by Hugh Walpole
“Well, I’m glad he was happy,” he said to me. Then he stood, looking at me curiously. I returned the look. We neither of us said anything. These are all commonplaces, I suppose, that I am discovering. The only importance is that some ten million human beings are, in this war, making these discoveries for themselves, just as I am. Who can tell what that may mean? I have seen here no visions, nor have I met any one who has seen them, but there are undoubted facts — not easy things to discount.
Sunday, August 15. Things are pretty bad here. The Austrians have taken Vulatch. Both on the right and on the left they have advanced. They may arrive here at any moment. The magnificence of the Russian soldier is surely beyond all praise. I wonder whether people in France and England realise that for the last three months here he has been fighting with one bullet as against ten. He stands in his trench practically unarmed against an enemy whose resources seem, endless — but nothing can turn him back. Whatever advances the Germans may make I see Russia returning again and again. I do from the bottom of my soul, and, what is of more importance, from the sober witness of my eyes, here believe that nothing can stop the impetus born of her new spirit. This war is the beginning of a world history for her.
Krylov this afternoon said that he thought that we should leave this place, get out our wagons and retire. But how can we? At this moment, how can we? We are just now at the most critical meeting of the ways — the extra twelve versts back to Mittövo may make the whole difference to many of the cases, and the doctors of the Division, Krylov himself admits, have got their arms full. We simply can’t leave them.... There has been some confusion here. There doesn’t seem any responsible person to give us orders. Colonel Maximoff has forgotten us, I believe. In any case I think that we must stay on here for another day and night. Perhaps we shall get away to-morrow....
I had a queer experience this afternoon. I don’t want to make too much of it but here it is. I went up to my room this afternoon at five to get some sleep, as I’m on duty to-night. I lay down and shut my eyes and then, of course, as I always do, immediately saw Marie Ivanovna. I know quite clearly that this present relationship to her cannot continue for long or I shall be off my head. I can see myself quite clearly as though I were outside myself, and I know that I’m madder now than I was a week ago. For instance in this business of Marie Ivanovna, I knew then that my seeing her was an illusion — now I am not quite sure. I knew a week ago that I saw her because she is so much in my thoughts, because of the intolerable heat, because of the Flies and the Forest, because of Semyonov. I am not sure now whether it is not her wish that I should see her. She comes as she came on those last days before she left me — with all the kindness in her eyes that no other human being has ever given me before, nor will ever give me again. To-day I looked and was not sure whether she were gone or no. I was not sure of several things in the room and as I lay there I said to myself, “Is that really a looking-glass or no?” “If I tried could I touch it or would it fade from under my hand?” The room was intolerably close and there was a fly who persecuted me. As I lay there he came and settled on my hand. He waited, watching me with his wicked sneering eyes, then he crept forward, and waited again, rubbing his legs one against the other. Then very slyly, laughing to himself, he began to tickle me. I slashed with my hand at him, he flew into the air, sneering, then with a little “ping” settled on the back of my neck. I vowed that I would not mind him; I lay still. He began then to crawl very slowly forward towards my chin, and it was as though he were dragging spidery strands of nerves through my body, fitting them all on to stiff, tight wires. He reached my chin, and then again, sneering up into my eyes, he began to tickle. I thought once more that I had him, but once again he was in the air. Then, after waiting until I had almost sunk back into sleep, he did the worst thing that a fly can do, began, very slowly, to crawl down the inside of my pince-nez (I had been trying to read). He got between the glass and my eyelash and moved very faintly with his damnable legs. Then my patience went — I did what during these last days I have vowed not to do, lost my control, jumped from my bed, and cursed with rage....
Then with my head almost bursting with heat and my legs trembling I had an awful moment, I thought that I was really mad. I thought that I would get the looking-glass and smash it and that then I would jump from the window. In another moment I thought that something would break in my head, the something with which I kept control over myself — I seemed to hear myself praying aloud: “Oh God! let me keep my reason! Oh God! let me keep my reason!” and I could see the Forest like a great green hot wave rising beyond the window to a towering height ready to leap down upon me.
Then Semyonov came in. He stood in the doorway and looked at me. He must have thought me strange and I know that I waited, staring at him, feeling foolish as I always do with him. But he spoke to me kindly, with the sort of kindness that there is sometimes in his voice, patronising and reluctant of course.
“You can’t sleep, Mr.?” he said.
“No,” I answered, and said something about flies.
“What have you been doing to the looking-glass?” he asked, laughing, for there the thing was on the floor, broken into pieces. I am sure that I never touched it.
“That’s unlucky,” he said. “Never mind, Mr.,” he said smiling at me, “twenty-two misfortunes, aren’t you? Always dropping something,” he added quite kindly. “More, perhaps, than the rest of us.... Wash your face in cold water. It’s this infernal heat that worries us all.”
I remember then that he poured the water into the blue tin basin for me and then, taking the tin mug himself, poured it in cupfuls over my hands and arms. I afterwards did the same for him. At that moment I very nearly spoke to him of Marie. I wished desperately to try; but I looked at his face, and his eyes, laughing at me as they always did, stopped me.
