The Secret City by Hugh Walpole - HTML preview

"Perhaps I will get tired of his strength one day--it may be--just as now I am tired of Nicholas's weakness. Everything has its end.

"But no! he has humour, and he sees life as it is. I shal be able always to tell him the truth. With Nicholas it is always lies...."

She suddenly sprang up and stood before me.

"Now, do you think me noble?" she cried.

"Yes," I answered.

"Ah! you are incorrigible! You have drunk Dostoieffsky until you can see nothing but God and the moujik! But I am alive, Ivan Andreievitch, not a heroine in a book! Alive, alive, alive! Not one of your Lisas or Annas or Natashas. I'm alive enough to shoot Uncle Alexei and poison Nicholas--but I'm soft too, soft so that I cannot bear to see a rabbit killed... and yet I love Sherry so that I am blind for him and deaf for him and dead for him--when he is not there. My love--the only one of my life--the first and the last--"

She flung out her arms:

"Life! Now! Before it is too late! I want it, I want him, I want happiness!"

She stood thus for a moment, staring out to the sea. Then her arms dropped, she laughed, fastening her cloak--

"There's your nobility, Ivan Andreievitch--theatrical, al of it. I know what I am, and I know what I shal do. Nicholas will live to eighty; I also. I shal hate him, but I shal he in an agony when he cuts his finger. I shall never see Sherry again. Later, he will marry a fresh English girl like an apple.... I, because I am weak, soft putty--I have made it so."

She turned away from me, staring desperately at the wal . When she looked back to me her face was grey.

She smiled. "What a baby you are!... But take care of yourself. Don't come on Monday if it's bad weather. Good-bye."

She went.

After a bad, sleepless night, and a morning during which I dozed in a nightmareish kind of way, I got up early in the afternoon, had some tea, and about six o'clock started out.

It was a lovely evening; the spring light was in the air, the tufted trees beside the canal were pink against the pale sky, and thin layers of ice, like fragments of jade, broke the soft blue of the water. How pleasant to feel the cobbles firm beneath one's feet, to know that the snow was gone for many months, and that light now would flood the streets and squares! Nevertheless, my foreboding was not raised, and the veils of colour hung from house to house and from street to street could not change the realities of the scene.

I climbed the stairs to the flat and found Vera waiting for me. She was with Uncle Ivan, who, I found to my disappointment, was coming with us.

We started off.

"We can walk across to the Bourse," she said. "It's such a lovely evening, and we're a little early."

We talked of nothing but the most ordinary things; Uncle Ivan's company prevented anything else. To say that I cursed him is to put it very mildly. He had been, I believe, oblivious of al the scenes that had occurred during the last weeks. If the Last Judgement occurred under his very nose, and he had had a cosy meal in front of him, he would have noticed nothing. The Revolution had had no effect on him at all; it did not seem strange to him that Semyonov should come to live with them; he had indeed fancied that Nicholas had not "been very well" lately, but then Nicholas had always been an odd and cantankerous fellow, and he, as he told me, never paid too much attention to his moods. His one anxiety was lest Sacha should be hindered from her usual shopping on the morrow, it being May Day, when there would be processions and other tiresome things. He hoped that there was enough food in the house.

"There will be cold cutlets and cheese," Vera said.

He told me that he real y did not know why he was going to this meeting.

He took no interest in politics, and he hated speeches, but he would like to see our Ambassador. He had heard that he was always excellently dressed....

Vera said very little. Her troubles that evening must have been accumulating upon her with terrible force--I did not know, at that time, about her night-scene with Nicholas. She was very quiet, and just as we entered the building she whispered to me:

"Once over to-morrow--"

I did not catch the rest. People pressed behind us, and for a moment we were separated; we were not alone again. I have wondered since what she meant by that, whether she had a foreboding or some more definite warning, or whether she simply referred to the danger of riots and general lawlessness. I shal never know now.

