. She quickly saw my devotion and she laughed a little, but she was always kind. I could talk to her and she liked to listen. She had — she has, great ideals, great hopes and ambitions. We worked together there and then, afterwards, in those beautiful spring evenings in Petrograd when the canals shone all night and the houses were purple, we walked.... The night before last night I begged her to marry me ... and she accepted. She said that we would go together to the war, that I should be her knight and she my lady and that we would care for the wounds of the whole world. Ah! what a night that was — shall I ever forget it? After she had left me, I walked all night and sang.... I was mad.... I am mad now. That she should love me! She, so beautiful, so pure, so wonderful. I at whom women have always laughed. Ah! God forgive me, my heart will break—”
As he spoke the heavy grey clouds of the first dawn were parting and a faint very liquid blue, almost white and very cold, hovered above dim shapeless trees and fields. I flung open the corridor window and a sound of running water and the first notes of some sleepy bird met me.
“And her family?” I said. “Who are they, and will they not mind her marrying an Englishman?”
“She has only a mother,” he answered. “I fancy that Marie has always had her own way.”
“Yes,” I thought to myself. “I also fancy that that is so.” A sense of almost fatherly protection had developed in myself towards him. How could he, who knew nothing at all of women, hope to manage that self-willed, eager, independent girl? Why, why, why had she engaged herself to him? I fancied that very possibly there were qualities in him — his very childishness and helplessness — which, if they only irritated an Englishman, would attract a Russian. Lame dogs find a warm home in Russia. But did she know anything about him? Would she not, in a week, be irritated by his incapacity? And he — he — bless his innocence! — was so confident as though he had been married to her for years!
“Look here!” I said, moved by a sudden impulse. “Will you mind if, sometimes, I tell you things? I’ve been to the war before. It’s a strange life, unlike anything you’ve ever known — and Russians too are strange — especially at first. You won’t take it badly, if—”
He touched my arm with his hand while his whole face was lighted with his smile. “Why, my dear fellow, I shall be proud. No one has ever thought me worth the bother. I want to be — to be — at my best here. Practical, you know — like others. I don’t want her to think me—”
“No, exactly,” I said hurriedly, “I understand.” Gold was creeping into the sky. A lark rose, triumphant. A pool amongst the reeds blazed like a brazen shield. The Spring day had flung back her doors. I saw that suddenly fatigue had leapt upon my friend. He tottered on his little seat, then his face, grey in the light, fell forward. I caught him in my arms, half carried, half led him into our little carriage, arranged him in the empty corner, and left him, fast, utterly fast, asleep.
CHAPTER II
THE SCHOOL-HOUSE
The greater part of the next day was spent by us in the little town of S —— , a comfortable place very slightly disturbed by the fact that it had been already the scene of four battles; there was just this effect, as it seemed to me, that the affairs of the day were carried on with a kind of somnolent indifference.... “You may order your veal,” the waiter seemed to say, “but whether you will get it or no is entirely in the hands of God. It is, therefore, of no avail that I should hurry or that you should show temper should the veal not appear. At any moment your desire for veal and my ability to bring it you may have ceased for ever.”
For the rest the town billowed with trees of the youngest green; also birds of the tenderest age, if one may judge by their happiness at the spring weather. There were many old men in white smocks and white trousers and women in brightly-coloured kerchiefs. But, except for the young birds, it was a silent place.
I had much business to carry through and saw the rest of our company only at luncheon time; it was after luncheon that I had a little conversation with Marie Ivanovna. She chose me quite deliberately from the others, moved our chairs to the quieter end of the little balcony where we were, planted her elbows on the table and stared into my face with her large round credulous eyes. (I find on looking back, that I have already used exactly those adjectives. That may stand: I mean that, emphatically, and beyond every other impression she made, her gaze declared that she was ready to believe anything that she were told, and the more in the telling the better.)
She spoke, as always, with that sense of restrained, sharply disciplined excitement, as though her eager vitality were some splendid if ferocious animal struggling at its chain.
“You talked to John — Mr. Trenchard — last night,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, smiling into her eyes.
“I know — all night — he told me. He’s splendid, isn’t he? Splendid!”
“I like him very much,” I answered.
“Ah! you must! you must! You must all like him! You don’t know — his thoughts, his ideals — they are wonderful. He’s like some knight of the Middle Ages.... Ah, but you’ll think that silly, Mr. Durward. You’re a practical Englishman. I hate practical Englishmen.”
“Thank you,” I said, laughing.
“No, but I do. You sneer at everything beautiful. Here in Russia we’re more simple. And John’s very like a Russian in many ways. Don’t you think he is?”
“I haven’t known him long enough—” I began.
