The Dark Forest Part 5

There arose then in these days of the wounded at M----a strange relationship between myself and Nikitin. Friendship, I have said, I may not call it. Nikitin afterwards told me it was my interest in the study of human character that led to his frankness--as though he had said, "Here is a man who likes to play a certain game. I also enjoy it. We will play it together, but when the game is finished we separate." Although discussions as to the characters of one or another of us were continuous and, to an Englishman at any rate, most strangely public, I do not think that the Russians in our Otriad were really interested in human psychology. One criticised or praised in order to justify some personal disappointment or pleasure. There was nothing that gave our company greater pleasure than to declare in full voice that "So-and-so was a dear, most sympathetic, a fine man." Public praise was continuous and the most honest and spontaneous affair; if criticism sometimes followed with surprising quickness that was spontaneous too; all the emotions in our Otriad were spontaneous to the very extreme of spontaneity. But we were not real students of one another; we were content to call things by their names, to call silence silence, obstinacy obstinacy, good temper good temper, and leave it at that.

No one, I think, really considered Nikitin at all deeply. They admired him for his "quiet" but would have liked him better had he shared some of their frankness--and that was all.

It happened that for several days I worked in the bandaging room directly under Nikitin. The work had a peculiar and really una.n.a.lysable fascination for me. It was perhaps the directness of contact that pleased me. I suppose one felt that here at any rate one was doing immediate practical good, relieving distress and agony that must, by some one, be immediately relieved; and, at any rate, in the first days at M---- when the press of wounded was terrific (we treated, in one day and night, nine hundred wounded soldiers) there could be no doubt of the real demand for incessant tireless work. But there was in my pleasure more than this. It was as though, through the bodies of the wounded soldiers, I was helping to drive home the attack upon our enemy. By our enemy I do not mean anything as concretely commonplace as the German nation. One scarcely considered Germany as a definite personality. One was resolved to cripple its power because one believed that power to be a menace to the helpless, the innocent, the lovers of truth and beauty; but that resolve, although it never altered, seemed (the nearer one approached the citadel) in some way to be farther and farther removed from the real question. Germany was of no importance, and the ruin that Germany was wreaking was of no importance compared with the histories of the individual souls that were now in the making. Here were we: Nikitin, Trenchard, Sister K----, Molozov, myself and the others--engaged upon our great adventure. Across the surface of the world, at this same instant, out upon the same hunt, seeking the same answer to their mystery, were millions of our fellows. Somewhere in the heart of the deep forest the enemy was hiding. We would defeat him? He would catch us unawares? He had some plot, some hidden surprise? What should we find when we met him?... We hated Germany, G.o.d knows, with a quiet, unresting, interminable hatred, but it was not Germany that we were fighting.

And these wounded knew something that we did not. In the first moments of their agony when we met them their souls had not recovered from the shock of their encounter. It was, with many of them, more than the mere physical pain. They were still held by some discovery at whose very doors they had been. The discovery itself had not been made by them, but they had been so near to it that many of them would never be the same man again. "No, your Honour," one soldier said to me. "It isn't my arm.... That is nothing, Slava Bogu ... but life isn't so real now. It is half gone." He would explain no more.

Since the battle of S----, I had been restless. I wanted to be back there again and this work was to me like talking to travellers who had come from some country that one knew and desired.

In the early morning, when the light was so cold and inhuman, when the candles stuck in bottles on the window-sills shivered and quavered in the little breeze, when the big basin on the floor seemed to swell ever larger and larger, with its burden of b.l.o.o.d.y rags and soiled bandages and filthy fragments of dirty clothes, when the air was weighted down with the smell of blood and human flesh, when the sighs and groans and cries kept up a perpetual undercurrent that one did not notice and yet faltered before, when again and again bodies, torn almost in half, faces mangled for life, hands battered into pulp, legs hanging almost by a thread, rose before one, pa.s.sed and rose again in endless procession, then, in those early hours, some fantastic world was about one. The poplar trees beyond the window, the little beechwood on the hill, the pond across the road, a round grey sheet of ruffled water, these things in the half-light seemed to wait for our defeat. One instant on our part and it seemed that all the pain and torture would rise in a flood and overwhelm one ... in those early morning hours the enemy crept very close indeed. We could almost hear his hot breath behind the bars of our fastened doors.

There was a peculiar little headache that I have felt nowhere else, before or since, that attacked one on those early mornings. It was not a headache that afflicted one with definite physical pain. It was like a cold hand pressing upon the brow, a hand that touched the eyes, the nose, the mouth, then remained, a chill weight upon the head; the blood seemed to stop in its course, one's heart beat feebly, and things were dim before one's eyes. One was stupid and chose one's words slowly, looking at people closely to see whether one really knew them, even unsure about oneself, one's history, one's future; neither hungry, tired, nor thirsty, neither sad nor joyful, neither excited nor dull, only with the cold hand upon one's brow, catching (with troubled breath) the beating of one's heart.

In normal times the night-duty was of course taken in rotation, but during the pressure of these four days we had to s.n.a.t.c.h our rest when we might.

About midnight on the fifth day the procession of wounded suddenly slackened, and by two o'clock in the morning had ceased entirely. The two nurses went to bed leaving Nikitin, myself, and some sleepy sanitars alone. The little room was empty of all wounded, they having been removed to the tent on the farther side of the road. The candles had sunk deep into the bottles and were spluttering in a sea of grease. The room smelt abominably, the blood on the floor had trickled in thin red lines into the cracks between the boards, and the basins with the soiled bandages overflowed. There was absolute silence. One sanitar, asleep, had leaned, still standing, over a chair, and his shadow with his heavy hanging head high above the candle against the wall.

Nikitin, seeming gigantic in the failing candlelight, stood back against the window. He did not keep, as did Semyonov, perfect neatness. A night of work left him with his hair on end, his black beard rough and disordered; his shirtsleeves were turned up, his arms stained with blood, and in his white ap.r.o.n he looked like some kingly butcher. I was tired, the cold headache was upon me. I wished that I could go, but I knew that both he and I must stay until eight o'clock. While there was work to do nothing mattered, but now in the silence the whole world seemed as empty and foul as a drained and stinking tub.

