CHAPTER XIII
A day or two before Denzil sailed for France he dined with Verisschenzko. The intense preoccupation of the last war preparations had left him very little time for grieving. He was unhappy when he thought of Amaryllis, but he was a man, and another primitive instinct was in action in him—the zest of going out to fight!
Verisschenzko was depressed, his country was not yet giving him the opportunity to fulfil his hopes, and he fretted that he must direct things from so far.
They sat in a quiet corner of the Berkeley and talked in a desultory fashion all through the hors d'ouvres and the soup.
"I am sick of things, Denzil," Verisschenzko said at last. "I feel inclined to end it all sometimes."
"And belie the whole meaning of your whole beliefs. Don't be a fool, Stépan. I always have told you that there is one grain of suicide in the composition of every Russian. Now it has become active with you. Have another glass of champagne, old boy, and then you'll talk sense again. It is sickening to be killed, or maimed, or any beastly thing if it comes along with duty, but to court it is madness pure and simple. It's just rot."
"I'm with you," and he called the waiter and ordered a fine champagne, while he smiled, showing his strong, square teeth.
"They don't have decent vodka—but the brandy will do the trick," and in an instant his mood changed even before the cognac had come.
"It is the lingering trace of some other life of folly, when I talk like that—I know it, Denzil. It is the harking back to long months of gloom and darkness and snow and the howling of wolves and the fear of the knout. This is not my first Russian life, you know!"
"Probably not; but you've had some more balanced intervening ones, or I should have found you dead with veronal, or some other filthy thing before this, with your highly strung nerves! I am not really alarmed about you though, Stépan—you are fundamentally sane."