The Secret City Part 45

He drew his chair closer to my bed and dropped his voice as though he were going to whisper a secret to me.

"The other night I was awake--about two in the morning it was--and wanted a book--so I went into the dining-room. I'd only got bedroom slippers on and I was stopped at the door by a sound. It was Semyonov sitting over by the further window, in his shirt and trousers, his beard in his hands, and sobbing as though his heart would break. I'd never heard a man cry like that. I hate hearing a man cry anyway. I've heard fellers at the Front when they're off their heads or something... but Semyonov was worse than that. It was a strong man crying, with all his wits about him.... Then I heard some words. He kept repeating again and again. 'Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!... Wait for me!... Wait for me!

Wait for me!...' over and over again--awful! I crept back to my room frightened out of my life. I've never known anything so awful. And Semyonov of all people!

"It was like that man in _Wuthering Heights_. What's his name?

Heathcliffe! I always thought that was a bit of an exaggeration when he dashed his head against a tree and all that. But, by Jove, you never know!... Now, Durward, you've got to tell me. You've known Semyonov for years. You can explain. What's it all about, and what's he trying to do to Markovitch?"

"I can scarcely think what to tell you," I said at last. "I don't really know much about Semyonov, and my guesses will probably strike you as insane."

"No, they won't," said Bohun. "I've learnt a bit lately."

"Semyonov," I said, "is a deep-dyed sensualist. All his life he's thought about nothing but gratifying his appet.i.tes. That's simple enough--there are plenty of that type everywhere. But unfortunately for him he's a very clever man, and like every Russian both a cynic and an idealist--a cynic in facts _because_ he's an idealist. He got everything so easily all through his life that his cynicism grew and grew. He had wealth and women and position. He was as strong as a horse. Every 'one gave way to him and he despised everybody. He went to the Front, and one day came across a woman different from any other whom he had ever known."

"How different?" asked Bohun, because I paused.

"Different in that she was simpler and naver and honester and better and more beautiful--"

"Better than Vera?" Bohun asked.

"Different," I said. "She was younger, less strong-willed, less clever, less pa.s.sionate perhaps. But alone--alone, in all the world. Every one must love her--No one could help it...."

I broke off again. Bohun waited.

I went on. "Semyonov saw her and s.n.a.t.c.hed her from the Englishman to whom she was engaged. I don't think she ever really loved the Englishman, but she loved Semyonov."

"Well?" said Bohun.

"She was killed. A stray shot, when she was giving tea to the men in the trenches.... It meant a lot... to all of us. The Englishman was killed too, so he was all right. I think Semyonov would have liked that same end; but he didn't get it, so he's remained desolate. Really desolate, in a way that only your thorough sensualist can be. A beautiful fruit just within his grasp, something at last that can tempt his jaded appet.i.te. He's just going to taste it, when whisk! it's gone, and gone, perhaps, into some one else's hands. How does he know? How does he know anything? There may be another life--who can really prove there isn't?

and when you've seen something in the very thick and glow of existence, something more alive than life itself, and, click! it's gone--well, it _must_ have gone somewhere, mustn't it? Not the body only, but that soul, that spirit, that individual personal expression of beauty and purity and loveliness? Oh, it must be somewhere yet!... It _must_ be!...

At any rate _he_ didn't know. And he didn't know either that she might not have proved his idealism right after all. Ah! to your cynic there's nothing more maddening! Do you think your cynic loves his cynicism? Not a bit of it! Not he! But he won't be taken in by sham any more. That he swears....

"So it was with Semyonov. This girl might have proved the one real exception; she might have lasted, she might have grown even more beautiful and more wonderful, and so proved his idealism true after all.

He doesn't know, and I don't know. But there it is. He's haunted by the possibility of it all his days. He's a man now ruled by an obsession. He thinks of one thing and one thing only, day and night. His sensuality has fallen away from him because women are dull--sterile to him beside that perfect picture of the woman lost. Lost! he may recover her! He doesn't know. The thought of death obsesses him. What is there in it? Is she behind there or no? Is she behind there, maddening thought, with her Englishman?

"He must know. He _must_ know. He calls to her--she won't come to him.

What is he to do? Suicide? No, to a proud man like Semyonov that's a miserable confession of weakness. How they'd laugh at him, these other despicable human beings, if he did that! He'd prove himself as weak as they. No, that's not for him. What then?

"This is a fantastic world, Bohun, and nothing is impossible for it.

Suppose he were to select some one, some weak and irritable and sentimental and disappointed man, some one whose every foible and weakness he knew, suppose he were to place himself near him and so irritate and confuse and madden him that at last one day, in a fury of rage and despair, that man were to do for him what he is too proud to do for himself! Think of the excitement, the interest, the food for his cynicism, the food for his conceit such a game would be to Semyonov. Is this going to do it? Or this? Or this? Now I've got him far enough?