Nikitin looked at me.

"You're tired," he said.

"No, I'm not tired," I answered. "I shouldn't sleep if I went to bed. But I've got a headache that is not a headache, I smell a smell that isn't a smell, I'm going to be sick--and yet I'm not going to be sick."

"Come outside," he said, "and get rid of this air." We went out and sat down on a wooden bench that bordered the yard. Before us was the high-road that ran from the town of S---- into the very heart of the Carpathians. As the cold grey faded we could catch the thin outline of those mountains, faint, like pencil-lines upon the sky now washed with pink, covered in their nearer reaches by thick forests, insubstantial, although they were close at hand, like water or long clouds. We could see the road, white and clear at our feet, melting into shadow beyond us, and catching in the little misty pools the coloured reflection of the morning sky.

The air was very fresh; a c.o.c.k behind me welcomed the sun; the cold band withdrew from my forehead.

Nikitin was silent and I, silent also, sat there, almost asleep, happy and tranquil. It seemed to me very natural to him that he should neither move nor speak, but after a time he began to talk. I had in that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I was listening to some history. I know that I did not sleep and yet even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours. I know that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact. And yet it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist of all that slumber Nikitin's voice, soft, measured, itself like an echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated--but to my heart rather than to my brain. Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard in the train.... And now as I sit here, in so different a place, amongst men so different, those other two come back to me, happy ghosts. Yes, happy I know that one at least of them is!

Like water behind gla.s.s, like music behind a screen, Nikitin's voice comes back to me--dim but so close, mysterious but so intimate. Ah, the questions that I would ask him now if only I might have those morning hours over again!

"You're a solemn man altogether, Durward. Perhaps all Englishmen seem so to us, and it may be only your tranquillity, so unlike our moods and nerves by which we kill ourselves dead before we're half way through life.... I had an English tutor for a year when I was a boy. He didn't teach me much: 'all right' and 'Tank you' is the only English I've kept, but I think of him now as the very quietest man in all the universe. He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods and tempers killed him when he was just over forty.... We have a proverb, 'In the still marshes there are devils,' and we admire and fear quiet men because they have something that we have not. And I like the way that you watch us, Durward. Your friend Trenchard does not watch us at all and one could be his friend. For you one has quite another feeling. It is as though I had something to give you that you really want. Why should I not give it you? My giving it will do me no harm, it may even yield me pleasure. You will not throw it away. You are an Englishman and will not for a moment's temper or pa.s.sion reveal secrets. And there are no secrets. What I tell you you may tell the world--but I warn you that it will neither interest them nor will they believe it.... There is, you see, no climax to my story. I have no story, indeed; like an old feldscher in my village who hates our village Pope. 'Why, Georg Georgevitch,' I say, 'do you hate him? He is a worthy man.' 'Your Honour,' he says, 'there is nothing there; a fat man, but G.o.d has the rest of him--I hate him for his emptiness.' I'm in a humour to talk. I have, in a way, fulfilled the purpose that my English tutor created in me. I've grown a sort of quiet skin, you know, but under that skin the heart pounds away, the veins swell to bursting. I'm a fool behind it all--just a fool as every Russian is a fool with more in hand than he knows how to deal with. You don't understand Russia, do you? No, and I don't and no one does. But we can all talk about her--and love her too, if you like, although our sentiment's a bad thing in us, some say. But for us not to talk--for one of us to be silent--do you know how hard that is?... And through it all how I despise myself for wishing to tell them! What business is it of theirs? Then this war. Can you conceive what it is doing to Russians? If you have loved Russia and dreamed for her and had your dreams flung again and again to the ground and trampled on--and now, once more, the bubbles are in the sky, glittering, gleaming ... do we not have to speak, do you think? Must it not be hard, when before we have not been able to be silent about women and vodka, to be silent now about the dearest wish of our heart? We have come out here, all of us, to see what we will find. I have come because I want to get nearer to something--I had brought something in my heart about which I had learnt to be silent. 'That is enough!' I thought, 'there can be nothing else about which I can wish to talk; but now, suddenly, like that crucifix on the hillock by the road that the sun has just touched, there is something more. And now here we are nothing ... two souls come together out of s.p.a.ce for an hour ... and it doesn't matter what I say to you, except that it's true and the truth will be something for you. Here's what I've come to the war with ... my little bit of possession, if you like, that I've brought with me, as we've all brought something. Will you understand me? Perhaps not, and it really doesn't matter. I know what I have, what I want, but not what I am. So how should you know if I do not? And I love life, I believe in G.o.d. I wish to meet Death. One can be serious without being absurd at an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things.... Andrey Va.s.silievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about us. You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at it during at least half the week.

"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Va.s.silievitch at a friend's house in Petrograd. He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration, but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man whom I would ever care to know. I had been at this time five years in Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon. I was a successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own actions, would not die. How I wished for it to die! I thought of the day when I should be without it as the day of liberation, of freedom. That had become my idea, I must tell you, the dominating idea of my life: that I should kill my idealism, laugh at the belief in G.o.d, lose faith in every one and everything, and then simply enjoy myself--my work which I loved and my pleasure which I should love when my idealism had died.... Sometimes during those years I thought that it was dying. Women helped to kill it, I believed, and I knew many women, desperately persistently laughing at them, leaving them or being left by them; and then, in spite of myself, bitterly, deeply disappointed. Something always saying to me: 'I am G.o.d and you cannot hide from me.' 'I am G.o.d and I will not be hidden.'

"And on this night, about five years ago, at the house of a friend, I met Andrey Va.s.silievitch. We left the house together, and because it was a fine night, walked down the Nevski. There at the corner of the Morskaia, because he was a nervous man who wished to be well with every one in the world and because he had nothing especial to say, he asked me to dinner, and I, because it was a fine night and there had been good wine, said that I would go.

