CHAPTER XIV

HOW THEY LIVED TOGETHER AND YET APART

As Hope had foreseen, the recovery of her health, sufficient at all events to permit of her undertaking household duties, was the signal for Madame Roskova's departure.

She had hinted at it many times, and had yielded as often to Hope's earnest entreaties and remained.

"My dear," she would say of a night, with more than a suggestion of reproof in her manner, "Serge Petrovitch and I have been very good friends, and I am greatly beholden to him, but he will begin to hate me soon if I keep you away from him like this. It is not in nature and it is not right. If you really want me to stop, you two occupy this room, and I will sleep on the hearth out there."

"No, no, Anna!" Hope would make haste to reply. "You must not go. Serge is quite content and so am I, I do assure you. It is enough for us that we are together," and then would she blush rosy red in the merciful darkness and wonder if her soul was imperilled past redemption by such unblushing lying.

And Anna Roskova said little but wondered much, and sighed for her own lonely exile in Yakutsk, and thought again how different it would have been with them, and deemed Hope but a cold wife.

But with returning health and the retuning of her jangled nerves, Hope's outlook on life became to assume its normal aspect. Matters began to settle themselves into their proper places and to take their proper proportions. She saw that no one was to blame for what had happened, that the strange mischance which had cast her into Pavlof's keeping, while her husband wandered at large between Yeniseisk and London, was the outcome of no plot, but a valiant attempt to benefit her. She recovered her trust in herself and her faith in Paul Pavlof. She saw that Pavlof was right, and that the only thing possible to her was to wait patiently till they should hear from Serge. And she set herself bravely to adapt herself to the required conditions.

And so it was with a certain equanimity that she one day received Madame Roskova's announcement that Marya Verskaïa was sick and had begged her to come and stop with her, and she was going on the morrow.

"Da!" said Madame, when Hope raised no objection, but simply expressed her regret at Marya's illness. "So you are reconciled to him at last and don't mind my going! That is right and as it should be, and I am glad of it."

"I am very, very grateful for all your kindness, Anna. I never can forget all you have done for me. But--as you say----"

"Da, child! That is all right! I am rejoiced to think that all is right again between you. I have thought you a stone, for the lack is not on his part. He loves you as much as ever. He is on fire for you, and no wonder. I can hear it in his voice when he speaks to you, and see it in his eye when he looks at you. He just worships you, my dear. So be you good to him, for he is a man beyond most."

And Hope knew it all and was troubled for him. For she knew that the fire would never break forth to her undoing. It might burn and burn till it consumed him, but the flame would never scorch her nor the smoke besmirch.

"You will let me bring in some of the others now and then?" asked Madame Roskova, before she went next day. "They are all hungry to see you, and they will talk and talk and it will do none of you any harm now. It has been all I could do to keep them away. But now you are all right again----"

"Surely, Anna! I shall be glad to see them now. While I was lying broken there it would have driven me crazy, but now I shall be glad."

So Madame Roskova squeezed into a corner of the little hut up the valley with Marya Verskaïa and Dmitri Polokof, and sorely missed the wider atmosphere of the doctor's house. For Marya had a lively tongue, and her alleged sickness did not extend to it or in any way affect it, and ceaseless chatter becomes at times a weariness to the flesh, to say nothing of the soul.

Dmitri, when he heard of Madame Roskova's coming, breathed a silent but fervent "God be thanked!" and welcomed her warmly. Marya launched twenty questions at her concerning Madame Palma before she had got her cloak off, and Anna, knowing her friend, replied with discretion and supplied no grist but only chaff to Marya's chattering little mill.

So Hope Palma and Paul Pavlof entered upon a new phase of the strangely twisted story of their lives--a phase which tested and tried them both in many ways, and was to Pavlof as the breaking of seals and the dipping, chancily and hazardously, into the pages of the unknown. He learnt much of woman and her ways, and at times it set his head spinning, and at times twisted his heart-strings. Learning is bitter-sweet; at times a deep delight, and again, a long travail; and the understanding of even one woman was beyond the wisdom of the Preacher whose experience had been wider than most.

They sat long before the stove in silence that first night of their solitariness, both their minds running swiftly in the same direction but on different lines.

When would they hear from Serge?

Would they ever hear from him?

Supposing they did not?

Supposing they heard of his death?

The silence was verging on the irksome when Pavlof broke it, in fear that it might become painful to her.

"I am glad you let Anna Vassilievna go, Hope Ivanovna. It tells me that you trust me."

"She has been very good to me and I shall always be grateful to her, but----"

"Since you can trust yourself in my hands, it will make things easier for you to be without her, I think."

"It would have been impossible to go on much longer like that."

