hard was another
matter. Nikitin seemed to me for the first time in my knowledge of him
to come down from his idealistic dreaming. He cared for Trenchard like
a child, but never obtrusively. Trenchard seemed to appreciate it, but
there was something about him that I did not like. His nerves were
tensely strained, he did his work with his eyes fixed upon some
impossible distance, he often did not hear us when we spoke to him.

And so the three of us formed a kind of hedge about him to protect
him, a hedge of which he was perfectly unconscious. He was very silent
and I would have given a great deal to hear again one of those
Glebeshire stories that I had once found so tiresome. That some plan
or purpose was in his head one could not doubt.

We had, all of us, much in common in our characters. We liked the
sentimental easy coloured view of life. We suddenly felt a strange
freedom here in this place. For myself, on the third day, I found that
Marie Ivanovna was most strangely present with me, and on the
afternoon of that day, our wounded quiet on their beds, our wagons
sent into the tent with no prospect of their return for several hours,
we sat together, Nikitin, Andrey Vassilievitch and I, looking out
through a break in the garden towards the Forest, and talked about
her. The weather was now very heavy--certainly a thunderstorm was
coming. I was also weighted down by an intense desire for sleep, at
the same time knowing that if I were to fling myself on my bed sleep
would not come to me. This is an experience that is not unusual at the
Front, and officers have told me that in the middle of a battle when
there comes a sudden lull, their longing for sleep has been so
overpowering that no imminent danger could lift it from their eyes.

We sat there then and talked in low voices of Marie Ivanovna. I was
aware of the buzzing of the flies, of the dull yellow light beyond the
windows, of the Forest crouching a little as it seemed to me like a
creature who expects a blow. We were all half asleep perhaps, the room
dark behind us, and we talked of her as we might talk of a picture, a
book, an experience ended and dismissed--something outside our present
affairs. And yet I knew that for me at any rate she was not outside
them. I felt as though at any moment she might enter the room. We
discussed her aloofness, her sudden happiness and her sudden distress,
her intimacies and withdrawals, Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch
slowly ela