The Dark Forest

“But the fools, because they cared more deeply, were chosen …”

Spanish Nights, Henry Galleon

To
Konstantine Somoff
this book is dedicated
by his friend the author

Part I

I

Spring in the Train

His was the first figure to catch my eye that evening in Petrograd; he stood under the dusky lamp in the vast gloomy Warsaw station, with exactly the expression that I was afterwards to know so well, impressed not only upon his face but also upon the awkwardness of his arms that hung stiffly at his side, upon the baggy looseness of his trousers at the knees, the unfastened straps of his long black military boots. His face, with its mild blue eyes, straggly fair moustache, expressed anxiety and pride, timidity and happiness, apprehension and confidence. He was in that first moment of my sight of him as helpless, as unpractical, and as anxious to please as any lost dog in the world—and he was also as proud as Lucifer. I knew him at once for an Englishman; his Russian uniform only accented the cathedral-town, small public-school atmosphere of his appearance. He was exactly what I had expected. He was not, however, alone, and that surprised me. By his side stood a girl, obviously Russian, wearing her Sister’s uniform with excitement and eager anticipation, her eyes turning restlessly from one part of the platform to another, listening with an impatient smile to the remarks of her companion.

From where I stood I could hear his clumsy, hesitating Russian and her swift, preoccupied replies. I came up to them.

“Mr. Trenchard?” I asked.

He blushed, stammered, held out his hand, missed mine, blushed the more, laughed nervously.

“I’m glad … I knew … I hope. …”

I could feel that the girl’s eyes were upon me with all the excited interest of one who is expecting that every moment of her new wonderful experience will be of a stupendous, even immortal quality.

“I am Sister Marie Ivanovna, and you are, of course, Mr. Durward,” she said. “They are all waiting for you—expecting you—you’re late, you know!” She laughed and moved forward as though she would accompany me to the group by the train. We went to the train together.

“I should tell you,” she said quickly and suddenly with nervousness, “that we are engaged, Mr. Trenchard and I—only last night. We have been working at the same hospital. … I don’t know anyone,” she continued in the same intimate, confiding whisper. “I would be frightened terribly if I were not so excited. Ah! there’s Anna Mihailovna. … I know her, of course. It was through, her aunt—the one who’s on Princess Soboleff’s train—that I had the chance of going with you. Oh! I’m so happy that I had the chance—if I hadn’t had it. …”

We were soon engulfed now. I drew a deep breath and surrendered myself. The tall, energetic figure of Anna Mihailovna, the lady to whose practical business gifts and unlimited capacity for compelling her friends to surrender their last bow and button in her service we owed the existence of our Red Cross unit, was to be seen like a splendid flag waving its followers on to glory and devotion. We were devoted, all of us. Even I, whose second departure to the war this was, had after the feeblest resistance surrendered myself to the drama of the occasion. I should have been no gentleman had I done otherwise.

After the waters had closed above my head for, perhaps, five minutes of strangled, half-protesting, half-willing surrender I was suddenly compelled, by what agency I know not, to struggle to the surface, to look around me, and then quite instantly to forget my immersion. The figure of Trenchard, standing exactly as I had left him, his hands uneasily at his sides, a half-anxious, half-confident smile on his lips, his eyes staring straight in front of him, absolutely compelled my attention. I had forgotten him, we had all forgotten him, his own lady had forgotten him. I withdrew from the struggling, noisy group and stepped back to his side. It was then that, as I now most clearly remember, I was conscious of something else, was aware that there was a strange faint blue light in the dark clumsy station, a faint throbbing glow, that, like the reflection of blue water on a sunlit ceiling, hovered and hung above the ugly shabbiness of the engines and trucks, the rails with scattered pieces of paper here and there, the iron arms that supported the vast glass roof, the hideous funnel that hung with its gaping mouth above the water-tank. The faint blue light was the spring evening—the spring evening that, encouraged by God knows what brave illusion, had penetrated even these desperate fastnesses. A little breeze accompanied it and the dirty pieces of paper blew to and fro; then suddenly a shaft of light quivered upon the blackness, quivered and spread like a golden fan, then flooded the huge cave with trembling ripples of light. There was even, I dare swear, at this safe distance, a smell of flowers in the air.

“It’s a most lovely …” Trenchard said, smiling at me, “spring here … I find. …”

I was compelled by some unexpected sense of fatherly duty to be practical.

“You’ve got your things?” I said. “You’ve found your seat?”

“Well, I didn’t know …” he stammered.

“Where are they?” I asked him.

He was not quite sure where they were. He stood, waving his hands, whilst the golden sunlight rippled over his face. I was suddenly irritated.

