ld too," I said. "And I'm useless at
everything. I only make a bungle of everything I try. But I'll be your
true friend to the end of my time--"

The bell rang and we went back into the theatre.

VIII

And yet, strangely enough, when I lay awake that night in my room on my
deserted island, it was of Markovitch that I was thinking. Of all the
memories of the preceding evening that of Markovitch huddled over his
food, sullen and glowering, with Semyonov watching him, was
predominant.

Markovitch was, so to speak, the dark horse of them all, and he was also
when one came to look at it all the way round the centre of the story.
And yet it was Markovitch with his inconsistencies, his mysteries, his
impulses, and purposes, whom I understood least of them all. He makes,
indeed, a very good symbol of my present difficulties.

In that earlier experience of Marie in the forests of Galicia the matter
had been comparatively easy. I had then been concerned with the outward
manifestation of war--cannon, cholera, shell, and the green glittering
trees of the forest itself. But the war had made progress since then. It
had advanced out of material things into the very souls of men. It was
no longer the forest of bark and tinder with which the chiefs of this
world had to deal, but, to adapt the Russian proverb itself, "with the
dark forest of the hearts of men."

How much more baffling and intangible this new forest, and how deeply
serious a business now for those who were still thoughtlessly and
selfishly juggling with human affairs.

"There is no ammunition," I remember crying desperately in Galicia. We
had moved further than the question of ammunition now.

I had a strange dream that night. I saw my old forest of two years
before--the very woods of Buchatch with the hot painted leaves, the
purple slanting sunlight, the smell, the cries, the whirr of the shell.
But in my dream the only inhabitant of that forest was Markovitch. He
was pursued by some animal. What beast it was I could not see, always
the actual vision was denied to me, but I could hear it plunging through
the thickets, and once I caught a glimpse of a dark crouching body like
a shadow against the light.

But Markovitch I saw all the time, sweating with heat and terror, his
clothes torn, his eyes inflamed, his breath coming in desperate pants,
turning once and again as though he would stop and offer defiance, then
hasting on, his face and hands scratched and