by Hugh Walpole
He heard her say, “What’s happened? Who are you?…” and then in a sharper, more urgent voice, “Where’s my husband?”
Then she saw Andre…. She gave a sharp little cry, moved forward towards him, and stopped.
“I don’t know what she did then,” said Lawrence. “I think she suddenly began to run down the passage. I know she was crying, ‘Paul! Paul! Paul!’… I never saw her again.”
The officer — an elderly kindly-looking man like a doctor or a lawyer (I am trying to give every possible detail, because I think it important) — then came up to Lawrence and asked him some questions:
“What was his name?”
“Jeremy Ralph Lawrence.”
“He was an Englishman.”
“Yes.”
“Working at the British Embassy?”
“No, at the British Military Mission.”
“He was officer?”
“Yes.”
“In the British Army?”
“Yes. He had fought for two years in France.”
“He had been lodging with Baron Wilderling?”
“Yes. Ever since he came to Russia.”
The officer nodded his head. They knew about him, had full information.
A friend of his, a Mr. Boris Grogoff, had spoken of him.
The officer was then very polite, told him that they regretted extremely the inconvenience and discomfort to which he might be put, but that they must detain him until this affair was concluded— “which will be very soon” added the officer. He also added that he wished Lawrence to be a witness of what occurred so that he should see that, under the new regime in Russia, everything was just and straightforward.
“I tried to tell him,” said Lawrence to me, “that Wilderling was off his head. I hadn’t the least hope, of course…. It was all quite clear, and, at such a time, quite just. Wilderling had been shooting them out of his window…. The officer listened very politely, but when I had finished he only shook his head. That was their affair he said.
“It was then that I realised Wilderling. He was standing quite close to me. He had obviously been struggling a bit, because his shirt was all torn, and you could see his chest. He kept moving his hand and trying to pull his shirt over; it was his only movement. He was as straight as a dart, and except for the motion of his hand as still as a statue, standing between the soldiers, looking directly in front of him. He had been mad in that other room, quite dotty.
“He was as sane as anything now, grave and serious and rather ironical, just as he always looked. Well it was at that moment, when I saw him there, that I thought of Vera. I had been thinking of her all the time of course. I had been thinking of nothing else for weeks. But that minute, there in the hall, settled me. Callous, wasn’t it? I ought to have been thinking only of Wilderling and his poor old wife. After all, they’d been awfully good to me. She’d been almost like a mother all the time…. But there it was. It came over me like a storm. I’d been fighting for nights and days and days and nights not to go to her — fighting like hell, trying to play the game the sentimentalists would call it. I suppose seeing the old man there and knowing what they were going to do to him settled it. It was a sudden conviction, like a blow, that all this thing was real, that they weren’t playing at it, that any one in the town was as near death as winking…. And so there it was! Vera! I’d got to get to her — at once — and never leave her again until she was safe. I’d got to get to her! I’d got to get to her! I’d got to get to her!… Nothing else mattered. Not Wilderling’s death nor mine either, except that if I was dead I’d be out of it and wouldn’t be able to help her. They talk about men with one idea. From that moment I had only one idea in all the world — I don’t know that I’ve had any other one since. They talk about scruples, moralities, traditions. They’re all right, but there just are moments in life when they simply don’t count at all…. Vera was in danger — Well, that was all that mattered.
“The officer said something to Wilderling. I heard Wilderling answer:
“You’re rebels against His Majesty…. I wish I’d shot more of you!”
Fine old boy, you know, whatever way you look at it.
“They moved him forward then. He went quite willingly, without any kind of resistance. They motioned to me to follow. We walked out of the flat down the stairs, no one saying a word. We went out on to the Quay. There was no one there. They stood him up against the wall, facing the river. It was dark, and when he was against the wall he seemed to vanish, — only I got one kind of gesture, a sort of farewell, you know, his grey hair waving in the breeze from the river.
“There was a report, and it was as though a piece of the wall slowly unsettled itself and fell forward. No sound except the report. Oh, he was a fine old boy!
“The officer came up to me and said very politely:
“‘You are free now, sir,’ and something about regretting incivility, and something, I think, about them perhaps wanting me again to give some sort of evidence. Very polite he was.
“I was mad, I suppose, I don’t know. I believe I said something to him about Vera, which of course he didn’t understand.
“I know I wanted to run like hell to Vera to see that she was safe.
“But I didn’t. I walked off as slowly as anything. It was awful. They’d been so good to me, and yet I wasn’t thinking of Wilderling at all….”
XIV
Markovitch on that same afternoon came back to the flat early. He also, like Lawrence, felt the strange peace and tranquillity of the town, and it seemed inevitably like the confirmation of all his dearest hopes. The Czar was gone, the Old Regime was gone, the people, smiling and friendly, were maintaining their own discipline — above all, Vera had kissed him.
He did not go deeper into his heart and see how strained all their recent relations must have been for this now to give him such joy. He left that — it simply was that at last he and Vera understood one another, she had found that she cared for him after all, and that he was necessary to her happiness. What that must mean for their future life together he simply dared not think…. It would change the world for him. He felt like the man in the story from whom the curse is suddenly lifted….