“Ah, you don’t like him! I see you don’t.... No, it’s no use your saying anything. He isn’t English enough for you, that’s what it is. You think him unpractical, unworldly. Well, so he is. Do you think I’d ever be engaged to an ordinary Englishman? I’d die of ennui in a week. Oh! yes, I would. But you like John, really, don’t you?”
“I tell you that I do,” I answered, “but really, after only two days—”
“Ah! that’s so English! So cautious! How I hate your caution! Why can’t you say at once that you haven’t made up your mind about him — because that’s the truth, isn’t it? I wish he would not sit there, looking at me, and not talking to the others. He ought to talk to them, but he’s afraid that they’ll laugh at his Russian. It’s not very good, his Russian, is it? I can’t help laughing myself sometimes!”
Her English was extremely good. Sometimes she used a word in its wrong sense; she had one or two charming little phrases of her own: “What a purpose to?” instead of: “Why?” and sometimes a double negative. She rolled her r’s more than is our habit.
I said, looking straight into her eyes:
“It’s a tremendous thing to him, his having you. I can see that although I’ve known him so short a time. He’s a very lucky man and — and — if his luc
k were to go, I think that he’d simply die. There! That isn’t a very English thing to have said, is it?”
“Why did you say it?” she cried sharply. “You don’t trust me. You think—”
“I think nothing,” I answered. “Only he’s not like ordinary men. He’s so much younger than his age.”
She gave me then the strangest look. The light seemed suddenly to die out of her face; her eyes sought mine as though for help. There were tears in them.
“Oh! I do want to be good to him!” she whispered. Then got up abruptly and joined the others.
Late in the afternoon an automobile arrived and carried off most of our party. I was compelled to remain for several hours, and intended to drive, looking forward indeed to the long quiet silence of the spring evening. Moved by some sudden impulse I suggested to Trenchard that he should wait and drive with me: “The car will be very crowded,” I said, “and I think too that you’d like to see some of the country properly. It’s a lovely evening — only thirty versts.... Will you wait and come with me?”
He agreed at once; he had been, all day, very quiet, watching, with that rather clumsy expression of his, the expression of a dog who had been taught by his master some tricks which he had half-forgotten and would presently be expected to remember.
When I made my suggestion he flung one look at Marie Ivanovna. She was busied over some piece of luggage, and half-turned her head, smiling at him:
“Ah, do go, John — yes? We will be so cr-rowded.... It will be very nice for you driving.”
I fancied that I heard him sigh. He tried to help the ladies with their luggage, handed them the wrong parcels, dropped delicate packages, apologised, blushed, was very hot, collected dust from I know not where.... Once I heard a sharp, angry voice: “John! Oh!...” I could not believe that it was Marie Ivanovna. Of course she was hot and tired and had slept, last night, but little. The car, watched by an inquisitive but strangely apathetic crowd of peasants, snorted its way down the little streets, the green trees blowing and the starlings chattering. In a moment the starlings and our two selves seemed to have the whole dead little town to ourselves.
I saw quite clearly that he was unhappy; he could never disguise his feelings; as he waited for the trap to appear he had the same lost and abandoned appearance that he had on my first vision of him at the Petrograd station. The soldier who was to drive us smiled as he saw me.
“Only thirty versts, your honour ... or, thank God, even less. It will take us no time.” He was a large clumsy creature, like an eager overgrown puppy; he was one of the four or five Nikolais in our Otriad, and he is to be noticed in this history because he attached himself from the very beginning to Trenchard with that faithful and utterly unquestioning devotion of which the Russian soldier is so frequently capable. He must, I think, have seen something helpless and unhappy in Trenchard’s appearance on this evening. Sancho to our Don Quixote he was from that first moment.
“Yes, he’s an English gentleman,” I said when he had listened for a moment to Trenchard’s Russian.
“Like yourself,” said Nikolai.
“Yes, Nikolai. You must look after him. He’ll be strange here at first.”
“Slushaiu (I hear).”
That was all he said. He got up on to his seat, his broad back was bent over his horses.
“Well, and how have things been, Nikolai, busy?”
“Nikak nyet — not at all. Very quiet.”
“No wounded?”
“Nothing at all, Barin, for two weeks now.”
“Have you liked that?”
“Tak totchno. Certainly yes.”
“No, but have you?”
“Tak totchno, Barin.”
Then he turned and gave, for one swift instant, a glance at Trenchard, who was, very clumsily, climbing into the carriage. Nikolai looked at him gravely. His round, red face was quite expressionless as he turned back and began to abjure his horses in that half-affectionate, half-abusive and wholly human whispering exclamation that Russians use to their animals. We started.