“But please,” I said, “there isn’t much time. Four of us men have a compartment together. Just show me where your things are and then I’ll introduce you.” He seemed reluctant to move, as though the spot that he had chosen was the only safe one in the whole station; but I forced him forward, found his bags, had them placed in their carriage, then turned to introduce him to his companions.

Anna Mihailovna had said to me: “This detachment will be older than the last. Doctor Nikitin—he’ll take that other doctor’s place, the one who had typhus—and Andrey Vassilievitch—you’ve known him for years. He talks a great deal but he’s sympathetic and such a good business man. He’ll be useful. Then there’s an Englishman; I don’t know much about him, except that he’s been working for three months at the English Hospital. He’s not a correspondent, never written a line in his life. I only saw him for a moment, but he seemed sympathetic. …”

Anna Mihailovna, as is well known to all of us, finds everyone sympathetic simply because she has so much to do and so many people to see that she has no time to go deeply into things. If you have no time for judging character you must have some good common rule to go by. I had known little Andrey Vassilievitch for some years and had found him tiresome. Finally, I did not care about the possibility of an Englishman. Perhaps I had wished (through pride) to remain the only Englishman in our Otriad. I had made friends with them all, I was at home with them. Another Englishman might transplant me in their affections. Russians transfer, with the greatest ease, their emotions from one place to another; or he might be a failure and so damage my country’s reputation. Some such vain and stupid prejudice I had. I know that I looked upon our new additions with disfavour.

There, at any rate, Dr. Nikitin and little Andrey Vassilievitch were, and a strange contrast they made. Nikitin’s size would have compelled attention anywhere, even in Russia, which is, of course, a country of big men. It was not only that he was tall and broad; the carriage of his head, the deep blackness of his beard, his eyebrows, his eyes, the sure independence with which he held himself, as though he were indifferent to the whole world (and that I know that he was), must anywhere have made him remarked and remembered. He looked now immensely fine in his uniform, which admirably suited him. He stood, without his greatcoat, his hand on his sword, his eyes half-closed as though he were almost asleep, and a faint half-smile on his face as though he were amused at his thoughts. I remember that my first impression of him was that he was so completely beneath the domination of some idea or remembrance that, at that moment, no human being could touch him. When I took Trenchard up to him I was so conscious of his remoteness that I was embarrassed and apologetic.

And if I was aware of Nikitin’s remoteness I was equally conscious of Andrey Vassilievitch’s proximity. He was a little man of a round plump figure; he wore a little imperial and sharp, inquisitive moustaches; his hair was light brown and he was immensely proud of it. In Petrograd he was always very smartly dressed. He bought his clothes in London and his plump hands had a movement familiar to all his friends, a flicker of his hands to his coat, his waistcoat, his trousers, to brush off some imaginary speck of dust. It was obvious now that he had given very much thought to his uniform. It fitted him perfectly, his epaulettes glittered, his boots shone, his sword was magnificent, but he looked, in spite of all his efforts, exactly what he was, a rich successful merchant; never was there anyone less military. He had dressed up, one might suppose, for some fancy-dress ball.

I could see at once that he was ill at ease, anxious as ever to please everyone, to like everyone, to be liked in return, but unable, because of some thought that troubled him, to give his whole attention to this business of pleasing.

He greeted me with a warmth that was really genuine although he bestowed it upon his merest acquaintances. His great dream in life was a universal popularity—that everyone should love him. At any rate at that time I thought that to be his dream—I know now that there was something else.

“But Ivan Petrovitch! … This is delightful! Here we all are! What pleasure! Thank God, we’re all here, no delays, nothing unfortunate. An Englishman? … Indeed, I am very glad! Your friend speaks Russian? Not very much, but enough? … You know Vladimir Stepanovitch? Dr. Nikitin … my friend Meester Durward. Also Meester? … ah, I beg your pardon, Tronsart. Two Englishmen in our Otriad … the alliance, yes, delightful!”

Nikitin slowly opened his eyes, shook hands with me and with Trenchard, said that he was glad to see us and was silent again. Trenchard stammered and blushed, said something in very bad Russian, then glanced anxiously, with an eager light in his mild blue eyes, in the direction of the excited crowd that chattered and stirred about the train. There was something, in that look of his, that both touched and irritated me. What does he come for? I thought to myself. With his bad Russian and his English prejudices. Of course he’ll be lonely and then he’ll be in everyone’s way.

I could remember, readily enough, some of the loneliness of those first months of my own, when both war and the Russians had differed so from my expectations. This fellow looked just the figure for high romantic pictures. He had, doubtless, seen Russia in the colours of the pleasant superficial books of travel that have of late, in England, been so popular, books that see in the Russian a blessed sort of idiot unable to read or write but vitally conscious of God, and in Russia a land of snow, icons, mushrooms and pilgrims. Yes, he would be disappointed, unhappy, and tiresome. Upon myself would fall the chief burden of his trouble—I should have enough upon my shoulders without him.

