The Secret City Part 26

She hurried forward with Nina, and Lawrence and I came more slowly behind. We were now in a labyrinth of little streets and black overhanging flats. Not a soul anywhere--only the moonlight in great broad flashes of light--once or twice a woman hurried by keeping in the shadow. Sometimes, at the far end of the street, we saw the s.h.i.+ning, naked Nevski.

Lawrence was silent, then, just as we were turning into the square where the Michailovsky Theatre was he began:

"What's the matter?... What's the matter with her, Durward? What have I done?"

"I don't know that you've done anything," I answered.

"But don't you see?" he went on. "She won't speak to me. She won't look at me. I won't stand this long. I tell you I won't stand it long. I'll make her come off with me in spite of them all. I'll have her to myself.

I'll make her happy, Durward, as she's never been in all her life. But I must have her.... I can't live close to her like this, and yet never be with her. Never alone, never alone. Why is she behaving like this to me?"

He spoke really like a man in agony. The words coming from him in little tortured sentences as though they were squeezed from him desperately, with pain at every breath that he drew.

"She's afraid of herself, I expect, not of you." I put my hand on his sleeve. "Lawrence," I said, "go home. Go back to England. This is becoming too much for both of you. Nothing can come of it, but unhappiness for everybody."

"No!" he said. "It's too late for any of your Platonic advice, Durward.

I'm going to have her, even though the earth turns upside down."

We went up the steps and into the theatre. There was, of course, scarcely any one there. The Michailovsky is not a large theatre, but the stalls looked extraordinarily desolate, every seat watching one with a kind of insolent wink as though, like the Nevski ten minutes before it said, "Well, now you humans are getting frightened, you're all stopping away. We're coming back to our own!"

There was some such malicious air about the whole theatre. Above, in the circle, the little empty boxes were dim and shadowy, and one fancied figures moved there, and then saw that there was no one. Someone up in the gallery laughed, and the laugh went echoing up and down the empty s.p.a.ces. A few people came in and sat nervously about, and no one spoke except in a low whisper, because voices sounded so loud and impertinent.

Then again the man in the gallery laughed, and every one looked up frowning. The play began. It was, I think, _Les Idees de Francoise_, but of that I cannot be sure. It was a farce of the regular French type, with a bedroom off, and marionettes who continually separated into couples and giggled together. The giggling to-night was of a sadly hollow sort. I pitied and admired the actors, spontaneous as a rule, but now bravely stuffing any kind of sawdust into the figures in their hands, but the leakage was terrible, and the sawdust lay scattered all about the stage. The four of us sat as solemn as statues--I don't think one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed.

I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the audience thinking of their safety, and the players thinking of their salaries, and Protopopoff at home thinking of his victory, and the Czar in Tsarskoe thinking of his G.o.dsent autocracy, and Europe thinking of its ideals, and Germany thinking of its militarism--all self-justified, all mistaken, and all fulfilling some deeper plan at whose purpose they could not begin to guess. And how intermingled we all were! Vera and Nina, M. Robert and Mdlle. Flori on the other side of the footlights, Trenchard and Marie killed in Galicia, the Kaiser and Hindenburg, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the postmaster of my village in Glebes.h.i.+re.

The curtain is coming down, the fat husband is deceived once again, the lovers are in the bedroom listening behind the door, the comic waiter is winking at the chamber-maid....

The lights are up and we are alone again in the deserted theatre.

Towards the end of the last interval I went out into the pa.s.sage behind the stalls to escape from the chastened whispering that went trembling up and down like the hissing of terrified snakes. I leaned against the wall in the deserted pa.s.sage and watched the melancholy figure of the cloak-room attendant huddled up on a chair, his head between his hands.

Suddenly I saw Vera. She came up to me as though she were going to walk past me, and then she stopped and spoke. She talked fast, not looking at me, but beyond, down the pa.s.sage.

"I'm sorry, Ivan Andreievitch," she said. "I was cross the other day. I hurt you. I oughtn't to have done that."

"You know," I said, "that I never thought of it for a minute."

"No, I was wrong. But I've been terribly worried during these last weeks. I've thought it all out to-day and I've decided--" there was a catch in her breath and she paused; she went on--"decided that there mustn't be any more weakness. I'm much weaker than I thought. I would be ashamed if I didn't think that shame was a silly thing to have. But now I am quite clear; I must make Nicholas and Nina happy. Whatever else comes I must do that. It has been terrible, these last weeks. We've all been angry and miserable, and now I must put it right. I can if I try.

I've been forgetting that I chose my own life myself, and now I mustn't be cowardly because it's difficult. I will make it right myself...."

She paused again, then she said, looking me straight in the face,

"Ivan Andreievitch, does Nina care for Mr. Lawrence?"

She was looking at me, with large black eyes so simply, with such trust in me, that I could only tell her the truth.

"Yes," I said, "she does."

Her eyes fell, then she looked up at me again.

"I thought so," she said. "And does he care for her?"

