CHAPTER II
MARIE IVANOVNA
It was on July 23 that I first entered the Forest of S——. I did not, I remember, pay the event any especial attention. I went with Anna Petrovna to the cholera village that is on the outskirts of the forest, and I recollect that we hastened back because that evening we were to celebrate the conclusion of the first six months' work of our Otriad. Of my entrance into the forest I remember absolutely nothing; it seemed, I suppose, an ordinary enough forest to me. Of the festivities in the evening I have a very clear recollection. I remember that it was the loveliest summer weather, not too hot, with a little breeze coming up from the river, and the green glittering on every side of us with the quiver of flashing water. In the little garden outside our house a table had been improvised and on this were a large gilt ikon, a vase of flowers in a hideous purple jar, and two tall candles whose flames looked unreal and thin in the sunlight. There was the priest, a fine stout man with a long black beard and hair falling below his shoulders, clothed in silk of gold and purple, waving a censer, monotoning the prayers in a high Russian tenor, with one eye on the choir of sanitars, one eye on the candles blown by the wind, the breeze meanwhile playing irreverent jests on his splendid skirts of gold. Then there was the congregation in three groups. The first group—two generals, two colonels, four or five other officers, the Sisters (Sister K—— bowing and crossing herself incessantly, Anna Petrovna with her attention obviously on the dinner cooking behind a tree in the garden, Marie Ivanovna looking lovely and happy and good), ourselves—Molozov official, Semyonov sarcastic, Nikitin in a dream, Andrey Vassilievitch busy with his smart uniform, Trenchard (forgotten his sword, his blue handkerchief protruding from his pocket) absorbed by the ceremony, myself thinking of Trenchard, Goga—and the rest. The second group—the singing sanitars, some ten of them, stout and healthy, singing as Russians do with complete self-forgetfulness and a rapturous happiness in front of them, a funny little man with spectacles and a sharp-pointed beard, once a schoolmaster, now a sanitar, conducting their music with a long bony finger—all of them chanting the responses with perfect precision and harmony. Third group, the other sanitars, the strangest collection of faces, wild, savage and eastern: Tartars, Lithuanians, Mongolian, mild and northern, cold and western, merry and human from Little Russia, gigantic and fierce from the Caucasus, small and frozen from Archangel, one or two civilised and superior and uninteresting from Petrograd and Moscow.
Over the wall a long row of interested Galician peasants and soldiers passing in carts or on horseback. Seeing the ikon, the priest, the blowing candles, hearing the singing they would take off their hats, cross themselves, for a moment their eyes would go dreamy, mild, forgetful, then on their hats would go again, back they would turn their horses, cursing them up the hill, chaffing the Galician women, down deep in the everyday life again.
The service ended. The priest turns to us, the gold Cross is raised, we advance one by one: the generals, the colonels, the lieutenants, the Sisters, Semyonov, Nikitin, Goga, then the choir, then the sanitars, even to hunch-backed Alesha, who is always given the dirtiest work to do and is only half a human being; one by one we kiss the Cross, the candles are blown out, the ikon folded up and put away in a cardboard box, we are introduced to the generals, there is general conversation, and the stars and the moon come out "blown straight up, it seems, out of the bosom of the Nestor...."
It was a very happy and innocent evening. For extracting the utmost happiness possible out of the simplest materials the Russians have surely no rivals. How our generals and our colonels enjoyed that evening! A wonderful dinner was cooked between two stones in the garden—little pig, young chickens, borshtsh, that most luxurious of soups, and ices—yes, and ices. Then there were speeches, many, many glasses of tea, strawberry and cherry jam, biscuits and cigarettes. We were all very, very happy....
It was arranged on the morning after the feast that I should go again to the cholera village with Marie Ivanovna and Semyonov. Under a morning of a blazing relentless heat, bars of light ruling the sky, we started, the three of us, at about ten o'clock, in the little low dogcart, followed by the kitchen and the boiler. Marie Ivanovna sat next to Semyonov, I facing them. Semyonov was happier than I had ever seen him before. Happiness was not a quality with which I would ever have charged him; he had seemed to despise it as something too simple and sentimental for any but sentimental fools—but now this morning (I had noticed something of the same thing in him the evening before) he was quite simply happy, looking younger by many years, the ironical curve of his lip gone, his eyes smiling, his attitude to the world gentle and almost benevolent. Of course she, Marie Ivanovna, had wrought this change in him. There was no doubt this morning that she loved him. She had in her face and bearing all the pride and also all the humility that a love, won, secured, ensured, brings with it. She did not look at him often nor take his hand. She spoke to me during the drive and only once and again smiled up at him; but her soul, shining through the thin covering of her body, laughed to me, crying: "I am happy because I have my desire. Of yesterday I remember nothing, of to-morrow I can know nothing, but to-day is mine!"
He was very quiet. When he looked at her his eyes took complete possession of her. I did not, that morning, count at all to either of them, but I too felt a kind of pride as though I were sharing in some triumphal procession. She chattered on, and then at last was silent. I remember that the great heat of the morning wrought in us all a kind of lethargy. We were lazily confident that day that nothing evil could overtake us. We idly watched the sky, the river, the approaching forest, with a luxurious reliance on the power of man, and I caught much of my assurance from Semyonov himself. He did really seem to me, that morning, a "tremendous" figure, as he sat there, so still, so triumphant. He had never before, perhaps, been quite certain of Marie Ivanovna, had been alarmed at her independence, or at his own passionate love for her. But this morning he knew. She loved him. She was his—no one could take her from him. She was the woman he wanted as he had never wanted a woman before, and she was his—she was his!
I do not remember our entering the forest. I know that first you climb a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of N——. It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, that I felt the heat to be almost unbearable; it seemed strange to me, I remember, that they (whoever "they" were), having so many trees here, a forest that stretched many miles behind them, should have chosen to pitch their village upon the only exposed and torrid bit of ground that they could find. Behind us was the forest, in front of us also the forest, but here, how the sun blazed down on the roofs and little blown patches of garden, how it glared in through the broken windows, and penetrated into the darkest corners of the desolate rooms!