by Hugh Walpole
He looked at her clearly and without hesitation.
“I was very stupid,” he said. “I thought that because I had come into a big thing I would be big myself. It is not so; I am the same person as I was in England. I have not changed at all and I shall never change ... only in this one thing that whether you go from me or whether you stay I shall never love anybody but you. All men say that, I know,” he added, “but there are not many men who have had so little in their lives as I, and so perhaps it means more with me than it does with others.”
She made no reply to him. She had not, I believe, heard him. She said, as though she were speaking to herself: “If we had not come, John, if we had stayed in Petrograd, anything might have been. But here there is something more than people. I don’t know whether I love or hate any one. I cannot marry you or any man until this is all over.”
“And then,” he interrupted passionately, touching her sleeve with his hand. “After the war? Perhaps — again, you will—”
She took his hand in hers, looking at him as though she were suddenly seeing him for the first time:
“No — you, John, never. In Petrograd I didn’t know what this could be — no idea — none. And now that I’m here I can think of nothing else than what I’m going to find. There is something here that I’d be afraid of if I let myself be and that’s what I love. What will happen when I meet it? Shall I feel fear or no? And so, too, if there were a man whom I feared....”
“Semyonov!” Trenchard cried.
She looked at him and did not answer. He caught her hand urgently. “No, Marie, no — any one but Semyonov. It doesn’t matter about me. But you must be happy — you must be. Nothing else — and he won’t make you. He isn’t—”
“Happy!” she answered scornfully. “I don’t want to be happy. That isn’t it. But to be sure that one’s not afraid—” (She repeated to herself several times Hrabrost — the Russian for “bravery.”) “That is more than you, John, or than I or than—”
She broke off, looked at him suddenly as he told me “very tenderly and kindly as though she liked me.”
“John, I’m your friend. I’ve been bad to you, but I’m your friend. I don’t understand why I’ve been so bad to you because, I would be fur-rious — yes, fur-rious — if any one else were bad to you. And be mine, John, whatever I do, be mine. I’m not really a bad character — only I think it’s too exciting now, here — everything — for me to stop and think.”
“You know,” he answered with a rather tired gesture (he had worked in that hot theatre all the morning) “that I am always the same — but you must not marry Semyonov,” he added fiercely.
She did not answer him, looked up at the sunlight and said after a time:
“I hate Sister K —— . She is not really religious. She doesn’t wash either. Let us go back. I was away, I said, only for a little.”
They walked back, he told me, in perfect silence. He was more unhappy than ever. He was more unhappy because he saw quite clearly that he did not understand her at all; he felt farther away from her than ever and loved her more devotedly than ever: a desperate state of things. If he had taken that sentence of hers— “I think it’s too exciting — now — here — for me to stop and think,” he would, I fancy, have found the clue to her, but he would not believe that she was so simple as that. In the two days that followed, days of the greatest discomfort, disappointment and disorder, his mind never left her for a moment. His diary for these four days is very short and unromantic.
“June 23rd. In X —— . Morning worked in the theatre. Bandaged thirty. Operation 1 — arm amputated. Learn that there has been a battle round the school-house at O —— where we first were. Wonderful weather. Spent some time in the park. Talked to M. there. Evening moved — thirty versts to P —— . Much dust, very slow, owing to the Guards retreating at same time. Was with Durward and Andrey Vassilievitch in a Podvoda — Like the latter, but he’s out of place here. Arrived 1.30.
“June 24th. Off early morning. This time black carriage with Sisters K —— and Anna Petrovna. More dust — thousands of soldiers passing us, singing as though there were no retreat. News from L —— very bad. Say there’s no ammunition. Arrived Nijnieff evening 7.30. Very hungry and thirsty. We could find no house for some hours; a charming little town in a valley. Nestor seems huge — very beautiful with wooded hills. But whole place so swallowed in dust impossible to see anything. Heaps of wounded again. I and Molozov in nice room alone. Have not seen M. all day.
