by Hugh Walpole
He gave me one last word:
“All the same I don’t give her up to you,” he said.
When I came downstairs again it was to find confusion and noise. In the first place little Andrey Vassilievitch was quarrelling loudly with Nikitin. He was speaking Russian very fast and I did not discover his complaint. There was something comic in the sight of his small body towering to a perfect tempest of rage, his plump hands gesticulating and always his eyes, anxious and self-important, doing their best to look after his dignity. Nikitin explained to me that he had been urging Andrey Vassilievitch to return to Mittövo with the wagons. “There’s no need,” he said, “for us all to stay. It’s only taking unnecessary risks — and somebody should take charge of the wagons.”
“There’s Feodor Constantinovitch,” said Andrey, naming a feldscher and stammering in his rage. “He’s re-responsible enough.” Then, seeing that he was creating something of a scene, he relapsed into a would-be dignified sulkiness, finally said he would not go, and strutted away.
There were many other disturbances, men coming and going, one of the battery officers appearing for a moment dirty and dishevelled, and always the wounded drowsy or in delirium, watching with dull eyes the evening shadows, talking excitedly in their sleep. Semyonov called me to help in the operating room. Within the next two hours he had carried out two amputations with admirable cool composure. During the second one, when the man’s arm tumbled off into the basin and lay there amongst the filthy rags with the dirty white fingers curved, their nails dead and grey, I suddenly felt violently sick.
A sanitar took my place and I went out into the cool of the forest, where a silver pattern of stars swung now above the branches and a full moon, red and cold, was rising beyond the hill. After a time I felt better and, finding that I was not needed for a time, I wrote this diary.
Tuesday, August 17th. It is just six o’clock — a most lovely evening. Strangely enough everything is utterly quiet — not a sound anywhere. You might fancy yourself in the depths of England somewhere. However, considering what has happened to-day and what they expect will happen now at any moment, the strain on our nerves is pretty severe, and as usual at such times I will fill in my diary. This is probably the last time that I write it here as we move as soon as the wagons return, which should be in about two hours from now.
All our things are packed and I shall slip this book into my bag as soon as I have written this entry; but I have probably two or three hours clear for writing, as everything is ready for departure. Meanwhile I am wonderfully tranquil and at peace, able, too, to think clearly and rationally for the first time since Marie’s death. I want to give an account of the events since my last entry minutely and as truthfully as my memory allows me.
At about half-past eleven last night Semyonov and I went up to our bedroom to sleep, Nikitin being on duty. There was not much noise, the cannon sounding a considerable distance away, but the flashlights and rockets against the night-sky were wonderful, and when we had blown out the candle our dark little room leapt up and down or turned round and round, the window flashing into vision and out again. Semyonov was almost immediately asleep, but I lay on my back and, of course, as usual, thought of Marie. My headache of the evening still raged furiously and I was in desperately low spirits. I had been able to eat nothing during the preceding day. I lay there half asleep, half awake, for, I suppose, a long time, hearing the window rattle sometimes when the cannon was noisy and feeling under the jerky reflections on the wall as though I were in an old shambling cab driving along a dark road, I thought a good deal about that talk with Semyonov that I had. What a strange man! But then I do not understand him at all. I don’t think I understand any Russian, such a mixture of hardness and softness as they are, kind and then indifferent, cruel and then sentimental. But I understand people very little, and in all my years at Polchester there was never one single person whom I knew. Semyonov is perfectly right, I suppose, from his point of view to think me a fool. I lay there thinking of Semyonov. He was sleeping on his back, looking very big under the clothes, his beard square and stiff, lit up by the flashing light and then sinking into darkness again. I thought of him and of myself and of the strange contrast that we were, and how queer it was that the same woman should have cared for both of us. And I know that, although I did not hate him at all, I would give almost anything for him not to have been there, never to have been there. Whilst he was there I knew that I had no chance. Marie had not laughed at me during those days at Petrograd; she had believed in me then and I had been worth believing in. If people had believed in me more I might be a very different man now.
