Chapter 2

For it is quite unnecessary to treat as axiomatic the assertion that
fiction should imitate life. It is merely a literary theory like
another. There is in fact a second theory that is just as plausible,
and this is that fiction should use life merely as raw material which
it arranges in ingenious patterns. You have a very good analogy in
painting. The landscape painters of the seventeenth century were not
interested in the direct representation of nature, which to them was no
more than the occasion for a formal decoration. They constructed a
scene architecturally, balancing for example the mass of a tree with
the mass of a cloud, and used light and shade to make a definite
pattern. Their intention was not to portray a landscape but to create
a work of art. It was a deliberate composition. In their arrangement
of the facts of nature they were satisfied if they did not outrage the
spectator’s sense of reality. It was left for the Impressionists to
paint what they saw. They tried to catch nature in its fleeting
beauty; they were content to render the radiance of sunlight, the
colour of shadows or the translucency of the air. They aimed at truth.
They wanted a painter to be no more than an eye and a hand. They
despised intelligence. It is strange how empty their paintings look
now when you place them beside the stately pictures of Claude. The
method of Claude is the method of that master of the short story Guy de
Maupassant. It is a very good one and I have a notion that it will
survive the other. Already it is getting a little difficult to care
much what middle-class Russians were like fifty years ago, and the
anecdote in Chekov’s stories is not as a rule absorbing enough (as the
story of Paolo and Francesca or of Macbeth is absorbing) to hold your
attention apart from your interest in the people. The method of which
I speak is that which chooses from life what is curious, telling and
dramatic; it does not seek to copy life, but keeps to it closely enough
not to shock the reader into disbelief; it leaves out this and changes
that; it makes a formal decoration out of such of the facts as it has
found convenient to deal with and presents a picture, the result of
artifice, which, because it represents the author’s temperament, is to
a certain extent a portrait of himself, but which is designed to
excite, interest and absorb the reader. If it is a success he accepts
it as true.

I have written all this in order to impress upon the reader that this
book is a work of fiction, though I should say not much more so than
several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during the
last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs. The work of an
agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely
monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless. The material it offers
for stories is scrappy and pointless; the author has himself to make it
coherent, dramatic and probable.

In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik
Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my
efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from
Vladivostock. One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped
at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch
water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs.
A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him
and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty. Their
uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big, vigorous
fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a
beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn’t eighteen. He
had a broad face, with flat, wide features; and on his forehead was a
great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes
gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was
strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train
waited on and he sang song after song. I could not understand his
words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear
the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the
interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the
toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of
the ripe corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long
months of dark winter; and then the dancing of women in the villages
and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt
the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches
on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death.
It was horrible and deeply moving. A cap lay at the singer’s feet and
the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized
them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was
something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt
that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting
world. He did not seem quite human. The soldiers stood silent and
hostile. Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the
travelling herd. There was a disdainful anger on their side and
immeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was
but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain.

ASHENDEN

I

R.

It was not till the beginning of September that Ashenden, a writer by
profession, who had been abroad at the outbreak of the war, managed to
get back to England. He chanced soon after his arrival to go to a
party and was there introduced to a middle-aged Colonel whose name he
did not catch. He had some talk with him. As he was about to leave
this officer came up to him and asked:

“I say, I wonder if you’d mind coming to see me. I’d rather like to
have a chat with you.”

“Certainly,” said Ashenden. “Whenever you like.”

“What about to-morrow at eleven?”

“All right.”

“I’ll just write down my address. Have you a card on you?”