I had expected a crowded meeting, but I was not prepared for the multitude that I found. We entered by a side-door, and then passed up a narrow passage, which led us to the reserved seats at the side of the platform. I had secured these some days before. In the dark passage one could realise nothing; important gentlemen in frock-coats, officers, and one or two soldiers, were hurrying to and fro, with an air of having a great deal to do, and not knowing at all how to do it. Beyond the darkness there was a steady hum, like the distant whirr of a great machine. There was a very faint smel in the air of boots and human flesh. A stout gentleman with a rosette in his buttonhole showed us to our seats. Vera sat between Uncle Ivan and myself. When I looked about me I was amazed. The huge hall was packed so tightly with human beings that one could see nothing but wave on wave of faces, or, rather, the same face, repeated again and again and again, the face of a baby, of a child, of a credulous, cynical dreamer, a face the kindest, the naivest, the cruel est, the most friendly, the most human, the most savage, the most Eastern, and the most Western in the world.

That vast presentation of that reiterated visage seemed suddenly to explain everything to me. I felt at once the stupidity of any appeal, and the instant necessity for every kind of appeal. I felt the negation, the sudden slipping into insignificant unimportance of the whole of the Western world--and, at the same time, the dismissal of the East. "No longer my masters" a voice seemed to cry from the very heart of that multitude. "No longer will we halt at your command, no longer will your words be wisdom to us, no longer shal we smile with pleasure at your stories, and cringe with fear at your displeasure; you may hate our defection, you may lament our disloyalty, you may bribe us and smile upon us, you may preach to us and bewail our sins. We are no longer yours--WE ARE OUR OWN--Salute a new world, for it is nothing less that you see before you!..."

And yet never were there forces more unconscious of their destiny--utterly unselfconscious as animals, babies, the flowers of the field. Still there to be driven, perhaps to be persuaded, to be whipped, to be cajoled, to be blinded, to be tricked and deceived, drugged and deafened--but not for long! The end of that old world had come--the new world was at hand--"Life begins to-morrow!"

The dignitaries came upon the platform, and, beyond them al , in distinction, nobility, wisdom was our own Ambassador. This is no place for a record of the discretion and tact and forbearance that he had shown during those last two years. To him had fallen perhaps the most difficult work of all in the war. It might seem that on broad grounds the Allies had failed with Russia, but the end was not yet, and in years to come, when England reaps unexpected fruit from her Russian al iance, let her remember to whom she owed it. No one could see him there that night without realising that there stood before Russia, as England's representative, not only a great courtier and statesman, but a great gentleman, who had bonds of courage and endurance that linked him to the meanest soldier there.

I have emphasised this because he gave the note to the whole meeting.

Again and again one's eyes came back to him and always that high brow, that unflinching carriage of the head, the nobility and breeding of every movement gave one reassurance and courage. One's own troubles seemed smal beside that example, and the tangled morality of that vexed time seemed to be tested by a simpler and higher standard.

It was altogether a strange affair. At first it lacked interest, some member of the Italian Embassy spoke, I think, and then some one from Serbia. The audience was apathetic. Al those bodies, so tightly wedged together that arms and legs were held in an iron vice, stayed motionless, and once and again there would be a short burst of applause or a sibilant whisper, but it would be something mechanical and uninspired. I could see one soldier, in the front row behind the barrier, a stout fel ow with a face of supreme good humour, down whose forehead the sweat began to trickle; he was patient for a while, then he tried to raise his hand. He could not move without sending a ripple down the whole front line. Heads were turned indignantly in his direction. He submitted; then the sweat trickled into his eyes. He made a superhuman effort and half raised his arm; the crowd pushed again and his arm fel .

His face wore an expression of ludicrous despair....

The hal got hotter and hotter. Soldiers seemed to be still pressing in at the back. The Italian gentleman screamed and waved his arms, but the faces turned up to his were blank and amiably expressionless.

"It is indeed terribly hot," said Uncle Ivan.

Then came a sailor from the Black Sea Fleet who had made himself famous during these weeks by his impassioned oratory. He was a thin dark-eyed fel ow, and he obviously knew his business. He threw himself at once into the thick of it al , paying no attention to the stout frock-coated gentlemen who sat on the platform, dealing out no compliments, whether to the audience or the speakers, wasting no time at all. He told them all that they had debts to pay, that their honour was at stake, and that Europe was watching them. I don't know that that Face that stared at him cared very greatly for Europe, but it is certain that a breath of emotion passed across it, that there was a stir, a movement, a response....

