LAWRENCE
I
Of some of the events that I am now about to relate it is obvious that I could not have been an eye-witness--and yet, looking back from the strange isolation that is now my world I find it incredibly difficult to realise what I saw and what I did not. Was I with Nina and Vera on that Tuesday night when they stood face to face with one another for the first time? Was I with Markovitch during his walk through that marvel ous new world that he seemed himself to have created? I know that I shared none of these things..., and yet it seems to me that I was at the heart of them al . I may have been told many things by the actors in those events--I may not. I cannot now in retrospect see any of it save as my own personal experience, and as my own personal experience I must relate it; but, as I have already said at the beginning of this book, no one is compel ed to believe either my tale or my interpretation. Every man would, I suppose, like to tell his story in the manner of some other man. I can conceive the events of this part of my narration being interpreted in the spirit of the wildest farce, of the genteelest comedy, of the most humorous satire--"Other men, Other gifts." I am a dul and pompous fel ow, as Semyonov often tells me; and I hope that I never allowed him to see how deeply I felt the truth of his words.
Meanwhile I will begin with a smal adventure of Henry Bohun's.
Apparently, one evening soon after Nina's party, he found himself about half-past ten in the evening, lonely and unhappy, walking down the Nevski. Gay and happy crowds wandered by him, brushing him aside, refusing to look at him, showing in fact no kind of interest in his existence. He was suddenly frightened, the distances seemed terrific and the Nevski was so hard and bright and shining--that it had no use at al for any lonely young man. He decided suddenly that he would go and see me. He found an Isvostchick, but when they reached the Ekaterinsgofsky Canal the surly coachman refused to drive further, saying that his horse had gone lame, and that this was as far as he had bargained to go.
Henry was forced to leave the cab, and then found himself outside the little people's cinema, where he had once been with Vera and myself.
He knew that my rooms were not far away, and he started off beside the white and silent canal, wondering why he had come, and wishing he were back in bed.
There was still a great deal of the baby in Henry, and ghosts and giants and scaly-headed monsters were not incredibilities to his young imagination. As he left the main thoroughfare and turned down past the widening docks, he suddenly knew that he was terrified. There had been stories of wild attacks on rich strangers, sand-bagging and the rest, often enough, but it was not of that kind of thing that he was afraid.
He told me afterwards that he expected to see "long thick crawling creatures" creeping towards him over the ice. He continual y turned round to see whether some one were fol owing him. When he crossed the tumbledown bridge that led to my island it seemed that he was absolutely alone in the whole world. The masts of the ships dim through the cold mist were like tangled spiders' webs. A strange hard red moon peered over the towers and chimneys of the distant dockyard. The ice was limitless, and of a dirty grey pallor, with black shadows streaking it.
My island must have looked desolate enough, with its dirty snow-heaps, old boards and scrap-iron and tumbledown cottages.
Again, as on his first arrival in Petrograd, Henry was faced by the solemn fact that events are so often romantic in retrospect, but grimly realistic in experience. He reached my lodging and found the door open.
He climbed the dark rickety stairs and entered my sitting-room. The blinds were not drawn, and the red moon peered through on to the grey shadows that the ice beyond always flung. The stove was not burning, the room was cold and deserted. Henry called my name and there was no answer. He went into my bedroom and there was no one there. He came back and stood there listening.
He could hear the creaking of some bar beyond the window and the melancholy whistle of a distant train.
He was held there, as though spel bound. Suddenly he thought that he heard some one climbing the stairs. He gave a cry, and that was answered by a movement so close to him that it was almost at his elbow.
"Who's there?" he cried. He saw a shadow pass between the moon and himself. In a panic of terror he cried out, and at the same time struck a match. Some one came towards him, and he saw that it was Markovitch.
He was so relieved to find that it was a friend that he did not stop to wonder what Markovitch should be doing hiding in my room. It afterwards struck him that Markovitch looked odd. "Like a kind of conspirator, in old shabby Shuba with the col ar turned up. He looked jolly ill and dirty, as though he hadn't slept or washed. He didn't seem a bit surprised at seeing me there, and I think he scarcely realised that it _was_ me. He was thinking of something else so hard that he couldn't take me in."
