He suddenly sprang up and stood before me. “Tomorrow I shall think otherwise—and yet this is part of the truth that I have told you. … And your Englishman? I like him … I like him. That girl will treat him badly, of course. How can she do otherwise? He sees her like Turgenev’s Liza. Well, she is not that. No girl in Russia today is like Turgenev’s Liza. And it’s a good thing.” He smiled—that strange, happy, confident mysterious smile that I had seen first on the Petrograd platform. Then he turned and walked slowly towards the house.
What Nikitin had said about Trenchard’s expectation of “romantic war” was perhaps true, in different degrees, of all of us. Even I, in spite of my earlier experience, felt some irritation at this delay, and to those of us who had arrived flaming with energy, bravery, resolution to make their name before Europe, this feasting in a country garden seemed a deliberate insult. Was this “romantic war?” These long meals under the trees, deep sleeps in the afternoon when the pigeons cooed round the little red bell-tower and the pump creaked in the cobbled courtyard and the bees hummed in the garden? Bees, cold water shining deep in the well, and the samovar chuckling behind the flowerbeds, and fifteen versts away the Austrians challenging the Russian nation! … “You know,” Andrey Vassilievitch said to me, “it’s very disheartening.”
Marie Ivanovna at the end of the first week spoke her mind. I found her one evening before supper leaning over the fence, gazing across the long flat field, pale gold in the dusk with the hills like grey clouds beyond it.
“They tell me,” she said, turning to me, “that we may be another fortnight like this.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s quite possible, or even longer. We can’t provide wounded and battles for you if there aren’t any.”
“But there are!” she cried. “Isn’t the whole of Europe fighting and isn’t it simply disgusting of us to be sitting down here, eating and sleeping, just as though we were in a dacha in the country? At least in the hospital in Petrograd I was working … here. …”
“We’ve got to stick to our Division,” I answered. “They can’t have it in reserve very long. When it goes, we’ll go. The whole secret of leading this life out here is taking exactly what comes as completely as you can take it. If it’s a time for sleeping and eating, sleep and eat—there’ll be days enough when you’ll get nothing of either.”
She laughed then, swinging round to me, with the dusk round her white nurse’s cap and her eyes dark with her desires and hopes and disappointments.
“Oh, I’ve no right to be discontented. … Everyone is so good to me. I love them all—even you, Mr. Durward. But I want to begin, to begin, to begin! I want to see what it’s like, to find what there is there that frightens them, or makes them happy. We had a young officer in our hospital who died. He was too ill … he could tell us nothing, but he was so excited by something … something he was in the middle of. … Who was it? What was it? I must be there, hunt it out, find that I’m strong enough not to be afraid of anything.” She suddenly dropped her voice, changing with sharp abruptness. “And John? He’s not happy here, is he?”
“You should know,” I answered, “better than any of us.”
“Why should I know?” she replied, flaming out at me. “You always blame me about him, but you are unfair. I want him to be happy—I would make him so if I could. But he’s so strange, so different from his time at the hospital. He will scarcely speak to me or to anyone. Why can’t he be agreeable to everyone? I want them to like him but how can they when he won’t talk to them and runs away if they come near him? He’s disappointed perhaps at its being so quiet here. It isn’t
