"After I had left her that night I did not walk the streets, nor drink, nor find companions. I went home and slept the soundest sleep of my life. In the morning I knew tranquillity for the first time in all my days. I did not, as I had done after many earlier first meetings, hasten to see my friend. I did not know even that she liked me and yet I felt no doubt nor confusion. It was, perhaps, that I was ready to accept this new influence under any conditions, was ready for once to leave the rules to another. I felt no curiosity, knew no determination to discover the conditions of her life that I might bend them to my own purposes. I was quite passive, untroubled, and of a marvellous, almost selfish happiness.
"Our friendship continued very easily. It soon came to our meeting every day. In the summer they moved to their house in Finland and I went to stay with them. But it was not until her return to Petrograd in September that I told her that I loved her. Upon one of the first autumn days, upon an evening, when the little green tree outside their door was gold and there was a slip of an apricot moon, when the first fires were lighted (Andrey Vassilievitch had English fireplaces), sitting alone together in her little faded old-fashioned room, I told her that I loved her. She listened very quietly as I talked, her eyes on my face, grave, sad perhaps, and yet humorous, secure in her own settled life but sharing also in the life of others. She watched me rather as a mother watches her child.... I told her that it mattered nothing the conditions that she put upon me; that so long as I saw her and knew that she believed me to be her friend I asked for nothing. She answered, still very quietly but putting her hand on mine, that she had loved me from the first moment of our meeting. That she wondered that yet once again love should have come into her life when she had thought that that was all finished for her. She told me that love had been in her life nothing but pain and distress, and then she asked me, very simply, whether I would try to keep this thing so that it should be happy and should endure. I said that I would obey her in anything that she should command.... There followed then the strangest life for me. Lovers in the fullest sense we were and yet it was different from any love that I had ever known. When I ask myself why, in what, it differed I cannot answer. Two old grey middle-aged people who happened to suit one another.... Not romantic.... But I think in the end of it all the reason was that she never revealed herself to me entirely. I was always curious about her, always felt that other people knew more of her than I did, always thought that one day I should know all. It is 'knowing all' that kills love, and I never knew all. We were always together. She was a woman of very remarkable intelligence, loving music, literature, painting, with a most excellently critical love. Her friendship with me gave her, I do believe, a new youth and happiness. We became inseparable, and all my earlier life had passed away from me like worn-out clothes. I was happy—but of course I was not satisfied. I was jealous of that which Audrey Vassilievitch had—and I lacked. My whole relationship to Andrey Vassilievitch was a curious one. My friendship for his wife must I am sure have been torture to him. He knew that she had given me a great deal that she had never given to him. And yet, because he loved her so profoundly, he was only anxious that she should be happy. He saw that my friendship gave her new interests, new life even. He encouraged me, then, in every way, to stay with them, to be with them. He left us alone continually. During the whole of that four years he never once spoke in anger to me nor challenged my fidelity. My relationship to him was difficult. We were, quite simply as men, the worst-suited in the world. He had not a trick nor a habit that did not get on my nerves; he was intelligent only in those things that I despised a man for knowing. This would have been well enough had he not persisted in talking about matters of art and literature, of which, of course, he knew nothing. He did it, I believe, to please his wife and myself. I despised him for many things and yet, in my heart, I knew that he had much that I had not. He was, and is, a finer man than I.... And, last and first of all, he possessed part of his wife that I did not. After all, she did, in her own beautiful way, love him. She was a mother to him; she laughed tenderly at his foolishness, cared for him, watched over him, defended him. Me she would never need to defend. Our relationship was built rather on my defence of her. Sometimes I would wish that I were such a durak as Andrey Vassilievitch, that I might have her protection.... There were many, many times when I hated him—no times at all when he did not irritate me. I wished.... I wished.... I do not know what I wished. Only I always waited for the time when I should have all of her, when I should hold her against all the world. Then, after four years of this new life, she quite suddenly died. Again in that little house, on a 'white night,' just as when I had at first met her, the purple curtains hanging in the little street, the isvostchik sleeping, the clocks in the house chattering in their haste to keep up with time.... Only two months before the outbreak of the war she caught cold, for a week suffered from pneumonia and died. At the last Andrey Vassilievitch and I were alone with her. He had her hand in his but her last cry was 'Victor,' and as she died I felt as though, at last, after that long waiting, she had leapt into my arms for ever....
"After her death for many weeks, she was with me more completely than she had been during her lifetime. I knew that she was dead, but I thought that I also had died. I went into Finland alone, saw no one, talked to no one, saw only her. Then quite suddenly I came to life again. She withdrew from me.... Work seemed the only possible thing; but I was, during all this time, happy not miserable. She was not with me, but she was not very far away. Then Andrey Vassilievitch came back to me. He told me that he knew that she had loved me—that he had tried to speak of her to others who had known her, but they had, none of them, had real knowledge of her. Might he speak to me sometimes about her?
"I found that though he irritated me more than ever I liked to talk about her to him. As I spoke of her he scarcely was present at all and yet he had known her and loved her, and would listen for ever and ever if I wished.
"When the war had lasted some months the fancy came to me that I could get nearer to her by going into it. I might even die, which would be best of all. I did not wish to kill myself because I felt that to be a coward's death, and in such a way I thought that I would only separate myself from her. But in the war, perhaps, I might meet death in such a way as to show him that I despised him both for myself and her. By suicide I would be paying him reverence.... Some such thought also had Andrey Vassilievitch. I heard that he thought of attaching himself to some Red Cross Otriad. I told him my plans. He said no more, but suddenly, as you know, I found him on the platform of the Warsaw station. Afterwards he apologised to me, said that he must be near me, that he would try not to annoy me, that if sometimes he spoke of her to me he hoped that I would not mind.... And I? What do I feel? I do not know. He has some share in her that I have not. I have some share in her that he has not, and I think that it has come to both of us that the one of us who dies first will attain her. It seems to me now that she is continually with me, but I believe that this is nothing to the knowledge I shall have of her one day. Am I right? Is Andrey Vassilievitch right? Can it be that such a man—such men, I should say, as either I or he—will ever be given such happiness? I do not know. I only know that God exists—that Love is more powerful than man—that Death can fall before us if we believe that it will—that the soul of man is Power and Love.... I believe in God...."
CHAPTER V
FIRST MOVE TO THE ENEMY
It was during two nights in the forest of S——, about which I must afterwards write, that I had those long conversations with Trenchard, upon whose evidence now I must very largely depend. Before me as I write is his Diary, left to me by him. In this whole business of the war there is nothing more difficult than the varied and confused succession with which moods, impressions, fancies, succeed one upon another, but Trenchard told me so simply and yet so graphically of the events of these weeks that followed the battle of S—— that I believe I am departing in no way from the truth in my present account, the truth, at any rate as he himself believed it to be....