Delphi collected works o.., p.280
Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated), page 280
Here I interrupted him and told him that perhaps it was better that he should not confide in me the inner history of his marriage.
“Why not?” he asked me suspiciously.
“Because I’m only an acquaintance, you scarcely know me. You may regret it afterwards when you’re in another mood.”
“Oh, you English!” he said contemptuously; “you’re always to be trusted. As a nation you’re not, but as one man to another you’re not interested enough in human nature to give away secrets.”
“Well, tell me what you like,” I said. “Only I make no promises about anything.”
“I don’t want you to,” he retorted; “I’m only telling you what every one knows. Wasn’t I aware from the first moment that she married me out of pity, and didn’t they all know it, and laugh and tell her she was a fool. She knew that she was a fool too, but she was very young, and thought it fine to sacrifice herself for an idea. I was ill and I talked to her about my future. She believed in it, she thought I could do wonderful things if only some one looked after me. And at the same time despised me for wanting to be looked after…. And then I wasn’t so ugly as I am now. She had some money of her own, and we took in lodgers, and I loved her, as I love her now, so that I could kiss her feet and then hate her because she was kind to me. She only cares for her sister, Nina; and because I was jealous of the girl and hated to see Vera good to her I had her to live with us, just to torture myself and show that I was stronger than all of them if I liked…. And so I am, than her beastly uncle the doctor and all the rest of them — let him do what he likes….”
It was the first time that he had mentioned Semyonov.
“He’s coming back,” I said.
“Oh, is he?” snarled Markovitch. “Well, he’d better look out.” Then his voice, his face, even the shape of his body, changed once again. “I’m not a bad man, Ivan Andreievitch. No, I’m not…. You think so of course, and I don’t mind if you do. But I love Vera, and if she loved me I could do great things. I could astonish them all. I hear them say, ‘Ah, that Nicholas Markovitch, he’s no good… with his inventions. What did a fine woman like that marry such a man for?’ I know what they say. But I’m strong if I like. I gave up drink when I wished. I can give up anything. And when I succeed they’ll see — and then we’ll have enough money not to need these people staying with us and despising us….”
“No one despises you, Nicolai Leontievitch,” I interrupted.
“And what does it matter if they do?” he fiercely retorted. “I despise them — all of them. It’s easy for them when everything goes well with them, but with me everything goes wrong. Everything!… But I’m strong enough to make everything go right — and I will.”
This was, for the time, the end of his confidences. He had, I was sure, something further to tell me, some plan, some purpose, but he decided suddenly that he would keep it to himself, although I am convinced that he had only told me his earlier story in order that I might understand this new idea of his. But I did not urge him to tell me. My interest in life had not yet sufficiently revived; it was, after all, none of my business.
For the rest, it seemed that he had been wildly enthusiastic about the war at its commencement. He had had great ideas about Russia, but now he had given up all hope. Russia was doomed; and Germany, whom he hated and admired, would eat her up. And what did it matter? Perhaps Germany would “run Russia,” and then there would be order and less thieving, and this horrible war would stop. How foolish it had been to suppose that any one in Russia would ever do anything. They were all fools and knaves and idle in Russia — like himself.
And so he left me.
XI
On Christmas Eve, late in the evening, I went into a church. It was my favourite church in Petrograd, rising at the English Prospect end of the Quay, with its white rounded towers pure and quiet and modest.
I had been depressed all day. I had not been well, and the weather was harsh, a bitterly cold driving wind beating down the streets and stroking the ice of the canal into a dull grey colour. Christmas seemed to lift into sharper, bitterer irony the ghastly horrors of this end endless war. Last Christmas I had been too ill to care, and the Christmas before I had been at the Front when the war had been young and full of hope, and I had seen enough nobility and self-sacrifice to be reassured about the true stuff of the human soul. Now all that seemed to be utterly gone. On the one side my mind was filled with my friends, John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna. The sacrifice that they had made seemed to be wicked and useless. I had lost altogether that conviction of the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for so long, carried with me. They were dead, dead… simply dead. There at the Front one had believed in many things. Here in this frozen and starving town, with every ghost working against every human, there was assurance of nothing — only deep foreboding and an ominous silence. The murder of Rasputin still hung over every head. The first sense of liberty had passed, and now his dirty malicious soul seemed to be watching us all, reminding us that he had not left us, but was waiting for the striking of some vast catastrophe that the friends whom he had left behind him to carry on his work were preparing. It was this sense of moving so desperately and so hopelessly in the dark that was with me. Any chance that there had seemed to be of Russia rising from the war with a free soul appeared now to be utterly gone. Before our eyes the powers that ruled us were betraying us, laughing at us, selling us. And we did not know who was our enemy, who our friend, whom to believe, of whom to take counsel. Peculation and lying and the basest intrigue was on every side of us, hunger for which there was no necessity, want in a land packed with everything. I believe that there may have been very well another side to the picture, but at that time we could not see; we did not wish to see, we were blindfolded men….