"Oh, Bohun!" he said in a confused way.
"Hul o, Nicolai Leontievitch," Bohun said, trying to be unconcerned.
"What are you doing here?"
"Came to see Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "Wasn't here; I was going to write to him."
Bohun then lit a candle and discovered that the place was in a very considerable mess. Some one had been sifting my desk, and papers and letters were lying about the floor. The drawers of my table were open, and one chair was over-turned. Markovitch stood back near the window, looking at Bohun suspiciously. They must have been a curious couple for such a position. There was an awkward pause, and then Bohun, trying to speak easily, said:
"Well, it seems that Durward isn't coming. He's out dining somewhere I expect."
"Probably," said Markovitch drily.
There was another pause, then Markovitch broke out with: "I suppose you think I've been here trying to steal something."
"Oh no--oh no--no--" stammered Bohun.
"But I have," said Markovitch. "You can look round and see. There it is on every side of you. I've been trying to find a letter."
"Oh yes," said Bohun nervously.
"Well, that seems to you terrible," went on Markovitch, growing ever fiercer. "Of course it seems to you perfect Englishmen a dreadful thing.
But why heed it?... You al do things just as bad, only you are hypocrites."
"Oh yes, certainly," said Bohun.
"And now," said Markovitch with a snarl. "I'm sure you will not think me a proper person for you to lodge with any longer--and you will be right.
I am not a proper person. I have no sense of decency, thank God, and no Russian has any sense of decency, and that is why we are beaten and despised by the whole world, and yet are finer than them all--so you'd better not lodge with us any more."
"But of course," said Bohun, disliking more and more this uncomfortable scene--"of course I shal continue to stay with you. You are my friends, and one doesn't mind what one's friends do. One's friends are one's friends."
Suddenly, then, Markovitch jerked himself forward, "just as though,"
Bohun afterwards described it to me, "he had shot himself out of a catapault."
"Tel me," he said, "is your English friend in love with my wife?"
What Bohun wanted to do then was to run out of the room, down the dark stairs, and away as fast as his legs would carry him. He had not been in Russia so long that he had lost his English dislike of scenes, and he was seriously afraid that Markovitch was, as he put it, "bang off his head."
But at this critical moment, he remembered, it seems, my injunction to him, "to be kind to Markovitch--to make a friend of him." That had always seemed to him before impossible enough, but now, at the very moment when Markovitch was at his queerest, he was also at his most pathetic, looking there in the mist and shadows too untidy and dirty and miserable to be real y alarming. Henry then took courage. "That's all nonsense, Markovitch," he said. "I suppose by 'your English friend' you mean Lawrence. He thinks the world of your wife, of course, as we al do, but he's not the fel ow to be in love. I don't suppose he's ever been real y in love with a woman in his life. He's a kindly good-hearted chap, Lawrence, and he wouldn't do harm to a fly."
Markovitch peered into Bohun's face. "What did you come here for, any of you?" he asked. "What's Russia over-run with foreigners for? We'll clear the lot of you out, al of you...." Then he broke off, with a pathetic little gesture, his hand up to his head. "But I don't know what I'm saying--I don't mean it, really. Only things are so difficult, and they slip away from one so.
"I love Russia and I love my wife, Mr. Bohun--and they've both left me.
But you aren't interested in that. Why should you be? Only remember when you're inclined to laugh at me that I'm like a man in a cockle-shell boat--and it isn't my fault. I was put in it."
"But I'm never inclined to laugh," said Bohun eagerly. "I may be young and only an Englishman--but I shouldn't wonder if I don't understand better than you think. You try and see.... And I'll tel you another thing, Nicolai Leontievitch, I loved your wife myself--loved her madly--and she was so good to me and so far above me, that I saw that it was like loving one of the angels. That's what we al feel, Nicolai Leontievitch, so that you needn't have any fear--she's too far above all of us. And I only want to be your friend and hers, and to help you in any way I can."
(I can see Bohun saying this, very sincere, his cheeks flushed, eager.) Markovitch held out both his hands.