"The next day I cursed my folly. I do not know to this day why I did not break the engagement, it would have been sufficiently easy, but break it I did not and a week later, reluctantly, I went. Do you know how houses and streets of which you have observed nothing, afterwards, called out by some important event, leap into detail? That night I swear that I saw nothing of that little street behind the Mariinsky Theatre. It was a fine 'white night' at the end of May and the theatre was in a bustle of arrivals because it was nearly eight o'clock. Not at all the hour of Russian dinner, as you know, but Andrey Va.s.silievitch always liked to be as English as possible. I tell you that I saw nothing of the street and yet now I know that at the door of the little trakteer there were two men and a woman laughing, that an isvotchik was drawn up in front of a high white block of flats, asleep, his head fallen on his breast, that the wonderful light, faintly blue and misty like gauze hung down from the sky, down over the houses, but falling not quite on to the pavement which was hard and ugly and grey. The little street was very silent and quiet and had, like so many Petrograd streets, a decorous intimacy with the eighteenth century ghosts thronging its air....

"Afterwards, how I was to know that street, every stone and corner of it! It seems wonderful to me now that I trod its pavement that night so carelessly. My destination was a square little house at the corner on the right. Andrey Va.s.silievitch boasted a whole house to himself, a rare pride in our city, as you know. When I was inside the doors I knew at once that it was not Andrey Va.s.silievitch's house at all. Some stronger spirit than his was there. Knowing him, I had expected to find there many modern things, some imitation of English manners, some bad but expensive pictures, a gramophone, a pianolo, a library of Russian cla.s.sics in our hideous modern bindings, a billiard-room--you know the character. How quiet this little house was. In the little square hall an old faded carpet, a grandfather's clock and two eighteenth century prints of Petrograd. All the rooms were square, so Russian with their placid family portraits, their old tables and chairs, not beautiful save for their fidelity, and old thumbed editions of Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov in the bookshelves. Clocks, old slow clocks, all telling different time, all over the house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all those odd family things that Russians collect, china of the worst period, bra.s.s trays, large candlesticks, musical boxes, anything you please. Only in the dining-room there was some attempt at modernity. Bad modern furniture, on the walls bad copies of such things as Somoff's 'Blue Lady,' Vrubel's 'Pan' and one of Benoit's 'Peter the Great' water-colours. Beyond this room the house was of eighty years ago, m.u.f.fled in its old furniture, speaking with the voice of its old clocks, scented with the scent of its musk and lavender, watched by the contented gaze of the old family portraits.

"Alexandra Pavlovna, Andrey Va.s.silievitch's wife, was waiting for us. Has it happened to you yet that your life that has been such and such a life is in the moment of a heart-beat all another life? You have pa.s.sed an examination, you are suddenly ill, you break your back by a fall, or more simply than all of these, you enter a town, see a picture, hear a bar of music.... The thing's done: all values changed: what you saw before you see no longer, what you needed before you need no longer, what you expected before you expect no longer.... Alexandra Pavlovna was not a beautiful woman. Not tall, with hair quite grey, eyes not dark nor light--sad though. When she smiled there was great charm but so it is true of many women. Her complexion was always pale and her voice, although it was sweet to those who loved her, was perhaps too quiet to be greatly remarked by strangers. I have known men who thought her an ordinary woman.... She had much humour but did not show it to every one. She was as still as that cloud there above the hill, full of colour; like, that is, to those who loved her; seen from another view, as perhaps that cloud may be, there was nothing wonderful.... Nothing wonderful, but so many loved her! There was never, I think, a woman so greatly beloved. And you may judge by me. I had led a life in which after my work women had always played the chief part, and as the months pa.s.sed and I had grown proud I had vowed that women must be exceptional to please me. I had felt the eye of the world upon me. 'You'll see no ordinary women in Victor Leontievitch's company' I heard them say, and I was proud that they should say it. From the first instant of seeing Alexandra Pavlovna I loved her and I loved her in a new, an utterly new way. For the first time in my life I did not think of myself as a traveller who, pa.s.sing for many years through countries that did not greatly interest him, feels his aches and pains, his money troubles, his discomforts and little personal irritations. Then suddenly he crosses the border and the new land so possesses him that he is only a vessel for its beauty, to absorb it, to hold it, to carry the burden of it in safety.... I crossed the border. For four years after that I pursued that enchanted journey. Why did I love her? Who can say? Andrey Va.s.silievitch adored her with an utter devotion and had done so since the first moment of meeting her. I have known many others, women and men, who felt that devotion. On that first evening we were very quiet--only another woman, a cousin of hers. After dinner I had half an hour's talk with her. I can see her--ah! how I can see you, my dear!--sitting back a little in her chair, resting, her hands folded very quietly in her lap, her eyes watching me gravely. I felt like a boy who has come into the world for the first time. I could not talk to her--I stammered over the simplest things. But I was conscious of a deep luxurious delight. I did not, as I had done before, lay plans, say that this-and-this would be so if I did this-and-this, I did not consciously try to influence or direct her. I felt no definite sensual attraction, did not say, as I had always done with other women, 'It is the hair, the eyes, the mouth.' If I thought at all it was only 'This is better than anything that I have known before; I had never dreamt of anything like this.'

"After I had left her that night I did not walk the streets, nor drink, nor find companions. I went home and slept the soundest sleep of my life. In the morning I knew tranquillity for the first time in all my days. I did not, as I had done after many earlier first meetings, hasten to see my friend. I did not know even that she liked me and yet I felt no doubt nor confusion. It was, perhaps, that I was ready to accept this new influence under any conditions, was ready for once to leave the rules to another. I felt no curiosity, knew no determination to discover the conditions of her life that I might bend them to my own purposes. I was quite pa.s.sive, untroubled, and of a marvellous, almost selfish happiness.

