Delphi collected works o.., p.234
Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated), page 234
I would like now to make my account as brief as possible.
Upon the afternoon of August 16 we were all at Mittövo, extremely anxious about our friends. Molozov was in a great state of alarm. The sanitars with the wagons that arrived at about four o’clock in the afternoon told us that a violent attack in the intermediate neighbourhood of our white house was expected at any moment. The wagons were to return as quickly as possible, and bring every one away. They left about five o’clock in charge of Molozov and Goga, who were bursting with excitement. I knew that they could not be with us again until at any rate nine o’clock, but I was so nervous that at about seven I walked out to the cross and watched.
It was a very dark night, but the sky was simply on fire with searchlights and rockets, very fine behind the Forest and reflected in the river. The cannonade was incessant but one could not tell how close it was. At last, at about half-past eight, I could endure my ignorance no longer and I went down the hill towards the bridge. I had not been there more than ten minutes and had just seen a shell burst with a magnificent spurt of fire high in the wood opposite, when our wagons suddenly clattered up out of the darkness. I saw at once that something was wrong. The horses were being driven furiously although there was now no need, as I thought, for haste. I could just see Semyonov in the half light and he shouted something to me. I caught one of the wagons as it passed and nearly crushed Goga.
We were making so much noise that I had to shout to him.
“Well?” I cried.
Then I saw that he was crying, his arms folded about his face, sobbing like a little boy.
“What is it?” I shouted.
“Mr....” he said, “Andrey Vassilievitch....” I looked round. One of the sanitars nodded.
Then there followed a nightmare of which I can remember very little. It seems that at about four in the afternoon the Austrians made a furious attack. At about seven our men retreated and broke. They were gradually beaten back towards the river. Then, out of Mittövo, the “Moskovsky Polk” made a magnificent counter-attack, rallied the other Division and finally drove the Austrians right back to their original trenches. From nine o’clock until twelve we were in the thick of it. After midnight all was quiet again. I will not give you details of our experiences as they are not all to my present purpose.
At about half-past one in the morning I found Nikitin standing in the garden, looking in front of him across the river, over which a very faint light was beginning to break....
I touched him on the arm and he started, as though he had been very far away.
“How did Trenchard die?”
He answered at once, very readily: “About three o’clock the shells were close. The wagons arrived a little before seven so we had fully four anxious hours. We had had everything ready all the afternoon and, of course, just then we couldn’t go out to fetch the wounded and I think that the army sanitars were working in another direction, so that we had nothing to do — which was pretty trying. I didn’t see Mr. until just before seven. He had been busy upstairs about something and then at the sound of the wagons he came out. I had noticed that all day he had seemed very much quieter and more cheerful. He had been in a wretched condition on the earlier days, nervous and over-strained, and I was very glad to see him so much better. We were all working then, moving the wounded from the house to the wagons. We couldn’t hear one another speak, the noise was so terrific. Andrey and Mr. were directing the sanitars near the house. Semyonov and I were near the wagons. I had looked up and shouted something to Andrey when suddenly I heard a shell that seemed as though it would break right over me. I braced myself, as one does, to meet it. For a moment I heard nothing but the noise; my nostrils were choked with the smell and my eyes blinded with dust. But I knew that I had not been hit, and I stood there, rather stupidly, wondering. Then cleared. I saw that all the right corner of the house was gone, and that Semyonov had run forward and was kneeling on the ground. With all the shouting and firing it was very difficult to realise anything. I ran to Semyonov. Andrey ... but I won’t ... I can’t ... he must have been right under the thing and was blown to pieces. Mr., strangely enough, lying there with his arms spread out, seemed to have been scarcely touched. But I saw at once when I came to him that he had only a few moments to live, He had a terrible stomach wound but was suffering no pain, I think. Semyonov was kneeling, with his arm behind his head, looking straight into his eyes.