"You're right," he cried. "She's above us all. It's true that she's an angel, and we are al her servants. You have helped me by saying what you have, and I won't forget it. You are right; I am wasting my time with ridiculous suspicions when I ought to be working. Concentration, that's what I want, and perhaps you will give it me."
He suddenly came forward and kissed Bohun on both cheeks. He smelt, Bohun thought, of vodka. Bohun didn't like the embrace, of course, but he accepted it graceful y.
"Now we'll go away," said Markovitch.
"We ought to put things straight," said Bohun.
"No; I shal leave things as they are," said Markovitch, "so that he shal see exactly what I've done. I'll write a note."
He scribbled a note to me in pencil. I have it still. It ran: Dear Ivan Andreievitch--I looked for a letter from my wife to you. In doing so I was I suppose contemptible. But no matter. At least you see me as I am. I clasp your hand, N. Markovitch.
They went away together.
II
I was greatly surprised to receive, a few days later, an invitation from Baron Wilderling; he asked me to go with him on one of the first evenings in March to a performance of Lermontov's "Masquerade" at the Alexandra Theatre. I say Lermontov, but heaven knows that that great Russian poet was not supposed to be going to have much to say in the affair. This performance had been in preparation for at least ten years, and when such delights as Gordon Craig's setting of "Hamlet," or Benois'
dresses for "La Locandiera" were discussed, the Wise Ones said:
"Ah,--al very well--just wait until you see 'Masquerade.'"
These manifestations of the artistic spirit had not been very numerous of late in Petrograd. At the beginning of the war there had been many cabarets--"The Cow," "The Calf," "The Dog," "The Striped Cat"--and these had been underground cellars, lighted by Chinese lanterns, and the hal s decorated with Futurist paintings by Yakkolyeff or some other still more advanced spirit. It seemed strange to me as I dressed that evening. I do not know how long it was since I had put on a dinner-jacket. With the exception of that one other visit to Baron Wilderling this seemed to be my one link with the old world, and it was curious to feel its fascination, its air of comfort and order and cleanliness, its courtesy and discipline. "I think I'll leave these rooms," I thought as I looked about me, "and take a decent flat somewhere."
It is a strange fact, behind which there lies, I believe, some odd sort of moral significance, that I cannot now recal the events of that evening in any kind of clear detail. I remember that it was bitterly cold, with a sky that was flooded with stars. The snow had a queer metal ic sheen upon it as though it were coloured ice, and I can see now the Nevski like a slab of some fiercely painted metal rising out of the very smack of our horses' hoofs as my sleigh sped along--as though, silkworm-like, I spun it out of the entrails of the sledge. It was al light and fire and colour that night, with towers of gold and frosted green, and even the black crowds that thronged the Nevski pavements shot with colour.
Somewhere in one of Shorthouse's stories--in _The Little Schoolmaster Mark_, I think--he gives a curious impression of a whirling fantastic crowd of revel ers who evoke by their movements some evil pattern in the air around them, and the boy who is standing in their midst sees this dark twisted sinister picture forming against the gorgeous walls and the coloured figures until it blots out the whole scene and plunges him into darkness. I will not pretend that on this evening I discerned anything sinister or ominous in the gay scene that the Alexandra Theatre offered me, but I was nevertheless weighed down by some quite unaccountable depression that would not let me alone. For this I can see now that Lawrence was very largely responsible. When I met him and the Wilderlings in the foyer of the theatre I saw at once that he was greatly changed.
The clear open expression of his eyes was gone; his mind was far away from his company--and it was as though I could see into his brain and watch the repetition of the old argument occurring again and again and again with always the same questions and answers, the same reproaches, the same defiances, the same obstinacies. He was caught by what was perhaps the first crisis of his life. He had never been a man for much contact with his fel ow-beings, he had been aloof and reserved, generous in his judgements of others, severe and narrow in his judgement of himself. Above all, he had been proud of his strength....
Now he was threatened by something stronger than himself. He could have managed it so long as he was aware only of his love for Vera.... Now, when, since Nina's party, he knew that also Vera loved him, he had to meet the tussle of his life.