"Our friendship continued very easily. It soon came to our meeting every day. In the summer they moved to their house in Finland and I went to stay with them. But it was not until her return to Petrograd in September that I told her that I loved her. Upon one of the first autumn days, upon an evening, when the little green tree outside their door was gold and there was a slip of an apricot moon, when the first fires were lighted (Andrey Va.s.silievitch had English fireplaces), sitting alone together in her little faded old-fashioned room, I told her that I loved her. She listened very quietly as I talked, her eyes on my face, grave, sad perhaps, and yet humorous, secure in her own settled life but sharing also in the life of others. She watched me rather as a mother watches her child.... I told her that it mattered nothing the conditions that she put upon me; that so long as I saw her and knew that she believed me to be her friend I asked for nothing. She answered, still very quietly but putting her hand on mine, that she had loved me from the first moment of our meeting. That she wondered that yet once again love should have come into her life when she had thought that that was all finished for her. She told me that love had been in her life nothing but pain and distress, and then she asked me, very simply, whether I would try to keep this thing so that it should be happy and should endure. I said that I would obey her in anything that she should command.... There followed then the strangest life for me. Lovers in the fullest sense we were and yet it was different from any love that I had ever known. When I ask myself why, in what, it differed I cannot answer. Two old grey middle-aged people who happened to suit one another.... Not romantic.... But I think in the end of it all the reason was that she never revealed herself to me entirely. I was always curious about her, always felt that other people knew more of her than I did, always thought that one day I should know all. It is 'knowing all' that kills love, and I never knew all. We were always together. She was a woman of very remarkable intelligence, loving music, literature, painting, with a most excellently critical love. Her friendship with me gave her, I do believe, a new youth and happiness. We became inseparable, and all my earlier life had pa.s.sed away from me like worn-out clothes. I was happy--but of course I was not satisfied. I was jealous of that which Andrey Va.s.silievitch had--and I lacked. My whole relationship to Andrey Va.s.silievitch was a curious one. My friendship for his wife must I am sure have been torture to him. He knew that she had given me a great deal that she had never given to him. And yet, because he loved her so profoundly, he was only anxious that she should be happy. He saw that my friendship gave her new interests, new life even. He encouraged me, then, in every way, to stay with them, to be with them. He left us alone continually. During the whole of that four years he never once spoke in anger to me nor challenged my fidelity. My relationship to him was difficult. We were, quite simply as men, the worst-suited in the world. He had not a trick nor a habit that did not get on my nerves; he was intelligent only in those things that I despised a man for knowing. This would have been well enough had he not persisted in talking about matters of art and literature, of which, of course, he knew nothing. He did it, I believe, to please his wife and myself. I despised him for many things and yet, in my heart, I knew that he had much that I had not. He was, and is, a finer man than I.... And, last and first of all, he possessed part of his wife that I did not. After all, she did, in her own beautiful way, love him. She was a mother to him; she laughed tenderly at his foolishness, cared for him, watched over him, defended him. Me she would never need to defend. Our relationship was built rather on my defence of her. Sometimes I would wish that I were such a durak as Andrey Va.s.silievitch, that I might have her protection.... There were many, many times when I hated him--no times at all when he did not irritate me. I wished.... I wished.... I do not know what I wished. Only I always waited for the time when I should have all of her, when I should hold her against all the world. Then, after four years of this new life, she quite suddenly died. Again in that little house, on a 'white night,' just as when I had at first met her, the purple curtains hanging in the little street, the isvostchik sleeping, the clocks in the house chattering in their haste to keep up with time.... Only two months before the outbreak of the war she caught cold, for a week suffered from pneumonia and died. At the last Andrey Va.s.silievitch and I were alone with her. He had her hand in his but her last cry was 'Victor,' and as she died I felt as though, at last, after that long waiting, she had leapt into my arms for ever....

"After her death for many weeks, she was with me more completely than she had been during her lifetime. I knew that she was dead, but I thought that I also had died. I went into Finland alone, saw no one, talked to no one, saw only her. Then quite suddenly I came to life again. She withdrew from me.... Work seemed the only possible thing; but I was, during all this time, happy not miserable. She was not with me, but she was not very far away. Then Andrey Va.s.silievitch came back to me. He told me that he knew that she had loved me--that he had tried to speak of her to others who had known her, but they had, none of them, had real knowledge of her. Might he speak to me sometimes about her?

"I found that though he irritated me more than ever I liked to talk about her to him. As I spoke of her he scarcely was present at all and yet he had known her and loved her, and would listen for ever and ever if I wished.

"When the war had lasted some months the fancy came to me that I could get nearer to her by going into it. I might even die, which would be best of all. I did not wish to kill myself because I felt that to be a coward's death, and in such a way I thought that I would only separate myself from her. But in the war, perhaps, I might meet death in such a way as to show him that I despised him both for myself and her. By suicide I would be paying him reverence.... Some such thought also had Andrey Va.s.silievitch. I heard that he thought of attaching himself to some Red Cross Otriad. I told him my plans. He said no more, but suddenly, as you know, I found him on the platform of the Warsaw station. Afterwards he apologised to me, said that he must be near me, that he would try not to annoy me, that if sometimes he spoke of her to me he hoped that I would not mind.... And I? What do I feel? I do not know. He has some share in her that I have not. I have some share in her that he has not, and I think that it has come to both of us that the one of us who dies first will attain her. It seems to me now that she is continually with me, but I believe that this is nothing to the knowledge I shall have of her one day. Am I right? Is Andrey Va.s.silievitch right? Can it be that such a man--such men, I should say, as either I or he--will ever be given such happiness? I do not know. I only know that G.o.d exists--that Love is more powerful than man--that Death can fall before us if we believe that it will--that the soul of man is Power and Love.... I believe in G.o.d...."

CHAPTER V.

FIRST MOVE TO THE ENEMY.

It was during two nights in the forest of S----, about which I must afterwards write, that I had those long conversations with Trenchard, upon whose evidence now I must very largely depend. Before me as I write is his Diary, left to me by him. In this whole business of the war there is nothing more difficult than the varied and confused succession with which moods, impressions, fancies, succeed one upon another, but Trenchard told me so simply and yet so graphically of the events of these weeks that followed the battle of S---- that I believe I am departing in no way from the truth in my present account, the truth, at any rate as he himself believed it to be....

