“I found that though he irritated me more than ever I liked to talk about her to him. As I spoke of her he scarcely was present at all and yet he had known her and loved her, and would listen forever and ever if I wished.
“When the war had lasted some months the fancy came to me that I could get nearer to her by going into it. I might even die, which would be best of all. I did not wish to kill myself because I felt that to be a coward’s death, and in such a way I thought that I would only separate myself from her. But in the war, perhaps, I might meet death in such a way as to show him that I despised him both for myself and her. By suicide I would be paying him reverence. … Some such thought also had Andrey Vassilievitch. I heard that he thought of attaching himself to some Red Cross Otriad. I told him my plans. He said no more, but suddenly, as you know, I found him on the platform of the Warsaw station. Afterwards he apologised to me, said that he must be near me, that he would try not to annoy me, that if sometimes he spoke of her to me he hoped that I would not mind. … And I? What do I feel? I do not know. He has some share in her that I have not. I have some share in her that he has not, and I think that it has come to both of us that the one of us who dies first will attain her. It seems to me now that she is continually with me, but I believe that this is nothing to the knowledge I shall have of her one day. Am I right? Is Andrey Vassilievitch right? Can it be that such a man—such men, I should say, as either I or he—will ever be given such happiness? I do not know. I only know that God exists—that Love is more powerful than man—that Death can fall before us if we believe that it will—that the soul of man is Power and Love. … I believe in God. …”
V
First Move to the Enemy
It was during two nights in the forest of S⸺, about which I must afterwards write, that I had those long conversations with Trenchard, upon whose evidence now I must very largely depend. Before me as I write is his Diary, left to me by him. In this whole business of the war there is nothing more difficult than the varied and confused succession with which moods, impressions, fancies, succeed one upon another, but Trenchard told me so simply and yet so graphically of the events of these weeks that followed the battle of S⸺ that I believe I am departing in no way from the truth in my present account, the truth, at any rate as he himself believed it to be. …
The only impression that he brought away with him from the battle of S⸺ was that picture, lighted by the horizon fires, of Marie Ivanovna kneeling with her hand on Semyonov’s shoulder. That, every detail and colour of it, bit into his brain.
In understanding him it is of the first importance to remember that this was the one and only love business of his life. The effect of those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as glass is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was, fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of him? That she should make nothing of him at all was as incredible to him as that there should not be, somewhere in the world, Polchester town in Glebeshire county.
There had been with him, I think, from the first a fear that “it was all too good to be true”—Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. It is not easy for any man, after thirty years’ shy shrinking from the world, to shake himself free of superstitions, and such terrors the quiet and retired Polchester had bred in Trenchard’s heart as though it had been the very epitome of life at its lowest and vilest. It simply came to this, that he refused to believe that Marie Ivanovna had been given to him only to be taken away again. About women he knew simply nothing and Russian women are not the least complicated of their sex. About Marie Ivanovna he of course knew nothing at all.
His first weeks in our Otriad had been like the painful return to drab reality after a splendid dream. “After all I am the hopeless creature I thought I was. What was there, in those days in Petrograd, that could blind me?” His shyness returned, his awkwardness, his mistakes in tact and resource were upon him again like a suit of badly made clothes. He knew this but he believed that it could make no difference to his