That, at any rate, is the kind of figure that I give to his mood that evening. He has told me much of what happened to him afterwards, but nothing of that particular night, except once. "Do you remember that
'Masquerade' evening?... I was in hell that night...." which, for Lawrence, was expressive enough.
Both the Baron and his wife were in great spirits. The Baron was more than ever the evocation of the genius of elegance and order; he seemed carved out of some coloured ivory, behind whose white perfection burnt a shining resolute flame.
His clothes were so perfect that they would have expressed the whole of him even though his body had not been there. He was happy. His eyes danced appreciatively; he waved his white gloves at the scene as though blessing it.
"Of course, Mr. Durward," he said to me, "this is nothing compared with what we could do before the war--nevertheless here you see, for a moment, a fragment of the old Petersburg--Petersburg as it shall be, please God, again one day...."
I do not in the least remember who was present that evening, but it was, I believe, a very distinguished company. The lights blazed, the jewels flashed, and the chatter was tremendous. The horseshoe-shaped seats behind the stal s clustered in knots and bunches of colour under the great glitter of electricity about the Royal Box. Artists--Somoff and Benois and Dobujinsky; novelists like Sologub and Merejkowsky; dancers like Karsavina--actors from all over Petrograd--they were there, I expect, to add criticism and argument to the adulation of friends and of the carelessly observant rich Jews and merchants who had come simply to display their jewellery. Petrograd, like every other city in the world, is artistic only by the persistence of its minority.
I'm sure that there were Princesses and Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses for any one who needed them, and it was only in the gallery where the students and their girl-friends were gathered that the name of Lermontov was mentioned. The name of the evening was "Meyerhold," the gentleman responsible for the production. At last the Event that had been brewing ceaselessly for the last ten years--ever since the last Revolution in fact--was to reach creation. The moment of M. Meyerhold's life had arrived--the moment, had we known it, of many other lives also; but we did not know it. We buzzed and we hummed, we gasped and we gaped, we yawned and we applauded; and the rustle of gold tissue, the scent of gold leaf, the thick sticky substance of gold paint, filled the air, flooded the arena, washed past us into the street outside. Meanwhile M.
Meyerhold, white, perspiring, in his shirt-sleeves with his collar loosened and his hair damp, is in labour behind the gold tissue to produce the child of his life... and Behold, the Child is produced!
And such a child! It was not I am sure so fantastic an affair in reality as in my rememberance of it. I have, since then, read Lermontov's play, and I must confess that it does not seem, in cold truth, to be one of his finest works. It is long and old-fashioned, melodramatic and clumsy--but then it was not on this occasion Lermontov's play that was the thing. But it was a masquerade, and that in a sense far from the author's intention. As I watched I remember that I forgot the bad acting (the hero was quite atrocious), forgot the lapses of taste in the colour and arrangement of the play, forgot the artifices and elaborate originalities and false sincerities; there were, I have no doubt, many things in it al that were bad and meretricious--I was dreaming. I saw, against my will and outside my own agency, mingled with the gold screens, the purple curtains, the fantasies and extravagances of the costumes, the sudden flashes of unexpected colour through light or dress or backcloth--pictures from those Galician days that had been, until Semyonov's return, as I fancied, forgotten.
A crowd of revellers ran down the stage, and a shimmering cloud of gold shot with red and purple was flung from one end of the hall to the other, and behind it, through it, between it, I saw the chill light of the early morning, and Nikitin and I sitting on the bench outside the stinking but that we had used as an operating theatre, watching the first rays of the sun warm, the cold mountain's rim. I could hear voices, and the murmurs of the sleeping men and the groans of the wounded. The scene closed. There was space and light, and a gorgeous figure, stiff with the splendour of his robes, talked in a dark garden with his lady. Their voices murmured, a lute was played, some one sang, and through the thread of it al I saw that moment when, packed together on our cart, we hung for an instant on the top of the hill and looked back to a country that had suddenly crackled into flame. There was that terrific crash as of the smashing of a world of china, the fierce crackle of the machine-guns, and then the boom of the cannon from under our very feet... the garden was filled with revel ers, laughing, dancing, singing, the air was filled again with the air of gold paint, the tenor's voice rose higher and higher, the golden screens closed--the act was ended.
