Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  “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, and then 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 little trakteer there were two men and a woman laughing, that an isvotchik was drawn up in front of a high white block of flats, asleep, his head fallen on his breast, that the wonderful 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 that they 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.’

  “After I had left her that night I did not walk the streets, nor drink, nor find companions. I went home and slept the soundest sleep of my life. In the morning I knew tranquillity for the first time in all my days. I did not, as I had done after many earlier first meetings, hasten to see my friend. I did not know even that she liked me and yet I felt no doubt nor confusion. It was, perhaps, that I was ready to accept this new influence under any conditions, was ready for once to leave the rules to another. I felt no curiosity, knew no determination to discover the conditions of her life that I might bend them to my own pu
rposes. I was quite passive, untroubled, and of a marvellous, almost selfish happiness.

  “Our friendship continued very easily. It soon came to our meeting every day. In the summer they moved to their house in Finland and I went to stay with them. But it was not until her return to Petrograd in September that I told her that I loved her. Upon one of the first autumn days, upon an evening, when the little green tree outside their door was gold and there was a slip of an apricot moon, when the first fires were lighted (Andrey Vassilievitch had English fireplaces), sitting alone together in her little faded old-fashioned room, I told her that I loved her. She listened very quietly as I talked, her eyes on my face, grave, sad perhaps, and yet humorous, secure in her own settled life but sharing also in the life of others. She watched me rather as a mother watches her child.... I told her that it mattered nothing the conditions that she put upon me; that so long as I saw her and knew that she believed me to be her friend I asked for nothing. She answered, still very quietly but putting her hand on mine, that she had loved me from the first moment of our meeting. That she wondered that yet once again love should have come into her life when she had thought that that was all finished for her. She told me that love had been in her life nothing but pain and distress, and then she asked me, very simply, whether I would try to keep this thing so that it should be happy and should endure. I said that I would obey her in anything that she should command.... There followed then the strangest life for me. Lovers in the fullest sense we were and yet it was different from any love that I had ever known. When I ask myself why, in what, it differed I cannot answer. Two old grey middle-aged people who happened to suit one another.... Not romantic.... But I think in the end of it all the reason was that she never revealed herself to me entirely. I was always curious about her, always felt that other people knew more of her than I did, always thought that one day I should know all. It is ‘knowing all’ that kills love, and I never knew all. We were always together. She was a woman of very remarkable intelligence, loving music, literature, painting, with a most excellently critical love. Her friendship with me gave her, I do believe, a new youth and happiness. We became inseparable, and all my earlier life had passed away from me like worn-out clothes. I was happy — but of course I was not satisfied. I was jealous of that which Audrey Vassilievitch had — and I lacked. My whole relationship to Andrey Vassilievitch was a curious one. My friendship for his wife must I am sure have been torture to him. He knew that she had given me a great deal that she had never given to him. And yet, because he loved her so profoundly, he was only anxious that she should be happy. He saw that my friendship gave her new interests, new life even. He encouraged me, then, in every way, to stay with them, to be with them. He left us alone continually. During the whole of that four years he never once spoke in anger to me nor challenged my fidelity. My relationship to him was difficult. We were, quite simply as men, the worst-suited in the world. He had not a trick nor a habit that did not get on my nerves; he was intelligent only in those things that I despised a man for knowing. This would have been well enough had he not persisted in talking about matters of art and literature, of which, of course, he knew nothing. He did it, I believe, to please his wife and myself. I despised him for many things and yet, in my heart, I knew that he had much that I had not. He was, and is, a finer man than I.... And, last and first of all, he possessed part of his wife that I did not. After all, she did, in her own beautiful way, love him. She was a mother to him; she laughed tenderly at his foolishness, cared for him, watched over him, defended him. Me she would never need to defend. Our relationship was built rather on my defence of her. Sometimes I would wish that I were such a durak as Andrey Vassilievitch, that I might have her protection.... There were many, many times when I hated him — no times at all when he did not irritate me. I wished.... I wished.... I do not know what I wished. Only I always waited for the time when I should have all of her, when I should hold her against all the world. Then, after four years of this new life, she quite suddenly died. Again in that little house, on a ‘white night,’ just as when I had at first met her, the purple curtains hanging in the little street, the isvostchik sleeping, the clocks in the house chattering in their haste to keep up with time.... Only two months before the outbreak of the war she caught cold, for a week suffered from pneumonia and died. At the last Andrey Vassilievitch and I were alone with her. He had her hand in his but her last cry was ‘Victor,’ and as she died I felt as though, at last, after that long waiting, she had leapt into my arms for ever....