The golden fan had vanished from the station walls. A dim pale glow, with sparkles as of gold dust shining here and there upon that grimy world, faltered and trembled before the rattle and roar that threatened it. Nevertheless, Spring was with us at our departure. As the bells rang, as the ladies of our Committee screamed and laughed, as Anna Mihailovna showered directions and advice upon us, as we crowded backwards into our compartment before the first jolt of the departing train, Spring was with us … but of course we were all of us too busy to be aware of it.

Nikitin, I remember, reduced us very quickly, for all practical purposes, to a company of three. He lowered one of the upper beds, climbed into it, stretched himself out and lay in silence staring at the carriage-roof. His body was a shadow in the half-light, touched once and again by the gesture of the swinging lamp, that swept him out of darkness and back into it again. The remaining three of us did not during either that evening or the next day make much progress. At times there would of course be tea, and then the two Sisters who were in a compartment close at hand joined us.

Marie Ivanovna, Trenchard’s lady, was quieter than she had been before. Her face, which now seemed younger than ever, wore a look of important seriousness as though she were conscious of the indecency of her earlier excitement. She spoke very little, but no one could be in her presence without feeling the force of her vitality like some hammer, silent but of immense power, beating relentlessly upon the atmosphere. Its effect was the stronger in that one realised how utterly at present she was unable to deal with it. Her very helplessness was half of her power—half of her danger too. She was most certainly not beautiful; her nose was too short, her mouth too large, her forehead, from which her black hair was brushed straight back, too high. Her complexion was pale and when she was confused, excited, or pleased, the colour came into her face in a faint flush that ebbed and flowed but never reached its full glow. Her hands were thin and pale. It was her eyes that made her so young; they were so large and round and credulous, scornful sometimes with the scorn of the very young for all the things in the world that they have not experienced—but young especially in all their urgent capacity for life, in their confidence of carrying through all the demands that the High Gods might make upon them. I knew as I looked at her that at present her eagerness for experience was stronger, by far, than her eagerness for any single human being. I wondered whether Trenchard knew that. He was, beyond discussion, most desperately in love; the love of a shy man who has for so many years wondered and dreamed and finds, when the reality comes to him, that it is more, far more, than he had expected. When she came in to us he sat very quietly by her side and talked, if he talked at all, to the other Sister, a stout comfortable woman with no illusions, no expectations, immense capacity and an intensely serious attitude to food and drink.

Trenchard let his eyes rest upon his lady’s face whenever she was unaware, but I could see that he was desperately anxious not to offend her. His attitude to all women, even to Anna Petrovna, the motherly Sister, was that of a man who has always blundered in their company, who has been mocked, perhaps, for his mistakes. I could see, however, that his pride in his new possession, his pride and his happiness, carried with it an absolute assurance of his security. He had no doubts at all. He seemed, in this, even younger than she.

Through all that long Spring day we wandered on—wandering it seemed as the train picked its way through the fields under a sky of blue thin and fine like glass; through a world so quiet and still that birds and children sang and called as though to reassure themselves that they were not alone. Nothing of the war in all this. At the stations there were officers eating ztchee soup and veal and drinking glasses of weak tea, there were endless mountains of hot meat pies; the icons in the restaurants looked down with benignancy and indifference upon the food and the soldiers and beyond the station the light green trees blowing in the little wind; the choruses of the soldiers came from their trains as though it were the very voice of Spring itself. It sounded in the distance like—

Barinisha Barinisha—Pop.
Barinisha—Pop.
So—la, la—la …
Bar … inisha la.

The bell rang, officers with meat pies in their hands came running across the platform. We swung on again through the green golden day.

Andrey Vassilievitch of course chattered to us all. It was his way, and after a very brief experience of it one trained oneself to regard it as an inevitable background, like the jerking and smoke of the train, the dust, the shrill Russian voices in the next compartment, the blowing of paper to and fro in the corridor. I very quickly discovered that he was intensely conscious of Nikitin, who scarcely throughout the day moved from his upper bunk. Andrey Vassilievitch handed him his tea, brought his meat pies and sandwiches from the station, and offered him newspapers. He did not, however, speak to him and I was aware that throughout that long day he was never once unconscious of him. His chatter, which was always the most irrepressible thing in the world, had, perhaps, today some direction behind it. For the first time in my long acquaintance with Andrey Vassilievitch he interested me. The little man was distressed by the heat and dirt; his fingers were always flickering about his clothes. He was intensely polite to everyone, especially to Trenchard, paying him many compliments about England and the English. The English were the only “sportsmen” in the world. He had been once in London for a week; it had rained very much, but one afternoon it had been fine, and then what clothes he had seen! But the City! He had been down into the City and was lost in admiration; he had also been lost in practical earnest and had appealed to one of the splendid policemen as to the way to Holborn Viaduct, a name that he was quite unable to pronounce. This incident he told us several times. Meanwhile … he hoped he might ask without offence … what was our Navy doing? Why weren’t our submarines as active as the German submarines? And in France … how many soldiers had we now? He did hope that he was not offending. … He spoke rapidly and indistinctly and much of his conversation Trenchard did not understand; he made some rather stupid replies and Marie Ivanovna laughed.

