CHAPTER IV
THE FOREST
Part of a letter that Philip Mark wrote to his friend:—
“... I couldn’t stay any longer. They’d had me there a fortnight and then one of the daughters came home from being ‘finished’ in Paris, so that they’ve really no room for strangers. I’ve moved here—not very far away—three furnished rooms in an upper part in a small street off Victoria Street. It’s quiet with an amazing quietness considering its closeness to all the rattle. The Roman Catholic Cathedral is just round the corner—hideous to look at, but it’s nice inside. There’s a low little pub. opposite that reminds me comfortably of one of our beloved ‘Trakteer’—you see I’m sentimental about Moscow already—more so every day.
“I’ve so much to tell you, and yet it comes down to one very simple thing. I’ve found, I believe, already the very soul I set out to find, set out with yours and Anna’s blessing, remember. You mayn’t tell her yet. It’s too soon and it may so easily come to nothing, but I do believe that if I’d searched England through and through for many years I could never have found anyone so—so—exactly what I need. You must have guessed in that very first letter that it had, even then, begun. It began from the instant that I saw her—it seems to me now to be as deeply seated in me as my own soul itself. But you know that at the root of everything is my own distrust in myself. Perhaps if I had never gone to Russia I should have had more confidence, but that country, as I see it now, stirs always through the hearts of its lovers, questions about everything in heaven or earth and then tells one at the end that nothing matters. And the Englishman that is in me has always fought that distrust, has called it sentimental, feeble, and then again I’ve caught back the superstition and the wonder. In Russia one’s so close to God and the Devil—in England there is business and common-sense. Between the two I’m pretty useless. If you had once seen Katherine you’d know why she seems to me a refuge from all that I’ve been fighting with Anna for so long. She’s clear and true as steel—so quiet, so sure, so much better and finer than myself that I feel that I’m the most selfish hound in the world to dream of attaching her to me. Mind you, I don’t know at present that she’s interested; she’s so young and ignorant in so many ways, with all her calm common-sense, that I’m terrified of alarming her, and if she doesn’t care for me I’ll never disturb her—never. But if she should—well, then, I believe that I can make her happy—I know myself by now. I’ve left my Moscow self behind me just as Anna said that I must. There’s nothing stranger than the way that Anna foretold it all. That night when she shewed me that I must go she drew a picture of the kind of woman whom I must find. She had never been to England, she had only, in all her life, seen one or two Englishwomen, but she knew, she knew absolutely. It’s as though she had seen Katherine in her dreams....
“But I’m talking with absurd assurance. Putting Katherine entirely aside there is all the family to deal with. Trenchard himself likes me—Mrs. Trenchard hates me. That’s not a bit too strong, and the strange thing is that there’s no reason at all for it that I can see, nor have we been, either of us, from the beginning anything but most friendly to one another. If she suspected that I was in love with Katherine I might understand it, but that is impossible. There has been nothing, I swear, to give anyone the slightest suspicion. She detects, I think, something foreign and strange in me. Russia of course she views with the deepest suspicion, and it would amuse you to hear her ideas of that country. Nothing, although she has never been near it nor read anything but silly romances about it, could shake her convictions. Because I don’t support them she knows me for a liar. She is always calm and friendly to me, but her intense dislike comes through it all. And yet I really like her. She is so firm and placid and determined. She adores her family—she will fight for them to the last feather and claw. She is so sure and so certain about everything, and yet I believe that in her heart she is always afraid of something—it’s out of that fear, I am sure, that her hatred of me comes. For the others, the only one who troubled about me was the boy, and he is the strangest creature. He’d like me to give him all my experiences: he hasn’t the slightest notion of them, but he’s morbidly impatient of his own inexperience and the way his family are shutting him out of everything, and yet he’s Trenchard enough to disapprove violently of that wider experience if it came to him. He’d like me, for instance, to take him out and show him purple restaurants, ladies in big hats, and so on. If he did so he’d feel terribly out of it and then hate me. He’s a jumble of the crudest, most impossible and yet rather touching ideas, enthusiasms, indignations, virtues, would-be vices. He adores his sister. About that at least he is firm—and if I were to harm her or make her unhappy!...
“I suppose it’s foolish of me to go on like this. I’m indulging myself, I can talk to no one. So you ... just as I used to in those first days such years ago when I didn’t know a word of Russian, came and sat by the hour in your flat, talked bad French to your wife, and found all the sympathy I wanted in your kind fat face, even though we could only exchange a word or two in the worst German. How good you were to me then! How I must have bored you!... There’s no one here willing to be bored like that. To an Englishman time is money—none of that blissful ignoring of the rising and setting of sun, moon, and stars that for so many years I have enjoyed. ‘The morning and the evening were the first day....’ It was no Russian God who said that. I’ve found some old friends—Millet, Thackeray, you’ll remember—they were in Moscow two years ago. But with them it is ‘Dinner eight o’clock sharp, old man—got an engagement nine-thirty.’ So I’m lonely. I’d give the world to see your fat body in the doorway and hear your voice rise into that shrill Russian scream of pleasure at seeing me. You should sit down—You should have some tea although I’ve no Samovar to boil the water in, and I’d talk about Katherine, Katherine, Katherine—until all was blue. And you’d say ‘Harosho’ ‘Harosho’—and it would be six in the morning before we knew.... God help us all, I mustn’t talk about it. It all comes to this, in the end, as to whether a man can, by determination and resolve, of his own will, wipe out utterly the old life and become a new man. All those Russian years—Anna, Paul, Paul’s death, all the thought, the view, the vision of life, the philosophy that Russia gave me—those things have got to disappear.... They never existed. I’ve got again what, all those years, you all said that I wanted—the right to be once again an English citizen with everything, morals and all, cut and dried. I can say, like old Vladimir after his year in Canada, ‘I’d never seen so many clean people in my life.’ I’ve got what I wanted, and I mustn’t—I musn’t—look back.
“I believe I can carry it all through if I can get Katherine—get her and keep her and separate her from the family. She’s got to belong to me and not to the Trenchards. Moscow—The Trenchards! Oh, Paul, there’s a Comedy there—and a tragedy too perhaps. I’m an ass, but I’m frightened. I think I’m doing the finest things and, when they’re done, they turn out the rottenest. Supposing I become a Trenchard myself? Think of that night when Paul died. Afterwards we went up to the Kremlin, you remember. How quiet it was and how entirely I seemed to have died with Paul, and then how quickly life was the same again. But at any rate Moscow cared for me and told me that it cared—London cares nothing ... not even for the Trenchards....
“Think of me, Paul, as often as you can. Think of that afternoon in the restaurant when you first showed me how to drink Vodka and I told you in appalling German that Byron and Wilde weren’t as good as you thought them.... Think of me, old man. I believe I’m in for a terrible business. If Katherine loves me the family will fight me. If she doesn’t love me nothing else now seems to matter ... and, with it all, I’m as lonely as though I were a foreigner who didn’t know a word of English and hadn’t a friend.... I’ve got my Ikon up on the right corner—Near it is a print of ‘Queen Victoria receiving news of her accession to the throne of England’ ...”