“‘Mr., Mr.,’ he said several times, as though he wanted to rouse him to consciousness. Then, quite suddenly, Mr. seemed to realise. He looked at Semyonov and smiled, one of those rather timid, shy smiles that were so customary with him. His eyes though were not timid. They were filled with the strangest look of triumph and expectation.
“The two men looked at one another and I, seeing that nothing was to be done, waited. Semyonov then, speaking as though he and Mr. were alone in all this world of noise and confusion, said:
“‘You’ve won, Mr.... You’ve won!’ He repeated this several times as though it was of the utmost importance that Mr. should realise his words.
“Mr., smiling, looked at Semyonov, gave a little sigh, and died.
“I can hear now the tones of Semyonov’s voice. There was something so strange in its mixture of irony, bitterness and kindness — just that rather contemptible, patronising kindness that is so especially his.
“We had no time to wait after that. We got the wagons out by a miracle without losing a man. Semyonov was marvellous in his self-control and coolness....”
We were both silent for a long time. Nikitin only once again. “Andrey!... My God, how I will miss him!” he said — and I, who knew how often he had cursed the little man and been impatient with his importunities, understood. “I have lost more — far more — than Andrey,” he said. “I talked to you once, Ivan Andreievitch. You will understand that I have no one now who can bring her to me. I think that she will never come to me alone. I never needed her as he did, No more dreams....”
We were interrupted by Semyonov, who, carrying a lantern, passed us. He saw us and turned back.
“We must be ready by seven,” he said sharply. “A general retirement. Ivan Andreievitch, do you know whether Mr. had friends or relations to whom we can write?”
“I heard of nobody,” I answered.
“Nobody?”
“Nobody.”
Just before he turned my eyes met his. He appeared to me as a man who, with all his self-control, was compelling himself to meet the onset of an immeasurable devastating loss.
He gave us a careless nod and vanished into the darkness.
THE GREEN MIRROR
The Green Mirror was first published in London by Macmillan in January 1918. Walpole had begun to write the novel more than four years earlier before the First World War broke out in 1914. At the time of publication, the author had just returned from his post at the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in Petrograd at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was quickly appointed to a position at the Foreign Office, in the Department of Information and he would remain working in propaganda until the beginning of 1919. Walpole had long been an admirer of the novelist Joseph Conrad and had written a critical review of his work in 1916. They met in early 1918 and Walpole was enthusiastic in his praise for the respected author: he exclaimed in his diary that Conrad was ‘even better than I expected’ and after a later June meeting, he stated that it has been ‘A great and glorious day. Conrad simply superb...a real genius’. Walpole wrote that Conrad commented on The Green Mirror, saying it was ‘fine’ but needed more ‘resonance’.
The Green Mirror focuses on the fortunes and dynamics of the upper-middle-class Trenchard family at the turn of the twentieth century. The world they have inhabited so comfortably and confidently for so long is beginning to collapse, but the older members of the family remain wilfully ignorant of this shifting order. The mother of the family comes into conflict with her daughter, Katherine, when the young woman decides to marry Philip, who is deemed to be an unsuitable match. Mrs. Trenchard is desperate to keep her daughter at home and expects Katherine to obey and adhere to her every whim. An important secret is uncovered, while Katherine is forced to reassess her position in the family and her relationship with her mother.
