“You seem very fond of Nikitin,” I said.
“We are friends … we have been friends for many years. My wife was very fond of him. I am a lonely man, Ivan Andreievitch, since the death of my wife, and to be with anyone who knew her is a great happiness … yes, a great happiness.”
“And Semyonov?” I asked.
“I have nothing to say against Alexei Petrovitch,” he answered stiffly.
When later I joined the others at the cottage higher up the road taken by the doctors of the Division, I discovered Trenchard in an ecstasy of happiness. He did not speak to me but his shining eyes, the eagerness with which standing back from the group he watched us all, told me everything. Marie Ivanovna had been kind to him, and when I found her in the centre of them, her whole body alert with excitement, I forgot my anger at her earlier unkindness or, if I remembered it, laid it to the charge of my own imagination or Trenchard’s sensitiveness.
Indeed we were all excited. How could we fail to be! There was some big business toward, and in it we were to have our share. We were, perhaps this very day, to penetrate into the reality of the thing that for nine months now we had been watching. All of us, with our little private histories like bundles on our backs, are venturing out to try our fortune. … What are we going to find?
I remember indeed that early on that afternoon I felt the drama of the whole affair so heavily that I saw in every soldier who passed me a messenger of fate. They called me to a meal. Eat! Now! How absurd it seemed! Semyonov watched me cynically:
“Eat and then sleep,” he said, “or you’ll be no use to anyone.”
Afterwards I went back to the kitchen and slept. That sleep was the end of my melodrama. I was awakened by a rough hand on my shoulder to find it dark beyond the windows and Semyonov watching me impatiently:
“Come, get up! It’s time for us to start,” and then moved out. I was conscious that I was cold and irritable. I looked back with surprised contempt to my earlier dramatic emotions. I was hungry; I put on my overcoat, shivered, came out into the evening, saw the line of wagons silhouetted against the sky, listened to the perfect quiet on every side of me, yawned and was vexed to find Trenchard at my side.
Why this is actually dull!
I thought to myself. It is as though I were going to some dinner that I know beforehand will be exceedingly tiresome—only then I should get some food.
I was disappointed at the lack of drama in the affair. I looked at my watch—it was ten o’clock. Semyonov was arranging everything with a masterly disregard of personal feelings. He swore fine Russian oaths, abused the sanitars, always in his cold rather satirical voice, his heavy figure moving up and down the road with a practical vivid alertness that stirred my envy and also my annoyance. I felt utterly useless. He ordered me on to my wagon in a manner that, in my present half-sleepy, half-surly mood seemed to me abominably abrupt. Trenchard climbed up, very clumsily, after me.
I leaned back on the straw, let my arms fall and lay there, flat on my back, staring straight into the sky. … With that my mood suddenly changed. I was at peace with the whole world. Tonight was again thick with a heavy burden of stars that seemed to weigh like the silver lid of some mighty box heavily down, down upon us, until trees and hills and the dim Carpathians were bent flat beneath the pressure. I lying upon my back, seeing only that sheet of stars, in my nostrils the smell of the straw, rocked by the slow dreamy motion of the wagon, was filled with an exquisite ease and lethargy. I was going into battle, was I? I was to have tonight the supreme experience of my life? It might be that tonight I should die—only last week two members of the Red Cross—a nurse and a doctor—had been killed. It might be that these stars, this straw, this quiet night were round me for the last time. It did not matter to me—nothing could touch me. My soul was somewhere far away, upon some business of its own, and how happy was my body without the soul, how contented, how undisturbed! I could fancy that I should go, thus rocking, into battle and there die before my soul had time to return to me. What would my soul do then? Find some other body, or go wandering, searching for me? A star, a flash of light like a cry of happiness or of glad surprise, fell through heaven and the other stars trembled at the sight.
My wagon stopped with a jerk. Some voice asked: what the devil were we doing filling the road with our carts at the exact moment that such-and-such a Division wished to move.
I heard Semyonov’s voice, very cold, official and polite. Then again: “Well, in God’s name, hurry then! … taking up the road! … hurry, I tell you!”
On we jogged again. Trenchard’s voice came to me: he had been, it might be, talking for some time.
“And so I’m not surprised, Durward, that you thought me a terrible fool to show my feelings as I’ve done this last fortnight. But you don’t know what it is to me—to have something at last in your hands that you’ve dreamed of all your life and never dared to hope for: to have it and feel that at any moment it may slip away and leave you in a worse state than you were before. I’d been wishing, these last weeks, that I’d never met her, that I’d simply come to the war by myself. But now—today—when she spoke to me as she did, asked me to forgive her