He walked home through the quiet town, humming to himself. He fancied that there was a warmth in the air, a strange kindly omen of spring, although the snow was still thick on the ground, and the Neva a grey carpet of ice.
He came into the flat and found it empty. He went into his little room and started on his inventions. He was so happy that he hummed to himself as he worked and cut slices off his pieces of wood, and soaked flannel in bottles, and wrote funny little sentences in his abominable handwriting in a red notebook.
One need not grudge it him, poor Markovitch. It was the last happy half-hour of his life.
He did not turn on his green-shaded lamp, but sat there in the gathering dusk, chipping up the wood and sometimes stopping, idly lost in happy thoughts.
Some one came in. He peered through his little glass window and saw that it was Nina. She passed quickly through the dining-room, beyond, towards her bedroom, without stopping to switch on the light.
Nina had broken the spell. He went back to his table, but he couldn’t work now, and he felt vaguely uneasy and cold. He was just going to leave his work and find the Retch and settle down to a comfortable read, when he heard the hall door close. He stood behind his little glass window and watched; it was Vera, perhaps… it must be… his heart began eagerly to beat.
It was Vera. At once he saw that she was strangely agitated. Before she had switched on the light he realised it. With a click the light was on. Markovitch had intended to open his door and go out to her, smiling. He saw at once that she was waiting for some one…. He stood, trembling, on tiptoe, his face pressed against the glass of the pane.
Lawrence came in. He had the face, Markovitch told me many weeks afterwards, “of a triumphant man.”
They had obviously met outside, because Vera said, a
s though continuing a conversation:
“And it’s only just happened?”
“I’ve come straight from there,” Lawrence answered.
Then he went up to her. She let herself at once go to him and he half carried her to a chair near the table and exactly opposite Markovitch’s window.
They kissed “like people who had been starving all their lives.” Markovitch was trembling so that he was afraid lest he should tumble or make some noise. The two figures in the chair were like statues in their immobile, relentless, unswerving embrace.
Suddenly he saw that Nina was standing in the opposite doorway “like a ghost.” She was there for so brief a moment that he could not be sure that she had been there at all. Only her white, frightened face remained with him.
One of his thoughts was:
“This is the end of my life.”
Another was:
“How could they be so careless, with the light on, and perhaps people in the flat!”
And after that:
“They need it so much that they don’t care who sees — Starved people….”
And after that:
“I’m starved too.”
He was so cold that his teeth were chattering, and he crept back from his window, crept into the farthest farthest corner of his little room, and crouched there on the floor, staring and staring, but seeing nothing at all.
PART III. MARKOVITCH AND SEMYONOV.
I
On the evening of that very afternoon, Thursday, I again collapsed. I was coming home in the dusk through a whispering world. All over the streets, everywhere on the broad shining snow, under a blaze of stars so sharp and piercing that the sky seemed strangely close and intimate, the talk went on. Groups everywhere and groups irrespective of all class distinction — a well-to-do woman in rich furs, a peasant woman with a shawl over her head, a wild, bearded soldier, a stout, important officer, a maid-servant, a cab-driver, a shopman — talking, talking, talking, talking…. The eagerness, the ignorance, the odd fairy-tale world spun about those groups, so that the coloured domes of the churches, the silver network of the stars, the wooden booths, the mist of candles before the Ikons, the rough painted pictures on the shops advertising the goods sold within — all these things shared in that crude idealistic, cynical ignorance, in that fairy-tale of brutality, goodness, cowardice, and bravery, malice and generosity, superstition and devotion that was so shortly to be offered to a materialistic, hard-fighting, brave and unthinking Europe!…
That, however, was not now my immediate business — enough of that presently. My immediate business, as I very quickly discovered, was to pluck up enough strength to drag my wretched body home. The events of the week had, I suppose, carried me along. I was to suffer now the inevitable reaction. I felt exactly as though I had been shot from a gun and landed, suddenly, without breath, without any strength in any of my limbs in a new and strange world. I was standing, when I first realised my weakness, beside the wooden booths in the Sadovaya. They were all closed of course, but along the pavement women and old men had baskets containing sweets and notepaper and red paper tulips offered in memory of the glorious Revolution. Right across the Square the groups of people scattered in little dusky pools against the snow, until they touched the very doors of the church…. I saw all this, was conscious that the stars and the church candles mingled… then suddenly I had to clutch the side of the booth behind me to prevent myself from falling. My head swam, my limbs were as water, and my old so well-remembered friend struck me in the middle of the spine as though he had cut me in two with his knife. How was I ever to get home? No one noticed me — indeed they seemed to my sick eyes to have ceased to be human. Ghosts in a ghostly world, the snow gleaming through them so that they only moved like a thin diaphanous veil against the wall of the sky… I clutched my booth. In a moment I should be down. The pain in my back was agony, my legs had ceased to exist, and I was falling into a dark, dark pool of clear jet-black water, at the bottom of which lay a star….