She spoke English very well, with an accent that was charming. She had had, she said, an English nurse, and then an English governess.

Of course they asked me many questions about the future. Would we be close to the Front? How many versts? Would there be plenty of work, and would we really see things? We wanted to be useful, no use going if we were not to be useful. How many Sisters were there then already? Were they “sympathetic”? Was Molozov, the head of the Otriad, an agreeable man? Was he kind, or would he be angry about simply nothing? Who would bandage and who would feed the villagers and who would bathe the soldiers? Were the officers of the Ninth Army pleasant to us? Where? Who? When? The day slipped away, the colours were drawn from the sky, the fields, the hills, the stars came out in their myriads, thickly clustered in ropes, and lakes and coils of light; the air was scented with flowers. The second night passed.

The greater part of the next day was spent in H——, a snug town with a little park like a clean handkerchief, streets with coloured shops, neat and fresh-painted like toys from a toyshop, little blue trains, statues of bewigged eighteenth-century kings and dukes, and a restaurant, painted Watteau-fashion with bright green groves, ladies in hoops and powder, and long-legged sheep. Here we wandered, five of us. Nikitin told us that he would meet us at the station that evening. He had his own business in the place. The little town was delivered over to the Russian army but seemed happy enough in its deliverance. I have never realised in any place more completely the spirit of bright cheerfulness, and the soldiers who thronged the little streets were as far from alarm and thunder as the painted sheep in the restaurant. Marie Ivanovna was as excited as though she had never been in a town before. She bought a number of things in the little expensive shops—eau de cologne, sweets, an electric lamp, a wristwatch, and some preserved fruit. Trenchard made her presents; she thanked him with a gratitude that made him so happy that he stumbled over his sword more than ever, blushing and pushing his cap back from his head. There are some who might have laughed at him, carrying her parcels, his face flushed, his legs knocking against one another, but it was here, at H——, that, for the first time, I positively began to like him. By the evening when we were assembled in the station again as I looked at him standing, waiting for directions, smiling, hot, untidy and awkward, I knew that I liked him very much indeed. …

Our new train overflowed: with the greatest difficulty we secured a small wooden compartment with seats sharp and narrow and a smell of cabbage, bad tobacco, and dirty clothes. The floor was littered with sunflower seeds and the paper wrappings of cheap sweets. The air came in hot stale gusts down the corridor, met the yet closer air of our carriage, battled with it and retired defeated. We flung open the windows and a cloud of dust rose gaily to meet us. The whole of the Russian army seemed to be surging upon the platform; orderlies were searching for their masters, officers shouting for their orderlies, soldiers staggering along under bundles of clothes and rugs and pillows; here a group standing patiently, each man with his blue-painted kettle and on his face that expression of happy, half-amused, half-inquisitive, wholly amiable tolerance which reveals the Russian soldier’s favourite attitude to the world. Two priests with wide dirty black hats, long hair, and soiled grey gowns slowly found their way through the crowd. A bunch of Austrian prisoners in their blue-grey uniform made a strange splash of colour in a corner of the platform, where, very contentedly, they were drinking their tea; someone in the invisible distance was playing the balalaika and every now and then some church bell in the town rang clearly and sharply above the tumult. The thin films of dust, yellow in the evening sun, hovered like golden smoke under the station roof. At last with a reluctant jerk and shiver the train was slowly persuaded to totter into the evening air; the evening scents were again around us, the balalaika, now upon the train, hummed behind us, as we pushed out upon her last night’s journey.

The two Sisters had the seats by the windows; Nikitin curled up his great length in another corner and Andrey Vassilievitch settled himself with much grunting and many exclamations beside him. I and Trenchard sat stiffly on the other side.

