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Title: The Secret City

Author: Hugh Walpole

Release Date: May 14, 2004 [EBook #12349]

Language: English

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BY HUGH WALPOLE

_STUDIES IN PLACE_
  THE SECRET CITY
  THE DARK FOREST
  THE GOLDEN SCARECROW
  THE WOODEN HORSE
  MARADICK AT FORTY
  THE GODS AND MR. PERRIN

_TWO PROLOGUES_
  THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE
  FORTITUDE

_THE RISING CITY_
  1. THE DUCHESS OF WREXE
  2. THE GREEN MIRROR



THE SECRET CITY

A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS

BY

HUGH WALPOLE

AUTHOR OF "FORTITUDE," "THE DARK FOREST," "THE DUCHESS OF WREXE," ETC.

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




TO

MAJOR JAMES ANNAND (15TH BATTALION 48TH HIGHLANDERS, C.E.F.)

IN RETURN FOR THE GIFT OF HIS FRIENDSHIP




In the eastern quarter dawn breaks, the stars flicker pale.
The morning cock at Ju-nan mounts the wall and crows.
The songs are over, the clock run down, but still the feast is set.
The Moon grows dim and the stars are few; morning has come to the world.
At a thousand gates and ten thousand doors the fish-shaped keys turn;
Round the Palace and up by the Castle, the crows and magpies are flying.

_Cock-Crow Song_. Anon. (1st Century B.C.).




CONTENTS


PART I Vera And Nina


PART II Lawrence


PART III Markovitch And Semyonov




PART I

VERA AND NINA




THE SECRET CITY

VERA AND NINA


I

There are certain things that I feel, as I look through this bundle of
manuscript, that I must say. The first is that of course no writer ever
has fulfilled his intention and no writer ever will; secondly, that
there was, when I began, another intention than that of dealing with my
subject adequately, namely that of keeping myself outside the whole of
it; I was to be, in the most abstract and immaterial sense of the word,
a voice, and that simply because this business of seeing Russian
psychology through English eyes has no excuse except that it _is_
English. That is its only interest, its only atmosphere, its only
motive, and if you are going to tell me that any aspect of Russia
psychological, mystical, practical, or commercial seen through an
English medium is either Russia as she really is or Russia as Russians
see her, I say to you, without hesitation, that you don't know of what
you are talking.

Of Russia and the Russians I know nothing, but of the effect upon myself
and my ideas of life that Russia and the Russians have made during these
last three years I know something. You are perfectly free to say that
neither myself nor my ideas of life are of the slightest importance to
any one. To that I would say that any one's ideas about life are of
importance and that any one's ideas about Russian life are of
interest... and beyond that, I have simply been compelled to write. I
have not been able to help myself, and all the faults and any virtues in
this story come from that. The facts are true, the inferences absolutely
my own, so that you may reject them at any moment and substitute others.
It is true that I have known Vera Michailovna, Nina, Alexei Petrovitch,
Henry, Jerry, and the rest--some of them intimately--and many of the
conversations here recorded I have myself heard. Nevertheless the
inferences are my own, and I think there is no Russian who, were he to
read this book, would not say that those inferences were wrong. In an
earlier record, to which this is in some ways a sequel,[1] my inferences
were, almost without exception, wrong, and there is no Russian alive for
whom this book can have any kind of value except as a happy example of
the mistakes that the Englishman can make about the Russian.

But it is over those very mistakes that the two souls, Russian and
English, so different, so similar, so friendly, so hostile, may meet....
And in any case the thing has been too strong for me. I have no other
defence. For one's interest in life is stronger, God knows how much
stronger, than one's discretion, and one's love of life than one's
wisdom, and one's curiosity in life than one's ability to record it. At
least, as I have said, I have endeavoured to keep my own history, my own
desires, my own temperament out of this, as much as is humanly
possible....

And the facts are true.

[Footnote 1: _The Dark Forest_.]



II

They had been travelling for a week, and had quite definitely decided
that they had nothing whatever in common. As they stood there, lost and
desolate on the grimy platform of the Finland station, this same thought
must have been paramount in their minds: "Thank God we shan't have to
talk to one another any longer. Whatever else may happen in this
strange place that at least we're spared." They were probably quite
unconscious of the contrast they presented, unconscious because, at this
time, young Bohun never, I should imagine, visualised himself as
anything more definite than absolutely "right," and Lawrence simply
never thought about himself at all. But they were perfectly aware of
their mutual dissatisfaction, although they were of course absolutely
polite. I heard of it afterwards from both sides, and I will say quite
frankly that my sympathy was all with Lawrence. Young Bohun can have
been no fun as a travelling companion at that time. If you had looked at
him there standing on the Finland station platform and staring haughtily
about for porters you must have thought him the most self-satisfied of
mortals. "That fellow wants kicking," you would have said. Good-looking,
thin, tall, large black eyes, black eyelashes, clean and neat and
"right" at the end of his journey as he had been at the beginning of it,
just foreign-looking enough with his black hair and pallor to make him
interesting--he was certainly arresting. But it was the
self-satisfaction that would have struck any one. And he had reason; he
was at that very moment experiencing the most triumphant moment of his
life.

He was only twenty-three, and was already as it seemed to the youthfully
limited circle of his vision, famous. Before the war he had been, as he
quite frankly admitted to myself and all his friends, nothing but
ambitious. "Of course I edited the _Granta_ for a year," he would say,
"and I don't think I did it badly.... But that wasn't very much."

No, it really wasn't a great deal, and we couldn't tell him that it was.
He had always intended, however, to be a great man; the _Granta_ was
simply a stepping-stone. He was already, during his second year at
Cambridge, casting about as to the best way to penetrate, swiftly and
securely, the fastnesses of London journalism. Then the war came, and he
had an impulse of perfectly honest and selfless patriotism..., not
quite selfless perhaps, because he certainly saw himself as a mighty
hero, winning V.C.'s and saving forlorn hopes, finally received by his
native village under an archway of flags and mottoes (the local
postmaster, who had never treated him very properly, would make the
speech of welcome). The reality did him some good, but not very much,
because when he had been in France only a fortnight he was gassed and
sent home with a weak heart. His heart remained weak, which made him
interesting to women and allowed time for his poetry. He was given an
easy post in the Foreign Office and, in the autumn of 1916 he published
_Discipline: Sonnets and Poems_. This appeared at a very fortunate
moment, when the more serious of British idealists were searching for
signs of a general improvement, through the stress of war, of poor
humanity.... "Thank God, there are our young poets," they said.

The little book had excellent notices in the papers, and one poem in
especial "How God spoke to Jones at Breakfast-time" was selected for
especial praise because of its admirable realism and force. One paper
said that the British breakfast-table lived in that poem "in all its
tiniest most insignificant details," as no breakfast-table, save
possibly that of Major Pendennis at the beginning of _Pendennis_ has
lived before. One paper said, "Mr. Bohun merits that much-abused word
'genius.'"

The young author carried these notices about with him and I have seen
them all. But there was more than this. Bohun had been for the last four
years cultivating Russian. He had been led into this through a real,
genuine interest. He read the novelists and set himself to learn the
Russian language. That, as any one who has tried it will know is no easy
business, but Henry Bohun was no fool, and the Russian refugee who
taught him was no fool. After Henry's return from France he continued
his lessons, and by the spring of 1916 he could read easily, write
fairly, and speak atrociously. He then adopted Russia, an easy thing to
do, because his supposed mastery of the language gave him a tremendous
advantage over his friends. "I assure you that's not so," he would say.
"You can't judge Tchehov till you've read him in the original. Wait till
you can read him in Russian." "No, I don't think the Russian characters
are like that," he would declare. "It's a queer thing, but you'd almost
think I had some Russian blood in me... I sympathise so." He followed
closely the books that emphasised the more sentimental side of the
Russian character, being of course grossly sentimental himself at heart.
He saw Russia glittering with fire and colour, and Russians, large,
warm, and simple, willing to be patronised, eagerly confessing their
sins, rushing forward to make him happy, entertaining him for ever and
ever with a free and glorious hospitality.

"I really think I do understand Russia," he would say modestly. He said
it to me when he had been in Russia two days.

Then, in addition to the success of his poems and the general interest
that he himself aroused the final ambition of his young heart was
realised. The Foreign Office decided to send him to Petrograd to help in
the great work of British propaganda.

He sailed from Newcastle on December 2, 1916....



III

At this point I am inevitably reminded of that other Englishman who, two
years earlier than Bohun, had arrived in Russia with his own pack of
dreams and expectations.

But John Trenchard, of whose life and death I have tried elsewhere to
say something, was young Bohun's opposite, and I do not think that the
strange unexpectedness of Russia can he exemplified more strongly than
by the similarity of appeal that she could make to two so various
characters. John was shy, self-doubting, humble, brave, and a
gentleman,--Bohun was brave and a gentleman, but the rest had yet to be
added to him. How he would have patronised Trenchard if he had known
him! And yet at heart they were not perhaps so dissimilar. At the end of
my story it will be apparent, I think, that they were not.

That journey from Newcastle to Bergen, from Bergen to Torneo, from
Torneo to Petrograd is a tiresome business. There is much waiting at
Custom-houses, disarrangement of trains and horses and meals, long
wearisome hours of stuffy carriages and grimy window-panes. Bohun I
suspect suffered, too, from that sudden sharp precipitance into a world
that knew not _Discipline_ and recked nothing of the _Granta_. Obviously
none of the passengers on the boat from Newcastle had ever heard of
_Discipline_. They clutched in their hands the works of Mr. Oppenheim,
Mr. Compton Mackenzie, and Mr. O'Henry and looked at Bohun, I imagine,
with indifferent superiority. He had been told at the Foreign Office
that his especial travelling companion was to be Jerry Lawrence. If he
had hoped for anything from this direction one glance at Jerry's
brick-red face and stalwart figure must have undeceived him. Jerry,
although he was now thirty-two years of age, looked still very much the
undergraduate. My slight acquaintance with him had been in those earlier
Cambridge days, through a queer mutual friend, Dune, who at that time
seemed to promise so magnificently, who afterwards disappeared so
mysteriously. You would never have supposed that Lawrence, Captain of
the University Rugger during his last two years, Captain of the English
team through all the Internationals of the season 1913-14, could have
had anything in common, except football, with Dune, artist and poet if
ever there was one. But on the few occasions when I saw them together it
struck me that football was the very least part of their common ground.
And that was the first occasion on which I suspected that Jerry Lawrence
was not quite what he seemed....

I can imagine Lawrence standing straddleways on the deck of the
_Jupiter_, his short thick legs wide apart, his broad back indifferent
to everything and everybody, his rather plump, ugly, good-natured face
staring out to sea as though he saw nothing at all. He always gave the
impression of being half asleep, he had a way of suddenly lurching on
his legs as though in another moment his desire for slumber would be too
strong for him, and would send him crashing to the ground. He would be
smoking an ancient briar, and his thick red hands would be clasped
behind his back....

No encouraging figure for Bohun's aestheticism.

I can see as though I had been present Bohun's approach to him, his
patronising introduction, his kindly suggestion that they should eat
their meals together, Jerry's smiling, lazy acquiescence. I can imagine
how Bohun decided to himself that "he must make the best of this chap.
After all, it was a long tiresome journey, and anything was better than
having no one to talk to...." But Jerry, unfortunately, was in a bad
temper at the start. He did not want to go out to Russia at all. His
father, old Stephen Lawrence, had been for many years the manager of
some works in Petrograd, and the first fifteen years of Jerry's life had
been spent in Russia. I did not, at the time when I made Jerry's
acquaintance at Cambridge, know this; had I realised it I would have
understood many things about him which puzzled me. He never alluded to
Russia, never apparently thought of it, never read a Russian book, had,
it seemed, no connection of any kind with any living soul in that
country.

Old Lawrence retired, and took a fine large ugly palace in Clapham to
end his days in....

Suddenly, after Lawrence had been in France for two years, had won the
Military Cross there and, as he put it, "was just settling inside his
skin," the authorities realised his Russian knowledge, and decided to
transfer him to the British Military Mission in Petrograd. His anger
when he was sent back to London and informed of this was extreme. He
hadn't the least desire to return to Russia, he was very happy where he
was, he had forgotten all his Russian; I can see him, saying very
little, looking like a sulky child and kicking his heel up and down
across the carpet.

"Just the man we want out there, Lawrence," he told me somebody said to
him; "keep them in order."

"Keep them in order!" That tickled his sense of humour. He was to laugh
frequently, afterwards, when he thought of it. He always chewed a joke
as a cow chews the cud.

So that he was in no pleasant temper when he met Bohun on the decks of
the _Jupiter_. That journey must have had its humours for any observer
who knew the two men. During the first half of it I imagine that Bohun
talked and Lawrence slumbered. Bohun patronised, was kind and indulgent,
and showed very plainly that he thought his companion the dullest and
heaviest of mortals. Then he told Lawrence about Russia; he explained
everything to him, the morals, psychology, fighting qualities,
strengths, and weaknesses. The climax arrived when he announced: "But
it's the mysticism of the Russian peasant which will save the world.
That adoration of God...."

"Rot!" interrupted Lawrence.

Bohun was indignant. "Of course if you know better--" he said.

"I do," said Lawrence, "I lived there for fifteen years. Ask my old
governor about the mysticism of the Russian peasant. He'll tell you."

Bohun felt that he was justified in his annoyance. As he said to me
afterwards: "The fellow had simply been laughing at me. He might have
told me about his having been there." At that time, to Bohun, the most
terrible thing in the world was to be laughed at.

After that Bohun asked Jerry questions. But Jerry refused to give
himself away. "I don't know," he said, "I've forgotten it all. I don't
suppose I ever did know much about it."

At Haparanda, most unfortunately, Bohun was insulted. The Swedish
Customs Officer there, tired at the constant appearance of
self-satisfied gentlemen with Red Passports, decided that Bohun was
carrying medicine in his private bags. Bohun refused to open his
portmanteau, simply because he "was a Courier and wasn't going to be
insulted by a dirty foreigner." Nevertheless "the dirty foreigner" had
his way and Bohun looked rather a fool. Jerry had not sympathised
sufficiently with Bohun in this affair.... "He only grinned," Bohun told
me indignantly afterwards. "No sense of patriotism at all. After all,
Englishmen ought to stick together."

Finally, Bohun tested Jerry's literary knowledge. Jerry seemed to have
none. He liked Fielding, and a man called Farnol and Jack London.

He never read poetry. But, a strange thing, he was interested in Greek.
He had bought the works of Euripides and Aeschylus in the Loeb Library,
and he thought them "thundering good." He had never read a word of any
Russian author. "Never _Anna_? Never _War and Peace_? Never _Karamazov_?
Never Tchehov?"

No, never.

Bohun gave him up.



IV

It should be obvious enough then that they hailed their approaching
separation with relief. Bohun had been promised by one of the
secretaries at the Embassy that rooms would be found for him. Jerry
intended to "hang out" at one of the hotels. The "Astoria" was, he
believed, the right place.

"I shall go to the 'France' for to-night," Bohun declared, having lived,
it would seem, in Petrograd all his days. "Look me up, old man, won't
you?"

Jerry smiled his slow smile. "I will," he said. "So long."

We will now follow the adventures of Henry. He had in him, I know, a
tiny, tiny creature with sharp ironical eyes and pointed springing feet
who watched his poses, his sentimentalities and heroics with
affectionate scorn. This same creature watched him now as he waited to
collect his bags, and then stood on the gleaming steps of the station
whilst the porters fetched an Isvostchick, and the rain fell in long
thundering lines of steel upon the bare and desolate streets.

"You're very miserable and lonely," the Creature said; "you didn't
expect this."

No, Henry had not expected this, and he also had not expected that the
Isvostchick would demand eight roubles for his fare to the "France."
Henry knew that this was the barest extortion, and he had sworn to
himself long ago that he would allow nobody to "do" him. He looked at
the rain and submitted. "After all, it's war time," he whispered to the
Creature.

He huddled himself into the cab, his baggage piled all about him, and
tried by pulling at the hood to protect himself from the elements. He
has told me that he felt that the rain was laughing at him; the cab was
so slow that he seemed to be sitting in the middle of pools and melting
snow; he was dirty, tired, hungry, and really not far from tears. Poor
Henry was very, very young....

He scarcely looked at the Neva as he crossed the bridge; all the length
of the Quay he saw only the hunched, heavy back of the old cabman and
the spurting, jumping rain, the vast stone grave-like buildings and the
high grey sky. He drove through the Red Square that swung in the rain.
He was thinking about the eight roubles.... He pulled up with a jerk
outside the "France" hotel. Here he tried, I am sure, to recover his
dignity, but he was met by a large, stout, eastern-looking gentleman
with peacock feathers in his round cap who smiled gently when he heard
about the eight roubles, and ushered Henry into the dark hall with a
kindly patronage that admitted of no reply.

The "France" is a good hotel, and its host is one of the kindest of
mortals, but it is in many ways Russian rather than Continental in its
atmosphere. That ought to have pleased and excited so sympathetic a soul
as Henry. I am afraid that this moment of his arrival was the first
realisation in his life of that stern truth that that which seems
romantic in retrospect is only too often unpleasantly realistic in its
actual experience.

He stepped into the dark hall, damp like a well, with a whirring
snarling clock on the wall and a heavy glass door pulled by a rope
swinging and shifting, the walls and door and rack with the letters
shifting too. In this rocking world there seemed to be no stable thing.
He was dirty and tired and humiliated. He explained to his host, who
smiled but seemed to be thinking of other things, that he wanted a bath
and a room and a meal. He was promised these things, but there was no
conviction abroad that the "France" had gone up in the world since Henry
Bohun had crossed its threshold. An old man with a grey beard and the
fixed and glittering eye of the "Ancient Mariner" told him to follow
him. How well I know those strange, cold, winding passages of the
"France," creeping in and out across boards that shiver and shake, with
walls pressing in upon you so thin and rocky that the wind whistles and
screams and the paper makes ghostly shadows and signs as though unseen
fingers moved it. There is that smell, too, which a Russian hotel alone,
of all the hostelries in the world, can produce, a smell of damp and
cabbage soup, of sunflower seeds and cigarette-ends, of drainage and
patchouli, of, in some odd way, the sea and fish and wet pavements. It
is a smell that will, until I die, be presented to me by those dark
half-hidden passages, warrens of intricate fumbling ways with boards
suddenly rising like little mountains in the path; behind the wainscot
one hears the scuttling of innumerable rats.

The Ancient Mariner showed Henry to his room and left him. Henry was
depressed at what he saw. His room was a slip cut out of other rooms,
and its one window was faced by a high black wall down whose surface
gleaming water trickled. The bare boards showed large and gaping cracks;
there was a washstand, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a faded padded
arm-chair with a hole in it. In the corner near the window was an Ikon
of tinsel and wood; a little round marble-topped table offered a dusty
carafe of water. A heavy red-plush bell-rope tapped the wall.

He sat down in the faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was the
room hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that in
Petrograd.... I myself am aware of what walls and streets and rivers,
engaged on their own secret life in that most secret of towns, can do to
the mere mortals who interfere with their stealthy concerns. Henry
dreamt; he was never afterwards able to tell me of what he had dreamt,
but it had been a long heavy cobwebby affair, in which the walls of the
hotel seemed to open and to close, black little figures moving like ants
up and down across the winding ways. He saw innumerable carafes and
basins and beds, the wall-paper whistling, the rats scuttling, and lines
of cigarette-ends, black and yellow, moving in trails like worms across
the boards. All men like worms, like ants, like rats and the gleaming
water trickling interminably down the high black wall. Of course he was
tired after his long journey, hungry too, and depressed.... He awoke to
find the Ancient Mariner watching him. He screamed. The Mariner
reassured him with a toothless smile, gripped him by the arm and showed
him the bathroom.

"_Pajaluista!_" said the Mariner.

Although Henry had learnt Russian, so unexpected was the pronunciation
of this familiar word that it was as though the old man had said "Open
Sesame!"....



V

He felt happy and consoled after a bath, a shave, and breakfast. Always
I should think he reacted very quickly to his own physical sensations,
and he was, as yet, too young to know that you cannot lay ghosts by the
simple brushing of your hair and sponging your face. After his breakfast
he lay down on the bed and again fell asleep, but this time not to
dream; he slept like a Briton, dreamless, healthy and clean. He awoke as
sure of himself as ever.... The first incantation had not, you see, been
enough....

He plunged into the city. It was raining with that thick dark rain that
seems to have mud in it before it has fallen. The town was veiled in
thin mist, figures appearing and disappearing, tram-bells ringing, and
those strange wild cries in the Russian tongue that seem at one's first
hearing so romantic and startling, rising sharply and yet lazily into
the air. He plunged along and found himself in the Nevski Prospect--he
could not mistake its breadth and assurance, dull though it seemed in
the mud and rain.

But he was above all things a romantic and sentimental youth, and he was
determined to see this country as he had expected to see it; so he
plodded on, his coat-collar up, British obstinacy in his eyes and a
little excited flutter in his heart whenever a bright colour, an Eastern
face, a street pedlar, a bunched-up, high-backed coachman, anything or
any one unusual presented itself.

He saw on his right a great church; it stood back from the street,
having in front of it a desolate little arrangement of bushes and public
seats and winding paths. The church itself was approached by flights of
steps that disappeared under the shadow of a high dome supported by vast
stone pillars. Letters in gold flamed across the building above the
pillars.

Henry passed the intervening ground and climbed the steps. Under the
pillars before the heavy, swinging doors were two rows of beggars; they
were dirtier, more touzled and tangled, fiercer and more ironically
falsely submissive than any beggars that, he had ever seen. He described
one fellow to me, a fierce brigand with a high black hat of feathers, a
soiled Cossack coat and tall dirty red leather boots; his eyes were
fires, Henry said. At any rate that is what Henry liked to think they
were. There was a woman with no legs and a man with neither nose nor
ears. I am sure that they watched Henry with supplicating hostility. He
entered the church and was instantly swallowed up by a vast multitude.

He described to me afterwards that it was as though he had been pushed
(by the evil, eager fingers of the beggars no doubt) into deep water. He
rose with a gasp, and was first conscious of a strange smell of dirt and
tallow and something that he did not know, but was afterwards to
recognise as the scent of sunflower seed. He was pushed upon, pressed
and pulled, fingered and crushed. He did not mind--he was glad--this was
what he wanted. He looked about him and found that he and all the people
round him were swimming in a hazy golden mist flung into the air from
the thousands of lighted candles that danced in the breeze blowing
through the building. The whole vast shining floor was covered with
peasants, pressed, packed together. Peasants, men and women--he did not
see a single member of the middle-class. In front of him under the altar
there was a blaze of light, and figures moved in the blaze uncertainly,
indistinctly. Now and then a sudden quiver passed across the throng, as
wind blows through the corn. Here and there men and women knelt, but for
the most part they stood steadfast, motionless, staring in front of
them. He looked at them and discovered that they had the faces of
children--simple, trustful, unintelligent, unhumorous children,--and
eyes, always kindlier than any he had ever seen in other human beings.
They stood there gravely, with no signs of religious fervour, with no
marks of impatience or weariness and also with no evidence of any
especial interest in what was occurring. It might have been a vast
concourse of sleep-walkers.

He saw that three soldiers near to him were holding hands....

From the lighted altars came the echoing whisper of a monotonous chant.
The sound rose and fell, scarcely a voice, scarcely an appeal, something
rising from the place itself and sinking back into it again without
human agency.

After a time he saw a strange movement that at first he could not
understand. Then watching, he found that unlit candles were being passed
from line to line, one man leaning forward and tapping the man in front
of him with the candle, the man in front passing it, in his turn,
forward, and so on until at last it reached the altar where it was
lighted and fastened into its sconce. This tapping with the candles
happened incessantly throughout the vast crowd. Henry himself was
tapped, and felt suddenly as though he had been admitted a member of
some secret society. He felt the tap again and again, and soon he seemed
to be hypnotised by the low chant at the altar and the motionless silent
crowd and the dim golden mist. He stood, not thinking, not living, away,
away, questioning nothing, wanting nothing....

He must of course finish with his romantic notion. People pushed around
him, struggling to get out. He turned to go and was faced, he told me,
with a remarkable figure. His description, romantic and sentimental
though he tried to make it, resolved itself into nothing more than the
sketch of an ordinary peasant, tall, broad, black-bearded, neatly clad
in blue shirt, black trousers, and high boots. This fellow stood
apparently away from the crowd, apart, and watched it all, as you so
often may see the Russian peasant doing, with indifferent gaze. In his
mild blue eyes Bohun fancied that he saw all kinds of things--power,
wisdom, prophecy--a figure apart and symbolic. But how easy in Russia it
is to see symbols and how often those symbols fail to justify
themselves! Well, I let Bohun have his fancies. "I should know that man
anywhere again," he declared. "It was as though he knew what was going
to happen and was ready for it." Then I suppose he saw my smile, for he
broke off and said no more.

And here for a moment I leave him and his adventures.



VI

I must speak, for a moment, of myself. Throughout the autumn and winter
of 1914 and the spring and summer of 1915 I was with the Russian Red
Cross on the Polish and Galician fronts. During the summer and early
autumn of 1915 I shared with the Ninth Army the retreat through Galicia.
Never very strong physically, owing to a lameness of the left hip from
which I have suffered from birth, the difficulties of the retreat and
the loss of my two greatest friends gave opportunities to my arch-enemy
Sciatica to do what he wished with me, and in October 1915 I was forced
to leave the Front and return to Petrograd. I was an invalid throughout
the whole of that winter, and only gradually during the spring of 1916
was able to pull myself back to an old shadow of my former vigour and
energy. I saw that I would never be good for the Front again, but I
minded that the less now in that the events of the summer of 1915 had
left me without heart or desire, the merest spectator of life, passive
and, I cynically believed, indifferent. I was nothing to any one, nor
was any one anything to me. The desire of my heart had slipped like a
laughing ghost away from my ken--men of my slow warmth and cautious
suspicion do not easily admit a new guest....

Moreover during this spring of 1916 Petrograd, against my knowledge,
wove webs about my feet. I had never shared the common belief that
Moscow was the only town in Russia. I had always known that Petrograd
had its own grace and beauty, but it was not until, sore and sick at
heart, lonely and bitter against fate, haunted always by the face and
laughter of one whom I would never see again, I wandered about the
canals and quays and deserted byways of the city that I began to
understand its spirit. I took, to the derision of my few friends, two
tumbledown rooms on Pilot's Island, at the far end of Ekateringofsky
Prospect. Here amongst tangled grass, old, deserted boats, stranded,
ruined cottages and abraided piers, I hung above the sea. Not indeed the
sea of my Glebeshire memories; this was a sluggish, tideless sea, but in
the winter one sheet of ice, stretching far beyond the barrier of the
eye, catching into its frosted heart every colour of the sky and air,
the lights of the town, the lamps of imprisoned barges, the moon, the
sun, the stars, the purple sunsets, and the strange, mysterious lights
that flash from the shadows of the hovering snow-clouds. My rooms were
desolate perhaps, bare boards with holes, an old cracked mirror, a
stove, a bookcase, a photograph, and a sketch of Rafiel Cove. My friends
looked and shivered; I, staring from my window on to the entrance into
the waterways of the city, felt that any magic might come out of that
strange desolation and silence. A shadow like the sweeping of the wing
of a great bird would hover above the ice; a bell from some boat would
ring, then the church bells of the city would answer it; the shadow
would pass and the moon would rise, deep gold, and lie hard and sharp
against the thick, impending air; the shadow would pass and the stars
come out, breaking with an almost audible crackle through the stuff of
the sky... and only five minutes away the shop-lights were glittering,
the Isvostchicks crying to clear the road, the tram-bells clanging, the
boys shouting the news. Around and about me marvellous silence....

In the early autumn of 1916 I met at a dinner-party Nicolai Leontievitch
Markovitch. In the course of a conversation I informed him that I had
been for a year with the Ninth Army in Galicia, and he then asked me
whether I had met his wife's uncle Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov, who was
also with the Ninth Army. It happened that I had known Alexei Petrovitch
very well and the sound of his name brought back to me so vividly events
and persons with whom we had both been connected that I had difficulty
in controlling my sudden emotion. Markovitch invited me to his house. He
lived, he told me, with his wife in a flat in the Anglisky Prospect; his
sister-in-law and another of his wife's uncles, a brother of Alexei
Petrovitch, also lived with them. I said that I would be very glad to
come.

It is impossible to describe how deeply, in the days that followed, I
struggled against the attraction that this invitation presented to me. I
had succeeded during all these months in avoiding any contact with the
incidents or characters of the preceding year. I had written no letters
and had received none; I had resolutely avoided meeting any members of
my old Atriad when they came to the town.

But now I succumbed. Perhaps something of my old vitality and curiosity
was already creeping back into my bones, perhaps time was already
dimming my memories--at any rate, on an evening early in October I paid
my call. Alexei Petrovitch was not present; he was on the Galician
front, in Tarnople. I found Markovitch, his wife Vera Michailovna, his
sister-in-law Nina Michailovna, his wife's uncle Ivan Petrovitch and a
young man Boris Nicolaievitch Grogoff. Markovitch himself was a thin,
loose, untidy man with pale yellow hair thinning on top, a ragged, pale
beard, a nose with a tendency to redden at any sudden insult or unkind
word and an expression perpetually anxious.

Vera Michailovna on the other hand was a fine young woman and it must
have been the first thought of all who met them as to why she had
married him. She gave an impression of great strength; her figure tall
and her bosom full, her dark eyes large and clear. She had black hair, a
vast quantity of it, piled upon her head. Her face was finely moulded,
her lips strong, red, sharply marked. She looked like a woman who had
already made up her mind upon all things in life and could face them
all. Her expression was often stern and almost insolently scornful, but
also she could be tender, and her heart would shine from her eyes. She
moved slowly and gracefully, and quite without self-consciousness.

A strange contrast was her sister, Nina Michailovna, a girl still, it
seemed, in childhood, pretty, with brown hair, laughing eyes, and a
trembling mouth that seemed ever on the edge of laughter. Her body was
soft and plump; she had lovely hands, of which she was obviously very
proud. Vera dressed sternly, often in black, with a soft white collar,
almost like a nurse or nun. Nina was always in gay colours; she wore
clothes, as it seemed to me, in very bad taste, colours clashing,
strange bows and ribbons and lace that had nothing to do with the dress
to which they were attached. She was always eating sweets, laughed a
great deal, had a shrill piercing voice, and was never still. Ivan
Petrovitch, the uncle, was very different from my Semyonov. He was
short, fat, and dressed with great neatness and taste. He had a short
black moustache, a head nearly bald, and a round chubby face with small
smiling eyes. He was a Chinovnik, and held his position in some
Government office with great pride and solemnity. It was his chief aim,
I found, to be considered cosmopolitan, and when he discovered the
feeble quality of my French he insisted in speaking always to me in his
strange confused English, a language quite of his own, with sudden
startling phrases which he had "snatched" as he expressed it from
Shakespeare and the Bible. He was the kindest soul alive, and all he
asked was that he should be left alone and that no one should quarrel
with him. He confided to me that he hated quarrels, and that it was an
eternal sorrow to him that the Russian people should enjoy so greatly
that pastime. I discovered that he was terrified of his brother, Alexei,
and at that I was not surprised. His weakness was that he was
inpenetrably stupid, and it was quite impossible to make him understand
anything that was not immediately in line with his own
experiences--unusual obtuseness in a Russian. He was vain about his
clothes, especially about his shoes, which he had always made in London;
he was sentimental and very easily hurt.

Very different again was the young man Boris Nicolaievitch Grogoff. No
relation of the family, he seemed to spend most of his time in the
Markovitch flat. A handsome young man, strongly built, with a head of
untidy curly yellow hair, blue eyes, high cheek bones, long hands with
which he was for ever gesticulating. Grogoff was an internationalist
Socialist and expressed his opinions at the top of his voice whenever he
could find an occasion. He would sit for hours staring moodily at the
floor, or glaring fiercely upon the company. Then suddenly he would
burst out, walking about, flinging up his arms, shouting. I saw at once
that Markovitch did not like him and that he despised Markovitch. He did
not seem to me a very wise young man, but I liked his energy, his
kindness, sudden generosities, and honesty. I could not see his reason
for being so much in this company.

During the autumn of 1916 I spent more and more time with the
Markovitches. I cannot tell you what was exactly the reason. Vera
Michailovna perhaps, although let no one imagine that I fell in love
with her or ever thought of doing so. No, my time for that was over. But
I felt from the first that she was a fine, understanding creature, that
she sympathised with me without pitying me, that she would be a good and
loyal friend, and that I, on my side could give her comprehension and
fidelity. They made me feel at home with them; there had been as yet no
house in Petrograd whither I could go easily and without ceremony, which
I could leave at any moment that I wished. Soon they did not notice
whether I were there or no; they continued their ordinary lives and
Nina, to whom I was old, plain, and feeble, treated me with a friendly
indifference that did not hurt as it might have done in England. Boris
Grogoff patronised and laughed at me, but would give me anything in the
way of help, property, or opinions, did I need it. I was in fact by
Christmas time a member of the family. They nicknamed me "Durdles,"
after many jokes about my surname and reminiscences of "Edwin Drood" (my
Russian name was Ivan Andreievitch). We had merry times in spite of the
troubles and distresses now crowding upon Russia.

And now I come to the first of the links in my story. It was with this
family that Henry Bohun was to lodge.



VII

Some three years before, when Ivan Petrovitch had gone to live with the
Markovitches, it had occurred to them that they had two empty rooms and
that these would accommodate one or two paying guests. It seemed to them
still more attractive that these guests should be English, and I expect
that it was Ivan Petrovitch who emphasised this. The British Consulate
was asked to assist them, and after a few inconspicuous clerks and young
business men they entertained for a whole six months the Hon. Charles
Trafford, one of the junior secretaries at the Embassy. At the end of
those six months the Hon. Charles, burdened with debt, and weakened by
little sleep and much liquor, was removed to a less exciting atmosphere.
With all his faults, he left faithful friends in the Markovitch flat,
and he, on his side, gave so enthusiastic an account of Mme.
Markovitch's attempts to restrain and modify his impetuosities that the
Embassy recommended her care and guidance to other young secretaries.
The war came and Vera Michailovna declared that she could have lodgers
no longer, and a terrible blow this was to Ivan Petrovitch. Then
suddenly, towards the end of 1916, she changed her mind and announced to
the Embassy that she was ready for any one whom they could send her.
Henry Bohun was offered, accepted, and prepared for. Ivan Petrovitch was
a happy man once more.

I never discovered that Markovitch was much consulted in these affairs.
Vera Michailovna "ran" the flat financially, industrially, and
spiritually. Markovitch meanwhile was busy with his inventions. I have,
as yet, said nothing about Nicolai Leontievitch's inventions. I
hesitate, indeed, to speak of them, although they are so essential, and
indeed important a part of my story. I hesitate simply because I do not
wish this narrative to be at all fantastic, but that it should stick
quite honestly and obviously to the truth. It is certain moreover that
what is naked truth to one man seems the falsest fancy to another, and
after all I have, from beginning to end, only my own conscience to
satisfy. The history of the human soul and its relation to divinity
which is, I think, the only history worth any man's pursuit must push
its way, again and again, through this same tangled territory which
infests the region lying between truth and fantasy; one passes suddenly
into a world that seems pure falsehood, so askew, so obscure, so twisted
and coloured is it. One is through, one looks back and it lies behind
one as the clearest truth. Such an experience makes one tender to other
men's fancies and less impatient of the vague and half-defined
travellers' tales that other men tell. Childe Roland is not the only
traveller who has challenged the Dark Tower.

In the Middle Ages Nicolai Leontievitch Markovitch would have been
called, I suppose, a Magician--a very half-hearted and unsatisfactory
one he would always have been--and he would have been most certainly
burnt at the stake before he had accomplished any magic worthy of the
name. His inventions, so far as I saw anything of them, were innocent
and simple enough. It was the man himself rather than his inventions
that arrested the attention. About the time of Bohun's arrival upon the
scene it was a new kind of ink that he had discovered, and for many
weeks the Markovitch flat dripped ink from every pore. He had no
laboratory, no scientific materials, nor, I think, any profound
knowledge. The room where he worked was a small box-like place off the
living-room, a cheerless enough abode with a little high barred window
in it as in a prison-cell, cardboard-boxes piled high with feminine
garments, a sewing-machine, old dusty books, and a broken-down
perambulator occupying most of the space. I never could understand why
the perambulator was there, as the Markovitches had no children. Nicolai
Leontievitch sat at a table under the little window, and his favourite
position was to sit with the chair perched on one leg and so, rocking in
this insecure position, he brooded over his bottles and glasses and
trays. This room was so dark even in the middle of the day that he was
often compelled to use a lamp. There he hovered, with his ragged beard,
his ink-stained fingers and his red-rimmed eyes, making strange noises
to himself and envolving from his materials continual little explosions
that caused him infinite satisfaction. He did not mind interruptions,
nor did he ever complain of the noise in the other room, terrific though
it often was. He would be absorbed, in a trance, lost in another world,
and surely amiable and harmless enough. And yet not entirely amiable.
His eyes would close to little spots of dull, lifeless colour--the only
thing alive about him seemed to be his hands that moved and stirred as
though they did not belong to his body at all, but had an independent
existence of their own--and his heels protruding from under his chair
were like horrid little animals waiting, malevolently, on guard.

His inventions were, of course, never successful, and he contributed,
therefore, nothing to the maintenance of his household. Vera Michailovna
had means of her own, and there were also the paying guests. But he
suffered from no sense of distress at his impecuniosity. I discovered
very quickly that Vera Michailovna kept the family purse, and one of
the earliest sources of family trouble was, I fancy, his constant
demands for money. Before the war he had, I believe, been drunk whenever
it was possible. Because drink was difficult to obtain, and in a flood
of patriotism roused by the enthusiasm of the early days of the war, he
declared himself a teetotaller, and marvellously he kept his vows. This
abstinence was now one of his greatest prides, and he liked to tell you
about it. Nevertheless he needed money as badly as ever, and he borrowed
whenever he could. One of the first things that Vera Michailovna told me
was that I was on no account to open my purse to him. I was not always
able to keep my promise.

On this particular evening of Bohun's arrival I came, by invitation, to
supper. They had told me about their Englishman, and had asked me indeed
to help the first awkward half-hour over the stile. It may seem strange
that the British Embassy should have chosen so uncouth a host as Nicolai
Leontievitch for their innocent secretaries, but it was only the more
enterprising of the young men who preferred to live in a Russian family;
most of them inhabited elegant flats of their own, ornamented with
coloured stuffs and gaily decorated cups and bright trays from the Jews'
Market, together with English comforts and luxuries dragged all the way
from London. Moreover, Markovitch figured very slightly in the
consciousness of his guests, and the rest of the flat was roomy and
clean and light. It was, like most of the homes of the Russian
Intelligentzia over-burdened with family history. Amazing the things
that Russians will gather together and keep, one must suppose, only
because they are too lethargic to do away with them. On the walls of the
Markovitch dining-room all kinds of pictures were hung--old family
photographs yellow and dusty, old calendars, prints of ships at sea, and
young men hanging over stiles, and old ladies having tea, photographs of
the Kremlin and the Lavra at Kieff, copies of Ivan and his murdered son
and Serov's portrait of Chaliapine as Boris Godounov. Bookcases there
were with tattered editions of Pushkin and Lermontov. The middle of the
living-room was occupied with an enormous table covered by a dark red
cloth, and this table was the centre of the life of the family. A large
clock wheezed and groaned against the wall, and various chairs of
different shapes and sizes filled up most of the remaining space.
Nevertheless, although everything in the room looked old except the
white and gleaming stove, Vera Michailovna spread over the place the
impress of her strong and active personality. It was not a sluggish
room, nor was it untidy as so many Russian rooms are. Around the table
everybody sat. It seemed that at all hours of the day and night some
kind of meal was in progress there; and it was almost certain that from
half-past two in the afternoon until half-past two on the following
morning the samovar would be found there, presiding with sleepy dignity
over the whole family and caring nothing for anybody. I can smell now
that especial smell of tea and radishes and salted fish, and can hear
the wheeze of the clock, the hum of the samovar, Nina's shrill laugh and
Boris's deep voice.... I owe that room a great deal. It was there that I
was taken out of myself and memories that fared no better for their
perpetual resurrection. That room called me back to life.

On this evening there was to be, in honour of young Bohun, an especially
fine dinner. A message had come from him that he would appear with his
boxes at half-past seven. When I arrived Vera was busy in the kitchen,
and Nina adding in her bedroom extra ribbons and laces to her costume;
Boris Nicolaievitch was not present; Nicolai Leontievitch was working in
his den.

I went through to him. He did not look up as I came in. The room was
darker than usual; the green shade over the lamp was tilted wickedly as
though it were cocking its eye at Markovitch's vain hopes, and there was
the man himself, one cheek a ghastly green, his hair on end and his
chair precariously balanced.

I heard him say as though he repeated an incantation--"_Nu Vot... Nu
Vot... Nu Vot_."

"_Zdras te_, Nicolai Leontievitch," I said. Then I did not disturb him
but sat down on a rickety chair and waited. Ink dripped from his table
on to the floor. One bottle lay on its side, the ink oozing out, other
bottles stood, some filled, some half-filled, some empty.

"Ah, ha!" he cried, and there was a little explosion; a cork spurted out
and struck the ceiling; there was smoke and the crackling of glass. He
turned round and faced me, a smudge of ink on one of his cheeks, and
that customary nervous unhappy smile on his lips.

"Well, how goes it?" I asked.

"Well enough." He touched his cheek then sucked his fingers. "I must
wash. We have a guest to-night. And the news, what's the latest?"

He always asked me this question, having apparently the firm conviction
that an Englishman must know more about the war than a man of any other
nationality. But he didn't pause for an answer--"News--but of course
there is none. What can you expect from this Russia of ours?--and the
rest--it's all too far away for any of us to know anything about
it--only Germany's close at hand. Yes. Remember that. You forget it
sometimes in England. She's very near indeed.... We've got a guest
coming--from the English Embassy. His name's Boon and a funny name too.
You don't know him, do you?"

No, I didn't know him. I laughed. Why should he think that I always knew
everybody, I who kept to myself so?

"The English always stick together. That's more than can be said for us
Russians. We're a rotten lot. Well, I must go and wash."

Then, whether by a sudden chance of light and shade, or if you like to
have it, by a sudden revelation on the part of a beneficent Providence,
he really did look malevolent, standing in the middle of the dirty
little room, malevolent and pathetic too, like a cross, sick bird.

"Vera's got a good dinner ready. That's one thing, Ivan Andreievitch,"
he said; "and vodka--a little bottle. We got it from a friend. But I
don't drink now, you know."

He went off and I, going into the other room, found Vera Michailovna
giving last touches to the table. I sat and watched with pleasure her
calm assured movements. She really was splendid, I thought, with the
fine carriage of her head, her large mild eyes, her firm strong hands.

"All ready for the guest, Vera Michailovna?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered, smiling at me, "I hope so. He won't be very
particular, will he, because we aren't princes?"

"I can't answer for him," I replied, smiling back at her. "But he can't
be more particular than the Hon. Charles--and he was a great success."

The Hon. Charles was a standing legend in the family, and we always
laughed when we mentioned him.

"I don't know"--she stopped her work at the table and stood, her hand up
to her brow as though she would shade her eyes from the light--"I wish
he wasn't coming--the new Englishman, I mean. Better perhaps as we
were--Nicholas--" she stopped short. "Oh, I don't know! They're
difficult times, Ivan Andreievitch."

The door opened and old Uncle Ivan came in. He was dressed very smartly
with a clean white shirt and a black bow tie and black patent leather
shoes, and his round face shone as the sun.

"Ah, Mr. Durward," he said, trotting forward. "Good health to you! What
excellent weather we're sharing."

"So we are, M. Semyonov," I answered him. "Although it did rain most of
yesterday you know. But weather of the soul perhaps you mean? In that
case I'm very glad to hear that you are well."

"Ah--of the soul?" He always spoke his words very carefully, clipping
and completing them, and then standing back to look at them as though
they were china ornaments arranged on a shining table. "No--my soul
to-day is not of the first rank, I'm afraid."

It was obvious that he was in a state of the very greatest excitement;
he could not keep still, but walked up and down beside the long table,
fingering the knives and forks.

Then Nina burst in upon us in one of her frantic rages. Her tempers were
famous both for their ferocity and the swiftness of their passing. In
the course of them she was like some impassioned bird of brilliant
plumages, tossing her feathers, fluttering behind the bars of her cage
at some impertinent, teasing passer-by. She stood there now in the
doorway, gesticulating with her hands.

"_Nu, Tznaiesh schto?_ Michael Alexandrovitch has put me off--says he is
busy all night at the office. He busy all night! Don't I know the
business he's after? And it's the third time--I won't see him again--no,
I won't. He--"

"Good-evening, Nina Michailovna," I said, smiling. She turned to me.

"Durdles--Mr. Durdles--only listen. It was all arranged for
to-night--the _Parisian_, and then we were to come straight back--"

"But your guest--" I began.

However the torrent continued. The door opened and Boris Grogoff came
in. Instantly she turned upon him.

"There's your fine friend!" she cried; "Michael Alexandrovitch isn't
coming. Put me off at the last moment, and it's the third time. And I
might have gone to Musikalnaya Drama. I was asked by--"

"Well, why not?" Grogoff interrupted calmly. "If he had something better
to do--"

Then she turned upon him, screaming, and in a moment they were at it,
tooth and nail, heaping up old scores, producing fact after fact to
prove, the one to the other, false friendship, lying manners, deceitful
promises, perjured records. Vera tried to interrupt, Markovitch said
something, I began a remonstrance--in a moment we were all at it, and
the room was a whirl of noise. In the tempest it was only I who heard
the door open. I turned and saw Henry Bohun standing there.

I smile now when I think of that moment of his arrival, go fitting to
the characters of the place, so appropriate a symbol of what was to
come. Bohun was beautifully dressed, spotlessly neat, in a bowler hat a
little to one side, a light-blue silk scarf, a dark-blue overcoat. His
face wore an expression of dignified self-appreciation. It was as though
he stood there breathing blessings on the house that he had sanctified
by his arrival. He looked, too, with it all, such a boy that my heart
was touched. And there was something good and honest about his eyes.

He may have spoken, but certainly no one heard him in the confusion.

I just caught Nina's shrill voice: "Listen all of you! There you are!
You hear what he says! That I told him it was to be Tuesday when,
everybody knows--Verotchka! Ah--Verotchka! He says--" Then she paused; I
caught her amazed glance at the door, her gasp, a scream of stifled
laughter, and behold she was gone!

Then they all saw. There was instant silence, a terrible pause, and then
Bohun's polite gentle voice: "Is this where Mr. Markovitch lives? I beg
your pardon--"

Great awkwardness followed. It is quite an illusion to suppose that
Russians are easy, affable hosts. I know of no people in the world who
are so unable to put you at your ease if there is something unfortunate
in the air. They have few easy social graces, and they are inclined to
abandon at once a situation if it is made difficult for them. If it
needs an effort to make a guest happy they leave him alone and trust to
a providence in whose powers, however, they entirely disbelieve. Bohun
was led to his room, his bags being carried by old Sacha, the
Markovitch's servant, and the Dvornik.

His bags, I remember, were very splendid, and I saw the eyes of Uncle
Ivan grow large as he watched their progress. Then with a sigh he drew a
chair up to the table and began eating zakuska, putting salt-fish and
radishes and sausage on to his place and eating them with a fork.

"Dyadya, Ivan!" Vera said reproachfully. "Not yet--we haven't begun.
Ivan Andreievitch, what do you think? Will he want hot water?"

She hurried after him.

The evening thus unfortunately begun was not happily continued. There
was a blight upon us all. I did my best, but I was in considerable pain
and very tired. Moreover, I was not favourably impressed with my first
sight of young Bohun. He seemed to me foolish and conceited. Uncle Ivan
was afraid of him. He made only one attack.

"It was a very fruitful journey that you had, sir, I hope?"

"I beg your pardon," said Bohun.

"A very fruitful journey--nothing burdensome nor extravagant?"

"Oh, all right, thanks," Bohun answered, trying unsuccessfully to show
that he was not surprised at my friend's choice of words. But Uncle Ivan
saw that he had not been successful and his lip trembled. Markovitch was
silent and Boris Nicolaievitch sulked. Only once towards the end of the
meal Bohun interested me.

"I wonder," he asked me, "whether you know a fellow called Lawrence? He
travelled from England with me. A man who's played a lot of football."

"Not Jerry Lawrence, the international!" I said. "Surely he can't have
come out here?" Of course it was the same. I was interested and
strangely pleased. The thought of Lawrence's square back and cheery
smile was extremely agreeable just then.

"Oh! I'm very glad," I answered. "I must get him to come and see me. I
knew him pretty well at one time. Where's he to be found?"

Bohun, with an air of rather gentle surprise, as though he could not
help thinking it strange that any one should take an interest in
Lawrence's movements, told me where he was lodging.

"And I hope you also will find your way to me sometime,"

I added. "It's an out-of-place grimy spot, I'm afraid. You might bring
Lawrence round one evening."

Soon after that, feeling that I could do no more towards retrieving an
evening definitely lost, I departed. At the last I caught Markovitch's
eye. He seemed to be watching for something. A new invention perhaps. He
was certainly an unhappy man.



VIII

I was to meet Jerry Lawrence sooner than I had expected. And it was in
this way.

Two days after the evening that I have just described I was driven to go
and see Vera Michailovna. I was driven, partly by my curiosity, partly
by my depression, and partly by my loneliness. This same loneliness was,
I believe, at this time beginning to affect us all. I should be
considered perhaps to be speaking with exaggeration if I were to borrow
the title of one of Mrs. Oliphant's old-fashioned and charming novels
and to speak of Petrograd as already "A Beleaguered City"--beleaguered,
moreover, in very much the same sense as that other old city was. From
the very beginning of the war Petrograd was isolated--isolated not by
the facts of the war, its geographical position or any of the obvious
causes, but simply by the contempt and hatred with which it was
regarded. From very old days it was spoken of as a German town. "If you
want to know Russia don't go to Petrograd." "Simply a cosmopolitan town
like any other." "A smaller Berlin"--and so on, and so on. This sense of
outside contempt influenced its own attitude to the world. It was
always at war with Moscow. It showed you when you first arrived its
Nevski, its ordered squares, its official buildings as though it would
say: "I suppose you will take the same view as the rest. If you don't
wish to look any deeper here you are. I'm not going to help you."

As the war developed it lost whatever gaiety and humour it had. After
the fall of Warsaw the attitude of the Russian people in general became
fatalistic. Much nonsense was talked in the foreign press about "Russia
coming back again and again." "Russia, the harder she was pressed the
harder she resisted," and the ghost of Napoleon retreating from Moscow
was presented to every home in Europe; but the plain truth was that,
after Warsaw, the temper of the people changed. Things were going wrong
once more as they had always gone wrong in Russian history, and as they
always would go wrong. Then followed bewilderment. What to do? Whose
fault was it all? Shall we blame our blood or our rulers? Our rulers,
certainly, as we always, with justice, have blamed them--our blood, too,
perhaps. From the fall of Warsaw, in spite of momentary flashes of
splendour and courage, the Russians were a blindfolded, naked people,
fighting a nation fully armed. Now, Europe was vast continents away, and
only Germany, that old Germany whose soul was hateful, whose practical
spirit was terribly admirable, was close at hand. The Russian people
turned hither and thither, first to its Czar, then to its generals, then
to its democratic spirit, then to its idealism--and there was no hope
anywhere. They appealed for Liberty. In the autumn of 1916 a great
prayer from the whole country went up that the bandage might be taken
from its eyes, and soon, lest when the light did at last come the eyes
should be so unused to it that they should see nothing. Nicholas had his
opportunity--the greatest opportunity perhaps ever offered to man. He
refused it. From that moment the easiest way was closed, and only a most
perilous rocky path remained.