“June 25th. This morning Nikitin, Sister K —— , Goga, and I attempted to get back to P —— to see whether there were wounded. Started off on the carts but when we got to the hill above the village met the whole of our Division coming out. The village abandoned, so back we had to go again through all the dust. Evening nothing doing. Every one depressed.
“June 26th. Very early — half-past five in the morning — we were roused and had to take part in an exodus like the Israelites. Most unpleasant, moving an inch an hour, Cossacks riding one down if one preferred to go on foot to being bumped in the haycart. Every one in the depths of depression. Crossed the Nestor, a perfectly magnificent river. Five versts further, then stopped at a farmhouse, pitched tents. Instantly hundreds of wounded. Battle fierce just other side of Nijnieff. Worked like a nigger — from two to eight never stopped bandaging. About ten went off to the position with Molozov. Strange to be back in the little town under such different circumstances. Dark as pitch — raining. Much noise, motors, soldiers like ghosts though — shrapnel all the time. Tired, depressed and nervous. Horrid waiting doing nothing; two houses under the shrapnel. Expected also at every moment bridge behind us to be blown up. At last wagons filled with wounded, started back and got home eventually, taking two hours over it. Very glad when it was over....”
We had arrived, indeed, although we did not then know it and were expecting, every moment, to move back again, at the conclusion of our first exodus. Our only other transition, after a day or two longer at our farmhouse, was forward four versts to a tiny village on a high hill overlooking the Nestor, to the left of Nijnieff. This village was called Mittövo. Mittövo was to be our world for many weeks to come. We inhabited once again the large white deserted country-house with the tangled garden, the dusty bare floors, the broken windows. At the end of the tangled garden there was a white stone cross, and here was a most wonderful view, the high hill running precipitously down to the flat silver expanse of the Nestor that ran like a gleaming girdle under the breasts of the slopes beyond. These further slopes were clothed with wood. I remember, on the first day that I watched, the forest beyond was black and dense like a cloud resting on the hill; the Nestor and our own country was soaked with sun.
“That’s a fine forest,” I said to my companion.
“Yes, the forest of S —— , stretches miles back into Galicia.” It was Nikitin that day who spoke to me. We turned carelessly away. Meanwhile how difficult and unpleasant those first weeks at Mittövo were! We had none of us realised, I suppose, how sternly those days of retreat had tested our nerves. We had been not only retreating, but (at the same time) working fiercely, and now, when for some while the work slackened and, under the hot blazing sun, we found nothing for our hands to do, a grinding irritable reaction settled down upon us.
I had known in my earlier experience at the war the troubles that inevitably rise from inaction; the little personal inconveniences, the tyrannies of habits and manners and appearances, when you’ve got nothing to do but sit and watch your immediate neighbour. But on that earlier occasion our army had been successful; it seemed that the war would soon find its conclusion in the collapse of Germany, and good news from Europe smiled upon us every morning at breakfast. Now we were tired and over-wrought. Good news there was none — indeed every day brought disastrous tidings. We, ourselves, must look back upon a hundred versts of fair smiling country that we had conquered with the sacrifice of many thousands of lives and surrendered without the giving of
a blow. And always the force that compelled us to this was sinister and ironical by its invisibility.
It was the Russian temperament to declare exactly what it felt, to give free rein to its moods and dislikes and discomforts. The weather was beginning to be fiercely hot, there were many rumours of cholera and typhus — we, all of us, lost colour and appetite, slept badly and suffered from sudden headaches.