I had, long ago, accustomed myself to sleep in any position on any occasion, however sudden it might be, and I fancied that I should now, in a moment, be asleep, although I had never, in my long travelling experience, known greater discomfort. I looked at the dim lamp, at the square patch beyond the windows, at Nikitin’s long body, which seemed nevertheless so perfectly comfortable, and at Andrey Vassilievitch’s short fat one, which was so obviously miserably uncomfortable; I smelt the cabbage, the dust, the sunflower seeds; first one bone then another ached, in the centre of my back there was an intolerable irritation; above all, there was in my brain some strange insistent compulsion, as though someone were forcing me to remember something that I had forgotten, or as though again someone were forewarning me of some peril or complication. I had, very distinctly, that impression, so familiar to all of us, of passing through some experience already known: I had seen already the dim lamp, the square patch of evening sky, Nikitin, Andrey Vassilievitch. … I knew that in a moment Trenchard. … He did. … He touched my arm.

“Can you sleep?” he whispered.

“No,” I answered.

“It’s terribly hot, close—smell. … Are you going to sleep?”

“No,” I whispered back again.

“Let us move into the corridor. It will be cooler there.”

There seemed to me quite a new sound of determination and resolve in his voice. His nervousness had left him with the daylight. He led the way out of the carriage, turned down the little seats in the corridor, provided cigarettes.

“It isn’t much better here, but we’ll have the window open. It’ll get better. This is really war, isn’t it, being so uncomfortable as this? I feel as though things were really beginning.”

“Well, we shall be there tomorrow night,” I answered him. “I hope you’re not going to be disappointed.”

“Disappointed in what?” His voice was quite sharp as he spoke to me, “You don’t know what I want.”

“I suppose you’re like the rest of us. You want to see what war really is. You want to do some good if you can. You want to be seriously occupied in it to prevent your thinking too much about it. Then, because you’re English, you want to see what the Russians are really like. You’re curious and sympathetic, inquisitive and, perhaps, a little sentimental about it. … Am I right?”

“No, not quite—there are other things. I’d like to tell you. Do you mind,” he said suddenly looking up straight into my face with a confiding smile that was especially his own, “if I talk, if I tell you why I’ve come? I’ve no right, I don’t know you—but I’m so happy tonight that I must talk—I’m so happy that I feel as though I shall never get through the night alive.”

Of our conversation after this, or rather of his talk, excited, eager, intimate and shy, old and wise and very, very young, I remember now, I think, every word with especial vividness. After events were to fix it all in my brain with peculiar accuracy, but his narration had that night of itself its own individual quality. His was no ordinary personality, or, at any rate, the especial circumstances of the time drove it into no ordinary shape, and I believe that never before in all his days had he spoken freely and eagerly to anyone. It was simply tonight his exultation and happiness that impelled him, perhaps also some sense of high adventure that his romantic character would, most inevitably, extract from our expedition and its purposes.

At any rate, I listened, saying a word now and then, whilst the hour grew dark, lit only by the stars, then trembled into a pale dawn overladen with grey dense clouds, which again broke, rolled away, before another shining, glittering morning. I remember that it was broad daylight when we, at last, left the corridor.

“I’m thirty-three,” he said. “I don’t feel it, of course; I seem to be now only just beginning life. I’m a very unpractical person and in that way, perhaps, I’m younger than my age.”

I remember that I said something to him about his, most certainly, appearing younger.

“Most certainly I do. I’m just the same as when I went up to Cambridge and I was then as when I first went to Rugby. Nothing seems to have had any effect upon me—except, perhaps, these last two days. Do you know Glebeshire?” he asked me abruptly.

I said that I had spent one summer there with a reading party.

“Ah,” he answered, smiling, “I can tell, by the way you say that, that you don’t really know it at all. To us Glebeshire people it’s impossible to speak of it so easily. There are Trenchards all over Glebeshire, you know, lots of them. In Polchester, our cathedral town, where I was born, there are at least four Trenchard families. Then in Truxe, at Garth, at Rasselas, at Clinton—but why should I bother you with all this? It’s only to tell you that the Trenchards are simply Glebeshire forever and ever. To a Trenchard, anywhere in the world, Glebeshire is hearth and home.”

“I believe I’ve met,” I said, “your Trenchards of Garth. George Trenchard. … She was a Faunder. They have a house in Westminster. There’s a charming Miss Trenchard with whom I danced.”

“Yes, those are the George Trenchards,” he answered with eagerness and delight, as though I had formed a new link with him. “Fancy your knowing them! How small the world is! My father was a cousin, a first cousin, of George Trenchard’s. The girl—you must mean Millie—is delightful. Katherine, the elder sister, is married now. She too is charming, but in a different, graver way.”

He spoke of them all with a serious lingering pleasure, as though he were summoning them all into the dusty, stuffy corridor, carrying them with him into these strange countries and perilous adventures.

