by Hugh Walpole
At any rate there we sat, huddled together, reflected in the countless looking-glasses as a helpless miserable “lot,” falling into long silences, hoping for the coming of Molozov with later news, listening to the confusion in the street below. Marie Ivanovna with her hands behind her back and her head up walked, nervously, up and down the long room. Her eyes stared beyond us and the place, striving perhaps to find some reason why life should so continually insist on being a different thing from her imaginings of it.
Lighted by the hot sun, blown upon by the dust, her figure, tall, thin, swaying a little in its many reflections, had the determined valour of some Joan of Arc. But Joan of Arc, I thought to myself, had at least some one definite against whom to wave her white banner; we were fighting dust and the sun.
Trenchard and Nikitin had left us to go into the town to search for news. We were silent. Suddenly Marie Ivanovna, turning upon us all as though she hated us, cried fiercely:
“I think you should know that Mr. Trenchard and I are no longer engaged.”
It was neither the time nor the place for such a declaration. I cannot suggest why Marie Ivanovna spoke unless it were that she felt life that was betraying her so basely that she, herself, at least, must be honest. We none of us knew what to say. What could we say? This appalling day had sunk for us all individualities. We were scarcely aware of one another’s names and here was Marie Ivanovna thrusting all these personalities upon us. Sister Sofia’s red-rimmed eyes glittered with pleasure but she only said: “Oh, dear, I’m very sorry.” Sister K —— who was always without tact made a most uncomfortable remark: “Poor Mr.!...”
That, I believe, was what we were all feeling. I had an impulse to run out into the street, find Trenchard, and make him comfortable. I felt furiously indignant with the girl. We all looked at her, I suppose, with indignation, because she regarded us with a fierce, insulting smile, then turned her back upon us and went to a window.
At that moment Molozov with Trenchard, Nikitin and Semyonov, entered. I have said earlier in this book that only upon one occasion have I seen Molozov utterly overcome, a defeated man. This was the occasion to which I refer. He stood there in the doorway, under a vulgar bevy of gilt and crimson cupids, his face dull paste in colour, his hands hanging like lead; he looked at us without seeing us. Semyonov said something to him: “Why, of course,” I heard him reply, “we’ve got to get out as quickly as we can.... That’s all.”
He came over towards us and we were all, except Marie Ivanovna, desperately frightened. She cried to him: “Well, what’s the truth? How bad is it?”
He didn’t turn to her but answered to us all.
“It’s abominable — everywhere.”
I know that then the great feeling of us all was that we must escape from the horrible place in some way. This beastly town of O —— (once cursed by us for its gentle placidity) was responsible for the whole disaster; it was as though we said to ourselves, “If we had not been here this would not have happened.”
We all stood up as though we felt that we must leave at once, and while we stood thus there was a report that shook the floor so that we rocked on our feet, brought a shower of dust and whitewash from the walls, cracked the one remaining pane of glass and drove two mice scattering with terror wildly across the floor. The noise had been terrific. Our very hearts stood still. The Austrians were here then.... This was the end....
“It’s the bridge,” Semyonov said quietly, and of course ironically. “We’ve blown it up. There’ll be the other in a moment.”
There was — a second shock brought down more dust and a large scale of gilt wood from one of the cornices. We waited then for our orders, looking down from the windows on to what seemed a perfect babel of disorder and confusion.
“We must be at X —— to-night,” Molozov told us. “The Staff is on its way already. We should be moving in half an hour.”
We made our preparations.
Trenchard, meanwhile, had had during this afternoon one driving compelling impulse beyond all others, that he must, at all costs, escape all personal contact with Marie Ivanovna. It seemed to him the most awful thing that could possibly happen to him now would be a compulsory conversation with her. He did not, of course, know that she had spoken to us, and he thought that it would be the easiest thing in all the confusion that this retreat involved that he should be flung up against her. He sought his chief refuge in Nikitin. I am aware that in the things I have said of Nikitin, in speaking both of his relation to Andrey Vassilievitch’s wife and to Trenchard himself, I have shown him as something of a sentimental figure. And yet sentimental was the very last thing that he really was. He had not the “open-heartedness” that is commonly asserted to be the chief glory and the chief defect of the Russian soul. He had talked to me because I was a foreigner and of no importance to him — some one who would be entirely outside his life. He took Trenchard now for his friend I believe because he really was attracted by the admixture of chivalry and helplessness, of simplicity and credulity, of timidity and courage that the man’s character displayed. I am sure that had it been I who had been in Trenchard’s position he would not have stretched out one finger to help me.