The only impression that he brought away with him from the battle of S---- was that picture, lighted by the horizon fires, of Marie Ivanovna kneeling with her hand on Semyonov's shoulder. That, every detail and colour of it, bit into his brain.

In understanding him it is of the first importance to remember that this was the one and only love business of his life. The effect of those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as gla.s.s is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was, fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of him? That she should make nothing of him at all was as incredible to him as that there should not be, somewhere in the world, Polchester town in Glebeshire county.

There had been with him, I think, from the first a fear that "it was all too good to be true"--Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. It is not easy for any man, after thirty years' shy shrinking from the world, to shake himself free of superst.i.tions, and such terrors the quiet and retired Polchester had bred in Trenchard's heart as though it had been the very epitome of life at its lowest and vilest. It simply came to this, that he refused to believe that Marie Ivanovna had been given to him only to be taken away again. About women he knew simply nothing and Russian women are not the least complicated of their s.e.x. About Marie Ivanovna he of course knew nothing at all.

His first weeks in our Otriad had been like the painful return to drab reality after a splendid dream. "After all I am the hopeless creature I thought I was. What was there, in those days in Petrograd, that could blind me?" His shyness returned, his awkwardness, his mistakes in tact and resource were upon him again like a suit of badly made clothes. He knew this but he believed that it could make no difference to his lady. So sure was he of himself in regard to her--she might be transformed into anything hideous or vile and still now he would love her--that he could not believe that she would change. The love that had come to them was surely eternal--it must be, it must be, it must be....

He failed altogether to understand her youth, her inexperience, above all her coloured romantic fancy. Her romantic fancy had made him in her eyes for a brief hour something that he was not. After a month at the war I believe that she had grown into a woman. She had loved him for an instant as a young girl loves a hero of a novel. And although she was now a woman she must still keep her romantic fancy. He was no longer part of that--only a clumsy man at whom people laughed. She must, I think, have suffered at her own awakening, for she was honest, impetuous, pure, if ever woman was those things.

He did not see her as she was--he still clung to his confidence; but he began as the days advanced to be terribly afraid. His fears centred themselves round Semyonov. Semyonov must have seemed to him an awful figure, powerful, contemptuous, all-conquering. Any blunders that he committed were doubled by Semyonov's presence. He could do nothing right if Semyonov were there. He was only too ready to believe that Semyonov knew the world and he did not, and if Semyonov thought him a fool--it was quite obvious what Semyonov thought him--then a fool he must be. He clung desperately to the hope that there would be a battle--a romantic dramatic battle--and that in it he would most gloriously distinguish himself. He believed that, for her sake, he would face all the terrors of h.e.l.l. The battle came and there were no terrors of h.e.l.l--only sick headache, noise, men desperately wounded, and, once again, his own clumsiness. Then, in that final picture of Marie Ivanovna and Semyonov he saw his own most miserable exclusion.

In the days that followed there was much work and he was forgotten. He a.s.sisted in the bandaging-room; in later days he was to prove most efficient and capable, but at first he was shy and nervous and Semyonov, who seemed always to be present, did not spare him.

Then, quite suddenly, Marie Ivanovna changed. She was kinder to him than she had ever been, yes, kinder than during those early days in Petrograd. We all noticed the change in her. When she was with him in the bandaging-room she whispered advice to him, helped him when she had a free moment, laughed with him, put him, of course, into a heaven of delight. How happy at once he was! His clumsiness instantly fell away from him, he only smiled when Semyonov sneered, his Russian improved in a remarkable manner. She was tender to him as though she were much older than he. He has told me that, in spite of his joy, that tenderness alarmed him. Also when he kissed her she drew back a little--and she did not reply when he spoke of their marriage.

But for four days he was happy! He used to sing to himself as he walked about the house in a high cracked voice--one song I did but see her pa.s.sing by--another Early one morning--I can hear him now, his voice breaking always on the high notes.

Early one morning Just as the sun was rising I heard a maid singing In the valley below: "Ah! don't deceive me! Pray never leave me,' How could you treat a poor maiden so!"

His pockets were more full than ever of knives and string and b.u.t.tons. His smile when he was happy lightened his face, changing the lines of it, making it if not handsome pleasant and friendly. He would talk to himself in English, ruffling his hands through his hair: "And then, at three o'clock I must go with Andrey Va.s.silievitch ..." or "I wonder whether she'll mind if I ask--" He had a large briar pipe at which he puffed furiously, but could not smoke without an endless procession of matches that afterwards littered the floor around him. "The tobacco's damp," he explained to us a hundred times. "It's better damp...."

Then, quite suddenly, the blow fell.

One evening, as they were standing alone together in the yard watching the yellow sky die into dusk, without any preparation, she spoke to him.

"John," she said, "I can't marry you."

He heard her as though she had spoken to another man. It was as though he said: "Ah, that will be bad news for so-and-so."

"I don't understand," he said, and instantly afterwards his heart began to beat like a raging beast and his knees trembled.

"I can't marry you," she told him, "because I don't love you. Ah, I've known it a long time--ever since we left Petrograd. I've often, often wanted to tell you ... I've been afraid."

"You can't marry me?" he repeated, "But you must...." Then hurriedly: "No, I shouldn't say that. You must forgive me ... you have confused me."

"I'm very unhappy ... I've been unhappy a long time. It was a mistake in Petrograd. I don't love you--but it isn't only that.... You wouldn't be happy with me. You think now ... but it's a mistake."

He has told me that as the idea worked through to his brain his only thought was that he must keep her at all costs, under any conditions, keep her.

"You can't--you mustn't," he whispered, staring as though he would hold her by her eyes. "Don't you see that you mustn't? What am I to do after all this? What are we both to do? It's breaking everything. I shan't believe in anything if you.... Ah! but no, you don't really mean anything...."

He saw that she was trembling and he bent forward, put his arm very gently round her as though he would protect her.

But she very strongly drew away from him, looked him in the face, then dropped her eyes, let her whole body droop as though she were most bitterly ashamed.