Another five minutes!... Think of the hairbreadth escapes, the check and counter check, the sense, above all, that to a man like Semyonov is almost everything, that he is master of human emotions, that he can direct wretched, weak human beings whither he will.

"And the other--the weak, disappointed, excitable man--can't you see that Semyonov has him close to his hand, that he has only to stretch a finger--"

"Markovitch!" cried Bohun.

"Now you know," I said, "why you've got to stay on in that flat."

VI

I have said already, I think, that the instinctive motive of Vera's life was her independent pride. Cling to that, and however the world might rock and toss around her she could not be wrecked. Imagine, then, what she must have suffered during the weeks that followed her surrender to Lawrence. Not that for a moment she intended to go back on her surrender, which was, indeed, the proudest moment of her whole life.

She never looked back for one second after that embrace, she never doubted herself or him or the supreme importance of love itself; but the rest of her--her tenderness, her fidelity, her loyalty, her self-respect--this was all tortured now by the things that she seemed compelled to do. It must have appeared to her as though Fate, having watched that complete abandonment, intended to deprive her of everything upon which she had depended. She was, I think, a woman of very simple instincts. The things that had been in her life--her love for Nina, her maternal tenderness for Nicholas, her sense of duty--remained with her as strongly after that tremendous Thursday afternoon as they had been before it. She did not see why they need be changed. She did not love Nina any the less because she loved Lawrence; indeed, she had never loved Nina so intensely as on the night when she had realised her love for Lawrence to the full, that night when they had sheltered the policeman. And she had never pretended to love Nicholas. She had always told him that she did not love him. She had been absolutely honest with him always, and he had often said to her, "If ever real love comes into your life, Vera, you will leave me," and she had always answered him, "No, Nicholas, why should I? I will never change. Why should I?"

She honestly thought that her love for Lawrence need not alter things.

She would tell Nicholas, of course, and then she would act as he wished.

If she were not to see Lawrence she would not see him--that would make no difference to her love for him. What she did not realise--and that was strange after living with him for so long--was that he was always hoping that her tender kindliness towards him would, one day, change into something more pa.s.sionate. I think that, subconsciously, she did realise it, and that was why she was, during those weeks before the Revolution, so often uneasy and unhappy. But I am sure that definitely she never admitted it.

The great fact was that, as soon as possible, she must tell Nicholas all about it. And the days went by, and she did not. She did not, partly because she had now some one else as well as herself to consider. I believe that in those weeks between that Thursday and Easter Day she never had one moment alone with Lawrence. He came, as Bohun had told me, to see them; he sat there and looked at her, and listened and waited.

She herself, I expect, prevented their being alone. She was waiting for something to happen. Then Nina's flight overwhelmed everything. That must have been the most awful thing. She never liked Grogoff, never trusted him, and had a very clear idea of his character. But more awful to her than his weakness was her knowledge that Nina did not love him.

What could have driven her to do such a thing? She knew of her affection for Lawrence, but she had, perhaps, never taken that seriously. How could Nina really love Lawrence when he, so obviously, cared nothing at all for her? She reasoned then, as every one always does, on the lines of her own character. She herself could never have cared seriously for any one had there been no return. Her pride would not have allowed her....

But Nina had been the charge of her life. Before Nicholas, before her own life, before everything. Nina was her duty, her sacred cause--and now she was betraying her trust! Something must be done--but what? but what? She knew Nina well enough to realise that a false step would only plunge her farther than ever into the business. It must have seemed to her indeed that because of her own initial disloyalty the whole world was falling away from her.

Then there came Semyonov; I did not at this time at all sufficiently realise that her hatred of her uncle--for it _was_ hatred, more, much more than mere dislike--had been with her all her life. Many months afterwards she told me that she could never remember a time when she had not hated him. He had teased her when she was a very little girl, laughing at her nave honesty, throwing doubts on her independence, cynically ridiculing her loyalty. There had been one horrible winter month (then ten or eleven years of age) when she had been sent to stay with him in Moscow.

He had a fine house near the Arbat, and he was living (although she did not of course know anything about that at the time) with one of his gaudiest mistresses. Her mother and father being dead she had no protection. She was defenceless. I don't think that he in any way perverted her innocence. I except that he was especially careful to shield her from his own manner of life (he had always his own queer tradition of honour which he effected indeed to despise), but she felt more than she perceived. The house was garish, over-scented and over-lighted. There were many gilt chairs and large pictures of naked women and numbers of coloured cushions. She was desperately lonely. She hated the woman of the house, who tried, I have no doubt, to be kind to her, and after the first week she was left to herself.

One night, long after she had gone to bed there was a row downstairs, one of the scenes common enough between Semyonov and his women.

Terrified, she went to the head of the stairs and heard the smash of falling gla.s.s and her uncle's voice raised in a scream of rage and vituperation. A great naked woman in a gold frame swung and leered at her in the lighted pa.s.sage. She fled back to her dark room and lay, for the rest of that night, trembling and quivering with her head beneath the bed-clothes.

