“No—it isn’t that. It’s something I should have told you, I suppose, long ago. I would have told you, only it was all so over and done with for me that I couldn’t imagine its mattering to anyone. I told your father that there was no complication in my life, and that’s true—there is none. There’s nothing I have nor think nor do that isn’t yours.”
She said very quietly: “You were in love with someone before you knew me?”
He was surprised and immensely reassured by the quietness and tranquillity of her voice.
“That’s it—That’s it,” he said, eagerly, his heart bounding with relief and happiness. “Look here, Katie. I must tell you everything—everything, so that there can’t be anything between us any more that you don’t know. You see, when I went to Russia first I was very young—very young for my age too. Russia isn’t much of a place when you don’t know the language and the weather’s bad—and I’d gone expecting too much. I’d heard so much about Russia’s hospitality and kindness, but I was with English people at first, and most of them were tired to death of Russia, and only saw its worst side and didn’t paint it very cheerfully. Then the Russians I did meet had to struggle along in bad French or English (it’s all rot about Russians being great linguists), and if a Russian isn’t spontaneous he isn’t anything at all. Then when I did go to their houses their meals simply killed me. They make one eat such a lot and drink such a lot and sit up all night—I simply couldn’t stand it. So at first I was awfully lonely and unhappy—awfully unhappy.”
She sighed in sympathy and pressed closer to him.
“I’m not the sort of man,” Philip went on, “to stand being lonely. It’s bad for me. Some men like it. It simply kills me. But after about six months or more I knew a little Russian, and I got to know one or two Russians individually. There’s one thing I can tell you—that until you know a Russian personally, so that he feels that he’s got some kind of personal part in you, you simply don’t know him at all. It’s so easy to generalise about Russians. Wait until you’ve made a friend.... I made a friend, several friends. I began to be happier.”
Katherine pressed his hand. The bonfire was towering steadily now in a great golden pillar of smoke and flame to heaven. The music of the fiddle and the horn, as though they were its voice, trembled dimly in the air: all the stars were shining, and a full moon, brittle like glass, flung a broad silver road of light across the black Peak and the sea. There was no breeze, but the scent of the flowers from the gardens on the rocks mingled with the strong briny odour of the sea-pinks that covered the ground at their feet.
“The spring came all in a moment, like a new scene at the play. I was introduced to some theatre people, who had a house in the country near Moscow. You’ve no idea of the slackness and ease of a Russian country house. People just come and go—the doors are all open, meals are always going on—there’s always a samovar, and sweets in little glass dishes, and cold fish and meat and little hot pies. In the evening there was dancing, and afterwards the men would just sleep about anywhere. I met a girl there, the first Russian woman who had attracted me. Her name was Anna Mihailovna, and she was a dancer in the Moscow Ballet.”
He paused, but Katherine said nothing nor did she move.
“She attracted me because she had never known an Englishman before, and I was exactly what she had always thought an Englishman would be. That pleased me then—I wanted, I even felt it my duty, to be the typical Englishman. It wasn’t that she admired the typical Englishman altogether: she laughed at me a great deal, she laughed at my having everything so cut and dried, at my dogmatising so easily, at my disliking Russian unpunctuality and lack of method.