“You said there was something you wanted to ask my advice about?”
I broke the silence.
He looked at me with his long slow considering stare. He mumbled something; then, with a sudden gesture, he gripped my arm, and his heavy body quivering with the urgency of his words he said:
“It’s Vera Markovitch. … I’d give my body and soul and spirit for her happiness and safety. … God forgive me, I’d give my country and my honour. … I ache and long for her, so that I’m afraid for my sanity. I’ve never loved a woman, nor lusted for one, nor touched one in my whole life, Durward—and now … and now … I’ve gone right in. I’ve spoken no word to anyone; but I couldn’t stand my own silence. … Durward, you’ve got to help me!”
I walked on, seeing the golden light and the curving arc of snow and the little figures moving like dolls from light to shadow. Lawrence! I had never thought of him as an urgent lover; even now, although I could still feel his hand quivering on my arm, I could have laughed at the ludicrous incongruity of romance, and that stolid thickset figure. And at the same time I was afraid. Lawrence in love was no boy on the threshold of life like Bohun … here was no trivial passion. I realised even in that first astonished moment the trouble that might be in store for all of us.
“Look here, Lawrence!” I said at last. “The first thing that you may as well realise is that it is hopeless. Vera Michailovna has confided in me a good deal lately, and she is devoted to her husband, thinks of nothing else. She’s simple, naive, with all her sense and wisdom. …”
“Hopeless!” he interrupted, and he gave a kind of grim chuckle of derision. “My dear Durward, what do you suppose I’m after? … rape and adultery and Markovitch after us with a pistol? I tell you—” and here he spoke fiercely, as though he were challenging the whole icebound world around us—“that I want nothing but her happiness, her safety, her comfort! Do you suppose that I’m such an ass as not to recognise the kind of thing that my loving her would lead to? I tell you I’m after nothing for myself, and that not because I’m a fine unselfish character, but simply because the thing’s too big to let anything into it but herself. She shall never know that I care twopence about her, but she’s got to be happy and she’s got to be safe. … Just now, she’s neither of those things, and that’s why I’ve spoken to you. … She’s unhappy and she’s afraid, and that’s got to change. I wouldn’t have spoken of this to you if I thought you’d be so shortsighted. …”
“All right! All right!” I said testily. “You may be a kind of Galahad, Lawrence, outside all natural law. I don’t know, but you’ll forgive me if I go for a moment on my own experience—and that experience is, that you can start on as highbrow an elevation as you like, but love doesn’t stand still, and the body’s the body, and tomorrow isn’t yesterday—not by no means. Moreover, Markovitch is a Russian and a peculiar one at that. Finally, remember that I want Vera Michailovna to be happy quite as much as you do!”
He was suddenly grave and almost boyish in his next words.
“I know that—you’re a decent chap, Durward—I know it’s hard to believe me, but I just ask you to wait and test me. No one knows of this—that I’d swear—and no one shall; but what’s the matter with her, Durward, what’s she afraid of? That’s why I spoke to you. You know her, and I’ll throttle you here where we stand if you don’t tell me just what the trouble is. I don’t care for confidences or anything of the sort. You must break them all and tell me—”
His hand was on my arm again, his big ugly face, now grim and obstinate, close against mine.
“I’ll tell you,” I said slowly, “all I know, which is almost nothing. The trouble is Semyonov, the doctor. Why or how I can’t say, although I’ve seen enough of him in the past to know the trouble he can be. She’s afraid of him, and Markovitch is afraid of him. He likes playing on people’s nerves. He’s a bitter, disappointed man, who loved desperately once, as only real sensualists can … and now he’s in love with a ghost. That’s why real life maddens him.”
“Semyonov!” Lawrence whispered the name.
We had come to the end of the quay. My dear church with its round grey wall stood glistening in the moonlight, the shadows from the snow rippling up its sides, as though it lay under water. We stood and looked across the river.
“I’ve always hated that fellow,” Lawrence said. “I’ve only seen him about twice, but I believe I hated him before I saw him. … All right, Durward, that’s what I wanted to know. Thank you. Good night.”
And before I could speak he had gripped my hand, had turned back, and was walking swiftly away, across the golden-lighted quay.
XIX
From the moment that Lawrence left me, vanishing into the heart of the snow and ice, I was obsessed by a conviction of approaching danger and peril. It has been one of the most disastrous weaknesses of my life that I have always shrunk from precipitate action. Before the war it had seemed to many of us that life could be jockeyed into decisions by words and theories and speculations. The swift, and, as it were, revengeful precipitancy of the last three years had driven me into a self-distrust and cowardice which had grown and grown until life had seemed veiled and distant and mysteriously obscure. From my own obscurity, against my will, against my courage, against my own knowledge of myself, circumstances were demanding that I should advance and act.
