NIKITIN
But this is not my story. If I have hitherto taken the chief place it
is because, in some degree, the impressions of Trenchard, Marie
Ivanovna, Andrey Vassilievitch must, during those first days, have run
with my own. We had all been brought to the same point--that last
vision from the hill of the battle of S---- and from that day we were
no longer apprentices.
I now then retire. What happened to myself during the succeeding
months is of no matter. But two warnings may be offered. The first is
that it must not be supposed that the experiences of myself, of
Trenchard, of Nikitin in this business found their parallel in any
other single human being alive. It would be quite possible to select
every individual member of our Otriad and to prove from their case
that the effect of war upon the human soul--whether Russian or
English--was thus and thus. A study, for example, might be made of
Anna Petrovna to show that the effect of war is simply nothing at all,
that any one who pretends to extract cases and contrasts from the
contact of war with the soul is simply peddling in melodrama. Anna
Petrovna herself would certainly have been of that opinion. Or one
might select Sister K---- and prove from her case that the effect of
war was to display the earthly failings and wickedness of mankind,
that it was a punishment hurled by an irate God upon an unrepentant
people and that any one who saw beauty or courage in such a business
was a sham sentimentalist. Sister K---- would take a gloomy joy in
such a denunciation. Or if one selected the boy Goga it would be
simply to state that war was an immensely jolly business, in which one
stood the chance of winning the Georgian medal and thus triumphing
over one's schoolfellows, in which people were certainly killed but
"it couldn't happen to oneself"; meals were plentiful, there were
horses to ride, one was spoken to pleasantly by captains and even
generals. Moreover one wore a uniform.
Or if Molozov, our chief, were questioned he would most certainly say
that war, as he saw it, was mainly a business of diplomacy, a business
of keeping the people around one in good temper, the soldiers in good
order, the generals and their staffs in good appetite, the other Red
Cross organisations in good self-conceit, and himself in good health.
All these things he did most admirably and he had, moreover, a heart
that felt as deeply for Russia as any heart in the world; but see the
matter psychologically or even dramatically he would not. He had his
own "nerves" and on occasion he displayed them, but war was for him,
entirely, a thing of training opposed to training, strategy opposed to
strategy, method and system opposed to method and system. For our
doctors again, war was half an affair of blood and bones, half an
affair of longing for home and children. The army doctors contemplated
our voluntary efforts with a certain irony. What could we understand
of war when we might, if we pleased, return home at any moment? Why,
it was simply a picnic to us.... No, they saw in it no drama whatever.
Nevertheless how are we to be assured that these others, Anna
Petrovna, Sister K----, Goga, the Doctors had not their own secret
view? The subject here is simply the attitude of certain private
persons with whom I was allowed some intimacy ... for the rest one has
no right to speak.
There comes then the second difficulty, namely: that of Nikitin,
Andrey Vassilievitch, Semyonov and Marie Ivanovna one can only present
a foreign point of view. Of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch, at
least, I was the friend, but however deeply a Russian admits an
Englishman into friendship he can, to the very last, puzzle, confuse,
utterly surprise him. The Russian character seems, superficially, with
its lack of restraint, its idealism, its impracticality, its
mysticism, its material simplicities, to be so readily grasped that
the surprise that finally remains is the more dumbfounding. Perhaps
after all it is the very closeness of our resemblance the one to the
other that confuses us. It is, perhaps, that in the Russians' soul the
East can never be reconciled to the West. It is perhaps that the
Russian never reveals his secret ideal even to himself; far distant is
it then from his friend. It may be that towards other men the Russian
is indifferent and towards women his relation is so completely sexual
that his true character is hidden from her. Whatever it be that
surprise remains. For to those whom Russia and her people draw back
again and again, however sternly they may resist, this sure truth
stands: that here there is a mystery, a mystery that may never be
discovered. In the very soul of Russia the mystery is stirring; here
the restlessness, the eagerness, the disappointment, the vision of the
pursuit is working; and some who are outside her gates she has drawn
into that same search.
I am not sure whether I may speak of Nikitin as my friend. I believe
that no one in our Otriad save Trenchard could make, with truth, this
claim. But for his own reasons or, perhaps, for no reason at all, he
chose me on two occasions as his confidant, and of these two
occasions I can recall every detail.
