The Secret City Part 30

"However, let us forget personalities.... There are better things here!"

As he spoke two young Russian officers came tumbling up the stairs. They were talking excitedly, not listening to one another, red in the face and tripping over their swords. They went up to the next floor, their voices very shrill.

"So much for your sentimental Russia," said Semyonov. He spoke very quietly. "How I shall love to see these fools all toppled over, and then the fools who toppled them toppled in their turn.

"Durward, you're a fool too, but you're English, and at least you've got a conscience. I tell you, you'll see in these next months such cowardice, such selfishness, such meanness, such ignorance as the world has never known--and all in the name of Freedom! Why, they're chattering about freedom already downstairs as hard as they can go!"

"As usual, Semyonov," I answered hotly, "you believe in the good of no one. If there's really a Revolution coming, which I still doubt, it may lead to the n.o.blest liberation."

"Oh, you're an a.s.s!" he interrupted quietly. "n.o.bility and the human race! I tell you, Ivan Andreievitch of the n.o.ble character, that the human race is rotten; that it is composed of selfishness, vice, and meanness; that it is hypocritical beyond the bounds of hypocrisy, and that of all mean cowardly nations on this earth the Russian nation is the meanest and most cowardly!... That fine talk of ours that you English s...o...b..r over!--a mere excuse for idleness, and you'll know it before another year is through. I despise mankind with a contempt that every day's fresh experience only the more justifies. Only once have I found some one who had a great soul, and she, too, if I had secured her, might have disappointed me.... No, my time is coming. I shall see at last my fellowmen in their true colours, and I shall even perhaps help them to display them. My worthy Markovitch, for example--"

"What about Markovitch?" I asked sharply.

He got up, smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder.

"He shall be driven by ghosts," he answered, and turned off to the stairs.

He looked back for a moment. "The funny thing is, I like you, Durward,"

he said.

X

I remember very little of my return to my island that night. The world was horribly dark and cold, the red moon had gone, and a machine-gun pursued me all the way home like a barking dog. I crossed the bridge frankly with nerves so hara.s.sed, with so many private anxieties and so much public apprehension, with so overpowering a suspicion that every shadow held a rifle that my heart leapt in my breast, and I was suddenly sick with fear when some one stepped across the road and put his hand on my arm. You see I have nothing much to boast about myself. My relief was only slightly modified when I saw that it was the Rat. The Rat had changed! He stood, as though on purpose under the very faint grey light of the lamp at the end of the bridge, and seen thus, he did in truth seem like an apparition. He was excited of course, but there was more in his face than that. The real truth about him was, that he was filled with some determination, some purpose. He was like a child who is playing at being a burglar, his face had exactly that absorption, that obsessing pre-occupation.

"I've been waiting for you, Barin," he said in his hoa.r.s.e musical voice.

"What is it?" I asked.

"This is where I live," he said, and he showed me a very dirty piece of paper. "I think you ought to know."

"Why?" I asked him.

"_Kto snaiet_? (who knows?) The Czar's gone and we are all free men...."

I felt oddly that suddenly now he knew himself my master. That was now in his voice.

"What are you going to do with your freedom?" I asked.

He sighed.

"I shall have my duties now," he said. "I'm not a free man at all. I obey orders for the first time. The people are going to rule. I am the people."

He paused. Then he went on very seriously. "That is why, Barin, I give you that paper. I have friendly feelings towards you. I don't know what it is, but I am your brother. They may come and want to rob your house.

Show them that paper."

"Thank you very much," I said. "But I'm not afraid. There's nothing I mind them stealing. All the same I'm very grateful."

He went on very seriously.

"There'll be no Czar now and no police. We will stop the war and all be rich." He sighed. "But I don't know that it will bring happiness." He suddenly seemed to me forlorn and desolate and lonely, like a lost dog.

I knew quite well that very soon, perhaps directly he had left me, he would plunder and murder and rob again.

But that night, the two of us alone on the island and everything so still, waiting for great events, I felt close to him and protective.

"Don't get knocked on the head, Rat," I said, "during one of your raids.

Death is easily come by just now. Look after yourself."

He shrugged his shoulders. "_Shto boodet, boodet_ (what will be, will be). _Neechevo_ (it's of no importance)." He had vanished into the shadows.

XI

I realise that the moment has come in my tale when the whole interest of my narrative centres in Markovitch. Markovitch is really the point of all my story as I have, throughout, subconsciously, recognised. The events of that wonderful Tuesday when for a brief instant the sun of freedom really did seem to all of us to break through the clouds, that one day in all our lives when hopes, dreams, Utopias, fairy tales seemed to be sober and realistic fact, those events might be seen through the eyes of any of us. Vera, Nina, Grogoff, Semyonov, Lawrence, Bohun and I, all shared in them and all had our sensations and experiences. But my own were drab and ordinary enough, and from the others I had no account so full and personal and true as from Markovitch. He told me all about that great day afterwards, only a short time before that catastrophe that overwhelmed us all, and in his account there was all the growing suspicion and horror of disillusion that after-events fostered in him.