When I had finished he thanked me, wiped his hands, then turning round at the door he said: “Why don’t you go back to Mittövo, Mr. —— You’re tired out.”
“You know why,” I answered, without looking at him He seemed then as though he would speak, but he stopped himself and went away. I lay down again and tried to sleep, but when I closed my eyes the green beyond the window burnt through my eyelids — and then the fly (I am sure it was the same fly) returned....
Monday, August 16.... Lord! but I am tired of this endless bandaging, cleaning of filthy wounds, paring away of ragged ends of flesh, smelling, breathing, drinking blood and dust and dirt. The poor fellows! Their bravery is beyond any word of mine. They have come these last few days with their eyes dazed and their ears deafened. Indeed the roaring of the cannon has been since yesterday afternoon incessant. They say that the Austrians are straining every nerve to break through to the river and cross. We are doing what we can to prevent them, but what can we do? There simply IS NOT AMMUNITION! The officers here are almost crying with despair, and the men know it and go on, with their cheerfulness, their obedience, their mild kindliness — go into that green hell to be butchered, and come out of it again, if they are lucky, with their bodies mangled and twisted, and horror in their eyes. It’s nobody’s fault, I suppose, this business. How easy to write in the daily papers that the Germans prepared for war and that we did not, and that after a month or two all will be well.... After a month or two! tell that to us here stuck in this Forest and hear us how we laugh!...
Meanwhile, for the good of my health, I’m figuring very clearly to myself all the physical features of this place. It’s a long white house, two-storied. The front door has broken glass over it and there’s a litter of tumbled bricks on the top step. After you’ve gone through the front door you come into the hall where the wounded are as thick as flies. You go through the hall and turn to the left. There’s a pantry place on your right all full of flies and when you open the door they unsettle with a great buzz and shift into all sorts of shapes and patterns. Next to them is our sitting-room, the horrid place always dirty and stifling. Then there’s the operating-room, then
another room for beds, then the kitchen. Outside to the right there’s the garden, dry now with the heat, and the orchard smells of the men they’ve buried in it. To the left, after a little clearing, there’s the forest always green and glittering. The men are in the trenches now, the new ones that were made last week, so I suppose that we shall be in the thick of it very shortly. That battery at the edge of the hill has been banging away all the morning. What else is there? There’s an old pump just outside the sitting-room window. There’s a litter of dirty paper and refuse there, too, that the flies gather round. There’s an old barn away to the right where some horses are and two cows. I have to keep my mind on these things because I know they’re real. You can touch them with your hands and they’ll still be there even if you go away — they won’t walk with you as you move. So I must fasten on to these things about which there can’t be any doubt. In the same way I like to remember that book in the sitting-room — Mr. Glass who lectured on “Fools,” the Ruysdael, and the Normal Pupils who acted Othello. They’re real enough and are probably somewhere now quietly studying, or teaching, or sleeping — I envy them....
A thing that happened this morning disturbed us all. Four soldiers came out of the Forest quite mad. They seemed rational enough at first and said that they’d been sent out of the first line trenches with contusion — one of them had a bleeding finger, but the others were untouched. Then one of them, a middle-aged man with a black beard, began quite gravely to tell us that the Forest was moving. They had seen it with their own eyes. They had watched all the trees march slowly forward like columns of soldiers and soon the whole Forest would move and would crush every one in it. It was all very well fighting Austrians, but whole forests was more than any one could expect of them. Then suddenly one of them cried out, pointing with his finger: “See, Your Honour — there it comes!... Ah! let us run! let us run!” One of them began to cry. It was very disagreeable. I saw Audrey Vassilievitch who was present glance anxiously through the window at the Forest and then gravely check himself and look at me nervously to see whether I had noticed. The men afterwards fell into a strange kind of apathy. We sent them off to Mittövo in the afternoon.
I want now to remember as exactly as possible a strange conversation I had this evening with Semyonov. I came up when it was getting dusk to the bedroom. One of the Austrian batteries was spitting away over the hill but we were not replying. Everything this afternoon has looked as though they were preparing for a heavy attack. Our little window was open and the sky beyond was a sort of very pale green, and against this you could see a flush of colour rising and falling like the opening and shutting of a door. Everything quite silent except the Austrian cannon and a soldier, delirious, downstairs, singing.
The Forest was deep black, but you could see the soldiers’ fires gleaming here and there like beasts’ eyes. Our room was almost dark and I was very startled to find Semyonov sitting on his bed and staring in front of him. He looked like a wooden figure sitting there, and he didn’t move as I came in. I’m glad that although I’m still awkward and clumsy with him (as I am, and always will be, I suppose, with every one) I’m not afraid of him any more. The room was so dark that he looked like a shadow. I had intended to fetch something and go away, but instead of that I sat down on my bed, feeling suddenly very tired and lethargic.
“Well, Mr.,” he said in the ironical voice he always uses to me.
(I would wish now to repeat if I can every word of our conversation.)
“Krylov has been again,” I said. “He told Nikitin that we ought to go to-night. Nikitin asked him whether the Division had plenty of wagons and Krylov admitted that there weren’t nearly enough. He agreed that it would make a lot of difference if we could keep this place going until to-morrow night — all the same he advised us to leave.”