With every week of that winter of 1916, Petrograd stepped deeper and
deeper into the darkness. Its strangeness grew and grew upon me as the
days filed through. I wondered whether my illness and the troubles of
the preceding year made me see everything at an impossible angle--or it
was perhaps my isolated lodging, my crumbling rooms, with the grey
expanse of sea and sky in front of them that was responsible. Whatever
it was, Petrograd soon came to be to me a place with a most terrible
secret life of its own.

There is an old poem of Pushkin's that Alexandre Benois has most
marvellously illustrated, which has for its theme the rising of the
river Neva in November 1824. On that occasion the splendid animal
devoured the town, and in Pushkin's poem you feel the devastating power
of the beast, and in Benois' pictures you can see it licking its lips as
it swallowed down pillars and bridges and streets and squares with poor
little fragments of humanity clutching and crying and fruitlessly
appealing.

This poem only emphasised for me the suspicion that I had originally
had, that the great river and the marshy swamp around it despised
contemptuously the buildings that man had raised beside and upon it, and
that even the buildings in their turn despised the human beings who
thronged them. It could only be some sense of this kind that could make
one so repeatedly conscious that one's feet were treading ancient
ground.

The town, raised all of a piece by Peter the Great, could claim no
ancient history at all; but through every stick and stone that had been
laid there stirred the spirit and soul of the ground, so that out of one
of the sluggish canals one might expect at any moment to see the horrid
and scaly head of some palaeolithic monster with dead and greedy eyes
slowly push its way up that it might gaze at the little black hurrying
atoms as they crossed and recrossed the grey bridge. There are many
places in Petrograd where life is utterly dead; where some building,
half-completed, has fallen into red and green decay; where the water
lies still under iridescent scum and thick clotted reeds seem to stand
at bay, concealing in their depths some terrible monster.

At such a spot I have often fancied that the eyes of countless
inhabitants of that earlier world are watching me, and that not far away
the waters of Neva are gathering, gathering, gathering their mighty
momentum for some instant, when, with a great heave and swell, they will
toss the whole fabric of brick and mortar from their shoulders, flood
the streets and squares, and then sink tranquilly back into great sheets
of unruffled waters marked only with reeds and the sharp cry of some
travelling bird.

All this may be fantastic enough, I only know that it was sufficiently
real to me during that winter of 1916 to be ever at the back of my mind;
and I believe that some sense of that kind had in all sober reality
something to do with that strange weight of uneasy anticipation that we
all of us, yes, the most unimaginative amongst us, felt at this time.

Upon this afternoon when I went to pay my call on Vera Michailovna, the
real snow began to fall. We had had the false preliminary attempt a
fortnight before; now in the quiet persistent determination, the solid
soft resilience beneath one's feet, and the patient aquiescence of roofs
and bridges and cobbles one knew that the real winter had come. Already,
although it was only four o'clock in the afternoon, there was darkness,
with the strange almost metallic glow as of the light from an inverted
looking-glass that snow makes upon the air. I had not far to go, but the
long stretch of the Ekateringofsky Canal was black and gloomy and
desolate, repeating here and there the pale yellow reflection of some
lamp, but for the most part dim and dead, with the hulks of barges lying
like sleeping monsters on its surface. As I turned into Anglisky
Prospect I found stretched like a black dado, far down the street,
against the wall, a queue of waiting women. They would be there until
the early morning, many of them, and it was possible that then the
bread would not be sufficient. And this not from any real lack, but
simply from the mistakes of a bungling, peculating Government. No wonder
that one's heart was heavy.

I found Vera Michailovna to my relief alone. When Sacha brought me into
the room she was doing what I think I had never seen her do before,
sitting unoccupied, her eyes staring in front of her, her hands folded
on her lap.

"I don't believe that I've ever caught you idle before, Vera
Michailovna," I said.

"Oh, I'm glad you've come!" She caught my hand with an eagerness very
different from her usual calm, quiet greeting. "Sit down. It's an
extraordinary thing. At that very moment I was wishing for you."

"What is it I can do for you?" I asked. "You know that I would do
anything for you."

"Yes, I know that you would. But--well. You can't help me because I
don't know what's the matter with me."

"That's very unlike you," I said.

"Yes, I know it is--and perhaps that's why I am frightened. It's so
vague; and you know I long ago determined that if I couldn't define a
trouble and have it there in front of me, so that I could strangle
it--why I wouldn't bother about it. But those things are so easy to
say."

She got up and began to walk up and down the room. That again was
utterly unlike her, and altogether I seemed to be seeing, this
afternoon, some quite new Vera Michailovna, some one more intimate, more
personal, more appealing. I realised suddenly that she had never before,
at any period of our friendship, asked for my help--not even for my
sympathy. She was so strong and reliant and independent, cared so little
for the opinion of others, and shut down so closely upon herself her
private life, that I could not have imagined her asking help from any
one. And of the two of us, she was the man, the strong determined soul,
the brave and self-reliant character. It seemed to me ludicrous that
she should ask for my help. Nevertheless I was greatly touched.

"I would do anything for you," I said.

She turned to me, a splendid figure, her head, with its crown of black
hair, lifted, her hands on her hips, her eyes gravely regarding me.

"There are three things," she said, "perhaps all of them nothing.... And
yet all of them disturbing. First my husband. He's beginning to drink
again."

"Drink?" I said; "where can he get it from?"

"I don't know. I must discover. But it isn't the actual drinking. Every
one in our country drinks if he can. Only what has made my husband break
his resolve? He was so proud of it. You know how proud he was. And he
lies about it. He says he is not drinking. He never used to lie about
anything. That was not one of his faults."

"Perhaps his inventions," I suggested.

"Pouf! His inventions! You know better than that, Ivan Andreievitch. No,
no. It is something.... He's not himself. Well, then, secondly, there's
Nina. The other night did you notice anything?"

"Only that she lost her temper. But she's always doing that."

"No, it's more than that. She's unhappy, and I don't like the life she's
leading. Always out at cinematographs and theatres and restaurants, and
with a lot of boys who mean no harm, I know--but they're idiotic,
they're no good.... Now, when the war's like this and the suffering....
To be always at the cinematograph! But I've lost my authority over her,
Ivan Andreievitch. She doesn't care any longer what I say to her. Once,
and not so long ago, I meant so much to her. She's changed, she's
harder, more careless, more selfish. You know, Ivan Andreievitch, that
Nina's simply everything to me. I don't talk about myself, do I? but at
least I can say that since--oh, many, many years, she's been the whole
world and more than the whole world to me. Our mother and father were
killed in a railway accident coming up from Odessa when Nina was very
small, and since then Nina's been mine--all mine!"

She said that word with sudden passion, flinging it at me with a fierce
gesture of her hands. "Do you know what it is to want that something
should belong to you, belong entirely to you, and to no one else? I've
been too proud to say, but I've wanted that terribly all my life. I
haven't had children, although I prayed for them, and perhaps now it is
as well. But Nina! She's known she was mine, and, until now, she's loved
to know it. But now she's escaping from me, and she knows that too, and
is ashamed. I think I could bear anything but that sense that she
herself has that she's being wrong--I hate her to be ashamed."

"Perhaps," I suggested, "it's time that she went out into the world now
and worked. There are a thousand things that a woman can do."

"No--not Nina. I've spoilt her, perhaps; I don't know. I always liked to
feel that she needed my help. I didn't want to make her too
self-reliant. That was wrong of me, and I shall be punished for it."

"Speak to her," I said. "She loves you so much that one word from you to
her will be enough."

"No," Vera Michailovna said slowly. "It won't be enough now. A year ago,
yes. But now she's escaping as fast as she can."

"Perhaps she's in love with some one," I suggested.

"No. I should have seen at once if it had been that. I would rather it
were that. I think she would come back to me then. No, I suppose that
this had to happen. I was foolish to think that it would not. But it
leaves one alone--it--"

She pulled herself up at that, regarding me with sudden shyness, as
though she would forbid me to hint that she had shown the slightest
emotion, or made in any way an appeal for pity.

I was silent, then I said:

"And the third thing, Vera Michailovna?"

"Uncle Alexei is coming back." That startled me. I felt my heart give
one frantic leap.

"Alexei Petrovitch!" I cried. "When? How soon?"

"I don't know. I've had a letter." She felt in her dress, found the
letter and read it through. "Soon, perhaps. He's leaving the Front for
good. He's disgusted with it all, he says. He's going to take up his
Petrograd practice again."

"Will he live with you?"

"No. God forbid!"

She felt then, perhaps, that her cry had revealed more than she
intended, because she smiled and, trying to speak lightly, said:

"No. We're old enemies, my uncle and I. We don't get on. He thinks me
sentimental, I think him--but never mind what I think him. He has a bad
effect on my husband."

"A bad effect?" I repeated.

"Yes. He irritates him. He laughs at his inventions, you know."

I nodded my head. Yes, with my earlier experience of him I could
understand that he would do that.

"He's a cynical, embittered man," I said. "He believes in nothing and in
nobody. And yet he has his fine side--"

"No, he has no fine side," she interrupted me fiercely. "None. He is a
bad man. I've known him all my life, and I'm not to be deceived."

Then in a softer, quieter tone she continued:

"But tell me, Ivan Andreievitch. I've wanted before to ask you. You were
with him on the Front last year. We have heard that he had a great love
affair there, and that the Sister whom he loved was killed. Is that
true?"

"Yes," I said, "that is true."

"Was he very much in love with her?"

"I believe terribly."

"And it hurt him deeply when she was killed?"

"Desperately deeply."

"But what kind of woman was she? What type? It's so strange to me. Uncle
Alexei... with his love affairs!"

I looked up, smiling. "She was your very opposite, Vera Michailovna, in
everything. Like a child--with no knowledge, no experience, no
self-reliance--nothing. She was wonderful in her ignorance and bravery.
We all thought her wonderful."

"And she loved _him?_"

"Yes--she loved him."

"How strange! Perhaps there is some good in him somewhere. But to us at
any rate he always brings trouble. This affair may have changed him.
They say he is very different. Worse perhaps--"

She broke out then into a cry:

"I want to get away, Ivan Andreievitch! To get away, to escape, to leave
Russia and everything in it behind me! To escape!"

It was just then that Sacha knocked on the door. She came in to say that
there was an Englishman in the hall inquiring for the other Englishman
who had come yesterday, that he wanted to know when he would be back.

"Perhaps I can help," I said. I went out into the hall and there I found
Jerry Lawrence.

He stood there in the dusk of the little hall looking as resolute and
unconcerned as an Englishman, in a strange and uncertain world, is
expected to look. Not that he ever considered the attitudes fitting to
adopt on certain occasions. He would tell you, if you inquired, that "he
couldn't stand those fellows who looked into every glass they passed."
His brow wore now a simple and innocent frown like that of a healthy
baby presented for the first time with a strange and alarming rattle. It
was only later that I was to arrive at some faint conception of
Lawrence's marvellous acceptance of anything that might happen to turn
up. Vice, cruelty, unsuspected beauty, terror, remorse, hatred, and
ignorance--he accepted them all once they were there in front of him. He
sometimes, as I shall on a later occasion, show, allowed himself a free
expression of his views in the company of those whom he could trust, but
they were never the views of a suspicious or a disappointed man. It was
not that he had great faith in human nature. He had, I think, very
little. Nor was he without curiosity--far from it. But once a thing was
really there he wasted no time over exclamations as to the horror or
beauty or abomination of its actual presence. There was as he once
explained to me, "precious little time to waste." Those who thought him
a dull, silent fellow--and they were many--made of course an almost
ludicrous mistake, but most people in life are, I take it, too deeply
occupied with their own personal history to do more than estimate at its
surface value the appearance of others... but after all such a
dispensation makes, in all probability for the general happiness....

On this present occasion Jerry Lawrence stood there exactly as I had
seen him stand many times on the football field waiting for the
referee's whistle, his thick short body held together, his mouth shut
and his eyes on guard. He did not at first recognise me.

"You've forgotten me," I said.

"I beg your pardon," he answered in his husky good-natured voice, like
the rumble of an amiable bull-dog.

"My name is Durward," I said, holding out my hand. "And years ago we had
a mutual friend in Olva Dune."

That pleased him. He gripped my hand very heartily and smiled a big ugly
smile. "Why, yes," he said. "Of course. How are you? Feeling fit? Damned
long ago all that, isn't it? Hope you're really fit?"

"Oh, I'm all right," I answered. "I was never a Hercules, you know. I
heard that you were here from Bohun. I was going to write to you. But
it's excellent that we should meet like this."

"I was after young Bohun," he explained. "But it's pleasant to find
there's another fellow in the town one knows. I've been a bit at sea
these two days. To tell you the truth I never wanted to come." I heard a
rumble in his throat that sounded like "silly blighters."

"Come in," I said. "You must meet Madame Markovitch with whom Bohun is
staying--and then wait a bit. He won't be long, I expect."

The idea of this seemed to fill Jerry with alarm. He turned back toward
the door. "Oh! I don't think... she won't want... better another time..."
his mouth was filled with indistinct rumblings.

"Nonsense." I caught his arm. "She is delightful. You must make yourself
at home here. They'll be only too glad."

"Does she speak English?" he asked.

"No," I answered. "But that's all right."

He backed again towards the door.

"My Russian's so slow," he said. "Never been here since I was a kid. I'd
rather not, really--"

However, I dragged him in and introduced him. I had quite a fatherly
desire, as I watched him, that "he should make good." But I'm afraid
that that first interview was not a great success. Vera Michailovna was
strange that afternoon, excited and disturbed as I had never known her,
and I could see that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she
could bring herself to think about Jerry at all.

And Jerry himself was so unresponsive that I could have beaten him.
"Why, you're duller than you used to be," I thought to myself, and
wondered how I could have suspected, in those days, subtle depths and
mysterious comprehensions. Vera Michailovna asked him questions about
France and London but, quite obviously, did not listen to his answers.

After ten minutes he pulled himself up slowly from his chair:

"Well, I must be going," he said. "Tell young Bohun I shall be waiting
for him to-night--7.30--Astoria--" He turned to Vera Michailovna to say
good-bye, and then, suddenly, as she rose and their eyes met, they
seemed to strike some unexpected chord of sympathy. It took both of
them, I think, by surprise; for quite a moment they stared at one
another.

"Please come whenever you want to see your friend," she said, "we shall
be delighted."

"Thank you," he answered simply, and went.

When he had gone she said to me:

"I like that man. One could trust him."

"Yes, one could," I answered her.



IX

I must return now to young Henry Bohun. I would like to arouse your
sympathy for him, but sympathy's a dangerous medicine for the young, who
are only too ready, so far as their self-confidence goes, to take a mile
if you give them an inch. But with Bohun it was simply a case of
re-delivering, piece by piece, the mile that he had had no possible
right to imagine in his possession, and at the end of his relinquishment
he was as naked and impoverished a soul as any life with youth and
health on its side can manage to sustain. He was very miserable during
these first weeks, and then it must be remembered that Petrograd was, at
this time, no very happy place for anybody. Bohun was not a coward--he
would have stood the worst things in France without flinching--but he
was neither old enough nor young enough to face without a tremor the
queer world of nerves and unfulfilled expectation in which he found
himself. In the first place, Petrograd was so very different from
anything that he had expected. Its size and space, its power of reducing
the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights
and shadows, its waste spaces and cold, empty, moonlit squares, its
jumble of modern and mediaeval civilisation, above all, its supreme
indifference to all and sundry--these things cowed and humiliated him.
He was sharp enough to realise that here he was nobody at all. Then he
had not expected to be so absolutely cut off from all that he had known.
The Western world simply did not seem to exist. The papers came so
slowly that on their arrival they were not worth reading. He had not
told his friends in England to send his letters through the Embassy bag,
with the result that they would not, he was informed, reach him for
months.

Of his work I do not intend here to speak,--it does not come into this
story,--but he found that it was most complicated and difficult, and
kicks rather than halfpence would be the certain reward. And Bohun hated
kicks....

Finally, he could not be said to be happy in the Markovitch flat. He
had, poor boy, heard so much about Russian hospitality, and had formed,
from the reading of the books of Mr. Stephen Graham and others,
delightful pictures of the warmest hearts in the world holding out the
warmest hands before the warmest samovars. In its spirit that was true
enough, but it was not true in the way that Bohun expected it.

The Markovitches, during those first weeks, left him to look after
himself because they quite honestly believed that that was the thing
that he would prefer. Uncle Ivan tried to entertain him, but Bohun found
him a bore, and with the ruthless intolerance of the very young, showed
him so. The family did not put itself out to please him in any way. He
had his room and his latchkey. There was always coffee in the morning,
dinner at half-past six, and the samovar from half-past nine onwards.
But the Markovitch family life was not turned from its normal course.
Why should it be?

And then he was laughed at. Nina laughed at him. Everything about him
seemed to Nina ridiculous--his cold bath in the morning, his
trouser-press, the little silver-topped bottles on his table, the crease
in his trousers, his shining neat hair, the pearl pin in his black tie,
his precise and careful speech, the way that he said "_Nu tak...
Spasebo... gavoreet... gariachy_..." She was never tired of imitating
him; and very soon he caught her strutting about the dining-room with a
man's cap on her head, twisting a cane and bargaining with an
Isvostchick--this last because, only the evening before, he had told
them with great pride of his cleverness in that especial direction. The
fun was good-natured enough, but it was, as Russian chaff generally is,
quite regardless of sensitive feelings. Nina chaffed everybody and
nobody minded, but Bohun did not know this, and minded very much indeed.
He showed during dinner that evening that he was hurt, and sat over his
cabbage soup very dignified and silent. This made every one
uncomfortable, although Vera told me afterwards that she found it
difficult not to laugh. The family did not make themselves especially
pleasant, as Henry felt they ought to have done--they continued the even
tenor of their way. He was met by one of those sudden cold horrible
waves of isolated terror with which it pleases Russia sometimes to
overwhelm one. The snow was falling; the town was settling into a
suspicious ominous quiet. There was no light in the sky, and horrible
winds blew round the corners of abandoned streets. Henry was desperately
homesick. He would have cut and run, had there been any possible means
of doing it. He did not remember the wild joy with which he had heard,
only a few weeks before, that he was to come to Petrograd. He had
forgotten even the splendours of _Discipline_. He only knew that he was
lonely and frightened and home-sick. He seemed to be without a friend in
the world.

But he was proud. He confided in nobody. He went about with his head up,
and every one thought him the most conceited young puppy who had ever
trotted the Petrograd streets. And, although he never owned it even to
himself, Jerry Lawrence seemed to him now the one friendly soul in all
the world. You could be sure that Lawrence would be always the same; he
would not laugh at you behind your back, if he disliked something he
would say so. You knew where you were with him, and in the uncertain
world in which poor Bohun found himself that simply was everything.
Bohun would have denied it vehemently if you told him that he had once
looked down on Lawrence, or despised him for his inartistic mind.
Lawrence was "a fine fellow"; he might seem a little slow at first, "but
you wait and you will see what kind of a chap he is." Nevertheless Bohun
was not able to be for ever in his company; work separated them, and
then Lawrence lodged with Baron Wilderling on the Admiralty Quay, a long
way from Anglisky Prospect. Therefore, at the end of three weeks, Henry
Bohun discovered himself to be profoundly wretched. There seemed to be
no hope anywhere. Even the artist in him was disappointed. He went to
the Ballet and saw Tchaikowsky's "Swan Lake"; but bearing Diagilev's
splendours in front of him, and knowing nothing about the technique of
ballet-dancing he was bored and cross and contemptuous. He went to
"Eugen Onyegin" and enjoyed it, because there was still a great deal of
the schoolgirl in him; but after that he was flung on to Glinka's
"Russlan and Ludmilla," and this seemed to him quite interminable and to
have nothing to do with the gentleman and lady mentioned in the title.
He tried a play at the Alexander Theatre; it was, he saw, by Andréeff,
whose art he had told many people in England he admired, but now he
mixed him up in his mind with Kuprin, and the play was all about a
circus--very confused and gloomy. As for literature, he purchased some
new poems by Balmont, some essays by Merejkowsky, and André Biely's _St.
Petersburg,_ but the first of these he found pretentious, the second
dull, and the third quite impossibly obscure. He did not confess to
himself that it might perhaps be his ignorance of the Russian language
that was at fault. He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries,
and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois,
Douboginsky, Lançeray, and Ostroymova--all the quite obvious people. He
wrote home to his mother "that from what he could see of Russian Art it
seemed to him to have a real future in front of it"--and he bought
little painted wooden animals and figures at the Peasants' Workshops and
stuck them up on the front of his stove.

"I like them because they are so essentially Russian," he said to me,
pointing out a red spotted cow and a green giraffe. "No other country
could have been responsible for them."

Poor boy, I had not the heart to tell him that they had been made in
Germany.

However, as I have said, in spite of his painted toys and his operas he
was, at the end of three weeks, a miserable man. Anybody could see that
he was miserable, and Vera Michailovna saw it. She took him in hand, and
at once his life was changed. I was present at the beginning of the
change.

It was the evening of Rasputin's murder. The town of course talked of
nothing else--it had been talking, without cessation, since two o'clock
that afternoon. The dirty, sinister figure of the monk with his magnetic
eyes, his greasy beard, his robe, his girdle, and all his other
properties, brooded gigantic over all of us. He was brought into
immediate personal relationship with the humblest, most insignificant
creature in the city, and with him incredible shadows and shapes, from
Dostoeffsky, from Gogol, from Lermontov, from Nekrasov--from whom you
please--all the shadows of whom one is eternally subconsciously aware
in Russia--faced us and reminded us that they were not shadows but
realities.

The details of his murder were not accurately known--it was only sure
that, at last, after so many false rumours of attempted assassination,
he was truly gone, and this world would be bothered by his evil presence
no longer.

Pictures formed in one's mind as one listened. The day was fiercely
cold, and this seemed to add to the horror of it all--to the
Hoffmannesque fantasy of the party, the lights, the supper, and the
women, the murder with its mixture of religion and superstition and
melodrama, the body flung out at last so easily and swiftly, on to the
frozen river. How many souls must have asked themselves that day--"Why,
if this is so easy, do we not proceed further? A man dies more simply
than you thought--only resolution... only resolution."

I know that that evening I found it impossible to remain in my lonely
rooms; I went round to the Markovitch flat. I found Vera Michailovna and
Bohun preparing to go out; they were alone in the flat. He looked at me
apprehensively. I think that I appeared to him at that time a queer,
moody, ill-disposed fellow, who was too old to understand the true
character of young men's impetuous souls. It may be that he was
right....

"Will you come with us, Ivan Andreievitch?" Vera Michailovna asked me.
"We're going to the little cinema on Ekateringofsky--a piece of local
colour for Mr. Bohun."

"I'll come anywhere with you," I said. "And we'll talk about Rasputin."

Bohun was only too ready. The affair seemed to his romantic soul too
good to be true. Because we none of us knew, at that time, what had
really happened, a fine field was offered for every rumour and
conjecture.

Bohun had collected some wonderful stories. I saw that, apart from
Rasputin, he was a new man--something had happened to him. It was not
long before I discovered that what had happened was that Vera
Michailovna had been kind to him. Vera's most beautiful quality was her
motherliness. I do not intend that much-abused word in any sentimental
fashion. She did not shed tears over a dirty baby in the street, nor did
she drag decrepit old men into the flat to give them milk and fifty
kopecks,--but let some one appeal to the strength and bravery in her,
and she responded magnificently. I believe that to be true of very many
Russian women, who are always their most natural selves when something
appeals to the best in them. Vera Michailovna had a strength and a
security in her protection of souls weaker than her own that had about
it nothing forced or pretentious or self-conscious--it was simply the
natural woman acting as she was made to act. She saw that Bohun was
lonely and miserable and, now that the first awkwardness was passed and
he was no longer a stranger, she was able, gently and unobtrusively, to
show him that she was his friend. I think that she had not liked him at
first; but if you want a Russian to like you, the thing to do is to show
him that you need him. It is amazing to watch their readiness to receive
dependent souls whom they are in no kind of way qualified to
protect--but they do their best, and although the result is invariably
bad for everybody's character, a great deal of affection is created.

As we walked to the cinema she asked him, very gently and rather shyly,
about his home and his people and English life. She must have asked all
her English guests the same questions, but Bohun, I fancy, gave her
rather original answers. He let himself go, and became very young and
rather absurd, but also sympathetic. We were, all three of us, gay and
silly, as one very often suddenly is, in Russia, in the middle of even
disastrous situations. It had been a day of most beautiful weather, the
mud was frozen, the streets clean, the sky deep blue, the air harshly
sweet. The night blazed with stars that seemed to swing through the haze
of the frost like a curtain moved, very gently, by the wind. The
Ekateringofsky Canal was blue with the stars lying like scraps of
quicksilver all about it, and the trees and houses were deep black in
outline above it. I could feel that the people in the street were happy.
The murder of Rasputin was a sign, a symbol; his figure had been behind
the scenes so long that it had become mythical, something beyond human
power--and now, behold, it was not beyond human power at all, but was
there like a dead stinking fish. I could see the thought in their minds
as they hurried along: "Ah, he is gone, the dirty fellow--_Slava
Bogu_--the war will soon be over."

I, myself, felt the influence. Perhaps now the war would go better,
perhaps Stunner and Protopopoff and the rest of them would be dismissed,
and clean men... it was still time for the Czar.... And I heard Bohun,
in his funny, slow, childish Russian: "But you understand, Vera
Michailovna, that my father knows nothing about writing, nothing at
all--so that it wouldn't matter very much what he said.... Yes, he's
military--been in the Army always...."

Along the canal the little trees that in the spring would be green
flames were touched now very faintly by silver frost. A huge barge lay
black against the blue water; in the middle of it the rain had left a
pool that was not frozen and under the light of a street lamp blazed
gold--very strange the sudden gleam.... We passed the little wooden
shelter where an old man in a high furry cap kept oranges and apples and
nuts and sweets in paper. One candle illuminated his little store. He
looked out from the darkness behind him like an old prehistoric man. His
shed was peaked like a cocked hat, an old fat woman sat beside him
knitting and drinking a glass of tea....

"I'm sorry, Vera Michailovna, that you can't read English...." Bohun's
careful voice was explaining, "Only Wells and Locke and Jack London...."


I heard Vera Michailovna's voice. Then Bohun again:

"No, I write very slowly--yes, I correct an awful lot...."

We stumbled amongst the darkness of the cobbles; where pools had been
the ice crackled beneath our feet, then the snow scrunched.... I loved
the sound, the sharp clear scent of the air, the pools of stars in the
sky, the pools of ice at our feet, the blue like the thinnest glass
stretched across the sky. I felt the poignancy of my age, of the country
where I was, of Bohun's youth and confidence, of the war, of disease and
death--but behind it all happiness at the strange sense that I had
to-night, that came to me sometimes from I knew not where, that the
undercurrent of the river of life was stronger than the eddies and
whirlpools on its surface, that it knew whither it was speeding, and
that the purpose behind its force was strong and true and good....

"Oh," I heard Bohun say, "I'm not really very young, Vera Michailovna.
After all, it's what you've done rather than your actual years...."

"You're older than you'll ever be again, Bohun, if that's any
consolation to you," I said.

We had arrived. The cinema door blazed with light, and around it was
gathered a group of soldiers and women and children, peering in at a
soldiers' band, which, placed on benches in a corner of the room, played
away for its very life. Outside, around the door were large bills
announcing "The Woman without a Soul, Drama in four parts," and there
were fine pictures of women falling over precipices, men shot in
bedrooms, and parties in which all the guests shrank back in extreme
horror from the heroine. We went inside and were overwhelmed by the
band, so that we could not hear one another speak. The floor was covered
with sunflower seeds, and there was a strong smell of soldiers' boots
and bad cigarettes and urine. We bought tickets from an old Jewess
behind the pigeon-hole and then, pushing the curtain aside, stumbled
into darkness. Here the smell was different, being, quite simply that of
human flesh not very carefully washed. Although, as we stumbled to some
seats at the back, we could feel that we were alone, it had the
impression that multitudes of people pressed in upon us, and when the
lights did go up we found that the little hall was indeed packed to its
extremest limit.

No one could have denied that it was a cheerful scene. Soldiers,
sailors, peasants, women, and children crowded together upon the narrow
benches. There was a great consumption of sunflower seeds, and the
narrow passage down the middle of the room was littered with fragments.
Two stout and elaborate policemen leaned against the wall surveying the
public with a friendly if superior air. There was a tremendous amount of
noise. Mingled with the strains of the band beyond the curtain were
cries and calls and loud roars of laughter. The soldiers embraced the
girls, and the children, their fingers in their mouths, wandered from
bench to bench, and a mangy dog begged wherever he thought that he saw a
kindly face. All the faces were kindly--kindly, ignorant, and
astoundingly young. As I felt that youth I felt also separation; I and
my like could emphasise as we pleased the goodness, docility, mysticism
even of these people, but we were walking in a country of darkness. I
caught a laugh, the glance of some women, the voice of a young
soldier--I felt behind us, watching us, the thick heavy figure of
Rasputin. I smelt the eastern scent of the sunflower seeds, I looked
back and glanced at the impenetrable superiority of the two policemen,
and I laughed at myself for the knowledge that I thought I had, for the
security upon which I thought that I rested, for the familiarity with
which I had fancied I could approach my neighbours.... I was not wise, I
was not secure, I had no claim to familiarity....

The lights were down and we were shown pictures of Paris. Because the
cinema was a little one and the prices small the films were faded and
torn, so that the Opera and the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre and
the Seine danced and wriggled and broke before our eyes. They looked
strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd
semi-civilisation in which we were living. There were comments all
around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a
party.... The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head swam
a little and I seemed to see Rasputin, swelling in his black robe,
catching us all into its folds, sweeping us up into the starlight sky.
We were under the flare of the light again. I caught Bohun's happy eyes;
he was talking eagerly to Vera Michailovna, not removing his eyes from
her face. She had conquered him; I fancied as I looked at her that her
thoughts were elsewhere.

There followed a Vaudeville entertainment. A woman and a man in
peasants' dress came and laughed raucously, without meaning, their eyes
narrowly searching the depths of the house, then they stamped their feet
and whirled around, struck one another, laughed again, and vanished.

The applause was half-hearted. Then there was a trainer of dogs, a
black-eyed Tartar with four very miserable little fox-terriers, who
shivered and trembled and jumped reluctantly through hoops. The audience
liked this, and cried and shouted and threw paper pellets at the dogs. A
stout perspiring Jew in a shabby evening suit came forward and begged
for decorum. Then there appeared a stout little man in a top hat who
wished to recite verses of, I gathered, a violent indecency. I was
uncomfortable about Vera Michailovna, but I need not have been. The
indecency was of no importance to her, and she was interested in the
human tragedy of the performer. Tragedy it was. The man was hungry and
dirty and not far from tears. He forgot his verses and glanced nervously
into the wings as though he expected to be beaten publicly by the
perspiring Jew.

He stammered; his mouth wobbled; he covered it with a dirty hand. He
could not continue.

The audience was sympathetic. They listened in encouraging silence; then
they clapped; then they shouted friendly words to him. You could feel
throughout the room an intense desire that he should succeed. He
responded a little to the encouragement, but could not remember his
verses. He struggled, struggled, did a hurried little breakdown dance,
bowed and vanished into the wings, to be beaten, I have no doubt, by the
Jewish gentleman. We watched a little of the "Drama of the Woman without
a Soul," but the sense of being in a large vat filled with boiling human
flesh into whose depths we were pressed ever more and more deeply was at
last too much for us, and we stumbled our way into the open air. The
black shadow of the barge, the jagged outline of the huddled buildings
against the sky, the black tower at the end of the canal, all these swam
in the crystal air.

We took deep breaths of the freshness and purity; cheerful noises were
on every side of us, the band and laughter; a church bell with its deep
note and silver tinkle; the snow was vast and deep and hard all about
us. We walked back very happily to Anglisky Prospect. Vera Michailovna
said good-night to me and went in. Before he followed her, Bohun turned
round to me:

"Isn't she splendid?" he whispered. "By God, Durward, I'd do anything
for her.... Do you think she likes me?"

"Why not?" I asked.

"I want her to--frightfully. I'd do anything for her. Do you think she'd
like to learn English?"

"I don't know," I said. "Ask her."

He disappeared. As I walked home I felt about me the new interaction of
human lives and souls--ambitions, hopes, youth. And the crisis, behind
these, of the world's history made up, as it was, of the same
interactions of human and divine. The fortunes and adventures of the
soul on its journey towards its own country, its hopes and fears,
struggles and despairs, its rejections and joy and rewards--its death
and destruction--all this in terms of human life and the silly
blundering conditions of this splendid glorious earth.... Here was Vera
Michailovna and her husband, Nina and Boris Grogoff, Bohun and Lawrence,
myself and Semyonov--a jumbled lot--with all our pitiful self-important
little histories, our crimes and virtues so insignificant and so quickly
over, and behind them the fine stuff of the human and divine soul,
pushing on through all raillery and incongruity to its goal. Why, I had
caught up, once more, that interest in life that I had, I thought, so
utterly lost! I stopped for a moment by the frozen canal and laughed to
myself. The drama of life was, after all, too strong for my weak
indifference. I felt that night as though I had stepped into a new house
with lighted rooms and fires and friends waiting for me. Afterwards, I
was so closely stirred by the sense of impending events that I could not
sleep, but sat at my window watching the faint lights of the sky shift
and waver over the frozen ice....



X

We were approaching Christmas. The weather of these weeks was
wonderfully beautiful, sharply cold, the sky pale bird's-egg blue, the
ice and the snow glittering, shining with a thousand colours. There
began now a strange relationship between Markovitch and myself.

There was something ineffectual and pessimistic about me that made
Russians often feel in me a kindred soul. At the Front, Russians had
confided in me again and again, but that was not astonishing, because
they confided in every one. Nevertheless, they felt that I was less
English than the rest, and rather blamed me in their minds, I think, for
being so. I don't know what it was that suddenly decided Markovitch to
"make me part of his life." I certainly did not on my side make any
advances.

One evening he came to see me and stayed for hours. Then he came two or
three times within the following fortnight. He gave me the effect of not
caring in the least whether I were there or no, whether I replied or
remained silent, whether I asked questions or simply pursued my own
work. And I, on my side, had soon in my consciousness his odd,
irascible, nervous, pleading, shy and boastful figure painted
permanently, so that his actual physical presence seemed to be
unimportant. There he was, as he liked to stand up against the white
stove in my draughty room, his rather dirty nervous hands waving in
front of me, his thin hair on end, his ragged beard giving his eyes an
added expression of anxiety. His body was a poor affair, his legs thin
and uncertain, an incipient stomach causing his waistcoat suddenly to
fall inwards somewhere half-way up his chest, his feet in ill-shapen
boots, and his neck absurdly small inside his high stiff collar. His
stiff collar jutting sharply into his weak chin was perhaps his most
striking feature. Most Russians of his careless habits wore soft collars
or students' shirts that fastened tight about the neck, but this high
white collar was with Markovitch a sign and a symbol, the banner of his
early ambitions; it was the first and last of him. He changed it every
day, it was always high and sharp, gleaming and clean, and it must have
hurt him very much. He wore with it a shabby black tie that ran as far
up the collar as it could go, and there was a sense of pathos and
struggle about this tie as though it were a wild animal trying to escape
over an imprisoning wall. He would stand clutching my stove as though it
assured his safety in a dangerous country; then suddenly he would break
away from it and start careering up and down my room, stopping for an
instant to gaze through my window at the sea and the ships, then off
again, swinging his arms, his anxious eyes searching everywhere for
confirmation of the ambitions that still enflamed him.

For the root and soul of him was that he was greatly ambitious. He had
been born, I learnt, in some small town in the Moscow province, and his
father had been a schoolmaster in the place--a kind of Perodonov, I
should imagine, from the things that Markovitch told me about him. The
father, at any rate, was a mean, malicious, and grossly sensual
creature, and he finally lost his post through his improper behaviour
towards some of his own small pupils. The family then came to evil days,
and at a very early age young Markovitch was sent to Petrograd to earn
what he could with his wits. He managed to secure the post of a
secretary to an old fellow who was engaged in writing the life of his
grandfather--a difficult book, as the grandfather had been a voluminous
letter-writer, and this correspondence had to be collected and
tabulated. For months, and even years, young Markovitch laboriously
endeavoured to arrange these old yellow letters, dull, pathetic,
incoherent. His patron grew slowly imbecile, but through the fogs that
increasingly besieged him saw only this one thing clearly, that the
letters must be arranged. He kept Markovitch relentlessly at his table,
allowing him no pleasures, feeding him miserably and watching him
personally undress every evening lest he should have secreted certain
letters somewhere on his body. There was something almost sadist
apparently in the old gentleman's observation of Markovitch's labours.

It was during these years that Markovitch's ambitions took flame. He was
always as he told me having "amazing ideas." I asked him--What kind of
ideas? "Ideas by which the world would be transformed.... Those letters
were all old, you know, and dusty, and yellow, and eaten, some of them,
by rats, and they'd lie on the floor and I'd try to arrange them in
little piles according to their dates.... There'd be rows of little
packets all across the floor..., and then somehow, when one's back was
turned, they'd move, all of their own wicked purpose--and one would have
to begin all over again, bending with one's back aching, and seeing
always the stupid handwriting.... I hated it, Ivan Andreievitch, of
course I hated it, but I had to do it for the money. And I lived in his
house, too, and as he got madder it wasn't pleasant. He wanted me to
sleep with him because he saw things in the middle of the night, and
he'd catch hold of me and scream and twist his fat legs round me... no,
it wasn't agreeable. _On ne sympatichne saff-szem_. He wasn't a nice man
at all. But while I was sorting the letters these ideas would come to me
and I would be on fire.... It seemed to me that I was to save the world,
and that it would not be difficult if only one might be resolute enough.
That was the trouble--to be resolute. One might say to oneself, 'On
Friday October 13th I will do so and so, and then on Saturday November
3rd I will do so and so, and then on December 24th it will be finished.'
But then on October 13th one is, may be, in quite another mood--one is
even ill possibly--and so nothing is done and the whole plan is ruined.
I would think all day as to how I would make myself resolute, and I
would say when old Feodor Stepanovitch would pinch my ear and deny me
more soup, 'Ah ha, you wait, you old pig-face--you wait until I've
mastered my resolution--and then I'll show you!' I fancied, for
instance, that if I could command myself sufficiently I could just go to
people and say, 'You must have bath-houses like this and this'--I had
all the plans ready, you know, and in the hottest room you have couches
like this, and you have a machine that beats your back--so, so, so--not
those dirty old things that leave bits of green stuff all over you--and
so on, and so on. But better ideas than that, ideas about poverty and
wealth, no more kings, you know, nor police, but not your cheap
Socialism that fellows like Boris Nicolaievitch shout about; no, real
happiness, so that no one need work as I did for an old beast who didn't
give you enough soup, and have to keep quiet, all the same and say
nothing. Ideas came like flocks of birds, so many that I couldn't
gather them all but had sometimes to let the best ones go. And I had no
one to talk to about them--only the old cook and the girl in the
kitchen, who had a child by old Feodor that he wouldn't own,--but she
swore it was his, and told every one the time when it happened and where
it was and all.... Then the old man fell downstairs and broke his neck,
and he'd left me some money to go on with the letters...."

At this point Markovitch's face would become suddenly triumphantly
malevolent, like the face of a schoolboy who remembers a trick that he
played on a hated master. "Do you think I went on with them, Ivan
Andreievitch? no, not I... but I kept the money."

"That was wrong of you," I would say gravely.

"Yes--wrong of course. But hadn't he been wrong always? And after all,
isn't everybody wrong? We Russians have no conscience, you know, about
anything, and that's simply because we can't make up our minds as to
what's wrong and what's right, and even if we do make up our minds it
seems a pity not to let yourself go when you may be dead to-morrow.
Wrong and right.... What words!... Who knows? Perhaps it would have been
the greatest wrong in the world to go on with the letters, wasting
everybody's time, and for myself, too, who had so many ideas, that life
simply would never be long enough to think them all out."

It seemed that shortly after this he had luck with a little invention,
and this piece of luck was, I should imagine, the ruin of his career, as
pieces of luck so often are the ruin of careers. I could never
understand what precisely his invention was, it had something to do with
the closing of doors, something that you pulled at the bottom of the
door, so that it shut softly and didn't creak with the wind. A Jew
bought the invention, and gave Markovitch enough money to lead him
confidently to believe that his fortune was made. Of course it was not,
he never had luck with an invention again, but he was bursting with
pride and happiness, set up house for himself in a little flat on the
Vassily Ostrov--and met Vera Michailovna. I wish I could give some true
idea of the change that came over him when he reached this part of his
story. When he had spoken of his childhood, his father, his first
struggles to live, his life with his old patron, he had not attempted to
hide the evil, the malice, the envy that there was in his soul. He had
even emphasised it, I might fancy, for my own especial benefit, so that
I might see that he was not such a weak, romantic, sentimental creature
as I had supposed--although God knows I had never fancied him romantic.
Now when he spoke of his wife his whole body changed. "She married me
out of pity," he told me. "I hated her for that, and I loved her for
that, and I hate and love her for it still."

Here I interrupted him and told him that perhaps it was better that he
should not confide in me the inner history of his marriage.

"Why not?" he asked me suspiciously.

"Because I'm only an acquaintance, you scarcely know me. You may regret
it afterwards when you're in another mood."

"Oh, you English!" he said contemptuously; "you're always to be trusted.
As a nation you're not, but as one man to another you're not interested
enough in human nature to give away secrets."

"Well, tell me what you like," I said. "Only I make no promises about
anything."

"I don't want you to," he retorted; "I'm only telling you what every one
knows. Wasn't I aware from the first moment that she married me out of
pity, and didn't they all know it, and laugh and tell her she was a
fool. She knew that she was a fool too, but she was very young, and
thought it fine to sacrifice herself for an idea. I was ill and I talked
to her about my future. She believed in it, she thought I could do
wonderful things if only some one looked after me. And at the same time
despised me for wanting to be looked after.... And then I wasn't so ugly
as I am now. She had some money of her own, and we took in lodgers, and
I loved her, as I love her now, so that I could kiss her feet and then
hate her because she was kind to me. She only cares for her sister,
Nina; and because I was jealous of the girl and hated to see Vera good
to her I had her to live with us, just to torture myself and show that I
was stronger than all of them if I liked.... And so I am, than her
beastly uncle the doctor and all the rest of them--let him do what he
likes...."

It was the first time that he had mentioned Semyonov.

"He's coming back," I said.

"Oh, is he?" snarled Markovitch. "Well, he'd better look out." Then his
voice, his face, even the shape of his body, changed once again. "I'm
not a bad man, Ivan Andreievitch. No, I'm not.... You think so of
course, and I don't mind if you do. But I love Vera, and if she loved me
I could do great things. I could astonish them all. I hear them say,
'Ah, that Nicholas Markovitch, he's no good... with his inventions.
What did a fine woman like that marry such a man for?' I know what they
say. But I'm strong if I like. I gave up drink when I wished. I can give
up anything. And when I succeed they'll see--and then we'll have enough
money not to need these people staying with us and despising us...."

"No one despises you, Nicolai Leontievitch," I interrupted.

"And what does it matter if they do?" he fiercely retorted. "I despise
them--all of them. It's easy for them when everything goes well with
them, but with me everything goes wrong. Everything!... But I'm strong
enough to make everything go right--and I will."

This was, for the time, the end of his confidences. He had, I was sure,
something further to tell me, some plan, some purpose, but he decided
suddenly that he would keep it to himself, although I am convinced that
he had only told me his earlier story in order that I might understand
this new idea of his. But I did not urge him to tell me. My interest in
life had not yet sufficiently revived; it was, after all, none of my
business.

For the rest, it seemed that he had been wildly enthusiastic about the
war at its commencement. He had had great ideas about Russia, but now he
had given up all hope. Russia was doomed; and Germany, whom he hated and
admired, would eat her up. And what did it matter? Perhaps Germany would
"run Russia," and then there would be order and less thieving, and this
horrible war would stop. How foolish it had been to suppose that any one
in Russia would ever do anything. They were all fools and knaves and
idle in Russia--like himself.

And so he left me.



XI

On Christmas Eve, late in the evening, I went into a church. It was my
favourite church in Petrograd, rising at the English Prospect end of the
Quay, with its white rounded towers pure and quiet and modest.

I had been depressed all day. I had not been well, and the weather was
harsh, a bitterly cold driving wind beating down the streets and
stroking the ice of the canal into a dull grey colour. Christmas seemed
to lift into sharper, bitterer irony the ghastly horrors of this end
endless war. Last Christmas I had been too ill to care, and the
Christmas before I had been at the Front when the war had been young and
full of hope, and I had seen enough nobility and self-sacrifice to be
reassured about the true stuff of the human soul. Now all that seemed to
be utterly gone. On the one side my mind was filled with my friends,
John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna. The sacrifice that they had made
seemed to be wicked and useless. I had lost altogether that conviction
of the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for so
long, carried with me. They were dead, dead... simply dead. There at
the Front one had believed in many things. Here in this frozen and
starving town, with every ghost working against every human, there was
assurance of nothing--only deep foreboding and an ominous silence. The
murder of Rasputin still hung over every head. The first sense of
liberty had passed, and now his dirty malicious soul seemed to be
watching us all, reminding us that he had not left us, but was waiting
for the striking of some vast catastrophe that the friends whom he had
left behind him to carry on his work were preparing. It was this sense
of moving so desperately and so hopelessly in the dark that was with me.
Any chance that there had seemed to be of Russia rising from the war
with a free soul appeared now to be utterly gone. Before our eyes the
powers that ruled us were betraying us, laughing at us, selling us. And
we did not know who was our enemy, who our friend, whom to believe, of
whom to take counsel. Peculation and lying and the basest intrigue was
on every side of us, hunger for which there was no necessity, want in a
land packed with everything. I believe that there may have been very
well another side to the picture, but at that time we could not see; we
did not wish to see, we were blindfolded men....

I entered the church and found that the service was over. I passed
through the aisle into the little rounded cup of dark and gold where the
altars were. Here there were still collected a company of people,
kneeling, some of them, in front of the candles, others standing there,
motionless like statues, their hands folded, gazing before them. The
candles flung a mist of dim embroidery upon the walls, and within the
mist the dark figures of the priests moved to and fro. An old priest
with long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and reading
a long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice. There was the scent of
candles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place. The
tawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the candle-light, and an echo of
the cold wind creeping up the long dark aisle blew the light about so
that the gilt was like flashing piercing eyes. I wrapped my Shuba
closely about me, and stood there lost in a hazy, indefinite dream.

I was comforted and touched by the placid, mild, kindly faces of those
standing near me. "No evil here...." I thought. "Only ignorance, and for
that others are responsible."

I was lost in my dream and I did not know of what I was dreaming. The
priest's voice went on, and the lights flickered, and it was as though
some one, a long way off, were trying to give me a message that it was
important that I should hear, important for myself and for others. There
came over me, whence I know not, a sudden conviction of the fearful
power of Evil, a sudden realisation, as though I had been shown
something, a scene or a picture or writing which had brought this home
to me.... The lights seemed to darken, the priest's figure faded, and I
felt as though the message that some one had been trying to deliver to
me had been withdrawn. I waited a moment, looking about me in a
bewildered fashion, as though I had in reality just woken from sleep.
Then I left the church.

Outside the cold air was intense. I walked to the end of the Quay and
leaned on the stone parapet. The Neva seemed vast like a huge, white,
impending shadow; it swept in a colossal wave of frozen ice out to the
far horizon, where tiny, twinkling lights met it and closed it in. The
bridges that crossed it held forth their lights, and there were the
gleams, like travelling stars, of the passing trams, but all these were
utterly insignificant against the vast body of the contemptuous ice. On
the farther shore the buildings rose in a thin, tapering line, looking
as though they had been made of black tissue paper, against the solid
weight of the cold, stony sky. The Peter and Paul Fortress, the towers
of the Mohammedan Mosque were thin, immaterial, ghostly, and the whole
line of the town was simply a black pencilled shadow against the ice,
smoke that might be scattered with one heave of the force of the river.
The Neva was silent, but beneath that silence beat what force and power,
what contempt and scorn, what silent purposes?

I saw then, near me, and gazing, like myself, on to the river the tall,
broad figure of a peasant, standing, without movement, black against the
sky.

He seemed to dominate the scene, to be stronger and more contemptuous
than the ice itself, but also to be in sympathy with it.

I made some movement, and he turned and looked at me. He was a fine man,
with a black beard and noble carriage. He passed down the Quay and I
turned towards home.



XII

About four o'clock on Christmas afternoon I took some flowers to Vera
Michailovna. I found that the long sitting-room had been cleared of all
furniture save the big table and the chairs round it. About a dozen
middle-aged ladies were sitting about the table and solemnly playing
"Lotto." So serious were they that they scarcely looked up when I came
in. Vera Michailovna said my name and they smiled and some of them
bowed, but their eyes never left the numbered cards. "_Dvar...
Peedecat... Cheteeriy... Zurock Tree... Semdecet Voisim_"... came from a
stout and good-natured lady reading the numbers as she took them from
the box. Most of the ladies were healthy, perspiring, and of a most
amiable appearance. They might, many of them, have been the wives of
English country clergymen, so domestic and unalarmed were they. I
recognised two Markovitch aunts and a Semyonov cousin.

There was a hush and a solemnity about the proceedings. Vera Michailovna
was very busy in the kitchen, her face flushed and her sleeves rolled
up; Sacha, the servant, malevolently assisting her and scolding
continually the stout and agitated country girl who had been called in
for the occasion.

"All goes well," Vera smilingly assured me. "Half-past six it is--don't
be late."

"I will be in time," I said.

"Do you know, I've asked your English friend. The big one."

"Lawrence?... Is he coming?"

"Yes. At least I understood so on the telephone, but he sounded
confused. Do you think he will want to come?"

"I'm sure he will," I answered.

"Afterwards I wasn't sure. I thought he might think it impertinent when
we know him so little. But he could easily have said if he didn't want
to come, couldn't he?"

There seemed to me something unusual in the way that she asked me these
questions. She did not usually care whether people were offended or no.
She had not time to consider that, and in any case she despised people
who took offence easily.

I would perhaps have said something, but the country girl dropped a
plate and Sacha leapt upon the opportunity. "Drunk!... What did I say,
having such a girl? Is it not better to do things for yourself? But
no--of course no one cares for my advice, as though last year the same
thing...." And so on.

I left them and went home to prepare for the feast.