It was as though I had received, in some dim, bewildered fashion, a warning. When the lights went up, it was some moments before I realised that the Baron was speaking to me, that a babel of chatter, like a sudden rain storm on a glass roof, had burst on every side of us, and that a huge Jewess, al bare back and sham pearls, was trying to pass me on her way to the corridor. The Baron talked away: "Very amusing, don't you think? After Reinhardt, of course, although they say now that Reinhardt got al his ideas from your man Craig. I'm sure I don't know whether that's so.... I hope you're more reassured to-night, Mr.
Durward. You were ful of alarms the other evening. Look around you and you'll see the true Russia...."
"I can't believe this to be the true Russia," I said. "Petrograd is not the true Russia. I don't believe that there _is_ a true Russia."
"Well, there you are," he continued eagerly. "No true Russia! Quite so.
Very observant. But we have to pretend there is, and that's what you foreigners are always forgetting. The Russian is an individualist--give him freedom and he'll lose al sense of his companions. He will pursue his own idea. Myself and my party are here to prevent him from pursuing his own idea, for the good of himself and his country. He may be discontented, he may grumble, but he doesn't realise his luck. Give him his freedom, and in six months you'll see Russia back in the Middle Ages."
"And another six months?" I asked.
"The Stone Age."
"And then?"
"Ah," he said, smiling, "you ask me too much, Mr. Durward. We are speaking of our own generation."
The curtain was up again and I was back in my other world. I cannot tell you anything of the rest of the play--I remember nothing. Only I know that I was actual y living over again those awful days in the forest--the heat, the flies, the smells, the glassy sheen of the trees, the perpetual rumble of the guns, the desolate whine of the shel s--and then Marie's death, Trenchard's sorrow, Trenchard's death, that last view of Semyonov... and I felt that I was being made to remember it al for a purpose, as though my old friend, rich now with his wiser knowledge, was whispering to me, "Al life is bound up. You cannot leave anything behind you; the past, the present, the future are one. You had pushed us away from you, but we are with you always for ever. I am your friend for ever, and Marie is your friend, and now, once more, you have to take your part in a battle, and we have come to you to share it with you. Do not be confused by history or public events or class struggle or any big names; it is the individual and the soul of the individual alone that matters. I and Marie and Vera and Nina and Markovitch--our love for you, your love for us, our courage, our self-sacrifice, our weakness, our defeat, our progress--these are the things for which life exists; it exists as a training-ground for the immortal soul...."
With a sweep of colour the stage broke into a mist of movement. Masked and hooded figures in purple and gold and blue and red danced madly off into a forest of stinking, sodden leaves and trees as thin as tissue-paper burnt by the sun. "Oh--aye! oh--aye! oh--aye!" came from the wounded, and the dancers answered, "Tra-la-la-la! Tra-la-la-la,'"
The golden screens were drawn forward, the lights were up again, and the whole theatre was stirring like a coloured paper ant heap.
Outside in the foyer I found Lawrence at my elbow.
"Go and see her," he whispered to me, "as soon as possible! Tell her--tell her--no, tel her nothing. But see that she's al right and let me know. See her to-morrow--early!"
I could say nothing to him, for the Baron had joined us.
"Good-night! Good-night! A most delightful evening!... Most amusing!...
No, thank you, I shal walk!"
"Come and see us," said the Baroness, smiling.
"Very soon," I answered. I little knew that I should never see either of them again.
III
I awoke that night with a sudden panic that I must instantly see Vera.