The strange thing is that I do not know who it was who rescued me. I know that some one came. I know that to my own dim surprise an Isvostchick was there and that very feebly I got into it. Some one was with me. Was it my black-bearded peasant? I fancy now that it was. I can even, on looking back, see him sitting up, very large and still, one thick arm holding me. I fancy that I can still smell the stuff of his clothes. I fancy that he talked to me, very quietly, reassuring me about something. But, upon my word, I don’t know. One can so easily imagine what one wants to be true, and now I want, more than I would then ever have believed to be possible, to have had actual contact with him. It is the only conversation between us that can ever have existed: never, before or after, was there another opportunity. And in any case there can scarcely have been a conversation, because I certainly said nothing, and I cannot remember anything that he said, if indeed he said anything at all. At any rate I was there in the Sadovaya, I was in a cab, I was in my bed. The truth of the rest of it any one may decide for himself….
II
That Thursday was March 15. I was conscious of my existence again on Sunday, April 1st. I opened my eyes and saw that there was a thaw. That was the first thing of which I was aware — that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you…. My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above my only bookcase, confound it!) was coloured a mouldy grey, and from this huge drops like elephant’s tears, splashed monotonously. (Already The Spirit of Man was disfigured by a long grey streak, and the green back of Galleon’s Roads was splotched with stains.) Some one had placed a bucket near the door to catch a perpetual stream flowing from the corner of the room. Down into the bucket it pattered with a hasty, giggling, hysterical jiggle. I rather liked the companionship of it. I didn’t mind it at all. I really minded nothing whatever…. I sighed my appreciation of my return to life. My sigh brought some one from the corner of my room and that some one was, of course, the inevitable Eat. He came up to my bed in his stealthy, furtive fashion, and looked at me reproachfully. I asked him, my voice sounding to myself strange and very far away, what he was doing there. He answered that if it had not been for him I should be dead. He had come early one morning and found me lying in my bed and no one in the place at all. No one — because the old woman had vanished. Yes, the neighbours had told him. Apparently on that very Thursday she had decided that the Revolution had given her her freedom, and that she was never going to work for anybody ever again. She had told a woman-neighbour that she heard that the land now was going to be given back to everybody, and she was returning therefore to her village somewhere in the Moscow Province. She had not been back there for twenty years. And first, to celebrate her liberty, she would get magnificently drunk on furniture polish.
“I did not see her of course,” said the Rat. “No. When I came, early in the morning, no one was here. I thought that you were dead, Barin, and I began collecting your property, so that no one else should take it. Then you made a movement, and I saw that you were alive — so I got some cabbage soup and gave it you. That certainly saved you…. I’m going to stay with you now.”
I did not care in the least whether he went or stayed. He chattered on. By staying with me he would inevitably neglect his public duties. Perhaps I didn’t know that he had public duties? Yes, he was now an Anarchist, and I should be astonished very shortly, by the things the Anarchists would do. All the same, they had their own discipline. They had their own processions, too, like any one else. Only four days ago he had marched all over Petrograd carrying a black flag. He must confess that he was rather sick of it. But they must have processions…. Even the prostitutes had marched down the Nevski the other day demanding sho
rter hours.
But of course I cannot remember all that he said. During the next few days I slowly pulled myself out of the misty dead world in which I had been lying. Pain came back to me, leaping upon me and then receding, finally, on the third day suddenly leaving me altogether. The Rat fed me on cabbage soup and glasses of tea and caviare and biscuits. During those three days he never left me, and indeed tended me like a woman. He would sit by my bed and with his rough hand stroke my hair, while he poured into my ears ghastly stories of the many crimes that he had committed. I noticed that he was cleaner and more civilised. His beard was clipped and he smelt of cabbage and straw — a rather healthy smell. One morning he suddenly took the pail, filled it with water and washed himself in front of my windows. He scrubbed himself until I should have thought that he had no skin left.
“You’re a fine big man, Rat,” I said.
He was delighted with that, and came quite near my bed, stretching his naked body, his arms and legs and chest, like a pleased animal.
“Yes, I’m a fine man, Barin,” he said; “many women have loved me, and many will again…” Then he went back, and producing clean drawers and vest from somewhere (I suspect that they were mine but I was too weak to care), put them on.
On the second and third days I felt much better. The thaw was less violent, the wood crackled in my stove. On the morning of Wednesday April 14 I got up, dressed, and sat in front of my window. The ice was still there, but over it lay a faint, a very faint, filmy sheen of water. It was a day of gleams, the sun flashing in and out of the clouds. Just beneath my window a tree was pushing into bud. Pools of water lay thick on the dirty melting snow. I got the Rat to bring a little table and put some books on it. I had near me The Spirit of Man, Keats’s Letters, The Roads, Beddoes, and Pride and Prejudice. A consciousness of the outer world crept, like warmth, through my bones.
“Rat,” I said, “who’s been to see me?”