I returned punctually at half-past six and found every one there. Many
of the ladies had gone, but the aunts remained, and there were other
uncles and some cousins. We must have been in all between twenty and
thirty people. The table was now magnificently spread. There was a fine
glittering Father Christmas in the middle, a Father Christmas of German
make, I am afraid. Ribbons and frosted strips of coloured paper ran in
lines up and down the cloth. The "Zakuska" were on a side-table near
the door--herrings and ham and smoked fish and radishes and mushrooms
and tongue and caviare and, most unusual of all in those days, a
decanter of vodka.

No one had begun yet; every one stood about, a little uneasy and
awkward, with continuous glances flung at the "Zakuska" table. Of the
company Markovitch first caught my eye. I had never seen him so clean
and smart before. His high, piercing collar was of course the first
thing that one saw; then one perceived that his hair was brushed, his
beard trimmed, and that he wore a very decent suit of rather shiny
black. This washing and scouring of him gave him a curiously subdued and
imprisoned air; I felt sympathetic towards him; I could see that he was
anxious to please, happy at the prospect of being a successful host,
and, to-night, most desperately in love with his wife. That last stood
out and beyond all else. His eyes continually sought her face; he had
the eyes of a dog watching and waiting for its master's appreciative
word.

I had never before seen Vera Michailovna so fine and independent and, at
the same time, so kind and gracious. She was dressed in white, very
plain and simple, her shining black hair piled high on her head, her
kind, good eyes watching every one and everything to see that all were
pleased. She, too, was happy to-night, but happy also in a strange,
subdued, quiescent way, and I felt, as I always did about her, that her
soul was still asleep and untouched, and that much of her reliance and
independence came from that. Uncle Ivan was in his smart clothes, his
round face very red and he wore his air of rather ladylike but
inoffensive superiority. He stood near the table with the "Zakuska," and
his eyes rested there. I do not now remember many of the Markovitch and
Semyonov relations. There was a tall thin young man, rather bald, with a
short black moustache; he was nervous and self-assertive, and he had a
high, shrill voice. He talked incessantly. There were several
delightful, middle-aged women, quiet and ready to be pleased with
everything--the best Russian type of all perhaps, women who knew life,
who were generously tolerant, kind-hearted, with a quiet sense of humour
and no nonsense about them. There was one fat red-faced man in a very
tight black coat, who gave his opinion always about food and drink. He
was from Moscow--his name Paul Leontievitch Rozanov--and I met him on a
later occasion of which I shall have to tell in its place. Then there
were two young girls who giggled a great deal and whispered together.
They hung around Nina and stroked her hair and admired her dress, and
laughed at Boris Grogoff and any one else who was near them.

Nina was immensely happy. She loved parties of course, and especially
parties in which she was the hostess. She was like a young kitten or
puppy in a white frock, with her hair tumbling over her eyes. She was
greatly excited, and as joyous as though there were no war, and no
afflicted Russia, and nothing serious in all the world. This was the
first occasion on which I suspected that Grogoff cared for her.
Outwardly he did nothing but chaff and tease her, and she responded in
that quick rather sharp and very often crudely personal way at which
foreigners for the first time in Russian company so often wonder.
Badinage with Russians so quickly passes to lively and noisy
quarrelling, which in its turn so suddenly fades into quiet contented
amiability that it is little wonder that the observer feels rather
breathless at it all. Grogoff was a striking figure, with his fine
height and handsome head and bold eyes, but there was something about
him that I did not like. Immensely self-confident, he nevertheless
seldom opened his mouth without betraying great ignorance about almost
everything. He was hopelessly ill-educated, and was the more able
therefore from the very little knowledge that he had to construct a very
simple Socialist creed in which the main statutes were that everything
should be taken from the rich and given to the poor, the peasants
should have all the land, and the rulers of the world be beheaded. He
had no knowledge of other countries, although he talked very freely of
what he called his "International Principles." I could not respect him
as I could many Russian revolutionaries, because he had never on any
occasion put himself out or suffered any inconvenience for his
principles, living as he did, comfortably, with all the food and clothes
that he needed. At the same time he was, on the other hand, kindly and
warm-hearted, and professed friendship for me, although he despised what
he called my "Capitalistic tendencies." Had he only known, he was far
richer and more autocratic than I!

In the midst of this company Henry Bohun was rather shy and
uncomfortable. He was suspicious always that they would laugh at his
Russian (what mattered it if they did?), and he was distressed by the
noise and boisterous friendliness of every one. I could not help smiling
to myself as I watched him. He was learning very fast. He would not tell
any one now that "he really thought that he did understand Russia," nor
would he offer to put his friends right about Russian characteristics
and behaviour. He watched the young giggling girls, and the fat Rozanov,
and the shrill young man with ill-concealed distress. Very far these
from the Lizas and Natachas of his literary imagination--and yet not so
far either, had he only known.

He pinned all his faith, as I could see, to Vera Michailovna, who did
gloriously fulfil his self-instituted standards. And yet he did not know
her at all! He was to suffer pain there too.

At dinner he was unfortunately seated between one of the giggling girls
and a very deaf old lady who was the great-aunt of Nina and Vera. This
old lady trembled like an aspen leaf, and was continually dropping
beneath the table a little black bag that she carried. She could make
nothing of Bohun's Russian, even if she heard it, and was under the
impression that he was a Frenchman. She began a long quivering story
about Paris to which she had once been, how she had lost herself, and
how a delightful Frenchman had put her on her right path again.... "A
chivalrous people, your countrymen".... she repeated, nodding her head
so that her long silver earrings rattled again--"gay and chivalrous!"
Bohun was not, I am afraid, as chivalrous as he might have been, because
he knew that the girl on his other side was laughing at his attempts to
explain that he was not a Frenchman. "Stupid old woman!" he said to me
afterwards. "She dropped her bag under the table at least twenty times!"

Meanwhile the astonishing fact was that the success of the dinner was
Jerry Lawrence. He was placed on Vera Michailovna's left hand, Rozanov,
the Moscow merchant near to him, and I did not hear him say anything
very bright or illuminating, but every one felt, I think, that he was a
cheerful and dependable person. I always felt, when I observed him, that
he understood the Russian character far better than any of us. He had
none of the self-assertion of the average Englishman and, at the same
time, he had his opinions and his preferences. He took every kind of
chaff with good-humoured indifference, but I think it was above
everything else his tolerance that pleased the Russians. Nothing shocked
him, which did not at all mean that he had no code of honour or morals.
His code was severe and stern, but his sense of human fallibility, and
the fine fight that human nature was always making against stupendous
odds stirred him to a fine and comprehending clarity. He had many
faults. He was obstinate, often dull and lethargic, in many ways grossly
ill-educated and sometimes wilfully obtuse--but he was a fine friend, a
noble enemy, and a chivalrous lover. There was nothing mean nor petty in
him, and his views of life and the human soul were wider and more
all-embracing than in any Englishman I have ever known. You may say of
course that it is sentimental nonsense to suppose at all that the human
soul is making a fine fight against odds. Even I, at this period, was
tempted to think that it might be nonsense, but it is a view as good as
another, after all, and so ignorant are all of us that no one has a
right to say that anything is impossible!

After drinking the vodka and eating the "Zakuska," we sat down to table
and devoured crayfish soup. Every one became lively. Politics of course,
were discussed.

I heard Rozanov say, "Ah, you in Petrograd! What do you know of things?
Don't let me hurt any one's feelings, pray.... Most excellent soup, Vera
Michailovna--I congratulate you.... But you just wait until Moscow takes
things in hand. Why only the other day Maklakoff said to a friend of
mine--'It's all nonsense,' he said."

And the shrill-voiced young man told a story--"But it wasn't the same
man at all. She was so confused when she saw what she'd done, that I
give you my word she was on the point of crying. I could see tears...
just trembling--on the edge. 'Oh, I beg your pardon,' she said, and the
man was such a fool...."

Markovitch was busy about the drinks. There was some sherry and some
light red wine. Markovitch was proud of having been able to secure it.
He was beaming with pride. He explained to everybody how it had been
done. He walked round the table and stood, for an instant, with his hand
on Vera Michailovna's shoulder. The pies with fish and cabbage in them
were handed round. He jested with the old great-aunt. He shouted in her
ear:

"Now, Aunt Isabella... some wine. Good for you, you know--keep you
young...."

"No, no, no..." she protested, laughing and shaking her earrings, with
tears in her eyes. But he filled her glass and she drank it and coughed,
still protesting.

"Thank you, thank you," she chattered as Bohun dived under the table and
found her bag for her. I saw that he did not like the crayfish soup,
and was distressed because he had so large a helping.

He blushed and looked at his plate, then began again to eat and stopped.

"Don't you like it?" one of the giggling girls asked him. "But it's very
good. Have another 'Pie!'"

The meal continued. There were little suckling pigs with "Kasha," a kind
of brown buckwheat. Every one was gayer and gayer. Now all talked at
once, and no one listened to anything that any one else said. Of them
all, Nina was by far the gayest. She had drunk no wine--she always said
that she could not bear the nasty stuff, and although every one tried to
persuade her, telling her that now when you could not get it anywhere,
it was wicked not to drink it, she would not change her mind. It was
simply youth and happiness that radiated from her, and also perhaps some
other excitement for which I could not account. Grogoff tried to make
her drink. She defied him. He came over to her chair, but she pushed him
away, and then lightly slapped his cheek. Every one laughed. Then he
whispered something to her. For an instant the gaiety left her eyes.
"You shouldn't say that!" she answered almost angrily. He went back to
his seat. I was sitting next to her, and she was very charming to me,
seeing that I had all that I needed and showing that she liked me. "You
mustn't be gloomy and ill and miserable," she whispered to me. "Oh! I've
seen you! There's no need. Come to us and we'll make you as happy as we
can--Vera and I.... We both love you."

"My dear, I'm much too old and stupid for you to bother about!"

She put her hand on my arm. "I know that I'm wicked and care only for
pleasure.... Vera's always saying so. But I can be better if you want me
to be."

This was flattering, but I knew that it was only her general happiness
that made her talk like that. And at once she was after something else.
"Your Englishman," she said, looking across the table at Lawrence, "I
like his face. I should be frightened of him, though."

"Oh no, you wouldn't," I answered. "He wouldn't hurt any one."

She continued to look at him and he, glancing up, their eyes met. She
smiled and he smiled. Then he raised his glass and drank.

"I mustn't drink," she called across the table. "It's only water and
that's bad luck."

"Oh, you can challenge any amount of bad luck--I'm sure," he called
back to her.

I fancied that Grogoff did not like this. He was drinking a great deal.
He roughly called Nina's attention.

"Nina... Ah--Nina!"

But she, although I am certain that she heard him, paid no attention.

He called again more loudly:

"Nina... Nina!"

"Well?" She turned towards him, her eyes laughing at him.

"Drink my health."

"I can't. I have only water."

"Then you must drink wine."

"I won't. I detest it."

"But you must."

He came over to her and poured a little red wine into her water. She
turned and emptied the glass over his hand. For an instant his face was
dark with rage.

"I'll pay you for that," I heard him whisper.

She shrugged her shoulders. "He's tiresome, Boris...." she said, "I like
your Englishman better."

We were ever gayer and gayer. There were now of course no cakes nor
biscuits, but there was jam with our tea, and there were even some
chocolates. I noticed that Vera and Lawrence were getting on together
famously. They talked and laughed, and her eyes were full of pleasure.

Markovitch came up and stood behind them, watching them. His eyes
devoured his wife.

"Vera!" he said suddenly.

"Yes!" she cried. She had not known that he was behind her; she was
startled. She turned round and he came forward and kissed her hand. She
let him do this, as she let him do everything, with the indulgence that
one allows a child. He stood, afterwards, half in the shadow, watching
her.

And now the moment for the event of the evening had arrived. The doors
of Markovitch's little work-room were suddenly opened, and
there--instead of the shabby untidy dark little hole--there was a
splendid Christmas Tree blazing with a hundred candles. Coloured balls
and frosted silver and wooden figures of red and blue hung all about the
tree--it was most beautifully done. On a table close at hand were
presents. We all clapped our hands. We were childishly delighted. The
old great-aunt cried with pleasure. Boris Grogoff suddenly looked like a
happy boy of ten. Happiest and proudest of them all was Markovitch. He
stood there, a large pair of scissors in his hand, waiting to cut the
string round the parcels. We said again and again, "Marvellous!"
"Wonderful!" "Splendid!"... "But this year--however did you find it,
Vera Michailovna?" "To take such trouble!..." "Splendid! Splendid!" Then
we were given our presents. Vera, it was obvious had chosen them, for
there was taste and discrimination in the choice of every one. Mine was
a little old religious figure in beaten silver--Lawrence had a silver
snuff-box.... Every one was delighted. We clapped our hands. We shouted.
Some one cried "Cheers for our host and hostess!"

We gave them, and in no half measure. We shouted. Boris Grogoff cried,
"More cheers!"

It was then that I saw Markovitch's face that had been puckered with
pleasure like the face of a delighted child suddenly stiffen, his hand
moved forward, then dropped. I turned and found, standing in the
doorway, quietly watching us, Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov.



XIII

I stared at him. I could not take my eyes away. I instantly forgot every
one else, the room, the tree, the lights.... With a force, with a
poignancy and pathos and brutality that were more cruel than I could
have believed possible that other world came back to me. Ah! I could see
now that all these months I had been running away from this very thing,
seeking to pretend that it did not exist, that it had never existed. All
in vain--utterly in vain. I saw Semyonov as I had just seen him, sitting
on his horse outside the shining white house at O----. Then Semyonov
operating in a stinking room, under a red light, his arms bathed in
blood; then Semyonov and Trenchard; then Semyonov speaking to Marie
Ivanovna, her eyes searching his face; then that day when I woke from my
dream in the orchard to find his eyes staring at me through the bright
green trees, and afterwards when we went in to look at her dead; then
worst of all that ride back to the "Stab" with my hand on his thick,
throbbing arm.... Semyonov in the Forest, working, sneering, hating us,
despising us, carrying his tragedy in his eyes and defying us to care;
Semyonov that last time of all, vanishing into the darkness with his
"Nothing!" that lingering echo of a defiant desperate soul that had
stayed with me, against my bidding, ever since I had heard it.

What a fool had I been to know these people! I had felt from the first
to what it must lead, and I might have avoided it and I would not. I
looked at him, I faced him, I smiled. He was the same as he had been. A
little stouter, perhaps, his pale hair and square-cut beard looking as
though it had been carved from some pale honey-coloured wood, the thick
stolidity of his long body and short legs, the squareness of his head,
the coldness of his eyes and the violent red of his lips, all were just
as they had been--the same man, save that now he was in civilian
clothes, in a black suit with a black bow tie. There was a smile on his
lips, that same smile half sneer half friendliness that I knew so well.
His eyes were veiled....

He was, I believe, as violently surprised to see me as I had been to see
him, but he held himself in complete control!

He said, "Why, Durward!... Ivan Andreievitch!" Then he greeted the
others.

I was able, now, to notice the general effect of his arrival. It was as
though a cold wind had suddenly burst through the windows, blown out all
the candles upon the tree and plunged the place into darkness. Those who
did not know him felt that, with his entrance, the gaiety was gone.
Markovitch's face was pale, he was looking at Vera who, for an instant,
had stood, quite silently, staring at her uncle, then, recovering
herself, moved forward.

"Why, Uncle Alexei!" she cried, holding out her hand. "You're too late
for the tree! Why didn't you tell us? Then you could have come to
dinner... and now it is all over. Why didn't you tell us?"

He took her hand, and, very solemnly, bent down and kissed it.

"I didn't know myself, dear Vera Michailovna. I only arrived in
Petrograd yesterday; and then in my house everything was wrong, and I've
been busy all day. But I felt that I must run in and give you the
greetings of the season.... Ah, Nicholas, how are you? And you, Ivan?...
I telephoned to you.... Nina, my dear...." And so on. He went round
and shook hands with them all. He was introduced to Bohun and Lawrence.
He was very genial, praising the tree, laughing, shouting in the ears of
the great-aunt. But no one responded. As so frequently happens in Russia
the atmosphere was suddenly changed. No one had anything to say. The
candles on the tree were blown out. Of course, the evening was not
nearly ended. There would be tea and games, perhaps--at any rate every
one would sit and sit until three or four if, for no other reason,
simply because it demanded too much energy to rise and make farewells.
But the spirit of the party was utterly dead....

The samovar hissed at the end of the table. Vera Michailovna sat there
making tea for every one. Semyonov (I should now in the heart of his
relations, have thought of him as Alexei Petrovitch, but so long had he
been Semyonov to me that Semyonov he must remain) was next to her, and I
saw that he took trouble, talking to her, smiling, his stiff strong
white fingers now and then stroking his thick beard, his red lips
parting a little, then closing so firmly that it seemed that they would
never open again.

I noticed that his eyes often wandered towards me. He was uneasy about
my presence there, I thought, and that disturbed me. I felt as I looked
at him the same confusion as I had always felt. I did not hate him. His
strength of character, his fearlessness, these things in a country
famous for neither quality I was driven to admire and to respect. And I
could not hate what I admired.

And yet my fear gathered and gathered in volume as I watched him. What
would he do with these people? What plans had he? What purpose? What
secret, selfish ambitions was he out now to secure?

Markovitch was silent, drinking his tea, watching his wife, watching us
all with his nervous frowning expression.

I rose to go and then, when I had said farewell to every one and went
towards the door, Semyonov joined me.

"Well, Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "So we have not finished with one
another yet."

He looked at me with his steady unswerving eyes; he smiled.

I also smiled as I found my coat and hat in the little hall. Sacha
helped me into my Shuba. He stood, his lips a little apart, watching me.

"What have you been doing all this time?" he asked me.

"I've been ill," I answered.

"Not had, I hope."

"No, not had. But enough to keep me very idle."

"As much of an optimist as ever?"

"Was I an optimist?"

"Why, surely. A charming one. Do you love Russia as truly as ever?"

I laughed, my hand on the door. "That's my affair, Alexei Petrovitch," I
answered.

"Certainly," he said, smiling. "You're looking older, you know."

"You too," I said.

"Yes, perhaps. Would I still think you sentimental, do you suppose?"

"It is of no importance, Alexei Petrovitch," I said. "I'm sure you have
other better things to do. Are you remaining in Petrograd?"

He looked at me then very seriously, his eyes staring straight into
mine.

"I hope so."

"You will work at your practice?"

"Perhaps." He nodded to me. "Strange to find you here...." he said. "We
shall meet again. Good-night."

He closed the door behind me.




XIV

Next day I fell ill. I had felt unwell for several weeks, and now I woke
up to a bad feverish cold, my body one vast ache, and at the same time
impersonal, away from me, floating over above me, sinking under me, tied
to me only by pain....

I was too utterly apathetic to care. The old woman who looked after my
rooms telephoned to my doctor, a stout, red-faced jolly man, who came
and laughed at me, ordered me some medicine, said that I was in a high
fever, and left me. After that, I was, for several days, caught into a
world of dreams and nightmares. No one, I think, came near me, save my
old woman, Marfa, and a new acquaintance of mine, the Rat.

The Rat I had met some weeks before outside my house. I had been
returning one evening, through the dark, with a heavy bag of books which
I had fetched from an English friend of mine who lodged in the
Millionnaya. I had had a cab for most of the distance, but that had
stopped on the other side of the bridge--it could not drive amongst the
rubbish pebbles and spars of my island. As I staggered along with my bag
a figure had risen, as it seemed to me, out of the ground and asked
huskily whether he could help me. I had only a few steps to go, but he
seized my burden and went in front of me. I submitted. I told him my
door and he entered the dark passage, climbed the rickety stairs and
entered my room. Here we were both astonished. He, when I had lighted my
lamp, was staggered by the splendour and luxury of my life, I, as I
looked at him, by the wildness and uncouthness of his appearance. He was
as a savage from the centre of Africa, thick ragged hair and beard, a
powerful body in rags, and his whole attitude to the world primeval and
utterly primitive. His mouth was cruel; his eyes, as almost always with
the Russian peasant, mild and kindly. I do not intend to take up much
space here with an account of him, but he did, after this first meeting,
in some sort attach himself to me. I never learned his name nor where he
lived; he was I should suppose an absolutely abominable plunderer and
pirate and ruffian. He would appear suddenly in my room, stand by the
door and talk--but talk with the ignorance, naïvete, brutal simplicity
of an utterly abandoned baby. Nothing mystical or beautiful about the
Rat. He did not disguise from me in the least that there was no crime
that he had not committed--murder, rape, arson, immorality of the most
hideous, sacrilege, the basest betrayal of his best friends--he was not
only savage and outlaw, he was deliberate anarchist and murderer. He had
no redeeming point that I could anywhere discover. I did not in the
least mind his entering my room when he pleased. I had there nothing of
any value; he could take my life even, had he a mind to that.... The
naïve abysmal depths of his depravity interested me. He formed a kind of
attachment to me. He told me that he would do anything for me. He had a
strange tact which prevented him from intruding upon me when I was
occupied. He was as quick as any cultured civilised cosmopolitan to see
if he was not wanted. He developed a certain cleanliness; he told me,
with an air of disdainful superiority, that he had been to the public
baths. I gave him an old suit of mine and a pair of boots. He very
seldom asked for anything; once and again he would point to something
and say that he would like to have it; if I said that he could not he
expressed no disappointment; sometimes he stole it, but he always
acknowledged that he had done so if I asked him, although he would lie
stupendously on other occasions for no reason at all.

"Now you must bring that back," I would say sternly.

"Oh no, Barin.... Why? You have so many things. Surely you will not
object. Perhaps I will bring it--and perhaps not."

"You must certainly bring it," I would say.

"We will see," he would say, smiling at me in the friendliest fashion.

He was the only absolutely happy Russian I have ever known. He had no
passages of despair. He had been in prison, he would be in prison again.
He had spasms of the most absolute ferocity. On one occasion I thought
that I should be his next victim, and for a moment my fate hung, I
think, in the balance. But he changed his mind. He had a real liking for
me, I think. When he could get it, he drank a kind of furniture polish,
the only substitute in these days for vodka. This was an absolutely
killing drink, and I tried to prove to him that frequent indulgence in
it meant an early decease. That did not affect him in the least. Death
had no horror for him although, I foresaw, with justice as after events
proved, that if he were faced with it he would be a very desperate
coward. He liked very much my cigarettes, and I gave him these on
condition that he did not spit sunflower seeds over my floor. He kept
his word about this.

He chatted incessantly, and sometimes I listened and sometimes not. He
had no politics and was indeed comfortably ignorant of any sort of
geography or party division. There were for him only the rich and the
poor. He knew nothing about the war, but he hoped, he frankly told me,
that there would be anarchy in Petrograd, so that he might rob and
plunder.

"I will look after you then, Barin," he answered me, "so that no one
shall touch you." I thanked him. He was greatly amused by my Russian
accent, although he had no interest in the fact that I was English, nor
did he want to hear in the least about London or any foreign town.
Marfa, my old servant, was, of course, horrified at this
acquaintanceship of mine, and warned me that it would mean both my death
and hers. He liked to tease and frighten her, but he was never rude to
her and offered sometimes to help her with her work, an offer that she
always indignantly refused. He had some children, he told me, but he did
not know where they were. He tried to respect my hospitality, never
bringing any friends of his with him, and only once coming when he was
the worse for drink. On that occasion he cried and endeavoured to
embrace me. He apologised for this the next day.

They would try to take him soon, he supposed, for a soldier, but he
thought that he would be able to escape. He hated the Police, and would
murder them all if he could. He told me great tales of their cruelty,
and he cursed them most bitterly. I pointed out to him that society must
be protected, but he did not see why this need be so. It was, he
thought, wrong that some people had so much and others so little, but
this was as far as his social investigations penetrated.

He was really distressed by my illness. Marfa told me that one day when
I was delirious he cried. At the same time he pointed out to her that,
if I died, certain things in my rooms would be his. He liked a silver
cigarette case of mine, and my watch chain, and a signet ring that I
wore. I saw him vaguely, an uncertain shadow in the mists of the first
days of my fever. I was not, I suppose, in actual fact, seriously ill,
and yet I abandoned myself to my fate, allowing myself to slip without
the slightest attempt at resistance, along the easiest way, towards
death or idiocy or paralysis, towards anything that meant the
indifferent passivity of inaction. I had bad, confused dreams. The
silence irritated me. I fancied to myself that the sea ought to make
some sound, that it was holding itself deliberately quiescent in
preparation for some event. I remember that Marfa and the doctor
prevented me from rising to look from my window that I might see why the
sea was not roaring. Some one said to me in my dreams something about
"Ice," and again and again I repeated the word to myself as though it
were intensely significant. "Ice! Ice! Ice!... Yes, that was what I
wanted to know!" My idea from this was that the floor upon which I
rested was exceedingly thin, made only of paper in fact, and that at any
moment it might give way and precipitate me upon the ice. This terrified
me, and the way that the cold blew up through the cracks in the floor
was disturbing enough. I knew that my doctor thought me mad to remain in
such a place. But above all I was overwhelmed by the figure of Semyonov.
He haunted me in all my dreams, his presence never left me for a single
instant. I could not be sure whether he were in the room or no, but
certainly he was close to me... watching me, sneering at me as he had
so often done before.

I was conscious also of Petrograd, of the town itself, in every one of
its amazingly various manifestations. I saw it all laid out as though I
were a great height above it--the fashionable streets, the Nevski and
the Morskaia with the carriages and the motor-cars and trams, the kiosks
and the bazaars, the women with their baskets of apples, the boys with
the newspapers, the smart cinematographs, the shop in the Morskaia with
the coloured stones in the window, the oculist and the pastry-cook's and
the hairdressers and the large "English shop" at the corner of the
Nevski, and Pivato's the restaurant, and close beside it the art shop
with popular post cards and books on Serov and Vrubel, and the Astoria
Hotel with its shining windows staring on to S. Isaac's Square. And I
saw the Nevski, that straight and proud street, filled with every kind
of vehicle and black masses of people, rolling like thick clouds up and
down, here and there, the hum of their talk rising like mist from the
snow. And there was the Kazan Cathedral, haughty and proud, and the book
shop with the French books and complete sets of Tchekov and Merejkowsky
in the window, and the bridges and the palaces and the square before the
Alexander Theatre, and Elisseieff's the provision shop, and all the
banks, and the shops with gloves and shirts, all looking ill-fitting as
though they were never meant to be worn, and then the little dirty shops
poked in between the grand ones, the shop with rubber goods and the
shop with an Aquarium, gold-fish and snails and a tortoise, and the shop
with oranges and bananas. Then, too, there was the Arcade with the
theatre where they acted _Romance_ and _Potash and Perlmutter_ (almost
as they do in London), and on the other side of the street, at the
corner of the Sadovia, the bazaar with all its shops and its trembling
mist of people. I watched the Nevski, and saw how it slipped into the
Neva with the Red Square on one side of it, and S. Isaac's Square on the
other, and the great station at the far end of it, and about these two
lines the Neva and the Nevski, the whole town sprawled and crept, ebbed
and flowed. Away from the splendour it stretched, dirty and decrepit and
untended, here piles of evil flats, there old wooden buildings with
cobbled courts, and the canals twisting and creeping up and down through
it all. It was all bathed, as I looked down upon it, in coloured mist.
The air was purple and gold and light blue, fading into the snow and ice
and transforming it. Everywhere there were the masts of ships and the
smell of the sea and rough deserted places--and shadows moved behind the
shadows, and yet more shadows behind _them_, so that it was all
uncertain and unstable, and only the river knew what it was about.

Over the whole town Semyonov and I moved together, and the ice and snow
silenced our steps, and no one in the whole place spoke a word, so that
we had to lower our voices and whispered....



XV

Suddenly I was better. I quite recovered from my fever and only lay
still on my bed, weak, and very hungry. I was happy, happy as I had not
been since I came to Petrograd. I felt all the luxury of convalescence
creeping into my bones. All that I need do was to lie there and let
people feed me and read a little if it did not make my head ache. I had
a water-colour painted by Alexander Benois on the wall opposite me, a
night in the Caucasus, with a heavy sweep of black hill, a deep blue
steady sky, and a thin grey road running into endless distance. A
pleasing picture, with no finality in its appeal--intimate too, so that
it was one's own road and one's own hill. I had bought it extravagantly,
at last year's "_Mir Eskoustva_," and now I was pleased at my
extravagance.

Marfa was very good to me, feeding me, and being cross with me to make
me take an interest in things, and acting with wonderful judgement about
my visitors. Numbers of people, English and Russian, came to see me--I
had not known that I had so many friends. I felt amiable to all the
world, and hopeful about it, too. I looked back on the period before my
illness as a bad dream.

People told me I was foolish to live out in this wretched place of mine,
where it was cold and wild and lonely. And then when they came again
they were not so sure, and they looked out on the ice that shone in
waves and shadows of light under the sun, and thought that perhaps they
too would try. But of course, I knew well that they would not....

As I grew stronger I felt an intense and burning interest in the history
that had been developing when I fell ill. I heard that Vera Michailovna
and Nina had called many times. Markovitch had been, and Henry Bohun
and Lawrence.

Then, one sunny afternoon, Henry Bohun came in and I was surprised at my
pleasure at the sight of him. He was shocked at the change in me, and
was too young to conceal it.

"Oh, you do look bad!" were his first words as he sat down by my bed. "I
say, are you comfortable here? Wouldn't you rather be somewhere with
conveniences--telephone and lifts and things?"

"Not at all!" I answered. "I've got a telephone. I'm very happy where I
am."

"It is a queer place," he said. "Isn't it awfully unhealthy?"

"Quite the reverse--with the sea in front of it! About the healthiest
spot in Petrograd!"

"But I should get the blues here. So lonely and quiet. Petrograd is a
strange town! Most people don't dream there's a queer place like this."

"That's why I like it," I said. "I expect there are lots of queer
places in Petrograd if you only knew."

He wandered about the room, looking at my few pictures and my books and
my writing-table. At last he sat down again by my bed.

"Now tell me all the news," I said.

"News?" he asked. He looked uncomfortable, and I saw at once that he had
come to confide something in me. "What sort of news? Political?"

"Anything."

"Well, politics are about the same. They say there's going to be an
awful row in February when the Duma meets--but then other people say
there won't be a row at all until the war is over."

"What else do they say?"

"They say Protopopoff is up to all sorts of tricks. That he says prayers
with the Empress and they summon Rasputin's ghost.... That's all rot of
course. But he does just what the Empress tells him, and they're going
to enslave the whole country and hand it over to Germany."

"What will they do that for?" I asked.

"Why, then, the Czarevitch will have it--under Germany. They say that
none of the munitions are going to the Front, and Protopopoff's keeping
them all to blow up the people here with."

"What else?" I asked sarcastically.

"No, but really, there's something in it, I expect." Henry looked
serious and important. "Then on the other hand, Clutton-Davies says the
Czar's absolutely all right, dead keen on the war and hates Germany...
_I_ don't know--but Clutton-Davies sees him nearly every day."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Oh, food's worse than ever! Going up every day, and the bread queues
are longer and longer. The Germans have spies in the queues, women who
go up and down telling people it's all England's fault."

"And people are just the same?"

"Just the same; Donons' and the Bear are crowded every day. You can't
get a table. So are the cinematographs and the theatres. I went to the
Ballet last night."

"What was it?"

"'La fille mal gardée'--Karsavina dancing divinely. Every one was
there."

This closed the strain of public information. I led him further.

"Well, Bohun, what about our friends the Markovitches?" I asked. "How
are you getting on there?"

He blushed and looked at his boots.

"All right," he said. "They're very decent."

Then he burst out with: "I say, Durward, what do you think of this uncle
that's turned up, the doctor chap?"

"Nothing particular. Why?"

"You were with him at the Front, weren't you?"

"I was."

"Was he a good doctor?"

"Excellent."

"He had a love affair at the Front, hadn't he?"

"Yes."

"And she was killed?"

"Yes."

"Poor devil...." Then he added: "Did he mind very much?"

"Very much."

"Funny thing, you wouldn't think he would."

"Why not," I asked.

"Oh, he looks a hard sort of fellow--as though he'd stand anything. I
wouldn't like to have a row with him."

"Has he been to the Markovitches much lately?"

"Yes--almost every evening."

"What does he do there?"

"Oh, just sits and talks. Markovitch can't bear him. You can see that
easily enough. He teases him."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Oh, he laughs at him all the time, at his inventions and that kind of
thing. Markovitch gets awfully wild. He is bit of an ass, isn't he?"

"Do you like Semyonov?" I asked.

"I do rather," said Henry. "He's very decent to me. I had a walk with
him one afternoon. He said you were awfully brave at the Front."

"Thank him for nothing," I said.

"And he said you didn't like him--don't you?"

"Ah, that's too old a story," I answered. "We know what we feel about
one another."

"Well, Lawrence simply hates him," continued Bohun. "He says he's the
most thundering cad, and as bad as you make them. I don't see how he can
tell."

This interested me extremely. "When did he tell you this?" I asked.

"Yesterday. I asked him what he had to judge by and he said instinct. I
said he'd no right to go only by that."

"Has Lawrence been much to the Markovitches?"

"Yes--once or twice. He just sits there and never opens his mouth."

"Very wise of him if he hasn't got anything to say."

"No, but really--do you think so? It doesn't make him popular."

"Why, who doesn't like him?"

"Nobody," answered Henry ungrammatically. "None of the English anyway.
They can't stand him at the Embassy or the Mission. They say he's
fearfully stuck-up and thinks about nothing but himself.... I don't
agree, of course--all the same, he might make himself more agreeable to
people."

"What nonsense!" I answered hotly. "Lawrence is one of the best fellows
that ever breathed. The Markovitches don't dislike him, do they?"

"No, he's quite different with them. Vera Michailovna likes him I know."

It was the first time that he had mentioned her name to me. He turned
towards me now, his face crimson. "I say--that's really what I came to
talk about, Durward. I care for her madly!... I'd die for her. I would
really. I love her, Durward. I see now I've never loved anybody before."

"Well, what will you do about it?"

"Do about it?... Why nothing, of course. It's all perfectly hopeless.
In the first place, there's Markovitch."

"Yes. There's Markovitch," I agreed.

"She doesn't care for him--does she? You know that--" He waited, eagerly
staring into my face.

I had a temptation to laugh. He was so very young, so very helpless, and
yet--that sense of his youth had pathos in it too, and I suddenly liked
young Bohun--for the first time.

"Look here, Bohun," I said, trying to speak with a proper solemnity.
"Don't be a young ass. You know that it's hopeless, any feeling of that
kind. She _does_ care for her husband. She could never care for you in
that way, and you'd only make trouble for them all if you went on with
it.... On the other hand, she needs a friend badly. You can do that for
her. Be her pal. See that things are all right in the house. Make a
friend of Markovitch himself. Look after _him!_"

"Look after Markovitch!" Bohun exclaimed.

"Yes... I don't want to be melodramatic, but there's trouble coming
there; and if you're the friend of them all, you can help--more than you
know. Only none of the other business--"

Bohun flushed. "She doesn't know--she never will. I only want to be a
friend of hers, as you put it. Anything else is hopeless, of course.
I'm not the kind of fellow she'd ever look at, even if Markovitch wasn't
there. But if I can do anything... I'd be awfully glad. What kind of
trouble do you mean?" he asked.

"Probably nothing," I said; "only she wants a friend. And Markovitch
wants one too."

There was a pause--then Bohun said, "I say, Durward--what an awful ass I
was."

"What about?" I asked.

"About my poetry--and all that. Thinking it so important."

"Yes," I said, "you were."

"I've written some poetry to her and I tore it up," he ended.

"That's a good thing," said I.

"I'm glad I told you," he said. He got up to go. "I say, Durward--"

"Well," I asked.

"You're an awfully funny chap. Not a bit what you look--"

"That's all right," I said; "I know what you mean."


"Well, good-night," he said, and went.



XVI

I thought that night, as I lay cosily in my dusky room, of those old
stories by Wilkie Collins that had once upon a time so deeply engrossed
my interest--stories in which, because some one has disappeared on a
snowy night, or painted his face blue, or locked up a room and lost the
key, or broken down in his carriage on a windy night at the cross-roads,
dozens of people are involved, diaries are written, confessions are
made, and all the characters move along different roads towards the same
lighted, comfortable Inn. That is the kind of story that intrigues me,
whether it be written about out-side mysteries by Wilkie Collins or
inside mysteries by the great creator of "The Golden Bowl" or mysteries
of both kinds, such as Henry Galleon has given us. I remember a friend
of mine, James Maradick, once saying to me, "It's no use trying to keep
out of things. As soon as they want to put you in--you're in. The moment
you're born, you're done for."

It's just that spectacle of some poor innocent being suddenly caught
into some affair, against his will, without his knowledge, but to the
most serious alteration of his character and fortunes, that one watches
with a delight almost malicious--whether it be _The Woman in White, The
Wings of the Dove,_ or _The Roads_ that offer it us. Well, I had now to
face the fact that something of this kind had happened to myself.

I was drawn in--and I was glad. I luxuriated in my gladness, lying there
in my room under the wavering, uncertain light of two candles, hearing
the church bells clanging and echoing mysteriously beyond the wall. I
lay there with a consciousness of being on the very verge of some
adventure, with the assurance, too, that I was to be of use once more,
to play my part, to fling aside, thank God, that old cloak of apathetic
disappointment, of selfish betrayal, of cynical disbelief. Semyonov had
brought the old life back to me and I had shrunk from the impact of it;
but he had brought back to me, too, the presences of my absent friends
who, during these weary months, had been lost to me. It seemed to me
that, in the flickering twilight, John and Marie were bringing forward
to me Vera and Nina and Jerry and asking me to look after them.... I
would do my best.

And while I was thinking of these things Vera Michailovna came in. She
was suddenly in the room, standing there, her furs up to her throat, her
body in shadow, but her large, grave eyes shining through the
candlelight, her mouth smiling.

"Is it all right?" she said, coming forward. "I'm not in the way? You're
not sleeping?"

I told her that I was delighted to see her.

"I've been almost every day, but Marfa told me you were not well enough.
She _does_ guard you--like a dragon. But to-night Nina and I are going
to Rozanov's, to a party, and she said she'd meet me here.... Shan't I
worry you?"

"Worry me! You're the most restful friend I have--" I felt so glad to
see her that I was surprised at my own happiness. She sat down near to
me, very quietly, moving, as she always did, softly and surely.

I could see that she was distressed because I looked ill, but she asked
me no tiresome questions, said nothing about my madness in living as I
did (always so irritating, as though I were a stupid child), praised the
room, admired the Benois picture, and then talked in her soft, kindly
voice.

"We've missed you so much, Nina and I," she said. "I told Nina that if
she came to-night she wasn't to make a noise and disturb you."

"She can make as much noise as she likes," I said. "I like the right
kind of noise."

We talked a little about politics and England and anything that came
into our minds. We both felt, I know, a delightful, easy intimacy and
friendliness and trust. I had never with any other woman felt such a
sense of friendship, something almost masculine in its comradeship and
honesty. And to-night this bond between us strengthened wonderfully. I
blessed my luck. I saw that there were dark lines under her eyes and
that she was pale.

"You're tired," I said.

"Yes, I am," she acknowledged. "And I don't know why. At least, I do
know. I'm going to use you selfishly, Durdles. I'm going to tell you all
my troubles and ask your help in every possible way. I'm going to let
you off nothing."

I took her hand.

"I'm proud," I said, "now and always."

"Do you know that I've never asked any one's help before? I was rather
conceited that I could get on always without it. When I was very small I
wouldn't take a word of advice from any one, and mother and father, when
I was tiny, used to consult me about everything. Then they were killed
and I _had_ to go on alone.... And after that, when I married Nicholas,
it was I again who decided everything. And my mistakes taught me
nothing. I didn't want them to teach me."

She spoke that last word fiercely, and through the note that came into
her voice I saw suddenly the potentialities that were in her, the other
creature that she might be if she were ever awakened.

She talked then for a long time. She didn't move at all; her head rested
on her hand and her eyes watched me. As I listened I thought of my other
friend Marie, who now was dead, and how restless she was when she spoke,
moving about the room, stopping to demand my approval, protesting
against my criticism, laughing, crying out.... Vera was so still, so
wise, too, in comparison with Marie, braver too--and yet the same heart,
the same charity, the same nobility.

But she was my friend, and Marie I had loved.... The difference in that!
And how much easier now to help than it had been then, simply because
one's own soul _was_ one's own and one stood by oneself!

How happy a thing freedom is--and how lonely!

She told me many things that I need not repeat here, but, as she talked,
I saw how, far more deeply than I had imagined, Nina had been the heart
of the whole of her life. She had watched over her, protected her,
advised her, warned her, and loved her, passionately, jealously, almost
madly all the time.

"When I married Nicholas," she said, "I thought of Nina more than any
one else. That was wrong.... I ought to have thought most of Nicholas;
but I knew that I could give her a home, that she could have everything
she wanted. And still she would be with me. Nicholas was only too ready
for that. I thought I would care for her until some one came who was
worthy of her, and who would look after her far better than I ever
could.

"But the only person who had come was Boris Grogoff. He loved Nina from
the first moment, in his own careless, conceited, opinionated way."

"Why did you let him come so often to the house if you didn't approve of
him?" I asked.

"How could I prevent it?" she asked me. "We Russians are not like the
English. In England I know you just shut the door and say, 'Not at
home.'

"Here if any one wanted to come he comes. Very often we hate him for
coming, but still there it is. It is too much trouble to turn him out,
besides it wouldn't be kind--and anyway they wouldn't go. You can be as
rude as you like here and nobody cares. For a long while Nina paid no
attention to Boris. She doesn't like him. She will never like him, I'm
sure. But now, these last weeks, I've begun to be afraid. In some way,
he has power over her--not much power, but a little--and she is so
young, so ignorant--she knows nothing.

"Until lately she always told me everything. Now she tells me nothing.
She's strange with me; angry for nothing. Then sorry and sweet
again--then suddenly angry.... She's excited and wild, going out all the
time, but unhappy too.... I _know_ she's unhappy. I can feel it as
though it were myself."

"You're imagining things," I said. "Now when the war's reached this
period we're all nervous and overstrung. The atmosphere of this town is
enough to make any one fancy that they see anything. Nina's all right."


"I'm losing her! I'm losing her!" Vera cried, suddenly stretching out
her hand as though in a gesture of appeal. "She must stay with me. I
don't know what's happening to her. Ah, and I'm so lonely without her!"

There was silence between us for a little, and then she went on.

"Durdles, I did wrong to marry Nicholas--wrong to Nina, wrong to
Nicholas, wrong to myself, I thought it was right. I didn't love
Nicholas--I never loved him and I never pretended to. He knew that I did
not. But I thought then that I was above love, that knowledge was what
mattered. Ideas--saving the world--and he had _such_ ideas! Wonderful!
There was, I thought, nothing that he would not be able to do if only he
were helped enough. He wanted help in every way. He was such a child, so
unhappy, so lonely, I thought that I could give him everything that he
needed. Don't fancy that I thought that I sacrificed myself. I felt that
I was the luckiest girl in all the world--and still, now when I see that
he is not strong enough for his ideas I care for him as I did then, and
I would never let any trouble touch him if I could help it. But
if--if--"

She paused, turned away from me, looking towards the window.

"If, after all, I was wrong. If, after all, I was meant to love. If love
were to come now... real love... now...."

She broke off, suddenly stood up, and very low, almost whispering, said:

"I have fancied lately that it might come. And then, what should I do?
Oh, what should I do? With Nicholas and Nina and all the trouble there
is now in the world--and Russia--I'm afraid of myself--and ashamed...."

I could not speak. I was utterly astonished. Could it be Bohun of whom
she was speaking? No, I saw at once that the idea was ludicrous. But if
not--.

I took her hand.

"Vera," I said. "Believe me. I'm much older than you, and I know. Love's
always selfish, always cruel to others, always means trouble, sorrow,
and disappointment. But it's worth it, even when it brings complete
disaster. Life isn't life without it."

I felt her hand tremble in mine.

"I don't know," she said, "I know nothing of it, except my love for
Nina. It isn't that now there's anybody. Don't think that. There is no
one--no one. Only my self-confidence is gone. I can't see clearly any
more. My duty is to Nina and Nicholas. And if they are happy nothing
else matters--nothing. And I'm afraid that I'm going to do them harm."

She paused as though she were listening. "There's no one there, is
there?" she asked me--"there by the door?"

"No--no one."

"There are so many noises in this house. Don't they disturb you?"

"I don't think of them now. I'm used to them--and in fact I like them."

She went on: "It's Uncle Alexei of course. He comes to see us nearly
every day. He's very pleasant, more pleasant than he has ever been
before, but he has a dreadful effect on Nicholas--"

"I know the effect he can have," I said.

"I know that Nicholas has been feeling for a long time that his
inventions are no use. He will never own it to me or to any one--but I
can tell. I know it so well. The war came and his new feeling about
Russia carried him along. He put everything into that. Now that has
failed him, and he despises himself for having expected it to do
otherwise. He's raging about, trying to find something that he can
believe in, and Uncle Alexei knows that and plays on that.... He teases
him; he drives him wild and then makes him happy again. He can do
anything with him he pleases. He always could. But now he has some plan.
I used to think that he simply laughed at people because it amused him
to see how weak they can be. But now there's more than that. He's been
hurt himself at last, and that has hurt his pride, and he wants to hurt
back.... It's all in the dark. The war's in the dark... everything...."
Then she smiled and put her hand on my arm. "That's why I've come to
you, because I trust you and believe you and know you say what you
mean."

Once before Marie had said those same words to me. It was as though I
heard her voice again.

"I won't fail you," I said.

There was a knock on the door, it was flung open as though by the wind,
and Nina was with us. Her face was rosy with the cold, her eyes laughed
under her little round fur cap. She came running across the room, pulled
herself up with a little cry beside the bed, and then flung herself upon
me, throwing her arms around my neck and kissing me.

"My dear Nina!" cried Vera.

She looked up, laughing.

"Why not? Poor Durdles. Are you better? _Biédnie_... give me your
hands. But--how cold they are! And there are draughts everywhere. I've
brought you some chocolates--and a book."

"My dear!..." Vera cried again. "He won't like _that_," pointing to a
work of fiction by a modern Russian literary lady whose heart and brain
are of the succulent variety.

"Why not? She's very good. It's lovely! All about impossible people!
Durdles, _dear_! I'll give up the party. We won't go. We'll sit here and
entertain you. I'll send Boris away. We'll tell him we don't want him."

"Boris!" cried Vera.

"Yes," Nina laughed a little uneasily, I thought. "I know you said he
wasn't to come. He'll quarrel with Rozanov of course. But he said he
would. And so how was one to prevent him? You're always so tiresome,
Vera.... I'm not a baby now, nor is Boris. If he wants to come he shall
come."

Vera stood away from us both. I could see that she was very angry. I had
never seen her angry before.

"You know that it's impossible, Nina," she said. "You know that Rozanov
hates him. And besides--there are other reasons. You know them
perfectly well, Nina."

Nina stood there pouting, tears were in her eyes.

"You're unfair," she said. "You don't let me do anything. You give me no
freedom, I don't care for Boris, but if he wants to go he shall go. I'm
grown up now. You have your Lawrence. Let me have my Boris."

"My Lawrence?" asked Vera.

"Yes. You know that you're always wanting him to come--always looking
for him. I like him, too. I like him very much. But you never let me
talk to him. You never--"

"Quiet, Nina." Vera's voice was trembling. Her face was sterner than I'd
ever seen it. "You're making me angry."

"I don't care how angry I make you. It's true. You're impossible now.
Why shouldn't I have my friends? I've nobody now. You never let me have
anybody. And I like Mr. Lawrence--"

She began to sob, looking the most desolate figure.

Vera turned.

"You don't know what you've said, Nina, nor how you've hurt.... You can
go to your party as you please--"

And before I could stop her she was gone.

Nina turned to me a breathless, tearful face. She waited; we heard the
door below closed.

"Oh, Durdles, what have I done?"

"Go after her! Stop her!" I said.

Nina vanished and I was alone. My room was intensely quiet.



XVII

They didn't come to see me again together. Vera came twice, kind and
good as always, but with no more confidences; and Nina once with flowers
and fruit and a wild chattering tongue about the cinemas and Smyrnov,
who was delighting the world at the Narodny Dom, and the wonderful
performance of Lermontov's "Masquerade" that was shortly to take place
at the Alexander Theatre.

"Are you and Vera friends again?" I asked her.

"Oh yes! Why not?" And she went on, snapping a chocolate almond between
her teeth--"The one at the 'Piccadilly' is the best. It's an Italian
one, and there's a giant in it who throws people all over the place, out
of windows and everywhere. Ah! how lovely!... I wish I could go every
night."

"You ought to be helping with the war," I said severely.

"Oh, I hate the war!" she answered. "We're all terribly tired of it.
Tanya's given up going to the English hospital now, and is just meaning
to be as gay as she can be; and Zinaida Fyodorovna had just come back
from her Otriad on the Galician front, and she says it's shocking there
now--no food or dancing or anything. Why doesn't every one make peace?"

"Do you want the Germans to rule Russia?" I asked.

"Why not?" she said, laughing. "We can't do it ourselves. We don't care
who does it. The English can do it if they like, only they're too lazy
to bother. The German's aren't lazy, and if they were here we'd have
lots of theatres and cinematographs."

"Don't you love your country?" I asked.

"This isn't our country," she answered. "It just belongs to the Empress
and Protopopoff."

"Supposing it became your country and the Emperor went?"

"Oh, then it would belong to a million different people, and in the end
no one would have anything. Can't you see how they'd fight?"... She
burst out laughing: "Boris and Nicholas and Uncle Alexei and all the
others!"

Then she was suddenly serious.

"I know, Durdles, you consider that I'm so young and frivolous that I
don't think of anything serious. But I can see things like any one else.
Can't you see that we're all so disappointed with ourselves that nothing
matters? We thought the war was going to be so fine--but now it's just
like the Japanese one, all robbery and lies--and we can't do anything to
stop it."

"Perhaps some day some one will," I said.

"Oh yes!" she answered scornfully, "men like Boris."

After that she refused to be grave for a moment, danced about the room,
singing, and finally vanished, a whirlwind of blue silk.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week later I was out in the world again. That curious sense of
excitement that had first come to me during the early days of my illness
burnt now more fiercely than ever. I cannot say what it was exactly that
I thought was going to happen. I have often looked back, as many other
people must have done, to those days in February and wondered whether I
foresaw anything of what was to come, and what were the things that
might have seemed to me significant if I had noticed them. And here I am
deliberately speaking of both public and private affairs. I cannot quite
frankly dissever the two. At the Front, a year and a half before, I had
discovered how intermingled the souls of individuals and the souls of
countries were, and how permanent private history seemed to me and how
transient public events; but whether that was true or no before, it was
now most certain that it was the story of certain individuals that I was
to record,--the history that was being made behind them could at its
best be only a background.

I seemed to step into a city ablaze with a sinister glory. If that
appears melodramatic I can only say that the dazzling winter weather of
those weeks was melodramatic. Never before had I seen the huge buildings
tower so high, never before felt the shadows so vast, the squares and
streets so limitless in their capacity for swallowing light and colour.
The sky was a bitter changeless blue; the buildings black; the snow and
ice, glittering with purple and gold, swept by vast swinging shadows as
though huge doors opened and shut in heaven, or monstrous birds hovered,
their wings spread, motionless in the limitless space.