I, even in the way that one does when, one is only half awake, struggled out of bed and felt for my clothes. Then I remembered and climbed back again, but sleep would not return to me. The self-criticism and self-distrust that were always attacking me and paralysing my action sprang upon me now and gripped me. What was I to do? How was I to act? I saw Vera and Nina and Lawrence and, behind them, smiling at me, Semyonov. They were asking for my help, but they were, in some strange, intangible way, most desperately remote. When I read now in our papers shrill criticisms on our officials, our Cabinet, our generals, our propagandists, our merchants, for their failure to deal adequately with Russia, I say: Deal adequately? First you must catch your bird... and no Western snare has ever caught the Russian bird of paradise, and I dare prophesy that no Western snare ever will. Had I not broken my heart in the pursuit, and was I not as far as ever from attainment? The secret of the mystery of life is the isolation that separates every man from his fel ow--the secret of dissatisfaction too; and the only purpose in life is to realise that isolation, and to love one's fellow-man because of it, and to show one's own courage, like a flag to which the other travellers may wave their answer; but we Westerners have at least the waiting comfort of our discipline, of our materialism, of our indifference to ideas. The Russian, I believe, lives in a world of loneliness peopled only by ideas. His impulses towards self-confession, towards brotherhood, towards vice, towards cynicism, towards his belief in God and his scorn of Him, come out of this world; and beyond it he sees his fellow-men as trees walking, and the Mountain of God as a distant peak, placed there only to emphasise his irony.
I had wanted to be friends with Nina and Vera--I had even longed for it--and now at the crisis when I must rise and act they were so far away from me that I could only see them, like coloured ghosts, vanishing into mist.
I would go at once and see Vera and there do what I could. Lawrence must return to England--then al would be well. Markovitch must be persuaded.... Nina must be told.... I slept and tumbled into a nightmare of a pursuit, down endless streets, of flying figures.
Next day I went to Vera. I found her, to my joy, alone. I realised at once that our talk would be difficult. She was grave and severe, sitting back in her chair, her head up, not looking at me at all, but beyond through the window to the tops of the trees feathery with snow against the sky of egg-shell blue. I am always beaten by a hostile atmosphere.
To-day I was at my worst, and soon we were talking like a couple of the merest strangers.
She asked me whether I had heard that there were very serious disturbances on the other side of the river.
"I was on the Nevski early this afternoon," I said, "and I saw about twenty Cossacks go gal oping down towards the Neva. I asked somebody and was told that some women had broken into the bakers' shops on Vassily Ostrov...."
"It will end as they always end," said Vera. "Some arrests and a few people beaten, and a policeman will get a medal."
There was a long pause. "I went to 'Masquerade' the other night," I said.
"I hear it's very good...."
"Pretentious and rather vulgar--but amusing al the same."
"Every one's talking about it and trying to get seats...."
"Yes. Meyerhold must be pleased."
"They discuss it much more than they do the war, or even politics. Every one's tired of the war."
I said nothing. She continued:
"So I suppose we shal just go on for years and years.... And then the Empress herself will be tired one day and it will suddenly stop." She showed a flash of interest, turning to me and looking at me for the first time since I had come in.
"Ivan Andreievitch, what do you stay in Russia for? Why don't you go back to England?"
I was taken by surprise. I stammered, "Why do I stay? Why, because--because I like it."
"You can't like it. There's _nothing_ to like in Russia."
"There's _everything_!" I answered. "And I have friends here," I added.
But she didn't answer that, and continued to sit staring out at the trees. We talked a little more about nothing at al , and then there was another long pause. At last I could endure it no longer, I jumped to my feet.
"Vera Michailovna," I cried, "what have I done?"
"Done?" she asked me with a look of self-conscious surprise. "What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean well enough," I answered. I tried to speak firmly, but my voice trembled a little. "You told me I was your friend. When I was ill the other day you came to me and said that you needed help and that you wanted me to help you. I said that I would--"
I paused.
"Well?" she said, in a hard, unrelenting voice.
"Well--" I hesitated and stammered, cursing myself for my miserable cowardice. "You are in trouble now, Vera--great trouble--I came here because I am ready to do anything for you--anything--and you treat me like a stranger, almost like an enemy."
I saw her lip tremble--only for an instant. She said nothing.
"If you've got anything against me since you saw me last," I went on,
"tell me and I'll go away. But I had to see you and also Lawrence--"
At the mention of his name her whole body quivered, but again only for an instant.
"Lawrence asked me to come and see you."
She looked up at me then gravely and coldly, and without the sign of any emotion either in her face or voice.
"Thank you, Ivan Andreievitch, but I want no help--I am in no trouble.
It was very kind of Mr. Lawrence, but really--"
Then I could endure it no longer. I broke out:
"Vera, what's the matter. You know all this isn't true.... I don't k