He sat down, there was a roar of applause; he regarded them contemptuously. At that moment I caught sight of Boris Grogoff. I had been on the watch for him. I had thought it very likely that he would be there. Well, there he was, at the back of the crowd, listening with a contemptuous sneer on his face, and a long golden curl poking out from under his cap.

And then something else occurred--something really strange. I was conscious, as one sometimes is in a crowd, that I was being stared at by some one deliberately. I looked about me, and then, led by the attraction of the other's gaze, I saw quite close to me, on the edge of the crowd nearest to the platform, the Rat.

He was dressed rather jauntily in a dark suit with his cup set on one side, and his hair shining and curled. His face glittered with soap, and he was smiling in his usual friendly way. He gazed at me quite steadily.

My lips moved very slightly in recognition. He smiled and, I fancy, winked.

Then, as though he had actually spoken to me, I seemed to hear him say:

"Well, good-bye.... I'm never coming to you again. Good-bye, good-bye."

It was as definite a farewell as you can have from a man, more definite than you will have from most, as though, further, he said: "I'm gone for good and al . I have other company and more profitable plunder. On the back of our glorious Revolution I rise from crime to crime....

Good-bye."

I was, in sober truth, never to speak to him again. I cannot but regret that on the last occasion when I should have a real opportunity of looking him full in the face, he was to offer me a countenance of friendly good-humour and amiable rascality.

I shal have, until I die, a feeling of tenderness....

I was recal ed from my observation of Grogoff and the Rat by the sensation that the waters of emotion were rising higher around me. I raised my eyes and saw that the Belgian Consul was addressing the meeting. He was a stout little man, with eye-glasses and a face of no importance, but it was quite obvious at once that he was most terribly in earnest. Because he did not know the Russian language he was under the unhappy necessity of having a translator, a thin and amiable Russian, who suffered from short sight and a nervous stammer.

He could not therefore have spoken under heavier disadvantages, and my heart ached for him. It need not have done so. He started in a low voice, and they shouted to him to speak up. At the end of his first paragraph the amiable Russian began his translation, sticking his nose into the paper, losing the place and stuttering over his sentences.

There was a restless movement in the hal , and the poor Belgian Consul seemed lost. He was made, however, of no mean stuff. Before the Russian had finished his translation the little man had begun again. This time he had stepped forward, waving his glasses and his head and his hand, bending forward and backward, his voice rising and rising. At the end of his next paragraph he paused and, because the Russian was slow and stammering once again, went forward on ids own account. Soon he forgot himself, his audience, his translator, everything except his own dear Belgium. His voice rose and rose; he pleaded with a marvellous rhythm of eloquence her history, her fate, her shameful devastation. He appealed on behalf of her murdered children, her ravished women, her slaughtered men.

He appealed on behalf of her Arts, her Cathedrals, and libraries ruined, her towns plundered. He told a story, very quietly, of an old grandfather and grandmother murdered and their daughter ravished before the eyes of her tiny children. Here he himself began to shed tears. He tried to brush them back. He paused and wiped his eyes.... Final y, breaking down altogether, he turned away and hid his face....

I do not suppose that there were more than a dozen persons in that hal who understood anything of the language in which he spoke. Certainly it was the merest gibberish to that whole army of listening men.

Nevertheless, with every word that he uttered the emotion grew tenser.

Cries--little sharp cries like the bark of a puppy--broke out here and there. "_Verrno! Verrno! Verrno_! (True! True! True!)" Movements, like the swift finger of the wind on the sea, hovered, wavered, and vanished....

He turned back to them, his voice broken with sobs, and he could only cry the one word "Belgia... Belgia... Belgia"... To that they responded. They began to shout, to cry aloud. The screams of "_Verrno...

Verrno_" rose until it seemed that the roof would rise with them.

The air was filled with shouts, "Bravo for the Al ies." "_Soyousniki!