And all this had, as ever, nothing to do with human life. The little
courtyards with their woodstacks and their coloured houses, carts and
the cobbled squares and the little stumpy trees that bordered the canals
and the little wooden huts beside the bridges with their candles and
fruit--these were human and friendly and good, but they had their
precarious condition like the rest of us.

On the first afternoon of my new liberty I found myself in the Nevski
Prospect, bewildered by the crowds and the talk and trams and motors and
carts that passed in unending sequence up and down the long street.
Standing at the corner of the Sadovia and the Nevski one was carried
straight to the point of the golden spire that guarded the farther end
of the great street. All was gold, the surface of the road was like a
golden stream, the canal was gold, the thin spire caught into its
piercing line all the colour of the swiftly fading afternoon; the wheels
of the carriages gleamed, the flower-baskets of the women glittered like
shining foam, the snow flung its crystal colour into the air like thin
fire dim before the sun. The street seemed to have gathered on to its
pavements the citizens of every country under the sun. Tartars, Mongols,
Little Russians, Chinamen, Japanese, French officers, British officers,
peasants and fashionable women, schoolboys, officials, actors and
artists and business men and priests and sailors and beggars and hawkers
and, guarding them all, friendly, urbane, filled with a pleasant
self-importance that seemed at that hour the simplest and easiest of
attitudes, the Police. "Rum--rum--rum--whirr--whirr--whirr--whirr"--like
the regular beat of a shuttle the hum rose and fell, as the sun faded
into rosy mist and white vapours stole above the still canals.

I turned to go home and felt some one touch my elbow.

I swung round and there, his broad face ruddy with the cold, was Jerry
Lawrence.

I was delighted to see him and told him so.

"Well, I'm damned glad," he said gruffly. "I thought you might have a
grudge against me."

"A grudge?" I said. "Why?"

"Haven't been to see you. Heard you were ill, but didn't think you'd
want me hanging round."

"Why this modesty?" I asked.

"No--well--you know what I mean." He shuffled his feet. "No good in a
sick-room."

"Mine wasn't exactly a sick-room," I said. "But I heard that you did
come."

"Yes. I came twice," he answered, looking at me shyly. "Your old woman
wouldn't let me see you."

"Never mind that," I said; "let's have an evening together soon."

"Yes--as soon as you like." He looked up and down the street. "There are
some things I'd like to ask your advice about."

"Certainly," I said.

"What do you say to coming and dining at my place? Ever met Wilderling?"

"Wilderling?" I could not remember for the moment the name.

"Yes--the old josser I live with. Fine old man--got a point of view of
his own!"

"Delighted," I said.

"To-morrow. Eight o'clock. Don't dress."

He was just going off when he turned again.

"Awfully glad you're better," he said. He cleared his throat, looked at
me in a very friendly way, then smiled.

"_Awfully_ glad you're better," he repeated, then went off, rolling his
broad figure into the evening mist.

I turned towards home.



XVIII

I arrived at the Baron's punctually at eight o'clock. His flat was in a
small side street off the English Quay. I paused for a moment, before
turning into its dark recesses, to gather in the vast expanse of the
frozen river and the long white quay. It was as though I had found my
way behind a towering wall that now closed me in with a smile of
contemptuous derision. There was no sound in the shining air and the
only figure was a guard who moved monotonously up and down outside the
Winter Palace.

I rang the bell and the "Schwitzer," bowing very ceremoniously, told me
the flat was on the second floor. I went up a broad stone staircase and
found a heavy oak door with brass nails confronting me. When this slowly
swung open I discovered a very old man with white hair bowing before me.
He was a splendid figure in a uniform of dark blue, his tall thin figure
straight and slim, his white moustaches so neat and fierce that they
seemed to keep guard over the rest of his face as though they warned
him that they would stand no nonsense. There was an air of hushed
splendour behind him, and I could hear the heavy, solemn ticking of a
clock keeping guard over all the austere sanctities of the place. When I
had taken off my Shuba and goloshes I was ushered into a magnificent
room with a high gold clock on the mantlepiece, gilt chairs, heavy dark
carpets and large portraits frowning from the grey walls. The whole room
was bitterly silent, save for the tick of the clock. There was no fire
in the fireplace, but a large gleaming white stove flung out a close
scented heat from the further corner of the room. There were two long
glass bookcases, some little tables with gilt legs, and a fine Japanese
screen of dull gold. The only other piece of furniture was a huge grand
piano near the window.

I sat down and was instantly caught into the solemn silence. There was
something threatening in the hush of it all. "We do what we're told,"
the clock seemed to say, "and so must you." I thought of the ice and
snow beyond the windows, and, in spite of myself, shivered.

Then the door opened and the Baron came in. He stood for a moment by the
door, staring in front of him as though he could not penetrate the heavy
and dusky air, and seen thus, under the height and space of the room, he
seemed so small as to be almost ridiculous. But he was not ridiculous
for long. As he approached one was struck at once by the immaculate
efficiency that followed him like a protecting shadow. In himself he was
a scrupulously neat old man with weary and dissipated eyes, but behind
the weariness, the neatness, and dissipation was a spirit of indomitable
determination and resolution. He wore a little white Imperial and a long
white moustache. His hair was brushed back and his forehead shone like
marble. He wore a black suit, white spats, and long, pointed, black
patent-leather shoes. He had the smallest feet I have ever seen on any
man.

He greeted me with great courtesy. His voice was soft, and he spoke
perfect English, save for a very slight accent that was rather charming;
this gave his words a certain naïvete. He rubbed his hands and smiled in
a gentle but determined way, as though he meant no harm by it, but had
decided that it was a necessary thing to do. I forget of what we talked,
but I know that I surrendered myself at once to an atmosphere that had
been strange to me for so long that I had almost forgotten its
character--an atmosphere of discipline, order, comfort, and above all,
of security. My mind flew to the Markovitches, and I smiled to myself at
the thought of the contrast.

Then, strangely, when I had once thought of the Markovitch flat the
picture haunted me for the rest of the evening. I could see the Baron's
gilt chairs and gold clock, his little Imperial and shining shoes only
through the cloudy disorder of the Markovitch tables and chairs. There
was poor Markovitch in his dark little room perched on his chair with
his boots, with his hands, with his hair... and there was poor Uncle
and there poor Vera.... Why was I pitying them? I gloried in them. That
is Russia... This is....

"Allow me to introduce you to my wife," the Baron said, bending forward,
the very points of his toes expressing amiability.

The Baroness was a large solid lady with a fine white bosom and strong
white arms. Her face was homely and kind; I saw at once that she adored
her husband; her placid smile carried beneath its placidity a tremulous
anxiety that he should be pleased, and her mild eyes swam in the light
of his encouragement. I was sure, however, that the calm and discipline
that I felt in the things around me came as much from her domesticity as
from his discipline. She was a fortunate woman in that she had attained
the ambition of her life--to govern the household of a man whom she
could both love and fear.

Lawrence came in, and we went through high folding doors into the
dining-room. This room had dark-blue wall-paper, electric lights heavily
shaded, and soft heavy carpets. The table itself was flooded with
light--the rest of the room was dusk. I wondered as I looked about me
why the Wilderlings had taken Lawrence as a paying guest. Before my
visit I had imagined that they were poor, as so many of the better-class
Russians were, but here were no signs of poverty. I decided that.

Our dinner was good, and the wine was excellent. We talked, of course,
politics, and the Baron was admirably frank.

"I won't disguise from you, M. Durward," he said, "that some of us watch
your English effort at winning the heart of this country with sympathy,
but also, if I am not offending you, with some humour. I'm not speaking
only of your propaganda efforts. You've got, I know, one or two literary
gentlemen here--a novelist, I think, and a professor and a journalist.
Well, soon you'll find them inefficient, and decide that you must have
some commercial gentlemen, and then, disappointed with them, you'll
decide for the military... and still the great heart of Russia will
remain untouched."

"Yes," I said, "because your class are determined that the peasant shall
remain uneducated, and until he is educated he will be unable to
approach any of us."

"Quite so," said the Baron smiling at me very cheerfully. "I perceive,
M. Durward, that you are a democrat. So are we all, these days.... You
look surprised, but I assure you that the good of the people in the
interests of the people is the only thing for which any of us care. Only
some of us know Russia pretty well, and we know that the Russian peasant
is not ready for liberty, and if you were to give him liberty to-night
you would plunge his country into the most desperate torture of anarchy
and carnage known in history. A little more soup?--we are offering you
only a slight dinner."

"Yes, but, Baron," I said, "would you tell me when it is intended that
the Russian peasant shall begin his upward course towards light and
learning? If that day is to be for ever postponed?"

"It will not be for ever postponed," said the Baron gently. "Let us
finish the war, and education shall be given slowly, under wise
direction, to every man, woman, and child in the country. Our Czar is
the most liberal ruler in Europe--and he knows what is good for his
children."

"And Protopopoff and Stürmer?" I asked.

"Protopopoff is a zealous, loyal liberal, but he has been made to see
during these last months that Russia is not at this moment ready for
freedom. Stürmer--well, M. Stürmer is gone."

"So you, yourself, Baron," I asked, "would oppose at this moment all
reform?"

"With every drop of blood in my body," he answered, and his hand flat
against the tablecloth quivered. "At this crisis admit one change and
your dyke is burst, your land flooded. Every Russian is asked at this
moment to believe in simple things--his religion, his Czar, his country.
Grant your reforms, and in a week every babbler in the country will be
off his head, talking, screaming, fighting. The Germans will occupy
Russia at their own good time, you will be beaten on the West and
civilisation will be set back two hundred years. The only hope for
Russia is unity, and for unity you must have discipline, and for
discipline, in Russia at any rate, you must have an autocracy."

As he spoke the furniture, the grey walls, the heavy carpets, seemed to
whisper an echo of his words: "Unity... Discipline... Discipline...
Autocracy... Autocracy... Autocracy...."

"Then tell me, Baron," I said, "if it isn't an impertinent question, do
you feel so secure in your position that you have no fears at all? Does
such a crisis, as for instance Milyukoff's protest last November, mean
nothing? You know the discontent.... Is there no fear....?"

"Fear!" He interrupted me, his voice swift and soft and triumphant. "M.
Durward, are you so ignorant of Russia that you consider the outpourings
of a few idealistic Intelligentzia, professors and teachers and poets,
as important? What about the people, M. Durward? You ask any peasant in
the Moscow Government, or little Russia, or the Ukraine whether he will
remain loyal to his Little Father or no! Ask--and the question you
suggested to me will be answered."

"Then, you feel both secure and justified?" I said.

"We feel both secure and justified"--he answered me, smiling.

After that our conversation was personal and social. Lawrence was very
quiet. I observed that the Baroness had a motherly affection for him,
that she saw that he had everything that he wanted, and that she gave
him every now and then little friendly confidential smiles. As the meal
proceeded, as I drank the most excellent wine and the warm austerity of
my surroundings gathered ever more closely around me, I wondered whether
after all my apprehensions and forebodings of the last weeks had not
been the merest sick man's cowardice. Surely if any kingdom in the world
was secure, it was this official Russia. I could see it stretching
through the space and silence of that vast land, its servants in every
village, its paths and roads all leading back to the central citadel,
its whispered orders flying through the air from district to district,
its judgements, its rewards, its sins, its virtues, resting upon a basis
of superstition and ignorance and apathy, the three sure friends of
autocracy through history!

And on the other side--who? The Rat, Boris Grogoff, Markovitch. Yes, the
Baron had reason for his confidence.... I thought for a moment of that
figure that I had seen on Christmas Eve by the river--the strong grave
bearded peasant whose gaze had seemed to go so far beyond the bounds of
my own vision. But no! Russia's mystical peasant--that was an old tale.
Once, on the Front, when I had seen him facing the enemy with bare
hands, I had, myself, believed it. Now I thought once more of the
Rat--_that_ was the type whom I must now confront.

I had a most agreeable evening. I do not know how long it had been
since I had tasted luxury and comfort and the true fruits of
civilisation. The Baron was a most admirable teller of stories, with a
capital sense of humour. After dinner the Baroness left us for half an
hour, and the Baron became very pleasantly Rabelaisian, speaking of his
experiences in Paris and London, Vienna and Berlin so easily and with so
ready a wit that the evening flew. The Baroness returned and, seeing
that it was after eleven, I made my farewells. Lawrence said that he
would walk with me down the quay before turning into bed. My host and
hostess pressed me to come as often as possible. The Baron's last words
to me were:

"Have no fears, M. Durward. There is much talk in this country, but we
are a lazy people."

The "we" rang strangely in my ears.

"He's of course no more a Russian than you or I," I said to Lawrence, as
we started down the quay.

"Oh yes, he is!" Lawrence said. "Quite genuine--not a drop of German
blood in spite of the name. But he's a Prussian at heart--a Prussian of
the Prussians. By that I don't mean in the least that he wants Germany
to win the war. He doesn't--his interests are all here, and you mayn't
believe me, but I assure you he's a Patriot. He loves Russia, and he
wants what's best for her--and believes that to be Autocracy."

After that Lawrence shut up. He would not say another word. We walked
for a long time in silence. The evening was most beautiful. A golden
moon flung the snow into dazzling relief against the deep black of the
palaces. Across the Neva the line of towers and minarets and chimneys
ran like a huge fissure in the golden, light from sky to sky.

"You said there was something you wanted to ask my advice about?"

I broke the silence.

He looked at me with his long slow considering stare. He mumbled
something; then, with a sudden gesture, he gripped my arm, and his heavy
body quivering with the urgency of his words he said:

"It's Vera Markovitch.... I'd give my body and soul and spirit for her
happiness and safety.... God forgive me, I'd give my country and my
honour.... I ache and long for her, so that I'm afraid for my sanity.
I've never loved a woman, nor lusted for one, nor touched one in my
whole life, Durward--and now... and now... I've gone right in. I've
spoken no word to any one; but I couldn't stand my own silence....
Durward, you've got to help me!"

I walked on, seeing the golden light and the curving arc of snow and the
little figures moving like dolls from light to shadow. Lawrence! I had
never thought of him as an urgent lover; even now, although I could
still feel his hand quivering on my arm, I could have laughed at the
ludicrous incongruity of romance, and that stolid thick-set figure. And
at the same time I was afraid. Lawrence in love was no boy on the
threshold of life like Bohun... here was no trivial passion. I realised
even in that first astonished moment the trouble that might be in store
for all of us.

"Look here, Lawrence!" I said at last. "The first thing that you may as
well realise is that it is hopeless. Vera Michailovna has confided in me
a good deal lately, and she is devoted to her husband, thinks of nothing
else. She's simple, naïve, with all her sense and wisdom...."

"Hopeless!" he interrupted, and he gave a kind of grim chuckle of
derision. "My dear Durward, what do you suppose I'm after?... rape and
adultery and Markovitch after us with a pistol? I tell you--" and here
he spoke fiercely, as though he were challenging the whole ice-bound
world around us--"that I want nothing but her happiness, her safety,
her comfort! Do you suppose that I'm such an ass as not to recognise the
kind of thing that my loving her would lead to? I tell you I'm after
nothing for myself, and that not because I'm a fine unselfish character,
but simply because the thing's too big to let anything into it but
herself. She shall never know that I care twopence about her, but she's
got to be happy and she's got to be safe.... Just now, she's neither of
those things, and that's why I've spoken to you.... She's unhappy and
she's afraid, and that's got to change. I wouldn't have spoken of this
to you if I thought you'd be so short-sighted...."

"All right! All right!" I said testily. "You may be a kind of Galahad,
Lawrence, outside all natural law. I don't know, but you'll forgive me
if I go for a moment on my own experience--and that experience is, that
you can start on as highbrow an elevation as you like, but love doesn't
stand still, and the body's the body, and to-morrow isn't yesterday--not
by no means. Moreover, Markovitch is a Russian and a peculiar one at
that. Finally, remember that I want Vera Michailovna to be happy quite
as much as you do!"

He was suddenly grave and almost boyish in his next words.

"I know that--you're a decent chap, Durward--I know it's hard to believe
me, but I just ask you to wait and test me. No one knows of this--that
I'd swear--and no one shall; but what's the matter with her, Durward,
what's she afraid of? That's why I spoke to you. You know her, and I'll
throttle you here where we stand if you don't tell me just what the
trouble is. I don't care for confidences or anything of the sort. You
must break them all and tell me--"

His hand was on my arm again, his big ugly face, now grim and obstinate,
close against mine.

"I'll tell you," I said slowly, "all I know, which is almost nothing.
The trouble is Semyonov, the doctor. Why or how I can't say, although
I've seen enough of him in the past to know the trouble he _can_ be.
She's afraid of him, and Markovitch is afraid of him. He likes playing
on people's nerves. He's a bitter, disappointed man, who loved
desperately once, as only real sensualists can... and now he's in love
with a ghost. That's why real life maddens him."

"Semyonov!" Lawrence whispered the name.

We had come to the end of the quay. My dear church with its round grey
wall stood glistening in the moonlight, the shadows from the snow
rippling up its sides, as though it lay under water. We stood and looked
across the river.

"I've always hated that fellow," Lawrence said. "I've only seen him
about twice, but I believe I hated him before I saw him.... All right,
Durward, that's what I wanted to know. Thank you. Good-night."

And before I could speak he had gripped my hand, had turned back, and
was walking swiftly away, across the golden-lighted quay.



XIX

From the moment that Lawrence left me, vanishing into the heart of the
snow and ice, I was obsessed by a conviction of approaching danger and
peril. It has been one of the most disastrous weaknesses of my life that
I have always shrunk from precipitate action. Before the war it had
seemed to many of us that life could be jockeyed into decisions by words
and theories and speculations. The swift, and, as it were, revengeful
precipitancy of the last three years had driven me into a self-distrust
and cowardice which had grown and grown until life had seemed veiled and
distant and mysteriously obscure. From my own obscurity, against my
will, against my courage, against my own knowledge of myself,
circumstances were demanding that I should advance and act. It was of no
avail to myself that I should act unwisely, that I should perhaps only
precipitate a crisis that I could not help. I was forced to act when I
would have given my soul to hold aloof, and in this town, whose darkness
and light, intrigue and display, words and action, seemed to derive some
mysterious force from the very soil, from the very air, the smallest
action achieved monstrous proportions. When you have lived for some
years in Russia you do not wonder that its citizens prefer inaction to
demonstration--the soil is so much stronger than the men who live upon
it.

Nevertheless, for a fortnight I did nothing. Private affairs of an
especially tiresome kind filled my days--I saw neither Lawrence nor
Vera, and, during that period, I scarcely left my rooms.

There was much expectation in the town that February 14th, when the Duma
was appointed to meet, would be a critical day. Fine things were said of
the challenging speeches that would be made, of the firm stand that the
Cadet party intended to take, of the crisis with which the Court party
would be faced.

Of course nothing occurred. It may be safely said that, in Russian
affairs, no crisis occurs, either in the place or at the time, or in the
manner in which it is expected. Time with us here refuses to be caught
by the throat. That is the revenge that it takes on the scorn with
which, in Russia, it is always covered.

On the 20th of February I received an invitation to Nina's birthday
party. She would be eighteen on the 28th. She scribbed at the bottom of
Vera's note:

Dear Durdles--If you don't come I will never forgive you.--Your loving
Nina.

The immediate problem was a present. I knew that Nina adored presents,
but Petrograd was now no easy place for purchases, and I wished, I
suppose as a kind of tribute to her youth and freshness and colour, to
give her something for which she would really care. I sallied out on a
wonderful afternoon when the town was a blaze of colour, the walls dark
red, dark brown, violet, pink, and the snow a dazzling glitter of
crystal. The bells were ringing for some festival, echoing as do no
other bells in the world from wall to wall, roof to roof, canal to
canal. Everybody moved as though they were inspired with a gay sense of
adventure, men and women laughing; the Isvostchicks surveying possible
fares with an eye less patronising and lugubrious than usual, the flower
women and the beggars and the little Chinese boys and the wicked old men
who stare at you as though they were dreaming of Eastern debauches,
shared in the sun and tang of the air and high colour of the sky and
snow.

I pushed my way into the shop in the Morskaia that had the coloured
stones--the blue and azure and purple stones--in the window. Inside the
shop, which had a fine gleaming floor, and an old man with a tired eye,
there were stones of every colour, but there was nothing there for
Nina--all was too elaborate and grand.

Near the Nevski is a fine shop of pictures with snow scenes and blue
rivers and Italian landscapes, and copies of Repin and Verestchagin, and
portraits of the Czar. I searched here, but all were too sophisticated
in their bright brown frames, and their air of being the latest thing
from Paris and London. Then I crossed the road, threading my way through
the carriages and motor cars, past the old white-bearded sweeper with
the broom held aloft, gazing at the sky, and plunged into the English
Shop to see whether I might buy something warm for Nina. Here, indeed, I
could fancy that I was in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or
Truro, or Canterbury. A demure English provincialism was over
everything, and a young man in a high white collar and a shiny black
coat, washed his hands as he told me that "they hadn't any in stock at
the moment, but they were expecting a delivery of goods at any minute."
Russian shopmen, it is almost needless to say, do not care whether they
have goods in stock or no. They have other things to think about. The
air was filled with the chatter of English governesses, and an English
clergyman and his wife were earnestly turning over a selection of
woollen comforters.

Nothing here for Nina--nothing at all. I hurried away. With a sudden
flash of inspiration I realised that it was in the Jews' Market that I
would find what I wanted. I snatched at the bulging neck of a sleeping
coachman, and before he was fully awake was in his sledge, and had told
him my destination. He grumbled and wished to know how much I intended
to pay him, and when I said one and a half roubles, answered that he
would not take me for less than three. I threatened him then with the
fat and good-natured policeman who always guarded the confused junction
of the Morskaia and Nevski, and he was frightened and moved on. I sighed
as I remembered the days not so long before, when that same coachman
would have thought it an honour to drive me for half a rouble. Down the
Sadovya we slipped, bumping over the uneven surface of the snow, and the
shops grew smaller and the cinemas more stringent, and the women and men
with their barrows of fruit and coloured notepaper and toys more
frequent. Then through the market with the booths and the church with
its golden towers, until we stood before the hooded entrance to the
Jews' Paradise. I paid him, and without listening to his discontented
cries pushed my way in. The Jews' Market is a series of covered arcades
with a square in the middle of it, and in the middle of the square a
little church with some doll-like trees. These arcades are Western in
their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the
wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern,
so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs,
the cries, the singing, and the dancing that meets one here it is as
though a new world was suddenly born--a world offensive, dirty, voluble,
blackguardly perhaps, but intriguing, tempting, and ironical. The
arcades are generally so crowded that one can move only at a slow pace
and, on every side one is pestered by the equivalents of the old English
cry: "What do you lack? What do you lack?"

Every mixture of blood and race that the world contains is to be seen
here, but they are all--Tartars, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Indians,
Arabs, Moslem, and Christian--formed by some subtle colour of
atmosphere, so that they seem all alike to be citizens of some secret
little town, sprung to life just for a day, in the heart of this other
city. Perhaps it is the dull pale mist that the glass flings down,
perhaps it is the uncleanly dust-clogged air; whatever it be, there is a
stain of grey shadowy smoke upon all this world, and Ikons and shabby
jewels, and piles of Eastern clothes, and old brass pots, and silver,
hilted swords, and golden-tasselled Tartar coats gleam through the
shadow and wink and stare.

To-day the arcades were so crowded that I could scarcely move, and the
noise was deafening.

Many soldiers were there, looking with indulgent amusement upon the
scene, and the Jews with their skull-caps and the fat, huge-breasted
Jewish women screamed and shrieked and waved their arms like boughs in a
storm. I stopped at many shops and fingered the cheap silver toys, the
little blue and green Ikons, the buckles and beads and rosaries that
thronged the trays, but I could not find anything for Nina. Then
suddenly I saw a square box of mother-of-pearl and silver, so charming
and simple, the figures on the silver lid so gracefully carved that I
decided at once.

The Jew in charge of it wanted twice as much as I was ready to give, and
we argued for ten minutes before a kindly and appreciative crowd. At
last we arranged a compromise, and I moved away, pleased and satisfied.
I stepped out of the arcade and faced the little Square. It was, at that
instant, fantastic and oddly coloured; the sun, about to set, hung in
the misty sky a perfect round crimson globe, and it was perched, almost
maliciously, just above the tower of the little church.

The rest of the world was grey. The Square was a thick mass of human
beings so tightly wedged together that it seemed to move backwards and
forwards like a floor of black wood pushed by a lever. One lamp burnt
behind the window of the church, the old houses leaned forward as though
listening to the babel below their eaves.

But it was the sun that seemed to me then so evil and secret and
cunning. Its deep red was aloof and menacing, and its outline so sharp
that it was detached from the sky as though it were human, and would
presently move and advance towards us. I don't know what there was in
that crowd of struggling human beings and that detached red sun.... The
air was cruel, and through all the arcades that seemed to run like veins
to this heart of the place I could feel the cold and the dark and the
smoky dusk creeping forward to veil us all with deepest night.

I turned away and then saw, advancing towards me, as though he had just
come from the church, pushing his way, and waving a friendly hand to me,
Semyonov.



XX

His greeting was most amiable. He was wearing a rather short fur coat
that only reached to a little below his knees, and the fur of the coat
was of a deep rich brown, so that his pale square yellow beard
contrasted with this so abruptly as to seem false. His body was as ever
thick and self-confident, and the round fur cap that he wore was cocked
ever so slightly to one side. I did not want to see him, but I was
caught. I fancied that he knew very well that I wanted to escape, and
that now, for sheer perversity, he would see that I did not. Indeed, he
caught my arm and drew me out of the Market. We passed into the dusky
streets.

"Now, Ivan Andreievitch," he said, "this is very pleasant... very....
You elude me, you know, which is unkind with two so old acquaintances.
Of course I know that you dislike me, and I don't suppose that I have
the highest opinion of _you_, but, nevertheless, we should be interested
in one another. Our common experience...." He broke off with a little
shiver, and pulled his fur coat closer around him.

I knew that all that I wanted was to break away. We had passed quickly
on leaving the Market into some of the meanest streets of Petrograd.
This was the Petrograd of Dostoeffsky, the Petrograd of "Poor Folk" and
"Crime and Punishment" and "The Despised and Rejected."... Monstrous
groups of flats towered above us, and in the gathering dusk the figures
that slipped in and out of the doors were furtive shadows and ghosts. No
one seemed to speak; you could see no faces under the spare pale-flamed
lamps, only hear whispers and smell rotten stinks and feel the snow,
foul and soiled under one's feet....

"Look here, Semyonov," I said, slipping from the control of his hand,
"it's just as you say. We don't like one another, and we know one
another well enough to say so. Neither you nor I wish to revive the
past, and there's nothing in the present that we have in common."

"Nothing!" He laughed. "What about my delightful nieces and their home
circle? You were always one to shrink from the truth, Ivan Andreievitch.
You fancy that you can sink into the bosom of a charming family and
escape the disadvantages.... Not at all. There are always disadvantages
in a Russian family. _I_ am the disadvantage in this one." He laughed
again, and insisted on taking my arm once more. "If you feel so strongly
about me, Durward" (when he used my surname he always accented the
second syllable very strongly) "all you have to do is to cut my niece
Vera out of your visiting list. That, I imagine, is the last thing that
you wish. Well, then--"

"Vera Michailovna is my friend," I said hotly--it was foolish of me to
be so easily provoked, but I could not endure his sneering tone. "If you
imply--"

"Nonsense," he answered sharply, "I imply nothing. Do you suppose that I
have been more than a month here without discovering the facts? It's
your English friend Lawrence who is in love with Vera--and Vera with
him."

"That is a lie!" I cried.

He laughed. "You English," he said, "are not so unobservant as you seem,
but you hate facts. Vera and your friend Lawrence have been in love with
one another since their first meeting, and my dear nephew-in-law
Markovitch knows it."

"That's impossible," I cried. "He--"

"No," Semyonov replied, "I was wrong. He does not know it--he suspects.
And my nephew-in-law in a state of suspicion is a delightful study."

By now we were in a narrow street, so dark that we stumbled at every
step. We seemed to be quite alone.

It was I who now caught his arm. "Semyonov!" I said, and my urgency
stopped him so that he stood where he was. "Leave them alone! Leave them
alone! They've done no harm to you, they can offer you nothing, they are
not intelligent enough for you nor amusing enough. Even if it is true
what you say it will pass--Lawrence will go away. I will see that he
does. Only leave them alone! For God's sake, let them be!"

His face was very close to mine, and, looking at it in the gathering
dark, it was as though it were a face of glass behind which other faces
passed and repassed. I cannot hope to give any idea of the strange
mingling of regret, malice, pride, pain, scorn, and humour that those
eyes showed. His red lips parted as though he would speak, for a moment
he turned away from me and looked down the black tunnel of the street,
then he walked forward again.

"You are wrong, my friend," he said, "if you imagine that there is no
amusement for me in the study of my family. It _is_ my family, you know.
I have none other. Perhaps it has never occurred to you, Durward, that
possibly I am a lonely man."

As he spoke I heard again the echo of that voice as it vanished into the
darkness.... "No one?" and the answer: "No one."...

"Don't imagine," he continued, "that I am asking for your pity. That
indeed would be humorous. I pity no one, and I despise the men who have
it to bestow... but there are situations in life that are intolerable,
Ivan Andreievitch, and any man who _is_ a man will see that he escapes
from such a thing. May I not find in the bosom of my family such an
escape?" He laughed.

"I know nothing about that," I began hotly. "All I know is--"

But he went on as though he had not heard me.

"Have you ever thought about death since you came away from the Front,
Durward? It used to occupy your mind a good deal while you were there, I
remember--in a foolish, romantic, sentimental way of course. You'll
forgive my saying that your views of death were those of a second-hand
novelist--all the same I'll do you the justice of acknowledging that you
had studied it at first hand. You're not a coward, you know."

I was struck most vividly with a sense of his uneasiness. During those
other days uneasy was the very last thing that I ever would have said
that he was--even after his catastrophe his grip of his soul did not
loosen. It was just that loosening that I felt now; he had less control
of the beasts that dwelt beneath the ground of his house, and he could
hear them snarl and whine, and could feel the floor quiver with the echo
of their movements.

I suddenly knew that I was afraid of him no longer.

"Now, see, Alexei Petrovitch," I said, "it isn't death that we want to
talk about now. It is a much simpler thing. It is, that you shouldn't
for your own amusement simply go in and spoil the lives of some of my
friends for nothing at all except your own stupid pride. If that's your
plan I'm going to prevent it."

"Why, Ivan Andreievitch," he cried, laughing, "this is a challenge."

"You can take it as what you please," I answered gravely.

"But, incorrigible sentimentalist," he went on, "tell me--are you,
English and moralist and believer in a good and righteous God as you
are, are you really going to encourage this abominable adultery, this
open, ruthless wrecking of a good man's home? You surprise me; this is a
new light on your otherwise rather uninteresting character."

"Never mind my character," I answered him; "all you've got to do is to
leave Vera Michailovna alone. There'll be no wrecking of homes, unless
you are the wrecker."

He put his hand on my arm again.

"Listen, Durward," he said, "I'll tell you a little story. I'm a doctor
you know, and many curious things occur within my province. Well, some
years ago I knew a man who was very miserable and very proud. His pride
resented that he should be miserable, and he was always suspecting that
people saw his weakness, and as he despised human nature, and thought
his companions fools and deserving of all that they got, and more, he
couldn't bear the thought that they should perceive that he allowed
himself to be unhappy. He coveted death. If it meant extinction he could
imagine nothing pleasanter than so restful an aloofness, quiet and apart
and alone, whilst others hurried and scrambled and pursued the
future....

"And if death did not mean extinction then he thought that he might
snatch and secure for himself something which in life had eluded him. So
he coveted death. But he was too proud to reach it by suicide. That
seemed to him a contemptible and cowardly evasion, and such an easy
solution would have denied the purpose of all his life. So he looked
about him and discovered amongst his friends a man whose character he
knew well, a man idealistic and foolish and romantic, like yourself,
Ivan Andreievitch, only caring more for ideas, more impulsive and more
reckless. He found this man and made him his friend. He played with him
as a cat does with a mouse. He enjoyed life for about a year and then he
was murdered...."

"Murdered!" I exclaimed.

"Yes--shot by his idealistic friend. I envy him that year. He must have
experienced many breathless sensations. When the murderer was tried his
only explanation was that he had been irritated and disappointed.

"'Disappointed of what?' asked the judge.

"'Of everything in which he believed....' said the man.

"It seemed a poor excuse for a murder; he is still, I have no doubt, in
Siberia.

"But I envy my friend. That was a delightful death to die....
Good-night, Ivan Andreievitch."

He waved his hand at me and was gone. I was quite alone in the long
black street, engulfed by the high, overhanging flats.



XXI

Late on the afternoon of Nina's birthday, when I was on the point of
setting out for the English Prospect, the Rat appeared. I had not seen
him for several weeks; but there he was, stepping suddenly out of the
shadows of my room, dirty and disreputable and cheerful. He had been, I
perceived, drinking furniture polish.

"Good-evening, Barin."

"Good-evening," I said sternly. "I told you not to come here when you
were drunk."

"I'm not drunk," he said, offended, "only a little. It's not much that
you can get these days. I want some money, Barin."

"I've none for you," I answered.

"It's only a little--God knows that I wouldn't ask you for much, but I'm
going to be very busy these next days, and it's work that won't bring
pay quickly. There'll be pay later, and then I will return it to you."

"There's nothing for you to-night," I said.

He laughed. "You're a fine man, Barin. A foreigner is fine--that's
where the poor Russian is unhappy. I love you, Barin, and I will look
after you, and if, as you say, there isn't any money here, one must
pray to God and he will show one the way."

"What's this work you're going to do?" I asked him.

"There's going to be trouble the other side of the river in a day or
two," he answered, "and I'm going to help."

"Help what?" I asked.

"Help the trouble," he answered, smiling.

"Behave like a blackguard, in fact."

"Ah, blackguard, Barin!" he protested, using a Russian word that is
worse than blackguard. "Why these names?... I'm not a good man, God have
mercy on my soul, but then I pretend nothing. I am what you see.... If
there's going to be trouble in the town I may as well be there. Why not
I as well as another? And it is to your advantage, Barin, that I should
be."

"Why to my advantage?" I asked him.

"Because I am your friend, and we'll protect you," he answered.

"I wouldn't trust you a yard," I told him.

"Well, perhaps you're right," he said. "We are as God made us--I am no
better than the rest."

"No, indeed you're not," I answered him. "Why do you think there'll be
trouble?"

"I know.... Perhaps a lot of trouble, perhaps only a little. But it
will be a fine time for those of us who have nothing to lose.... So you
have no money for me?"

"Nothing."

"A mere rouble or so?"

"Nothing."

"Well, I must be off.... I am your friend. Don't forget," and he was
gone.

It had been arranged that Nina and Vera, Lawrence and Bohun and I should
meet outside the Giniselli at five minutes to eight. I left my little
silver box at the flat, paid some other calls, and just as eight o'clock
was striking arrived outside the Giniselli. This is Petrograd's apology
for a music-hall--in other words, it is nothing but the good
old-fashioned circus.

Then, again, it is not quite the circus of one's English youth, because
it has a very distinct Russian atmosphere of its own. The point really
is the enthusiasm of the audience, because it is an enthusiasm that in
these sophisticated, twentieth-century days is simply not to be found in
any other country in Europe. I am an old-fashioned man and, quite
frankly, I adore a circus; and when I can find one with the right
sawdust smell, the right clown, and the right enthusiasm, I am happy.
The smart night is a Saturday, and then, if you go, you will see, in the
little horse-boxes close to the arena, beautiful women in jewellery and
powder, and young officers, and fat merchants in priceless Shubas. But
to-night was not a Saturday, and therefore the audience was very
democratic, screaming cat-calls from the misty distances of the gallery,
and showering sunflower seeds upon the heads of the bourgeoisie, who
were, for the most part, of the smaller shopkeeper kind.

Nina, to-night, was looking very pretty and excited. She was wearing a
white silk dress with blue bows, and all her hair was piled on the top
of her head in imitation of Vera--but this only had the effect of making
her seem incredibly young and naïve, as though she had put her hair up
just for the evening because there was to be a party. It was explained
that Markovitch was working but would be present at supper. Vera was
quiet, but looked happier, I thought, than I had seen her for a long
time. Bohun was looking after her, and Lawrence was with Nina. I sat
behind the four of them, in the back of the little box, like a presiding
Benevolence.

Mostly I thought of how lovely Vera was to-night, and why it was, too,
that more people did not care for her. I knew that she was not popular,
that she was considered proud and reserved and cold. As she sat there
now, motionless, her hands on her lap, her whole being seemed to me to
radiate goodness and gentleness and a loving heart. I knew that she
could be impatient with stupid people, and irritated by sentimentality,
and infuriated by meanness and cruelty, but the whole size and grandeur
of her nobility seemed to me to shine all about her and set her apart
from the rest of human beings. She was not a woman whom I ever could
have loved--she had not the weaknesses and naïveties and appealing
helplessness that drew love from one's heart. Nor could I have ever
dared to face the depth and splendour of the passion that there was in
her--I was not built on that heroic scale. God forgive me if, as I
watched them, I felt a sudden glow of almost eager triumph at the
thought of Lawrence as her lover! I checked it. My heart was suddenly
heavy.

Such a development could only mean tragedy, and I knew it. I had even
sworn to Semyonov that I would prevent it. I looked at them and felt my
helpless weakness. Who was I to prevent anything? And who was there now,
in the whole world, who would be guided by my opinion? They might have
me as a confidant because they trusted me, but after that... no, I had
no illusions. I was pushed off the edge of the world, hanging on still
with one quivering hand--soon my grip would loosen--and, God help me, I
did not want to go.

Nina turned back to me and, with a little excited clap of her hands,
drew my attention to the gallant Madame Gineselli, who, although by no
means a chicken, arrayed in silver tights and a large black picture-hat,
stood on one foot on the back of her white horse and bowed to the
already hysterical gallery. Mr. Gineselli cracked his whip, and the
white horse ambled along and the sawdust flew up into our eyes, and
Madame bent her knees first in and then out, and the bourgeoisie clapped
their hands and the gallery shouted "Brava." Gineselli cracked his whip
and there was the clown "Jackomeno, beloved of his Russian public," as
it was put on the programme; and indeed so he seemed to be, for he was
greeted with roars of applause. There was nothing very especially
Russian about him, however, and when he had taken his coat off and
brushed a place on which to put it and then flung it on the ground and
stamped on it, I felt quite at home with him and ready for anything.

He called up one of the attendants and asked him whether he had ever
played the guitar. I don't know what it was that the attendant answered,
because something else suddenly transfixed my attention--the vision of
Nina's little white-gloved hand resting on Lawrence's broad knee. I saw
at once, as though she had told me, that she had committed herself to a
most desperate venture. I could fancy the resolution that she had
summoned to take the step, the way that now her heart would be furiously
beating, and the excited chatter with which she would try to cover up
her action. Vera and Bohun could not, from where they were sitting, see
what she had done; Lawrence did not move, his back was set like a rock;
he stared steadfastly at the arena. Nina never ceased talking, her
ribbons fluttering and her other hand gesticulating.

I could not take my eyes from that little white hand. I should have
been, I suppose, ashamed of her, indignant for her, but I could only
feel that she was, poor child, in for the most desperate rebuff. I could
see from where I sat her cheek, hot and crimson, and her shrill voice
never stopped.

The interval arrived, to my intense relief, and we all went out into the
dark passage that smelt of sawdust and horses. Almost at once Nina
detached me from the others and walked off with me towards the lighted
hall.

"You saw," she said.

"Saw what?" I asked.

"Saw what I was doing."

I felt that she was quivering all over, and she looked so ridiculously
young, with her trembling lip and blue hat on one side and burning
cheeks, that I felt that I wanted to take her into my arms and kiss and
pet her.

"I saw that you had your hand on his knee," I said. "That was silly of
you, Nina."

"Why shouldn't I?" she answered furiously. "Why shouldn't I enjoy life
like every one else? Why should Vera, have everything?"

"Vera!" I cried. "What has it to do with Vera?"

She didn't answer my question. She put her hand on my arm, pressing
close up to me as though she wanted my protection.

"Durdles, I want him for my friend. I do--I do. When I look at him and
think of Boris and the others I don't want to speak to any one of them
again. I only want him for my friend. I'm getting old now, and they
can't treat me as a child any longer. I'll show them. I know what I'll
do if I can't have the friends I want and if Vera is always managing
me--I'll go off to Boris."

"My dear Nina," I said, "you mustn't do that. You don't care for him."

"No, I know I don't--but I will go if everybody thinks me a baby. And
Durdles--Durdles, please--make him like me--your Mr. Lawrence."

She said his name with the funniest little accent.

"Nina, dear," I said, "will you take a little piece of advice from me?"

"What is it?" she asked doubtfully.

"Well, this.... Don't you make any move yourself. Just wait and you'll
see he'll like you. You'll make him shy if you--"

But she interrupted me furiously in one of her famous tempers.

"Oh, you Englishmen with your shyness and your waiting and your
coldness! I hate you all, and I wish we were fighting with the Germans
against you. Yes, I do--and I hope the Germans win. You never have any
blood. You're all cold as ice.... And what do you mean spying on me?
Yes, you were--sitting behind and spying! You're always finding out what
we're doing, and putting it all down in a book. I hate you, and I won't
ever ask your advice again."

She rushed off, and I was following her when the bell rang for the
beginning of the second part. We all went in, Nina chattering and
laughing with Bohun just as though she had never been in a temper in her
life.

Then a dreadful thing happened. We arrived at the box, and Vera, Bohun,
and Nina sat in the seats they had occupied before. I waited for
Lawrence to sit down, but he turned round to me.

"I say, Durward--you sit next to Nina Michailovna this time. She'll be
bored having me all the while."

"No, no!" I began to protest, but Nina, her voice shaking, cried:

"Yes, Durdles, you sit down next to me--please."

I don't think that Lawrence perceived anything. He said very cheerfully,
"That's right--and I'll sit behind and see that you all behave."

I sat down and the second part began. The second part was wrestling. The
bell rang, the curtains parted, and instead of the splendid horses and
dogs there appeared a procession of some of the most obese and monstrous
types of humanity. Almost naked, they wandered round the arena,
mountains of flesh glistening in the electric light. A little man, all
puffed up like a poulter pigeon, then advanced into the middle of the
arena, and was greeted with wild applause from the gallery. To this he
bowed and then announced in a terrific voice, "Gentlemen, you are about
to see some of the most magnificent wrestling in the world. Allow me to
introduce to you the combatants." He then shouted out the names: "Ivan
Strogoff of Kiev--Paul Rosing of Odessa--Jacob Smyerioff of
Petrograd--John Meriss from Africa (this the most hideous of
negroes)--Karl Tubiloff of Helsingfors...." and so on. The gentlemen
named smirked and bowed. They all marched off, and then, in a moment,
one couple returned, shook hands, and, under the breathless attention
of the whole house, began to wrestle.

They did not, however, command my attention. I could think of nothing
but the little crushed figure next to me. I stole a look at her and saw
that a large tear was hanging on one eyelash ready to fall. I looked
hurriedly away. Poor child! And her birthday! I cursed Lawrence for his
clumsiness. What did it matter if she had put her hand on his knee? He
ought to have taken it and patted it. But it was more than likely, as I
knew very well, that he had never even noticed her action. He was
marvellously unaware of all kinds of things, and it was only too
possible that Nina scarcely existed for him. I longed to comfort her,
and I did then a foolish thing. I put out my hand and let it rest for a
moment on her dress.

Instantly she moved away with a sharp little gesture.

Five minutes later I heard a little whisper: "Durdles, it's so hot
here--and I hate these naked men. Shall we go? Ask Vera--"

The first bout had just come to an end. The little man with the swelling
chest was alone, strutting up and down, and answering questions hurled
at him from the gallery.

"Uncle Vanya, where's Michael of Odessa?"

"Ah, he's a soldier in the army now."

"Uncle Vanya... Uncle Vanya... Uncle Vanya..."

"Well, well, what is it?"

"Why isn't _Chornaya Maska_, wrestling to-night?"

"Ah, he's busy."

"What's he busy with?"

"Never mind, he's busy."

"What's he busy with?... Uncle Vanya... Uncle Vanya..."

"_Shto?_"

"Isn't it true that Michael's dead now?"

"So they say."

"Is it true?"

"Uncle Vanya... Uncle Vanya...."

The message had passed along that Nina was tired and wanted to go. We
all moved out through the passage and into the cold fresh air.

"It was quite time," said Vera. "I was going to suggest it myself."

"I hope you liked it," said Lawrence politely to Nina.

"No, I hated it," she answered furiously, and turned her back on him.

It could not be said that the birthday party was promising very well.



XXII

And yet for the first half-hour it really seemed that it would "go" very
well indeed. It had been agreed that it was to be absolutely a "family"
party, and Uncle Ivan, Semyonov, and Boris Grogoff were the only
additions to our number. Markovitch was there of course, and I saw at
once that he was eager to be agreeable and to be the best possible host.
As I had often noticed before, there was something pathetic about
Markovitch when he wished to be agreeable. He had neither the figure nor
the presence with which to be fascinating, and he did not know in the
least how to bring out his best points.

Especially when he tried, as he was sometimes ill-advised enough to do,
to flirt with young girls, he was a dismal failure. He was intended, by
nature, to be mysterious and malevolent, and had he only had a
malevolent spirit there would have been no tragedy--but in the confused
welter that he called his soul, malevolence was the least of the
elements, and other things--love, sympathy, twisted self-pity, ambition,
courage, and cowardice--drowned it. He was on his best behaviour
to-night, and over the points of his high white collar his peaked, ugly,
anxious face peered, appealing to the Fates for generosity.

But the Fates despise those who appeal.

I very soon saw that he was on excellent terms with Semyonov, and this
could only be, I was sure, because Semyonov had been flattering him.
Very soon I learnt the truth. I was standing near the table, watching
the company, when I found Markovitch at my side.

"Very glad you've come, Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "I've been meaning
to come and see you, only I've been too busy."

"How's the ink getting along?" I asked him.

"Oh, the ink!" He brushed my words scornfully aside. "No, that's
nothing. We must postpone that to a more propitious time.
Meanwhile--meanwhile, Ivan Andreievitch, I've hit it at last!"

"What is it this time?" I asked.

He could hardly speak for his excitement. "It's wood--the bark--the bark
of the tree, you know--a new kind of fibre for cloth. If I hadn't got to
look after these people here, I'd take you and show you now. You're a
clever fellow--you'd understand at once. I've been showing it to Alexei"
(he nodded in the direction of Semyonov), "and he entirely agrees with
me that there's every kind of possibility in it. The thing will be to
get the labour--that's the trouble nowadays--but I'll find somebody--one
of these timber men...."

So that was it, was it? I looked across at Semyonov, who was now seated
on Vera's right hand just opposite Boris Grogoff. He was very quiet,
very still, looking about him, his square pale beard a kind of symbol of
the secret immobility of his soul. I fancied that I detected behind his
placidity an almost relieved self-satisfaction, as though things were
going very much better than he had expected.

"So Alexei Petrovitch thinks well of it, does he?" I asked.

"Most enthusiastic," answered Markovitch eagerly. "He's gone into the
thing thoroughly with me, and has made some admirable suggestions....
Ivan Andreievitch, I think I should tell you--I misjudged him. I wasn't
fair on what I said to you the other day about him. Or perhaps it is
that being at the Front has changed him, softened him a bit. His love
affair there, you know, made him more sympathetic and kindly. I believe
he means well to us all. Vera won't agree with me. She's more cynical
than she used to be. I don't like that in her. She never had a
suspicious nature before, but now she doesn't trust one."

"You don't tell her enough," I interrupted.

"Tell her?" he looked at me doubtfully. "What is there I should tell
her?"

"Everything!" I answered.

"Everything?" His eyes suddenly narrowed, his face was sharp and
suspicious. "Does she tell me everything? Answer me that, Ivan
Andreievitch. There was a time once--but now--I give my confidences
where I'm trusted. If she treated me fairly--"

There was no chance to say more; they called us to the table. I took my
place between Nina and Ivan.

As I have said, the supper began very merrily. Boris Grogoff was, I
think, a little drunk when he arrived; at any rate he was noisy from the
very beginning. I have wondered often since whether he had any private
knowledge that night which elated and excited him, and was responsible
in part, perhaps, for what presently occurred. It may well have been
so, although at the time, of course, nothing of the kind occurred to me.
Nina appeared to have recovered her spirits. She was sitting next to
Lawrence, and chattered and laughed with him in her ordinary fashion.

And now, stupidly enough, when I try to recall exactly the steps that
led up to the catastrophe, I find it difficult to see things clearly. I
remember that very quickly I was conscious that there was danger in the
air. I was conscious of it first in the eyes of Semyonov, those steady,
watching, relentless eyes so aloof as to be inhuman. He was on the other
side of the table, and suddenly I said to myself, "He's expecting
something to happen." Then, directly after that I caught Vera's eye, and
I saw that she too was anxious. She looked pale and tired and sad.

I caught myself in the next instant saying to myself, "Well, she's got
Lawrence to look after her now"--so readily does the spirit that is
beyond one's grasp act above and outside one's poor human will.

I saw then that the trouble was once again, as it had often been before,
Grogoff. He was drinking heavily the rather poor claret which Markovitch
had managed to secure from somewhere. He addressed the world in general.

"I tell you that we're going to stop this filthy war," he cried. "And if
our government won't do it, we'll take things into our own hands...."

"Well," said Semyonov, smiling, "that's a thing that no Russian has ever
said before, for certain."

Every one laughed, and Grogoff flushed. "Oh, it's easy to sneer!" he
said. "Just because there've been miserable cowards in Russian history,
you think it will always be so. I tell you it is not so. The time is
coming when tyranny will topple from its throne, and we'll show Europe
the way to liberty."

"By which you mean," said Semyonov, "that you'll involve Russia in at
least three more wars in addition to the one she's at present so
magnificently losing."

"I tell you," screamed Grogoff, now so excited that he was standing on
his feet and waving his glass in the air, "that this time you have not
cowards to deal with. This will not be as it was in 1905; I know of what
I'm speaking."

Semyonov leant over the table and whispered something in Markovitch's
ear. I had seen that Markovitch had already been longing to speak. He
jumped up on to his feet, fiercely excited, his eyes flaming.

"It's nonsense that you are talking, sheer nonsense!" he cried.
"Russia's lost the war, and all we who believed in her have our hearts
broken. Russia won't be mended by a few vapouring idiots who talk and
talk without taking action."

"What do you call me?" screamed Grogoff.

"I mention no names," said Markovitch, his little eyes dancing with
anger. "Take it or no as you please. But I say that we have had enough
of all this vapouring talk, all this pretence of courage. Let us admit
that freedom has failed in Russia, that she must now submit herself to
the yoke."

"Coward! Coward!" screamed Grogoff.

"It's you who are the coward!" cried Markovitch.

"Call me that and I'll show you!"

"I do call you it!"

There was an instant's pause, during which we all of us had, I suppose,
some idea of trying to intervene.

But it was too late. Grogoff raised his hand and, with all his force,
flung his glass at Markovitch. Markovitch ducked his head, and the glass
smashed with a shattering tinkle on the wall behind him.

We all cried out, but the only thing of which I was conscious was that
Lawrence had sprung from his seat, had crossed to where Vera was
standing, and had put his hand on her arm. She glanced up at him. That
look which they exchanged, a look of revelation, of happiness, of sudden
marvellous security, was so significant that I could have cried out to
them both, "Look out! Look out!"