Three days after our arrival at Mittövo we had all discovered private hostilities and resentments. I was as bad as any one. I could not endure the revolutionary student, Ivan Mihailovitch. I thought him most uncleanly in his habits, and I was compelled to sleep in the same room with him. Certainly it was true that washing was not one of the most important things in the world to him. In the morning he would lurch out of bed, put on a soiled shirt and trousers, dab his face with a decrepit sponge, take a tiny piece of soap from an old tin box, look at it, rub it on his fingers and put it hurriedly away again as though he were ashamed of it. Sometimes, getting out of bed, he would cry: “Have you heard the latest scandal? About the ammunition in the Tenth Army! They say—” and then he would forget his washing altogether. He did not shave his head, as most of us had done, but allowed his hair to grow very long, and this, of course, was often a subject of irritation to him. He had also a habit of sitting on his bed in his nightclothes, yawning and scratching his body all over, very slowly, with his long (and I’m afraid dirty) finger-nails, for the space, perhaps, of a quarter of an hour. This I found difficult to endure. His long white face was always a dirty shade of grey and his jacket was stained with reminiscences of his meals. His habits at table were terrible; he was always so deeply interested in what he was saying that he had not time to close his mouth whilst he was eating, to ask people to pass him food (he stretched his long dirty hand across the table) or to pass food to others. He shouted a great deal and was in a furious passion every five minutes. I also just at this time found the boy Goga tiresome; the boy had not been taught by his parents the duty that children owe to their elders and I am inclined to believe that this duty is almost universally untaught in Russia. To Goga a General was as nothing, he would contradict our old white-haired General T —— , when he came to dine with us, would patronise the Colonel and assure the General’s aide-de-camp that he knew better. He would advance his father as a perpetual and faithful witness to the truth of his statements. “You may say what you like,” he would cry to myself or a Sister, “but my father knows better than you do. He has the front seat in the Moscow Opera all through the season and has been to England three times.” Goga also had been once to England for a week (spent entirely on the Brighton Pier) and he told me many things. He would forget, for a moment, that I was an Englishman and would assure me that he knew better than I did. He was a being with the best heart in the world, but his parents loved him so much that they had neglected his education.
These things may seem trifling enough, but they had, nevertheless, their importance. Among the Sisters, Sister K —— was the unpopular one. I myself must honestly confess that she was a woman ill-suited to company less worthy than herself. She had an upright virtuous character but she was narrow (a rare fault in a Russian), superstitious, dogmatically religious, and entirely without tact. She quite honestly thought us a poor lot and would say to me: “I hope, Mr. Durward, you don’t judge Russia by the specimens you find here,” and was, of course, always overheard. She was a strict moralist, but was also generous with all the warmth of Russian generosity in money matters. She was a marvellous hard worker, quite fearless, accurate, and punctual in all things. She fought incessant battles with Anna Petrovna who hated her as warmly as it was in her quiet, unruffled heart to hate any one. The only thing stranger than the fierceness of their quarrels was the suddenness of their conclusion. I remember that at dinner one day they fought a battle over the question of a clean towel with a heat and vigour that was Homeric. A quarter of an hour later I found them quietly talking together. Anna Petrovna was showing Sister K —— a large and hideous photograph of her children.
“How sympathetic! How beautiful!” said Sister K —— .
“But I thought you hated her?” I said afterwards in confusion to Anna Petrovna.
“She was very sympathetic about my children,” said Anna Petrovna placidly.
Then, of course, Sister Sofia Antonovna, the sister with the red eyes, made trouble when she could. She was, as I discovered afterwards, a bitterly disappointed woman, having been deserted by her fiancé only a week before her marriage. That had happened three years ago and she still loved him, so that she had her excuse for her view of the world. My friends seemed to me, during those first weeks at Mittövo, simply a company of good-hearted, ill-disciplined children. I had gone directly back to my days in the nursery. Restraint of any kind there was none, discipline as to time or emotions was undreamed of, and with it all a vitality, a warmth of heart, a sincerity and honesty that made that Otriad, perhaps, the most lovable company I have ever known. Russians are fond of sneering at themselves; for him who declares that he likes Russia and Russians they have either polite disbelief or gentle contempt. In England we have qualities of endurance, of reliability, of solidity, to which, often enough, I long to return — but that warmth of heart that I have known here for two long years, a warmth that means love for the neglected, for the defeated, for the helpless, a warmth that lights a fire on every hearth in every house in Russia — that is a greater thing than the possessors of it know.
