Then she laughed. "I'm
getting an old woman, Ivan Andreievitch. It's ridiculous...." She broke
off. Then held out her hand.
"But we'll always be friends now, won't we? I'll never be cross with you
again."
I took her hand. "I'm getting old 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.
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