by Hugh Walpole
“You will of course understand, Madame,” he said stiffly, “that the search was inevitable. Regrettable but necessary. I’m sure you will see that for your own satisfaction….”
“You are assured now that there is no one here?” Vera interrupted him coldly.
“Assured,” he answered.
But where was the man? She felt as though she were in some fantastic nightmare in which nothing was as it seemed. The cupboard was not a cupboard, the policeman not a policeman….
“There is the kitchen,” she said.
In the kitchen of course they found nothing. There was a large cupboard in one corner but they did not look there. They had had enough. They returned into the dining-room and there, looking very surprised, his head very high above his collar was Markovitch.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
“I regret extremely,” said the officer pompously. “I have been compelled to make a search. Duty only… I regret. But no one is here. Your flat is at liberty. I wish you good-afternoon.”
Before Markovitch could ask further questions the room was emptied of them all. They tramped out, laughing and joking, children again, the hall door closed behind them.
Nina clutched Vera’s arm.
“Vera…. Vera, where is he?”
“I don’t know,” said Vera.
“What’s all this?” asked Nicholas.
They explained to him but he scarcely seemed to hear. He was radiant — smiling in a kind of ecstasy.
“They have gone? I am safe?”
In the doorway was the little policeman, black with grime and dust, so comical a figure that in reaction from the crisis of ten minutes before, they laughed hysterically.
“Oh look! look!…” cried Nina. “How dirty he is!”
“Where have you been?” asked Vera. “Why weren’t you in the cupboard?”
The little man’s teeth were chattering, so that he could scarcely speak….
“I heard them in the other room. I knew that the cupboard would be the first place. I slipped into the kitchen and hid in the fireplace.”
“You’re not angry, Nicholas?” Vera asked. “We couldn’t send him out to be shot.”
“What does that matter?” he almost impatiently brushed it aside. “There are other things more important.” He looked at the trembling dirty figure. “Only you’d better go back and hide again until it’s dark. They might come back….”
He caught Vera by the arm. His eyes were flames. He drew her with him back into her little room. He closed the door.
“The Revolution has come — it has really come,” he cried.
“Yes,” she answered, “it has come into this very house. The world has changed.”
“The Czar has abdicated…. The old world has gone, the old wicked world! Russia is born again!”
His eyes were the eyes of a fanatic.
Her eyes, too, were alight. She gazed past him.
“I know — I know,” she whispered as though to herself.
“Russia — Russia,” he went on coming closer and closer, “Russia and you. We will build a new world. We will forget our old troubles. Oh, Vera, my darling, my darling, we’re going to be happy now! I love you so. And now I can hope again. All our love will be clean in this new world. We’re going to be happy at last!”
But she did not hear him. She saw into space. A great exultation ran through her body. All lost for love! At last she was awakened, at last she lived, at last, at last, she knew what love was.
“I love him! I love him… him,” her soul whispered. “And nothing now in this world or the next can separate us.”
“Vera — Vera,” Nicholas cried, “we are together at last — as we have never been. And now we’ll work together again — for Russia.”
She looked at the man whom she had never loved, with a great compassion and pity. She put her arms around him and kissed him, her whole maternal spirit suddenly aware of him and seeking to comfort him.
At the touch of her lips his body trembled with happiness. But he did not know that it was a kiss of farewell….
XIII
I have no idea at all what Lawrence did during the early days of that week. He has never told me, and I have never asked him. He never, with the single exception of the afternoon at the Astoria, came near the Markovitches, and I know that was because he had now reached a stage where he did not dare trust himself to see Vera — just as she at that time did not trust herself to see him….
I do not know what he thought of those first days of the Revolution. I can imagine that he took it all very quietly, doing his duty and making no comment. He had of course his own interest in it, but it would be, I am sure, an entirely original interest, unlike any one else’s. I remember Dune once, in the long-dead days, saying to me, “It’s never any use guessing what Lawrence is thinking. When you think it’s football it’s Euripides, and when you think it’s Euripides it’s Marie Corelli.” Of all the actors in this affair he remains to me to the last as the most mysterious. I know that he loved Vera with the endurance of the rock, the heat of the flame, the ruthlessness of a torrent, but behind that love there sat the man himself, invisible, silent, patient, watching.
He may have had Semyonov’s contempt for the Revolutionary idealist, he may have had Wilderling’s belief in the Czar’s autocracy, he may have had Boris Grogoff’s enthusiasm for freedom and a general holiday. I don’t know. I know nothing at all about it. I don’t think that he saw much of the Wilderlings during the earlier part of the week. He himself was a great deal with the English Military Mission, and Wilderling was with his party whatever that might be. He could see of course that Wilderling was disturbed, or perhaps indignant is the right word. “As though you know,” he said, “some dirty little boy had been pullin’ snooks at him.” Nevertheless the Baroness was the human link. Lawrence would see from the first — that is, from the morning of the Sunday — that she was in an agony of horror. She confided in nobody, but went about as though she was watching for something, and at dinner her eyes never left her husband’s face for a moment. Those evening meals must have been awful. I can imagine the dignity, the solemn heavy room with all the silver, the ceremonious old man-servant and Wilderling himself behaving as though nothing at all were the matter. To do him all justice he was as brave as a lion, and as proud as a gladiator, and as conceited as a Prussian. On the Wednesday evening he did not return home. He telephoned that he was kept on important business.