“We’ll stay until some one orders us to go,” said Semyonov. “It will make a difference to a hundred men or more probably. If they do start firing on to this place we can get the men off in the wagons in time.”
“And what if the wagons have left for Mittövo?”
“We’ll have to wait until they come back,” he answered.
We sat there listening to the cannon. Then Semyonov said very quietly and not at all ironically, “I wish to ask you — I have wished before — tell me. You blame me for her death?”
I thought for a moment, then I replied:
“I did so at first. Now I do not think that it had anything to do with you or with me or with any one — except herself.”
“Except herself?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“She wished it, I think.”
His irony returned. “You believe in the power of others, Mr., too much. You should believe more in your own.”
“I believe in her power. She was stronger than you,” I answered.
“I’m sure that you like to think so,” he said laughing.
“She is still stronger than you....”
“So you are a mystic, Mr.,” he said. “Of course, with your romantic mind that is only natural. You believe, I suppose, that she is with us here in the room?”
“It cannot be of interest to you,” I answered quietly, “what I believe.”
“Yes, it is of interest,” he replied in a voice that was friendly and humorously indulgent, as though he spoke to a child. “I find it strange — I have found it strange for many weeks now — that I should think so frequently of you. You are not a man who would naturally be interesting to me. You are an Englishman and I am not interested in Englishmen. You are sentimental, you have no idea of life as it is, you like dull things, dull safe things, you believe always in what you are told. You have no sense of humour.... You should be of no interest to me, and yet during these last weeks I have not been able to get rid of you.”
“That is not my fault,” I said. “I have not been so anxious for your company.”
“No,” he said, speaking rather thoughtfully, as though he were seriously thinking something out, “you regard me, of course, as a very bad character. I have no desire to defend myself to you. But the point is that I have found myself often thinking of you, that I have even taken trouble sometimes to be with you.”
He waited as though he expected me to say something, but I was silent.
“It was perhaps that I saw that Marie Ivanovna cared for you. She gave you up to the end something that she never gave to me. That I suppose was tiresome to me.”
“You thought you knew her,” I said, hoping to hurt him. “You did not know her at all.”
“That may be,” he answered. “I certainly did not understand her, but that was attractive to me. And so, Mr., you thought that you understood her?”
But I did not answer him. My head ached frantically, I was wretchedly in want of sleep. I jumped to my feet, standing in front of him:
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” I cried. “Let us part. I am nothing to you — you despise me and laugh at me — you have from the first done so. It was because you laughed at me that she began to laugh. If you had not been there she might have continued to love me — she was very inexperienced. And now that she is gone I am of no more importance to you — let me be! For God’s sake, let me be!”
“You are free,” he said. “You can return to Mittövo in an hour’s time when the wagons go.”
I did not speak.
“No, you will not go,” he went on, “because you think that she is here. She died here — and you believe that she is not dead. I also will not go — for my own reasons.”
Then he jumped off his bed, stood upright against me, his clothes touching mine. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“No, Mr., we will remain together. I find you really rather charming. And you are changed, you know. You are not the silly fool you were when you first came to us!”
I moved away from him. I could not bear the touch of his hand on my shoulder. I had, I repeat, no fear of him. He might laugh at me or no as he pleased, but I did not want his kindness.
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br /> “My beliefs seem to you the beliefs of a child,” I said, trying to speak more calmly. “Well, then, leave me to them. They at least do you no harm. I love her now as I loved her when I first saw her. I cannot believe that I shall never be with her again. But that is my own affair and matters to no one but myself!”
He answered me: “You have a simple fashion of looking at things which I envy you. I assure you that I am not laughing at you. You believe, if I understand you, that after your death you will meet her again. You are afraid that if I die before you she will belong to me, but that if you die first you will be with her again as you were ‘at the beginning’?... Is not that so?”
I did not answer him.
“I swear to you,” he continued, “that I am not mocking you. What my own thoughts may be does not interest you, but I have not, in my life, found many things or persons that are worth one’s devotion, and she was worthy of being loved as you love her. Such days as these in such a place as this must bring strange thoughts to any man. When we return to Mittövo to-morrow night I assure you that you will see everything differently.”
He felt, I suppose, that he had been speaking too seriously because the ironic humour with which he always treated me returned.
“Here, Mr., at any rate we are. I’m sorry for you — tiresome to be tied to some one as uncongenial as myself — but be a little sorry for me, too. You’re not, you know, the ideal companion I would have chosen.”
“Why did you come?” I asked him. “Durward was here — we were doing very well—”
“Without me” — he caught me up. “Yes, I suppose so. But your fascination is so strong that—” He broke off laughing, then continued almost sharply: “Here we are anyway. To-night and to-morrow we are going to be lively enough if I know anything about it. I’ll do you the justice, Mr., of saying you’ve worked admirably here. I wouldn’t have believed it of you. Let us both of us drop our romantic fancies. We’ve no time to spare.” Then, turning at the door, he ended: “And you needn’t hate me so badly, you know. She cared for you in a way that she never gave me. Perhaps, after all, in the end, you will win—”