The Forest was deep black, but you could see the soldiers’ fires gleaming here and there like beasts’ eyes. Our room was almost dark and I was very startled to find Semyonov sitting on his bed and staring in front of him. He looked like a wooden figure sitting there, and he didn’t move as I came in. I’m glad that although I’m still awkward and clumsy with him (as I am, and always will be, I suppose, with everyone) I’m not afraid of him any more. The room was so dark that he looked like a shadow. I had intended to fetch something and go away, but instead of that I sat down on my bed, feeling suddenly very tired and lethargic.
“Well, Mr.,” he said in the ironical voice he always uses to me.
(I would wish now to repeat if I can every word of our conversation.)
“Krylov has been again,” I said. “He told Nikitin that we ought to go tonight. Nikitin asked him whether the Division had plenty of wagons and Krylov admitted that there weren’t nearly enough. He agreed that it would make a lot of difference if we could keep this place going until tomorrow night—all the same he advised us to leave.”
“We’ll stay until someone orders us to go,” said Semyonov. “It will make a difference to a hundred men or more probably. If they do start firing on to this place we can get the men off in the wagons in time.”
“And what if the wagons have left for Mittövo?”
“We’ll have to wait until they come back,” he answered.
We sat there listening to the cannon. Then Semyonov said very quietly and not at all ironically, “I wish to ask you—I have wished before—tell me. You blame me for her death?”
I thought for a moment, then I replied:
“I did so at first. Now I do not think that it had anything to do with you or with me or with anyone—except herself.”
“Except herself?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“She wished it, I think.”
His irony returned. “You believe in the power of others, Mr., too much. You should believe more in your own.”
“I believe in her power. She was stronger than you,” I answered.
“I’m sure that you like to think so,” he said laughing.
“She is still stronger than you. …”
“So you are a mystic, Mr.,” he said. “Of course, with your romantic mind that is only natural. You believe, I suppose, that she is with us here in the room?”
“It cannot be of interest to you,” I answered quietly, “what I believe.”
“Yes, it is of interest,” he replied in a voice that was friendly and humorously indulgent, as though he spoke to a child. “I find it strange—I have found it strange for many weeks now—that I should think so frequently of you. You are not a man who would naturally be interesting to me. You are an Englishman and I am not interested in Englishmen. You are sentimental, you have no idea of life as it is, you like dull things, dull safe things, you believe always in what you are told. You have no sense of humour. … You should be of no interest to me, and yet during these last weeks I have not been able to get rid of you.”
“That is not my fault,” I said. “I have not been so anxious for your company.”
“No,” he said, speaking rather thoughtfully, as though he were seriously thinking something out, “you regard me, of course, as a very bad character. I have no desire to defend myself to you. But the point is that I have found myself often thinking of you, that I have even taken trouble sometimes to be with you.”
He waited as though he expected me to say something, but I was silent.
“It was perhaps that I saw that Marie Ivanovna cared for you. She gave you up to the end something that she never gave to me. That I suppose was tiresome to me.”
“You thought you knew her,” I said, hoping to hurt him. “You did not know her at all.”
“That may be,” he answered. “I certainly did not understand her, but that was attractive to me. And so, Mr., you thought that you understood her?”
But I did not answer him. My head ached frantically, I was wretchedly in want of sleep. I jumped to my feet, standing in front of him:
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” I cried. “Let us part. I am nothing to you—you despise me and laugh at me—you have from the first done so. It was because you laughed at me that she began to laugh. If you had not been there she might have continued to love me—she was very inexperienced. And now that she is gone I am of no more importance to you—let me be! For God’s sake, let me be!”
“You are free,” he said. “You can return to Mittövo in an hour’s time when the wagons go.”
I did not speak.
“No, you will not go,” he went on, “because you think that she is here. She died here—and you believe that she is not dead. I also will not go—for my own reasons.”
Then he jumped off his bed, stood upright against me, his clothes touching mine. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“No, Mr., we will remain together. I find you really rather charming. And you are changed, you know. You are not the silly fool you were when you first came to us!”
I moved away from him. I could not bear the touch of his hand on my shoulder. I had,