“They always laughed at me—Millie especially; I’ve stayed sometimes with them at Garth. But I didn’t mean really to talk about them—I only wanted to show you how deeply Glebeshire matters to the Trenchards, and whatever happens, wherever a Trenchard goes, he always really takes Glebeshire with him. I was born in Polchester, as I said. My father had a little property there, but we always lived in a little round bow-windowed house in the Cathedral Close. I was simply brought up on the Cathedral. From my bedroom windows I looked on the whole of it. In our drawing-room you could hear the booming of the organ. I was always watching the canons crossing the cathedral green, counting the strokes of the cathedral bell, listening to the cawing of the cathedral rooks, smelling the cathedral smell of cold stone, wet umbrellas and dusty hassocks, looking up at the high tower and wondering whether anywhere in the world there was anything so grand and fine. My moral world, too, was built on the cathedral—on the cathedral ‘don’ts’ and ‘musts,’ on the cathedral hours and the cathedral prayers, and the cathedral ambitions and disappointments. My father’s great passion was golf. He was not a religious man. But my mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a disease. She died looking at it. Her spirit is somewhere round it now, I do believe.”

He paused, then went on:

“It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose. I who am an only child—I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always was my mother who told me everything.”

He was, I thought, the very simplest person to whom I had ever listened. The irritation that I had already felt on several occasions in his company again returned. “My father’s great passion was golf” would surely in the mouth of another have had some tinge of irony.

In Trenchard’s mild blue eyes irony was an incredible element. I could fancy what he would have to say to the very gentlest of cynics; some of the sympathy I had felt for him during the afternoon had left me.

He’s very little short of an idiot, I thought. He’s going to be dreadfully in the way.

“I was the only child, you see,” he continued. “Of course I was a great deal to my mother and she to me. We were always together. I don’t think that even when I was very young I believed all that she told me. She seemed to me always to take everything for granted. Heaven to me was so mysterious and she had such definite knowledge. I always liked things to be indefinite … I do still.” He laughed, paused for a moment, but was plainly now off on his fine white horse, charging the air, to be stopped by no mortal challenge. I had for a moment the thought that I would slip from my seat and leave him; I didn’t believe that he would have noticed my absence; but the thought of that small stuffy carriage held me.

But he was conscious of me; like the Ancient Mariner he fixed upon my arm his hand and stared into my eyes:

“There were other things that puzzled me. There was, for instance, the chief doctor in our town. He was a large, fat, jolly red-faced man, clean-shaven, with white hair. He was considered the best doctor in the place—all the old maids went to him. He was immensely jolly, you could hear his laugh from one end of the street to the other. He was married, had a delightful little house, where his wife gave charming dinners. He was stupid and self-satisfied. Even at his own work he was stupid, reading nothing, careless and forgetful, thinking about golf and food only all his days. He was a snob too and would give up anyone for the people at the Castle. Even when I was a small boy I somehow knew all this about him. My father thought the world of him and loved to play golf with him. … He was completely happy and successful and popular. Then there was another man, an old canon who taught me Latin before I went to Rugby, an old, untidy, dirty man, whose sermons were dull and his manners bad. He was a failure in life—and he was a failure to himself; dissatisfied with what he used to call his ‘bundle of rotten twigs,’ his life and habits and thoughts. But he thought that somewhere there was something he would find that would save him—somewhere, sometime … not God merely—‘like a key that will open all the doors in the house.’ To me he was fascinating. He knew so much, he was so humble, so kind, so amusing. Nobody liked him, of course. They tried to turn him out of the place, gave him a little living at last, and he married his cook. Was she his key? She may have been … I never saw him again. But I used to wonder. Why was the doctor so happy and the little canon so unhappy, the doctor so successful, the canon so unsuccessful? I decided that the great thing was to be satisfied with oneself. I determined that I would be satisfied with myself. Well, of course I never was—never have been. Something wouldn’t let me alone. The key to the door, perhaps … everything was shut up inside me, and at last I began to wonder whether there was anything there at all. When at nineteen I went to Cambridge I was very unhappy. Whilst I was there my mother died. I came back to the little bow-windowed house and lived with my father. I was quite alone in the world.”

In spite of myself I had a little movement of impatience.

“How self-centred the man is! As though his case were at all peculiar! Wants shaking up and knocking about.”

He seemed to know my thought.

“You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read—I used to sit in the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I’d walk in the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, wonder about people and I grew more and more frightened of talking, of meeting people, of little local dinner-parties. It was as though I were on one side of the river and they were all on the other. I would think sometimes how splendid it would be if I could cross—but I couldn’t cross. Every year it became more impossible!”

“You wanted someone to take you out of yourself,” I said, and then shuddered at my own banality. But he took me very seriously.

“I did. Of course,” he answered. “But who would bother? They all thought me impossible. The girls all laughed at me—my own cousins. Sometimes people tried to help me. They never went far enough. They gave me up too soon.”