But if I had cried they would not have heard me.

My next instinct was to turn to Markovitch. He was frowning, coughing a
little, and feeling the top of his collar. His face was turned towards
Grogoff and he was speaking--could catch some words: "No right... in my
own house... Boris... I apologise... please don't think of it." But
his eyes were not looking at Boris at all; they were turned towards
Vera, staring at her, begging her, beseeching her.... What had he seen?
How much had he understood? And Nina? And Semyonov?

But at once, in a way most truly Russian, the atmosphere had changed. It
was Nina who controlled the situation. "Boris," she cried, "come here!"

We all waited in silence. He looked at her, a little sulkily, his head
hanging, but his eyes glancing up at her.

He seemed nothing then but a boy caught in some misdemeanour, obstinate,
sulky, but ready to make peace if a chance were offered him.

"Boris, come here!"

He moved across to her, looking her full in the face, his mouth sulky,
but his eyes rebelliously smiling.

"Well... well...."

She stood away from the table, drawn to her full height, her eyes
commanding him: "How dare you! Boris, how dare you! My
birthday--_mine_--and you've spoilt it, spoilt it all. Come here--up
close!"

He came to her until his hands were almost on her body; he hung his
head, standing over her.

She stood back as though she were going to strike him, then suddenly
with a laugh she sprang upon the chair beside her, flung her arms round
his neck and kissed him; then, still standing on the chair, turned and
faced us all.

"Now, that's enough--all of you. Michael, Uncle Ivan, Uncle Alexei,
Durdles--how dare you, all of you? You're all as bad--every one of you.
I'll punish all of you if we have any more politics. Beastly politics!
What do they matter? It's my birthday. My _birthday_, I tell you. It
_shan't_ be spoilt."

She seemed to me so excited as not to know what she was saying. What had
she seen? What did she know?... Meanwhile Grogoff was elated, wildly
pleased like a boy who, contrary to all his expectations, had won a
prize.

He went up to Markovitch with his hand out:

"Nicholas--forgive me--_Prasteete_--I forgot myself. I'm ashamed--my
abominable temper. We are friends. You were right, too. We talk here in
Russia too much, far too much, and when the moment comes for action we
shrink back. We see too far perhaps. Who knows? But you were right and I
am a fool. You've taught me a lesson by your nobility. Thank you,
Nicholas. And all of you--I apologise to all of you."

We moved away from the table. Vera came over to us, and then sat on the
sofa with her arm around Nina's neck. Nina was very quiet now, sitting
there, her cheeks flushed, smiling, but as though she were thinking of
something quite different.

Some one proposed that we should play "Petits Cheveaux." We gathered
around the table, and soon every one was laughing and gambling.

Only once I looked up and saw that Markovitch was gazing at Vera; and
once again I looked at Vera and saw that she was staring before her,
seeing nothing, lost in some vision--but it was not of Markovitch that
she was thinking....

I was the first to leave--I said good-night to every one. I could hear
their laughter as I waited at the bottom of the stairs for the Dvornik
to let me out.

But when I was in the street the world was breathlessly still. I walked
up the Prospect--no soul was in sight, only the scattered lamps, the
pale snow, and the houses. At the end of the Canal I stopped. The
silence was intense.

It seemed to me then that in the very centre of the Canal the ice
suddenly cracked, slowly pulled apart, leaving a still pool of black
water. The water slowly stirred, rippled, then a long, horned, and scaly
head pushed up. I could see the shining scales on its thick side and the
ribbed horn on the back of the neck. Beneath it the water stirred and
heaved. With dead glazed eyes it stared upon the world, then slowly, as
though it were drawn from below, it sank. The water rippled in narrowing
circles--then all was still....

The moon came out from behind filmy shadow. The world was intensely
light, and I saw that the ice of the canal had never been broken, and
that no pool of black water caught the moon's rays.

It was fiercely cold and I hurried home, pulling my Shuba more closely
about me.




PART II

LAWRENCE




LAWRENCE


I

Of some of the events that I am now about to relate it is obvious that I
could not have been an eye-witness--and yet, looking back from the
strange isolation that is now my world I find it incredibly difficult to
realise what I saw and what I did not. Was I with Nina and Vera on that
Tuesday night when they stood face to face with one another for the
first time? Was I with Markovitch during his walk through that
marvellous new world that he seemed himself to have created? I know that
I shared none of these things..., and yet it seems to me that I was at
the heart of them all. I may have been told many things by the actors in
those events--I may not. I cannot now in retrospect see any of it save
as my own personal experience, and as my own personal experience I must
relate it; but, as I have already said at the beginning of this book, no
one is compelled to believe either my tale or my interpretation. Every
man would, I suppose, like to tell his story in the manner of some other
man. I can conceive the events of this part of my narration being
interpreted in the spirit of the wildest farce, of the genteelest
comedy, of the most humorous satire--"Other men, Other gifts." I am a
dull and pompous fellow, as Semyonov often tells me; and I hope that I
never allowed him to see how deeply I felt the truth of his words.

Meanwhile I will begin with a small adventure of Henry Bohun's.
Apparently, one evening soon after Nina's party, he found himself about
half-past ten in the evening, lonely and unhappy, walking down the
Nevski. Gay and happy crowds wandered by him, brushing him aside,
refusing to look at him, showing in fact no kind of interest in his
existence. He was suddenly frightened, the distances seemed terrific and
the Nevski was so hard and bright and shining--that it had no use at all
for any lonely young man. He decided suddenly that he would go and see
me. He found an Isvostchick, but when they reached the Ekaterinsgofsky
Canal the surly coachman refused to drive further, saying that his horse
had gone lame, and that this was as far as he had bargained to go.

Henry was forced to leave the cab, and then found himself outside the
little people's cinema, where he had once been with Vera and myself.

He knew that my rooms were not far away, and he started off beside the
white and silent canal, wondering why he had come, and wishing he were
back in bed.

There was still a great deal of the baby in Henry, and ghosts and giants
and scaly-headed monsters were not incredibilities to his young
imagination. As he left the main thoroughfare and turned down past the
widening docks, he suddenly knew that he was terrified. There had been
stories of wild attacks on rich strangers, sand-bagging and the rest,
often enough, but it was not of that kind of thing that he was afraid.
He told me afterwards that he expected to see "long thick crawling
creatures" creeping towards him over the ice. He continually turned
round to see whether some one were following him. When he crossed the
tumbledown bridge that led to my island it seemed that he was absolutely
alone in the whole world. The masts of the ships dim through the cold
mist were like tangled spiders' webs. A strange hard red moon peered
over the towers and chimneys of the distant dockyard. The ice was
limitless, and of a dirty grey pallor, with black shadows streaking it.
My island must have looked desolate enough, with its dirty snow-heaps,
old boards and scrap-iron and tumbledown cottages.

Again, as on his first arrival in Petrograd, Henry was faced by the
solemn fact that events are so often romantic in retrospect, but grimly
realistic in experience. He reached my lodging and found the door open.
He climbed the dark rickety stairs and entered my sitting-room. The
blinds were not drawn, and the red moon peered through on to the grey
shadows that the ice beyond always flung. The stove was not burning, the
room was cold and deserted. Henry called my name and there was no
answer. He went into my bedroom and there was no one there. He came back
and stood there listening.

He could hear the creaking of some bar beyond the window and the
melancholy whistle of a distant train.

He was held there, as though spellbound. Suddenly he thought that he
heard some one climbing the stairs. He gave a cry, and that was answered
by a movement so close to him that it was almost at his elbow.

"Who's there?" he cried. He saw a shadow pass between the moon and
himself. In a panic of terror he cried out, and at the same time struck
a match. Some one came towards him, and he saw that it was Markovitch.

He was so relieved to find that it was a friend that he did not stop to
wonder what Markovitch should be doing hiding in my room. It afterwards
struck him that Markovitch looked odd. "Like a kind of conspirator, in
old shabby Shuba with the collar turned up. He looked jolly ill and
dirty, as though he hadn't slept or washed. He didn't seem a bit
surprised at seeing me there, and I think he scarcely realised that it
_was_ me. He was thinking of something else so hard that he couldn't
take me in."

"Oh, Bohun!" he said in a confused way.

"Hullo, Nicolai Leontievitch," Bohun said, trying to be unconcerned.
"What are you doing here?"

"Came to see Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "Wasn't here; I was going to
write to him."

Bohun then lit a candle and discovered that the place was in a very
considerable mess. Some one had been sifting my desk, and papers and
letters were lying about the floor. The drawers of my table were open,
and one chair was over-turned. Markovitch stood back near the window,
looking at Bohun suspiciously. They must have been a curious couple for
such a position. There was an awkward pause, and then Bohun, trying to
speak easily, said:

"Well, it seems that Durward isn't coming. He's out dining somewhere I
expect."

"Probably," said Markovitch drily.

There was another pause, then Markovitch broke out with: "I suppose you
think I've been here trying to steal something."

"Oh no--oh no--no--" stammered Bohun.

"But I have," said Markovitch. "You can look round and see. There it is
on every side of you. I've been trying to find a letter."

"Oh yes," said Bohun nervously.

"Well, that seems to you terrible," went on Markovitch, growing ever
fiercer. "Of course it seems to you perfect Englishmen a dreadful thing.
But why heed it?... You all do things just as bad, only you are
hypocrites."

"Oh yes, certainly," said Bohun.

"And now," said Markovitch with a snarl. "I'm sure you will not think me
a proper person for you to lodge with any longer--and you will be right.
I am not a proper person. I have no sense of decency, thank God, and no
Russian has any sense of decency, and that is why we are beaten and
despised by the whole world, and yet are finer than them all--so you'd
better not lodge with us any more."

"But of course," said Bohun, disliking more and more this uncomfortable
scene--"of course I shall continue to stay with you. You are my friends,
and one doesn't mind what one's friends do. One's friends are one's
friends."

Suddenly, then, Markovitch jerked himself forward, "just as though,"
Bohun afterwards described it to me, "he had shot himself out of a
catapault."

"Tell me," he said, "is your English friend in love with my wife?"

What Bohun wanted to do then was to run out of the room, down the dark
stairs, and away as fast as his legs would carry him. He had not been in
Russia so long that he had lost his English dislike of scenes, and he
was seriously afraid that Markovitch was, as he put it, "bang off his
head."

But at this critical moment, he remembered, it seems, my injunction to
him, "to be kind to Markovitch--to make a friend of him." That had
always seemed to him before impossible enough, but now, at the very
moment when Markovitch was at his queerest, he was also at his most
pathetic, looking there in the mist and shadows too untidy and dirty and
miserable to be really alarming. Henry then took courage. "That's all
nonsense, Markovitch," he said. "I suppose by 'your English friend' you
mean Lawrence. He thinks the world of your wife, of course, as we all
do, but he's not the fellow to be in love. I don't suppose he's ever
been really in love with a woman in his life. He's a kindly good-hearted
chap, Lawrence, and he wouldn't do harm to a fly."

Markovitch peered into Bohun's face. "What did you come here for, any of
you?" he asked. "What's Russia over-run with foreigners for? We'll clear
the lot of you out, all of you...." Then he broke off, with a pathetic
little gesture, his hand up to his head. "But I don't know what I'm
saying--I don't mean it, really. Only things are so difficult, and they
slip away from one so.

"I love Russia and I love my wife, Mr. Bohun--and they've both left me.
But you aren't interested in that. Why should you be? Only remember when
you're inclined to laugh at me that I'm like a man in a cockle-shell
boat--and it isn't my fault. I was put in it."

"But I'm never inclined to laugh," said Bohun eagerly. "I may be young
and only an Englishman--but I shouldn't wonder if I don't understand
better than you think. You try and see.... And I'll tell you another
thing, Nicolai Leontievitch, I loved your wife myself--loved her
madly--and she was so good to me and so far above me, that I saw that it
was like loving one of the angels. That's what we all feel, Nicolai
Leontievitch, so that you needn't have any fear--she's too far above all
of us. And I only want to be your friend and hers, and to help you in
any way I can."

(I can see Bohun saying this, very sincere, his cheeks flushed, eager.)

Markovitch held out both his hands.

"You're right," he cried. "She's above us all. It's true that she's an
angel, and we are all her servants. You have helped me by saying what
you have, and I won't forget it. You are right; I am wasting my time
with ridiculous suspicions when I ought to be working. Concentration,
that's what I want, and perhaps you will give it me."

He suddenly came forward and kissed Bohun on both cheeks. He smelt,
Bohun thought, of vodka. Bohun didn't like the embrace, of course, but
he accepted it gracefully.

"Now we'll go away," said Markovitch.

"We ought to put things straight," said Bohun.

"No; I shall leave things as they are," said Markovitch, "so that he
shall see exactly what I've done. I'll write a note."

He scribbled a note to me in pencil. I have it still. It ran:

Dear Ivan Andreievitch--I looked for a letter from my wife to you. In
doing so I was I suppose contemptible. But no matter. At least you see
me as I am. I clasp your hand, N. Markovitch.

They went away together.



II

I was greatly surprised to receive, a few days later, an invitation from
Baron Wilderling; he asked me to go with him on one of the first
evenings in March to a performance of Lermontov's "Masquerade" at the
Alexandra Theatre. I say Lermontov, but heaven knows that that great
Russian poet was not supposed to be going to have much to say in the
affair. This performance had been in preparation for at least ten years,
and when such delights as Gordon Craig's setting of "Hamlet," or Benois'
dresses for "La Locandiera" were discussed, the Wise Ones said:

"Ah,--all very well--just wait until you see 'Masquerade.'"

These manifestations of the artistic spirit had not been very numerous
of late in Petrograd. At the beginning of the war there had been many
cabarets--"The Cow," "The Calf," "The Dog," "The Striped Cat"--and these
had been underground cellars, lighted by Chinese lanterns, and the halls
decorated with Futurist paintings by Yakkolyeff or some other still more
advanced spirit. It seemed strange to me as I dressed that evening. I do
not know how long it was since I had put on a dinner-jacket. With the
exception of that one other visit to Baron Wilderling this seemed to be
my one link with the old world, and it was curious to feel its
fascination, its air of comfort and order and cleanliness, its courtesy
and discipline. "I think I'll leave these rooms," I thought as I looked
about me, "and take a decent flat somewhere."

It is a strange fact, behind which there lies, I believe, some odd sort
of moral significance, that I cannot now recall the events of that
evening in any kind of clear detail. I remember that it was bitterly
cold, with a sky that was flooded with stars. The snow had a queer
metallic sheen upon it as though it were coloured ice, and I can see now
the Nevski like a slab of some fiercely painted metal rising out of the
very smack of our horses' hoofs as my sleigh sped along--as though,
silkworm-like, I spun it out of the entrails of the sledge. It was all
light and fire and colour that night, with towers of gold and frosted
green, and even the black crowds that thronged the Nevski pavements shot
with colour.

Somewhere in one of Shorthouse's stories--in _The Little Schoolmaster
Mark_, I think--he gives a curious impression of a whirling fantastic
crowd of revellers who evoke by their movements some evil pattern in the
air around them, and the boy who is standing in their midst sees this
dark twisted sinister picture forming against the gorgeous walls and the
coloured figures until it blots out the whole scene and plunges him into
darkness. I will not pretend that on this evening I discerned anything
sinister or ominous in the gay scene that the Alexandra Theatre offered
me, but I was nevertheless weighed down by some quite unaccountable
depression that would not let me alone. For this I can see now that
Lawrence was very largely responsible. When I met him and the
Wilderlings in the foyer of the theatre I saw at once that he was
greatly changed.

The clear open expression of his eyes was gone; his mind was far away
from his company--and it was as though I could see into his brain and
watch the repetition of the old argument occurring again and again and
again with always the same questions and answers, the same reproaches,
the same defiances, the same obstinacies. He was caught by what was
perhaps the first crisis of his life. He had never been a man for much
contact with his fellow-beings, he had been aloof and reserved, generous
in his judgements of others, severe and narrow in his judgement of
himself. Above all, he had been proud of his strength....

Now he was threatened by something stronger than himself. He could have
managed it so long as he was aware only of his love for Vera.... Now,
when, since Nina's party, he knew that also Vera loved him, he had to
meet the tussle of his life.

That, at any rate, is the kind of figure that I give to his mood that
evening. He has told me much of what happened to him afterwards, but
nothing of that particular night, except once. "Do you remember that
'Masquerade' evening?... I was in hell that night...." which, for
Lawrence, was expressive enough.

Both the Baron and his wife were in great spirits. The Baron was more
than ever the evocation of the genius of elegance and order; he seemed
carved out of some coloured ivory, behind whose white perfection burnt a
shining resolute flame.

His clothes were so perfect that they would have expressed the whole of
him even though his body had not been there. He was happy. His eyes
danced appreciatively; he waved his white gloves at the scene as though
blessing it.

"Of course, Mr. Durward," he said to me, "this is nothing compared with
what we could do before the war--nevertheless here you see, for a
moment, a fragment of the old Petersburg--Petersburg as it shall be,
please God, again one day...."

I do not in the least remember who was present that evening, but it was,
I believe, a very distinguished company. The lights blazed, the jewels
flashed, and the chatter was tremendous. The horseshoe-shaped seats
behind the stalls clustered in knots and bunches of colour under the
great glitter of electricity about the Royal Box. Artists--Somoff and
Benois and Dobujinsky; novelists like Sologub and Merejkowsky; dancers
like Karsavina--actors from all over Petrograd--they were there, I
expect, to add criticism and argument to the adulation of friends and of
the carelessly observant rich Jews and merchants who had come simply to
display their jewellery. Petrograd, like every other city in the world,
is artistic only by the persistence of its minority.

I'm sure that there were Princesses and Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses
for any one who needed them, and it was only in the gallery where the
students and their girl-friends were gathered that the name of Lermontov
was mentioned. The name of the evening was "Meyerhold," the gentleman
responsible for the production. At last the Event that had been brewing
ceaselessly for the last ten years--ever since the last Revolution in
fact--was to reach creation. The moment of M. Meyerhold's life had
arrived--the moment, had we known it, of many other lives also; but we
did not know it. We buzzed and we hummed, we gasped and we gaped, we
yawned and we applauded; and the rustle of gold tissue, the scent of
gold leaf, the thick sticky substance of gold paint, filled the air,
flooded the arena, washed past us into the street outside. Meanwhile M.
Meyerhold, white, perspiring, in his shirt-sleeves with his collar
loosened and his hair damp, is in labour behind the gold tissue to
produce the child of his life... and Behold, the Child is produced!

And such a child! It was not I am sure so fantastic an affair in reality
as in my rememberance of it. I have, since then, read Lermontov's play,
and I must confess that it does not seem, in cold truth, to be one of
his finest works. It is long and old-fashioned, melodramatic and
clumsy--but then it was not on this occasion Lermontov's play that was
the thing. But it was a masquerade, and that in a sense far from the
author's intention. As I watched I remember that I forgot the bad acting
(the hero was quite atrocious), forgot the lapses of taste in the colour
and arrangement of the play, forgot the artifices and elaborate
originalities and false sincerities; there were, I have no doubt, many
things in it all that were bad and meretricious--I was dreaming. I saw,
against my will and outside my own agency, mingled with the gold
screens, the purple curtains, the fantasies and extravagances of the
costumes, the sudden flashes of unexpected colour through light or dress
or backcloth--pictures from those Galician days that had been, until
Semyonov's return, as I fancied, forgotten.

A crowd of revellers ran down the stage, and a shimmering cloud of gold
shot with red and purple was flung from one end of the hall to the
other, and behind it, through it, between it, I saw the chill light of
the early morning, and Nikitin and I sitting on the bench outside the
stinking but that we had used as an operating theatre, watching the
first rays of the sun warm, the cold mountain's rim. I could hear
voices, and the murmurs of the sleeping men and the groans of the
wounded. The scene closed. There was space and light, and a gorgeous
figure, stiff with the splendour of his robes, talked in a dark garden
with his lady. Their voices murmured, a lute was played, some one sang,
and through the thread of it all I saw that moment when, packed together
on our cart, we hung for an instant on the top of the hill and looked
back to a country that had suddenly crackled into flame. There was that
terrific crash as of the smashing of a world of china, the fierce
crackle of the machine-guns, and then the boom of the cannon from under
our very feet... the garden was filled with revellers, laughing,
dancing, singing, the air was filled again with the air of gold paint,
the tenor's voice rose higher and higher, the golden screens closed--the
act was ended.

It was as though I had received, in some dim, bewildered fashion, a
warning. When the lights went up, it was some moments before I realised
that the Baron was speaking to me, that a babel of chatter, like a
sudden rain storm on a glass roof, had burst on every side of us, and
that a huge Jewess, all bare back and sham pearls, was trying to pass me
on her way to the corridor. The Baron talked away: "Very amusing, don't
you think? After Reinhardt, of course, although they say now that
Reinhardt got all his ideas from your man Craig. I'm sure I don't know
whether that's so.... I hope you're more reassured to-night, Mr.
Durward. You were full of alarms the other evening. Look around you and
you'll see the true Russia...."

"I can't believe this to be the true Russia," I said. "Petrograd is not
the true Russia. I don't believe that there _is_ a true Russia."

"Well, there you are," he continued eagerly. "No true Russia! Quite so.
Very observant. But we have to pretend there is, and that's what you
foreigners are always forgetting. The Russian is an individualist--give
him freedom and he'll lose all sense of his companions. He will pursue
his own idea. Myself and my party are here to prevent him from pursuing
his own idea, for the good of himself and his country. He may be
discontented, he may grumble, but he doesn't realise his luck. Give him
his freedom, and in six months you'll see Russia back in the Middle
Ages."

"And another six months?" I asked.

"The Stone Age."

"And then?"

"Ah," he said, smiling, "you ask me too much, Mr. Durward. We are
speaking of our own generation."

The curtain was up again and I was back in my other world. I cannot tell
you anything of the rest of the play--I remember nothing. Only I know
that I was actually living over again those awful days in the
forest--the heat, the flies, the smells, the glassy sheen of the trees,
the perpetual rumble of the guns, the desolate whine of the shells--and
then Marie's death, Trenchard's sorrow, Trenchard's death, that last
view of Semyonov... and I felt that I was being made to remember it all
for a purpose, as though my old friend, rich now with his wiser
knowledge, was whispering to me, "All life is bound up. You cannot leave
anything behind you; the past, the present, the future are one. You had
pushed us away from you, but we are with you always for ever. I am your
friend for ever, and Marie is your friend, and now, once more, you have
to take your part in a battle, and we have come to you to share it with
you. Do not be confused by history or public events or class struggle or
any big names; it is the individual and the soul of the individual alone
that matters. I and Marie and Vera and Nina and Markovitch--our love for
you, your love for us, our courage, our self-sacrifice, our weakness,
our defeat, our progress--these are the things for which life exists;
it exists as a training-ground for the immortal soul...."

With a sweep of colour the stage broke into a mist of movement. Masked
and hooded figures in purple and gold and blue and red danced madly off
into a forest of stinking, sodden leaves and trees as thin as
tissue-paper burnt by the sun. "Oh--aye! oh--aye! oh--aye!" came from
the wounded, and the dancers answered, "Tra-la-la-la! Tra-la-la-la,'"
The golden screens were drawn forward, the lights were up again, and the
whole theatre was stirring like a coloured paper ant heap.

Outside in the foyer I found Lawrence at my elbow.

"Go and see her," he whispered to me, "as soon as possible! Tell
her--tell her--no, tell her nothing. But see that she's all right and
let me know. See her to-morrow--early!"

I could say nothing to him, for the Baron had joined us.

"Good-night! Good-night! A most delightful evening!... Most amusing!...
No, thank you, I shall walk!"

"Come and see us," said the Baroness, smiling.

"Very soon," I answered. I little knew that I should never see either of
them again.



III

I awoke that night with a sudden panic that I must instantly see Vera.
I, even in the way that one does when, one is only half awake, struggled
out of bed and felt for my clothes. Then I remembered and climbed back
again, but sleep would not return to me. The self-criticism and
self-distrust that were always attacking me and paralysing my action
sprang upon me now and gripped me. What was I to do? How was I to act? I
saw Vera and Nina and Lawrence and, behind them, smiling at me,
Semyonov. They were asking for my help, but they were, in some strange,
intangible way, most desperately remote. When I read now in our papers
shrill criticisms on our officials, our Cabinet, our generals, our
propagandists, our merchants, for their failure to deal adequately with
Russia, I say: Deal adequately? First you must catch your bird... and
no Western snare has ever caught the Russian bird of paradise, and I
dare prophesy that no Western snare ever will. Had I not broken my
heart in the pursuit, and was I not as far as ever from attainment? The
secret of the mystery of life is the isolation that separates every man
from his fellow--the secret of dissatisfaction too; and the only purpose
in life is to realise that isolation, and to love one's fellow-man
because of it, and to show one's own courage, like a flag to which the
other travellers may wave their answer; but we Westerners have at least
the waiting comfort of our discipline, of our materialism, of our
indifference to ideas. The Russian, I believe, lives in a world of
loneliness peopled only by ideas. His impulses towards self-confession,
towards brotherhood, towards vice, towards cynicism, towards his belief
in God and his scorn of Him, come out of this world; and beyond it he
sees his fellow-men as trees walking, and the Mountain of God as a
distant peak, placed there only to emphasise his irony.

I had wanted to be friends with Nina and Vera--I had even longed for
it--and now at the crisis when I must rise and act they were so far away
from me that I could only see them, like coloured ghosts, vanishing into
mist.

I would go at once and see Vera and there do what I could. Lawrence must
return to England--then all would be well. Markovitch must be
persuaded.... Nina must be told.... I slept and tumbled into a
nightmare of a pursuit, down endless streets, of flying figures.

Next day I went to Vera. I found her, to my joy, alone. I realised at
once that our talk would be difficult. She was grave and severe, sitting
back in her chair, her head up, not looking at me at all, but beyond
through the window to the tops of the trees feathery with snow against
the sky of egg-shell blue. I am always beaten by a hostile atmosphere.
To-day I was at my worst, and soon we were talking like a couple of the
merest strangers.

She asked me whether I had heard that there were very serious
disturbances on the other side of the river.

"I was on the Nevski early this afternoon," I said, "and I saw about
twenty Cossacks go galloping down towards the Neva. I asked somebody and
was told that some women had broken into the bakers' shops on Vassily
Ostrov...."

"It will end as they always end," said Vera. "Some arrests and a few
people beaten, and a policeman will get a medal."

There was a long pause. "I went to 'Masquerade' the other night," I
said.

"I hear it's very good...."

"Pretentious and rather vulgar--but amusing all the same."

"Every one's talking about it and trying to get seats...."

"Yes. Meyerhold must be pleased."

"They discuss it much more than they do the war, or even politics. Every
one's tired of the war."

I said nothing. She continued:

"So I suppose we shall just go on for years and years.... And then the
Empress herself will be tired one day and it will suddenly stop." She
showed a flash of interest, turning to me and looking at me for the
first time since I had come in.

"Ivan Andreievitch, what do you stay in Russia for? Why don't you go
back to England?"

I was taken by surprise. I stammered, "Why do I stay? Why,
because--because I like it."

"You can't like it. There's _nothing_ to like in Russia."

"There's _everything_!" I answered. "And I have friends here," I added.
But she didn't answer that, and continued to sit staring out at the
trees. We talked a little more about nothing at all, and then there was
another long pause. At last I could endure it no longer, I jumped to my
feet.

"Vera Michailovna," I cried, "what have I done?"

"Done?" she asked me with a look of self-conscious surprise. "What do
you mean?"

"You know what I mean well enough," I answered. I tried to speak firmly,
but my voice trembled a little. "You told me I was your friend. When I
was ill the other day you came to me and said that you needed help and
that you wanted me to help you. I said that I would--"

I paused.

"Well?" she said, in a hard, unrelenting voice.

"Well--" I hesitated and stammered, cursing myself for my miserable
cowardice. "You are in trouble now, Vera--great trouble--I came here
because I am ready to do anything for you--anything--and you treat me
like a stranger, almost like an enemy."

I saw her lip tremble--only for an instant. She said nothing.

"If you've got anything against me since you saw me last," I went on,
"tell me and I'll go away. But I had to see you and also Lawrence--"

At the mention of his name her whole body quivered, but again only for
an instant.

"Lawrence asked me to come and see you."

She looked up at me then gravely and coldly, and without the sign of any
emotion either in her face or voice.

"Thank you, Ivan Andreievitch, but I want no help--I am in no trouble.
It was very kind of Mr. Lawrence, but really--"

Then I could endure it no longer. I broke out:

"Vera, what's the matter. You know all this isn't true.... I don't know
what idea you have now in your head, but you must let me speak to you.
I've got to tell you this--that Lawrence must go back to England, and as
soon as possible--and I will see that he does--"

That did its work. In an instant she was upon me like a wild beast,
springing from her chair, standing close to me, her head flung back, her
eyes furious.

"You wouldn't dare!" she cried. "It's none of your business, Ivan
Andreievitch. You say you're my friend. You're not. You're my enemy--my
enemy. I don't care for him, not in the very least--he is nothing to
me--nothing to me at all. But he mustn't go back to England. It will
ruin his career. You will ruin him for life, Ivan Andreievitch. What
business is it of yours? You imagine--because of what you fancied you
saw at Nina's party. There was nothing at Nina's party--nothing. I love
my husband, Ivan Andreievitch, and you are my enemy if you say anything
else. And you pretend to be his friend, but you are his enemy if you try
to have him sent back to England.... He must not go. For the matter of
that, I will never see him again--never--if that is what you want. See,
I promise you never--never--" She suddenly broke down--she, Vera
Michailovna, the proudest woman I had ever known, turning from me, her
head in her hands, sobbing, her shoulders bent.

I was most deeply moved. I could say nothing at first, then, when the
sound of her sobbing became unbearable to me, I murmured,

"Vera, please. I have no power. I can't make him go. I will only do what
you wish. Vera, please, please--"

Then, with her back still turned to me, I heard her say,

"Please, go. I didn't mean--I didn't... but go now... and come
back--later."

I waited a minute, and then, miserable, terrified of the future, I went.



IV

Next night (it was Friday evening) Semyonov paid me a visit. I was just
dropping to sleep in my chair. I had been reading that story of De la
Mare's _The Return_--one of the most beautiful books in our language,
whether for its spirit, its prose, or its poetry--and something of the
moon-lit colour of its pages had crept into my soul, so that the
material world was spun into threads of the finest silk behind which
other worlds were more and more plainly visible. I had not drawn my
blind, and a wonderful moon shone clear on to the bare boards of my
room, bringing with its rays the mother-of-pearl reflections of the
limitless ice, and these floated on my wall in trembling waves of opaque
light. In the middle of this splendour I dropped slowly into slumber,
the book falling from my hands, and I, on my part, seeming to float
lazily backwards and forwards, as though, truly, one were at the bottom
of some crystal sea, idly and happily drowned.

From all of this I was roused by a sharp knock on my door, and I started
up, still bewildered and bemused, but saying to myself aloud, "There's
some one there! there's some one there!..." I stood for quite a while,
listening, on the middle of my shining floor, then the knock was almost
fiercely repeated. I opened the door and, to my surprise, found Semyonov
standing there. He came in, smiling, very polite of course.

"You'll forgive me, Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "This is terribly
unceremonious. But I had an urgent desire to see you, and you wouldn't
wish me, in the circumstances, to have waited."

"Please," I said. I went to the window and drew the blinds. I lit the
lamp. He took off his Shuba and we sat down. The room was very dim now,
and I could only see his mouth and square beard behind the lamp.

"I've no Samovar, I'm afraid," I said. "If I'd known you were coming I'd
have told her to have it ready. But it's too late now. She's gone to
bed."

"Nonsense," he said brusquely. "You know that I don't care about that.
Now we'll waste no time. Let us come straight to the point at once. I've
come to give you some advice, Ivan Andreievitch--very simple advice. Go
home to England." Before he had finished the sentence I had felt the
hostility in his voice; I knew that it was to be a fight between us, and
strangely, at once the self-distrust and cowardice from which I had been
suffering all those weeks left me. I felt warm and happy. I felt that
with Semyonov I knew how to deal. I was afraid of Vera and Nina,
perhaps, because I loved them, but of Semyonov, thank God, I was not
afraid.

"Well, now, that's very kind of you," I said, "to take so much interest
in my movements. I didn't know that it mattered to you so much where I
was. Why must I go?"

"Because you are doing no good here. You are interfering in things of
which you have no knowledge. When we met before you interfered, and you
must honestly admit that you did not improve things. Now it is even more
serious. I must ask you to leave my family alone, Ivan Andreievitch."

"Your family!" I retorted, laughing. "Upon my word, you do them great
honour. I wonder whether they'd be very proud and pleased if they knew
of your adoption of them. I haven't noticed on their side any very great
signs of devotion."

He laughed. "No, you haven't noticed, Ivan Andreievitch. But there, you
don't really notice very much. You think you see the devil of a lot and
are a mighty clever fellow; but we're Russians, you know, and it takes
more than sentimental mysticism to understand us. But even if you did
understand us--which you don't--the real point is that we don't want
you, any of you, patronising, patting us on the shoulder, explaining us
to ourselves, talking about our souls, our unpunctuality, and our
capacity for drink. However, that's merely in a general way. In a
personal, direct, and individual way, I beg you not to visit my family
again. Stick to your own countrymen."

Although he spoke obstinately, and with a show of assurance, I realised,
behind his words, his own uncertainty.

"See here, Semyonov," I said. "It's just my own Englishmen that I am
going to stick to. What about Lawrence? And what about Bohun? Will you
prevent me from continuing my friendship with them?"

"Lawrence... Lawrence," he said slowly, in a voice quite other than his
earlier one, and as though he were talking aloud to himself. "Now,
that's strange... there's a funny thing. A heavy, dull, silent
Englishman, as ugly as only an Englishman can be, and the two of them
are mad about him--nothing in him--nothing--and yet there it is. It's
the fidelity in the man, that's what it is, Durward...." He suddenly
called out the word aloud, as though he'd made a discovery. "Fidelity...
fidelity... that's what we Russians admire, and there's a man with
not enough imagination to make him unfaithful. Fidelity!--lack of
imagination, lack of freedom--that's all fidelity is.... But I'm
faithful.... God knows I'm faithful--always! always!"

He stared past me. I swear that he did not see me, that I had vanished
utterly from his vision. I waited. He was leaning forward, pressing both
his thick white hands on the table. His gaze must have pierced the ice
beyond the walls, and the worlds beyond the ice.

Then quite suddenly he came back to me and said very quietly,

"Well, there it is, Ivan Andreievitch.... You must leave Vera and Nina
alone. It isn't your affair."

We continued the discussion then in a strange and friendly way. "I
believe it to be my affair," I answered quietly, "simply because they
care for me and have asked me to help them if they were in trouble. I
still deny that Vera cares for Lawrence.... Nina has had some girl's
romantic idea perhaps... but that is the extent of the trouble. You are
trying to make things worse, Alexei Petrovitch, for your own
purposes--and God only knows what they are."

He now spoke so quietly that I could scarcely hear his words. He was
leaning forward on the table, resting his head on his hands and looking
gravely at me.

"What I can't understand, Ivan Andreievitch," he said, "is why you're
always getting in my way. You did so in Galicia, and now here you are
again. It is not as though you were strong or wise--no, it is because
you are persistent. I admire you in a way, you know, but now, this time,
I assure you that you are making a great mistake in remaining. You will
be able to influence neither Vera Michailovna nor your bullock of an
Englishman when the moment comes. At the crisis they will never think of
you at all, and the end of it simply will be that all parties concerned
will hate you. I don't wish you any harm, and I assure you that you will
suffer terribly if you stay.... By the way, Ivan Andreievitch," his
voice suddenly dropped, "you haven't ever had--by chance--just by
chance--any photograph of Marie Ivanovna with you, have you? Just by
chance, you know...."

"No," I said shortly, "I never had one."

"No--of course--not. I only thought.... But of course you
wouldn't--no--no.... Well, as I was saying, you'd better leave us all to
our fate. You can't prevent things--you can't indeed." I looked at him
without speaking. He returned my gaze.

"Tell me one thing," I said, "before I answer you. What are you doing to
Markovitch, Alexei Petrovitch?"

"Markovitch!" He repeated the name with an air of surprise as though he
had never heard it before. "What do you mean?"

"You have some plan with regard to him," I said. "What is it?"

He laughed then. "I a plan! My dear Durward, how romantic you always
insist on being! I a plan! Your plunges into Russian psychology are as
naïve as the girl who pays her ten kopecks to see the Fat Woman at the
Fair! Markovitch and I understand one another. We trust one another. He
is a simple fellow, but I trust him."

"Do you remember," I said, "that the other day at the Jews' Market you
told me the story of the man who tortured his friend, until the man shot
him--simply because he was tired of life and too proud to commit
suicide. Why did you tell me that story?"

"Did I tell it you?" he asked indifferently. "I had forgotten. But it is
of no importance. You know, Ivan Andreievitch, that what I told you
before is true.... We don't want you here any more. I tell you in a
perfectly friendly way. I bear you no malice. But we're tired of your
sentimentality. I'm not speaking only for myself--I'm not indeed. We
feel that you avoid life to a ridiculous extent, and that you have no
right to talk to us Russians on such a subject. What, for instance, do
you know about women? For years I slept with a different woman every
night of the week--old and young, beautiful and ugly, some women like
men, some like God, some like the gutter. That teaches you something
about women--but only something. Afterwards I found that there was only
one woman--I left all the others like dirty washing--I was supremely
faithful... so I learnt the rest. Now you have never been faithful nor
unfaithful--I'm sure that you have not. Then about God? When have you
ever thought about Him? Why, you are ashamed to mention His name. If an
Englishman speaks of God when other men are present every one
laughs--and yet why? It is a very serious and interesting question. God
exists undoubtedly, and so we must make up our minds about Him. We must
establish some relationship--what it is does not matter--that is our
individual 'case'--but only the English establish no relationship and
then call it a religion.... And so in this affair of my family. What
does it matter what they do? That is the only thing of which you think,
that they should die or disgrace their name or be unhappy or quarrel....
Pooh! What are all those things compared with the idea behind them? If
they wish to sacrifice happiness for an idea, that is their good luck,
and no Russian would think of preventing them. But you come in with your
English morality and sentiment, and scream and cry.... No, Ivan
Andreievitch, go home! go home!"

I waited to be quite sure that he had finished, and then I said,

"That's all as it may be, Alexei Petrovitch. It may be as you say. The
point is, that I remain here."

He got up from his chair. "You are determined on that?"

"I am determined," I answered.

"Nothing will change you?"

"Nothing."

"Then it is a battle between us?"

"If you like."

"So be it."

I helped him on with his Shuba. He said, in an ordinary conversational
tone,

"There may be trouble to-morrow. There's been shooting by the Nicholas
Station this afternoon, I hear. I should avoid the Nevski to-morrow."

I laughed. "I'm not afraid of that kind of death, Alexei Petrovitch," I
said.

"No," he said, looking at me. "I will do you justice. You are not."

He pulled his Shuba close about him.

"Good-night, Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "It's been a very pleasant
talk."

"Very," I answered. "Good-night,"

After he had gone I drew back the blinds and let the moonlight flood the
room.



V

I feel conscious, as I approach the centre of my story, that there is an
appearance of uncertainty in the way that I pass from one character to
another. I do not defend that uncertainty.

What I think I really feel now, on looking back, is that each of
us--myself, Semyonov, Vera, Nina, Lawrence, Bohun, Grogoff, yes, and the
Rat himself--was a part of a mysterious figure who was beyond us,
outside us, and above us all. The heart, the lungs, the mouth, the
eyes... used against our own human agency, and yet free within that
domination for the exercise of our own free will. Have you never felt
when you have been swept into the interaction of some group of persons
that you were being employed as a part of a figure that without you
would be incomplete? The figure is formed.... For an instant it remains,
gigantic, splendid, towering above mankind, as a symbol, a warning, a
judgement, an ideal, a threat. Dimly you recognise that you have played
some part in the creation of that figure, and that living for a moment,
as you have done, in some force outside your individuality, you have yet
expressed that same individuality more nobly than any poor assertion of
your own small lonely figure could afford. You have been used and now
you are alone again.... You were caught up and united to your fellowmen.
God appeared to you--not, as you had expected, in a vision cut off from
the rest of the world, but in a revelation that you shared and that was
only revealed because you were uniting with others. And yet your
individuality was still there, strengthened, heightened, purified.

And the vision of the figure remains....

When I woke on Saturday morning, after my evening with Semyonov, I was
conscious that I was relieved as though I had finally settled some
affair whose uncertainty had worried me. I lay in bed chuckling as
though I had won a triumph over Semyonov, as though I said to myself,
"Well, I needn't be afraid of him any longer." It was a most beautiful
day, crystal clear, with a stainless blue sky and the snow like a carpet
of jewels, and I thought I would go and see how the world was behaving.
I walked down the Morskaia, finding it quiet enough, although I fancied
that the faces of the passers-by were anxious and nervous. Nevertheless,
the brilliant sunshine and the clear peaceful beauty of the snow
reassured me--the world was too beautiful and well-ordered a place to
allow disturbance. Then at the corner of the English shop where the
Morskaia joins the Nevski Prospect, I realised that something had
occurred. It was as though the world that I had known so long, and with
whom I felt upon such intimate terms, had suddenly screwed round its
face and showed me a new grin.

The broad space of the Nevski was swallowed up by a vast crowd, very
quiet, very amiable, moving easily, almost slothfully, in a slowly
stirring stream.

As I looked up the Nevski I realised what it was that had given me the
first positive shock of an altered world. The trams had stopped. I had
never seen the Nevski without its trams; I had always been forced to
stand on the brink, waiting whilst the stream of Isvostchicks galloped
past and the heavy, lumbering, coloured elephants tottered along,
amiable and slow and good-natured like everything else in that country.
Now the elephants were gone; the Isvostchicks were gone. So far as my
eye could see, the black stream flooded the shining way.

I mingled with the crowd and found myself slowly propelled in an
amiable, aimless manner up the street.

"What's the matter?" I asked a cheerful, fat little "Chinovnik," who
seemed to be tethered to me by some outside invincible force.

"I don't know...." he said. "They're saying there's been some shooting
up by the Nicholas Station--but that was last night. Some women had a
procession about food.... _Tak oni gavoryat_--so they say.... But I
don't know. People have just come out to see what they can see...."

And so they had--women, boys, old men, little children. I could see no
signs of ill-temper anywhere, only a rather open-mouthed wonder and
sense of expectation.

A large woman near me, with a shawl over her head and carrying a large
basket, laughed a great deal. "No, I wouldn't go," she said. "You go and
get it for yourself--I'm not coming. Not I, I was too clever for that."
Then she would turn, shrilly calling for some child who was apparently
lost in the crowd. "Sacha!... Ah! Sacha!" she cried--and turning again,
"Eh! look at the Cossack!... There's a fine Cossack!"

It was then that I noticed the Cossacks. They were lined up along the
side of the pavement, and sometimes they would suddenly wheel and
clatter along the pavement itself, to the great confusion of the crowd
who would scatter in every direction.

They were fine-looking men, and their faces expressed childish and
rather worried amiability. The crowd obviously feared them not at all,
and I saw a woman standing with her hand on the neck of one of the
horses, talking in a very friendly fashion to the soldier who rode it.
"That's strange," I thought to myself; "there's something queer here."
It was then, just at the entrance of the "Malaia Koniushennaia," that a
strange little incident occurred. Some fellow--I could just see his
shaggy head, his pale face, and black beard--had been shouting
something, and suddenly a little group of Cossacks moved towards him and
he was surrounded. They turned off with him towards a yard close at
hand. I could hear his voice shrilly protesting; the crowd also moved
behind, murmuring. Suddenly a Cossack, laughing, said something. I could
not hear his words, but every one near me laughed. The little Chinovnik
at my side said to me, "That's right. They're not going to shoot,
whatever happens--not on their brothers, they say. They'll let the
fellow go in a moment. It's only just for discipline's sake. That's
right. That's the spirit!"

"But what about the police?" I asked.

"Ah, the police!" His cheery, good-natured face was suddenly dark and
scowling. "Let them try, that's all. It's Protopopoff who's our
enemy--not the Cossacks."

And a woman near him repeated.

"Yes, yes, it's Protopopoff. Hurrah for the Cossacks!"

I was squeezed now into a corner, and the crowd swirled and eddied about
me in a tangled stream, slow, smiling, confused, and excited. I pushed
my way along, and at last tumbled down the dark stone steps into the
"Cave de la Grave," a little restaurant patronised by the foreigners and
certain middle-class Russians. It was full, and every one was eating his
or her meal very comfortably as though nothing at all were the matter. I
sat down with a young American, an acquaintance of mine attached to the
American Embassy.

"There's a tremendous crowd in the Nevski," I said.

"Guess I'm too hungry to trouble about it," he answered.

"Do you think there's going to be any trouble?" I asked.

"Course not. These folks are always wandering round. M. Protopopoff has
it in hand all right."

"Yes, I suppose he has," I answered with a sigh.

"You seem to want trouble," he said, suddenly looking up at me.

"No, I don't want trouble," I answered. "But I'm sick of this mess, this
mismanagement, thievery, lying--one's tempted to think that anything
would be better--"

"Don't you believe it," he said brusquely. "Excuse me, Durward, I've
been in this country five years. A revolution would mean God's own
upset, and you've got a war on, haven't you?"

"They might fight better than ever," I argued.

"Fight!" he laughed. "They're dam sick of it all, that's what they are.
And a revolution would leave 'em like a lot of silly sheep wandering on
to a precipice. But there won't be no revolution. Take my word."

It was at that moment that I saw Boris Grogoff come in. He stood in the
doorway looking about him, and he had the strangest air of a man walking
in his sleep, so bewildered, so rapt, so removed was he. He stared about
him, looked straight at me, but did not recognise me; finally, when a
waiter showed him a table, he sat down still gazing in front of him. The
waiter had to speak to him twice before he ordered his meal, and then he
spoke so strangely that the fellow looked at him in astonishment. "Guess
that chap's seen the Millennium," remarked my American. "Or he's drunk,
maybe."

This appearance had the oddest effect on me. It was as though I had been
given a sudden conviction that after all there was something behind this
disturbance. I saw, during the whole of the rest of that day, Grogoff's
strange face with the exalted, bewildered eyes, the excited mouth, the
body tense and strained as though waiting for a blow. And now, always
when I look back I see Boris Grogoff standing in the doorway of the
"Cave de la Grave" like a ghost from another world warning me.

In the afternoon I had a piece of business that took me across the
river. I did my business and turned homewards. It was almost dark, and
the ice of the Neva was coloured a faint green under the grey sky; the
buildings rose out of it like black bubbles poised over a swamp. I was
in that strange quarter of Petrograd where the river seems, like some
sluggish octopus, to possess a thousand coils. Always you are turning
upon a new bend of the ice, secretly stretching into darkness; strange
bridges suddenly meet you, and then, where you had expected to find a
solid mass of hideous flats, there will be a cluster of masts and the
smell of tar, and little fierce red lights like the eyes of waiting
beasts.

I seemed to stand with ice on every side of me, and so frail was my
trembling wooden bridge that it seemed an easy thing for the ice, that
appeared to press with tremendous weight against its banks, to grind the
supports to fragments. There was complete silence on every side of me.
The street to my left was utterly deserted. I heard no cries nor
calls--only the ice seemed once and again to quiver as though some
submerged creature was moving beneath it. That vast crowd on the Nevski
seemed to be a dream. I was in a world that had fallen into decay and
desolation, and I could smell rotting wood, and could fancy that frozen
blades of grass were pressing up through the very pavement stones.
Suddenly an Isvostchick stumbled along past me, down the empty street,
and the bumping rattle of the sledge on the snow woke me from my
laziness. I started off homewards. When I had gone a little way and was
approaching the bridge over the Neva some man passed me, looked back,
stopped and waited for me. When I came up to him I saw to my surprise
that it was the Rat. He had his coat-collar turned over his ears and his
dirty fur cap pulled down over his forehead. His nose was very red, and
his thin hollow cheeks a dirty yellow colour.

"Good-evening, Barin," he said, grinning.

"Good-evening," I said. "Where are you slipping off to so secretly?"

"Slipping off?" He did not seem to understand my word. I repeated it.

"Oh, I'm not slipping off," he said almost indignantly. "No, indeed. I'm
just out for a walk like your Honour, to see the town."

"What have they been doing this afternoon?" I asked. "There's been a
fine fuss on the Nevski."

"Yes, there has...." he said, chuckling. "But it's nothing to the fuss
there will be."

"Nonsense," I said. "The police have got it all in control already.
You'll see to-morrow...."

"And the soldiers, Barin?"

"Oh, the soldiers won't do anything. Talk's one thing--action's
another."

He laughed to himself and seemed greatly amused. This irritated me.

"Well, what do you know?" I asked.

"I know nothing," he chuckled. "But remember, Barin, in a week's time,
if you want me I'm your friend. Who knows? In a week I may be a rich
man."

"Some one else's riches," I answered.

"Certainly," he said. "And why not? Why should he have things? Is he a
better man than I? Possibly--but then it is easy for a rich man to keep
within the law. And then Russia's meant for the poor man. However," he
continued, with great contempt in his voice, "that's politics--dull
stuff. While the others talk I act."

"And what about the Germans?" I asked him. "Does it occur to you that
when you've collected your spoils the Germans will come in and take
them?"

"Ah, you don't understand us, Barin," he said, laughing. "You're a good
man and a kind man, but you don't understand us. What can the Germans
do? They can't take the whole of Russia. Russia's a big country.... No,
if the Germans come there'll be more for us to take."

We stood for a moment under a lamp-post. He put his hand on my arm and
looked up at me with his queer ugly face, his sentimental dreary eyes,
his red nose, and his hard, cruel little mouth.

"But no one shall touch you--unless it's myself if I'm very drunk. But
you, knowing me, will understand afterwards that I was at least not
malicious--"

I laughed. "And this mysticism that they tell us about in England. Are
you mystical, Rat? Have you a beautiful soul?"

He sniffed and blew his nose with his hand.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Barin--I suppose you haven't a
rouble or two on you?"

"No, I haven't," I answered. He looked up and down the bridge as though
he were wondering whether an attack on me was worth while. He saw a
policeman and decided that it wasn't.

"Well, good-night, Barin," he said cheerfully. He shuffled off. I looked
at the vast Neva, pale green and dim grey, so silent under the bridges.
The policeman, enormous under his high coat, the sure and confident
guardian of that silent world, came slowly towards me, and I turned away
home.



VI

The next day, Sunday, I have always called in my mind Nina's day, and so
I propose to deal with it here, describing it as far as possible from
her point of view and placing her in the centre of the picture.

The great fact about Nina, at the end, when everything has been said,
must always be her youth. That Russian youthfulness is something that no
Western people can ever know, because no Western people are accustomed,
from their very babyhood, to bathe in an atmosphere that deals only with
ideas.

In no Russian family is the attempt to prevent children from knowing
what life really is maintained for long; the spontaneous impetuosity of
the parents breaks it down. Nevertheless the Russian boy and girl, when
they come to the awkward age, have not the least idea of what life
really is. Dear me, no! They possess simply a bundle of incoherent
ideas, untested, ill-digested, but a wonderful basis for incessant
conversation. Experience comes, of course, and for the most part it is
unhappy experience.