I was almost asleep, scarcely conscious of the room, when suddenly I heard a voice cry, “Marie! Marie! Marie!” three times. It was a voice that I had never heard before, strong but also tender, full of pain, with a note in it too of a struggling self-control that would break in a moment and overwhelm its possessor. As I look back at it I remember that I felt the passion and strength in it so violently that I seemed to shrink into myself, as though I were witnessing something that no man should see, and as though also I were conscious of my own weakness and insignificance.
It was Semyonov. The flashlight flashed into the room, shining for an instant upon him. He was sitting up in bed, his shirt open and his chest bare. His eyes were fixed upon the window, but he was fast asleep. He seemed to me a new man. I had grown so accustomed to his sarcasm, his irony, that I had almost persuaded myself that he had never truly loved Marie, but had felt some sensual attraction for her that would, by realisation, have been at once satisfied. This was another man. Here was a struggle, an agony that was not for such men as I.
He cried again, “Marie! Marie!” then got up out of bed, walked on his naked feet in his shirt to the window, stood there and waited. The moonlight had, by this, struck our room and flooded it. He turned suddenly and faced me. I could not believe that he did not see me, but I could not endure the unhappiness in his eyes and I turned, looking down. I did not look at him again but I heard his feet patter back to the bed; then he stood there, his whole body strung to meet some overmastering crisis. He whispered her name as though she had come to him since his first call. “Ah, Marie, my darling,” he whispered.
I could not bear that. I crept from my bed, slipped away, closed the door softly behind me and stole downstairs.
I cannot write at length of what followed. It was the crisis of everything that has happened to me since I left Petrograd. Every experience that I had had was suddenly flung into this moment. I was in our sitting-room now, pitch dark because shutters had been placed outside the windows to guard against bullets. I stood there in my shirt and drawers: shuddering, shivering with hatred of myself, shivering with fear of Semyonov, shivering above all, with a desperate, agonising, torturing hunger for Marie. Semyonov’s voice had appalled me. I hadn’t realised before how strongly I had relied on his not truly caring for her. Everything in the man had seemed to persuade me of this, and I had even flattered myself on my miserable superiority to him, that I was the true faithful lover and he the vulgar sensualist. How small now I seemed beside him! — and how I feared him! Then I was at sudden fierce grip with the beast!... At grips at last!
I had once before, on another night, been tempted to kill myself, but that had been nothing to this. Now sick and ill, faint for food, I swayed there on the floor, hearing always in my ear— “Give way! Give way!... You’ll be in front of him, you’ll have left him behind you, he can do nothing ... a moment more and you can be with her — and he cannot reach you!”
I do not know how long I fought there. I was not fighting with an evil devil, a fearful beast as in my dreams I had always imagined it — I was fighting myself: every weakness in the past to which I had ever surrendered, every little scrap of personal history, every slackness and cowardice and lethargy was there on the floor against me.
I don’t know what it was that prevented me stealing back to my room, fetching my revolver and so ending
it. I could see Marie close to me, to be reached by the stretching of a finger. I could see myself living on, always conscious of Semyonov, his thick beastly confident body always there between myself and her.
I sank into the last depths of self-despair and degradation. No fine thing saved me, no help from noble principles, nothing fine. The whole was as sordid as possible. I knew, even as I struggled, that I was a silly figure there, with my bony ugliness, in my shirt and drawers, my hair on end and my teeth chattering. But I responded, I suppose, to some little pulse of manly obstinacy that beat somewhere in me. I would not be beaten by the Creature. Even in the middle of it I realised that this was the hardest tussle of my life and worth fighting. I know too that some thought of Nikitin came to me as though, in some way, my failure would damage him. I remembered that night of the Retreat when he had helped me and, as though he were appealing visibly to me there in the room, I responded; I seemed to feel that he was fighting some battle of his own and that my victory would fortify him. I stood with him beside me. So I fought it, fought it with the sweat dripping down my nose and my tongue dry. “No!” something suddenly cried in me. “If she’s his, she’s his — I will not take her this way!” — then in a snivelling, miserable fashion I began to cry, simply from exhaustion and nerves and headache. I slipped down into a chair. I sat there feeling utterly beaten and yet in some dim way, as one hears a trumpet sounding behind a range of hills, I was triumphant. There with my head on the table and my nose, I believe, in a plate left from some one’s last night’s supper, I slept a heavy, dreamless sleep.
