"Come outside," he said, "and get rid of this air." We went out and sat down on a wooden bench that bordered the yard. Before us was the high-road that ran from the town of S—— into the very heart of the Carpathians. As the cold grey faded we could catch the thin outline of those mountains, faint, like pencil-lines upon the sky now washed with pink, covered in their nearer reaches by thick forests, insubstantial, although they were close at hand, like water or long clouds. We could see the road, white and clear at our feet, melting into shadow beyond us, and catching in the little misty pools the coloured reflection of the morning sky.
The air was very fresh; a cock behind me welcomed the sun; the cold band withdrew from my forehead.
Nikitin was silent and I, silent also, sat there, almost asleep, happy and tranquil. It seemed to me very natural to him that he should neither move nor speak, but after a time he began to talk. I had in that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I was listening to some history. I know that I did not sleep and yet even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours. I know that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact. And yet it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist of all that slumber Nikitin's voice, soft, measured, itself like an echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated—but to my heart rather than to my brain. Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard in the train.... And now as I sit here, in so different a place, amongst men so different, those other two come back to me, happy ghosts. Yes, happy I know that one at least of them is!
Like water behind glass, like music behind a screen, Nikitin's voice comes back to me—dim but so close, mysterious but so intimate. Ah, the questions that I would ask him now if only I might have those morning hours over again!
"You're a solemn man altogether, Durward. Perhaps all Englishmen seem so to us, and it may be only your tranquillity, so unlike our moods and nerves by which we kill ourselves dead before we're half way through life.... I had an English tutor for a year when I was a boy. He didn't teach me much: 'all right' and 'Tank you' is the only English I've kept, but I think of him now as the very quietest man in all the universe. He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods and tempers killed him when he was just over forty.... We have a proverb, 'In the still marshes there are devils,' and we admire and fear quiet men because they have something that we have not. And I like the way that you watch us, Durward. Your friend Trenchard does not watch us at all and one could be his friend. For you one has quite another feeling. It is as though I had something to give you that you really want. Why should I not give it you? My giving it will do me no harm, it may even yield me pleasure. You will not throw it away. You are an Englishman and will not for a moment's temper or passion reveal secrets. And there are no secrets. What I tell you you may tell the world—but I warn you that it will neither interest them nor will they believe it.... There is, you see, no climax to my story. I have no story, indeed; like an old feldscher in my village who hates our village Pope. 'Why, Georg Georgevitch,' I say, 'do you hate him? He is a worthy man.' 'Your Honour,' he says, 'there is nothing there; a fat man, but God has the rest of him—I hate him for his emptiness.' I'm in a humour to talk. I have, in a way, fulfilled the purpose that my English tutor created in me. I've grown a sort of quiet skin, you know, but under that skin the heart pounds away, the veins swell to bursting. I'm a fool behind it all—just a fool as every Russian is a fool with more in hand than he knows how to deal with. You don't understand Russia, do you? No, and I don't and no one does. But we can all talk about her—and love her too, if you like, although our sentiment's a bad thing in us, some say. But for us not to talk—for one of us to be silent—do you know how hard that is?... And through it all how I despise myself for wishing to tell them! What business is it of theirs? Then this war. Can you conceive what it is doing to Russians? If you have loved Russia and dreamed for her and had your dreams flung again and again to the ground and trampled on—and now, once more, the bubbles are in the sky, glittering, gleaming ... do we not have to speak, do you think? Must it not be hard, when before we have not been able to be silent about women and vodka, to be silent now about the dearest wish of our heart? We have come out here, all of us, to see what we will find. I have come because I want to get nearer to something—I had brought something in my heart about which I had learnt to be silent. 'That is enough!' I thought, 'there can be nothing else about which I can wish to talk; but now, suddenly, like that crucifix on the hillock by the road that the sun has just touched, there is something more. And now here we are nothing ... two souls come together out of space for an hour ... and it doesn't matter what I say to you, except that it's true and the truth will be something for you. Here's what I've come to the war with ... my little bit of possession, if you like, that I've brought with me, as we've all brought something. Will you understand me? Perhaps not, and it really doesn't matter. I know what I have, what I want, but not what I am. So how should you know if I do not? And I love life, I believe in God. I wish to meet Death. One can be serious without being absurd at an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things.... Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about us. You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at it during at least half the week.
"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend's house in Petrograd. He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration, but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man whom I would ever care to know. I had been at this time five years in Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon. I was a successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own actions, would not die. How I wished for it to die! I thought of the day when I should be without it as the day of liberation, of freedom. That had become my idea, I must tell you, the dominating idea of my life: that I should kill my idealism, laugh at the belief in God, lose faith in every one and everything, and then simply enjoy myself—my work which I loved and my pleasure which I should love when my idealism had died.... Sometimes during those years I thought that it was dying. Women helped to kill it, I believed, and I knew many women, desperately persistently laughing at them, leaving them or being left by them; and then, in spite of myself, bitterly, deeply disappointed. Something always saying to me: 'I am God and you cannot hide from me.' 'I am God and I will not be hidden.'
"And on this night, about five years ago, at the house of a friend, I met Andrey Vassilievitch. We left the house together, and because it was a fine night, walked down the Nevski. There at the corner of the Morskaia, because he was a nervous man who wished to be well with every one in the world and because he had nothing especial to say, he asked me to dinner, and I, because it was a fine night and there had been good wine, said that I would go.
