I had a fear lest Andrey Vassilievitch should cry. He seemed so desolate there, giving strange little self-important coughs and sniffs, beating the ground with his smart little military boot.
Across the river the black wall of cloud had returned and now hung above the forest of S⸺, that lay sullenly, in its shadow, forbidding and thick, itself like a cloud. The world was cold, the Nestor like a snake. … I shivered, seized by some sudden sense of coming disaster and trouble. The evenings there were often strangely chill.
“Look,” cried Andrey Vassilievitch, starting to his feet “There’s Marie Ivanovna!”
I turned and saw her standing there, smiling at us, silently and without movement, like an apparition.
II
Marie Ivanovna
It was on July 23 that I first entered the Forest of S⸺. I did not, I remember, pay the event any especial attention. I went with Anna Petrovna to the cholera village that is on the outskirts of the forest, and I recollect that we hastened back because that evening we were to celebrate the conclusion of the first six months’ work of our Otriad. Of my entrance into the forest I remember absolutely nothing; it seemed, I suppose, an ordinary enough forest to me. Of the festivities in the evening I have a very clear recollection. I remember that it was the loveliest summer weather, not too hot, with a little breeze coming up from the river, and the green glittering on every side of us with the quiver of flashing water. In the little garden outside our house a table had been improvised and on this were a large gilt icon, a vase of flowers in a hideous purple jar, and two tall candles whose flames looked unreal and thin in the sunlight. There was the priest, a fine stout man with a long black beard and hair falling below his shoulders, clothed in silk of gold and purple, waving a censer, monotoning the prayers in a high Russian tenor, with one eye on the choir of sanitars, one eye on the candles blown by the wind, the breeze meanwhile playing irreverent jests on his splendid skirts of gold. Then there was the congregation in three groups. The first group—two generals, two colonels, four or five other officers, the Sisters (Sister K⸺ bowing and crossing herself incessantly, Anna Petrovna with her attention obviously on the dinner cooking behind a tree in the garden, Marie Ivanovna looking lovely and happy and good), ourselves—Molozov official, Semyonov sarcastic, Nikitin in a dream, Andrey Vassilievitch busy with his smart uniform, Trenchard (forgotten his sword, his blue handkerchief protruding from his pocket) absorbed by the ceremony, myself thinking of Trenchard, Goga—and the rest. The second group—the singing sanitars, some ten of them, stout and healthy, singing as Russians do with complete self-forgetfulness and a rapturous happiness in front of them, a funny little man with spectacles and a sharp-pointed beard, once a schoolmaster, now a sanitar, conducting their music with a long bony finger—all of them chanting the responses with perfect precision and harmony. Third group, the other sanitars, the strangest collection of faces, wild, savage and eastern: Tartars, Lithuanians, Mongolian, mild and northern, cold and western, merry and human from Little Russia, gigantic and fierce from the Caucasus, small and frozen from Archangel, one or two civilised and superior and uninteresting from Petrograd and Moscow.
Over the wall a long row of interested Galician peasants and soldiers passing in carts or on horseback. Seeing the icon, the priest, the blowing candles, hearing the singing they would take off their hats, cross themselves, for a moment their eyes would go dreamy, mild, forgetful, then on their hats would go again, back they would turn their horses, cursing them up the hill, chaffing the Galician women, down deep in the everyday life again.
The service ended. The priest turns to us, the gold Cross is raised, we advance one by one: the generals, the colonels, the lieutenants, the Sisters, Semyonov, Nikitin, Goga, then the choir, then the sanitars, even to hunchbacked Alesha, who is always given the dirtiest work to do and is only half a human being; one by one we kiss the Cross, the candles are blown out, the icon folded up and put away in a cardboard box, we are introduced to the generals, there is general conversation, and the stars and the moon come out “blown straight up, it seems, out of the bosom of the Nestor. …”
It was a very happy and innocent evening. For extracting the utmost happiness possible out of the simplest materials the Russians have surely no rivals. How our generals and our colonels enjoyed that evening! A wonderful dinner was cooked between two stones in the garden—little pig, young chickens, borscht, that most luxurious of soups, and ices—yes, and ices. Then there were speeches, many, many glasses of tea, strawberry and cherry jam, biscuits and cigarettes. We were all very, very happy. …
It was arranged on the morning after the feast that I should go again to the cholera village with Marie Ivanovna and Semyonov. Under a morning of a blazing relentless heat, bars of light ruling the sky, we started, the three of us, at about ten o’clock, in the little low dogcart, followed by the kitchen and the boiler. Marie Ivanovna sat next to Semyonov, I facing them. Semyonov was happier than I had ever seen him before. Happiness was not a quality with