The Baroness and Lawrence had the long slow meal together. It was almost more than Jerry could stand having, of course, his own private tortures to face. “It was as though the old lady felt that she had been deputed to support the honour of the family during her husband’s absence. She must have been wild with anxiety, but she showed no sign except that her hand trembled when she raised her glass.”
“What did you talk about?” I asked him.
“Oh, about anything! Theatres and her home, when she was a girl and
England…. Awful, every minute of it!”
There was a moment towards the end of the meal, when the good lady nearly broke down. The bell in the hall rang and there was a step; she thought it was her husband and half rose. It was, however, the Dvornik with a message of no importance. She gave a little sigh. “Oh, I do wish he would come!… I do wish he would come!” she murmured to herself.
“Oh, he’ll come,” Lawrence reassured her, but she seemed indignant with him for having overheard her. Afterwards, sitting together desolately in the magnificent drawing-room, she became affectionately maternal. I have always wondered why Lawrence confided to me the details of their very intimate conversation. It was exactly the kind of thing he was most reticent about.
She asked him about his home, his people, his ambitions. She had asked him about these things before, but to-night there was an appeal in her questions, as though she said:
“Take my mind off that other thing. Help me to forget, if it’s only for a moment.”
/> “Have you ever been in love?” she asked.
“Yes. Once,” he said.
“Was he in love now?”
“Yes.”
“With some one in Russia?”
“Yes.”
She hoped that he would be happy. He told her that he didn’t think happiness was quite the point in this particular case. There were other things more important — and, anyway, it was inevitable.
“He had fallen in love at first sight?”
“Yes. The very first moment.”
She sighed. So had she. It was, she thought, the only real way. She asked him whether it might not, after all, turn out better than he expected.
No, he did not think that it could. But he didn’t mind how it turned out — at least he couldn’t look that far. The point was that he was in it, up to the neck, and he was never going to be out of it again.
There was something boyish about that that pleased her. She put her plump hand on his knee and told him how she had first met the Baron, down in the South, at Kieff, how grand he had looked; how, seeing her across a room full of people, he had smiled at her before he had ever spoken to her or knew her name. “I was quite pretty then,” she added. “I have never regretted our marriage for a single moment,” she said. “Nor, I know, has he.”
“We hoped there would he children….” She gave a pathetic little gesture. “We will get away down to the South again as soon as the troubles are over,” she ended.
I don’t suppose he was thinking much of her — his mind was on Vera all the time — but after he had left her and lay in bed, sleepless, his mind dwelt on her affectionately, and he thought that he would like to help her. He realised, quite clearly, that Wilderling was in a very dangerous position, but I don’t think that it ever occurred to him for a moment that it would be wise for him to move to another flat.
On the next day, Thursday, Lawrence did not return until the middle of the afternoon. The town was, by now, comparatively quiet again. Numbers of the police had been caught and imprisoned, some had been shot and others were in hiding; most of the machine-guns shooting from the roofs had ceased. The abdication of the Czar had already produced the second phase of the Revolution — the beginning of the struggle between the Provisional Government and the Council of Workmen and Soldiers’ Deputies, and this was proceeding, for the moment, inside the walls of the Duma rather than in the streets and squares of the town. Lawrence returned, therefore, that afternoon with a strange sense of quiet and security.
“It was almost, you know, as though this tommy-rot about a White Revolution might be true after all — with this jolly old Duma and their jolly old Kerensky runnin’ the show. Of course I’d seen the nonsense about their not salutin’ the officers and all that, but I didn’t think any fellers alive would be such dam fools…. I might have known better.”
He let himself into the flat and found there a death-like stillness — no one about and no sound except the tickings of the large clock in the drawing-room.
He wandered into that horribly impressive place and suddenly sat down on the sofa with a realisation of extreme physical fatigue. He didn’t know why he was so tired, he had felt quite “bobbish” all the week; suddenly now his limbs were like water, he had a bad ache down his spine and his legs were as heavy as lead. He sat in a kind of trance on that sofa, he was not asleep, but he was also, quite certainly, not awake. He wondered why the place was so “beastly still” after all the noise there had been all the week. There was no one left alive — every one dead — except himself and Vera… Vera… Vera.
Then he was conscious that some one was looking at him through the double-doors. At first he didn’t realise who it was, the face was so white and the figure so quiet, then, pulling himself together, he saw that it was the old servant.
“What is it, Andre?” he asked, sitting up.
The old man didn’t answer, but came into the room, carefully closing the door behind him. Lawrence saw that he was trembling with fright, but was still endeavouring to behave with dignity.
“Barin! Barin!” he whispered, as though Lawrence were a long way from him. “Paul Konstantinovitch! (that was Wilderling). He’s mad…. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Oh, sir, stop him, stop him, or we shall all be murdered!”