Soyousniki_!" Men raised their caps and waved them, smiled upon one another as though they had suddenly heard wonderful news, shouted and shouted and shouted... and in the midst of it al the little rotund Belgian Consul stood bowing and wiping his eyes.

How pleased we al were! I whispered to Vera: "You see! They do care!

Their hearts are touched. We can do anything with them now!"

Even Uncle Ivan was moved, and murmured to himself "Poor Belgium! Poor Belgium!"

How delighted, too, were the gentlemen on the platform. Smiling, they whispered to one another, and I saw several shake hands. A great moment.

The little Consul bowed final y and sat down.

Never shal I forget the applause that fol owed. Like one man the thousands shouted, tears raining down their cheeks, shaking hands, even embracing! A vast movement, as though the wind had caught them and driven them forward, rose, lifted them, so that they swayed like bending corn towards the platform, for an instant we were al caught up together. There was one great cry: "Belgium!"

The sound rose, fel , sunk into a muttering whisper, died to give way to the breathless attention that awaited the next speaker.

I whispered to Vera: "I shal never forget that. I'm going to leave on that. It's good enough for me."

"Yes," she said, "we'll go."

"What a pity," whispered Uncle Ivan, "that they didn't understand what they were shouting about."

We slipped out behind the platform; turned down the dark long passage, hearing the new speaker's voice like a bel ringing beyond thick walls, and found our way into the open.

The evening was wonderful y fresh and clear. The Neva lay before us like a blue scarf, and the air faded into colourless beauty above the dark purple of the towers and domes. Vera caught my arm: "Look!" she whispered. "There's Boris!" I knew that she had on several occasions tried to force her way into his flat, that she had written every day to Nina (letters as it afterwards appeared, that Boris kept from her). I was afraid that she would do something violent.

"Wait!" I whispered, "perhaps Nina is here somewhere."

Grogoff was standing with another man on a small improvised platform just outside the gates of the Bourse.

As the soldiers came out (many of them were leaving now on the ful tide of their recent emotions) Grogoff and his friend caught them, held them, and proceeded to instruct their minds.

I caught some of Grogoff's sentences: "_Tovaristchi_!" I heard him cry,

"Comrades! Listen to me. Don't allow your feelings to carry you away!

You have serious responsibilities now, and the thing for you to do is not to permit sentiment to make you foolish. Who brought you into this war? Your leaders? No, your old masters. They bled you and robbed you and slaughtered you to fill their own pockets. Who is ruling the world now? The people to whom the world truly belongs? No, the Capitalists, the money-grubbers, the old thieves like Nicholas who is now under lock and key... Capitalists... England, France... Thieves, Robbers....

"Belgium? What is Belgium to you? Did you swear to protect her people?

Does England, who pretends such loving care for Belgium, does she look after Ireland? What about her persecution of South Africa? Belgium? Have you heard what she did in the Congo?..."

As the men came, talking, smiling, wiping their eyes, they were caught by Grogoff's voice. They stood there and listened. Soon they began to nod their heads. I heard them muttering that good old word "_Verrno!

Verrno_!" again. The crowd grew. The men began to shout their approval.

"Aye! it's true," I heard a solder near me mutter. "The English are thieves"; and another "Belgium?... After al I could not understand a word of what that little fat man said."

I heard no more, but I did not wonder now at the floods that were rising and rising, soon to engulf the whole of this great country. The end of this stage of our story was approaching for all of us.

We three had stood back, a little in the shadow, gazing about to see whether we could hail a cab.

As we waited I took my last look at Grogoff, his stout figure against the purple sky, the masts of the ships, the pale tumbling river, the black line of the farther shore. He stood, his arms waving, his mouth open, the personification of the disease from which Russia was suffering.

A cab arrived. I turned, said as it were, my farewel to Grogoff and everything for which he stood, and went.

We drove home almost in silence. Vera, staring in front of her, her face proud and reserved, building up a wal of her own thoughts.

"Come in for a moment, won't you?" she asked me, rather reluctantly I thought. But I accepted, climbed the stairs and fol owed Uncle Ivan's stubby and self-satisfied progress into the flat.

I heard Vera cry. I hurried after her and found, standing close together, in the middle of the room Henry Bohun and Nina!

