The Dark Forest quotes

His face, with its mild blue eyes, straggly fair moustache, expressed anxiety and pride, timidity and happiness, apprehension and confidence.

He was in that first moment of my sight of him as helpless, as unpractical, and as anxious to please as any lost dog in the world⁠—and he was also as proud as Lucifer.

I knew him at once for an Englishman; his Russian uniform only accented the cathedral-town, small public-school atmosphere of his appearance. He was exactly what I had expected. He was not, however, alone, and that surprised me.

I’ve no right, I don’t know you—but I’m so happy tonight that I must talk—

I’m so happy that I feel as though I shall never get through the night alive.

”

Why, why, why had she engaged herself to him? I fancied that very possibly there were qualities in him—his very childishness and helplessness—which, if they only irritated an Englishman, would attract a Russian.

Lame dogs find a warm home in Russia.

But did she know anything about him? Would she not, in a week, be irritated by his incapacity? And he—he—bless his innocence!—was so confident as though he had been married to her for years!

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.

“Oh no. That’s only his manner.

Many Russians look as though they were despising their neighbours when, as a matter of fact, they’re really despising themselves.

They’re very fond of despising themselves: their contempt allows them to do what they want to.”

“How could I know that he would hold such opinions? Never in my life have I been more surprised.”

So upon these little billows sailed the stout barque of Russian idealism, rising, falling, never overwhelmed, always bravely confident, never seeking for calm waters, refusing them indeed for their very placidity.

But in the midst of these shifting fortunes there were certain alliances and relationships that never changed. Amongst these was the alliance of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch. Friendship it could not be called.

… Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about us.

You’ll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at it during at least half the week.

“Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend’s house in Petrograd.

He never seemed to breathe, so still he was. And how I admired him for that! My father was a very excitable man, his moods and tempers killed him when he was just over forty. …

We have a proverb, ‘In the still marshes there are devils,’ and we admire and fear quiet men because they have something that we have not.

And I like the way that you watch us, Durward. Your friend Trenchard does not watch us at all and one could be his friend. For you one has quite another feeling.

He wasn’t, in any case, a man of authority and his broken stammering Russian wouldn’t help him. Then there is nothing stranger than the fashion in which the Russian language will (if you are a timid foreigner), of a sudden wilfully desert you.

Be bold with it and it may, somewhat haughtily, perhaps, consent to your use of it⁠ ⁠… be frightened of it and it will despise you forever.

Upon that afternoon it deserted Trenchard; even his own language seemed to have left him. His brain was cold and damp like the woods around him.

“What is it?” Trenchard said again.

“It’s the Austrians,” said the old man in Polish, of which Trenchard understood very little.

“First it’s the Russians. … Then it’s the Austrians. … Then it’s the Russians. … Then it’s the Austrians. And always between each of them I have to clean things up”—and some more which Trenchard did not understand.

“Happy!” she answered scornfully.

“I don’t want to be happy. That isn’t it. But to be sure that one’s not afraid⁠—”

(She repeated to herself several times hrabrost—the Russian for “bravery.”) “That is more than you, John, or than I or than—”

He looked at us, laughing; then he said to Trenchard, “But don’t you fear, Mr. You’ll go to heaven all right.

Even though it’s the wise men who succeed in this world, I don’t doubt it’s the fools who have their way in the next.

”

I bent my head; I felt a shame, a degradation as though I should have crept into some shadow and hidden. … I would not mention this were it not that afterwards, in retrospect, the moment seemed to me an omen.

After all, life is not always to the victorious!⁠ ⁠…

Our scarecrows wanted, horribly, their food. It was dreadful to see the anxiety with which they watched the portioning of the thick heavy hunks of black bread.

From the bend of the little hill we looked down upon it and the sight of it made me shudder.

It was the deadest place, the deadest place in the world⁠—all white under the sun it lay there like the bleached bones of some animal picked clean long ago by the birds.

Not a sound came from it, not a movement could be discerned in it. I could see, standing out straight from the heart of it, what must have been once a fine church.

“Semyonov … Semyonov,” he repeated to himself, smiling. “No, he had not power over her.” Then looking at me very calmly, he remarked: “

This Death, you know, Durward.⁠ ⁠… It simply doesn’t exist. It can’t stop her. It can’t stop anyone if they’re determined. I’ll find her before Semyonov does, too.