But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night, watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea, he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before he had finished his tale he was right back in that fantastic world that had burst at the touch like bubbles in the sun. I will give his account, as accurately as possible in his own words. I seldom interrupted him, and I think he soon forgot that I was there. He had come to me that night in a panic, for reasons which will he given later and I, in trying to rea.s.sure him, had reminded him of that day, when the world was suddenly Utopia.

"That _did_ exist, that world," I said. "And once having existed it cannot now be dead. Believe, believe that it will come back."

"Come back!" He shook his head. "Even if it is still there I cannot go back to it. I will tell you, Ivan Andreievitch, what that day was...

and why now I am so bitterly punished for having believed in it. Listen, what happened to me. It occurred, all of it, exactly as I tell you. You know that, just at that time, I had been worrying very much about Vera.

The Revolution had come I suppose very suddenly to every one; but truly to myself, because I had been thinking of Vera, it was like a thunder-clap. It's always been my trouble, Ivan Andreievitch, that I can't think of more than one thing at once, and the worry of it has been that in my life there has been almost invariably more than one thing that I ought to think of.... I would think of my invention, you know, that I ought to get on with it a little faster. Because really--it was making a sort of cloth out of bark that I was working at; as every day pa.s.sed, I could see more and more clearly that there was a great deal in this particular invention, and that it only needed real application to bring it properly forward. Only application as you know is my trouble.

If I could only shut my brain up...."

He told me then, I remember, a lot about his early childhood, and then the struggle that he had had to see one thing at once, and not two or three things that got in the way and hindered him from doing anything.

He went on about Vera.

"You know that one night I had crept up into your room, and looked to see whether there were possibly a letter there. That was a disgraceful thing to do, wasn't it? But I felt then that I had to satisfy myself. I wonder whether I can make you understand. It wasn't jealousy exactly, because I had never felt that I had had any very strong right over Vera, considering the way that she had married me; but I don't think I ever loved her more than I did during those weeks, and she was unattainable.

I was lonely, Ivan Andreievitch, that's the truth. Everything seemed to be slipping away from me, and in some way Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov seemed to accentuate that. He was always reminding me of one day or another when I had been happy with Vera long ago--some silly little expedition we had taken--or he was doubtful about my experiments being any good, or he would recall what I had felt about Russia at the beginning of the war.... All in a very kindly way, mind you. He was more friendly than he had ever been, and seemed to be altogether softer-hearted. But he made me think a great deal about Vera. He talked often so much. He thought that I ought to look after her more, and I explained that that wasn't my right.

"The truth is that ever since Nina's birthday-party I had been anxious.

I knew really that everything was right. Vera is of course the soul of honour--but something had occurred then which made me....

"Well, well, that doesn't matter now. The only point is that I was thinking of Vera a great deal, and wondering how I could make her happy.

She wasn't happy. I don't know how it was, but during those weeks just before the Revolution we were none of us happy. We were all uneasy as though we expected something were going to happen--and we were all suspicious....

"I only tell you this because then you will see why it was that the Revolution broke upon me with such surprise. I had been right inside myself, talking to n.o.body, wanting n.o.body to talk to me. I get like that sometimes, when words seem to mean so much that it seems dangerous to throw them about.... And perhaps it is. But silence is dangerous too.

Everything is dangerous if you are unlucky by nature....

"I had been indoors all that Monday working at my invention, and thinking about Vera, wondering whether I'd speak to her, then afraid of my temper (I have a bad temper), wanting to know what was the truth, thinking at one moment that if she cared for some one else that I'd go away...and then suddenly angry and jealous, wishing to challenge him, but I am a ludicrous figure to challenge any one, as I very well know.

Semyonov had been to see me that morning, and he had just sat there without saying anything. I couldn't endure that very long, so I asked him what he came for and he said, 'Oh, nothing.' I felt as though he were spying and I became uneasy. Why should he come so often now? And I was beginning to think of him when he wasn't there. It was as though he thought he had a right over all of us, and that irritated me.... Well, that was Monday. They all came late in the afternoon and told me all the news. They had been at the Astoria. The whole town seemed to be in revolt, so they said.

"But even then I didn't realise it. I was thinking of Vera just the same. I looked at her all the evening just as Semyonov had looked at me.

And didn't say anything.... I never wanted her so badly before. I made her sleep with me all that night. She hadn't done that for a long time, and I woke up early in the morning to hear her crying softly to herself.

She never used to cry. She was so proud. I put my arms round her, and she stopped crying and lay quite still. It wasn't fair what I did, but I felt as though Alexei Petrovitch had challenged me to do it. He always hated Vera I knew. I got up very early and went to my wood. You can imagine I wasn't very happy....