"I don't know," she said, "what I've been ... what I've done. During these last weeks I've been terrible to myself--and yet it's better too. I didn't live a real life before, and now I see things as they are. I don't love you, John, and so we mustn't marry."

He looked at her and then suddenly wild, furious, shouting at her: "You mustn't.... You dare not.... Then go if you wish. I don't want you, do you hear?... I don't want.... I don't want you!"

She turned and walked swiftly into the house. He watched her go, then with quick stumbling steps hurried into the field below the farm.

There he stood, thinking of nothing, knowing nothing, seeing nothing. The dusk came up, there had been rain during the day, the mist was in grey sheets, the wet dank smell of the earth and of the vegetables amongst which he stood grew stronger as the light faded. He thought of nothing, nothing at all. He felt in his pocket for his pipe, something dropped--and he knelt down there on the soaking ground, searching. He searched furiously, raging to himself again and again: "Oh! I must find it! I must find it! I must find it!" His hands tore the wet vegetables, were thick with the soil. Other things fell from his pockets, Then the rain began to descend again, thin and cold. In some building he could hear a horse moving, stamping. He pulled up the vegetables by their roots in his search. As though a sword had struck him his brain was clear. He knew of his loss. He flung himself on the ground, rubbing the wet soil on to his face, whispering desperately: "Oh G.o.d!--Oh G.o.d!--Oh G.o.d!"

On the day following we did not know of what had happened. Trenchard was not with us, as he was sent about midday with some sanitars to bury the dead in a wood five miles from M----. That must have been, in many ways, the most terrible day of his life and during it, for the first time, he was to know that unreality that comes to every one, sooner or later, at the war. It is an unreality that is the more terrible because it selects from reality details that cannot be denied, selects them without transformation, saying to his victim: "These things are as you have always seen them, therefore this world is as you have always seen it. It is real, I tell you." Let that false reality be admitted and there is no more peace.

On this day there were the two sanitars, whose faces now he knew, walking solidly beside his cart, there were the little orchards with the soldiers' tents sheltering beneath them, the villages with the old men, the women, the children, watching, like ghosts, their pa.s.sage, the fields in which the summer corn was ripening, the first trembling heat and beauty of a quiet day in early June. No sound in the world but peace, the woods opening around them as they advanced. He lay back on his b.u.mping cart, watching the world as though he was seeing pictures of some place where he had once been but long left. Yes, long ago he had left it. His world was now a narrow burning chamber, in which dwelt with him a taunting jeering torturing spirit of reminiscence. He saw with the utmost clearness every detail of his relationship with Marie Ivanovna. He had no doubt at all that that relationship was finally, hopelessly closed. His was not a character that was the stronger for misfortune. He submitted, crushed to the ground. His mind now dwelt upon that journey from Petrograd, a journey of incredible, ironic ecstasy lighted with the fires of the wonderful spring that had accompanied it. He recalled every detail of his conversation with me. His confidence that life would now be fine for him--how could life ever be fine for a man who let the prizes, the treasures, slip from his fingers, without an attempt to clutch them? It was so now that he saw the whole of the affair--blame of Marie Ivanovna there was none, only of his own weakness, his imbecile, idiotic weakness. In that last conversation with her why could he not have said that he refused to let her go, held to her, dominated her, as a strong man would have done? No, without a word, except a cry of impotent childish rage, he had submitted.... So, all his life it had been--so, all his life it would be.

He could only wonder now at his easy ready belief that happiness would last for him. Had happiness ever lasted? As a man began so he ended. Life laughed at him and would always laugh. Nevertheless, he had that journey--five days of perfect unalloyed delight. n.o.body could rob him of that. She had said to him that even at the beginning of the journey she had known that she did not love him--she had known but he had not, and even though he had cheated himself with the glittering bubble of an illusion the splendour had been there....

Meanwhile behind his despair there was something else stirring. He has told me that upon that afternoon he was only very dimly, very very faintly aware of it, aware of it only fiercely to deny it. He knew, however stoutly he might refuse to acknowledge it, that the events of the last weeks had bred in him some curiosity, some excitement that he could not a.n.a.lyse. He would like to have thought that his life began and ended only in Marie Ivanovna, but the Battle of S---- had, as it were in spite of himself, left something more.

He found that he recalled the details of that battle as though his taking part in it had bound him to something. Even it was suggested to him that there was something now that he must do outside his love for Marie Ivanovna, something that had perhaps no connexion with her at all. In the very heart of his misery he was conscious that a little pulse was beating that was strange to him, foreign to him; it was as though he were warned that he had embarked upon some voyage that must be carried through to the very end. He was, in truth, less completely overwhelmed by his catastrophe than he knew.

As they now advanced and entered upon the first outworks of the Carpathians the day clouded. They stumbled down into a little narrow brown valley and drove there by the side of an ugly naked stream, wandering sluggishly through mud and weeds. Over them the woods, grey and sullen, had completely closed. The sun, a round glazed disk sharply defined but without colour, was like a dirty plate in the sky. Up again into the woods, then over rough cart tracks, they came finally to a standstill amongst thick brushwood and dripping undergrowth.

They could hear, very far away, the noise of cannon. The sanitars were inclined to grumble. "Nice sort of business, looking for dead men here, your Honour.... We must leave the carts here and go on foot. What's it wet for? It hasn't been raining."

Why was it wet, indeed? A heavy brooding inertia, Trenchard has told me, seemed to seize them all. "They were not pleasant trees, you know," I remember his afterwards telling me, "all dirty and tangled, and we all looked dirty too. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. But that afternoon I simply didn't care about anything, nothing mattered." I don't think that the sanitars at that time respected Trenchard very greatly. He wasn't, in any case, a man of authority and his broken stammering Russian wouldn't help him. Then there is nothing stranger than the fashion in which the Russian language will (if you are a timid foreigner), of a sudden wilfully desert you. Be bold with it and it may, somewhat haughtily, perhaps, consent to your use of it ... be frightened of it and it will despise you for ever. Upon that afternoon it deserted Trenchard; even his own language seemed to have left him. His brain was cold and damp like the woods around him.

