Sister Sofia Antonovna smiled and her eyes watched us both. "I'm afraid your Mr. will be left behind," she said.
"Dr. Semyonov," Marie Ivanovna began—then stopped. We were all of us silent during the rest of the journey.
And how is one to give any true picture of the confusion into which we flung ourselves at O——? O—— had been the town at which, a little more than a month ago, we had arrived so eagerly, so optimistically. It had been to us then the quietest retreat in the world—irritating, provoking by reason of its peace. The little school-house, the green well, the orchard, the bees, the long light evenings with no sound but the birds and running water—those things had been a month ago.
We were hurled now into a world of dust and despair. The square market place, the houses that huddled round it were swallowed up by soldiers, horses, carts and whirling clouds. A wind blew and through the wind a hot sun blazed. Everywhere horses were neighing, cows and sheep were driven in thick herds through columns of soldiers, motor cars frantically pushed their way from place to place, and always, everywhere, covering every inch of ground flying, as it seemed, from the air, on to roofs, in and out of windows, from house to house, from corner to corner, was the humorous, pathetic, expectant, matter-of-fact, dreaming, stolid Russian soldier. He was to come to me, later on, in a very different fashion, but on this dreadful day in O—— he was simply part of the intolerable, depressing background.
If this day were dreadful to me what must it have been to Trenchard! We were none of us aware at this time of what had happened to him two days before, nor did we know of his adventure of yesterday. O—— seemed to him, he has told me, like hell.
We spent the day gathered together in a large white house that had formerly been the town-hall of O——. It had, I remember, high empty rooms all gilt and looking-glasses; the windows were broken and the dust came, in circles and twisting spirals, blowing over the gilt chairs and wooden floors.
We made tea and sat miserably together. Semyonov was in some other part of the town. We were to wait here until Molozov arrived from B——.
There can be few things so bad as the sense of insecurity that we had that afternoon. The very ground seemed to have been cut away from under our feet. We had gathered enough from the officers of our Division to know that something very disastrous "somewhere" had occurred. It was the very vagueness of the thing that terrified us. What could have happened? Only something very monstrous could have compelled so general a retirement. We might all of us be prisoners before the evening. That seemed to us, and indeed was afterwards proved in reality, to have been no slender possibility. There was no spot on earth that belonged to us. So firm and solid we had been at M——. Even we had hung pictures on the walls and planted flowers outside the dining-room. Now all that remained for us was this horrible place with its endless looking-glasses, its bare gleaming floors and the intolerable noise through its open windows of carts, soldiers, horses, the smell of dung and tobacco, and the hot air, like gas, that flung the dust into our faces.
Beyond the vague terrors of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia. Certainly Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of whom we were thinking. We had been, until then, her allies; we were now her servants.
By Russia every one of us, sitting in that huge room, meant something different. To Goga she was home, a white house on the Volga, tennis, long evenings, early mornings, holidays in a tangled wilderness of happiness. To Sister K—— she was "Holy Russia," Russia of the Kremlin, of the Lavra, of a million ikons in a million little streets, little rooms, little churches. To Sister Sofia she was Petrograd with cafés, novels by such writers as Verbitzkaia and our own Jack London, the cinematograph, and the Islands on a fine evening in May. To the student like a white fish she was a platform for frantic speeches, incipient revolutions, little untidy hysterical meetings in a dirty room in a back street, newspapers, the incapacities of the Douma, the robberies and villainies of the Government. To Anna Petrovna she was comfortable, unspeculative, friendly "home." To Nikitin she was the face of one woman upon whose eyes his own were always fixed. To Marie Ivanovna she was a flaming glorious wonder, mystical, transplendent, revealed in every blade of grass, every flash of sun across the sky, every line of the road, the top of every hill.