I don’t believe that he heard me.
“Semyonov?” he said slowly. “What did he do?”
“He was very quiet,” I answered. “He didn’t say anything. He looked awful.”
“Yes. She snapped her fingers at him anyway. He couldn’t keep her for all his bullying.”
“It pretty well killed him,” I said rather fiercely. “Look here, Trenchard. Don’t think of yourself—or of her. Everyone’s in it now. There isn’t any personality about it. We’ve simply got to do our best and not think about it. It’s thinking that beats one if one lets it.”
“Semyonov … Semyonov,” he repeated to himself, smiling. “No, he had not power over her.” Then looking at me very calmly, he remarked: “This Death, you know, Durward. … It simply doesn’t exist. It can’t stop her. It can’t stop anyone if they’re determined. I’ll find her before Semyonov does, too.”
Then, as though he had waked from sleep, he said to me, his voice trembling a little: “Am I talking queerly, Durward? If I am, don’t think anything of it. It’s this heat—and this place. Let’s get back.” He only spoke once more. He said: “Do you remember that first drive—ages ago, when we saw the trenches and heard the frogs and I thought there was someone there?”
“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”
“Well, it’s rather like that now, isn’t it?”
A pretty girl, twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, obviously the daughter of the red-faced proprietor, came up to us and asked us if we would like any more tea. She would be stout later on, her red cheeks were plump and her black hair arranged coquettishly in little shining curls. She smiled on us.
“No more tea?” she said.
“No more,” I answered.
“You will not be staying here?”
“Not tonight.”
“We have a nice room here.”
“No, thank you.”
“Perhaps one of you—”
“No. We are returning tonight.”
“Perhaps, for an hour or two.” Then smiling at me and laughing a little, “I have known many officers … very many.”
“No, thank you,” I said sternly.
“I have a sister,” she said. She turned, crying: “Marie, Marie!”
A little girl, who could not have been more than fourteen years of age, appeared from the background. She also was red-cheeked and plump; her hair also was arranged in black, shining curls. She stood looking at us, half smiling, half defiant, sucking her finger.
“She also has known officers,” said the girl. “She would be very glad, if you cared—”
I heard their father behind the bar humming to himself.
“Come out of this!” I said to Trenchard. “Come away!”
He followed me quietly, bowing very politely to the staring sisters. …
“Go on,” I said to Nikolai. “Drive on. No time to waste. We’ve got work to do.”
On our return we found that the press of work was not as yet severe. Half the building belonged to us, the remaining half being used by the officers of the battery. Nikitin had arranged a large room, that must I think have been a dining-room in happier days, with beds; to the right was the operating-room, overhead were our bedrooms and the room where originally I had sat with Marie Ivanovna was a general meeting place. The officers of the battery, two middle-aged and two very young indeed, were extremely courteous and begged us to make use of them in any way possible. They were living in the raggedest fashion, a week’s growth of beard on their chins, their beds unmade, the floor littered with ends of cigarettes, pieces of paper, journals.
“Been here weeks,” they apologetically explained to us. “Come in and have a meal with us whenever you like.” They resembled animals in a cave. When they were not on duty they played chemin-de-fer and slept. Meanwhile for three days and nights our work was slight. The battle drew further away into the Forest. Wagons with wounded came to us only at long intervals.
The result of these three days was a strange new intimacy between the four of us. I have never in all my life seen anything more charming than the behaviour of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch to Trenchard. There is something about Russian kindness that is both simpler and more tactful than any other kindness in the world. Tact is too often another name for insincerity, but Russian kindheartedness is the most honest impulse in the Russian soul, the quality that comes first, before anger, before injustice, before prejudice, before slander, before disloyalty, and overrides them all. They were, of course, conscious that Trenchard’s case was worse than their own. Marie Ivanovna’s death had shocked them, but she had been outside their lives and already she was fading from them. Trenchard was another matter. Nikitin seemed to me for the first time in my knowledge of him to come down from his idealistic dreaming. He cared for Trenchard like a child, but never obtrusively. Trenchard seemed to appreciate it, but there was something about him that I did not like. His nerves were tensely strained, he did his work with his eyes fixed upon some impossible distance, he often did not hear us when we spoke to him.
And so the three of us formed a kind of hedge about him to protect him, a hedge of which he was perfectly unconscious. He was very silent and I would have given a great deal to hear again one of those Glebeshire stories that I had once found so tiresome. That some plan or purpose was in his head one could not doubt.
We had, all of us, much in common in our characters. We liked the sentimental easy coloured view of life. We suddenly felt a strange freedom here in this place. For myself, on the third day, I found that Marie Ivanovna was most strangely present with me, and on the afternoon of that day, our wounded quiet on their