We returned that night from S---- to find that the whole Otriad had
settled in the village of M----, where I myself had been the night
before. We were all living in an empty deserted farmhouse, with a
yard, a big orchard, wide barns and a wild overrun garden. We were, I
think, a little disappointed at the very languid interest that the
history of our adventures roused, but the truth was that the wounded
had begun to arrive in great numbers and there was no time for
travellers' stories.
A dream, I know, yesterday's experiences seemed to me as I settled
down to the business that had filled so much of my earlier period at
the war. Here, with the wounded, I was at home--the bare little room,
the table with the bottles and bandages and scissors, the basins and
dishes, the air ever thicker and thicker with that smell of dried
blood, unwashed bodies, and iodine that is like no other smell in the
world. The room would be crowded, the sanitars supporting legs and
arms and heads, nurses dashing to the table for bandages or iodine or
scissors, three or four stretchers occupying the floor of the room
with the soldiers who were too severely wounded to sit or stand, these
soldiers often utterly quiet, dying perhaps, or watching with eyes
that realised only dreams and shadows, the little window square, the
strip of sky, the changing colours of the day; then the sitting
soldiers, on ordinary of a marvellous and most simple patience,
watching the bandaging of their arms and hands and legs, whispering
sometimes "_Bojé moi! Bojé moi!_" dragging themselves up from their
desperate struggle for endurance to answer the sanitars who asked
their name, their regiments, the nature of their wounds. Sometimes
they would talk, telling how the thing had happened to them:
"And there, your Honour, before I could move, she had come--such a
noise--eh, eh, a terrible thing--I called out '_Zemliac_. Here it is!'
I said, and he...."
But as a rule they were very quiet, starting perhaps at the sting of
the iodine, asking for a bandage to be tighter or not so tight,
sometimes suddenly slipping in a faint to the ground, and then
apologising afterwards. And in their eyes always that look as though,
very shortly, they would hear some story so marvellous that it would
compensate for all their present pain and distress. There would be the
doctors, generally two at a time--Semyonov, unmoved, rough apparently
in his handling of the men but always accomplishing his work with
marvellous efficiency, abusing the nurses and sanitars without
hesitation if they did not do as he wished, but never raising his soft
ironic voice, his square body of a solidity and composure that nothing
could ruffle, his fair beard, his blue eyes, his spotless linen all
sharing in his self-assured superiority to us all; one of the Division
doctors, Alexei Ivanovitch, a man from Little Russia, beloved of us
all, whether in the Otriad or the army, a character possessing it
seemed none of the Russian moods and sensibilities, of the kindest
heart but no sentimentality, utterly free from self-praise,
self-interest, self-assertion, humorous, loving passionately his
country and, with all his Russian romance and even mysticism, packed
with practical common sense; another Division doctor, a young man,
carving for himself a practice out of Moscow merchants, crammed with
all the latest inventions and discoveries, caring for nothing save his
own career and frankly saying so, but a lively optimist whose belief
in his own powers was quite refreshing in its sincerity.
In such a place and under such conditions Semyonov had at the earlier
period been master of us all. The effect of his personality was such
that we had, every one of us, believed him invincible. The very
frankness of his estimate of the world and ourselves as the most
worthless and incompetent bundle of rubbish, caused us to yield
completely to him. We believed that he rated himself but little higher
than the rest of us. He _was_ superior but only because he saw so
clearly with eyes purged of sentiment and credulity. We, poor
creatures, had still our moments of faith and confidence. I had never
liked him and during these last days had positively hated him. I did
not doubt that he was making the frankest love to Marie Ivanovna and I
thought he was influencing her.... Trenchard was my friend, and what
an infant indeed he seemed against Semyonov's scornful challenge!
But now, behold, Semyonov had his rival! If Semyonov cared nothing for
any of us, Nikitin, it was plain enough, cared nothing for Semyonov.
From the very first the two men had been opponents. It seemed as
though Nikitin's great stature and fine air, as of a king travelling
in disguise from some foreign country, made him the only man in the
world to put out Semyonov's sinister blaze. Nikitin was an idealist, a
mystic, a dreamer--everything that Semyonov was not. It is true that
if we mattered nothing at all to Semyonov, we also mattered nothing at
all to Nikitin, but for Nikitin there were dreams, visions, memories
and hopes. We were contented to be banished from his attention when we
were aware that happier objects detained him. We might envy him, we
could not dislike him.