"The next day I cursed my folly. I do not know to this day why I did not break the engagement, it would have been sufficiently easy, but break it I did not and a week later, reluctantly, I went. Do you know how houses and streets of which you have observed nothing, afterwards, called out by some important event, leap into detail? That night I swear that I saw nothing of that little street behind the Mariinsky Theatre. It was a fine 'white night' at the end of May and the theatre was in a bustle of arrivals because it was nearly eight o'clock. Not at all the hour of Russian dinner, as you know, but Andrey Vassilievitch always liked to be as English as possible. I tell you that I saw nothing of the street and yet now I know that at the door of the little trakteer there were two men and a woman laughing, that an isvotchik was drawn up in front of a high white block of flats, asleep, his head fallen on his breast, that the wonderful light, faintly blue and misty like gauze hung down from the sky, down over the houses, but falling not quite on to the pavement which was hard and ugly and grey. The little street was very silent and quiet and had, like so many Petrograd streets, a decorous intimacy with the eighteenth century ghosts thronging its air....
"Afterwards, how I was to know that street, every stone and corner of it! It seems wonderful to me now that I trod its pavement that night so carelessly. My destination was a square little house at the corner on the right. Andrey Vassilievitch boasted a whole house to himself, a rare pride in our city, as you know. When I was inside the doors I knew at once that it was not Andrey Vassilievitch's house at all. Some stronger spirit than his was there. Knowing him, I had expected to find there many modern things, some imitation of English manners, some bad but expensive pictures, a gramophone, a pianolo, a library of Russian classics in our hideous modern bindings, a billiard-room—you know the character. How quiet this little house was. In the little square hall an old faded carpet, a grandfather's clock and two eighteenth century prints of Petrograd. All the rooms were square, so Russian with their placid family portraits, their old tables and chairs, not beautiful save for their fidelity, and old thumbed editions of Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov in the bookshelves. Clocks, old slow clocks, all telling different time, all over the house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all those odd family things that Russians collect, china of the worst period, brass trays, large candlesticks, musical boxes, anything you please. Only in the dining-room there was some attempt at modernity. Bad modern furniture, on the walls bad copies of such things as Somoff's 'Blue Lady,' Vrubel's 'Pan' and one of Benoit's 'Peter the Great' water-colours. Beyond this room the house was of eighty years ago, muffled in its old furniture, speaking with the voice of its old clocks, scented with the scent of its musk and lavender, watched by the contented gaze of the old family portraits.
"Alexandra Pavlovna, Andrey Vassilievitch's wife, was waiting for us. Has it happened to you yet that your life that has been such and such a life is in the moment of a heart-beat all another life? You have passed an examination, you are suddenly ill, you break your back by a fall, or more simply than all of these, you enter a town, see a picture, hear a bar of music.... The thing's done: all values changed: what you saw before you see no longer, what you needed before you need no longer, what you expected before you expect no longer.... Alexandra Pavlovna was not a beautiful woman. Not tall, with hair quite grey, eyes not dark nor light—sad though. When she smiled there was great charm but so it is true of many women. Her complexion was always pale and her voice, although it was sweet to those who loved her, was perhaps too quiet to be greatly remarked by strangers. I have known men who thought her an ordinary woman.... She had much humour but did not show it to every one. She was as still as that cloud there above the hill, full of colour; like, that is, to those who loved her; seen from another view, as perhaps that cloud may be, there was nothing wonderful.... Nothing wonderful, but so many loved her! There was never, I think, a woman so greatly beloved. And you may judge by me. I had led a life in which after my work women had always played the chief part, and as the months passed and I had grown proud I had vowed that women must be exceptional to please me. I had felt the eye of the world upon me. 'You'll see no ordinary women in Victor Leontievitch's company' I heard them say, and I was proud that they should say it. From the first instant of seeing Alexandra Pavlovna I loved her and I loved her in a new, an utterly new way. For the first time in my life I did not think of myself as a traveller who, passing for many years through countries that did not greatly interest him, feels his aches and pains, his money troubles, his discomforts and little personal irritations. Then suddenly he crosses the border and the new land so possesses him that he is only a vessel for its beauty, to absorb it, to hold it, to carry the burden of it in safety.... I crossed the border. For four years after that I pursued that enchanted journey. Why did I love her? Who can say? Andrey Vassilievitch adored her with an utter devotion and had done so since the first moment of meeting her. I have known many others, women and men, who felt that devotion. On that first evening we were very quiet—only another woman, a cousin of hers. After dinner I had half an hour's talk with her. I can see her—ah! how I can see you, my dear!—sitting back a little in her chair, resting, her hands folded very quietly in her lap, her eyes watching me gravely. I felt like a boy who has come into the world for the first time. I could not talk to her—I stammered over the simplest things. But I was conscious of a deep luxurious delight. I did not, as I had done before, lay plans, say that this-and-this would be so if I did this-and-this, I did not consciously try to influence or direct her. I felt no definite sensual attraction, did not say, as I had always done with other women, 'It is the hair, the eyes, the mouth.' If I thought at all it was only 'This is better than anything that I have known before; I had never dreamt of anything like this.'