With a little sob of joy and shame too, Nina was locked in Vera's arms.

XV

This is obviously the place for the story, based, of course, on the very modest and slender account given me by the hero of it, of young Bohun's knightly adventure. In its inception the whole affair is still mysterious to me. Looking back from this distance of time I see that he was engaged on one knightly adventure after another--first Vera, then Markovitch, lastly Nina. The first I caught at the very beginning, the second I may be said to have inspired, but to the third I was completely blind. I was blind, I suppose, because, in the first place, Nina had, from the beginning, laughed at Bohun, and in the second, she had been entirely occupied with Lawrence.

Bohun's knight-errantry came upon her with, I am sure, as great a shock of surprise as it did upon me. And yet, when you come to think of it, it was the most natural thing. They were the only two of our party who had any claim to real youth, and they were still so young that they could believe in one ideal after another as quick as you can catch goldfish in a bowl of water. Bohun would, of course, have indignantly denied that he was out to help anybody, but that, nevertheless, was the direction in which his character led him; and once Russia had stripped from him that thin coat of self-satisfaction, he had nothing to do but mount his white charger and enter the tournament.

I've no idea when he first thought of Nina. He did not, of course, like her at the beginning, and I doubt whether she caused him any real concern, too, until her flight to Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once tel ing her she ought to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose.

At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off to a fellow like Grogoff!

He thought of it the more seriously when he saw the agony Vera was in.

She did not ask him to help her, and so he did nothing; but he watched her efforts, the letters that she wrote, the eagerness with which she ravished the post, her fruitless visits to Grogoff's flat, her dejected misery over her failure. He began himself to form plans, not, I am convinced, from any especial affection for Nina, but simply because he had the soul of a knight, although, thank God, he didn't know it. I expect, too, that he was pretty dissatisfied with his knight-errantries.

His impassioned devotion to Vera had led to nothing at al , his enthusiasm for Russia had led to a most unsatisfactory Revolution, and his fatherly protection of Markovitch had inspired apparently nothing more fruitful than distrust. I would like to emphasise that it was in no way from any desire to interfere in other people's affairs that young Bohun undertook these Quests. He had none of my own meddlesome quality.

He had, I think, very little curiosity and no psychological self-satisfaction, but he had a kind heart, an adventurous spirit, and a hatred for the wrong and injustice which seemed just now to be creeping about the world; but all this, again thank God, was entirely subconscious. He knew nothing whatever about himself.

The thought of Nina worried him more and more. After he went to bed at night, he would hear her laugh and see her mocking smile and listen to her shrill imitations of his own absurdities. She had been the one happy person amongst them al , and now--! Well, he had seen enough of Boris Grogoff to know what sort of fellow he was. He came at last to the conclusion that, after a week or two she would be "sick to death of it,"

and longing to get away, but then "her pride would keep her at it. She'd got a devil of a lot of pride." He waited, then, for a while, and hoped, I suppose, that some of Vera's appeals would succeed. They did not; and then it struck him that Vera was the very last person to whom Nina would yield--just because she wanted to yield to her most, which was pretty subtle of him and very near the truth.

No one else seemed to be making any very active efforts, and at last he decided that he must do something himself. He discovered Grogoff's address, went to the Gagarinskaya and looked up at the flat, hung about a bit in the hope of seeing Nina. Then he did see her at Rozanov's party, and this, although he said nothing to me about it at the time, had a tremendous effect on him. He thought she looked "awful." Al the joy had gone from her; she was years older, miserable, and defiant. He didn't speak to her, but from that night he made up his mind. Rozanov's party may be said to have been real y the turning-point of his life. It was the night that he came out of his shel , grew up, faced the world--and it was the night that he discovered that he cared about Nina.

The vision of her poor little tired face, her "rather dirty white dress," her "grown-up" hair, her timidity and her loneliness, never left him for a moment. Al the time that I thought he was occupied only with the problem of Markovitch and Semyonov, he was much more deeply occupied with Nina. So unnaturally secretive can young men be!