Semyonov never sneered at Nikitin. From the first he left him
absolutely alone. The two men simply avoided one another in so far as
was possible in a company so closely confined as ours. From the first
they treated one another with a high and almost extravagant
politeness. As Nikitin spoke but seldom, there was little opportunity
for the manifestation of what Semyonov must have considered "his
childishly romantic mind," and Nikitin, on his side, made on no single
occasion a reply to the challenge of Semyonov's caustic cynicism.
But if Nikitin was an idealist he was also, as was quite evident, a
doctor of absolutely first-rate ability and efficiency. I was present
at the first operation that he conducted with us--an easy amputation.
Semyonov was assisting and I know that he watched eagerly for some
slip or hesitation. It was an operation that any medical student might
have conducted with success, but the first incision of the knife
showed Nikitin a surgeon of genius. Semyonov recognised it.... I
fancied that from that moment I could detect in his attitude to
Nikitin a puzzled wonder that such an artist could be at the same time
such a fool.
I began to feel in Nikitin a very lively interest. I had from the
first been conscious of his presence, his distinction, his attitude of
patient expectation and continuously happy reminiscence; but I felt
now for the first time a closer, more personal interest. From the
first, as I have said on an earlier page, his relationship to Andrey
Vassilievitch had puzzled me. If Nikitin were not of the common race
of men, most assuredly was Andrey Vassilievitch of the most ordinary
in the world. He was a little man of a type in no way distinctively
Russian--a type very common in England, in America, in France, in
Germany. He was, one would have said, of the world worldly, a man who,
with a sharp business brain, had acquired for himself houses, lands,
food, servants, acquaintances. Upon these achievements he would pride
himself, having worked with his own hand to his own advantage, having
beaten other men who had started the race from the same mark as
himself. He would be a man of a kindly disposition, hospitable,
generous at times when needs were put plainly before him, but yet of
little imagination, conventional in all his standards, readily
influenced outside his business by any chance acquaintance, but
nevertheless having his eye on worldly advantage and progress; he
would be timid of soul, playing always for safety, taking the easiest
way with all emotion, treading always the known road, accepting day by
day the creed that was given to him; he would be, outside his brain,
of a poor intelligence, accepting the things of art on the standard of
popular applause, talking with a stupid garrulity about matters of
which he had no first-hand knowledge--proud of his position as a man
of the world, wise in the character and moods of men of which, in
reality, he knew nothing. Had he been an Englishman or a German, this
would have been all and yet, because he was a Russian, this was not
even the beginning of the matter.
I had, as I have already said, in earlier days known him only
slightly. I had once stayed for three days in his country-house and it
was here that I had met his wife. Russian houses are open to all the
world and, with such a man as Andrey Vassilievitch, through the doors
crowds of men and women are always coming and going, treating their
host like the platform of a railway station, eating his meals,
sleeping on his beds, making rendezvous with their friends, and yet
almost, on their departure, forgetting his very name.
My visit had been of a date now some five years old. I can only
remember that his wife did not make any very definite impression upon
me, a little quiet woman, of a short figure, with kind, rather sleepy
eyes, a soft voice, and the air of one who knows her housewifely
business to perfection and has joy in her knowledge. "Not
interesting," I would have judged her, but I had during my stay no
personal talk with her. It was only after my visit that I was told
that this quiet woman was the passion of Andrey Vassilievitch's life.
He had been over thirty when he had married her; she had been married
before, had been treated, I was informed, with great brutality by her
husband who had left her. She had then divorced him. Praise of her, I
discovered, was universal. She was apparently a woman who created love
in others, but this by no marked virtues or cleverness; no one said of
her that she was "brilliant," "charming," "fascinating." People spoke
of her as though here at least there was some one of whom they were
sure, some one too who made them the characters they wished to be,
some one finally who had not surrendered herself, who gave them her
love but not her whole soul, keeping always mystery enough to maintain
her independence. No scandal was connected with her name. I heard of
Nikitin and others as her friends, and that was all. Then, quite
suddenly, two months before the beginning of the war, she died. They
said that Andrey Vassilievitch was like a lost dog, wished also at
first to talk to all who had known her, wearying her friends with his
reminiscences, his laments, his complaints--then suddenly silent,
speaking to no one about her, at first burying himself in his
business, then working on some committee in connexion with one of the
hospitals, then, as it appeared on the impulse of a moment, departing
to the war.