Life is a tragedy to every Russian simply because the daily round is
forgotten by him in his pursuit of an ultimate meaning. We in the West
have learnt to despise ultimate meanings as unpractical and rather
priggish things.

Nina had thought so much and tested so little. She loved so vehemently
that her betrayal was the more inevitable. For instance, she did not
love Boris Grogoff in the least, but he was in some way connected with
the idea of freedom. She was, I am afraid, beginning to love Lawrence
desperately--the first love of her life--and he too was connected with
the idea of freedom because he was English. We English do not understand
sufficiently how the Russians love us for our easy victory over tyranny,
and despise us for the small use we have made of our victory--and then,
after all, there is something to be said for tyranny too....

But Nina did not see why she should not capture Lawrence. She felt her
vitality, her health, her dominant will beat so strongly within her that
it seemed to her that nothing could stop her. She loved him for his
strength, his silence, his good-nature, yes, and his stupidity. This
last gave her a sense of power over him, and of motherly tenderness too.
She loved his stiff and halting Russian--it was as though he were but
ten years old.

I am convinced, too, that she did not consider that she was doing any
wrong to Vera. In the first place she was not as yet really sure that
Vera cared for him. Vera, who had been to her always a mother rather
than a sister, seemed an infinite age. It was ridiculous that Vera
should fall in love--Vera so stately and stern and removed from passion.
Those days were over for Vera, and, with her strong sense of duty and
the fitness of things, she would realise that. Moreover Nina could not
believe that Lawrence cared for Vera. Vera was not the figure to be
loved in that way. Vera's romance had been with Markovitch years and
years ago, and now, whenever Nina looked at Markovitch, it made it at
once impossible to imagine Vera in any new romantic situation.

Then had come the night of the birthday party, and suspicion had at once
flamed up again. She was torn that night and for days afterwards with a
raging jealousy.

She hated Vera, she hated Lawrence, she hated herself. Then again her
mood had changed. It was, after all, natural that he should have gone to
protect Vera; she was his hostess; he was English, and did not know how
trivial a Russian scene of temper was. He had meant nothing, and poor
Vera, touched that at her matronly age any one should show her
attention, had looked at him gratefully.

That was all. She loved Vera; she would not hurt her with such
ridiculous suspicions, and, on that Friday evening when Semyonov had
come to see me, she had been her old self again, behaving to Vera with
all the tenderness and charm and affection that were her most delightful
gifts.

On this Sunday morning she was reassured; she was gay and happy and
pleased with the whole world. The excitement of the disturbances of the
last two days provided an emotional background, not too thrilling to be
painful, because, after all, these riots would, as usual, come to
nothing, but it was pleasant to feel that the world was buzzing, and
that without paying a penny one might see a real cinematograph show
simply by walking down the Nevski.

I do not know, of course, what exactly happened that morning until
Semyonov came in, but I can see the Markovitch family, like ten thousand
other Petrograd families, assembling somewhere about eleven o'clock
round the Samovar, all in various stages of undress, all sleepy and
pale-faced, and a little befogged, as all good Russians are when,
through the exigencies of sleep, they've been compelled to allow their
ideas to escape from them for a considerable period. They discussed, of
course, the disturbances, and I can imagine Markovitch portentously
announcing that "It was all over, he had the best of reasons-for
knowing...."

As he once explained to me, he was at his worst on Sunday, because he
was then so inevitably reminded of his lost youth.

"It's a gloomy day, Ivan Andreievitch, for all those who have not quite
done what they expected. The bells ring, and you feel that they ought to
mean something to you, but of course one's gone past all that.... But
it's a pity...."

Nina's only thought that morning was that Lawrence was coming in the
afternoon to take her for a walk. She had arranged it all. After a very
evident hint from her he had suggested it. Vera had refused, because
some aunts were coming to call, and finally it had been arranged that
after the walk Lawrence should bring Nina home, stay to half-past six
dinner, and that then they should all go to the French theatre. I also
was asked to dinner and the theatre. Nina was sure that something must
happen that afternoon. It would be a crisis.... She felt within her such
vitality, such power, such domination, that she believed that to-day she
could command anything.... She was, poor child, supremely confident, and
that not through conceit or vanity, but simply because she was a
fatalist and believed that destiny had brought Lawrence to her feet....

It was the final proof of her youth that she saw the whole universe
working to fulfil her desire.

The other proof of her youth was that she began, for the first time, to
suffer desperately. The most casual mention of Lawrence's name would
make her heart beat furiously, suffocating her, her throat dry, her
cheeks hot, her hands cold. Then, as the minute of his arrival
approached, she would sit as though she were the centre of a leaping
fire that gradually inch by inch was approaching nearer to her, the
flames staring like little eyes on the watch, the heat advancing and
receding in waves like hands. She hoped that no one would notice her
agitation. She talked nonsense to whomsoever was near to her with little
nervous laughs; she seemed to herself to be terribly unreal, with a
fierce hostile creature inside her who took her heart in his hot hands
and pressed it, laughing at her.

And then the misery! That little episode at the circus of which I had
been a witness was only the first of many dreadful ventures. She
confessed to me afterwards that she did not herself know what she was
doing. And the final result of these adventures was to encourage her
because he had not repelled her. He _must_ have noticed, she thought,
the times when her hand had touched his, when his mouth had been, so
close to hers that their very thoughts had mingled, when she had felt
the stuff of his coat, and even for an instant stroked it. He _must_
have noticed these things, and still he had never rebuffed her. He was
always so kind to her; she fancied that his voice had a special note of
tenderness in it when he spoke to her, and when she looked at his ugly,
quiet, solid face, she could not believe that they were not meant for
one another. He _must_ want her, her gaiety, happiness, youth--it would
be wrong for him _not_ to! There could be no girls in that stupid,
practical, far-away England who would be the wife to him that she would
be.

Then the cursed misery of that waiting! They could hear in their
sitting-room the steps coming up the stone stairs outside their flat,
and every step seemed to be his. Ah, he had come earlier than he had
fixed. Vera had stupidly forgotten, perhaps, or he had found waiting any
longer impossible. Yes, surely that was his footfall; she knew it so
well. There, now he was turning towards the door; there was a pause;
soon there would be the tinkle of the bell!...

No, he had mounted higher; it was not Lawrence--only some stupid,
ridiculous creature who was impertinently daring to put her into this
misery of disappointment. And then she would wonder suddenly whether she
had been looking too fixedly at the door, whether they had noticed her,
and she would start and look about her self-consciously, blushing a
little, her eyes hot and suspicious.

I can see her in all these moods; it was her babyhood that was leaving
her at last. She was never to be quite so spontaneously gay again,
never quite so careless, so audacious, so casual, so happy. In Russia
the awkward age is very short, very dramatic, often enough very tragic.
Nina was as helpless as the rest of the world.

At any rate, upon this Sunday, she was sure of her afternoon. Her eyes
were wild with excitement. Any one who looked at her closely must have
noticed her strangeness, but they were all discussing the events of the
last two days; there were a thousand stories, nearly all of them false
and a few; true facts.

No one in reality knew anything except that there had been some
demonstrations, a little shooting, and a number of excited speeches. The
town on that lovely winter morning seemed absolutely quiet.

Somewhere about mid-day Semyonov came in, and without thinking about it
Nina suddenly found herself sitting in the window talking to him. This
conversation, which was in its results to have an important influence on
her whole life, continued the development which that eventful Sunday was
to effect in her. Its importance lay very largely in the fact that her
uncle had never spoken to her seriously like a grown-up woman before.
Semyonov was, of course, quite clever enough to realise the change which
was transforming her, and he seized it, at once, for his own advantage.
She, on her side, had always, ever since she could remember, been
intrigued by him. She told me once that almost her earliest memory was
being lifted into the air by her uncle and feeling the thick solid
strength of his grasp, so that she was like a feather in the air, poised
on one of his stubborn fingers; when he kissed her each hair of his
beard seemed like a pale, taut wire, so stiff and resolute was it. Her
Uncle Ivan was a flabby, effeminate creature in comparison. Then, as she
had grown older, she had realised that he was a dangerous man, dangerous
to women, who loved and feared and hated him. Vera said that he had
great power over them and made them miserable, and that he was,
therefore, a bad, wicked man. But this only served to make him, in
Nina's eyes, the more a romantic figure.

However, he had never treated her in the least seriously, had tossed her
in the air spiritually just as he had done physically when she was a
baby, had given her chocolates, taken her once or twice to the cinema,
laughed at her, and, she felt, deeply despised her. Then came the war
and he had gone to the Front, and she had almost forgotten him. Then
came the romantic story of his being deeply in love with a nurse who had
been killed, that he was heartbroken and inconsolable and a changed man.
Was it wonderful that on his return to Petrograd she should feel again
that old Byronic (every Russian is still brought up on Byron) romance?
She did not like him, but--well--Vera was a staid old-fashioned
thing.... Perhaps they all misjudged him; perhaps he really needed
comfort and consolation. He certainly seemed kinder than he used to be.
But, until to-day, he had never talked to her seriously.

How her heart leapt into her throat when he began, at once, in his quiet
soft voice,

"Well, Nina dear, tell me all about it. I know, so you needn't be
frightened. I know and I understand."

She flung a terrified glance around her, but Uncle Ivan was reading the
paper at the other end of the room, her brother-in-law was cutting up
little pieces of wood in his workshop, and Vera was in the kitchen.

"What do you mean?" she said in a whisper. "I don't understand."

"Yes, you do," he answered, smiling at her. "You know, Nina, you're in
love with the Englishman, and have been for a long time. Well, why not?
Don't be so frightened about it. It is quite time that you should be in
love with some one, and he's a fine strong young man--not over-blessed
with brains, but you can supply that part of it. No, I think it's a very
good match. I like it. Believe me, I'm your friend, Nina." He put his
hand on hers.

He looked so kind, she told me afterwards, that she felt as though she
had never known him before; her eyes were filled with tears, so
overwhelming a relief was it to find some one at last who sympathised
and understood and wanted her to succeed. I remember that she was
wearing that day a thin black velvet necklet with a very small diamond
in front of it. She had been given it by Uncle Ivan on her last
birthday, and instead of making her look grown-up it gave her a
ridiculously childish appearance as though she had stolen into Vera's
bedroom and dressed up in her things. Then, with her fair tousled hair
and large blue eyes, open as a rule with a startled expression as though
she had only just awakened into an astonishingly exciting world, she was
altogether as unprotected and as guileless and as honest as any human
being alive. I don't know whether Semyonov felt her innocence and
youth--I expect he considered very little beside the plans that he had
then in view.... and innocence had never been very interesting to him.
He spoke to her just as a kind, wise, thoughtful uncle ought to speak to
a niece caught up into her first love-affair. From the moment of that
half-hour's conversation in the window Nina adored him, and believed
every word that came from his mouth.

"You see, Nina dear," he went on, "I've not spoken to you before because
you neither liked me nor trusted me. Quite rightly you listened to what
others said about me--"

"Oh no," interrupted Nina. "I never listen to anybody."

"Well then," said Semyonov, "we'll say that you were very naturally
influenced by them. And quite right--perfectly right. You were only a
girl then--you are a woman now. I had nothing to say to you then--now I
can help you, give you a little advice perhaps--"

I don't know what Nina replied. She was breathlessly pleased and
excited.

"What I want," he went on, "is the happiness of you all. I was sorry
when I came back to find that Nicholas and Vera weren't such friends as
they used to be. I don't mean that there's anything wrong at all, but
they must be brought closer together--and that's what you and I, who
know them and love them, can do--"

"Yes, yes," said Nina eagerly. Semyonov then explained that the thing
that really was, it seemed to him, keeping them apart were Nicholas's
inventions. Of course Vera had long ago seen that these inventions were
never going to come to anything, that they were simply wasting
Nicholas's time when he might, by taking an honest clerkship or
something of the kind, be maintaining the whole household, and the very
thought of him sitting in his workshop irritated her. The thing to do,
Semyonov explained, was to laugh Nicholas out of his inventions, to show
him that it was selfish nonsense his pursuing them, to persuade him to
make an honest living.

"But I thought," said Nina, "you approved of them. I heard you only the
other day telling him that it was a good idea, and that he must go on--"

"Ah!" said Semyonov. "That was my weakness, I'm afraid. I couldn't bear
to disappoint him. But it was wrong of me--and I knew it at the time."

Now Nina had always rather admired her brother-in-law's inventions. She
had thought it very clever of him to think of such things, and she had
wondered why other people did not applaud him more.

Now suddenly she saw that it was very selfish of him to go on with these
things when they never brought in a penny, and Vera had to do all the
drudgery. She was suddenly indignant with him. In how clear a light her
uncle placed things!

"One thing to do," said Semyonov, "is to laugh at him about them. Not
very much, not unkindly, but enough to make him see the folly of it."

"I think he does see that already, poor Nicholas," said Nina with wisdom
beyond her years.

"To bring Nicholas and Vera together," said Semyonov, "that's what we
have to do, you and I. And believe me, dear Nina, I on my side will do
all I can to help you. We are friends, aren't we?--not only uncle and
niece."

"Yes," said Nina breathlessly. That was all that there was to the
conversation, but it was quite enough to make Nina feel as though she
had already won her heart's desire. If any one as clever as her uncle
believed in this, then it _must_ be true. It had not been only her own
silly imagination--Lawrence cared for her. Her uncle had seen it,
otherwise he would never have encouraged her--Lawrence cared for her....

Suddenly, in the happy spontaneity of the moment she did what she very
seldom did, bent forward and kissed him.

She told me afterwards that that kiss seemed to displease him.

He got up and walked away.



VII

I do not know exactly what occurred during that afternoon. Neither
Lawrence nor Nina spoke about it to me. I only know that Nina returned
subdued and restrained. I can imagine them going out into that quiet
town and walking along the deserted quay; the quiet that afternoon was,
I remember, marvellous. The whole world was holding its breath. Great
events were occurring, but we were removed from them all. The ice
quivered under the sun and the snowclouds rose higher and higher into
the blue, and once and again a bell chimed and jangled.... There was an
amazing peace. Through this peaceful world Nina and Lawrence walked. His
mind must, I know, have been very far away from Nina, probably he saw
nothing of her little attempts at friendship; her gasping sentences
that seemed to her so daring and significant he scarcely heard. His only
concern was to endure the walk as politely as possible and return to
Vera.

Perhaps if she had not had that conversation with her uncle she would
have realised more clearly how slight a response was made to her, but
she thought only that this was his English shyness and gaucherie--she
must go slowly and carefully. He was not like a Russian. She must not
frighten him. Ah, how she loved him as she walked beside him, seeing and
not seeing the lovely frozen colours of the winter day, the quickly
flooding saffron sky! The first bright star, the great pearl-grey cloud
of the Neva as it was swept into the dark. In the dark she put, I am
sure, her hand on his arm, and felt his strength and took her small
hurried steps beside his long ones. He did not, I expect, feel her hand
on his sleeve at all. It was Vera whom he saw through the dusk. Vera
watching the door for his return, knowing that his eyes would rush to
hers, that every beat of his heart was for her....

I found them all seated at dinner when I entered. I brought them the
news of the shooting up at the Nicholas Station.

"Perhaps, we had better not go to the theatre," I said. "A number of
people were killed this afternoon, and all the trams are stopped."

Still it was all remote from us. They laughed at the idea of not going
to the theatre. The tickets had been bought two weeks ago, and the walk
would be pleasant. Of course we would go. It would be fun, too, to see
whether anything were happening.

With how strange a clarity I remember the events of that evening. It is
detached and hangs by itself among the other events of that amazing
time, as though it had been framed and separated for some especial
purpose. My impression of the colour of it now is of a scene intensely
quiet.

I saw at once on my arrival that Vera was not yet prepared to receive me
back into her friendship. And I saw, too, that she included Lawrence in
this ostracism. She sat there, stiff and cold, smiling and talking
simply because she was compelled, for politeness sake, to do so. She
would scarcely speak to me at all, and when I saw this I turned and
devoted myself to Uncle Ivan, who was always delighted to make me a
testing-ground for his English.

But poor Jerry! Had I not been so anxious lest a scene should burst upon
us all I could have laughed at the humour of it. Vera's attitude was a
complete surprise to him. He had not seen her during the preceding week,
and that absence from her had heightened his desire until it burnt his
very throat with its flame. One glance from her, when he came in, would
have contented him. He could have rested then, happily, quietly; but
instead of that glance she had avoided his eye, her hand was cold and
touched his only for an instant. She had not spoken to him again after
the first greeting. I am sure that he had never known a time when his
feelings threatened to be too much for him. His hold on himself and his
emotions had been complete. "These fellers," he once said to me about
some Russians, "are always letting their feelings overwhelm them--like
women. And they like it. Funny thing!" Well, funny or no, he realised it
now; his true education, like Nina's, like Vera's, like Bohun's, like
Markovitch's, perhaps like my own, was only now beginning. Funny and
pathetic, too, to watch his broad, red, genial face struggling to
express a polite interest in the conversation, to show nothing but
friendliness and courtesy. His eyes were as restless as minnows; they
darted for an instant towards Vera, then darted off again, then flashed
back. His hand moved for a plate, and I saw that it was shaking. Poor
Jerry! He had learnt what suffering was during those last weeks. But the
most silent of us all that evening was Markovitch. He sat huddled over
his food and never said a word. If he looked up at all he glowered, and
so soon as he had finished eating he returned to his workshop, closing
the door behind him. I caught Semyonov looking at him with a pleasant,
speculative smile....

At last Vera, Nina, Lawrence, and I started for the theatre. I can't say
that I was expecting a very pleasant evening, but the deathlike
stillness, both of ourselves and the town did, I confess, startle me.
Scarcely a word was exchanged by us between the English Prospect and
Saint Isaac's Square. The square looked lovely in the bright moonlight,
and I said something about it. It was indeed very fine, the cathedral
like a hovering purple cloud, the old sentry in his high peaked hat, the
black statue, and the blue shadows over the snow. It was then that
Lawrence, with an air of determined strength, detached Vera from us and
walked ahead with her. I saw that he was talking eagerly to her.

Nina said, with a little shudder, "Isn't it quiet, Durdles? As though
there were ghosts round every corner."

"Hope you enjoyed your walk this afternoon," I said.

"No, it was quiet then. But not like it is now. Let's walk faster and
catch the others up. Do you believe in ghosts, Durdles?"

"Yes, I think I do."

"So do I. Was it true, do you think, about the people being shot at the
Nicholas Station to-day?"

"I daresay."

"Perhaps all the dead people are crowding round here now. Why isn't any
one out walking?"

"I suppose they are all frightened by what they've heard, and think it
better to stay at home."

We were walking down the Morskaia, and our feet gave out a ringing echo.

"Let's keep up with them," Nina said. When we had joined the others I
found that they were both silent--Lawrence very red, Vera pale. We were
all feeling rather weary. A woman met us. "You aren't allowed to cross
the Nevski," she said; "the Cossacks are stopping everybody." I can see
her now, a stout, red-faced woman, a shawl over her head, and carrying a
basket. Another woman, a prostitute I should think, came up and joined
us.

"What is it?" she asked us.

The stout woman repeated in a trembling, agitated voice, "You aren't
allowed to cross the Nevski. The Cossacks are stopping everybody."

The prostitute shook her head in her alarm, and little flakes of powder
detached themselves from her nose. "_Bozhe moi_--_bozhe moi_!" she
said, "and I promised not to be late."

Vera then, very calmly and quietly, took command of the situation.
"We'll go and see," she said, "what is really the truth."

We turned up the side street to the Moika Canal, which lay like powdered
crystal under the moon. Not a soul was in sight.

There arrived then one of the most wonderful moments of my life. The
Nevski Prospect, that broad and mighty thoroughfare, stretched before us
like a great silver river. It was utterly triumphantly bare and naked.
Under the moon it flowed, with proud tranquillity, so far as the eye
could see between its high black banks of silent houses.

At intervals of about a hundred yards the Cossack pickets, like ebony
statues on their horses, guarded the way. Down the whole silver expanse
not one figure was to be seen; so beautiful was it under the high moon,
so still, so quiet, so proud, that it was revealing now for the first
time its real splendour. At no time of the night or day is the Nevski
deserted. How happy it must have been that night!...

For us, it was as though we hesitated on the banks of a river. I felt a
strange superstition, as though something said to me, "You cross that
and you are plunged irrevocably into a new order of events. Go home, and
you will avoid danger." Nina must have had something of the same
feeling, because she said:

"Let's go home. They won't let us cross. I don't want to cross. Let's go
home."

But Vera said firmly, "Nonsense! We've gone so far. We've got the
tickets. I'm going on."

I felt the note in her voice, superstitiously, as a kind of desperate
challenge, as though she had said:

"Well, you see nothing worse can happen to me than has happened."

Lawrence said roughly, "Of course, we're going on."

The prostitute began, in a trembling voice, as though we must all of
necessity understand her case:

"I don't want to be late this time, because I've been late so often
before.... It always is that way with me... always unfortunate...."

We started across, and when we stepped into the shining silver surface
we all stopped for an instant, as though held by an invisible force.

"That's it," said Vera, speaking it seemed to herself. "So it always is
with us. All revolutions in Russia end this way--"

An unmounted Cossack came forward to us.

"No hanging about there," he said. "Cross quickly. No one is to delay."

We moved to the other side of the Moika bridge. I thought of the
Cossacks yesterday who had assured the people that they would not
fire--well, that impulse had passed. Protopopoff and his men had
triumphed.

We were all now in the shallows on the other bank of the canal. The
prostitute, who was still at our side, hesitated for a moment, as though
she were going to speak. I think she wanted to ask whether she might
walk with us a little way. Suddenly she vanished without sound, into the
black shadows.

"Come along," said Vera. "We shall be dreadfully late." She seemed to be
mastered by an overpowering desire not to be left alone with Lawrence.
She hurried forward with Nina, and Lawrence and I came more slowly
behind. We were now in a labyrinth of little streets and black
overhanging flats. Not a soul anywhere--only the moonlight in great
broad flashes of light--once or twice a woman hurried by keeping in the
shadow. Sometimes, at the far end of the street, we saw the shining,
naked Nevski.

Lawrence was silent, then, just as we were turning into the square where
the Michailovsky Theatre was he began:

"What's the matter?... What's the matter with her, Durward? What have I
done?"

"I don't know that you've done anything," I answered.

"But don't you see?" he went on. "She won't speak to me. She won't look
at me. I won't stand this long. I tell you I won't stand it long. I'll
make her come off with me in spite of them all. I'll have her to myself.
I'll make her happy, Durward, as she's never been in all her life. But I
must have her.... I can't live close to her like this, and yet never be
with her. Never alone, never alone. Why is she behaving like this to
me?"

He spoke really like a man in agony. The words coming from him in little
tortured sentences as though they were squeezed from him desperately,
with pain at every breath that he drew.

"She's afraid of herself, I expect, not of you." I put my hand on his
sleeve. "Lawrence," I said, "go home. Go back to England. This is
becoming too much for both of you. Nothing can come of it, but
unhappiness for everybody."

"No!" he said. "It's too late for any of your Platonic advice, Durward.
I'm going to have her, even though the earth turns upside down."

We went up the steps and into the theatre. There was, of course,
scarcely any one there. The Michailovsky is not a large theatre, but the
stalls looked extraordinarily desolate, every seat watching one with a
kind of insolent wink as though, like the Nevski ten minutes before it
said, "Well, now you humans are getting frightened, you're all stopping
away. We're coming back to our own!"

There was some such malicious air about the whole theatre. Above, in the
circle, the little empty boxes were dim and shadowy, and one fancied
figures moved there, and then saw that there was no one. Someone up in
the gallery laughed, and the laugh went echoing up and down the empty
spaces. A few people came in and sat nervously about, and no one spoke
except in a low whisper, because voices sounded so loud and impertinent.

Then again the man in the gallery laughed, and every one looked up
frowning. The play began. It was, I think, _Les Idées de Françoise_, but
of that I cannot be sure. It was a farce of the regular French type,
with a bedroom off, and marionettes who continually separated into
couples and giggled together. The giggling to-night was of a sadly
hollow sort. I pitied and admired the actors, spontaneous as a rule, but
now bravely stuffing any kind of sawdust into the figures in their
hands, but the leakage was terrible, and the sawdust lay scattered all
about the stage. The four of us sat as solemn as statues--I don't think
one of us smiled. It was during the second Act that I suddenly laughed.
I don't know that anything very comic was happening on the stage, but I
was aware, with a kind of ironic subconsciousness, that some of the
superior spirits in their superior Heaven must be deriving a great deal
of fun from our situation. There was Vera thinking, I suppose, of
nothing but Lawrence, and Lawrence thinking of nothing but Vera, and
Nina thinking of nothing but Lawrence, and the audience thinking of
their safety, and the players thinking of their salaries, and
Protopopoff at home thinking of his victory, and the Czar in Tsarskoe
thinking of his Godsent autocracy, and Europe thinking of its ideals,
and Germany thinking of its militarism--all self-justified, all
mistaken, and all fulfilling some deeper plan at whose purpose they
could not begin to guess. And how intermingled we all were! Vera and
Nina, M. Robert and Mdlle. Flori on the other side of the footlights,
Trenchard and Marie killed in Galicia, the Kaiser and Hindenburg, the
Archbishop of Canterbury and the postmaster of my village in Glebeshire.

The curtain is coming down, the fat husband is deceived once again, the
lovers are in the bedroom listening behind the door, the comic waiter is
winking at the chamber-maid....

The lights are up and we are alone again in the deserted theatre.

Towards the end of the last interval I went out into the passage behind
the stalls to escape from the chastened whispering that went trembling
up and down like the hissing of terrified snakes. I leaned against the
wall in the deserted passage and watched the melancholy figure of the
cloak-room attendant huddled up on a chair, his head between his hands.

Suddenly I saw Vera. She came up to me as though she were going to walk
past me, and then she stopped and spoke. She talked fast, not looking at
me, but beyond, down the passage.

"I'm sorry, Ivan Andreievitch," she said. "I was cross the other day. I
hurt you. I oughtn't to have done that."

"You know," I said, "that I never thought of it for a minute."

"No, I was wrong. But I've been terribly worried during these last
weeks. I've thought it all out to-day and I've decided--" there was a
catch in her breath and she paused; she went on--"decided that there
mustn't be any more weakness. I'm much weaker than I thought. I would be
ashamed if I didn't think that shame was a silly thing to have. But now
I am quite clear; I must make Nicholas and Nina happy. Whatever else
comes I must do that. It has been terrible, these last weeks. We've all
been angry and miserable, and now I must put it right. I can if I try.
I've been forgetting that I chose my own life myself, and now I mustn't
be cowardly because it's difficult. I will make it right myself...."

She paused again, then she said, looking me straight in the face,

"Ivan Andreievitch, does Nina care for Mr. Lawrence?"

She was looking at me, with large black eyes so simply, with such trust
in me, that I could only tell her the truth.

"Yes," I said, "she does."

Her eyes fell, then she looked up at me again.

"I thought so," she said. "And does he care for her?"

"No," I said, "he does not."

"He must," she said. "It would be a very happy thing for them to marry."

She spoke very low, so that I could scarcely hear her words.

"Wait, Vera," I said. "Let it alone. Nina's very young. The mood will
pass. Lawrence, perhaps, will go back to England."

She drew in her breath and I saw her hand tremble, but she still looked
at me, only now her eyes were not so clear. 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. 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 bleeding. I wanted to offer
him help and assistance, but something prevented me; I could not get to
him. Finally he vanished from my sight and I was left alone in the
painted forest....

All the next morning I sat and wondered what I had better do, and at
last I decided that I would go and see Henry Bohun.

I had not seen Bohun for several weeks. I myself had been, of late, less
to the flat in the English Prospect, but I knew that he had taken my
advice that he should be kind to Nicholas Markovitch with due British
seriousness, and that he had been trying to bring some kind of
relationship about. He had even asked Markovitch to dine alone with him,
and Markovitch, although he declined the invitation was, I believe,
greatly touched.

So, about half-past one, I started off for Bohun's office on the
Fontanka. I've said somewhere before, I think, that Bohun's work was in
connection with the noble but uphill task of enlightening the Russian
public as to the righteousness of the war, the British character, and
the Anglo-Russian alliance. I say "uphill," because only a few of the
_real_ population of Russia showed the slightest desire to know anything
whatever about any country outside their own. Their interest is in ideas
not in boundaries--and what I mean by "real" will be made patent by the
events of this very day. However, Bohun did his best, and it was not his
fault that the British Government could only spare enough men and money
to cover about one inch of the whole of Russia--and, I hasten to add,
that if that same British Government had plastered the whole vast
country from Archangel to Vladivostock with pamphlets, orators, and
photographs it would not have altered, in the slightest degree, after
events.

To make any effect in Russia England needed not only men and money but a
hundred years' experience of the country. That same experience was
possessed by the Germans alone of all the Western peoples--and they have
not neglected to use it.

I went by tram to the Fontanka, and the streets seemed absolutely
quiet. That strange shining Nevski of the night before was a dream. Some
one in the tram said something about rifle-shots in the Summer Garden,
but no one listened. As Vera had said last night we had, none of us,
much faith in Russian revolutions.

I went up in the lift to the Propaganda office and found it a very nice
airy place, clean and smart, with coloured advertisements by Shepperson
and others on the walls, pictures of Hampstead and St. Albans and Kew
Gardens that looked strangely satisfactory and homely to me, and rather
touching and innocent. There were several young women clicking away at
typewriters, and maps of the Western front, and a colossal toy map of
the London Tube, and a nice English library with all the best books from
Chaucer to D.H. Lawrence and from the _Religio Medici_ to E.V. Lucas'
_London_.

Everything seemed clean and simple and a little deserted, as though the
heart of the Russian public had not, as yet, quite found its way there.
I think "guileless" was the adjective that came to my mind, and
certainly Burrows, the head of the place--a large, red-faced, smiling
man with glasses--seemed to me altogether too cheerful and pleased with
life to penetrate the wicked recesses of Russian pessimism.

I went into Bohun's room and found him very hard at work in a serious,
emphatic way which only made me feel that he was playing at it. He had a
little bookcase over his table, and I noticed the _Georgian Book of
Verse_, Conrad's _Nostromo_, and a translation of Ropshin's _Pale
Horse_.

"Altogether too pretty and literary," I said to him; "you ought to be
getting at the peasant with a pitchfork and a hammer--not admiring the
Intelligentzia."

"I daresay you're right," he said, blushing. "But whatever we do we're
wrong. We have fellows in here cursing us all day. If we're simple we're
told we're not clever enough; if we're clever we're told we're too
complicated. If we're militant we're told we ought to be
tender-hearted, and if we're tender-hearted we're told we're
sentimental--and at the end of it all the Russians don't care a damn."

"Well, I daresay you're doing some good somewhere," I said indulgently.

"Come and look at my view," he said, "and see whether it isn't
splendid."

He spoke no more than the truth. We looked across the Canal over the
roofs of the city--domes and towers and turrets, grey and white and
blue, with the dark red walls of many of the older houses stretched like
an Arabian carpet beneath white bubbles of clouds that here and there
marked the blue sky. It was a scene of intense peace, the smoke rising
from the chimneys, Isvostchicks stumbling along on the farther banks of
the Canal, and the people sauntering in their usual lazy fashion up and
down the Nevski. Immediately below our window was a skating-rink that
stretched straight across the Canal. There were some figures, like
little dolls, skating up and down, and they looked rather desolate
beside the deserted band-stands and the empty seats. On the road outside
our door a cart loaded with wood slowly moved along, the high hoop over
the horse's back gleaming with red and blue.

"Yes, it _is_ a view!" I said. "Splendid!--and all as quiet as though
there'd been no disturbances at all. Have you heard any news?"

"No," said Bohun. "To tell the truth I've been so busy that I haven't
had time to ring up the Embassy. And we've had no one in this morning.
Monday morning, you know," he added; "always very few people on Monday
morning"--as though he didn't wish me to think that the office was
always deserted.

I watched the little doll-like men circling placidly round and round
the rink. One bubble cloud rose and slowly swallowed up the sun.
Suddenly I heard a sharp crack like the breaking of a twig. "What's
that?" I said, stepping forward on to the balcony. "It sounded like a
shot."

"I didn't hear anything," said Bohun. "You get funny echoes up here
sometimes." We stepped back into Bohun's room and, if I had had any
anxieties, they would at once, I think, have been reassured by the
unemotional figure of Bohun's typist, a gay young woman with peroxide
hair, who was typing away as though for her very life.

"Look here, Bohun, can I talk to you alone for a minute?" I asked.

The peroxide lady left us.

"It's just about Markovitch I wanted to ask you," I went on. "I'm
infernally worried, and I want your help. It may seem ridiculous of me
to interfere in another family like this, with people with whom I have,
after all, nothing to do. But there are two reasons why it isn't
ridiculous. One is the deep affection I have for Nina and Vera. I
promised them my friendship, and now I've got to back that promise. And
the other is that you and I are really responsible for bringing Lawrence
into the family. They never would have known him if it hadn't been for
us. There's danger and trouble of every sort brewing, and Semyonov, as
you know, is helping it on wherever he can. Well, now, what I want to
know is, how much have you seen of Markovitch lately, and has he talked
to you?"

Bohun considered. "I've seen very little of him," he said at last. "I
think he avoids me now. He's such a weird bird that it's impossible to
tell of what he's really thinking. I know he was pleased when I asked
him to dine with me at the Bear the other night. He looked _most
awfully_ pleased. But he wouldn't come. It was as though he suspected
that I was laying a trap for him."

"But what have you noticed about him otherwise?"

"Well, I've seen very little of him. He's sulky just now. He suspected
Lawrence, of course--always after that night of Nina's party. But I
think that he's reassured again. And of course it's all so ridiculous,
because there's nothing to suspect, absolutely nothing--is there?"

"Absolutely nothing," I answered firmly.

He sighed with relief. "Oh, you don't know how glad I am to hear that,"
he said. "Because, although I've _known_ that it was all right, Vera's
been so odd lately that I've wondered--you know how I care about Vera
and--"

"How do you mean--odd?" I sharply interrupted.

"Well--for instance--of course I've told nobody--and you won't tell any
one either--but the other night I found her crying in the flat, sitting
up near the table, sobbing her heart out. She thought every one was
out--I'd been in my room and she hadn't known. But Vera, Durward--Vera
of all people! I didn't let her see me--she doesn't know now that I
heard her. But when you care for any one as I care for Vera, it's awful
to think that she can suffer like that and one can do nothing. Oh,
Durward, I wish to God I wasn't so helpless! You know before I came out
to Russia I felt so old; I thought there was nothing I couldn't do, that
I was good enough for anybody. And now I'm the most awful ass. Fancy,
Durward! Those poems of mine--I thought they were wonderful. I
thought--"

He was interrupted by a sudden sharp crackle like a fire bursting into a
blaze quite close at hand. We both sprang to the windows, threw them
open (they were not sealed, for some unknown reason), and rushed out on
to the balcony. The scene in front of us was just what it had been
before--the bubble clouds were still sailing lazily before the blue, the
skaters were still hovering on the ice, the cart of wood that I had
noticed was vanishing slowly into the distance. But from the
Liteiny--just over the bridge--came a confused jumble of shouts, cries,
and then the sharp, unmistakable rattle of a machine-gun. It was funny
to see the casual life in front of one suddenly pause at that sound. The
doll-like skaters seemed to spin for a moment and then freeze; one
figure began to run across the ice. A small boy came racing down our
street shouting. Several men ran out from doorways and stood looking up
into the sky, as though they thought the noise had come from there. The
sun was just setting; the bubble clouds were pink, and windows flashed
fire. The rattle of the machine-gun suddenly stopped, and there was a
moment's silence when the only sound in the whole world was the clatter
of the wood-cart turning the corner. I could see to the right of me the
crowds in the Nevski, that had looked like the continual unwinding of a
ragged skein of black silk, break their regular movement and split up
like flies falling away from an opening door.

We were all on the balcony by now--the stout Burrows, Peroxide, and
another lady typist, Watson, the thin and most admirable secretary (he
held the place together by his diligence and order), two Russian clerks,
Henry, and I.

We all leaned over the railings and looked down into the street beneath
us. To our left the Fontanka Bridge was quite deserted--then, suddenly,
an extraordinary procession poured across it. At that same moment (at
any rate it seems so now to me on looking back) the sun disappeared,
leaving a world of pale grey mist shot with gold and purple. The stars
were, many of them, already out, piercing with their sharp cold
brilliance the winter sky.

We could not at first see of what exactly the crowd now pouring over the
bridge was composed. Then, as it turned and came down our street, it
revealed itself as something so theatrical and melodramatic as to be
incredible. Incredible, I say, because the rest of the world was not
theatrical with it. That was always to be the amazing feature of the new
scene into which, without knowing it, I was at that moment stepping. In
Galicia the stage had been set--ruined villages, plague-stricken
peasants, shell-holes, trenches, roads cut to pieces, huge trees
levelled to the ground, historic châteaux pillaged and robbed. But here
the world was still the good old jog-trot world that one had always
known; the shops and hotels and theatres remained as they had always
been. There would remain, I believe, for ever those dull Jaeger
undergarments in the windows of the bazaar, and the bound edition of
Tchekov in the book-shop just above the Moika, and the turtle and the
gold-fish in the aquarium near Elisseieff; and whilst those things were
there I could not believe in melodrama.

And we did not believe. We dug our feet into the snow, and leaned over
the balcony railings absorbed with amused interest. The procession
consisted of a number of motor lorries, and on these lorries soldiers
were heaped. I can use no other word because, indeed, they seemed to be
all piled upon one another, some kneeling forward, some standing, some
sitting, and all with their rifles pointing outwards until the lorries
looked like hedgehogs. Many of the rifles had pieces of red cloth
attached to them, and one lorry displayed proudly a huge red flag that
waved high in air with a sort of flaunting arrogance of its own. On
either side of the lorries, filling the street, was the strangest mob of
men, women, and children. There seemed to be little sign of order or
discipline amongst them as they were all shouting different cries: "Down
the Fontanka!" "No, the Duma!" "To the Nevski!" "No, no, _Tovaristchi_
(comrades), to the Nicholas Station!"

Such a rabble was it that I remember that my first thought was of
pitying indulgence. So this was the grand outcome of Boris Grogoff's
eloquence, and the Rat's plots for plunder!--a fitting climax to such
vain dreams. I saw the Cossack, that ebony figure of Sunday night. Ten
such men, and this rabble was dispersed for ever! I felt inclined to
lean over and whisper to them, "Quick! quick! Go home!... They'll be
here in a moment and catch you!"

And yet, after all, there seemed to be some show of discipline. I
noticed that, as the crowd moved forward, men dropped out and remained
picketing the doorways of the street. Women seemed to be playing a large
part in the affair, peasants with shawls over their heads, many of them
leading by the hand small children.

Burrows treated it all as a huge joke. "By Jove," he cried, speaking
across to me, "Durward, it's like that play Martin Harvey used to
do--what was it?--about the French Revolution, you know."

"'The Only Way,'" said Peroxide, in a prim strangled voice.

"That's it--'The Only Way'--with their red flags and all. Don't they
look ruffians, some of them?"

There was a great discussion going on under our windows. All the lorries
had drawn up together, and the screaming, chattering, and shouting was
like the noise of a parrots' aviary. The cold blue light had climbed now
into the sky, which was thick with stars; the snow on the myriad roofs
stretched like a filmy cloud as far as the eye could see. The moving,
shouting crowd grew with every moment mistier.

"Oh, dear! Mr. Burrows," said the little typist, who was not Peroxide.
"Do you think I shall ever be able to get home? We're on the other side
of the river, you know. Do you think the bridges will be up? My mother
will be so terribly anxious."

"Oh, you'll get home all right," answered Burrows cheerfully. "Just wait
until this crowd has gone by. I don't expect there's any fuss down by
the river..."

His words were cut short by some order from one of the fellows below.
Others shouted in response, and the lorries again began to move forward.

"I believe he was shouting to us," said Bohun. "It sounded like 'Get
off' or 'Get away.'"

"Not he!" said Burrows; "they're too busy with their own affairs."

Then things happened quickly. There was a sudden strange silence below;
I saw a quick flame from some fire that had apparently been lit on the
Fontanka Bridge; I heard the same voice call out once more sharply, and
a second later I felt rather than heard a whizz like the swift flight of
a bee past my ear; I was conscious that a bullet had struck the brick
behind me. That bullet swung me into the Revolution....



IX

...We were all gathered together in the office. I heard one of the
Russians say in an agitated whisper, "Don't turn on the light!... Don't
turn on the light! They can see!"

We were all in half-darkness, our faces mistily white. I could hear
Peroxide breathing in a tremulous manner, as though in a moment she
would break into hysteria.

"We'll go into the inside room. We can turn the light on there," said
Burrows. We all passed into the reception-room of the office, a nice
airy place with the library along one wall and bright coloured maps on
the other. We stood together and considered the matter.

"It's real!" said Burrows, his red, cheery face perplexed and strained.
"Who'd have thought it?"

"Of course it's real!" cried Bohun impatiently (Burrows' optimism had
been often difficult to bear with indulgence).

"Now you see! What about your beautiful Russian mystic now?"

"Oh dear!" cried the little Russian typist. "And my mother!... What ever
shall I do? She'll hear reports and think that I'm being murdered. I
shall never get across."

"You'd better stay with me to-night, Miss Peredonov," said Peroxide
firmly. "My flat's quite close here in Gagarinsky. We shall be delighted
to have you."

"You can telephone to your mother, Miss Peredonov," said Burrows. "No
difficulty at all."

It was then that Bohun took me aside.

"Look here!" he said. "I'm worried. Vera and Nina were going to the
Astoria to have tea with Semyonov this afternoon. I should think the
Astoria might be rather a hot spot if this spreads. And I wouldn't trust
Semyonov. Will you come down with me there now?"

"Yes," I said, "of course I'll come."

We said a word to Burrows, put on our Shubas and goloshes, and started
down the stairs. At every door there were anxious faces. Out of one flat
came a very fat Jew.

"Gentlemen, what is this all about?"

"Riots," said Bohun.

"Is there shooting?"

"Yes," said Bohun.

"_Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi!_ And I live over on Vassily Ostrov! What do you
advise, _Gaspoda_? Will the bridges be up?"

"Very likely," I answered. "I should stay here."

"And they are shooting?" he asked again.

"They are," I answered.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen--stay for a moment. Perhaps together we could
think.... I am all alone here except for a lady... most
unfortunate...."

But we could not stay.

The world into which we stepped was wonderful. The background of snow
under the star-blazing sky made it even more fantastic than it naturally
was. We slipped into the crowd and, becoming part of it, were at once,
as one so often is, sympathetic with it. It seemed such a childish,
helpless, and good-natured throng. No one seemed to know anything of
arms or directions. There were, as I have already said, many women and
little children, and some of the civilians who had rifles looked quite
helpless. I saw one boy holding his gun upside down. No one paid any
attention to us. There was as yet no class note in the demonstration,
and the only hostile cries I heard were against Protopopoff and the
police. We moved back into the street behind the Fontanka, and here I
saw a wonderful sight. Some one had lighted a large bonfire in the
middle of the street and the flames tossed higher and higher into the
air, bringing down the stars in flights of gold, flinging up the snow
until it seemed to radiate in lines and circles of white light high over
the very roofs of the houses. In front of the fire a soldier, mounted on
a horse, addressed a small crowd of women and boys. On the end of his
rifle was a ragged red cloth.

I could not see his face. I saw his arms wave, and the fire behind him
exaggerated his figure and then dropped it into a straggling silhouette
against the snow. The street seemed deserted except for this group,
although now I could hear distant shouting on every side of me, and the
monotonous clap-clap-clap-clap of a machine-gun.

I heard him say, "_Tovaristchi!_ now is your time! Don't hesitate in the
sacred cause of freedom! As our brethren did in the famous days of the
French Revolution, so must we do now. All the Army is coming over to our
side. The Preobrojenski have come over to us and have arrested their
officers and taken their arms. We must finish with Protopopoff and our
other tyrants, and see that we have a just rule. _Tovaristchi_! there
will never be such a chance again, and you will repent for ever if you
have not played your part in the great fight for freedom!"

So it went on. It did not seem that his audience was greatly impressed.
It was bewildered and dazed. But the fire leapt up behind him giving him
a legendary splendour, and the whole picture was romantic and unreal
like a gaudy painting on a coloured screen.

We hurried through into the Nevski, and this we found nearly deserted.
The trams of course had stopped, a few figures hurried along, and once
an Isvostchick went racing down towards the river.

"Well, now, we seem to be out of it," said Bohun, with a sigh of relief.
"I must say I'm not sorry. I don't mind France, where you can tell which
is the front and which the back, but this kind of thing does get on
one's nerves. I daresay it's only local. We shall find them all as easy
as anything at the Astoria, and wondering what we're making a fuss
about."

At that moment we were joined by an English merchant whom we both knew,
a stout elderly man who had lived all his life in Russia. I was
surprised to find him in a state of extreme terror. I had always known
him as a calm, conceited, stupid fellow, with a great liking for Russian
ladies. This pastime he was able as a bachelor to enjoy to the full.
Now, however, instead of the ruddy, coarse, self-confident merchant
there was a pallid, trembling jelly-fish.

"I say, you fellows," he asked, catching my arm. "Where are you off to?"

"We're off to the Astoria," I answered.

"Let me come with you. I'm not frightened, not at all--all the same I
don't want to be left alone. I was in the 1905 affair. That was enough
for me. Where are they firing--do you know?"

"All over the place," said Bohun, enjoying himself. "They'll be down
here in a minute."

"Good God! Do you really think so? It's terrible--these fellows--once
they get loose they stick at nothing.... I remember in 1905.... Good
heavens! Where had we better go? It's very exposed here, isn't it?"

"It's very exposed everywhere," said Bohun. "I doubt whether any of us
are alive in the morning."

"Good heavens! You don't say so! Why should they interfere with us?"

"Oh, rich, you know, and that kind of thing. And then we're Englishmen.
They'll clear out all the English."

"Oh, I'm not really English. My mother was Russian. I could show them my
papers...."

Bohun laughed. "I'm only kidding you, Watchett," he said. "We're safe
enough. Look, there's not a soul about!" We were at the corner of the
Moika now; all was absolutely quiet. Two women and a man were standing
on the bridge talking together. A few stars clustered above the bend of
the Canal seemed to shift and waver ever so slightly through a gathering
mist, like the smoke of blowing candles.

"It seems all right," said the merchant, sniffing the air suspiciously
as though he expected to smell blood. We turned towards the Morskaia.
One of the women detached herself from the group and came to us.

"Don't go down the Morskaia," she said, whispering, as though some
hostile figure were leaning over her shoulder. "They're firing round the
Telephone Exchange." Even as she spoke I heard the sharp clatter of the
machine-gun break out again, but now very close, and with an intimate
note as though it were the same gun that I had heard before, which had
been tracking me down round the town.

"Do you hear that?" said the merchant.

"Come on," said Bohun. "We'll go down the Moika. That seems safe
enough!"

How strangely in the flick of a bullet the town had changed! Yesterday
every street had been friendly, obvious, and open; they were now no
longer streets, but secret blind avenues with strange trees, fantastic
doors, shuttered windows, a grinning moon, malicious stars, and snow
that lay there simply to prevent every sound. It was a town truly
beleaguered as towns are in dreams. The uncanny awe with which I moved
across the bridge was increased when the man with the women turned
towards me, and I saw that he was--or seemed to be--that same grave
bearded peasant whom I had seen by the river, whom Henry had seen in the
Cathedral, who remained with one, as passing strangers sometimes do,
like a symbol or a message or a threat.

He stood, with the Nevski behind him, calm and grave, and even it seemed
a little amused, watching me as I crossed. I said to Bohun, "Did you
ever see that fellow before?"

Bohun turned and looked.

"No," he said.

"Don't you remember? The man that first day in the Kazan?"

"They're all alike," Bohun said. "One can't tell...."

"Oh, come on," said the merchant. "Let's get to the Astoria."

We started down the Moika, past that faded picture-shop where there are
always large moth-eaten canvases of cornfields under the moon and
Russian weddings and Italian lakes. We had got very nearly to the little
street with the wooden hoardings when the merchant gripped my arm.

"What's that?" he gulped. The silence now was intense. We could not hear
the machine-gun nor any shouting. The world was like a picture smoking
under a moon now red and hard. Against the wall of the street two women
were huddled, one on her knees, her head pressed against the thighs of
the other, who stood stretched as though crucified, her arms out,
staring on to the Canal. Beside a little kiosk, on the space exactly in
front of the side street, lay a man on his face. His bowler-hat had
rolled towards the kiosk; his arms were stretched out so that he looked
oddly like the shadow of the woman against the wall.

Instead of one hand there was a pool of blood. The other hand with all
the fingers stretched was yellow against the snow.

As we came up a bullet from the Morskaia struck the kiosk.

The woman, not moving from the wall, said, "They've shot my husband...
he did nothing."

The other woman, on her knees, only cried without ceasing.

The merchant said, "I'm going back--to the Europe," and he turned and
ran.

"What's down that street?" I said to the woman, as though I expected her
to say "Hobgoblins." Bohun said, "This is rather beastly.... We ought to
move that fellow out of that. He may be alive still."

And how silly such a sentence when only yesterday, just here, there was
the beggar who sold boot-laces, and just there, where the man lay, an
old muddled Isvostchick asleep on his box!

We moved forward, and instantly it was as though I were in the middle of
a vast desert quite alone with all the hosts of heaven aiming at me
malicious darts. As I bent down my back was so broad that it stretched
across Petrograd, and my feet were tiny like frogs.

We pulled at the man. His head rolled and his face turned over, and the
mouth was full of snow. It was so still that I whispered, whether to
Bohun or myself, "God, I wish somebody would shout!" Then I heard the
wood of the kiosk crack, ever so slightly, like an opening door, and
panic flooded me as I had never known it do during all my time at the
Front.

"I've no strength," I said to Bohun.

"Pull for God's sake!" he answered. We dragged the body a little way; my
hand clutched the thigh, which was hard and cold under the stuff of his
clothing. His head rolled round, and his eyes now were covered with
snow. We dragged him, and he bumped grotesquely. We had him under the
wall, near the two women, and the blood welled out and dripped in a
spreading pool at the women's feet.

"Now," said Bohun, "we've got to run for it."

"Do you know," said I, as though I were making a sudden discovery, "I
don't think I can." I leaned back against the wall and looked at the
pool of blood near the kiosk where the man had been.

"Oh, but you've got to," said Bohun, who seemed to feel no fear. "We
can't stay here all night."

"No, I know," I answered. "But the trouble is--I'm not myself." And I
was not. That _was_ the trouble. I was not John Durward at all. Some
stranger was here with a new heart, poor shrivelled limbs, an enormous
nose, a hot mouth with no eyes at all. This stranger had usurped my
clothes and he refused to move. He was tied to the wall and he would not
obey me.

Bohun looked at me. "I say, Durward, come on, it's only a step. We must
get to the Astoria."

But the picture of the Astoria did not stir me. I should have seen Nina
and Vera waiting there, and that should have at once determined me. So
it would have been had I been myself. This other man was there.... Nina
and Vera meant nothing to him at all. But I could not explain that to
Bohun. "I can't go..." I saw Bohun's eyes--I was dreadfully ashamed.
"You go on..." I muttered. I wanted to tell him that I did not think
that I could endure to feel again that awful expansion of my back and
the turning my feet into toads.