They pa.s.sed through the thickets and came, to their great surprise, upon a trench occupied by soldiers. This surprised them because they had heard that the Austrians were many versts distant. The soldiers also seemed to wonder. They explained their mission to a young officer who seemed at first as though he would ask them something, then checked himself, gave them permission to pa.s.s through and watched them with grave gaze. After they had crossed the barbed wire the woods suddenly closed about them as though a door had been softly shut behind them. The ground now squelched beneath their feet, the sky between the trees was like damp blotting-paper, and the smell that had been only faintly in the air before was now heavy around them, blown in thick gusts as the wind moved through the trees. Shrapnel now could be distinctly heard at no great distance, with its hiss, its snap of sound, and sometimes rifle-shots like the crack of a ball on a cricket bat broke through the thickets. They separated, spreading like beaters in a long line: "Soon," Trenchard told me, "I was quite alone. I could hear sometimes the breaking of a twig or a stumbling footfall but I might have been alone at the end of the world. It was obvious that the regimental sanitars had been there before us because there were many new roughly made graves. There were letters too and post cards lying about all heavy with wet and dirt. I picked up some of these--letters from lovers and sisters and brothers. One letter I remember in a large baby-hand from a boy to his father telling him about his lessons and his drill, 'because he would soon be a soldier.' One letter, too, from a girl to her lover saying that she had had a dream and knew now that her 'dear Franz, whom she loved with all her soul, would return to her!... I am quite confident now that we shall be happy here again very soon....' In such a place, those words."

As he walked alone there he felt, as I had felt before the battle of S----, that he had already been there. He knew those trees, that smell, that heavy overhanging sky. Then he remembered, as I had remembered, his dream. But whereas that dream had been to me only a reflected story, with him it had lasted throughout his life. He knew every step of that first advance into the forest, the look back to the long dim white house with shadowy figures still about it, the avenue with many trees, the horses and dogs down the first grey path, then the sudden loneliness, the quiet broken only by the dripping of the trees.

Always that had caught him by the throat with terror, and now to-day he was caught once again. He was watched: he fancied that he could see the eyes behind the thicket and hear the rustling movement of somebody. To-day he could hear nothing. If at last his dream was to be fashioned into reality let it be so. Did the creature wish to destroy him, let it be so. He had no strength, no hope, no desire....

"It was there," he told me, "when I scarcely knew what was real and what was not, that I saw that for which I was searching. I noticed first the dark grey-blue of the trousers, then the white skull. There was a horrible stench in the air. I called and the sanitars answered me. Then I looked at it. I had never seen a dead man before. This man had been dead for about a fortnight, I suppose. Its grey-blue trousers and thick boots were in excellent condition and a tin spoon and some papers were showing out of the top of one boot. Its face was a grinning skull and little black animals like ants were climbing in and out of the mouth and the eye-sockets. Its jacket was in good condition, its arms were flung out beyond its head. I felt sick and the whole place was so damp and smelt so badly that it must have been horribly unhealthy. The sanitars began to dig a grave. Those who were not working smoked cigarettes, and they all stood in a group watching the body with a solemn and serious interest. One of them made a little wooden cross out of some twigs. There was a letter just beside the body which they brought me. It began: 'Darling Heinrich,--Your last letter was so cheerful that I have quite recovered from my depression. It may not be so long now before ...' and so on, like the other letters that I had read. It grinned at us there with a devilish sarcasm, but its trousers and boots were pitiful and human. The men finished the grave and then, with their feet, turned it over. As it rolled a flood of bright yellow insects swarmed out of its jacket, and a grey liquid trickled out of the skull. The last I saw of it was the gleam of the tin spoon above its boot...."

"We searched after that," he told me, "for several hours and found three more bodies. They were Austrians, in the condition of the first. I walked in a dream of horror. It was, I suppose, a bad day for me to have come with my other unhappiness weighing upon me, but I was, in some stupid way, altogether unprepared for what I had seen. I had, as I have told you, thought of death very often in my life but I had never thought of it like this. I did not now think of death very clearly but only of the uselessness of trying to bear up against anything when that was all one came to in the end. I felt my very bones crumble and my flesh decay on my body, as I stood there. I felt as though I had really been caught at last after a silly aimless flight and that even if I had the strength or cleverness to escape I had not the desire to try. I had been mocked with a week's happiness only to have it taken from me for my enemy's ironic enjoyment. I had a quite definite consciousness of my enemy. I had as a boy thought, you remember, of my uncle--and now, as I moved through the wood, I could hear the old man's chuckle just as he had chuckled in the old days, snapping his fingers together and twitching his nose...."

They searched the wood until late in the afternoon, trampling through the wet, peering through thickets, listening for one another's voices, finding sometimes a trophy in the shape of an empty shrapnel case, an Austrian cap or dagger. Then, quite suddenly, a sanitar noticed that the bursting of the shrapnel was much closer than it had been during the early afternoon. It was now, indeed, very near and they could sometimes see the flash of fire between the trees.

"There's something strange about this, your Honour," said one of the sanitars nervously, and they all looked at Trenchard as though it were his fault that they were there. Then close behind them, with a snap of rage, a shrapnel broke amongst the trees. After that they turned for home, without a word to one another, not running but hastening with flushed faces as though some one were behind them.

They came to the trench and to their surprise found it absolutely deserted. Then, plunging on, they arrived at the two wagons, climbed on to one of them, leaving Trenchard alone with the driver on the other. "I tell you," he remarked to me afterwards, "I sank into that wagon as though into my grave. I don't know that ever before or since in my life have I felt such exhaustion. It was reaction, I suppose--a miserable, wretched exhaustion that left me well enough aware that I was the most unhappy of men and simply forced me, without a protest, to accept that condition. Moreover, I had always before me the vision of the dead body. Wherever I turned there it was, grinning at me, the black flies crawling in and out of its jaws, and behind it something that said to me: 'There! now I have shown you what I can do.... To that you're coming.'..."