He evidently thinks he was worth a lot of trouble, I thought irritably. But suddenly he laughed.

“That same doctor one day spoke of me, not knowing that I was near him; or perhaps he knew and thought it would be good for me. ‘Oh, Trenchard,’ he said. ‘He ought to be in a nunnery … and he’d be quite safe, too. He’d never cause a scandal!’ They thought of me as something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he died, he said: ‘I’d like to have had a son!’ He never noticed me at his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him.”

“Well,” I said at last to break a long pause that followed his last words, “what did you think about all that time you were alone?”

“I used to think always about two things,” he said very solemnly. “One was love. I used to think how splendid it would be if only there would be someone to whom I could dedicate my devotion. I didn’t care if I got much in return or no, but they must be willing to have it ready for me to devote myself altogether. I used to watch the ladies in our town and select them, one after another. Of course they never knew and they would only have laughed had they known. But I felt quite desperate sometimes. I had so much in me to give to someone and the years were all slipping by and it became, every day, more difficult. There was a girl … something seemed to begin between us. She was the daughter of one of the canons, dark-haired, and she used to wear a lilac-coloured dress. She was very kind; once when we were walking through the town I began to talk to her. I believe she understood, because she was very, very young—only about eighteen—and hadn’t begun to laugh at me yet. She had a dimple in one cheek, very charming—but some man from London came to stay at the Castle and she was engaged to him. Then there were Katherine and Millie Trenchard, of whom we were talking. Katherine never laughed at me; she was serious and helped her mother about all the household things and the village where they lived. Afterwards she ran away with a young man and was married in London—very strange because she was so serious. There was a great deal of talk about it at the time. Millie too was charming. She laughed at me, of course, but she laughed at everyone. At any rate she was only cousinly to me; she would not have cared for my devotion.”

As he spoke I had a picture in my mind of poor Trenchard searching the countryside for someone to whom he might be devoted, tongue-tied, clumsy, stumbling and stuttering, a village Don Quixote with a stammer and without a Dulcinea.

“They must have been difficult years,” I said, and again cursed myself for my banality.

“They were,” he answered very gravely. “Very difficult.”

“And your other thoughts?” I asked him.

“They were about death,” he replied. “I had, from my very earliest years, a great terror of death. You might think that my life was not so pleasant that I should mind, very greatly, leaving it. But I was always thinking—hoping that I should live to be very old, even though I lost all my limbs and faculties. I believed that there was life of some sort after death, but just as I would hesitate outside a house a quarter of an hour from terror of meeting new faces so I felt about another life—I couldn’t bear all the introductions and the clumsy mistakes that I should be sure to make. But it was more personal than that. I had a horrible old uncle who died when I was a boy. He was a very ugly old man, bent and whitened and gnarled, a face and hands twisted with rheumatism. I used to call him Quilp to myself. He always wore, I remember, an old-fashioned dress. Velvet knee-breeches, a white stock, black shoes with buckles. I remember that his hands were damp and hair grew in bushes out of his ears. Well, I saw him once or twice and he filled me with terror like a figure out of the tapestry up at the Castle. Then he died.

“Our house was small and badly shaped, full of dark corners, and after his death he seemed to me to haunt the place. He figured Death to me and until I was quite old, until I went to Rugby, I fancied that he was sitting in a dark corner, on a chair, waiting, with his hands on his lap, until the time came for him to take me. Sometimes I would fancy that I heard him moving from one room to another, bringing his chair with him. Then I began to have a dream, a dream that frequently recurred all the time that I was growing up. It was a dream about a huge dark house in a huge dark forest. It was early morning, the light just glimmering between the thick damp trees. A large party of people gathered together in a high empty room prepared for an expedition. I was one of them and I was filled with sharp agonising terror. Sometimes in my dream I drank to give myself courage and the glass clattered against my lips. Sometimes I talked with one of the company; the room was very dark and I could see no faces. Then we would start trooping out into the bitterly cold morning air. There would be many horses and dogs. We would lead off into the forest and soon (it always happened) I would find myself alone—alone with the dripping trees high around me and the light that seemed to grow no lighter and the intense cold. Then suddenly it would be that I was the hunted, not the hunter. It was Death whom we were hunting—Death, for me my uncle—and I would fancy him waiting in the darkness, watching me, smiling, hearing his hunters draw off the scent, knowing that they would not find him, but that he had found me. Then my knees would fail me, I would sink down in a sweat of terror, and—wake! … Brrr! … I can see it now!”

He shook himself, turning round to me as though he were suddenly ashamed of himself, with a laugh half-shy, half-retrospective.