"She is a good woman----"

"She was growing importunate about us. If we could only have told her the whole matter--"

"A whisper of it getting out would have destroyed us all. Anna Vassilievna is more trustworthy than most, but the matter is so very strange that it would have been almost too much to expect her to keep it entirely to herself. Even if she did not speak of it her manner might have set folks wondering, and one cannot be too careful when lives are at stake."

"I have no doubt you are right. In any case it is too late to tell her now," she said quietly.

There was in this new atmosphere a sense at once of relief and restraint. With Anna Vassilievna's puzzled eye no longer on them, they were able to be themselves again, without necessity for guarding every word and look. And this in itself was a mighty relief, for false pretence is mother to awkwardness, and the natural man is the honest one, the man who is just himself and claims no more.

And now, too, they could discuss their affairs in a way that was not possible before, and therein also lay elements of enlightenment.

But, even in this new freedom, there was also a novel sense of restraint, in the ever present knowledge that they two, of all people in the world, were alone together in surely as strange and anomalous a companionship as the world had ever seen.

And these mingled feelings again made at once for speech and for silence, and so their talk was intermittent and discursive.

Pavlof, when he spoke to her, kept his eyes rigidly on the glowing embers, lest she should see in them that which would not be suppressed, but which he still would not have her see. And how should he, untutored man, know that she saw it all in the very stiffness of his manner, that it cried aloud to her in every tone of his voice whenever he pronounced her name.

For to woman has been given a sense denied as a rule to man. She knows by instinct when a man loves her. And Hope Palma knew that this man loved her still, in spite of himself, as much as he had ever loved her, and that was with every fibre of his being.

And so, when her eyes rested on him, she already found a difference in him since Anna Vassilievna left them. For eyes, after all, are but windows, and the soul that looks out of them colours all it sees with somewhat of itself.

And yet, again, perhaps, after all, there was in him a subtle and almost indefinable change bred of these new circumstances--the unintentional outward manifestation of these mixed feelings of freedom and restraint. He was at once stiffer and gentler than when Anna was there. For then he had to assume a warmth of demeanour befitting their supposed relationship, and to both of them it was merely an assumption and meant nothing. And now that no assumption was necessary, though all the warmth was in him still, his fear lest his real feelings should show through stiffened his manner and made it seem unduly cold and formal.

Many were the nights they sat so, during the first weeks of their release from Madame Roskova's kindly supervision, discussing at times, and from every point of view, Serge's chances of escape and the prospects of their hearing of it, but as often sitting in the silence of their long, long thoughts.

"You really think Serge would be able to get clear away, Paul Ivanuitch?" she would ask.

"From all we could learn there was no great difficulty, Hope Ivanovna. It is not like Kara, you see. Will you pardon me reminding you again that here I am Serge Petrovitch----"

"Oh, I am sorry. I cannot get used to it."

"It is only that I fear if you call me Paul Ivanuitch in private it may slip out at other times and lead to trouble."

"I will remember. You see, I have always thought of you as Paul Ivanuitch, and it is not easy to begin thinking of you as Serge Petrovitch."

"I know, and I am sorry for the necessity. If it were not of importance I would not ask it."

"And when do you think is the soonest we could hear from him?"

"He would get away in the early spring. It might take him some months to get back to Russia. He would strike up north, which would make it longer but safer. Then he would seek you first. Where would he learn that you had come out after him?"

"Old Masha would tell him that, if he found her."

"He would seek her at once when he could not find you. Where would she be?"

"I had to send her back to her people in Old Khersonese. They had been very good to me when I was ill--when my baby was born."

"Ah--God, yes!"--with a face full of sympathy--"I did not dare to ask you, Hope Ivanovna. Serge told me. What--did it----?"

"He died. And I was glad. Such a dear little fellow! But when he was dead I knew it was best so."

"It was very sore upon you, Hope Ivanovna."

"It was hard to lose him, but I knew it was better for him, and so I did not mourn for him, and in my heart I have him always."

It was only round the stove at night, however, that they had time for disjointed conversation, or, as the case might be, for brooding thought. Pavlof was working energetically with brain and hand to stamp out the hidden germs of typhus from the prison kameras--as far as that was possible without burning the whole place down. It was an almost impossible task. Hercules himself would have given it up in despair and applied the cleansing flame.

He talked hard and worked harder. But the Governor, absolute as were his powers over his prisoners, would not authorise the expenditure of a single rouble on sanitary matters without express permission from headquarters. Roubles were none too plentiful and had to be accounted for to the last kopeck. Men and women were sent there because they were superfluous. As Zazarin tersely put it. "Lives are cheap, but money is always dear. If we tell them a man is dead that ends it, but roubles never die, and we have to account for them."