He must have slept because he was suddenly conscious of sitting up in his car, surrounded by an intense stillness. He looked about him but could see nothing clearly, as though he were still sleeping. Then he was aware of a sanitar standing below the cart, looking up at him with great agitation and saying again and again: "Borje moi! Borje moi! Borje moi!"

"What is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. The sanitar then seemed to slip away leaving him alone with a vague sense of disaster. The sun had set, but there was a moon, full and high, and now by its light he could see that his wagon was standing outside the gate of the house at M----. There was the yard, the bandaging-room, the long faded wall of the house, the barn, but where? ... where?... He sat up, then jumped down on to the road. The big white tent on the further side of the yard, the tent that had, that very morning, been full of wounded, was gone. The lines of wagons, horses and tents that had filled the field across the road were gone. No voices came from the house--somewhere a door banged persistently--other sound there was none.

The sanitars then surrounded him, speaking all together, waving their arms, their faces white under the moon, their eyes large and frightened like the eyes of little children. He tried to push their babel off from him. He could not understand.... Was this a continuation of the nightmare of the afternoon? There was a roar just behind their ears as it seemed. They saw a light flash upon the sky and fade, flash again and fade. With their faces towards the horizon they watched.

"What is it?" Trenchard said at last. There advanced towards him then from out of the empty house an old man in a wide straw hat with a broom.

"What is it?" Trenchard said again.

"It's the Austrians," said the old man in Polish, of which Trenchard understood very little. "First it's the Russians.... Then it's the Austrians.... Then it's the Russians.... Then it's the Austrians. And always between each of them I have to clean things up"--and some more which Trenchard did not understand. The old man then stood at his gate watching them with a gaze serious, sad, reflective. Meanwhile the sanitars had discovered one of our own soldiers: this man, who had been sitting under a hedge and listening to the Austrian cannon with very uncomfortable feelings, told them of the affair. At three o'clock that afternoon our Otriad had been informed that it must retreat "within half an hour." Not only our own Sixty-Fifth Division, but the whole of the Ninth Army was retreating "within half an hour." Moreover the Austrians were advancing "a verst a minute." By four o'clock the whole of our Otriad had disappeared, leaving only this soldier to inform us that we must move on at once to T---- or S----, twenty or thirty versts distant.

"Retreating!" cried Trenchard. "But we were winning! We'd just won a battle!"

"Tak totchno!" said the soldier gravely, "Twenty versts! the horses won't do it, your Honour!"

"They've got to do it!" said Trenchard sharply, and the echo of the Austrian cannon, again as it seemed quite close at hand, emphasised his words. Except for this the silence of the world around them was eerie; only far away they seemed to hear the persistent rumble of carts on the road.

"They're gone! They're all gone! We're left last of all!" and "The Austrians advancing a verst a minute!"

He took a last look at the house which had seemed yesterday so absolutely to belong to them and now was already making preparations for its new guests. As he gazed he thought of his agony in that field below the house. Only last night and now what years ago it seemed! What years, what years ago!

He climbed wearily again upon his wagon. There had entered into his unhappiness now a new element. This was a sensation of cold despairing anger that ground should be yielded so helplessly. About every field, every hedge and lane and tree, as slowly they jogged along he felt this. Only to-day this corn, these stones, these flowers were Russian, and to-morrow Austrian! This, as it seemed, simply out of the air, dictated by some whispering devil crouching behind a hedge, afraid to appear! This, too, when only a few hours ago there had been that battle of S---- won by them after a struggle of many days; that position, soaked with Russian blood, to be surrendered now as a leaf blows in the wind.

When they arrived at T---- and found our Otriad he was, I believe, so deeply exhausted that he was not conscious of his actions. His account to me of what then occurred is fantastic and confused. He discovered apparently the house where we were; it was then one o'clock in the morning. Every one was asleep. There seemed to be no place for him to be, he could find neither candles nor matches, and he wandered out into the road again. Then, it seems, he was standing beside a deep lake. "I can remember nothing clearly except that the lake was black and endless. I stood looking at it. I could see the bodies out of the forest, only now they were slipping along the water, their skulls white and gleaming. I had also a confused impression that Russia was beaten and the war over. And that for me too life was utterly at an end.... I remember that I deliberately thought of Marie because it hurt so abominably. I repeated to myself the incidents of the night before, all of them, talking aloud to myself. I decided then that I would drown myself in the lake. It seemed the only thing to do. I took my coat off. Then sat down in the mud and took off my boots. Why I did this I don't know. I looked at the water, thought that it would be cold, but that it would soon be over because I couldn't swim. I heard the frogs, looked back at the flickering fires amongst our wagons, then walked down the bank...."

Nikitin must for some time have been watching him, because at that moment he stepped forward, took Trenchard's arm, and drew him back. Nikitin has himself told me that he was walking up and down the road that night because he could not sleep. When he spoke to Trenchard the man seemed dazed and bewildered, said something about "life being all over for him and--death being horrible!"

Nikitin put his arm round him, took him back to his room, where he made him a bed on the floor, gave him a sleeping-draught and watched him until he slept.

That was the true beginning of the friendship between Nikitin and Trenchard.

CHAPTER VI.

THE RETREAT.

The retreat struck us as breathlessly as though we had been whirled by a wind-storm into midair on the afternoon of a summer day. At five minutes to three we had been sitting round the table in the garden of the house at M---- drinking tea. We were, I remember, very gay. We had heard only the day before of the Russian surrender of Przemysl and that had for a moment depressed us; but as always we could see very little beyond our own immediate Division. Here, on our own Front, we had at last cleared the path before us. On that very afternoon we were gaily antic.i.p.ating our advance. Even Sister K---- who, for religious reasons, took always a gloomy view of the future, was cheerful. She sipped her cherry jam and smiled upon us. Anna Petrovna, imperturbably sewing, calmly sighed her satisfaction.

"Perhaps to-morrow we shall move. I feel like it. It will be splendid to go through the Carpathians--beautiful scenery, I believe." Molozov was absent in the town of B---- collecting some wagons that had arrived from Petrograd. "He'll be back to-night, I believe," said Sister K----. "Dear me, what a pleasant afternoon!"