The first edition's title page
CONTENTS
BOOK I. THE RAID
CHAPTER I. THE CEREMONY
CHAPTER II. THE WINTER AFTERNOON
CHAPTER III. KATHERINE
CHAPTER IV. THE FOREST
CHAPTER V. THE FINEST THING
CHAPTER VI. THE SHOCK
BOOK II. THE FEATHER BED
CHAPTER I. KATHERINE IN LOVE
CHAPTER II. MRS. TRENCHARD
CHAPTER III. LIFE AND HENRY
CHAPTER IV. GARTH IN ROSELANDS
CHAPTER V. THE FEAST
CHAPTER VI. SUNDAY
CHAPTER VII. ROCHE ST. MARY MOOR
BOOK III. KATHERINE AND ANNA
CHAPTER I. KATHERINE ALONE
CHAPTER II. THE MIRROR
CHAPTER III. ANNA AND MRS. TRENCHARD
CHAPTER IV. THE WILD NIGHT
CHAPTER V. THE TRENCHARDS
CHAPTER VI. THE CEREMONY
Joseph Conrad, 1904
TO
DOROTHY
WHO FIRST INTRODUCED ME
TO
KATHERINE
“There’s the feather bed element here brother, ach! and not only that! There’s an attraction here — here you have the end of the world, an anchorage, a quiet haven, the navel of the earth, the three fishes that are the foundation of the world, the essence of pancakes, of savoury fish-pies, of the evening samovar, of soft sighs and warm shawls, and hot stoves to sleep on — as snug as though you were dead, and yet you’re alive — the advantages of both at once.”
Dostoeffsky.
My dear Dorothy,
As I think you know, this book was finished in the month of August, 1914. I did not look at it again until I revised it during my convalescence after an illness in the autumn of 1915.
We are now in a world very different from that with which this story deals, and it must, I am afraid, appear slow in development and uneventful in movement, belonging, in style and method and subject, to a day that seems to us already old-fashioned.
But I will frankly confess that I have too warm a personal affection for Katherine, Philip, Henry and Millicent to be able to destroy utterly the signs and traditions of their existence, nor can I feel my book to be quite old-fashioned when the love of England, which I have tried to make the text of it, has in many of us survived so triumphantly changes and catastrophes and victories that have shaken into ruin almost every other faith we held.
Let this be my excuse for giving you, with my constant affection, this uneventful story.
Yours always,
HUGH WALPOLE.
Petrograd,
May 11th, 1917.
BOOK I. THE RAID
CHAPTER I. THE CEREMONY
I
The fog had swallowed up the house, and the house had submitted. So thick was this fog that the towers of Westminster Abbey, the river, and the fat complacency of the church in the middle of the Square, even the three Plane Trees in front of the old gate and the heavy old-fashioned porch had all vanished together, leaving in their place, the rattle of a cab, the barking of a dog, isolated sounds that ascended, plaintively, from a lost, a submerged world.
The House had, indeed, in its time seen many fogs for it had known its first one in the days of Queen Anne and even then it had yielded, without surprise and without curiosity, to its tyranny. On the brightest of days this was a solemn, unenterprising, unimaginative building, standing four-square to all the winds, its windows planted stolidly, securely, its vigorous propriety well suited to its safe, unagitated surroundings. Its faded red brick had weathered many London storms and would weather many more: that old, quiet Square, with its uneven stones, its church, and its plane-trees, had the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the river for its guardians ... the skies might fall, the Thames burst into a flaming fire, Rundle Square would not stir from its tranquillity.
The old house — No. 5, Rundle Square — had for its most charming feature its entrance. First came an old iron gate guarded, on either side, by weather-beaten stone pillars. Then a cobbled path, with little green lawns to right and left of it, ran to the door whose stolidity was crowned with an old porch of dim red brick. This was unusual enough for London, but there the gate, the little garden, the Porch had stood for some hundreds of years, and that Progress that had already its throttling fingers about London’s neck, had, as yet, left Rundle Square to its staid propriety.
Westminster abides, like a little Cathedral town, at the heart of London. One is led to it, through Whitehall, through Victoria Street, through Belgravia, over Westminster Bridge with preparatory caution. The thunder of London sinks, as the traveller approaches, dying gradually as though the spirit of the town warned you, with his finger at his lip. To the roar of the traffic there succeeds the solemn striking of Big Ben, the chiming of the Abbey Bells; so narrow and winding are many of the little streets that such traffic as penetrates them proceeds slowly, cautiously, almost sleepily; there are old buildings and grass squares, many clergymen, schoolboys in black gowns and battered top hats, and at the corners one may see policemen, motionless, somnolent, stationed one supposes, to threaten disturbance or agitation.