And Hope had the housework to attend to, and, since it was but a small house, and she had much time and a natural instinct for neatness and making the most of things, she brought and kept it up to such a high plane of comfort that Paul Pavlof hardly knew himself in it. Comfortable, in a way, it always had been under Madame Roskova's rough-and-ready housekeeping, but Anna Vassilievna's time had always been subject to many outside calls from the sick and needy ones, which had not yet fallen upon the newcomer, and--well, Hope's ideas of comfort went further than Anna Vassilievna's.

Pavlof was so full of his Augean labours that he must discuss them with her of a night, and Hope rejoiced in the new element as a relief from the tension of those long brooding silences, which at times became beyond endurance painful.

Then Madame Roskova began to bring in her friends, who had been waiting impatiently to make Madame Palma's acquaintance, and once they began coming the little house was rarely free of them. For, since the privilege of visiting among themselves was about the only privilege the Free Command possessed, they availed themselves of it to the full.

Their lives were hard and meagre, but in many cases their capacities for enthusiasm, and even their enthusiasms, had survived their sufferings. How they managed to live on the trifling allowance made by the paternal Government they would have found it difficult to explain. Their condition, indeed, was almost analogous to that of the proverbial villagers who wrung a livelihood out of one another's washing. Anna Roskova, for instance, earned scanty kopecks by mending and stitching for the officers of the guard. Then there were occasional trifling remittances from friends at home, some of which reached them and some of which did not. But all helped one another, and among them they fought the wolf from the door.

They were most of them men and women of education and utterly unused to manual labour, save such as the mines had painfully taught them. And, since there was no opening for the professions, even if they had been allowed to follow them, they just grubbed along from hand to mouth as best they could and stubbornly refused to starve. They ate little and thought and talked much.

Paul Pavlof--whom they knew only as Serge Palma--was better circumstanced than most, by reason of his quasi-official duties. But his own wants were of the smallest, and his hand and house and slim purse had always been open to all who needed help.

Naturally, that house became the life-centre of the community and had rarely been without visitors of an evening, until the arrival of that least expected of all visitors turned the world upside down for some of them.

While Hope lay in the little inner room, desiring nothing but quiet, Anna Roskova had rigidly forbidden visitors the house, and the cheerfulness of the community suffered eclipse. Now that the shadow had passed they returned with doubled enjoyment, and Hope need never lack company.

They rejoiced in her courage in compassing that wearisome journey, and one and all made much of her. They brought her books and papers, such as they had, and were ready to sit and talk by the hour of Russia and their nipped hopes and blighted endeavours.

When the distasteful day was over they came quietly in, one by one, and, over the steaming samovar of coarse brick tea, lived their lives again, and even ventured at times to entertain hopes of the future.

Their eulogies of "Serge Petrovitch," his courage, his self-denial, his sympathetic care of both hale and sick, knew no end. They rang the changes on his high qualities of heart and mind, till--when she remembered that the Serge Petrovitch of these encomiums was not her Serge Petrovitch--she sometimes tired of hearing them. And again, at times, as the praises of this Serge Petrovitch were ringing in her ears, they would attach themselves by some strange perversion of the senses to that other Serge, and she would think more tenderly of him than ever.

And then when, one by one, the rest had crept quietly away to their comfortless little homes, envious somewhat, perhaps, of the happiness of Palma and his beautiful wife, they two would sit brooding over the handful of ashes in the stove, thinking out their own thoughts, their elbows almost touching, but between them a great fixed gulf.

"Is he alive or is he dead?" Hope would ask herself. "Is he in outer exile or pining in prison? Or has he won through to freedom, and is he spending himself and risking himself trying to find out what has become of me? Shall we ever learn what has become of him? How long shall I wait here? Where can I go if I leave?"

And all her questions remained perpetual questions and there was no answer to any of them.

And Pavlof, at her elbow, gazed steadily into the little core of rosy life among the grey ashes, and asked himself--

"Is he alive or dead? Shall we ever get word from him? And if we do not, what is to become of Hope Ivanovna? She will not be content to remain here. And yet--and yet----"

He wished her nothing but good. To compass her happiness he would willingly lay down his life, as he had done once already in taking Serge's place at the mines. He wished Serge nothing but good. He had proved it. And yet--and yet----

If Serge was dead--if the fiction of their lives could blossom into fact! Ah, the glory and the joy of it! The heaven of Kara! He would ask no better than to live there and die there, so she were there too.

How was it possible to restrain such thoughts with that quiet figure at his elbow, with the sweet, clear-cut face, and the great brooding eyes?

But when at last she rose and he quietly bade her good-night, though his voice told nothing of what was in him and the shadows veiled his eyes and face, she read him like a book, and held him in honour because of the strong, true heart that was in him.

And when she was gone he unrolled his mattress and stretched himself on it before the stove, and dreamed of heaven on earth in a Kara hut, such as none but he would have rejoiced in--unless he were blessed with the love of a Hope Ivanovna.