"Of course I can't leave you," he said.

And suddenly I sprang back into my own clothes again. I flung the
charlatan out and he flumped off into air.

"Come on," I said, and I ran. No bullets whizzed past us. I was ashamed
of running, and we walked quite quietly over the rest of the open space.

"Funny thing," I said, "I was damned frightened for a moment."

"It's the silence and the houses," said Bohun.

Strangely enough I remember nothing between that moment and our arrival
at the Astoria. We must have skirted the Canal, keeping in the shadow of
the wall, then crossed the Saint Isaac's Square. The next thing I can
recall is our standing, rather breathless, in the hall of the Astoria,
and the first persons I saw there were Vera and Nina, together at the
bottom of the staircase, saying nothing, waiting.

In front of them was a motley crowd of Russian officers all talking and
gesticulating together. I came nearer to Vera and at once I said to
myself, "Lawrence is here somewhere." She was standing, her head up,
watching the doors, her eyes glowed with anticipation, her lips were a
little parted. She never moved at all, but was so vital that the rest of
the people seemed dolls beside her. As we came towards them Nina turned
round and spoke to some one, and I saw that it was Semyonov who stood at
the bottom of the staircase, his thick legs apart, stroking his beard
with his hand.

We came forward and Nina began at once--

"Durdles--tell us! What's happened?"

"I don't know," I answered. The lights after the dark and the snow
bewildered me, and the noise and excitement of the Russian officers were
deafening.

Nina went on, her face lit. "Can't you tell us anything? We haven't
heard a word. We came just in an ordinary way about four o'clock. There
wasn't a sound, and then, just as we were sitting down to tea, they all
came bursting in, saying that all the officers were being murdered, and
that Protopopoff was killed, and that--"

"That's true anyway," said a young Russian officer, turning round to us
excitedly. "I had it from a friend of mine who was passing just as they
stuck him in the stomach. He saw it all; they dragged him out of his
house and stuck him in the stomach--"

"They say the Czar's been shot," said another officer, a fat, red-faced
man with very bright red trousers, "and that Rodziancko's formed a
government..."

I heard on every side such words as "People--Rodziancko
--Protopopoff--Freedom," and the officer telling his tale again. "And
they stuck him in the stomach just as he was passing his house..."

Through all this tale Vera never moved. I saw, to my surprise, that
Lawrence was there now, standing near her but never speaking. Semyonov
stood on the stairs watching.

Suddenly I saw that she wanted me.

"Ivan Andreievitch," she said, "will you do something for me?" She spoke
very low, and her eyes did not look at me, but beyond us all out to the
door.

"Certainly," I said.

"Will you keep Alexei Petrovitch here? Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Bohun can
see us home. I don't want him to come with us. Will you ask him to wait
and speak to you?"

I went up to him. "Semyonov," I said, "I want a word with you, if I
may--"

"Certainly," he said, with that irritating smile of his, as though he
knew exactly of what I was thinking.

We moved up the dark stairs. As we went I heard Vera's clear, calm
voice:

"Will you see us home, Mr. Lawrence?... I think it's quite safe to go
now."

We stopped on the first floor under the electric light. There were two
easy-chairs there, with a dusty palm behind them. We sat down.

"You haven't really got anything to say to me," he began.

"Oh yes, I have," I said.

"No... You simply suggested conversation because Vera asked you to do
so."

"I suggested a conversation," I answered, "because I had something of
some seriousness to tell you."

"Well, she needn't have been afraid," he went on. "I wasn't going home
with them. I want to stop and watch these ridiculous people a little
longer.... What had you got to say, my philosophical, optimistic
friend?"

He looked quite his old self, sitting stockily in the chair, his strong
thighs pressing against the cane as though they'd burst it, his thick
square beard more wiry than ever, and his lips red and shining. He
seemed to have regained his old self-possession and confidence.

"What I wanted to say," I began, "is that I'm going to tell you once
more to leave Markovitch alone. I know the other day--that alone--"

"Oh _that_!" he brushed it aside impatiently. "There are bigger things
than that just now, Durward. You lack, as I have always said, two very
essential things, a sense of humour and a sense of proportion. And you
pretend to know Russia whilst you are without those two admirable
gifts!

"However, let us forget personalities.... There are better things here!"

As he spoke two young Russian officers came tumbling up the stairs. They
were talking excitedly, not listening to one another, red in the face
and tripping over their swords. They went up to the next floor, their
voices very shrill.

"So much for your sentimental Russia," said Semyonov. He spoke very
quietly. "How I shall love to see these fools all toppled over, and then
the fools who toppled them toppled in their turn.

"Durward, you're a fool too, but you're English, and at least you've got
a conscience. I tell you, you'll see in these next months such
cowardice, such selfishness, such meanness, such ignorance as the world
has never known--and all in the name of Freedom! Why, they're chattering
about freedom already downstairs as hard as they can go!"

"As usual, Semyonov," I answered hotly, "you believe in the good of no
one. If there's really a Revolution coming, which I still doubt, it may
lead to the noblest liberation."

"Oh, you're an ass!" he interrupted quietly. "Nobility and the human
race! I tell you, Ivan Andreievitch of the noble character, that the
human race is rotten; that it is composed of selfishness, vice, and
meanness; that it is hypocritical beyond the bounds of hypocrisy, and
that of all mean cowardly nations on this earth the Russian nation is
the meanest and most cowardly!... That fine talk of ours that you
English slobber over!--a mere excuse for idleness, and you'll know it
before another year is through. I despise mankind with a contempt that
every day's fresh experience only the more justifies. Only once have I
found some one who had a great soul, and she, too, if I had secured
her, might have disappointed me.... No, my time is coming. I shall see
at last my fellowmen in their true colours, and I shall even perhaps
help them to display them. My worthy Markovitch, for example--"

"What about Markovitch?" I asked sharply.

He got up, smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder.

"He shall be driven by ghosts," he answered, and turned off to the
stairs.

He looked back for a moment. "The funny thing is, I like you, Durward,"
he said.



X

I remember very little of my return to my island that night. The world
was horribly dark and cold, the red moon had gone, and a machine-gun
pursued me all the way home like a barking dog. I crossed the bridge
frankly with nerves so harassed, with so many private anxieties and so
much public apprehension, with so overpowering a suspicion that every
shadow held a rifle that my heart leapt in my breast, and I was suddenly
sick with fear when some one stepped across the road and put his hand on
my arm. You see I have nothing much to boast about myself. My relief was
only slightly modified when I saw that it was the Rat. The Rat had
changed! He stood, as though on purpose under the very faint grey light
of the lamp at the end of the bridge, and seen thus, he did in truth
seem like an apparition. He was excited of course, but there was more in
his face than that. The real truth about him was, that he was filled
with some determination, some purpose. He was like a child who is
playing at being a burglar, his face had exactly that absorption, that
obsessing pre-occupation.

"I've been waiting for you, Barin," he said in his hoarse musical voice.


"What is it?" I asked.

"This is where I live," he said, and he showed me a very dirty piece of
paper. "I think you ought to know."

"Why?" I asked him.

"_Kto snaiet_? (who knows?) The Czar's gone and we are all free men...."

I felt oddly that suddenly now he knew himself my master. That was now
in his voice.

"What are you going to do with your freedom?" I asked.

He sighed.

"I shall have my duties now," he said. "I'm not a free man at all. I
obey orders for the first time. The people are going to rule. I am the
people."

He paused. Then he went on very seriously. "That is why, Barin, I give
you that paper. I have friendly feelings towards you. I don't know what
it is, but I am your brother. They may come and want to rob your house.
Show them that paper."

"Thank you very much," I said. "But I'm not afraid. There's nothing I
mind them stealing. All the same I'm very grateful."

He went on very seriously.

"There'll be no Czar now and no police. We will stop the war and all be
rich." He sighed. "But I don't know that it will bring happiness." He
suddenly seemed to me forlorn and desolate and lonely, like a lost dog.
I knew quite well that very soon, perhaps directly he had left me, he
would plunder and murder and rob again.

But that night, the two of us alone on the island and everything so
still, waiting for great events, I felt close to him and protective.

"Don't get knocked on the head, Rat," I said, "during one of your raids.
Death is easily come by just now. Look after yourself."

He shrugged his shoulders. "_Shto boodet, boodet_ (what will be, will
be). _Neechevo_ (it's of no importance)." He had vanished into the
shadows.



XI

I realise that the moment has come in my tale when the whole interest of
my narrative centres in Markovitch. Markovitch is really the point of
all my story as I have, throughout, subconsciously, recognised. The
events of that wonderful Tuesday when for a brief instant the sun of
freedom really did seem to all of us to break through the clouds, that
one day in all our lives when hopes, dreams, Utopias, fairy tales seemed
to be sober and realistic fact, those events might be seen through the
eyes of any of us. Vera, Nina, Grogoff, Semyonov, Lawrence, Bohun and I,
all shared in them and all had our sensations and experiences. But my
own were drab and ordinary enough, and from the others I had no account
so full and personal and true as from Markovitch. He told me all about
that great day afterwards, only a short time before that catastrophe
that overwhelmed us all, and in his account there was all the growing
suspicion and horror of disillusion that after-events fostered in him.
But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night,
watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea,
he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before he had
finished his tale he was right back in that fantastic world that had
burst at the touch like bubbles in the sun. I will give his account, as
accurately as possible in his own words. I seldom interrupted him, and I
think he soon forgot that I was there. He had come to me that night in a
panic, for reasons which will he given later and I, in trying to
reassure him, had reminded him of that day, when the world was suddenly
Utopia.


"That _did_ exist, that world," I said. "And once having existed it
cannot now be dead. Believe, believe that it will come back."

"Come back!" He shook his head. "Even if it is still there I cannot go
back to it. I will tell you, Ivan Andreievitch, what that day was...
and why now I am so bitterly punished for having believed in it. Listen,
what happened to me. It occurred, all of it, exactly as I tell you. You
know that, just at that time, I had been worrying very much about Vera.
The Revolution had come I suppose very suddenly to every one; but truly
to myself, because I had been thinking of Vera, it was like a
thunder-clap. It's always been my trouble, Ivan Andreievitch, that I
can't think of more than one thing at once, and the worry of it has been
that in my life there has been almost invariably more than one thing
that I ought to think of.... I would think of my invention, you know,
that I ought to get on with it a little faster. Because really--it was
making a sort of cloth out of bark that I was working at; as every day
passed, I could see more and more clearly that there was a great deal in
this particular invention, and that it only needed real application to
bring it properly forward. Only application as you know is my trouble.
If I could only shut my brain up...."

He told me then, I remember, a lot about his early childhood, and then
the struggle that he had had to see one thing at once, and not two or
three things that got in the way and hindered him from doing anything.
He went on about Vera.

"You know that one night I had crept up into your room, and looked to
see whether there were possibly a letter there. That was a disgraceful
thing to do, wasn't it? But I felt then that I had to satisfy myself. I
wonder whether I can make you understand. It wasn't jealousy exactly,
because I had never felt that I had had any very strong right over Vera,
considering the way that she had married me; but I don't think I ever
loved her more than I did during those weeks, and she was unattainable.
I was lonely, Ivan Andreievitch, that's the truth. Everything seemed to
be slipping away from me, and in some way Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov
seemed to accentuate that. He was always reminding me of one day or
another when I had been happy with Vera long ago--some silly little
expedition we had taken--or he was doubtful about my experiments being
any good, or he would recall what I had felt about Russia at the
beginning of the war.... All in a very kindly way, mind you. He was more
friendly than he had ever been, and seemed to be altogether
softer-hearted. But he made me think a great deal about Vera. He talked
often so much. He thought that I ought to look after her more, and I
explained that that wasn't my right.

"The truth is that ever since Nina's birthday-party I had been anxious.
I knew really that everything was right. Vera is of course the soul of
honour--but something had occurred then which made me....

"Well, well, that doesn't matter now. The only point is that I was
thinking of Vera a great deal, and wondering how I could make her happy.
She wasn't happy. I don't know how it was, but during those weeks just
before the Revolution we were none of us happy. We were all uneasy as
though we expected something were going to happen--and we were all
suspicious....

"I only tell you this because then you will see why it was that the
Revolution broke upon me with such surprise. I had been right inside
myself, talking to nobody, wanting nobody to talk to me. I get like that
sometimes, when words seem to mean so much that it seems dangerous to
throw them about.... And perhaps it is. But silence is dangerous too.
Everything is dangerous if you are unlucky by nature....

"I had been indoors all that Monday working at my invention, and
thinking about Vera, wondering whether I'd speak to her, then afraid of
my temper (I have a bad temper), wanting to know what was the truth,
thinking at one moment that if she cared for some one else that I'd go
away...and then suddenly angry and jealous, wishing to challenge him,
but I am a ludicrous figure to challenge any one, as I very well know.
Semyonov had been to see me that morning, and he had just sat there
without saying anything. I couldn't endure that very long, so I asked
him what he came for and he said, 'Oh, nothing.' I felt as though he
were spying and I became uneasy. Why should he come so often now? And I
was beginning to think of him when he wasn't there. It was as though he
thought he had a right over all of us, and that irritated me.... Well,
that was Monday. They all came late in the afternoon and told me all the
news. They had been at the Astoria. The whole town seemed to be in
revolt, so they said.

"But even then I didn't realise it. I was thinking of Vera just the
same. I looked at her all the evening just as Semyonov had looked at me.
And didn't say anything.... I never wanted her so badly before. I made
her sleep with me all that night. She hadn't done that for a long time,
and I woke up early in the morning to hear her crying softly to herself.
She never used to cry. She was so proud. I put my arms round her, and
she stopped crying and lay quite still. It wasn't fair what I did, but I
felt as though Alexei Petrovitch had challenged me to do it. He always
hated Vera I knew. I got up very early and went to my wood. You can
imagine I wasn't very happy....

"Then suddenly I thought I'd go out into the streets, and see what was
happening. I couldn't believe really that there had been any change. So
I went out.

"Do you know of recent years I've walked out very seldom? What was it? A
kind of shyness. I knew when I was in my own house, and I knew whom I
was with. Then I was never a man who cared greatly about exercise, and
there was no one outside whom I wanted very much to see. So when I went
out that morning it was as though I didn't know Petrograd at all, and
had only just arrived there. I went over the Ekateringofsky Bridge,
through the Square, and to the left down the Sadovaya.

"Of course the first thing that I noticed was that there were no trams,
and that there were multitudes of people walking along and that they
were all poor people and all happy.' And I _was_ glad when I saw that.
Of course I'm a fool, and life can't be as I want it, but that's always
what I had thought life ought to be--all the streets filled with poor
people, all free and happy. And here they were!... with the snow crisp
under their feet, and the sun shining, and the air quite still, so that
all the talk came up, and up into the sky like a song. But of course
they were bewildered as well as happy. They didn't know where to go,
they didn't know what to do--like birds let out suddenly from their
cages. I didn't know myself. That's what sudden freedom does--takes your
breath away so that you go staggering along, and get caught again if
you're not careful. No trams, no policemen, no carriages filled with
proud people cursing you.... Oh, Ivan Andreievitch, I'd be proud myself
if I had money, and servants to put on my clothes, and new women every
night, and different food every day.... I don't blame them--but suddenly
proud people were gone, and I was crying without knowing it--simply
because that great crowd of poor people went pushing along, all talking
under the sunny sky as freely as they pleased.

"I began to look about me. I saw that there were papers posted on the
walls. They were those proclamations, you know, of Rodziancko's new
government, saying that while everything was unsettled, Milyukoff,
Rodziancko, and the others would take charge in order to keep order and
discipline. It seemed to me that there was little need to talk about
discipline. Had beggars appeared there in the road I believed that the
crowd would have stripped off their clothes and given them, rather than
that they should want.

"I stood by one proclamation and read it out to the little crowd. They
repeated the names to themselves, but they did not seem to care much.
'The Czar's wicked they tell me,' said one man to me. 'And all our
troubles come from him.'

"'It doesn't matter,' said another. 'There'll be plenty of bread now.'

"And indeed what did names matter now? I couldn't believe my eyes or my
ears, Ivan Andreievitch. It looked too much like Paradise and I'd been
deceived so often. So I determined to be very cautious. 'You've been
taken in, Nicolai Leontievitch, many many times. Don't you believe
this?' But I couldn't help feeling that if only this world would
continue, if only the people could always be free and happy and the sun
could shine, perhaps the rest of the world would see its folly and the
war would stop and never begin again. This thought would grow in my mind
as I walked, although I refused to encourage it.

"Motor lorries covered with soldiers came dashing down the street. The
soldiers had their guns pointed, but the crowd cheered and cheered,
waving hands and shouting. I shouted too. The tears were streaming down
my face. I couldn't help myself. I wanted to hold the sun and the snow
and the people all in my arms fixed so that it should never change, and
the world should see how good and innocent life could be.

"On every side people had asked what had really happened, and of course
no one knew. But it did not matter. Every one was so simple. A soldier,
standing beside one of the placards was shouting: '_Tovaristchi!_ What
we must have is a splendid Republic and a good Czar to look after it.'

"And they all cheered him and laughed and sang. I turned up one of the
side streets on to the Fontanka, and here I saw them emptying the rooms
of one of the police. That was amusing! I laugh still when I think of
it. Sending everything out of the windows,--underclothes, ladies'
bonnets, chairs, books, flower-pots, pictures, and then all the records,
white and yellow and pink paper, all fluttering in the sun like so many
butterflies. The crowd was perfectly peaceful, in an excellent temper.
Isn't that wonderful when you think that for months those people had
been starved and driven, waiting all night in the street for a piece of
bread, and that now all discipline was removed, no more policemen except
those hiding for their lives in houses, and yet they did nothing, they
touched no one's property, did no man any harm. People say now that it
was their apathy, that they were taken by surprise, that they were like
animals who did not know where to go, but I tell you, Ivan Andreievitch,
that it was not so. I tell you that it was because just for an hour the
soul could come up from its dark waters and breathe the sun and the
light and see that all was good. Oh, why cannot that day return? Why
cannot that day return?..."

He broke off and looked at me like a distracted child, his brows
puckered, his hands beating the air. I did not say anything. I wanted
him to forget that I was there.

He went on: "... I could not be there all day, I thought that I would go
on to the Duma. I flowed on with the crowd. We were a great river
swinging without knowing why, in one direction and only interrupted,
once and again, by the motor lorries that rattled along, the soldiers
shouting to us and waving their rifles, and we replying with cheers. I
heard no firing that morning at all. They said, in the crowd, that many
thousands had been killed last night. It seemed that on the roof of
nearly every house in Petrograd there was a policeman with a
machine-gun. But we marched along, without fear, singing. And all the
time the joy in my heart was rising, rising, and I was checking it,
telling myself that in a moment I would be disappointed, that I would
soon be tricked as I had been so often tricked before. But I couldn't
help my joy, which was stronger than myself....

"It must have been early afternoon, so long had I been on the road, when
I came at last to the Duma. You saw yourself, Ivan Andreievitch, that
all that week the crowd outside the Duma was truly a sea of people with
the motor lorries that bristled with rifles for sea-monsters and the
gun-carriages for ships. And such a babel! Every one talking at once and
nobody listening to any one.

"I don't know now how I pushed through into the Court, but at last I was
inside and found myself crushed up against the doors of the Palace by a
mob of soldiers and students. Here there was a kind of hush.

"When the door of the Palace opened there was a little sigh of interest.
At intervals armed guards marched up with some wretched pale dirty
Gorodovoi whom they had taken prisoner--"

Nicholas Markovitch paused again and again. He had been looking out to
the sea over whose purple shadows the sky pale green and studded with
silver stars seemed to wave magic shuttles of light, to and fro,
backwards and forwards.

"You don't mind all these details, Ivan Andreievitch? I am trying to
discover, for my own sake, all the details that led me to my final
experience. I want to trace the chain link by link...nothing is
unimportant..."

I assured him that I was absorbed by his story. And indeed I was. That
little, uncouth, lost, and desolate man was the most genuine human being
whom I had ever known. That quality, above all others, stood forth in
him. He had his secret as all men have their secret, the key to their
pursuit of their own immortality....But Markovitch's secret was a real
one, something that he faced with real bravery, real pride, and real
dignity, and when he saw what the issue of his conduct must be he would,
I knew, face it without flinching.

He went on, but looking at me now rather than the sea--looking at me
with his grave, melancholy, angry eyes. "...After one of these convoys
of prisoners the door remained for a moment open, and I seeing my chance
slipped in after the guards. Here I was then in the very heart of the
Revolution; but still, you know, Ivan Andreievitch, I couldn't properly
seize the fact, I couldn't grasp the truth that all this was really
occurring and that it wasn't just a play, a pretence, or a dream...
yes, a dream... especially a dream... perhaps, after all, that was
what it was. The Circular Hall was piled high with machine-guns, bags of
flour, and provisions of all kinds. There were some armed soldiers of
course and women, and beside the machine guns the floor was strewn with
cigarette ends and empty tins and papers and bags and cardboard boxes
and even broken bottles. Dirt and Desolation! I remember that it was
then when I looked at that floor that the first little suspicion stole
into my heart--not a suspicion so much as an uneasiness. I wanted at
once myself to set to work to clean up all the mess with my own hands.

"I didn't like to see it there, and no one caring whether it were there
or no.

"In the Catherine Hall into which I peered there was a vast mob, and
this huge mass of men stirred and coiled and uncoiled like some huge
ant-heap. Many of them, as I watched, suddenly turned into the outer
hall. Men jumped on to chairs and boxes and balustrades, and soon, all
over the place there were speakers, some shouting, some shrieking, some
with tears rolling down their cheeks, some swearing, some whispering as
though to themselves... and all the regiments came pouring in from the
station, tumbling in like puppies or babies with pieces of red cloth
tied to their rifles, some singing, some laughing, some dumb with
amazement... thicker and thicker and thicker... standing round the
speakers with their mouths open and their eyes wide, pushing and
jostling, but good-naturedly, like young dogs.

"Everywhere, you know, men were forming committees, committees for
social right, for a just Peace, for Women's Suffrage, for Finnish
Independence, for literature and the arts, for the better treatment of
prostitutes, for education, for the just division of the land. I had
crept into my corner, and soon as the soldiers came thicker and thicker,
the noise grew more and more deafening, the dust floated in hazy clouds.
The men had their kettles and they boiled tea, squatting down there,
sometimes little processions pushed their way through, soldiers shouting
and laughing with some white-faced policeman in their midst. Once I saw
an old man, his Shuba about his ears, stumbling with his eyes wide open,
and staring as though he were sleep-walking. That was Stürmer being
brought to judgement. Once I saw a man so terrified that he couldn't
move, but must be prodded along by the rifles of the soldiers. That was
Pitirim....

"And the shouting and screaming rose and rose like a flood. Once
Rodziancko came in and began shouting, '_Tovaristchi! Tovaristchi!_...'
but his voice soon gave away, and he went back into the Salle Catherine
again. The Socialists had it their way. There were so many, and their
voices were so fresh and the soldiers liked to listen to them. 'Land for
everybody!' they shouted. 'And Bread and Peace! Hurrah! Hurrah!' cried
the soldiers.

"'That's all very well,' said a huge man near me. 'But Nicholas is
coming, and to-morrow he will eat us all up!'

"But no one seemed to care. They were all mad, and I was mad too. It was
the drunkenness of dust. It got in our heads and our brains. We all
shouted. I began to shout too, although I didn't know what it was that I
was shouting.

"A grimy soldier caught me round the neck and kissed me. 'Land for
everybody!' he cried. 'Have some tea, _Tovaristch_!' and I shared his
tea with him.

"Then through the dust and noise I suddenly saw Boris Grogoff! That was
an astonishing thing. You see I had dissociated all this from my private
life. I had even, during these last hours, forgotten Vera, perhaps for
the very first moment since I met her. She had seemed to have no share
in this,--and then suddenly the figure of Boris showed me that one's
private life is always with one, that it is a secret city in which one
must always live, and whose gates one will never pass through, whatever
may be going on in the world outside. But Grogoff! What a change! You
know, I had always patronised him, Ivan Andreievitch. It had seemed to
me that he was only a boy with a boy's crude ideas. You know his fresh
face with the way that he used to push back his hair from his forehead,
and shout his ideas. He never considered any one's feelings. He was a
complete egoist, and a man, it seemed to me, of no importance. But now!
He stood on a bench and had around him a large crowd of soldiers. He was
shouting in just his old way that he used in the English Prospect, but
he seemed to have grown in the meantime, into a man. He did not seem
afraid any more. I saw that he had power over the men to whom he was
speaking.... I couldn't hear what he said, but through the dust and heat
he seemed to grow and grow until it was only him whom I saw there.

"'He will carry off Nina' was my next thought--ludicrous there at such a
time, in such a crowd, but it is exactly like that that life shifts and
shifts until it has formed a pattern. I was frightened by Grogoff. I
could not believe that the new freedom, the new Russia, the new world
would be made by such men. He waved his arms, he pushed back his hair,
the men shouted. Grogoff was triumphant: 'The New World... _Novaya
Jezn, Novaya Jezn_!' (New Life!) I heard him shout.

"The sun before it set flooded the hall with light. What a scene through
the dust! The red flags, the women and the soldiers and the shouting!

"I was suddenly dismayed. 'How can order come out of this?' I thought.
'They are all mad.... Terrible things are going to happen.' I was dirty
and tired and exhausted. I fought my way through the mob, found the
door. For a moment I looked back, to that sea of men lit by the last
light of the sun. Then I pushed out, was thrown, it seemed to me, from
man to man, and was at last in the air.... Quiet, fires burning in the
courtyard, a sky of the palest blue, a few stars, and the people singing
the 'Marseillaise.'

"It was like drinking great draughts of cold water after an intolerable
thirst....

"...Hasn't Tchekov said somewhere that Russians have nostalgia but no
patriotism? That was never true of me--can't remember how young I was
when I remember my father talking to me about the idea of Russia. I've
told you that he was by any kind of standard a bad man. He had, I think,
no redeeming points at all--but he had, all the same, that sense of
Russia. I don't suppose that he put it to any practical use, or that he
even tried to teach it to his pupils, but it would suddenly seize him
and he would let himself go, and for an hour he would be a fine
master--of words. And what Russian is ever more than that at the end?

"He spoke to me and gave me a picture of a world inside a world, and
this inside world was complete in itself. It had everything in
it--beauty, wealth, force, power; it could be anything, it could do
anything. But it was held by an evil enchantment as though a wicked
magician had it in thrall, and everything slept as in Tchaikowsky's
Ballet. But one day, he told me, the Prince would come and kill the
Enchanter, and this great world would come into its own. I remember that
I was so excited that I couldn't bear to wait, but prayed that I might
be allowed to go out and find the Enchanter... but my father laughed
and said that there were no Enchanter now, and then I cried. All the
same I never lost my hope. I talked to people about Russia, but it was
never Russia itself they seemed to care for--it was women or drink or
perhaps freedom and socialism, or perhaps some part of Russia, Siberia,
or the Caucasus--but my world they none of them believed in. It didn't
exist they said. It was simply my imagination that had painted it, and
they laughed at me and said it was held together by the lashes of the
knout, and when those went Russia would go too. As I grew up some of
them thought that I was revolutionary, and they tried to make me join
their clubs and societies. But those were no use to me. They couldn't
give me what I wanted. They wanted to destroy, to assassinate some one,
or to blow up a building. They had no thought beyond destruction, and
that to me seemed only the first step. And they never think of Russia,
our revolutionaries. You will have noticed that yourself, Ivan
Andreievitch. Nothing so small and trivial as Russia! It must be the
whole world or nothing at all. Democracy... Freedom... the Brotherhood
of Man! Oh, the terrible harm that words have done to Russia! Had the
Russians of the last fifty years been born without the gift of speech we
would be now the greatest people on the earth!

"But I loved Russia from end to end. The farthest villages in Siberia,
the remotest hut beyond Archangel, from the shops in the Sadovaya to the
Lavra at Kieff, from the little villages on the bank of the Volga to the
woods round Tarnopol--all, all one country, one people, one world within
a world. The old man to whom I was secretary discovered this secret hope
of mine. I talked one night when I was drunk and told him everything. I
mentioned even the Enchanter and the Sleeping Beauty! How he laughed at
me! He would never leave me alone. 'Nicolai Leontievitch believes in
Holy Russia!' he would say. 'Not so much Holy, you understand, as
Bewitched. A Fairy Garden, ladies, with a sleeping beauty in the middle
of it. Dear me, Nicolai Leontievitch, no wonder you are heart-free!'

"How I hated him and his yellow face and his ugly stomach! I would have
stamped on it with delight. But that made me shy. I was afraid to speak
of it to any one, and I kept to myself. Then Vera came and she didn't
laugh at me. The two ideas grew together in my head. Vera and Russia!
The two things in my life by which I stood--because man must have
something in life round which he may nestle as a cat curls up by the
fire.

"But even Vera did not seem to care for Russia as Russia. 'What can
Siberia be to me?' she would say. 'Why, Nicholas, it is no more than
China.'

"But it was more than China; when I looked at it on the map I recognised
it as though it were my own country. Then the war came and I thought the
desire of my heart was fulfilled. At last men talked about Russia as
though she truly existed. For a moment all Russia was united, all
classes, rich and poor, high and low. Men were patriotic together as
though one heart beat through all the land. But only for a moment.
Divisions came, and quickly things were worse than before. There came
Tannenburg and afterwards Warsaw.

"All was lost.... Russia was betrayed, and I was a sentimental fool. You
know yourself how cynical even the most sentimental Russians are--that
is because if you stick to facts you know where you are, but ideas are
always betraying you. Life simply isn't long enough to test them, that's
all, and man is certainly not a patient animal.

"At first I watched the war going from bad to worse, and then I shut
myself in and refused to look any longer. I thought only of Vera and my
work. I would make a great discovery and be rich, and then Vera at last
would love me. Idiot! As though I had not known that Vera would not love
for that kind of reason.... I determined that I would think no more of
Russia, that I would be a man of no country. Then during those last
weeks before the Revolution I began to be suspicious of Vera and to
watch her. I did things of which I was ashamed, and then I despised
myself for being ashamed.

"I am a man, I can do what I wish. Even though I am imprisoned I am
free.... I am my own master. But all the same, to be a spy is a mean
thing, Ivan Andreievitch. You Englishmen, although you are stupid, you
are not mean. It was that day when your young friend, Bohun, found me
looking in your room for letters, that in spite of myself I was ashamed.

"He looked at me in a sort of way as though, down to his very soul he
was astonished at what I had done. Well, why should I mind that he
should be astonished? He was very young and all wrong in his ideas of
life. Nevertheless that look of his influenced me. I thought about it
afterwards. Then came Alexei Petrovitch. I've told you already. He was
always hinting at something. He was always there as though he were
waiting for something to happen. He hinted things about Vera. It's
strange, Ivan Andreievitch, but there was a day just a week before the
Revolution, when I was very nearly jumping up and striking him. Just to
get rid of him so that he shouldn't be watching me....Why even when I
wasn't there he....

"But what's that got to do with my walk? Nothing perhaps. All the same,
it was all these little things that made me, when I walked out of the
Duma that evening so queer. You see I'd been getting desperate. All that
I had left was being taken from me, and then suddenly this Revolution
had come and given me back Russia again. I forgot Alexei Petrovitch and
your Englishman Lawrence and the failure of my work--I remembered, once
again, just as I had those first days of the war, Vera and Russia.

"There, in the clear evening air, I forgot all the talk there had been
inside the Duma, the mess and the noise and the dust. I was suddenly
happy again, and excited, and hopeful.... The Enchanter had come after
all, and Russia was to awake.

"Ah, what a wonderful evening that was! You know that there have been
times--very, very rare occasions in one's life--when places that one
knows well, streets and houses so common and customary as to be like
one's very skin--are suddenly for a wonderful half-hour places of magic,
the trees are gold, the houses silver, the bricks jewelled, the pavement
of amber. Or simply perhaps they are different, a new country of new
colour and mystery... when one is just in love or has won some prize,
or finished at last some difficult work. Petrograd was like that to me
that night; I swear to you, Ivan Andreievitch, I did not know where I
was. I seem now on looking back to have been in places that night,
magical places, that by the morning had flown away. I could not tell you
where I went. I know that I must have walked for miles. I walked with a
great many people who were all my brothers. I had drunk nothing, not
even water, and yet the effect on me was exactly as though I were drunk,
drunk with happiness, Ivan Andreievitch, and with the possibility of all
the things that might now be.

"We, many of us, marched along, singing the 'Marseillaise' I suppose.
There was firing I think in some of the streets, because I can remember
now on looking back that once or twice I heard a machine-gun quite close
to me and didn't care at all, and even laughed.... Not that I've ever
cared for that. Bullets aren't the sort of things that frighten me.
There are other terrors....All the same it was curious that we should
all march along as though there were no danger and the peace of the
world had come. There were women with us--quite a number of them I
think--and, I believe, some children. I remember that some of the way I
carried a child, fast asleep in my arms. How ludicrous it would be now
if I, of all men in the world, carried a baby down the Nevski! But it
was quite natural that night. The town seemed to me blazing with light.
Of course that it cannot have been; there can have only been the stars
and some bonfires. And perhaps we stopped at the police-courts which
were crackling away. I don't remember that, but I know that somewhere
there were clouds of golden sparks opening into the sky and mingling
with the stars--a wonderful sight, flocks of golden birds and behind
them a roar of sound like a torrent of water... I know that, most of
the night, I had one man especially for my companion. I can see him
quite clearly now, although, whether it is all my imagination or not I
can't say. Certainly I've never seen him since and never will again. He
was a peasant, a bigly made man, very neatly and decently dressed in a
workman's blouse and black trousers. He had a long black beard and was
grave and serious, speaking very little but watching everything. Kindly,
our best type of peasant--perhaps the type that will one day give Russia
her real freedom... one day... a thousand years from now....

"I don't know why it is that I can still see him so clearly, because I
can remember no one else of that night, and even this fellow may have
been my imagination. But I think that, as we walked along, I talked to
him about Russia and how the whole land now from Archangel to
Vladivostock might be free and be one great country of peace and plenty,
first in all the world.

"It seemed to me that every one was singing, men and women and
children....

"We must, at last, have parted from most of the company. I had come with
my friend into the quieter streets of the city. Then it was that I
suddenly smelt the sea. You must have noticed how Petrograd is mixed up
with the sea, how suddenly, where you never would expect it, you see the
masts of ships all clustered together against the sky. I smelt the sea,
the wind blew fresh and strong and there we were on the banks of the
Neva. Everywhere there was perfect silence. The Neva lay, tranquil,
bound under its ice. The black hulks of the ships lay against the white
shadows like sleeping animals. The curve of the sky, with its multitude
of stars, was infinite.

"My friend embraced me and left me and I stayed alone, so happy, so sure
of the peace of the world that I did what I had not done for years, sent
up a prayer of gratitude to God. Then with my head on my hands, looking
down at the masts of the ships, feeling Petrograd behind me with its
lights as though it were the City of God, I burst into tears--tears of
happiness and joy and humble gratitude.... I have no memory of anything
further."



XII

So much for the way that one Russian saw it. There were others. For
instance Vera....

I suppose that the motive of Vera's life was her pride. Quite early, I
should imagine, she had adopted that as the sort of talisman that would
save her from every kind of ill. She told me once that when she was a
little girl, the story of the witch who lured two children into the wood
and then roasted them in her oven had terrified her beyond all control,
and she would lie awake and shiver for hours because of it. It became a
symbol of life to her--the Forest was there and the Oven and the
Witch--and so clever and subtle was the Witch that the only way to
outwit her was by pride. Then there was also her maternal tenderness; it
was through that that Markovitch won her. She had not of course loved
him--she had never pretended to herself that she had--but she had seen
that he wanted caring for, and then, having taken the decisive step, her
pride had come to her aid, had shown her a glimpse of the Witch waiting
in the Forest darkness, and had proved to her that here was her great
opportunity. She had then, with the easy superiority of a young girl,
ignorant of life, dismissed love as of something that others might care
for but that would, in no case, concern herself. Did Love for a moment
smile at her or beckon to her Pride came to her and showed her Nina and
Nicholas, and that was enough.

But Love knows its power. He suddenly put forth his strength and Vera
was utterly helpless--far more helpless than a Western girl with her
conventional code and traditional training would have been. Vera had no
convention and no tradition. She had only her pride and her maternal
instinct and these, for a time, fought a battle for her... then they
suddenly deserted her.

I imagine that they really deserted her on the night of Nina's
birthday-party, but she would not admit defeat so readily, and fought on
for a little. On this eventful week when the world, as we knew it, was
tumbling about our ears, she had told herself that the only thing to
which she must give a thought was her fixed loyalty to Nina and
Nicholas. She would not think of Lawrence....She would not think of him.
And so resolving, thought of him all the more.

By Wednesday morning her nerves were exhausted. The excitements of this
week came as a climax to many months of strain. With the exception of
her visit to the Astoria she had been out scarcely at all and, although
the view from her flat was peaceful enough she could imagine every kind
of horror beyond the boundaries of the Prospect--and in every horror
Lawrence figured.

There occurred that morning a strange little conversation between Vera,
Semyonov, Nicholas Markovitch, and myself. I arrived about ten o'clock
to see how they were and to hear the news. I found Vera sitting quietly
at the table sewing. Markovitch stood near to her, his anxious eyes and
trembling mouth perched on the top of his sharp peaky collar and his
hands rubbing nervously one within another. He was obviously in a state
of very great excitement. Semyonov sat opposite Vera, leaning his thick
body on his arms, his eyes watching his niece and every once and again
his firm pale hand stroking his beard.

When I joined them he said to me:

"Well, Ivan Andreievitch, what's the latest news of your splendid
Revolution?"

"Why my Revolution?" I asked. I felt an especial dislike this morning of
his sneering eyes and his thick pale honey-coloured beard. "Whose ever
it was he should be proud of it. To see thousands of people who've been
hungry for months wandering about as I've seen them this morning and
none of them touching a thing--it's stupendous!"

Semyonov smiled but said nothing. His smile irritated me. "Oh, of course
you sneer at the whole thing, Alexei Petrovitch!" I said. "Anything fine
in human nature excites your contempt as I know of old."

I think that that was the first time that Vera had heard me speak to him
in that way, and she looked up at me with sudden surprise and I think
gratitude.

Semyonov treated me with complete contempt. He answered me slowly: "No,
Ivan Andreievitch, I don't wish to deprive you of any kind of happiness.
I wouldn't for worlds. But do you know our people, that's the question?
You haven't been here very long; you came loaded up with romantic
notions, some of which you've discarded but only that you may pick up
others....I don't want to insult you at all, but you simply don't know
that the Christian virtues that you are admiring just now so
extravagantly are simply cowardice and apathy....Wait a little! Wait a
little! and then tell me whether I've not been right."

There was a moment's pause like the hush before the storm, and then
Markovitch broke in upon us. I can see and hear him now, standing there
behind Vera with his ridiculous collar and his anxious eyes. The words
simply pouring from him in a torrent, his voice now rising into a shrill
scream, now sinking into a funny broken bass like the growl of a young
baby tiger. And yet he was never ridiculous. I've known other mortals,
and myself one of the foremost, who, under the impulse of some sudden
anger, enthusiasm, or regret, have been simply figures of fun....
Markovitch was never that. He was like a dying man fighting for
possession of the last plank. I can't at this distance of time remember
all that he said. He talked a great deal about Russia; while he spoke I
noticed that he avoided Semyonov's eyes, which never for a single
instant left his face.

"Oh, don't you see, don't you see?" he cried. "Russia's chance has come
back to her? We can fight now a holy, patriotic war. We can fight, not
because we are told to by our masters, but because we, of our own free
will, wish to defend the soil of our sacred country. _Our_ country! No
one has thought of Russia for the last two years--we have thought only
of ourselves, our privations, our losses--but now--now. O God! the world
may be set free again because Russia is at last free!"

"Yes," said Semyonov quietly (his eyes covered Markovitch's face as a
searchlight finds out the running figure of a man). "And who has spoken
of Russia during the last few days? Russia! Why, I haven't heard the
word mentioned once. I may have been unlucky, I don't know. I've been
out and about the streets a good deal... I've listened to a great many
conversations.... Democracy, yes, and Brotherhood and Equality and
Fraternity and Bread and Land and Peace and Idleness--but Russia! Not a
sound...."

"It will come! It will come!" Markovitch urged. "It _must_ come! You
didn't walk, Alexei, as I did last night, through the streets, and see
the people and hear their voices and see their faces.... Oh! I believe
that at last that good has come to the world, and happiness and peace;
and it is Russia who will lead the way.... Thank God! Thank God!" Even
as he spoke some instinct in me urged me to try and prevent him. I felt
that Semyonov would not forget a word of this, and would make his own
use of it in the time to come. I could see the purpose in Semyonov's
eyes. I almost called out to Nicholas, "Look out! Look out!" just as
though a man were standing behind him with a raised weapon....

"You really mean this?" asked Semyonov.

"Of course I mean it!" cried Markovitch. "Do I not sound as though I
did?"

"I will remind you of it one day," said Semyonov.

I saw that Markovitch was trembling with excitement from head to foot.
He sat down at the table near Vera and put one hand on the tablecloth to
steady himself. Vera suddenly covered his hand with hers as though she
were protecting him. His excitement seemed to stream away from him, as
though Semyonov were drawing it out of him.

He suddenly said:

"You'd like to take my happiness away from me if you could, Alexei. You
don't want me to be happy."

"What nonsense!" Semyonov said, laughing. "Only I like the truth--I
simply don't see the thing as you do. I have my view of us Russians. I
have watched since the beginning of the war. I think our people lazy and
selfish--think you must drive them with a whip to make them do anything.
I think they would be ideal under German rule, which is what they'll get
if their Revolution lasts long enough... that's all."

I saw that Markovitch wanted to reply, but he was trembling so that he
could not.

He said at last: "You leave me alone, Alexei; let me go my own way."

"I have never tried to prevent you," said Semyonov.

There was a moment's silence.

Then, in quite another tone, he remarked to me: "By the way, Ivan
Andreievitch, what about your friend Mr. Lawrence? He's in a position of
very considerable danger where he is with Wilderling. They tell me
Wilderling may be murdered at any moment."

Some force stronger than my will drove me to look at Vera. I saw that
Nicolai Leontievitch also was looking at her. She raised her eyes for an
instant, her lips moved as though she were going to speak, then she
looked down again at her sewing.

Semyonov watched us all. "Oh, he'll be all right," I answered. "If any
one in the world can look after himself it's Lawrence."

"That's all very well," said Semyonov, still looking at Markovitch. "But
to be in Wilderling's company this week is a very unhealthy thing for
any one. And that type of Englishman is not noted for cowardice."

"I tell you that Lawrence can look after himself," I insisted angrily.

Semyonov knew and Markovitch knew that I was speaking to Vera. No one
then said a word. There was a long pause. At last Semyonov saw fit to
go.

"I'm off to the Duma," he said. "There's a split, I believe. And I want
to hear whether it's true that the Czar's abdicated."

"I believe you'd rather he hadn't, Alexei Petrovitch," Markovitch broke
in fiercely.

He laughed at us all and said, "Whose interests am I studying? My
own?... Holy Russia's?... Yours?... When will you learn, Nicholas my
friend, that I am a spectator, not a participator?"

Vera was alone during most of that day; and even now, after the time
that has passed, I cannot bear to think of what she suffered. She
realised quite definitely and now, with no chance whatever of
self-deception, that she loved Lawrence with a force that no denial or
sacrifice on her part could alter. She told me afterwards that she
walked up and down that room for hours, telling herself again and again
that she must not go and see whether he were safe. She did not dare even
to leave the room. She felt that if she entered her bedroom the sight
of her hat and coat there would break down her resolution, that if she
went to the head of the stairs and listened she must then go farther and
then farther again. She knew quite well that to go to him now would mean
complete surrender. She had no illusions about that. The whole of her
body was quivering with desire for his embrace, for the warm strength of
his body, for the kindness in his eyes, and the compelling mastery of
his hands.

She had never loved a man before; but it seemed to her now that she had
known all these sensations always, and that she was now, at last, her
real self, and that the earlier Vera had been a ghost. And what ghosts
were Nina and Markovitch!

She told me afterwards that, on looking back, this seemed to her the
most horrible part of the horrible afternoon. These two, who had been
for so many years the very centre of her life, whom she had forced to
hold up, as it were, the whole foundation of her existence, now simply
were not real at all. She might call to them, and their voices were like
far echoes or the wind. She gazed at them, and the colours of the room
and the street seemed to shine through them.... She fought for their
reality. She forced herself to recall all the many things that they had
done together, Nina's little ways, the quarrels with Nicholas, the
reconciliations, the times when he had been ill, the times when they had
gone to the country, to the theatre... and through it all she heard
Semyonov's voice, "By the way, what about your friend Lawrence?... He's
in a position of very considerable danger... considerable danger...
considerable danger..."

By the evening she was almost frantic. Nina had been with a girl friend
in the Vassily Ostrov all day. She would perhaps stay there all night
if there were any signs of trouble. No one returned. Only the clock
ticked on. Old Sacha asked whether she might go out for an hour. Vera
nodded her head. She was then quite alone in the flat.

Suddenly, about seven o'clock, Nina came in. She was tired, nervous, and
unhappy. The Revolution had not come to _her_ as anything but a sudden
crumbling of all the life that she had known and believed in. She had
had, that afternoon, to run down a side street to avoid a machine-gun,
and afterwards on the Morskaia she had come upon a dead man huddled up
in the snow like a piece of offal. These things terrified her and she
did not care about the larger issues. Her life had been always intensely
personal--not selfish so much as vividly egoistic through her vitality.
And now she was miserable, not because she was afraid for her own
safety, but because she was face to face, for the first time, with the
unknown and the uncertain.

She came in, sat down at the table, put her head into her arms and burst
into tears. She must have looked a very pathetic figure with her little
fur hat askew, her hair tumbled--like a child whose doll is suddenly
broken.

Vera was at her side in a moment. She put her arms around her.

"Nina, dear, what is it?... Has somebody hurt you? Has something
happened? Is anybody--killed?"

"No!" Nina sobbed. "Nobody--nothing--only--I'm frightened. It all looks
so strange. The streets are so funny, and--there was--a dead man on the
Morskaia."

"You shouldn't have gone out, dear. I oughtn't to have let you. But now
we can just be cosy together. Sacha's gone out. There's no one here but
ourselves. We'll have supper and make ourselves comfortable."

Nina looked up, staring about her. "Has Sacha gone out? Oh, I wish she
hadn't!... Supposing somebody came."

"No one will come. Who could? No one wants to hurt _us!_ I've been here
all the afternoon, and no one's come near the flat. If anybody did come
we've only got to telephone to Nicholas. He's with Rozanov all the
afternoon."

"Nicholas!" Nina repeated scornfully. "As though he could help anybody."
She looked up. Vera told me afterwards that it was at that moment, when
Nina looked such a baby with her tumbled hair and her flushed cheeks
stained with tears, that she realised her love for her with a fierceness
that for a moment seemed to drown even her love for Lawrence. She caught
her to her and hugged her, kissing her again and again.

But Nina was suspicious. There were many things that had to be settled
between Vera and herself. She did not respond, and Vera let her go. She
went into her room, to take off her things.

Afterwards they lit the samovar and boiled some eggs and put the caviare
and sausage and salt fish and jam on the table. At first they were
silent, and then Nina began to recover a little.

"You know, Vera, I've had an extraordinary day. There were no trams
running, of course, and I had to walk all the distance. When I got there
I found Katerina Ivanovna in a terrible way because their Masha--whom
they've had for years, you know--went to a Revolutionary meeting last
evening, and was out all night, and she came in this morning and said
she wasn't going to work for them any more, that every one was equal
now, and that they must do things for themselves. Just fancy! When she's
been with them for years and they've been so good to her. It upset
Katerina Ivanovna terribly, because of course they couldn't get any one
else, and there was no food in the house."

"Perhaps Sacha won't come back again."

"Oh, she must! _She's_ not like that... and we've been so good to her.
_Nu... Patom_, some soldiers came early in the afternoon and they said
that some policeman had been firing from Katya's windows and they must
search the flat. They were very polite--quite a young student was in
charge of them, he was rather like Boris--and they went all over
everything. They were very polite, but it wasn't nice seeing them stand
there with their rifles in the middle of the dining-room. Katya offered
them some wine. But they wouldn't touch it. They said they had been told
not to, and they looked quite angry with her for offering it. They
couldn't find the policeman anywhere of course, but they told Katya they
might have to burn the house down if they didn't find him. I think they
just said it to amuse themselves. But Katya believed it, and was in a
terrible way and began collecting all her china in the middle of the
floor, and then Ivan came in and told her not to be silly."

"Weren't you frightened to come home?" asked Vera.

"Ivan wanted to come with me but I wouldn't let him. I felt quite brave
in the flat, as though I'd face anybody. And then every step I took
outside I got more and more frightened. It was so strange, so quiet with
the trams not running and the shops all shut. The streets are quite
deserted except that in the distance you see crowds, and sometimes there
were shots and people running.... Then suddenly I began to run. I felt
as though there were animals in the canals and things crawling about on
the ships. And then, just as I thought I was getting home, I saw a man,
dead on the snow.... I'm not going out alone again until it's over. I'm
so glad I'm back, Vera darling. We'll have a lovely evening."

They both discovered then how hungry they were, and they had an enormous
meal. It was very cosy with the curtains drawn and the wood crackling in
the stove and the samovar chuckling. There was a plateful of chocolates,
and Nina ate them all. She was quite happy now, and sang and danced
about as they cleared away most of the supper, leaving the samovar and
the bread and the jam and the sausage for Nicholas and Bohun when they
came in.

At last Vera sat down in the old red arm-chair that had the holes and
the places where it suddenly went flat, and Nina piled up some cushions
and sat at her feet. For a time they were happy, saying very little,
Vera softly stroking Nina's hair. Then, as Vera afterwards described it
to me, "Some fright or sudden dread of loneliness came into the room. It
was exactly as though the door had opened and some one had joined us...
and, do you know, I looked up and expected to see Uncle Alexei."

However, of course, there was no one there; but Nina moved away a
little, and then Vera, wanting to comfort her, tried to draw her closer,
and then of course, Nina (because she was like that) with a little
peevish shrug of the shoulders drew even farther away. There was, after
that, silence between them, an awkward ugly silence, piling up and up
with discomfort until the whole room seemed to be eloquent with it.

Both their minds were, of course, occupied in the same direction, and
suddenly Nina, who moved always on impulse and had no restraint, burst
out:

"I must know how Andrey Stepanovitch (their name for Lawrence, because
Jeremy had no Russian equivalent) is--I'm going to telephone."

"You can't," Vera said quietly. "It isn't working--I tried an hour ago
to get on to Nicholas."

"Well then, I shall go off and find out," said Nina, knowing very well
that she would not.

"Oh, Nina, of course you mustn't.... You know you can't. Perhaps when
Nicholas comes in he will have some news for us."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"You know why not. What would he think? Besides, you're not going out
into the town again to-night."

"Oh, aren't I? And who's going to stop me?"

"I am," said Vera.