Through all the little quarrels and disputes of our company there ran the thread of the affair of Trenchard, Marie Ivanovna and Semyonov. Trenchard was lighted now with the pleasure of their affection, and Marie Ivanovna, who had been at first so popular amongst them, was held to be hard and capricious. She, at least, did not make it easy for them to like her. She had seemed in those first days in O —— as though she wished to win all their hearts, but now it was as though she had not time to consider any of us, as though she had something of far greater importance to claim her attention. She was now very continually with Semyonov and yet it seemed to me that it was rather respect for his opinion and admiration of his independence than liking that compelled her. He was, beyond any question, in love with her, if the name of love can be given to the fierce, intolerant passion that governed him.
He made no attempt to disguise his feelings, was as rude to the rest of us as he pleased, and, of course, flung his scorn plentifully over Trenchard. But now I seemed to detect in him some shades of restlessness and anxiety that I had never seen in him before. He was not sure of her; he did not, I believe, understand her any more than did the rest of us. With justice, indeed, I was afraid for her. His passion, I thought, was as surely and as nakedly a physical one as any other that I had seen precede it, and would as certainly pass as all purely physical passions do. She was as ignorant of the world as on the day when she arrived amongst us; but my feeling about her was that she would receive his love almost as though in a dream, her thoughts fixed on something far from him and in no way depending on him. At any rate she was with him now continually. We judged her proud and hard-hearted, all of us except Trenchard who loved her, Semyonov who wanted her, and Nikitin, who, as I now believe, even then understood her.
Trenchard meanwhile was confused and unsettled: inaction did not suit him any better than it did the rest of us. He had too much time to think about Marie Ivanovna.
He was undoubtedly pleased at his new popularity. He expanded under it and became something of the loquacious and uncalculating person that he had shown himself during his confession to me in the train. To the Russians his loquacity was in no way strange or unpleasant. They were in the habit of unburdening themselves, their hopes, their disappointments, their joys, their tragedies, to the first strangers whom they met. It seemed quite natural to them that Trenchard, puffing his rebellious pipe, should talk to them about Glebeshire, Polchester, Rafiel, Millie and Katherine Trenchard.
“I’d like you to meet Katherine, Anna Petrovna
,” he would say. “You would find her delightful. She’s married now to a young man she ran away with, which surprised every one — her running away, I mean, because she was always considered such a serious character.”
“I forget whether you’ve seen my children, ‘Mr.’” Anna Petrovna would reply. “I must show you their photograph.”
And she would produce the large and hideous picture.
He was the same as in those first days, and yet how immensely not the same. He bore himself now with a chivalrous tact towards Marie Ivanovna that was beyond all praise. He always cherished in his heart his memory of their little conversation in the orchard. “How I wish,” he told me, “that I had made that conversation longer. It was so very short and I might so easily have lengthened it. There were so many things afterwards that I might have said — and she never gave me another chance.”
She never did — she kept him from her. Kind to him, perhaps, but never allowing him another moment’s intimacy. He had almost the air, it seemed to me, of patiently waiting for the moment when she should need him, the air too of a man who was sure, in his heart, that that moment would come.
And the other thing that stiffened him was his hatred for Semyonov. Hatred may seem too fierce a word for the emotion of any one as mild and gentle as Trenchard — and yet hatred at this time it was. He seemed no longer afraid of Semyonov and there was something about him now which surprised the other man. Through all those first days at Mittövo, when we seemed for a moment almost to have slipped out of the war and to be leading the smaller more quarrelsome life of earlier days, Trenchard was occupied with only one question— “What was he feeling about Semyonov?”— “I felt as though I could stand anything if only she didn’t love him. Since that awful night of the Retreat I had resigned myself to losing her; any one should marry her who would make her happy — but he — never! But it was the indecision that I could not bear. I didn’t know — I couldn’t tell, what she felt.”