I entered the church and found that the service was over. I passed through the aisle into the little rounded cup of dark and gold where the altars were. Here there were still collected a company of people, kneeling, some of them, in front of the candles, others standing there, motionless like statues, their hands folded, gazing before them. The candles flung a mist of dim embroidery upon the walls, and within the mist the dark figures of the priests moved to and fro. An old priest with long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and reading a long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice. There was the scent of candles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place. The tawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the candle-light, and an echo of the cold wind creeping up the long dark aisle blew the light about so that the gilt was like flashing piercing eyes. I wrapped my Shuba closely about me, and stood there lost in a hazy, indefinite dream.
I was comforted and touched by the placid, mild, kindly faces of those standing near me. “No evil here….” I thought. “Only ignorance, and for that others are responsible.”
I was lost in my dream and I did not know of what I was dreaming. The priest’s voice went on, and the lights flickered, and it was as though some one, a long way off, were trying to give me a message that it was important that I should hear, important for myself and for others. There came over me, whence I know not, a sudden conviction of the fearful power of Evil, a sudden realisation, as though I had been shown something, a scene or a picture or writing which had brought this home to me…. The lights seemed to darken, the priest’s figure faded, and I felt as though the message that some one had been trying to deliver to me had been withdrawn. I waited a moment, looking about me in a bewildered fashion, as though I had in reality just woken from sleep. Then I left the church.
Outside the cold air was intense. I walked to the end of the Quay and leaned on the stone parapet. The Neva seemed vast like a huge, white, impending shadow; it swept in a colossal wave of frozen ice out to the far horizon, where tiny, twinkling lights met it and closed it in. The bridges that crossed it held forth their lights, and there were the gleams, like travelling stars, of the passing trams, but all these were utterly insignificant against the vast body of the contemptuous ice. On the farther shore the buildings rose in a thin, tapering line, looking as though they had been made of black tissue paper, against the solid weight of the cold, stony sky. The Peter and Paul Fortress, the towers of the Mohammedan Mosque were thin, immaterial, ghostly, and the whole line of the town was simply a black pencilled shadow against the ice, smoke that might be scattered with one heave of the force of the river. The Neva was silent, but beneath that silence beat what force and power, what contempt and scorn, what silent purposes?
I saw then, near me, and gazing, like myself, on to the river the tall, broad figure of a peasant, standing, without movement, black against the sky.
He seemed to dominate the scene, to be stronger and more contemptuous than the ice itself, but also to be in sympathy with it.
I made some movement, and he turned and looked at me. He was a fine man, with a black beard and noble carriage. He passed down the Quay and I turned towards home.
XII
About four o’clock on Christmas afternoon I took some flowers to Vera Michailovna. I found that the long sitting-room had been cleared of all furniture save the big table and the chairs round it. About a dozen middle-aged ladies were sitting about the table and solemnly playing “Lotto.” So serious were they that they scarcely looked up when I came in. Vera Michailovna said my name and they smiled and some of them bowed, but their eyes never left the numbered cards. “Dvar… Peedecat… Cheteeriy… Zurock Tree… Semdecet Voisim”… came from a stout and good-natured lady reading the numbers as she took them from the box. Most of the ladies were healthy, perspiring, and of a most amiable appearance. They might, many of them, have been the wives of English country clergymen, so domestic and unalarmed were they. I recognised two Markovitch aunts and a Semyonov cousin.
There was a hush and a solemnity about the proceedings. Vera Michailovna was very busy in the kitchen, her face flushed and her sleeves rolled up; Sacha, the servant, malevolently assisting her and scolding continually the stout and agitated country girl who had been called in for the occasion.
“All goes well,” Vera smilingly assured me. “Half-past six it is — don’t be late.”
“I will be in time,” I said.
“Do you know, I’ve asked your English friend. The big one.”
“Lawrence?… Is he coming?”
“Yes. At least I understood so on the telephone, but he sounded confused. Do you think he will want to come?”
“I’m sure he will,” I answered.
“Afterwards I wasn’t sure. I thought he might think it impertinent when we know him so little. But he could easily have said if he didn’t want to come, couldn’t he?”
There seemed to me something unusual in the way that she asked me these questions. She did not usually care whether people were offended or no. She had not time to consider that, and in any case she despised people who took offence easily.
I would perhaps have said something, but the country girl dropped a plate and Sacha leapt upon the opportunity. “Drunk!… What did I say, having such a girl? Is it not better to do things for yourself? But no — of course no one cares for my advice, as though last year the same thing….” And so on.
I left them and went home to prepare for the feast.