I woke and heard a clock in the room strike three. I got up, stretched my arms, yawned and knew that my head was clear and my brain at peace. I can’t describe my feelings better than by saying that it was as though I had put my brain and my heart and all my fears and terrors under a good stiff pump of cold water. I felt a different man from four hours before, although still desperately tired and physically weak.
I went softly upstairs. The light of a most lovely summer morning flooded the room. Semyonov was lying, sleeping like a child, his head pillowed on his arm. Very cautiously I dressed, then went downstairs again. I did not understand now — the peace and happiness in my heart. All the time I was saying to myself: “Why am I so happy? Why am I so happy?”...
The world was marvellously fresh, with little white glittering clouds above the trees, the grass wet and shining, and the sky a high dome of blue light, like the inside of a glass bell that has the sun behind it. Here and there on the outskirts of the Forest fires were still dimly burning, pale and dim yellow shadows beneath the sun. Men wrapped in their coats were sleeping in little groups under the trees. Horses cropped at the grass; soldiers were moving with buckets of water. Two men, at the very edge of the Forest, stripped to the waist, were washing in a pool that was like a blue handkerchief in the great forest of green. I found a little glade, very bright and fresh, under a group of silver birch, and there I lay down on my back, my hands behind my head, looking up into the little dancing atoms of blue between the trees and the golden stars of sunlight that flashed and sparkled there.
Happiness and peace wrapped me round. I cannot pretend to disentangle and produce in proper sequence all the thoughts and memories that floated into my vision and away again, but I know that whereas before thoughts had attacked me as though they were foul animals biting at my brain, now I seemed myself gently to invite my memories.
Many scenes from my Polchester days that I had long forgotten came back to me. I was indeed startled by the clearness with which I saw that earlier figure — the very awkward, careless, ugly boy, listening lazily to other people’s plans, taking shelter from life under a vague love of beauty and an idle imagination; the man, awkward and ugly, sensitive because of his own self-consciousness, wasting his hours through his own self-contempt which paralysed all effort, still trusting to his idle love of beauty to pull him through to some superior standard, complaining of life, but never trying to get the better of it; then the man who came to Russia at the beginning of the war, still self-centred, always given up to timid self-analysis, but responding now a little to the new scenes, the new temperament, the new chances. Then this man, feeling that at last he was rid of all the tiresome encumbrances of the earlier years, lets himself go, falls in love, worships, dreams for a few days a wonderful dream — then for the first time in his life, begins to fight.
I saw all the steps so clearly and I saw every little thought, every little action, every little opportunity missed or taken, accumulating until the moment of climax four hours before. I seemed to have brought Polchester on my back to the war, and I could see quite clearly how each of us — Marie, Semyonov, Nikitin, Durward, every one of us — had brought their private histories and scenes with them. War is made up, I believe, not of shells and bullets, not of German defeats and victories, Russian triumphs or surrenders, English and French battles by sea and land, not of smoke and wounds and blood, but of a million million past thoughts, past scenes, streets of little country towns, lonely hills, dark sheltered valleys, the wide space of the sea, the crowded traffic of New York, London, Berlin, yes, and of smaller things than that, of little quarrels, of dances at Christmas time, of walks at night, of dressing for dinner, of waking in the morning, of meeting old friends, of sicknesses, theatres, church services, prostitutes, slums, cricket-matches, children, rides on a tram, baths on a hot morning, sudden unpleasant truth from a friend, momentary consciousness of God....