From that moment she feared her uncle as much as she hated him. Long afterwards came his influence over Nicholas. No one had so much influence over Nicholas as he. Nicholas himself admitted it. He was alternately charmed and frightened, beguiled and disgusted, attracted and repulsed. Before the war Semyonov had, for a time, seen a good deal of them, and Nicholas steadily degenerated. Then Semyonov was bored with it all and went off after other game more worthy of his doughty spear.

Then came the war, and Vera devoutedly hoped that her dear uncle would meet his death at the hands of some patriotic Austrian. He did indeed for a time disappear from their lives, and it seemed that he might never come back again. Then on that fateful Christmas Day he did return, and Vera's worst fears were realised. She hated him all the more because of her impotence. She could do nothing against him at all. She was never very subtle in her dealings with people, and her own natural honesty made her often stupid about men's motives. But the thing for which she feared her uncle most was his, as it seemed to her, supernatural penetration into the thoughts of others.

She of course greatly exaggerated his gifts in that direction simply because they were in no way her gifts, and he, equally of course, discovered very early in their acquaintance that this was the way to impress her. He played tricks with her exactly as a conjurer produces a rabbit out of a hat....

When he announced his intention of coming to live in the flat she was literally paralyzed with fright. Had it been any one else she would have fought, but in her uncle's drawing gradually nearer and nearer to the centre of all their lives, coming as it seemed to her so silently and mysteriously, without obvious motive, and yet with so stealthy a plan, against this man she could do nothing....

Nevertheless she determined to fight for Nicholas to the last--to fight for Nicholas, to bring back Nina, these were now the two great aims of her life; and whilst they were being realised her love for Lawrence must be pa.s.sive, pa.s.sive as a deep pa.s.sionate flame beats with unwavering force in the heart of the lamp....

They had made me promise long before that I would spend Easter Eve with them and go with them to our church on the Quay. I wondered now whether all the troubles of the last weeks would not negative that invitation, and I had privately determined that if I did not hear from them again I would slip off with Lawrence somewhere. But on Good Friday Markovitch, meeting me in the Morskaia, reminded me that I was coming.

It is very difficult to give any clear picture of the atmosphere of the town between Revolution week and this Easter Eve, and yet all the seeds of the later crop of horrors were sewn during that period. Its spiritual mentality corresponded almost exactly with the physical thaw that accompanied it--mist, then vapour dripping of rain, the fading away of one clear world into another that was indistinct, ghostly, ominous. I find written in my Diary of Easter Day--exactly five weeks after the outbreak of the Revolution--these words: "From long talks with K. and others I see quite clearly that Russians have gone mad for the time being. It's heartbreaking to see them holding meetings everywhere, arguing at every street corner as to how they intend to arrange a democratic peace for Europe, when meanwhile the Germans are gathering every moment force upon the frontiers."

Pretty quick, isn't it, to change from Utopia to threatenings of the worst sort of Communism? But the great point for us in all this--the great point for our private personal histories as well as the public one--was that it was during these weeks that the real gulf between Russia and the Western world showed itself! Yes, for more than three years we had been pretending that a week's sentiment and a hurriedly proclaimed Idealism could bridge a separation which centuries of magic and blood and bones had gone to build. For three years we tricked ourselves (I am not sure that the Russians were ever really deceived) ... but we liked the ballet, we liked Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky (we translated their inborn mysticism into the weakest kind of sentimentality), we liked the theory of inexhaustible numbers, we liked the picture of their pounding, steam-roller like, to Berlin... we tricked ourselves, and in the s.p.a.ce of a night our trick was exposed.

Plain enough the reasons for these mistakes that we in England have made over that same Revolution, mistakes made by none more emphatically than by our own Social Democrats. Those who hailed the Revolution as the fulfilment of all their dearest hopes, those who cursed it as the beginning of the d.a.m.nation of the world--all equally in the wrong. The Revolution had no thought for _them_. Russian extremists might shout as they pleased about their leading the fight for the democracies of the world--they never even began to understand the other democracies.

Whatever Russia may do, through repercussion, for the rest of the world, she remains finally alone--isolated in her Government, in her ideals, in her ambitions, in her abnegations. For a moment the world-politics of her foreign rulers seemed to draw her into the Western whirlpool. For a moment only she remained there. She has slipped back again behind her veil of mist and shadow. We may trade with her, plunge into her politics, steal from her Art, emphasise her religion--she remains alone, apart, mysterious....

I think it was with a kind of gulping surprise, as after a sudden plunge into icy cold water, that we English became conscious of this. It came to us first in the form that to us the war was everything--to the Russian, by the side of an idea the war was nothing at all. How was I, for instance, to recognise the men who took a leading part in the events of this extraordinary year as the same men who fought with bare hands, with fanatical bravery through all the Galician campaign of two years before?

Had I not realised sufficiently at that time that Russia moves always according to the Idea that governs her--and that when that Idea changes the world, _his_ world changes with it....

Well, to return to Markovitch....

VII