I returned punctually at half-past six and found every one there. Many of the ladies had gone, but the aunts remained, and there were other uncles and some cousins. We must have been in all between twenty and thirty people. The table was now magnificently spread. There was a fine glittering Father Christmas in the middle, a Father Christmas of German make, I am afraid. Ribbons and frosted strips of coloured paper ran in lines up and down the cloth. The “Zakuska” were on a side-table near the door — herrings and ham and smoked fish and radishes and mushrooms and tongue and caviare and, most unusual of all in those days, a decanter of vodka.
No one had begun yet; every one stood about, a little uneasy and awkward, with continuous glances flung at the “Zakuska” table. Of the company Markovitch first caught my eye. I had never seen him so clean and smart before. His high, piercing collar was of course the first thing that one saw; then one perceived that his hair was brushed, his beard trimmed, and that he wore a very decent suit of rather shiny black. This washing and scouring of him gave him a curiously subdued and imprisoned air; I felt sympathetic towards him; I could see that he was anxious to please, happy at the prospect of being a successful host, and, to-night, most desperately in love with his wife. That last stood out and beyond all else. His eyes continually sought her face; he had the eyes of a dog watching and waiting for its master’s appreciative word.
I had never before seen Vera Michailovna so fine and independent and, at the same time, so kind and gracious. She was dressed in white, very plain and simple, her shining black hair piled high on her head, her kind, good eyes watching every one and everything to see that all were pleased. She, too, was happy to-night, but happy also in a strange, subdued, quiescent way, and I felt, as I always did about her, that her soul was still asleep and untouched, and that much of her reliance and independence came from that. Uncle Ivan was in his smart clothes, his round face very red and he wore his air of rather ladylike but inoffensive superiority. He stood near the table with the “Zakuska,” and his eyes rested there. I do not now remember many of the Markovitch and Semyonov relations. There was a tall thin young man, rather bald, with a short black moustache; he was nervous and self-assertive, and he had a high, shrill voice. He talked incessantly. There were several delightful, middle-aged women, quiet and ready to be pleased with everything — the best Russian type of all perhaps, women who knew life, who were generously tolerant, kind-hearted, with a quiet sense of humour and no nonsense about them. There was one fat red-faced man in a very tight black coat, who gave his opinion always about food and drink. He was from Moscow — his name Paul Leontievitch Rozanov — and I met him on a later occasion of which I shall have to tell in its place. Then there were two young girls who giggled a great deal and whispered together. They hung around Nina and stroked her hair and admired her dress, and laughed at Boris Grogoff and any one else who was near them.
Nina was immensely happy. She loved parties of course, and especially parties in which she was the hostess. She was like a young kitten or puppy in a white frock, with her hair tumbling over her eyes. She was greatly excited, and as joyous as though there were no war, and no afflicted Russia, and nothing serious in all the world. This was the first occasion on which I suspected that Grogoff cared for her. Outwardly he did nothing but chaff and tease her, and she responded in that quick rather sharp and very often crudely personal way at which foreigners for the first time in Russian company so often wonder. Badinage with Russians so quickly passes to lively and noisy quarrelling, which in its turn so suddenly fades into quiet contented amiability that it is little wonder that the observer feels rather breathless at it all. Grogoff was a striking figure, with his fine height and handsome head and bold eyes, but there was something about him that I did not like. Immensely self-confident, he nevertheless seldom opened his mouth without betraying great ignorance about almost everything. He was hopelessly ill-educated, and was the more able therefore from the very little knowledge that he had to construct a very simple Socialist creed in which the main statutes were that everything should be taken from the rich and given to the poor, the peasants should have all the land, and the rulers of the world be beheaded. He had no knowledge of other countries, although he talked very freely of what he called his “International Principles.” I could not respect him as I could many Russian revolutionaries, because he had never on any occasion put himself out or suffered any inconvenience for his principles, living as he did, comfortably, with all the food and clothes that he needed. At the same time he was, on the other hand, kindly and warm-hearted, and professed friendship for me, although he despised what he called my “Capitalistic tendencies.” Had he only known, he was far richer and more autocratic than I!
In the midst of this company Henry Bohun was rather shy and uncomfortable. He was suspicious always that they would laugh at his Russian (what mattered it if they did?), and he was distressed by the noise and boisterous friendliness of every one. I could not help smiling to myself as I watched him. He was learning very fast. He would not tell any one now that “he really thought that he did understand Russia,” nor would he offer to put his friends right about Russian characteristics and behaviour. He watched the young giggling girls, and the fat Rozanov, and the shrill young man with ill-concealed distress. Very far these from the Lizas and Natachas of his literary imagination — and yet not so far either, had he only known.
He pinned all his faith, as I could see, to Vera Michailovna, who did gloriously fulfil his self-instituted standards. And yet he did not know her at all! He was to suffer pain there too.
