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"Ah! you must! you must! You must all like him! You don't know—his thoughts, his ideals—they are wonderful. He's like some knight of the Middle Ages. … Ah, but you'll think that silly, Mr. Durward. You're a practical Englishman. I hate practical Englishmen."
"Thank you," I said, laughing.
"No, but I do. You sneer at everything beautiful. Here in Russia we're more simple. And John's very like a Russian in many ways. Don't you think he is?"
"I haven't known him long enough—" I began.
"Ah, you don't like him! I see you don't. … No, it's no use your saying anything. He isn't English enough for you, that's what it is. You think him unpractical, unworldly. Well, so he is. Do you think I'd ever be engaged to an ordinary Englishman? I'd die of ennui in a week. Oh! yes, I would. But you like John, really, don't you?"
"I tell you that I do," I answered, "but really, after only two days—"
"Ah! that's so English! So cautious! How I hate your caution! Why can't you say at once that you haven't made up your mind about him—because that's the truth, isn't it? I wish he would not sit there, looking at me, and not talking to the others. He ought to talk to them, but he's afraid that they'll laugh at his Russian. It's not very good, his Russian, is it? I can't help laughing myself sometimes!"
Her English was extremely good. Sometimes she used a word in its wrong sense; she had one or two charming little phrases of her own: "What a purpose to?" instead of: "Why?" and sometimes a double negative. She rolled her r's more than is our habit.
I said, looking straight into her eyes:
"It's a tremendous thing to him, his having you. I can see that although I've known him so short a time. He's a very lucky man and—and—if his luck were to go, I think that he'd simply die. There! That isn't a very English thing to have said, is it?"
"Why did you say it?" she cried sharply. "You don't trust me. You think—"
"I think nothing," I answered. "Only he's not like ordinary men. He's so much younger than his age."
She gave me then the strangest look. The light seemed suddenly to die out of her face; her eyes sought mine as though for help. There were tears in them.
"Oh! I do want to be good to him!" she whispered. Then got up abruptly and joined the others.
Late in the afternoon an automobile arrived and carried off most of our party. I was compelled to remain for several hours, and intended to drive, looking forward indeed to the long quiet silence of the spring evening. Moved by some sudden impulse I suggested to Trenchard that he should wait and drive with me: "The car will be very crowded," I said, "and I think too that you'd like to see some of the country properly. It's a lovely evening—only thirty versts. … Will you wait and come with me?"
He agreed at once; he had been, all day, very quiet, watching, with that rather clumsy expression of his, the expression of a dog who had been taught by his master some tricks which he had half-forgotten and would presently be expected to remember.
When I made my suggestion he flung one look at Marie Ivanovna. She was busied over some piece of luggage, and half-turned her head, smiling at him:
"Ah, do go, John—yes? We will be so cr-rowded. … It will be very nice for you driving."
I fancied that I heard him sigh. He tried to help the ladies with their luggage, handed them the wrong parcels, dropped delicate packages, apologised, blushed, was very hot, collected dust from I know not where. … Once I heard a sharp, angry voice: "John! Oh! … " I could not believe that it was Marie Ivanovna. Of course she was hot and tired and had slept, last night, but little. The car, watched by an inquisitive but strangely apathetic crowd of peasants, snorted its way down the little streets, the green trees blowing and the starlings chattering. In a moment the starlings and our two selves seemed to have the whole dead little town to ourselves.
I saw quite clearly that he was unhappy; he could never disguise his feelings; as he waited for the trap to appear he had the same lost and abandoned appearance that he had on my first vision of him at the Petrograd station. The soldier who was to drive us smiled as he saw me.
"Only thirty versts, your honour … or, thank God, even less. It will take us no time." He was a large clumsy creature, like an eager overgrown puppy; he was one of the four or five Nikolais in our Otriad, and he is to be noticed in this history because he attached himself from the very beginning to Trenchard with that faithful and utterly unquestioning devotion of which the Russian soldier is so frequently capable. He must, I think, have seen something helpless and unhappy in Trenchard's appearance on this evening. Sancho to our Don Quixote he was from that first moment.
"Yes, he's an English gentleman," I said when he had listened for a moment to Trenchard's Russian.
"Like yourself," said Nikolai.
"Yes, Nikolai. You must look after him. He'll be strange here at first."
"Slushaiu (I hear)."
That was all he said. He got up on to his seat, his broad back was bent over his horses.
"Well, and how have things been, Nikolai, busy?"
"Nikak nyet—not at all. Very quiet."
"No wounded?"
"Nothing at all, Barin, for two weeks now."
"Have you liked that?"
"Tak totchno. Certainly yes."
"No, but have you?"
"Tak totchno, Barin."
Then he turned and gave, for one swift instant, a glance at Trenchard, who was, very clumsily, climbing into the carriage. Nikolai looked at him gravely. His round, red face was quite expressionless as he turned back and began to abjure his horses in that half-affectionate, half-abusive and wholly human whispering exclamation that Russians use to their animals. We started.
I have mentioned in these pages that I had already spent three months with our Otriad at the Front. I cannot now define exactly what it was that made this drive on this first evening something utterly distinct and apart from all that I had experienced during that earlier period. It is true that, before, I had been for almost two months in one place and had seen nothing at all of actual warfare, except the feeding and bandaging of the wounded. But I had imagined then, nevertheless, that I was truly "in the thick of things," as indeed, in comparison with my Moscow or Petrograd life, I was. We had not now driven through the quiet evening air for ten minutes before I knew, with assured certainty, that a new phase of life was, on this day, opening before me; the dark hedges, the thin fine dust on the roads, the deep purple colour of the air, beat at my heart, as though they themselves were helping with quiet insistency to draw me into the drama. And yet nothing could have been more peaceful than was that lovely evening. The dark plum-colour in the evening sky soaked like wine into the hills, the fields, the thatched cottages, the streams and the little woods.
The faint saffron that lingered below the crests and peaks of rosy cloud showed between the stems of the silver birches like the friendly smile of a happy day. The only human beings to be seen were the peasants driving home their cows; far on the horizon the Carpathian mountains were purple in the dusk, the snow on their highest ridges faintly silver. There was not a sound in the world except the ring of our horses' hoofs upon the road. And yet this sinister excitement hammered, from somewhere, at me as I had never felt it before. It was as though the lovely evening were a painted scene lowered to hide some atrocity.
"This is scarcely what you expected a conquered country to look like, is it?" I said to Trenchard.
He looked about him, then said, hesitating: "No … that is … I don't know what I expected."
A curved moon, dull gold like buried treasure, rose slowly above the hill; one white star flickered and the scents of the little gardens that lined the road grew thicker in the air as the day faded.