by Hugh Walpole
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 was to 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 the most 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 was resolved 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 u
pon 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 talking to 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 see whether 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 feldsch
er 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.