“What is he doing?” asked Lawrence, standing up.
“In the little back room,” Andre whispered, as though now he were confiding a terrible secret. “Come quickly…!”
Lawrence followed him; when he had gone a few steps down the passage he heard suddenly a sharp, muffled report.
“What’s that?”
Andre came close to him, his old, seamed face white like plaster.
“He has a rifle in there…” he said. “He’s shooting at them!” Then as Lawrence stepped up to the door of the little room that was Wilderling’s dressing-room, Andre caught his arm — .
“Be careful, Barin…. He doesn’t know what he’s about. He may not recognise you.”
“Oh, that’s all right!” said Lawrence. He pushed the door open and walked in. To give for a moment his own account of it: “You know that room was the rummiest thing. I’d never been into it before. I knew the old fellow was a bit of a dandy, but I never expected to see all the pots and jars and glasses there were. You’d have thought one wouldn’t have noticed a thing at such a time, but you couldn’t escape them, — his dressing-table simply covered, — white round jars with pink tops, bottles of hair-oil with ribbons round the neck, manicure things, heaps of silver things, and boxes with Chinese patterns on them, and one thing, open, with what was mighty like rouge in it. And clothes all over the place — red silk dressing-gown with golden tassels, and red leather slippers!
“I don’t remember noticing any of this at the moment, but it all comes back to me as soon as I begin to think of it — and the room stank of scent!”
But of course it was the old man in the corner who mattered. It was, I think, very significant of Lawrence’s character and his unEnglish-English tradition that the first thing that he felt was the pathos of it. No other Englishman in Petrograd would have seen that at all.
Wilderling was crouched in the corner against a piece of gold Japanese embroidery. He was in the shadow, away from the window, which was pushed open sufficiently to allow the muzzle of the rifle to slip between the woodwork and the pane. The old man, his white hair disordered, his clothes dusty, and his hands grimy, crept forward just as Lawrence entered, fired down into the side-street, then moved swiftly back into his corner again. He muttered to himself without ceasing in French, “Chiens! Chiens!… Chiens!” He was very hot, and he stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then he saw Lawrence.
“What do you want?” he asked, as though he didn’t recognize him.
Lawrence moved down the side of the room, avoiding the window. He touched the little man’s arm.
“I say, you know,” he said, “this won’t do.”
Wilderling smelt of gunpowder, and he was breathing hard as though he had been running desperately. He quivered when Lawrence touched him.
“Go away!” he said, “you mustn’t come here…. I’ll get them yet — I tell you I’ll get them yet — I tell you I’ll get them — Let them dare… Chiens… Chiens…” He jerked his rifle away from the window and began, with trembling fingers, to load it again.
Lawrence gripped his arm. “When I did that,” he said, “it felt as though there wasn’t an arm there at all, but just a bone which I could break if I pressed a bit harder.”
“Come away!” he said. “You damn fool — don’t you see that it’s hopeless?”
“And I’d always been so respectful to him….” he added in parenthesis.
Wilderling hissed at him, saying no words, just drawing in his breath.
“I’ve got two of them,” he whispered suddenly. “I’ll get them all.”
Then a bullet crashed through the window, burying itself in the opposite wall.
After that thi
ngs happened so quickly that it was impossible to say in what order they occurred. There was suddenly a tremendous noise in the flat.
“It was just as though the whole place was going to tumble about our ears. All the pots and bottles began to jump about, and then another bullet came through, landed on the dressing-table, and smashed everything. The looking-glass crashed, and the hair-oil was all over the place. I rushed out to see what was happening in the hall….”
What “was happening” was that the soldiers had broken the hall door in. Lawrence saw then a horrible thing. One of the men rushed forward and stuck Andre, who was standing, paralysed, by the drawing-room door, in the stomach. The old man cried out “just like a shot rabbit,” and stood there “for what seemed ages,” with the blood pouring out of his middle.
That finished Lawrence. He rushed forward, and they would certainly have “stuck” him too if someone hadn’t cried out, “Look out, he’s an Englishman — an Anglichanin — I know him.”
After that, for a time, he was uncertain of anything. He struggled; he was held. He heard noises around him — shouts or murmurs or sighs — that didn’t seem to him to be connected with anything human. He could not have said where he was nor what he was doing. Then, quite suddenly, everything cleared. He came to himself with a consciousness of that utter weariness that he had felt before. He was able to visualise the scene, to take it all in, but as a distant spectator. “It was like nothing so much as watching a cinematograph,” he told me. He could do nothing; he was held by three soldiers, who apparently wished him to be a witness of the whole affair. Andre’s body lay there, huddled up in a pool of drying blood, that glistened under the electric light. One of his legs was bent crookedly under him, and Lawrence had a strange mad impulse to thrust his way forward and put it straight.
It was then, with a horrible sickly feeling, exactly like a blow in the stomach, that he realised that the Baroness was there. She was standing, quite alone, at the entrance of the hall, looking at the soldiers, who were about eight in number.