“Our house was small and badly shaped, full of dark corners, and after his death he seemed to me to haunt the place. He figured Death to me and until I was quite old, until I went to Rugby, I fancied that he was sitting in a dark corner, on a chair, waiting, with his hands on his lap, until the time came for him to take me. Sometimes I would fancy that I heard him moving from one room to another, bringing his chair with him. Then I began to have a dream, a dream that frequently recurred all the time that I was growing up. It was a dream about a huge dark house in a huge dark forest. It was early morning, the light just glimmering between the thick damp trees. A large party of people gathered together in a high empty room prepared for an expedition. I was one of them and I was filled with sharp agonising terror. Sometimes in my dream I drank to give myself courage and the glass clattered against my lips. Sometimes I talked with one of the company; the room was very dark and I could see no faces. Then we would start trooping out into the bitterly cold morning air. There would be many horses and dogs. We would lead off into the forest and soon (it always happened) I would find myself alone—alone with the dripping trees high around me and the light that seemed to grow no lighter and the intense cold. Then suddenly it would be that I was the hunted, not the hunter. It was Death whom we were hunting—Death, for me my uncle—and I would fancy him waiting in the darkness, watching me, smiling, hearing his hunters draw off the scent, knowing that they would not find him, but that he had found me. Then my knees would fail me, I would sink down in a sweat of terror, and—wake! … Brrr! … I can see it now!”
He shook himself, turning round to me as though he were suddenly ashamed of himself, with a laugh half-shy, half-retrospective.
“We all have our dreams,” he continued. “But this came too often—again and again. The question of death became my constant preoccupation as I grew to think I would never see it, nor hear men speak of it, nor—”
“And you have come,” I could not but interrupt him, “here, to the very fortress—Why, man!—”
“I know,” he answered, smiling at me. “It must seem to you ridiculous. But I am a different person now—very different. Now I am ready, eager for anything. Death can be nothing to me now, or if that is too bold, at least I may say that I am prepared to meet him—anywhere—at any time. I want to meet him—I want to show—”
“We have all,” I said, “in our hearts, perhaps, come like that—come to prove that our secret picture of ourselves, that picture so different from our friends’ opinion of us, is really the true one. We can fancy them saying afterwards: ‘Well, I never knew that so-and-so had so much in him!’ We always knew.”
“No, you see,” Trenchard said eagerly, “there can be only one person now about whose opinion I care. If she thinks well of me—”
“You are very much in love,” I said, and loosed, as I had expected, the torrents of his happiness upon me.
“I was in Polchester when the war broke out. The town received it rather as though a first-class company had come from London to act in the Assembly Rooms for a fortnight. It was dramatic and picturesque and pleasantly patriotic. They see it otherwise now, I fancy. I seemed at once to think of Russia. For one thing I wanted desperately to help, and I thought that in England they would only laugh at me as they had always done. I am shortsighted. I knew that I should never be a soldier. I fancied that in Russia they would not say: ‘Oh, John Trenchard of Polchester. … He’s no good!’ before they’d seen whether I could do anything. Then of course I had read about the country—Tolstoy and Turgenev, and a little Dostoevsky and even Gorky and Chekhov. I went quite suddenly, making up my mind one evening. I seemed to begin to be a new man out of England. The journey delighted me. … I was in Moscow before I knew. I was there three months trying to learn Russian. Then I came to Petrograd and through the English Embassy found a place in one of the hospitals, where I worked as a sanitar for three months. I did not leave England until November, so that I have been in Russia now just six months. It was in this hospital that I met Miss Krassovsky—Marie Ivanovna. From the first moment I loved her, of course. And she liked me. She was the first woman, since my mother, who had really liked me. She quickly saw my devotion and she laughed a little, but she was always kind. I could talk to her and she liked to listen. She had—she has, great ideals, great hopes and ambitions. We worked together there and then, afterwards, in those beautiful spring evenings in Petrograd when the canals shone all night and the houses were purple, we walked. … The night before last night I begged her to marry me … and she accepted. She said that we would go together to the war, that I should be her knight and she