"No," I said, "he does not."

"He must," she said. "It would be a very happy thing for them to marry."

She spoke very low, so that I could scarcely hear her words.

"Wait, Vera," I said. "Let it alone. Nina's very young. The mood will pa.s.s. Lawrence, perhaps, will go back to England."

She drew in her breath and I saw her hand tremble, but she still looked at me, only now her eyes were not so clear. Then she laughed. "I'm getting an old woman, Ivan Andreievitch. It's ridiculous...." She broke off. Then held out her hand.

"But we'll always be friends now, won't we? I'll never be cross with you again."

I took her hand. "I'm getting old too," I said. "And I'm useless at everything. I only make a bungle of everything I try. But I'll be your true friend to the end of my time--"

The bell rang and we went back into the theatre.

VIII

And yet, strangely enough, when I lay awake that night in my room on my deserted island, it was of Markovitch that I was thinking. Of all the memories of the preceding evening that of Markovitch huddled over his food, sullen and glowering, with Semyonov watching him, was predominant.

Markovitch was, so to speak, the dark horse of them all, and he was also when one came to look at it all the way round the centre of the story.

And yet it was Markovitch with his inconsistencies, his mysteries, his impulses, and purposes, whom I understood least of them all. He makes, indeed, a very good symbol of my present difficulties.

In that earlier experience of Marie in the forests of Galicia the matter had been comparatively easy. I had then been concerned with the outward manifestation of war--cannon, cholera, sh.e.l.l, and the green glittering trees of the forest itself. But the war had made progress since then. It had advanced out of material things into the very souls of men. It was no longer the forest of bark and tinder with which the chiefs of this world had to deal, but, to adapt the Russian proverb itself, "with the dark forest of the hearts of men."

How much more baffling and intangible this new forest, and how deeply serious a business now for those who were still thoughtlessly and selfishly juggling with human affairs.

"There is no ammunition," I remember crying desperately in Galicia. We had moved further than the question of ammunition now.

I had a strange dream that night. I saw my old forest of two years before--the very woods of Buchatch with the hot painted leaves, the purple slanting sunlight, the smell, the cries, the whirr of the sh.e.l.l.

But in my dream the only inhabitant of that forest was Markovitch. He was pursued by some animal. What beast it was I could not see, always the actual vision was denied to me, but I could hear it plunging through the thickets, and once I caught a glimpse of a dark crouching body like a shadow against the light.

But Markovitch I saw all the time, sweating with heat and terror, his clothes torn, his eyes inflamed, his breath coming in desperate pants, turning once and again as though he would stop and offer defiance, then hasting on, his face and hands scratched and bleeding. I wanted to offer him help and a.s.sistance, but something prevented me; I could not get to him. Finally he vanished from my sight and I was left alone in the painted forest....

All the next morning I sat and wondered what I had better do, and at last I decided that I would go and see Henry Bohun.

I had not seen Bohun for several weeks. I myself had been, of late, less to the flat in the English Prospect, but I knew that he had taken my advice that he should be kind to Nicholas Markovitch with due British seriousness, and that he had been trying to bring some kind of relations.h.i.+p about. He had even asked Markovitch to dine alone with him, and Markovitch, although he declined the invitation was, I believe, greatly touched.

So, about half-past one, I started off for Bohun's office on the Fontanka. I've said somewhere before, I think, that Bohun's work was in connection with the n.o.ble but uphill task of enlightening the Russian public as to the righteousness of the war, the British character, and the Anglo-Russian alliance. I say "uphill," because only a few of the _real_ population of Russia showed the slightest desire to know anything whatever about any country outside their own. Their interest is in ideas not in boundaries--and what I mean by "real" will be made patent by the events of this very day. However, Bohun did his best, and it was not his fault that the British Government could only spare enough men and money to cover about one inch of the whole of Russia--and, I hasten to add, that if that same British Government had plastered the whole vast country from Archangel to Vladivostock with pamphlets, orators, and photographs it would not have altered, in the slightest degree, after events.

To make any effect in Russia England needed not only men and money but a hundred years' experience of the country. That same experience was possessed by the Germans alone of all the Western peoples--and they have not neglected to use it.

I went by tram to the Fontanka, and the streets seemed absolutely quiet. That strange s.h.i.+ning Nevski of the night before was a dream. Some one in the tram said something about rifle-shots in the Summer Garden, but no one listened. As Vera had said last night we had, none of us, much faith in Russian revolutions.

I went up in the lift to the Propaganda office and found it a very nice airy place, clean and smart, with coloured advertis.e.m.e.nts by Shepperson and others on the walls, pictures of Hampstead and St. Albans and Kew Gardens that looked strangely satisfactory and homely to me, and rather touching and innocent. There were several young women clicking away at typewriters, and maps of the Western front, and a colossal toy map of the London Tube, and a nice English library with all the best books from Chaucer to D.H. Lawrence and from the _Religio Medici_ to E.V. Lucas'

_London_.