”

The result of these three days was a strange new intimacy between the four of us. I have never in all my life seen anything more charming than the behaviour of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch to Trenchard.

There is something about Russian kindness that is both simpler and more tactful than any other kindness in the world.

Tact is too often another name for insincerity, but Russian kindheartedness is the most honest impulse in the Russian soul, the quality that comes first, before anger, before injustice, before prejudice, before slander, before disloyalty, and overrides them all.

I have never in all my life seen anything more charming than the behaviour of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch to Trenchard. There is something about Russian kindness that is both simpler and more tactful than any other kindness in the world.

Tact is too often another name for insincerity, but Russian kindheartedness is the most honest impulse in the Russian soul

, the quality that comes first, before anger, before injustice, before prejudice, before slander, before disloyalty, and overrides them all. They were, of course, conscious that Trenchard’s case was worse than their own.

Now the horrible thing is that the moment I realised him I felt afraid. I didn’t feel anger or hatred or fine desires for revenge—anything like that—simply a miserable contemptible fear.

It seems that as soon as I climb out of one fear I tumble into another.

They are not physical now, but worse!

He changed some things but not very much. We had been pretty intimate, all of us, before he came. I had really felt this last day that Vladimir Stepanovitch and Andrey Vassilievitch were understood by me.

Russians come and go so. At one moment they are close to you, intimate, openhearted, then suddenly they shut up, are miles away, look at you with distrust and suspicion.

So with these two. On Semyonov’s arrival they changed absolutely. He shut them up of course. We were all as gloomy at supper as though we were deadly enemies. But the worst thing was at night.

I am sitting in the room where they brought Marie. It’s strange to think of that, and when you’re sitting with a candle in a dark room you can imagine anything.

It’s odd in this affair how little things affect one.

There’s a book here, a “Report on New Mexico.” I looked at it idly the other day and now I’m forever picking it up. It always opens at the same page and I find myself thinking, speculating about it in a ridiculous manner.

At Polchester, too, they’ll be having cheap lectures in the Town-Hall and Shakespeare Readings and High-School Prize-givings. … Where’s the Connection between That and This?

Where’s the permanent thing in us that goes on whatever life may do to us?

Is life still beautiful and noble in spite of whatever man may do with it, or is Semyonov right and there is no meaning in my love for Marie, nothing real and true except the things we see with our eyes, hear with our ears?

What defeat to his proud spirit was working now in him? What longing? What fierce determination to secure even now his ends? The change that I fancied in him was perhaps no more than his bracing of his strength and courage to face new conditions.

Death had robbed him of his possession⁠—so much the worse then for Death!

Upon this day of icy cold, as I write these words, I am afraid that my account may be taken as an extravagant and unjustified conceit. But that I do most honestly believe it not to be.

It’s nobody’s fault, I suppose, this business. How easy to write in the daily papers that the Germans prepared for war and that we did not, and that after a month or two all will be well. …

After a month or two! tell that to us here stuck in this Forest and hear us how we laugh!⁠ ⁠…

Meanwhile, for the good of my health, I’m figuring very clearly to myself all the physical features of this place. It’s a long white house, two-storied. The front door has broken glass over it and there’s a litter of tumbled bricks on the top step.

What else is there? There’s an old pump just outside the sitting-room window. There’s a litter of dirty paper and refuse there, too, that the flies gather round. There’s an old barn away to the right where some horses are and two cows.

I have to keep my mind on these things because I know they’re real. You can touch them with your hands and they’ll still be there even if you go away⁠—they won’t walk with you as you move.

So I must fasten on to these things about which there can’t be any doubt. In the same way I like to remember that book in the sitting-room—Mr. Glass who lectured on “Fools,” the Ruysdael, and the Normal Pupils who acted Othello.

What a strange man! But then I do not understand him at all.

I don’t think I understand any Russian, such a mixture of hardness and softness as they are, kind and then indifferent, cruel and then sentimental.

But I understand people very little, and in all my years at Polchester there was never one single person whom I knew. Semyonov is perfectly right, I suppose, from his point of view to think me a fool. I lay there thinking of Semyonov.

Whilst he was there I knew that I had no chance. Marie had not laughed at me during those days at Petrograd; she had believed in me then and I had been worth believing in.

If people had believed in me more I might be a very different man now.

I was almost asleep, scarcely conscious of the room, when suddenly I heard a voice cry, “Marie! Marie! Marie!” three times.