There is, it seems, no impulse here to pile many more events upon the lap of the day than the poor thing can decently hold. Behind the windows of Westminster life is passing, surely, with easy tranquillity; the very door-bells are, many of them, old and comfortable, unsuited to any frantic ringing; there does not sound, through every hour, the whirring clang of workmen flinging, with eager haste, into the reluctant air, hideous and contemptuous buildings; dust does not rise in blinding clouds from the tortured corpses of old and happy houses.... Those who live here live long.
No. 5, Rundle Square then, had its destiny in pleasant places. Upon a fine summer evening the old red brick with its windows staring complacently upon a comfortable world showed a fine colour. Its very chimneys were square and solid, its eaves and water pipes regular and mathematical. Whatever horrid catastrophe might convulse the rest of London, No. 5 would suffer no hurt; the god of propriety — the strongest of all the gods — had it beneath His care.
Now behind the Fog it waited, as it had waited so often before, with certain assurance, for its release.
II
Inside the house at about half-past four, upon this afternoon November 8th, in the year 1902, young Henry Trenchard was sitting alone; he was straining his eyes over a book that interested him so deeply that he could not leave it in order to switch on the electric light; his long nose stuck into the book’s very heart and his eyelashes almost brushed the paper. The drawing-room where he was had caught some of the fog and kept it, and Henry Trenchard’s only light was the fading glow of a red cavernous fire. Henry Trenchard, now nineteen years of age, had known, in all those nineteen years, no change in that old drawing-room. As an ugly and tiresome baby he had wailed before the sombre indifference of that same old stiff green wall-paper — a little brighter then perhaps, — had sprawled upon the same old green carpet, had begged to be allowed to play with the same collection of little scent bottles and stones and rings and miniatures that lay now, in the same decent symmetry, in the same narrow glass-topped table over by the window. It was by shape and design a heavy room, slipping into its true spirit with the London dusk, the London fog, the London lamp-lit winter afternoon, seeming awkward, stiff, almost affronted before the sunshine and summer weather. One or two Trenchards — two soldiers and a Bishop — were there in heavy old gold frames, two ponderous glass-fronted book-cases guarded from any frivolous touch high stiff-backed volumes of Gibbons and Richardson and Hooker.
There were some old water-colours of faded green lawns, dim rocks and seas with neglected boats upon the sand — all these painted in the stiff precision of the ‘thirties and the ‘forties, smoked and fogged a little in their thin black frames.
Upon one round-table indeed there was a concession to the modern spirit in the latest numbers of the “Cornhill” and “Blackwood” magazines, the “Quarterly Review” and the “Hibbert Journal.”
The chairs in the room were for the most part stiff with gilt backs and wore a “Don’t you dare to sit down upon me” eye, but two arm-chairs, near the fire, of old green leather were comfortable enough and upon one of these Henry was now sitting. Above the wide stone fireplace was a large old gold mirror, a mirror that took into its expanse the whole of the room, so that, standing before it, with your back to the door, you could see everything that happened behind you. The Mirror was old and gave to the view that it embraced some old comfortable touch so that everything within it was soft and still and at rest. Now, in the gloom and shadow, the reflection was green and dark with the only point of colour the fading fire. Before it a massive gold clock with the figures of the Three Graces stiff and angular at its summit ticked away as though it were the voice of a very old gentleman telling an interminable story. It served indeed for the voice of the mirror itself....
Henry was reading a novel that showed upon its back Mudie’s bright yellow label. He was reading, as the clock struck half-past four, these words: —
“I sat on the stump of a tree at his feet, and below us stretched the land, the great expanse of the forests, sombre under the sunshine, rolling like a sea, with glints of winding rivers, the grey spots of villages, and here and there a clearing, like an islet of light amongst the dark waves of continuous tree-tops. A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint bays, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel.
