The Secret City. Hugh Walpole
knows that too, and is ashamed. I think I could bear anything but that sense that she herself has that she’s being wrong—I hate her to be ashamed.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “it’s time that she went out into the world now and worked. There are a thousand things that a woman can do.”
“No—not Nina. I’ve spoilt her, perhaps; I don’t know. I always liked to feel that she needed my help. I didn’t want to make her too self-reliant. That was wrong of me, and I shall be punished for it.”
“Speak to her,” I said. “She loves you so much that one word from you to her will be enough.”
“No,” Vera Michailovna said slowly. “It won’t be enough now. A year ago, yes. But now she’s escaping as fast as she can.”
“Perhaps she’s in love with some one,” I suggested.
“No. I should have seen at once if it had been that. I would rather it were that. I think she would come back to me then. No, I suppose that this had to happen. I was foolish to think that it would not. But it leaves one alone—it—”
She pulled herself up at that, regarding me with sudden shyness, as though she would forbid me to hint that she had shown the slightest emotion, or made in any way an appeal for pity.
I was silent, then I said:
“And the third thing, Vera Michailovna?”
“Uncle Alexei is coming back.” That startled me. I felt my heart give one frantic leap.
“Alexei Petrovitch!” I cried. “When? How soon?”
“I don’t know. I’ve had a letter.” She felt in her dress, found the letter and read it through. “Soon, perhaps. He’s leaving the Front for good. He’s disgusted with it all, he says. He’s going to take up his Petrograd practice again.”
“Will he live with you?”
“No. God forbid!”
She felt then, perhaps, that her cry had revealed more than she intended, because she smiled and, trying to speak lightly, said:
“No. We’re old enemies, my uncle and I. We don’t get on. He thinks me sentimental, I think him—but never mind what I think him. He has a bad effect on my husband.”
“A bad effect?” I repeated.
“Yes. He irritates him. He laughs at his inventions, you know.”
I nodded my head. Yes, with my earlier experience of him I could understand that he would do that.
“He’s a cynical, embittered man,” I said. “He believes in nothing and in nobody. And yet he has his fine side—”
“No, he has no fine side,” she interrupted me fiercely. “None. He is a bad man. I’ve known him all my life, and I’m not to be deceived.”
Then in a softer, quieter tone she continued:
“But tell me, Ivan Andreievitch. I’ve wanted before to ask you. You were with him on the Front last year. We have heard that he had a great love affair there, and that the Sister whom he loved was killed. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I said, “that is true.”
“Was he very much in love with her?”
“I believe terribly.”
“And it hurt him deeply when she was killed?”
“Desperately deeply.”
“But what kind of woman was she? What type? It’s so strange to me. Uncle Alexei … with his love affairs!”
I looked up, smiling. “She was your very opposite, Vera Michailovna, in everything. Like a child—with no knowledge, no experience, no self-reliance—nothing. She was wonderful in her ignorance and bravery. We all thought her wonderful.”
“And she loved him?”
“Yes—she loved him.”
“How strange! Perhaps there is some good in him somewhere. But to us at any rate he always brings trouble. This affair may have changed him. They say he is very different. Worse perhaps—”
She broke out then into a cry:
“I want to get away, Ivan Andreievitch! To get away, to escape, to leave Russia and everything in it behind me! To escape!”
It was just then that Sacha knocked on the door. She came in to say that there was an Englishman in the hall inquiring for the other Englishman who had come yesterday, that he wanted to know when he would be back.
“Perhaps I can help,” I said. I went out into the hall and there I found Jerry Lawrence.
He stood there in the dusk of the little hall looking as resolute and unconcerned as an Englishman, in a strange and uncertain world, is expected to look. Not that he ever considered the attitudes fitting to adopt on certain occasions. He would tell you, if you inquired, that “he couldn’t stand those fellows who looked into every glass they passed.” His brow wore now a simple and innocent frown like that of a healthy baby presented for the first time with a strange and alarming rattle. It was only later that I was to arrive at some faint conception of Lawrence’s marvellous acceptance of anything that might happen to turn up. Vice, cruelty, unsuspected beauty, terror, remorse, hatred, and ignorance—he accepted them all once they were there in front of him. He sometimes, as I shall on a later occasion, show, allowed himself a free expression of his views in the company of those whom he could trust, but they were never the views of a suspicious or a disappointed man. It was not that he had great faith in human nature. He had, I think, very little. Nor was he without curiosity—far from it. But once a thing was really there he wasted no time over exclamations as to the horror or beauty or abomination of its actual presence. There was as he once explained to me, “precious little time to waste.” Those who thought him a dull, silent fellow—and they were many—made of course an almost ludicrous mistake, but most people in life are, I take it, too deeply occupied with their own personal history to do more than estimate at its surface value the appearance of others … but after all such a dispensation makes, in all probability for the general happiness. …
On this present occasion Jerry Lawrence stood there exactly as I had seen him stand many times on the football field waiting for the referee’s whistle, his thick short body held together, his mouth shut and his eyes on guard. He did not at first recognise me.
“You’ve forgotten me,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” he answered in his husky good-natured voice, like the rumble of an amiable bull-dog.
“My name is Durward,” I said, holding out my hand. “And years ago we had a mutual friend in Olva Dune.”
That pleased him. He gripped my hand very heartily and smiled a big ugly smile. “Why, yes,” he said. “Of course. How are you? Feeling fit? Damned long ago all that, isn’t it? Hope you’re really fit?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” I answered. “I was never a Hercules, you know. I heard that you were here from Bohun. I was going to write to you. But it’s excellent that we should meet like this.”
“I was after young Bohun,” he explained. “But it’s pleasant to find there’s another fellow in the town one knows. I’ve been a bit at sea these two days. To tell you the truth I never wanted to come.” I heard a rumble in his throat that sounded like “silly blighters.”
“Come in,” I said. “You must meet Madame Markovitch with whom Bohun is staying—and then wait a bit. He won’t be long, I expect.”
The idea of this seemed to fill Jerry with alarm. He turned back toward the door. “Oh! I don’t think … she won’t want … better another time …” his mouth was filled with indistinct rumblings.
“Nonsense.”