I had expected to find him a changed man and was, perhaps,
disappointed that he should appear the same chattering feather-headed
little character whom I had known of old. Nevertheless I knew well
enough that there was more here than I could see, and that the root of
the matter was to be found in his connexion with Nikitin. In our
Otriad, friendships were continually springing up and dying down. Some
one would confide to one that so-and-so was "wonderfully sympathetic."
From the other side one would hear the same. For some days these
friends would be undivided, would search out from the Otriad the
others who were of their mind, would lose no opportunity of declaring
their "sympathy," would sit together at table, work together over the
bandaging, unite together in the public discussions that were frequent
and to a stranger's eye horribly heated. Then very soon there would
come a rift. How could that Russian passionate longing for justified
idealism be realised? Once more there were faults, spots on the sun,
selfishness, bad temper, narrowness, what you please. And at every
fresh disappointment would my companions be as surprised as though the
same thing had not happened to them only a fortnight ago.
"But only last week you liked him so much!"
"How could I know that he would hold such opinions? Never in my life
have I been more surprised."
So upon these little billows sailed the stout bark of Russian
idealism, rising, falling, never overwhelmed, always bravely
confident, never seeking for calm waters, refusing them indeed for
their very placidity.
But in the midst of these shifting fortunes there were certain
alliances and relationships that never changed. Amongst these was the
alliance of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch. Friendship it could not
be called. Nikitin, although apparently he was kindly to the little
man, yielded him no intimacy. It seemed to us a very one-sided
business, depending partly upon Andrey Vassilievitch's continual
assertions that Nikitin was "his oldest friend and the closest friend
of his wife," that "Nikitin was one of the most remarkable men in the
world," that "only his intimate friends could know how remarkable he
was"; partly too upon the dog-like capacity of Andrey Vassilievitch to
fetch and carry for his friend, to put himself indeed to the greatest
inconvenience. It was pathetic to see the flaming pleasure in the
man's eyes when Nikitin permitted him to wait upon him, and how
ironically, upon such an occasion, would Semyonov watch them both!
In spite of Nikitin's passivity he did, I fancied, more than merely
suffer this unequal alliance. It seemed to me that there was behind
his silence some active wish that the affair should continue. I should
speak too strongly if I were to say that he took pleasure in the man's
company, but he did, I believe, almost in spite of himself, secretly
encourage it. And there was, in spite of the comedy that persistently
hovered about his figure and habits, some fine spirit in Andrey
Vassilievitch's championship of his hero. How he hated Semyonov! How
he lost no single opportunity of trying to bring Nikitin forward in
public, of proving to the world who was the greater of the two men!
Something very single-hearted shone through the colour of his loyalty;
nothing, I was convinced, could swerve him from his fidelity. That, at
least, was until death.
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
unanalysable 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, God 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 bloody 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, passed 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 snatch 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 apron 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 cock 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 glass, 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 passion 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 God 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 space 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
God. 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 Vassilievitch 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 Vassilievitch 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 God, 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 God and you cannot hide from me.'
'I am God and I will not be hidden.'
"And on this night, about five years ago, at the house of a friend, I
met Andrey Vassilievitch. 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
Vassilievitch 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 Vassilievitch 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 Vassilievitch'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 classics 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, brass 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, muffled 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 Vassilievitch'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
passed 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 passed 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, passing 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 Vassilievitch 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 passive, 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 Vassilievitch 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 passed away from me like worn-out clothes. I was
happy--but of course I was not satisfied. I was jealous of that which
Andrey Vassilievitch had--and I lacked. My whole relationship to
Andrey Vassilievitch 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
Vassilievitch, 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
Vassilievitch 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 Vassilievitch 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 Vassilievitch. 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
Vassilievitch 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 God 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 God...."