Death too.... How clear now it was to me! During these weeks I had wondered, pursued the thought of Death. Was it this? Was it that? Was it pain? Was it terror? I had feared it, as for instance when I had seen the dead bodies in the Forest, or stood under the rain at Nijnieff. I had laughed at it as when I had gone with the sanitars. I had cursed it as when Marie Ivanovna had died. I had sought it as I had done last night — and always, as I drew closer and closer to it, fancied it some fine allegorical figure, something terrible, appalling, devastating.... How, when I was, as I believed, at last face to face with it, I saw that one was simply face to face with oneself.
Four hours I have been writing, and no sign of the wagons.... I am writing everything down as I remember it, because these things are so clear to me now and yet I know that afterwards they will be changed, twisted.
I was drowsy. I saw Polchester High Street, Garth in Roselands, Clinton, Truxe, best of all Rafiel. I went down the high white hill, deep into the valley, then along the road beside the stream where the houses begin, the hideous Wesleyan Chapel on my right, “Ebenezer Villa” on my left, then the cottages with the gardens, then the little street, the post-office, the butcher’s, the turn of the road and, suddenly, the bay with the fishing boats riding at anchor and beyond the sea.... England and Russia! to their strong and confident union I thought that I would give every drop of my blood, every beat of my heart, and as I lay there I seemed to see on one side the deep green lanes at Rafiel and on the other the shining canals, the little wooden houses, the cobbler and the tufted trees of Petrograd, the sea coast beyond Truxe and the wide snow-covered plains beyond Moscow, the cathedral at Polchester and the Kremlin, breeding their children, to the hundredth generation, for the same hopes, the same beliefs, the same desires.
I slept in the sun and had happy dreams.
I have re-read these last pages and I find some very fine stuff about— “giving every drop of blood,” etc., etc. Of course I am not that kind of man. Men, like Durward and myself — he resembles me in many ways, although he is stronger than I am, and doesn’t care what people think of him — are too analytical and self-critical to give much of their blood to anybody or to make their blood of very much value if they did.
I only meant that I would do my best.
Later in the morning the firing began again pretty close. Andrey Vassilievitch came to me and wanted to talk to me. I was rather short with him because I was busy. He wanted to tell me that he hoped I hadn’t misunderstood his quarrel with Nikitin last night
. It had been nothing at all. His nerves had been rather out of order. He was very much better to-day, felt quite another man. He looked another man and I said so. He said that I did.... Strange, but I felt as I looked at him that he was sickening for some bad illness. One feels that sometimes about people without being able to name a cause.
I have an affection for the little man — but he’s an awful fool. Well, so am I. But fools never respect fools.... Strange to see Semyonov. I had expected him for some reason to be different to-day. Just the same, of course, very sarcastic to me. I had a hole in one of my pockets and was always forgetting and putting money and things into it. This seemed to annoy him. But to-day nothing matters. Even the flies do not worry me. All the morning Marie has seemed so close to me. I have a strange excitement, the feeling that one has when one is in a train that approaches the place where some one whom one loves is waiting.... I feel exactly as though I were going on a journey....
Since three o’clock we’ve had a lively time. The attack began about five minutes to three, by a shell splashing into the Forest near our battery. No one killed, fortunately. They’ve simply stormed away since then. I don’t seem to be able to realise it and have been sitting in my room writing as though they were a hundred miles away. One so used to the noise. Everything is ready. We’ve got all the wounded prepared. If only the wagons would come.... Hallo! a shell in the garden — cracked one of these windows. I must go down to see whether any one’s touched.... I put this in my bag. To-morrow ... and I am so happy that...
The end of Trenchard’s diary.
These are the last words in Trenchard’s journal. It fills about half the second exercise book. The last pages are written in a hand very much clearer and steadier than the earlier ones.