At last he decided on a plan. He chose the Monday, the day of the Bourse meeting, because he fancied that Grogoff would be present at that and he might therefore catch Nina alone, and because he and his fel ow-propagandists would be expected also at the meeting and he would therefore be free of his office earlier on that afternoon. He had no idea at all how he would get into the flat, but he thought that fortune would be certain to favour him. He always thought that.

Well, fortune did. He left the office and arrived in the Gagarinskaya about half-past five in the evening. He walked about a little, and then saw a bearded tall fellow drive up in an Isvostchick. He recognised this man as Lenin, the soul of the anti-Government party, and a man who was afterwards to figure very prominently in Russia's politics. This fel ow argued very hotly with the Isvostchick about his fare, then vanished through the double doors. Bohun followed him. Outside Grogoff's flat Lenin waited and rang the bell. Bohun waited on the floor below; then, when he heard the door open, he noiselessly slipped up the stairs, and, as Lenin entered, fol owed behind him whilst the old servant's back was turned helping Lenin with his coat. He found, as he had hoped, a crowd of cloaks and a Shuba hanging beside the door in the dark corner of the wal . He crept behind these. He heard Lenin say to the servant that, after all, he would not take off his coat, as he was leaving again immediately. Then directly afterwards Grogoff came into the hal .

That was the moment of crisis. Did Grogoff go to the rack for his coat and al was over; a very unpleasant scene must fol ow--a ludicrous expulsion, a fling or two at the amiable habits of thieving and deceit on the part of the British nation, and any hope of seeing Nina ruined perhaps for ever. Worst of al , the ignominy of it! No young man likes to be discovered hidden behind a coat-rack, however honest his original intentions!

His heart beat to suffocation as he peeped between the coats.... Grogoff was already wearing his own overcoat. It was, thank God, too warm an evening for a Shuba. The men shook hands, and Grogoff saying something rather deferential y about the meeting, Lenin, in short, brusque tones, put him immediately in his place. Then they went out together, the door closed behind them, and the flat was as silent as an aquarium. He waited for a while, and then, hearing nothing, crept into the hall. Perhaps Nina was out. If the old servant saw him she would think him a burglar and would certainly scream. He pushed back the door in front of him, stepped forward, and almost stepped upon Nina!

She gave a little cry, not seeing whom it was. She was looking very untidy, her hair loose down her back, and a rough apron over her dress.

She looked ill, and there were heavy black lines under her eyes as though she had not slept for weeks.

Then she saw who it was and, in spite of herself, smiled.

"Genry!" she exclaimed.

"Yes," he said in a whisper, closing the door very softly behind him.

"Look here, don't scream or do anything foolish. I don't want that old woman to catch me."

He has no very clear memory of the conversation that fol owed. She stood with her back to the wal , storing at him, and every now and again taking up a corner of her pinafore and biting it. He remembered that action of hers especial y as being absurdly childish. But the overwhelming impression that he had of her was of her terror--terror of everything and of everybody, of everybody apparently except himself.

(She told him afterwards that he was the only person in the world who could have rescued her just then because she simply couldn't be frightened of some one at whom she'd laughed so often.) She was terrified, of course, of Grogoff--she couldn't mention his name without trembling--but she was terrified also of the old servant, of the flat, of the room, of the clock, of every sound or hint of a sound that there was in the world. She to be so frightened! She of whom he would have said that she was equal to any one or anything! What she must have been through during those weeks to have brought her to this!... But she told him very little. He urged her at once that she must come away with him, there and then, just as she was. She simply shook her head at that.

"No... No... No..." she kept repeating. "You don't understand."

"I do understand," he answered, always whispering, and with one ear on the door lest the old woman should hear and come in. "We've got very little time," he said. "Grogoff will never let you go if he's here. I know why you don't come back--you think we'll al look down on you for having gone. But that's nonsense. We are al simply miserable without you."

But she simply continued to repeat "No... No..." Then, as he urged her still further, she begged him to go away. She said that he simply didn't know what Grogoff would do if he returned and found him, and although he'd gone to a meeting he might return at any moment. Then, as though to urge upon him Grogoff's ferocity, in little hoarse whispers she let him see some of the things that during