Trenchard himself had only vague memories of the events of the preceding evening. He was aware quite simply that the whole thing had been a horrible dream and that “nothing so bad could ever possibly happen to him again.” He had “touched the worst,” and he undoubtedly found some relief to-day in the general distress and confusion. It covered his personal disaster and forced him to forget himself in other persons’ misfortunes. He was, as it happened, of more use than any one just then in getting every one speedily out of O —— . He ran messages, found parcels and bags for the Sisters, collected sanitars, even discovered the mongrel terrier, tied a string to him and gave him to one of our soldiers to look after. In what a confusion, as the evening fell, was the garden of our large white house! Huge wagons covered its lawn; horses, neighing, stamping, jumping, were dragged and pulled and threatened; officers, from stout colonels to very young lieutenants, came cursing and shouting, first this way and that. A huge bag of biscuits broke away from a provision van and fell scattering on to the ground; the soldiers, told that they might help themselves, laughing and shouting like babies, fell upon the store. But for the most part there was gloom, gloom, gloom under the evening sky. Sometimes the reflections of distant rockets would shudder and fade across the pale blue; incessantly, from every corner of the world, came the screaming rattle of carts, a sound like many pencils drawn across a gigantic slate — and always the dust rose and fell in webs and curtains of filmy gold, under the evening sun.
At last Trenchard found himself with Molozov and Ivan Mihailovitch, the student like a fish, in the old black carriage. Molozov had “flung the world to the devil,” Trenchard afterwards said, “and I sat there, you know, looking at his white face and wondering what I ought to talk about.” Trenchard suddenly found himself narrowly and aggressively English — and it is certain that every Englishman in Russia on Tuesday thanks God that he is a practical man and has some common sense, and on Wednesday wonders whether any one in England knows the true value of anything at all and is ashamed of a country so miserably without a passion for “ideas.”
To-night Trenchard was an Englishman. He had been really useful at O —— and he had felt a new spirit of kindness around him. He did not know that Marie Ivanovna had made her declaration to us and that we were therefore all anxious to show him that we thought that he had been badly treated. Moreover he suspected, with a true English distrust of emotions, that the Russians before him were inclined to luxuriate in their gloom. Molozov’s despair and Ivan Mihailovitch’s passionate eyes and jerking white hands irritated him.
He smiled a practical English smile and looked about him at the swaying procession of carts and soldiers with a practical eye.
“Come,” he said to Molozov, “don’t despair. There’s nothing really to be distressed about. There must
be these retreats, you know. There must be. The great thing in this war is to see the whole thing in proportion — the whole thing. France and England and the Dardanelles and Italy — everything. In another month or two—”
But Molozov, frowning, shook his head.
“This country ... no method ... no system. Nothing. It is terrible.... That’s a pretty girl!” he added moodily, looking at a group of peasants in a doorway. “A very pretty girl!” he added, sitting up a little and staring. Then he relapsed, “No system — nothing,” he murmured.
“But there will be,” continued Trenchard in his English voice. (He told me afterwards that he was conscious at the time of a horrible priggish superiority.) “Here in Russia you go up and down so. You’ve no restraint. Now if you had discipline—”
But he was interrupted by the melancholy figure of an officer who hung on to our slowly moving carriage, walking beside it with his hand on the door. He did not seem to have anything very much to say but looked at us with large melancholy eyes. He was small and needed dusting.
“What is it?” asked Molozov, saluting.
“I’ve had contusion,” said the little officer in a dreamy voice. “Contusion ... I don’t feel very well. I don’t quite know where I ought to go.”
“Our doctors are just behind,” said Molozov. “You can come on with them.”
“Your doctors ...” the little officer repeated dreamily. “Very well....” But he continued with us. “I’ve had contusion,” he said. “At M —— . Yes.... And now I don’t quite know where I am. I’m very depressed and unhappy. What do you advise?”
“There are our doctors,” Molozov repeated rather irritably. “You’ll find them ... behind there.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the melancholy little figure repeated and disappeared.
In some way this figure affected Trenchard very dismally and drove all his English common sense away. We were moving now slowly through clouds of dust, and peasants who watched us from their doorways with a cold indifference that was worse than exultation.
When we arrived, at two or three in the morning, at X —— , our destination, the spirits of all of us were heavily weighted. Tired, cross, dirty, driven and pursued, and always with us that harassing fear that we had now no ground upon which we might rest our feet, that nothing in the world belonged to us, that we were fugitives and vagabonds by the will of God.
As our carriage stopped before the door of the large white building in X —— that seemed just like the large white building in O —— , the little officer was again at our side.
“I’ve got contusion ...” he said. “I’m very unhappy, and I don’t know where to go.”
Trenchard felt now as though in another moment he would tumble back again into his nightmare of yesterday. The house at X —— indeed was fantastic enough. I feel that I am in danger of giving too many descriptions of our various halting-places. For the most part they largely resembled one another, large deserted country houses with broken windows, bare walls and floors, a tangled garden and a tattered collection of books in the Polish language. But this building at X —— was like no other of our asylums.
It was a huge place, a strange combination of the local town-hall and the local theatre. It was the theatre that at that early hour in the morning seemed to our weary eyes so fantastic. As we peered into it it was a huge place, already filled with wounded and lighted only by candles, stuck here and there in bottles. I could see, dimly, the stage at the back of the room, and still hanging, tattered and restless in the draught, a forgotten backcloth of some old play. I could see that it was a picture of a gay scene in an impossibly highly coloured town — high marble stairs down which flower-girls with swollen legs came tripping into a market-place filled with soldiers and their lovers— “Carmen” perhaps. It seemed absurd enough there in the uncertain candlelight with the wounded groaning and crying in front of it. There was already in the air that familiar smell of blood and iodine, the familiar cries of: “Oh, Sestritza — Oh, Sestritza!” the familiar patient faces of the soldiers, sitting up, waiting for their turn, the familiar sharp voice of the sanitar: “What Division? What regiment? bullet or shrapnel?”