I have mentioned in these pages that I had already spent three months with our Otriad at the Front. I cannot now define exactly what it was that made this drive on this first evening something utterly distinct and apart from all that I had experienced during that earlier period. It is true that, before, I had been for almost two months in one place and had seen nothing at all of actual warfare, except the feeding and bandaging of the wounded. But I had imagined then, nevertheless, that I was truly “in the thick of things,” as indeed, in comparison with my Moscow or Petrograd life, I was. We had not now driven through the quiet evening air for ten minutes before I knew, with assured certainty, that a new phase of life was, on this day, opening before me; the dark hedges, the thin fine dust on the roads, the deep purple colour of the air, beat at my heart, as though they themselves were helping with quiet insistency to draw me into the drama. And yet nothing could have been more peaceful than was that lovely evening. The dark plum-colour in the evening sky soaked like wine into the hills, the fields, the thatched cottages, the streams and the little woods.
The faint saffron that lingered below the crests and peaks of rosy cloud showed between the stems of the silver birches like the friendly smile of a happy day. The only human beings to be seen were the peasants driving home their cows; far on the horizon the Carpathian mountains were purple in the dusk, the snow on their highest ridges faintly silver. There was not a sound in the world except the ring of our horses’ hoofs upon the road. And yet this sinister excitement hammered, from somewhere, at me as I had never felt it before. It was as though the lovely evening were a painted scene lowered to hide some atrocity.
“This is scarcely what you expected a conquered country to look like, is it?” I said to Trenchard.
He looked about him, then said, hesitating: “No ... that is ... I don’t know what I expected.”
A curved moon, dull gold like buried treasure, rose slowly above the hill; one white star flickered and the scents of the little gardens that lined the road grew thicker in the air as the day faded.
I was conscious of some restraint with Trenchard: “He’s probably wishing,” I thought, “that he’d not been so expansive last night. He doesn’t trust me.”
Once he said abruptly:
“They’ll give me ... won’t they ... work to do? It would be terrible if there wasn’t work. I’m not so ... so stupid at bandaging. I learnt a lot in the hospital and although I’m clumsy with my hands generally I’m not so clumsy about that—”
“Why of course,” I answered. “When there’s work they’ll be only too delighted. But there won’t always be work. You must be prepared for that. Sometimes our Division is in reserve and then we’re in reserve too. Sometimes for so much as a fortnight. When I was out here before I was in one place for more than two months. You must just take everything as it comes.”
“I want to work,” he said. “I must.”
Once again only he spoke:
“That little fat man who travelled with us....”
“Andrey Vassilievitch,” I said.
“Yes.... He interests me. You knew him before?”
“Yes. I’ve known him slightly for some years.”
“What has he come for? He’s frightened out of his life.”
“Frightened?”
“Yes, he himself told me. He says that he’s very nervous but that he must do everything that every one else does — for a certain reason. He got very excited when he talked to me and asked me whether I thought it would all be very terrible.”
“He is a nervous fussy little man. Russians are not cowards, but Audrey Vassilievitch lost his wife last year. He was very devoted to her — very. He is miserable without her, they say. Perhaps he has come to the war to forget her.”
I was surprised at Trenchard’s interest; I had thought him so wrapt in his own especial affair that nothing outside it could occupy him. But he continued:
“He knew the tal
l doctor — Nikitin — before, didn’t he?”
“Yes.... Nikitin knew his wife.”
“Oh, I see.... Nikitin seems to despise him — I think he despises all of us.”
“Oh no. That’s only his manner. Many Russians look as though they were despising their neighbours when, as a matter of fact, they’re really despising themselves. They’re very fond of despising themselves: their contempt allows them to do what they want to.”
“I don’t think Nikitin despises himself. He looks too happy — at least, happy is not the word. Perhaps triumphant is what I mean.”
“Ah, if you begin speculating about Russian expression you’re lost. They express so much in their faces that you think you know all their deepest feelings. But they’re not their deep feelings that you see. Only their quick transient emotions that change every moment.” I fancied, just at that time, that I had studied the Russian character very intently and it was perhaps agreeable to me to air my knowledge before an Englishman who had come to Russia for the first time so recently.
But Trenchard did not seem to be greatly impressed by my cleverness. He spoke no more. We drove then in silence whilst the moon, rising high, caught colour into its dim outline, like a scimitar unsheathed; the trees and hedges grew, with every moment, darker. We left the valley through which we had been driving, slowly climbing the hill, and here, on the top of the rising ground, we had our first glimpse of the outposts of the war. A cottage had been posted on the highest point of the hill; now all that remained of it was a sheet of iron, crumpled like paper, propped in the centre by a black and solitary post, trailing thence on the ground amongst tumbled bricks and refuse. This sheet of iron was silver in the moonlight and stood out with its solitary black support against the night sky, which was now breaking into a million stars. Behind it stretched a flat plain that reached to the horizon.
“There,” I said to Trenchard, “there’s your first glimpse of actual warfare. What do you say to every house in your village at home like that? It’s ghastly enough if you see it as I have done, still smoking, with the looking-glasses and flower-pots and pictures lying about.”