  “After her death for many weeks, she was with me more completely than she had been during her lifetime. I knew that she was dead, but I thought that I also had died. I went into Finland alone, saw no one, talked to no one, saw only her. Then quite suddenly I came to life again. She withdrew from me.... Work seemed the only possible thing; but I was, during all this time, happy not miserable. She was not with me, but she was not very far away. Then Andrey Vassilievitch came back to me. He told me that he knew that she had loved me — that he had tried to speak of her to others who had known her, but they had, none of them, had real knowledge of her. Might he speak to me sometimes about her?

  “I found that though he irritated me more than ever I liked to talk about her to him. As I spoke of her he scarcely was present at all and yet he had known her and loved her, and would listen for ever and ever if I wished.

  “When the war had lasted some months the fancy came to me that I could get nearer to her by going into it. I might even die, which would be best of all. I did not wish to kill myself because I felt that to be a coward’s death, and in such a way I thought that I would only separate myself from her. But in the war, perhaps, I might meet death in such a way as to show him that I despised him both for myself and her. By suicide I would be paying him reverence.... Some such thought also had Andrey Vassilievitch. I heard that he thought of attaching himself to some Red Cross Otriad. I told him my plans. He said no more, but suddenly, as you know, I found him on the platform of the Warsaw station. Afterwards he apologised to me, said that he must be near me, that he would try not to annoy me, that if sometimes he spoke of her to me he hoped that I would not mind.... And I? What do I feel? I do not know. He has some share in her that I have not. I have some share in her that he has not, and I think that it has come to both of us that the one of us who dies first will attain her. It seems to me now that she is continually with me, but I believe that this is nothing to the knowledge I shall have of her one day. Am I right? Is Andrey Vassilievitch right? Can it be that such a man — such men, I should say, as either I or he — will ever be given such happiness? I do not know. I only know that God exists — that Love is more powerful than man — that Death can fall before us if we believe that it will — that the soul of man is Power and Love.... I believe in God....”

  CHAPTER V

  FIRST MOVE TO THE ENEMY

  It was during two nights in the forest of S —— , about which I must afterwards write, that I had those long conversations with Trenchard, upon whose evidence now I must very largely depend. Before me as I write is his Diary, left to me by him. In this whole business of the war there is nothing more difficult than the varied and confused succession with which moods, impressions, fancies, succeed one upon another, but Trenchard told me so simply and yet so graphically of the events of these weeks that followed the battle of S —— that I believe I am departing in no way from the truth in my present account, the truth, at any rate as he himself believed it to be....

  The only impression that he brought away with him from the battle of S —— was that picture, lighted by the horizon fires, of Marie Ivanovna kneeling with her hand on Semyonov’s shoulder. That, every detail and colour of it, bit into his brain.

  In understanding him it is of the first importance to remember that this was the one and only love business of his life. The effect of those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had
accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as glass is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was, fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of him? That she should make nothing of him at all was as incredible to him as that there should not be, somewhere in the world, Polchester town in Glebeshire county.

  There had been with him, I think, from the first a fear that “it was all too good to be true” — Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. It is not easy for any man, after thirty years’ shy shrinking from the world, to shake himself free of superstitions, and such terrors the quiet and retired Polchester had bred in Trenchard’s heart as though it had been the very epitome of life at its lowest and vilest. It simply came to this, that he refused to believe that Marie Ivanovna had been given to him only to be taken away again. About women he knew simply nothing and Russian women are not the least complicated of their sex. About Marie Ivanovna he of course knew nothing at all.

  His first weeks in our Otriad had been like the painful return to drab reality after a splendid dream. “After all I am the hopeless creature I thought I was. What was there, in those days in Petrograd, that could blind me?” His shyness returned, his awkwardness, his mistakes in tact and resource were upon him again like a suit of badly made clothes. He knew this but he believed that it could make no difference to his lady. So sure was he of himself in regard to her — she might be transformed into anything hideous or vile and still now he would love her — that he could not believe that she would change. The love that had come to them was surely eternal — it must be, it must be, it must be....