I remember that some wounded man, in high fever, was singing, and that no one could stop him.
“He’s dead,” I heard Semyonov’s curt voice behind me, and turning saw them cover the body on the stretcher with a sheet.
“Oh! Oh!... Oh! Oh!” shrieked a man from the middle of whose back Nikitin, probing with his finger, was extracting a bullet. The candles flared, the ladies from “Carmen” wavered on the marble steps, the high cracked voice of the soldier continued its song. I stood there with Trenchard and Andrey Vassilievitch. Then we turned away.
“We’re not wanted to-night,” I said. “We’d better get out of the way and sleep somewhere. There’ll be plenty to do to-morrow!” Little Andrey Vassilievitch, whom during the retreat I had entirely forgotten, looked very pathetic. He was dusty and dirty and hated his discomfort. He did not know where to go and was in everybody’s way. Nikitin was immensely busy and had no time to waste on his friend. Poor Andrey was tired and terribly depressed.
“What I say is,” he confided to us in a voice that trembled a little, “that we are not to despair. We have to retreat to-day, but who knows what will happen to-morrow? Every one is aware that Russia is a glorious country and has endless resources. Well then.... What I say is ...”; an officer bundled into him, apologised but quite obviously cursed him for being in the way.
“Come along,” said Trenchard, putting his arm on Andrey Vassilievitch’s sleeve. “We’ll find somewhere to sleep. Of course we’re not in despair. Why should we be? You’ll feel better to-morrow.”
They departed, and as they went I wondered at this new side in Trenchard’s character. He seemed strong, practical, and almost cheerful. I, knowing his disaster, was puzzled. My lame leg was hurting me to-night. I found a corner to lie down in, rolled myself in my greatcoat and passed through a strange succession of fantastic dreams in which Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna, Nikitin, and Semyonov all figured. Behind them I seemed to hear some voice crying: “I’ve got you all!... I’ve got you all!... You’re caught!... You’re caught!... You’re caught!”
On the following day there happened to Trenchard the thing that he had dreaded. Writing of it now I cannot disentangle it from the circumstances and surroundings of his account of it to me. He was looking back then, when he spoke to me, to something that seemed almost fantastic in its ironical reality. Every word of that conversation he afterwards recalled to himself again and again. As to Marie Ivanovna I think that he never even began to understand her; that he should believe in her was a different matter from his understanding her. That he should worship her was a tribute both to his inexperience and to his sentiment. But his relation to her and to this whole adventure of his was confused and complicated by the fact that he was not, I believe, in himself a sentimental man. What one supposed to be sentiment was a quite honest and naked lack of knowledge of the world. As experience came to him sentiment fell away from him. But experience was never to come to him in regard to Marie Ivanovna; he was to know as little of her at the end as he had known at the beginning, and this whole conversation with her (of course, I have only his report of it) is clouded with his romantic conception of her. To that I might add also my own romantic conception; if Trenchard never saw her clearly because he loved her, I never saw her clearly because — because — why, I do not know.... She was, from first to last, a figure of romance, irritating, aggressive, enchanting, baffling, always blinding, to all of us.
During the morning after our arrival in M —— Trenchard worked in the theatre, bandaging and helping with the transport of the wounded up the high and difficult staircase. Then at midday, tired with the heat, the closeness of the place, he escaped into the little park that bordered the farther side of the road. It was a burning day in June — the sun came beating through the trees, and as soon as he had turned the corner
of the path and had lost the line of ruined and blackened houses to his right he found himself in the wildest and most glittering of little orchards. The grass grew here to a great height — the apple-trees were of a fine age, and the sun in squares and circles and stars of light flashed like fire through the thick green. He stepped forward, blinded by the quivering gold, and walked into the arms of Marie Ivanovna. He, quite literally, ran against her and put his arms about her for a moment to steady her, not seeing who she was.
Then he gave a little cry.
She was also frightened. “It was the only time,” he told me, “that I had ever seen her show fear.”
They were silent, neither of them knowing the way to speak.
Then she said: “John, don’t r-run away. It is very good. I wanted to speak to you. Here, sit down here.”
She herself sat down and patted the grass, inviting him. He at once sat down beside her, but he could say nothing — nothing at all.
She waited for a time and then, seeing him, I suppose, at a loss and helpless, regained her own courage. “Are you still angry with me?”
“No,” he answered, not looking at her.
“You have a right to be; I behaved very badly.”
“I don’t understand,” he replied, “why you thought in Petrograd that you loved me and then — so soon — found that you did not — so soon.”
He looked at her and then lowered his eyes.
“What do you know or I know?” she suddenly asked him impetuously. “Are we not both always thinking that things will be so fine — seichass — and then they are not. How could we be happy together when we are both so ignorant? Ah, you know, John, you know that happy together we could never be.”