“We all have our dreams,” he continued. “But this came too often—again and again. The question of death became my constant preoccupation as I grew to think I would never see it, nor hear men speak of it, nor—”

“And you have come,” I could not but interrupt him, “here, to the very fortress—Why, man!—”

“I know,” he answered, smiling at me. “It must seem to you ridiculous. But I am a different person now—very different. Now I am ready, eager for anything. Death can be nothing to me now, or if that is too bold, at least I may say that I am prepared to meet him—anywhere—at any time. I want to meet him—I want to show—”

“We have all,” I said, “in our hearts, perhaps, come like that—come to prove that our secret picture of ourselves, that picture so different from our friends’ opinion of us, is really the true one. We can fancy them saying afterwards: ‘Well, I never knew that so-and-so had so much in him!’ We always knew.”

“No, you see,” Trenchard said eagerly, “there can be only one person now about whose opinion I care. If she thinks well of me—”

“You are very much in love,” I said, and loosed, as I had expected, the torrents of his happiness upon me.

“I was in Polchester when the war broke out. The town received it rather as though a first-class company had come from London to act in the Assembly Rooms for a fortnight. It was dramatic and picturesque and pleasantly patriotic. They see it otherwise now, I fancy. I seemed at once to think of Russia. For one thing I wanted desperately to help, and I thought that in England they would only laugh at me as they had always done. I am shortsighted. I knew that I should never be a soldier. I fancied that in Russia they would not say: ‘Oh, John Trenchard of Polchester. … He’s no good!’ before they’d seen whether I could do anything. Then of course I had read about the country—Tolstoy and Turgenev, and a little Dostoevsky and even Gorky and Chekhov. I went quite suddenly, making up my mind one evening. I seemed to begin to be a new man out of England. The journey delighted me. … I was in Moscow before I knew. I was there three months trying to learn Russian. Then I came to Petrograd and through the English Embassy found a place in one of the hospitals, where I worked as a sanitar for three months. I did not leave England until November, so that I have been in Russia now just six months. It was in this hospital that I met Miss Krassovsky—Marie Ivanovna. From the first moment I loved her, of course. And she liked me. She was the first woman, since my mother, who had really liked me. She quickly saw my devotion and she laughed a little, but she was always kind. I could talk to her and she liked to listen. She had—she has, great ideals, great hopes and ambitions. We worked together there and then, afterwards, in those beautiful spring evenings in Petrograd when the canals shone all night and the houses were purple, we walked. … The night before last night I begged her to marry me … and she accepted. She said that we would go together to the war, that I should be her knight and she my lady and that we would care for the wounds of the whole world. Ah! what a night that was—shall I ever forget it? After she had left me, I walked all night and sang. … I was mad. … I am mad now. That she should love me! She, so beautiful, so pure, so wonderful. I at whom women have always laughed. Ah! God forgive me, my heart will break—”

As he spoke the heavy grey clouds of the first dawn were parting and a faint very liquid blue, almost white and very cold, hovered above dim shapeless trees and fields. I flung open the corridor window and a sound of running water and the first notes of some sleepy bird met me.

“And her family?” I said. “Who are they, and will they not mind her marrying an Englishman?”

“She has only a mother,” he answered. “I fancy that Marie has always had her own way.”

Yes, I thought to myself. I also fancy that that is so. A sense of almost fatherly protection had developed in myself towards him. How could he, who knew nothing at all of women, hope to manage that self-willed, eager, independent girl? Why, why, why had she engaged herself to him? I fancied that very possibly there were qualities in him—his very childishness and helplessness—which, if they only irritated an Englishman, would attract a Russian. Lame dogs find a warm home in Russia. But did she know anything about him? Would she not, in a week, be irritated by his incapacity? And he—he—bless his innocence!—was so confident as though he had been married to her for years!

“Look here!” I said, moved by a sudden impulse. “Will you mind if, sometimes, I tell you things? I’ve been to the war before. It’s a strange life, unlike anything you’ve ever known—and Russians too are strange—especially at first. You won’t take it badly, if—”

He touched my arm with his hand while his whole face was lighted with his smile. “Why, my dear fellow, I shall be proud. No one has ever thought me worth the bother. I want to be—to be—at my best here. Practical, you know—like others. I don’t want her to think me—”

“No, exactly,” I said hurriedly, “I understand.” Gold was creeping into the sky. A lark rose, triumphant. A pool amongst the reeds blazed like a brazen shield. The Spring day had flung back her doors. I saw that suddenly fatigue had leapt upon my friend. He tottered on his little seat, then his face, grey in the light, fell forward. I caught him in my arms, half carried, half led him into our little carriage, arranged him in the empty corner, and left him, fast, utterly fast, asleep.