Nina sprang to her feet. In her later account to me of this quarrel she
said, "You know, Durdles, I don't believe I ever loved Vera more than I
did just then. In spite of her gravity she looked so helpless and as
though she wanted loving so terribly. I could just have flung my arms
round her and hugged her to death at the very moment that I was
screaming at her. Why are we like that?"

At any rate Nina stood up there and stamped her foot, her hair hanging
all about her face and her body quivering. "Oh, you're going to keep me,
are you? What right have you got over me? Can't I go and leave the flat
at any moment if I wish, or am I to consider myself your prisoner?...
_Tzuineeto, pajalueesta_... I didn't know. I can only eat my meals with
your permission, I suppose. I have to ask your leave before going to see
my friends.... Thank you, I know now. But I'm not going to stand it. I
shall do just as I please. I'm grown up. No one can stop me...."

Vera, her eyes full of distress looked helplessly about her. She never
could deal with Nina when she was in these storms of rage, and to-day
she felt especially helpless.

"Nina, dear... don't.... You know that it isn't so. You can go where
you please, do what you please."

"Thank you," said Nina, tossing her head. "I'm glad to hear it."

"I know I'm tiresome very often. I'm slow and stupid. If I try you
sometimes you must forgive me and be patient.... Sit down again and
let's be happy. You know how I love you. Nina, darling... come again."

But Nina stood there pouting. She was loving Vera so intensely that it
was all that she could do to hold herself back, but her very love made
her want to hurt.... "It's all very well to say you love me, but you
don't act as though you do. You're always trying to keep me in. I want
to be free. And Andrey Stepanovitch...."

They both paused at Lawrence's name. They knew that that was at the root
of the matter between them, that it had been so for a long time, and
that any other pretence would be false.

"You know I love him--" said Nina, "and I'm going to marry him."

I can see then Vera taking a tremendous pull upon herself as though she
suddenly saw in front of her a gulf into whose depths, in another
moment, she would fall. But my vision of the story, from this point, is
Nina's.

Vera told me no more until she came to the final adventure of the
evening. This part of the scene then is witnessed with Nina's eyes, and
I can only fill in details which, from my knowledge of them both, I
believe to have occurred. Nina, knew, of course, what the effect of her
announcement would be upon Vera, but she had not expected the sudden
thin pallor which stole like a film over her sister's face, the
withdrawal, the silence. She was frightened, so she went on recklessly.
"Oh, I know that he doesn't care for me yet.... I can see that of
course. But he will. He must. He's seen nothing of me yet. But I am
stronger than he, I can make him do as I wish. I _will_ make him. You
don't want me to marry him and I know why."

She flung that out as a challenge, tossing her head scornfully, but
nevertheless watching with frightened eyes her sister's face. Suddenly
Vera spoke, and it was in a voice so stern that it was to Nina a new
voice, as though she had suddenly to deal with some new figure whom she
had never seen before.

"I can't discuss that with you, Nina. You can't marry because, as you
say, he doesn't care for you--in that way. Also if he did it would be a
very unhappy marriage. You would soon despise him. He is not clever in
the way that you want a man to be clever. You'd think him slow and dull
after a month with him.... And then he ought to beat you and he
wouldn't. He'd be kind to you and then you'd be ruined. I can see now
that I've always been too kind to you--indeed, every one has--and the
result is, that you're spoilt and know nothing about life at all--or
men. You are right. I've treated you as a child too long. I will do so
no longer."

Nina turned like a little fury, standing back from Vera as though she
were going to spring upon her. "That's it, is it?" she cried. "And all
because you want to keep him for yourself. I understand. I have eyes.
You love him. You are hoping for an intrigue with him.... You love him!
You love him! You love him!... and he doesn't love you and you are so
miserable...."

Vera looked at Nina, then suddenly turned and burying her head in her
hands sobbed, crouching in her chair. Then slipping from the chair,
knelt catching Nina's knees, her head against her dress.

Nina was aghast, terrified--then in a moment overwhelmed by a surging
flood of love so that she caught Vera to her, caressing her hair,
calling her by her little name, kissing her again and again and again.

"Verotchka--Verotchka--I didn't mean anything. I didn't indeed. I love
you. I love you. You know that I do. I was only angry and wicked. Oh,
I'll never forgive myself. Verotchka--get up--don't kneel to me like
that...!"

She was interrupted by a knock on the outer hall door. To both of them
that sound must have been terribly alarming. Vera said afterwards, that
"at once we realised that it was the knock of some one more frightened
than we were."

In the first place, no one ever knocked, they always rang the rather
rickety electric bell--and then the sound was furtive and hurried, and
even frantic; "as though," said Vera, "some one on the other side of the
door was breathless."

The sisters stood, close together, for quite a long time without moving.
The knocking ceased and the room was doubly silent. Then suddenly it
began again, very rapid and eager, but muffled, almost as though some
one were knocking with a gloved hand.

Vera went then. She paused for a moment in the little hall, for again
there was silence and she fancied that perhaps the intruder had given up
the matter in despair. But, no--there it was again--and this third time
seemed to her, perhaps because she was so close to it, the most urgent
and eager of all. She went to the door and opened it. There was no light
in the passage save the dim reflection from the lamp on the lower floor,
and in the shadow she saw a figure cowering back into the corner behind
the door.

"Who is it?" she asked. The figure pushed past her, slipping into their
own little hall.

"But you can't come in like that," she said, turning round on him.

"Shut the door!" he whispered. "_Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi_.... Shut the
door."

She recognised him then. He was the policeman from the corner of their
street, a man whom they knew well. He had always been a pompous little
man, stout and short of figure, kindly so far as they knew, although
they had heard of him as cruel in the pursuit of his official duties.
They had once talked to him a little and he explained: "I wouldn't hurt
a fly, God knows," he had said, "of myself, but a man likes to do his
work efficiently--and there are so many lazy fellows about here."

He prided himself, they saw, on a punctilious attention to duty. When he
had to come there for some paper or other he was always extremely
polite, and if they were going away he helped them about their
passports. He told them on another occasion that "he was pleased with
life--although one never knew of course when it might come down upon
one--"

Well, it had come down on him now. A more pitiful object Vera had never
seen. He was dressed in a dirty black suit and wore a shabby fur cap,
his padded overcoat was torn.

But the overwhelming effect of him was terror. Vera had never before
seen such terror, and at once, as though the thing were an infectious
disease, her own heart began to beat furiously. He was shaking so that
the fur cap, which was too large for his head, waggled up and down over
his eye in a ludicrous manner.

His face was dirty as though he had been crying, and a horrid pallid
grey in colour.

His collar was torn, showing his neck between the folds of his overcoat.

Vera looked out down the stairs as though she expected to see something.
The flat was perfectly still. There was not a sound anywhere. She turned
back to the man again, he was crouching against the wall.

"You can't come in here," she repeated. "My sister and I are alone. What
do you want?... What's the matter?"

"Shut the door!... Shut the door!... Shut the door!..." he repeated.

She closed it. "Now what is it?" she asked, and then, hearing a sound,
turned to find that Nina was standing with wide eyes, watching.

"What is it?" Nina asked in a whisper.

"I don't know," said Vera, also whispering. "He won't tell me."

He pushed past them then into the dining-room, looked about him for a
moment, then sank into a chair as though his legs would no longer
support him, holding on to the cloth with both hands.

The sisters followed him into the dining-room.

"Don't shiver like that!" said Vera, "tell us why you've come in
here?"...

His eyes looked past them, never still, wandering from wall to wall,
from door to door.

"They're after me..." he said. "That's it--I was hiding in our cupboard
all last night and this morning. They were round there all the time
breaking up our things.... I heard them shouting. They were going to
kill me. I've done nothing--O God! what's that?"

"There's no one here," said Vera, "except ourselves."

"I saw a chance to get away and I crept out. But I couldn't get far....
I knew you would be good-hearted... good-hearted. Hide me
somewhere--anywhere!... and they won't come in here. Only until the
evening. I've done no one any harm.... Only my duty...."

He began to snivel, taking out from his coat a very dirty
pocket-handkerchief and dabbing his face with it.

The odd thing that they felt, as they looked at him, was the incredible
intermingling of public and private affairs. Five minutes before they
had been passing through a tremendous crisis in their personal
relationship. The whole history of their lives together, flowing through
how many years, through how many phases, how many quarrels, and
happiness and adventures had reached here a climax whose issue was so
important that life between them could never be the same again.

So urgent had been the affair that during that hour they had forgotten
the Revolution, Russia, the war. Moreover, always in the past, they had
assumed that public life was no affair of theirs. The Russo-Japanese
War, even the spasmodic revolt in 1905, had not touched them except as a
wind of ideas which blew so swiftly through their private lives that
they were scarcely affected by it.

Now in the person of that trembling, shaking figure at their table, the
Revolution had come to them, and not only the Revolution, but the
strange new secret city that Petrograd was... the whole ground was
quaking beneath them.

And in the eyes of the fugitive they saw what terror of death really
was. It was no tale read in a story-book, no recounting of an adventure
by some romantic traveller, it was _here_ with them in the flat and at
any moment....

It was then that Vera realised that there was no time to lose--something
must be done at once.

"Who's pursuing you?" she asked, quickly. "Where are they?"

He got up and was moving about the room as though he was looking for a
hiding-place.

"All the people.... Everybody!" He turned round upon them, suddenly
striking, what seemed to them, a ludicrously grand attitude.
"Abominable! That's what it is. I heard them shouting that I had a
machine-gun on the roof and was killing people. I had no machine-gun. Of
course not. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I had one. But there
they were. That's what they were shouting! And I've always done my duty.
What's one to do? Obey one's superior officer? Of course, what he says
one does. What's life for?... and then naturally one expects a reward.
Things were going well with me, very well indeed--and then this comes.
It's a degrading thing for a man to hide for a day and a night in a
cupboard." His teeth began to chatter then so that he could scarcely
speak. He seemed to be shaking with ague.

He caught Vera's hand. "Save me--save me!" he said. "Put me
somewhere.... I've done nothing disgraceful. They'll shoot me like a
dog--"

The sisters consulted.

"What are we to do?" asked Nina. "We can't let him go out to be killed."

"No. But if we keep him here and they come in and find him, we shall all
be involved.... It isn't fair to Nicholas or Uncle Ivan...."

"We can't let him go out."

"No, we can't," Vera replied. She saw at once how impossible that was.
Were he caught outside and shot they would feel that they had his death
for ever on their souls.

"There's the linen cupboard," she said.

She turned round to Nina. "I'm afraid," she said, "if you hide here,
you'll have to go into another cupboard. And it can only be for an hour
or two. We couldn't keep you here all night."

He said nothing except "Quick. Take me." Vera led him into her bedroom
and showed him the place. Without another word he pressed in amongst the
clothes. It was a deep cupboard, and, although he was a fat man, the
door closed quite evenly.

It was suddenly as though he had never been, Vera went back to Nina.

They stood close to one another in the middle of the room, and talked in
whispers.

"What are we going to do?"

"We can only wait!"

"They'll never dare to search your room, Vera."

"One doesn't know now... everything's so different."

"Vera, you _are_ brave. Forgive me what I said just now.... I'll help
you if you want--"

"Hush, Nina dear. Not that now. We've got to think--what's best...."

They kissed very quietly, and then they sat down by the table and
waited. There was simply nothing else to do.

Vera said that, during that pause, she could see the little policeman
everywhere. In every part of the room she found him, with his fat legs
and dirty, streaky face and open collar. The flat was heavy, portentous
with his presence, as though it stood with a self-important finger on
its lips saying, "I've got a secret in here. _Such_ a secret. You don't
know what _I've_ got...."

They discussed in whispers as to who would come in first. Nicholas or
Uncle Ivan or Bohun or Sacha? And supposing one of them came in while
the soldiers were there? Who would be the most dangerous? Sacha? She
would scream and give everything away. Suppose they had seen him enter
and were simply waiting, on the cat-and-mouse plan, to catch him? That
was an intolerable thought.

"I think," said Nina, "I must go and see whether there's any one
outside."

But there was no need for her to do that. Even as she spoke they heard
the steps on the stairs; and instantly afterwards there came the loud
knocking on their door. Vera pressed Nina's hand and went into the hall.

"_Kto tam_... Who's there?" she asked.

"Open the door!... The Workmen and Soldiers' Committee demand entrance
in the name of the Revolution."

She opened the door at once. During those first days of the Revolution
they cherished certain melodramatic displays.

Whether consciously or no they built on all the old French Revolution
traditions, or perhaps it is that every Revolution produces of necessity
the same clothing with which to cover its nakedness. A strange mixture
of farce and terror were those detachments of so-called justice. At
their head there was, as a rule, a student, often smiling and
bespectacled. The soldiers themselves, from one of the Petrograd
regiments, were frankly out for a good time and enjoyed themselves
thoroughly, but, as is the Slavonic way, playfulness could pass with
surprising suddenness to dead earnest--with, indeed, so dramatic a
precipitance that the actors themselves were afterwards amazed. Of these
"little, regrettable mistakes" there had already, during the week, been
several examples. To Vera, with the knowledge of the contents of her
linen-cupboard, the men seemed terrifying enough. Their leader was a fat
and beaming student--quite a boy. He was very polite, saying
"_Zdrastvuite,"_ and taking off his cap. The men behind him--hulking men
from one of the Guards regiments--pushed about in the little hall like a
lot of puppies, joking with one another, holding their rifles upside
down, and making sudden efforts at a seriousness that they could not
possibly sustain.

Only one of them, an older man with a thick black beard, was intensely
grave, and looked at Vera with beseeching eyes, as though he longed to
tell her the secret of his life.

"What can I do for you?" she asked the student.

"_Prosteete_... Forgive us." He smiled and blinked at her, then put on
his cap, clicked his heels, gave a salute, and took his cap off again.
"We wish to be in no way an inconvenience to you. We are simply obeying
orders. We have instructions that a policeman is hiding in one of these
flats.... We know, of course, that he cannot possibly be here.
Nevertheless we are compelled... _Prosteete_.... What nice pictures you
have!" he ended suddenly. It was then that Vera discovered that they
were by this time in the dining-room, crowded together near the door and
gazing at Nina with interested eyes.

"There's no one here, of course," said Vera, very quietly. "No one at
all."

"_Tak Tochno_ (quite so)," said the black-bearded soldier, for no
particular reason, suddenly.

"You will allow me to sit down?" said the student, very politely. "I
must, I am afraid, ask a few questions."

"Certainly," said Vera quietly. "Anything you like."

She had moved over to Nina, and they stood side by side. But she could
not think of Nina, she could not think even of the policeman in the
cupboard.... She could think only of that other house on the Quay where,
perhaps even now, this same scene was being enacted. They had found
Wilderling.... They had dragged him out.... Lawrence was beside him....
They were condemned together.... Oh! love had come to her at last in a
wild, surging flood! Of all the steps she had been led until at last,
only half an hour before in that scene with Nina, the curtains had been
flung aside and the whole view revealed to her. She felt such a
strength, such a pride, such a defiance, as she had not known belonged
to human power. She had, for many weeks, been hesitating before the
gates. Now, suddenly, she had swept through. His death now was not the
terror that it had been only an hour before. Nina's accusation had shown
her, as a flash of lightning flings the mountains into view, that now
she could never lose him, were he with her or no, and that beside that
truth nothing mattered.

Something of her bravery and grandeur and beauty must have been felt by
them all at that moment. Nina realised it.... She told me that her own
fear left her altogether when she saw how Vera was facing them. She was
suddenly calm and quiet and very amused.

The student officer seemed now to be quite at home. He had taken a great
many notes down in a little book, and looked very important as he did
so. His chubby face expressed great self-satisfaction. He talked half to
himself and half to Vera. "Yes... Yes... quite so. Exactly. And your
husband is not yet at home, Madame Markovitch.... _Nu da...._ Of course
these are very troublesome times, and as you say things have to move in
a hurry.

"You've heard perhaps that Nicholas Romanoff has abdicated entirely--and
refused to allow his son to succeed. Makes things simpler.... Yes....
Very pleasant pictures you have--and Ostroffsky--six volumes. Very
agreeable. I have myself acted in Ostroffsky at different times. I find
his plays very enjoyable. I am sure you will forgive us, Madame, if we
walk through your charming flat."

But indeed by this time the soldiers themselves had begun to roam about
on their own account. Nina remembers one soldier in especial--a large
dirty fellow with ragged moustache--who quite frankly terrified her. He
seemed to regard her with particular satisfaction, staring at her, and,
as it were, licking his lips over her. He wandered about the room
fingering things, and seemed to be immensely interested in Nicholas's
little den, peering through the glass window that there was in the door
and rubbing the glass with his finger. He presently pushed the door open
and soon they were all in there.

Then a characteristic thing occurred. Apparently Nicholas's
inventions--his little pieces of wood and bark and cloth, his glass
bottles, and tubes--seemed to them highly suspicious. There was laughter
at first, and then sudden silence. Nina could see part of the room
through the open door and she watched them as they gathered round the
little table, talking together in excited whispers. The tall,
rough-looking fellow who had frightened her before picked up one of the
tubes, and then, whether by accident or intention, let it fall, and the
tinkling smash of the glass frightened them all so precipitately that
they came tumbling out into the larger room. The big fellow whispered
something to the student, who at once became more self-important than
ever, and said very seriously to Vera:

"That is your husband's room, Madame, I understand?"

"Yes," said Vera quietly, "he does his work in there."

"What kind of work?"

"He is an inventor."

"An inventor of what?"

"Various things.... He is working at present on something to do with the
making of cloth."

Unfortunately this serious view of Nicholas's inventions suddenly seemed
to Nina so ridiculous that she tittered. She could have done nothing
more regrettable. The student obviously felt that his dignity was
threatened. He looked at her very severely:

"This is no laughing matter," he said. He himself then got up and went
into the inner room. He was there for some time, and they could hear him
fingering the tubes and treading on the broken glass. He came out again
at last.

He was seriously offended.

"You should have told us your husband was an inventor."

"I didn't think it was of importance," said Vera.

"Everything is of importance," he answered. The atmosphere was now
entirely changed. The soldiers were angry--they had, it seemed, been
deceived and treated like children. The melancholy fellow with the black
beard looked at Vera with eyes of deep reproach.

"When will your husband return?" asked the student.

"I am afraid I don't know," said Vera. She realised that the situation
was now serious, but she could not keep her mind upon it. In that house
on the Quay what was happening? What had, perhaps, already happened?...

"Where has he gone?"

"I don't know."

"Why didn't he tell you where he was going?"

"He often does not tell me."

"Ah, that is wrong. In these days one should always say where one is
going."

He stood up very stiff and straight. "Search the house," he said to his
men.

Suddenly then Vera's mind concentrated. It was as though, she told me "I
came back into the room and saw for the first time what was happening."

"There is no one in the rest of the flat," she said, "and nothing that
can interest you."

"That is for me to judge," said the little officer grimly.

"But I assure you there is nothing," she went on eagerly. "There is only
the kitchen and the bath-room and the five bedrooms."

"Whose bedrooms?" said the officer.

"My husband's, my own, my sister's, my uncle's, and an Englishman's,"
she answered, colouring a little.

"Nevertheless we must do our duty.... Search the house," he repeated.

"But you must not go into our bedrooms," she said, her voice rising.
"There is nothing for you there. I am sure you will respect our
privacy."

"Our orders must be obeyed," he answered angrily.

"But--" she cried.

"Silence, Madame," he said, furiously, staring at her as though she were
his personal, deadly enemy.

"Very well," said Vera proudly. "Please do as you wish."

The officer walked past her with his head up, and the soldiers followed
him, their eyes malicious and inquisitive and excited. The sisters stood
together waiting. Of course the end had come. They simply stood there
fastening their resolution to the extreme moment.

"I must go with them," said Vera. She followed them into her bedroom. It
was a very little place and they filled it, they looked rather sheepish
now, whispering to one another.

"What's in there?" said the officer, tapping the cupboard.

"Only some clothes," said Vera.

"Open it!" he ordered.

Then the world did indeed stand still. The clock ceased to tick, the
little rumble in the stove was silenced, the shuffling feet of one of
the soldiers stayed, the movement of some rustle in the wall paper was
held. The world was frozen.

"Now I suppose we shall all be shot," was Vera's thought, repeated over
and over again with a ludicrous monotony. Then she could see nothing but
the little policeman, tumbling out of the cupboard, dishevelled and
terrified. Terrified! what that look in his eyes would be! That at any
rate she could not face and she turned her head away from them, looking
out through the door into the dark little passage.

She heard as though from an infinite distance the words:

"Well, there's nobody there."

She did not believe him of course. He said that whoever he was, to test
her, to tempt her to give herself away. But she was too clever for them.
She turned back and faced them, and then saw, to the accompaniment of an
amazement that seemed like thunder in her ears, that the cupboard was
indeed empty.

"There is nobody," said the black-bearded soldier.

The student looked rather ashamed of himself. The white clothes, the
skirts, and the blouses in the cupboard reproached him.

"You will of course understand, Madame," he said stiffly, "that the
search was inevitable. Regrettable but necessary. I'm sure you will see
that for your own satisfaction...."

"You are assured now that there is no one here?" Vera interrupted him
coldly.

"Assured," he answered.

But where was the man? She felt as though she were in some fantastic
nightmare in which nothing was as it seemed. The cupboard was not a
cupboard, the policeman not a policeman....

"There is the kitchen," she said.

In the kitchen of course they found nothing. There was a large cupboard
in one corner but they did not look there. They had had enough. They
returned into the dining-room and there, looking very surprised, his
head very high above his collar was Markovitch.

"What does this mean?" he asked.

"I regret extremely," said the officer pompously. "I have been compelled
to make a search. Duty only... I regret. But no one is here. Your flat
is at liberty. I wish you good-afternoon."

Before Markovitch could ask further questions the room was emptied of
them all. They tramped out, laughing and joking, children again, the
hall door closed behind them.

Nina clutched Vera's arm.

"Vera.... Vera, where is he?"

"I don't know," said Vera.

"What's all this?" asked Nicholas.

They explained to him but he scarcely seemed to hear. He was
radiant--smiling in a kind of ecstasy.

"They have gone? I am safe?"

In the doorway was the little policeman, black with grime and dust, so
comical a figure that in reaction from the crisis of ten minutes before,
they laughed hysterically.

"Oh look! look!..." cried Nina. "How dirty he is!"

"Where have you been?" asked Vera. "Why weren't you in the cupboard?"

The little man's teeth were chattering, so that he could scarcely
speak....

"I heard them in the other room. I knew that the cupboard would be the
first place. I slipped into the kitchen and hid in the fireplace."

"You're not angry, Nicholas?" Vera asked. "We couldn't send him out to
be shot."

"What does that matter?" he almost impatiently brushed it aside. "There
are other things more important." He looked at the trembling dirty
figure. "Only you'd better go back and hide again until it's dark. They
might come back...."

He caught Vera by the arm. His eyes were flames. He drew her with him
back into her little room. He closed the door.

"The Revolution has come--it has really come," he cried.

"Yes," she answered, "it has come into this very house. The world has
changed."

"The Czar has abdicated.... The old world has gone, the old wicked
world! Russia is born again!"

His eyes were the eyes of a fanatic.

Her eyes, too, were alight. She gazed past him.

"I know--I know," she whispered as though to herself.

"Russia--Russia," he went on coming closer and closer, "Russia and you.
We will build a new world. We will forget our old troubles. Oh, Vera, my
darling, my darling, we're going to be happy now! I love you so. And now
I can hope again. All our love will be clean in this new world. We're
going to be happy at last!"

But she did not hear him. She saw into space. A great exultation ran
through her body. All lost for love! At last she was awakened, at last
she lived, at last, at last, she knew what love was.

"I love him! I love him... him," her soul whispered. "And nothing now
in this world or the next can separate us."

"Vera--Vera," Nicholas cried, "we are together at last--as we have never
been. And now we'll work together again--for Russia."

She looked at the man whom she had never loved, with a great compassion
and pity. She put her arms around him and kissed him, her whole maternal
spirit suddenly aware of him and seeking to comfort him.

At the touch of her lips his body trembled with happiness. But he did
not know that it was a kiss of farewell....



XIII

I have no idea at all what Lawrence did during the early days of that
week. He has never told me, and I have never asked him. He never, with
the single exception of the afternoon at the Astoria, came near the
Markovitches, and I know that was because he had now reached a stage
where he did not dare trust himself to see Vera--just as she at that
time did not trust herself to see him....

I do not know what he thought of those first days of the Revolution. I
can imagine that he took it all very quietly, doing his duty and making
no comment. He had of course his own interest in it, but it would be, I
am sure, an entirely original interest, unlike any one else's. I
remember Dune once, in the long-dead days, saying to me, "It's never any
use guessing what Lawrence is thinking. When you think it's football
it's Euripides, and when you think it's Euripides it's Marie Corelli."
Of all the actors in this affair he remains to me to the last as the
most mysterious. I know that he loved Vera with the endurance of the
rock, the heat of the flame, the ruthlessness of a torrent, but behind
that love there sat the man himself, invisible, silent, patient,
watching.

He may have had Semyonov's contempt for the Revolutionary idealist, he
may have had Wilderling's belief in the Czar's autocracy, he may have
had Boris Grogoff's enthusiasm for freedom and a general holiday. I
don't know. I know nothing at all about it. I don't think that he saw
much of the Wilderlings during the earlier part of the week. He himself
was a great deal with the English Military Mission, and Wilderling was
with _his_ party whatever that might be. He could see of course that
Wilderling was disturbed, or perhaps indignant is the right word. "As
though you know," he said, "some dirty little boy had been pullin'
snooks at him." Nevertheless the Baroness was the human link. Lawrence
would see from the first--that is, from the morning of the Sunday--that
she was in an agony of horror. She confided in nobody, but went about as
though she was watching for something, and at dinner her eyes never left
her husband's face for a moment. Those evening meals must have been
awful. I can imagine the dignity, the solemn heavy room with all the
silver, the ceremonious old man-servant and Wilderling himself behaving
as though nothing at all were the matter. To do him all justice he was
as brave as a lion, and as proud as a gladiator, and as conceited as a
Prussian. On the Wednesday evening he did not return home. He telephoned
that he was kept on important business.

The Baroness and Lawrence had the long slow meal together. It was almost
more than Jerry could stand having, of course, his own private tortures
to face. "It was as though the old lady felt that she had been deputed
to support the honour of the family during her husband's absence. She
must have been wild with anxiety, but she showed no sign except that her
hand trembled when she raised her glass."

"What did you talk about?" I asked him.

"Oh, about anything! Theatres and her home, when she was a girl and
England.... Awful, every minute of it!"

There was a moment towards the end of the meal, when the good lady
nearly broke down. The bell in the hall rang and there was a step; she
thought it was her husband and half rose. It was, however, the Dvornik
with a message of no importance. She gave a little sigh. "Oh, I do wish
he would come!... I do wish he would come!" she murmured to herself.

"Oh, he'll come," Lawrence reassured her, but she seemed indignant with
him for having overheard her. Afterwards, sitting together desolately in
the magnificent drawing-room, she became affectionately maternal. I have
always wondered why Lawrence confided to me the details of their very
intimate conversation. It was exactly the kind of thing he was most
reticent about.

She asked him about his home, his people, his ambitions. She had asked
him about these things before, but to-night there was an appeal in her
questions, as though she said:

"Take my mind off that other thing. Help me to forget, if it's only for
a moment."

"Have you ever been in love?" she asked.

"Yes. Once," he said.

"Was he in love now?"

"Yes."

"With some one in Russia?"

"Yes."

She hoped that he would be happy. He told her that he didn't think
happiness was quite the point in this particular case. There were other
things more important--and, anyway, it was inevitable.

"He had fallen in love at first sight?"

"Yes. The very first moment."

She sighed. So had she. It was, she thought, the only real way. She
asked him whether it might not, after all, turn out better than he
expected.

No, he did not think that it could. But he didn't mind how it turned
out--at least he couldn't look that far. The point was that he was in
it, up to the neck, and he was never going to be out of it again.

There was something boyish about that that pleased her. She put her
plump hand on his knee and told him how she had first met the Baron,
down in the South, at Kieff, how grand he had looked; how, seeing her
across a room full of people, he had smiled at her before he had ever
spoken to her or knew her name. "I was quite pretty then," she added. "I
have never regretted our marriage for a single moment," she said. "Nor,
I know, has he."

"We hoped there would he children...." She gave a pathetic little
gesture. "We will get away down to the South again as soon as the
troubles are over," she ended.

I don't suppose he was thinking much of her--his mind was on Vera all
the time--but after he had left her and lay in bed, sleepless, his mind
dwelt on her affectionately, and he thought that he would like to help
her. He realised, quite clearly, that Wilderling was in a very dangerous
position, but I don't think that it ever occurred to him for a moment
that it would be wise for him to move to another flat.

On the next day, Thursday, Lawrence did not return until the middle of
the afternoon. The town was, by now, comparatively quiet again. Numbers
of the police had been caught and imprisoned, some had been shot and
others were in hiding; most of the machine-guns shooting from the roofs
had ceased. The abdication of the Czar had already produced the second
phase of the Revolution--the beginning of the struggle between the
Provisional Government and the Council of Workmen and Soldiers'
Deputies, and this was proceeding, for the moment, inside the walls of
the Duma rather than in the streets and squares of the town. Lawrence
returned, therefore, that afternoon with a strange sense of quiet and
security.

"It was almost, you know, as though this tommy-rot about a White
Revolution might be true after all--with this jolly old Duma and their
jolly old Kerensky runnin' the show. Of course I'd seen the nonsense
about their not salutin' the officers and all that, but I didn't think
any fellers alive would be such dam fools.... I might have known
better."

He let himself into the flat and found there a death-like stillness--no
one about and no sound except the tickings of the large clock in the
drawing-room.

He wandered into that horribly impressive place and suddenly sat down on
the sofa with a realisation of extreme physical fatigue. He didn't know
why he was so tired, he had felt quite "bobbish" all the week; suddenly
now his limbs were like water, he had a bad ache down his spine and his
legs were as heavy as lead. He sat in a kind of trance on that sofa, he
was not asleep, but he was also, quite certainly, not awake. He wondered
why the place was so "beastly still" after all the noise there had been
all the week. There was no one left alive--every one dead--except
himself and Vera... Vera... Vera.

Then he was conscious that some one was looking at him through the
double-doors. At first he didn't realise who it was, the face was so
white and the figure so quiet, then, pulling himself together, he saw
that it was the old servant.

"What is it, Andre?" he asked, sitting up.

The old man didn't answer, but came into the room, carefully closing the
door behind him. Lawrence saw that he was trembling with fright, but was
still endeavouring to behave with dignity.

"Barin! Barin!" he whispered, as though Lawrence were a long way from
him. "Paul Konstantinovitch! (that was Wilderling). He's mad.... He
doesn't know what he's doing. Oh, sir, stop him, stop him, or we shall
all be murdered!"

"What is he doing?" asked Lawrence, standing up.

"In the little hack room," Andre whispered, as though now he were
confiding a terrible secret. "Come quickly...!"

Lawrence followed him; when he had gone a few steps down the passage he
heard suddenly a sharp, muffled report.

"What's that?"

Andre came close to him, his old, seamed face white like plaster.

"He has a rifle in there..." he said. "He's shooting at them!" Then as
Lawrence stepped up to the door of the little room that was Wilderling's
dressing-room, Andre caught his arm--.

"Be careful, Barin.... He doesn't know what he's about. He may not
recognise you."

"Oh, that's all right!" said Lawrence. He pushed the door open and
walked in. To give for a moment his own account of it: "You know that
room was the rummiest thing. I'd never been into it before. I knew the
old fellow was a bit of a dandy, but I never expected to see all the
pots and jars and glasses there were. You'd have thought one wouldn't
have noticed a thing at such a time, but you couldn't escape them,--his
dressing-table simply covered,--white round jars with pink tops,
bottles of hair-oil with ribbons round the neck, manicure things, heaps
of silver things, and boxes with Chinese patterns on them, and one
thing, open, with what was mighty like rouge in it. And clothes all over
the place--red silk dressing-gown with golden tassels, and red leather
slippers!

"I don't remember noticing any of this at the moment, but it all comes
back to me as soon as I begin to think of it--and the room stank of
scent!"

But of course it was the old man in the corner who mattered. It was, I
think, very significant of Lawrence's character and his
unEnglish-English tradition that the first thing that he felt was the
pathos of it. No other Englishman in Petrograd would have seen that at
all.

Wilderling was crouched in the corner against a piece of gold Japanese
embroidery. He was in the shadow, away from the window, which was pushed
open sufficiently to allow the muzzle of the rifle to slip between the
woodwork and the pane. The old man, his white hair disordered, his
clothes dusty, and his hands grimy, crept forward just as Lawrence
entered, fired down into the side-street, then moved swiftly back into
his corner again. He muttered to himself without ceasing in French,
"Chiens! Chiens!... Chiens!" He was very hot, and he stopped for a
moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then he saw Lawrence.

"What do you want?" he asked, as though he didn't recognize him.

Lawrence moved down the side of the room, avoiding the window. He
touched the little man's arm.

"I say, you know," he said, "this won't do."

Wilderling smelt of gunpowder, and he was breathing hard as though he
had been running desperately. He quivered when Lawrence touched him.

"Go away!" he said, "you mustn't come here.... I'll get them yet--I tell
you I'll get them yet--I tell you I'll get them--Let them dare...
Chiens... Chiens..." He jerked his rifle away from the window and
began, with trembling fingers, to load it again.

Lawrence gripped his arm. "When I did that," he said, "it felt as though
there wasn't an arm there at all, but just a bone which I could break if
I pressed a bit harder."

"Come away!" he said. "You damn fool--don't you see that it's hopeless?"

"And I'd always been so respectful to him...." he added in parenthesis.

Wilderling hissed at him, saying no words, just drawing in his breath.

"I've got two of them," he whispered suddenly. "I'll get them all."

Then a bullet crashed through the window, burying itself in the opposite
wall.

After that things happened so quickly that it was impossible to say in
what order they occurred. There was suddenly a tremendous noise in the
flat.

"It was just as though the whole place was going to tumble about our
ears. All the pots and bottles began to jump about, and then another
bullet came through, landed on the dressing-table, and smashed
everything. The looking-glass crashed, and the hair-oil was all over the
place. I rushed out to see what was happening in the hall...."

What "was happening" was that the soldiers had broken the hall door in.
Lawrence saw then a horrible thing. One of the men rushed forward and
stuck Andre, who was standing, paralysed, by the drawing-room door, in
the stomach. The old man cried out "just like a shot rabbit," and stood
there "for what seemed ages," with the blood pouring out of his middle.

That finished Lawrence. He rushed forward, and they would certainly have
"stuck" him too if someone hadn't cried out, "Look out, he's an
Englishman--an _Anglichanin_--I know him."

After that, for a time, he was uncertain of anything. He struggled; he
was held. He heard noises around him--shouts or murmurs or sighs--that
didn't seem to him to be connected with anything human. He could not
have said where he was nor what he was doing. Then, quite suddenly,
everything cleared. He came to himself with a consciousness of that
utter weariness that he had felt before. He was able to visualise the
scene, to take it all in, but as a distant spectator. "It was like
nothing so much as watching a cinematograph," he told me. He could do
nothing; he was held by three soldiers, who apparently wished him to be
a witness of the whole affair. Andre's body lay there, huddled up in a
pool of drying blood, that glistened under the electric light. One of
his legs was bent crookedly under him, and Lawrence had a strange mad
impulse to thrust his way forward and put it straight.

It was then, with a horrible sickly feeling, exactly like a blow in the
stomach, that he realised that the Baroness was there. She was standing,
quite alone, at the entrance of the hall, looking at the soldiers, who
were about eight in number.

He heard her say, "What's happened? Who are you?..." and then in a
sharper, more urgent voice, "Where's my husband?"

Then she saw Andre.... She gave a sharp little cry, moved forward
towards him, and stopped.

"I don't know what she did then," said Lawrence. "I think she suddenly
began to run down the passage. I know she was crying, 'Paul! Paul!
Paul!'... I never saw her again."

The officer--an elderly kindly-looking man like a doctor or a lawyer (I
am trying to give every possible detail, because I think it
important)--then came up to Lawrence and asked him some questions:

"What was his name?"

"Jeremy Ralph Lawrence."

"He was an Englishman."

"Yes."

"Working at the British Embassy?"

"No, at the British Military Mission."

"He was officer?"

"Yes."

"In the British Army?"

"Yes. He had fought for two years in France."

"He had been lodging with Baron Wilderling?"

"Yes. Ever since he came to Russia."

The officer nodded his head. They knew about him, had full information.
A friend of his, a Mr. Boris Grogoff, had spoken of him.

The officer was then very polite, told him that they regretted extremely
the inconvenience and discomfort to which he might be put, but that they
must detain him until this affair was concluded--"which will be very
soon" added the officer. He also added that he wished Lawrence to be a
witness of what occurred so that he should see that, under the new
regime in Russia, everything was just and straightforward.

"I tried to tell him," said Lawrence to me, "that Wilderling was off his
head. I hadn't the least hope, of course.... It was all quite clear,
and, at such a time, quite just. Wilderling had been shooting them out
of his window.... The officer listened very politely, but when I had
finished he only shook his head. That was their affair he said.

"It was then that I realised Wilderling. He was standing quite close to
me. He had obviously been struggling a bit, because his shirt was all
torn, and you could see his chest. He kept moving his hand and trying to
pull his shirt over; it was his only movement. He was as straight as a
dart, and except for the motion of his hand as still as a statue,
standing between the soldiers, looking directly in front of him. He had
been mad in that other room, quite dotty.

"He was as sane as anything now, grave and serious and rather ironical,
just as he always looked. Well it was at that moment, when I saw him
there, that I thought of Vera. I had been thinking of her all the time
of course. I had been thinking of nothing else for weeks. But that
minute, there in the hall, settled me. Callous, wasn't it? I ought to
have been thinking only of Wilderling and his poor old wife. After all,
they'd been awfully good to me. She'd been almost like a mother all the
time.... But there it was. It came over me like a storm. I'd been
fighting for nights and days and days and nights not to go to
her--fighting like hell, trying to play the game the sentimentalists
would call it. I suppose seeing the old man there and knowing what they
were going to do to him settled it. It was a sudden conviction, like a
blow, that all this thing was real, that they weren't playing at it,
that any one in the town was as near death as winking.... And so there
it was! Vera! I'd got to get to her--at once--and never leave her again
until she was safe. I'd got to get to her! I'd got to get to her! I'd
got to get to her!... Nothing else mattered. Not Wilderling's death nor
mine either, except that if I was dead I'd be out of it and wouldn't be
able to help her. They talk about men with one idea. From that moment I
had only one idea in all the world--I don't know that I've had any
other one since. They talk about scruples, moralities, traditions.
They're all right, but there just are moments in life when they simply
don't count at all.... Vera was in danger--Well, that was all that
mattered.

"The officer said something to Wilderling. I heard Wilderling answer:
"You're rebels against His Majesty.... I wish I'd shot more of you!"
Fine old boy, you know, whatever way you look at it.

"They moved him forward then. He went quite willingly, without any kind
of resistance. They motioned to me to follow. We walked out of the flat
down the stairs, no one saying a word. We went out on to the Quay. There
was no one there. They stood him up against the wall, facing the river.
It was dark, and when he was against the wall he seemed to vanish,--only
I got one kind of gesture, a sort of farewell, you know, his grey hair
waving in the breeze from the river.

"There was a report, and it was as though a piece of the wall slowly
unsettled itself and fell forward. No sound except the report. Oh, he
was a fine old boy!

"The officer came up to me and said very politely:

"'You are free now, sir,' and something about regretting incivility, and
something, I think, about them perhaps wanting me again to give some
sort of evidence. Very polite he was.

"I was mad, I suppose, I don't know. I believe I said something to him
about Vera, which of course he didn't understand.

"I know I wanted to run like hell to Vera to see that she was safe.

"But I didn't. I walked off as slowly as anything. It was awful. They'd
been so good to me, and yet I wasn't thinking of Wilderling at all...."



XIV

Markovitch on that same afternoon came back to the flat early. He also,
like Lawrence, felt the strange peace and tranquillity of the town, and
it seemed inevitably like the confirmation of all his dearest hopes. The
Czar was gone, the Old Regime was gone, the people, smiling and
friendly, were maintaining their own discipline--above all, Vera had
kissed him.

He did not go deeper into his heart and see how strained all their
recent relations must have been for this now to give him such joy. He
left that--it simply was that at last he and Vera understood one
another, she had found that she cared for him after all, and that he was
necessary to her happiness. What that must mean for their future life
together he simply dared not think.... It would change the world for
him. He felt like the man in the story from whom the curse is suddenly
lifted....

He walked home through the quiet town, humming to himself. He fancied
that there was a warmth in the air, a strange kindly omen of spring,
although the snow was still thick on the ground, and the Neva a grey
carpet of ice.

He came into the flat and found it empty. He went into his little room
and started on his inventions. He was so happy that he hummed to himself
as he worked and cut slices off his pieces of wood, and soaked flannel
in bottles, and wrote funny little sentences in his abominable
handwriting in a red notebook.

One need not grudge it him, poor Markovitch. It was the last happy
half-hour of his life.

He did not turn on his green-shaded lamp, but sat there in the gathering
dusk, chipping up the wood and sometimes stopping, idly lost in happy
thoughts.

Some one came in. He peered through his little glass window and saw that
it was Nina. She passed quickly through the dining-room, beyond, towards
her bedroom, without stopping to switch on the light.

Nina had broken the spell. He went back to his table, but he couldn't
work now, and he felt vaguely uneasy and cold. He was just going to
leave his work and find the _Retch_ and settle down to a comfortable
read, when he heard the hall door close. He stood behind his little
glass window and watched; it was Vera, perhaps... it must be... his
heart began eagerly to beat.

It _was_ Vera. At once he saw that she was strangely agitated. Before
she had switched on the light he realised it. With a click the light was
on. Markovitch had intended to open his door and go out to her, smiling.
He saw at once that she was waiting for some one.... He stood,
trembling, on tiptoe, his face pressed against the glass of the pane.

Lawrence came in. He had the face, Markovitch told me many weeks
afterwards, "of a triumphant man."

They had obviously met outside, because Vera said, as though continuing
a conversation:

"And it's only just happened?"

"I've come straight from there," Lawrence answered.

Then he went up to her. She let herself at once go to him and he half
carried her to a chair near the table and exactly opposite Markovitch's
window.

They kissed "like people who had been starving all their lives."
Markovitch was trembling so that he was afraid lest he should tumble or
make some noise. The two figures in the chair were like statues in their
immobile, relentless, unswerving embrace.

Suddenly he saw that Nina was standing in the opposite doorway "like a
ghost." She was there for so brief a moment that he could not be sure
that she had been there at all. Only her white, frightened face remained
with him.

One of his thoughts was:

"This is the end of my life."

Another was:

"How could they be so careless, with the light on, and perhaps people in
the flat!"

And after that:

"They need it so much that they don't care who sees--Starved people...."

And after that:

"I'm starved too."

He was so cold that his teeth were chattering, and he crept back from
his window, crept into the farthest farthest corner of his little room,
and crouched there on the floor, staring and staring, but seeing nothing
at all.




PART III

MARKOVITCH AND SEMYONOV




MARKOVITCH AND SEMYONOV.


I

On the evening of that very afternoon, Thursday, I again collapsed. I
was coming home in the dusk through a whispering world. All over the
streets, everywhere on the broad shining snow, under a blaze of stars so
sharp and piercing that the sky seemed strangely close and intimate, the
talk went on. Groups everywhere and groups irrespective of all class
distinction--a well-to-do woman in rich furs, a peasant woman with a
shawl over her head, a wild, bearded soldier, a stout, important
officer, a maid-servant, a cab-driver, a shopman--talking, talking,
talking, talking.... The eagerness, the ignorance, the odd fairy-tale
world spun about those groups, so that the coloured domes of the
churches, the silver network of the stars, the wooden booths, the mist
of candles before the Ikons, the rough painted pictures on the shops
advertising the goods sold within--all these things shared in that crude
idealistic, cynical ignorance, in that fairy-tale of brutality,
goodness, cowardice, and bravery, malice and generosity, superstition
and devotion that was so shortly to be offered to a materialistic,
hard-fighting, brave and unthinking Europe!...

That, however, was not now my immediate business--enough of that
presently. My immediate business, as I very quickly discovered, was to
pluck up enough strength to drag my wretched body home. The events of
the week had, I suppose, carried me along. I was to suffer now the
inevitable reaction. I felt exactly as though I had been shot from a gun
and landed, suddenly, without breath, without any strength in any of my
limbs in a new and strange world. I was standing, when I first realised
my weakness, beside the wooden booths in the Sadovaya. They were all
closed of course, but along the pavement women and old men had baskets
containing sweets and notepaper and red paper tulips offered in memory
of the glorious Revolution. Right across the Square the groups of people
scattered in little dusky pools against the snow, until they touched the
very doors of the church.... I saw all this, was conscious that the
stars and the church candles mingled... then suddenly I had to clutch
the side of the booth behind me to prevent myself from falling. My head
swam, my limbs were as water, and my old so well-remembered friend
struck me in the middle of the spine as though he had cut me in two with
his knife. How was I ever to get home? No one noticed me--indeed they
seemed to my sick eyes to have ceased to be human. Ghosts in a ghostly
world, the snow gleaming through them so that they only moved like a
thin diaphanous veil against the wall of the sky... I clutched my
booth. In a moment I should be down. The pain in my back was agony, my
legs had ceased to exist, and I was falling into a dark, dark pool of
clear jet-black water, at the bottom of which lay a star....

The strange thing is that I do not know who it was who rescued me. I
know that some one came. I know that to my own dim surprise an
Isvostchick was there and that very feebly I got into it. Some one was
with me. Was it my black-bearded peasant? I fancy now that it was. I can
even, on looking back, see him sitting up, very large and still, one
thick arm holding me. I fancy that I can still smell the stuff of his
clothes. I fancy that he talked to me, very quietly, reassuring me about
something. But, upon my word, I don't know. One can so easily imagine
what one wants to be true, and now I want, more than I would then ever
have believed to be possible, to have had actual contact with him. It is
the only conversation between us that can ever have existed: never,
before or after, was there another opportunity. And in any case there
can scarcely have been a conversation, because I certainly said nothing,
and I cannot remember anything that he said, if indeed he said anything
at all. At any rate I was there in the Sadovaya, I was in a cab, I was
in my bed. The truth of the rest of it any one may decide for
himself....



II

That Thursday was March 15. I was conscious of my existence again on
Sunday, April 1st. I opened my eyes and saw that there was a thaw. That
was the first thing of which I was aware--that water was apparently
dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your
bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to
moisture all about you.... My ramshackle habitation had never been a
very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have
definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the
panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above
my only bookcase, confound it!) was coloured a mouldy grey, and from
this huge drops like elephant's tears, splashed monotonously. (Already
_The Spirit of Man_ was disfigured by a long grey streak, and the green
back of Galleon's _Roads_ was splotched with stains.) Some one had
placed a bucket near the door to catch a perpetual stream flowing from
the corner of the room. Down into the bucket it pattered with a hasty,
giggling, hysterical jiggle. I rather liked the companionship of it. I
didn't mind it at all. I really minded nothing whatever.... I sighed my
appreciation of my return to life. My sigh brought some one from the
corner of my room and that some one was, of course, the inevitable Eat.
He came up to my bed in his stealthy, furtive fashion, and looked at me
reproachfully. I asked him, my voice sounding to myself strange and very
far away, what he was doing there. He answered that if it had not been
for him I should be dead. He had come early one morning and found me
lying in my bed and no one in the place at all. No one--because the old
woman had vanished. Yes, the neighbours had told him. Apparently on that
very Thursday she had decided that the Revolution had given her her
freedom, and that she was never going to work for anybody ever again.
She had told a woman-neighbour that she heard that the land now was
going to be given back to everybody, and she was returning therefore to
her village somewhere in the Moscow Province. She had not been back
there for twenty years. And first, to celebrate her liberty, she would
get magnificently drunk on furniture polish.

"I did not see her of course," said the Rat. "No. When I came, early in
the morning, no one was here. I thought that you were dead, Barin, and I
began collecting your property, so that no one else should take it. Then
you made a movement, and I saw that you were alive--so I got some
cabbage soup and gave it you. That certainly saved you.... I'm going to
stay with you now."

I did not care in the least whether he went or stayed. He chattered on.
By staying with me he would inevitably neglect his public duties.
Perhaps I didn't know that he had public duties? Yes, he was now an
Anarchist, and I should be astonished very shortly, by the things the
Anarchists would do. All the same, they had their own discipline. They
had their own processions, too, like any one else. Only four days ago he
had marched all over Petrograd carrying a black flag. He must confess
that he was rather sick of it. But they must have processions.... Even
the prostitutes had marched down the Nevski the other day demanding
shorter hours.

But of course I cannot remember all that he said. During the next few
days I slowly pulled myself out of the misty dead world in which I had
been lying. Pain came back to me, leaping upon me and then receding,
finally, on the third day suddenly leaving me altogether. The Rat fed me
on cabbage soup and glasses of tea and caviare and biscuits. During
those three days he never left me, and indeed tended me like a woman. He
would sit by my bed and with his rough hand stroke my hair, while he
poured into my ears ghastly stories of the many crimes that he had
committed. I noticed that he was cleaner and more civilised. His beard
was clipped and he smelt of cabbage and straw--a rather healthy smell.
One morning he suddenly took the pail, filled it with water and washed
himself in front of my windows. He scrubbed himself until I should have
thought that he had no skin left.

"You're a fine big man, Rat," I said.

He was delighted with that, and came quite near my bed, stretching his
naked body, his arms and legs and chest, like a pleased animal.

"Yes, I'm a fine man, Barin," he said; "many women have loved me, and
many will again..." Then he went back, and producing clean drawers and
vest from somewhere (I suspect that they were mine but I was too weak to
care), put them on.

On the second and third days I felt much better. The thaw was less
violent, the wood crackled in my stove. On the morning of Wednesday
April 14 I got up, dressed, and sat in front of my window. The ice was
still there, but over it lay a faint, a very faint, filmy sheen of
water. It was a day of gleams, the sun flashing in and out of the
clouds. Just beneath my window a tree was pushing into bud. Pools of
water lay thick on the dirty melting snow. I got the Rat to bring a
little table and put some books on it. I had near me _The Spirit of
Man_, Keats's _Letters_, _The Roads_, Beddoes, and _Pride and
Prejudice_. A consciousness of the outer world crept, like warmth,
through my bones.

"Rat," I said, "who's been to see me?"

"No one," said he.

I felt suddenly a ridiculous affront.

"No one?" I asked, incredulous.

"No one," he answered. "They've all forgotten you, Barin," he added
maliciously, knowing that that would hurt me.

It was strange how deeply I cared. Here was I who, only a short while
before, had declared myself done with the world for ever, and now I was
almost crying because no one had been to see me! Indeed, I believe in my
weakness and distress I actually did cry. No one at all? Not Vera nor
Nina nor Jeremy nor Bohun? Not young Bohun even...? And then slowly my
brain realised that there was now a new world. None of the old
conditions held any longer.

We had been the victims of an earthquake. Now it was--every man for
himself! Quickly then there came upon me an eager desire to know what
had happened in the Markovitch family. What of Jerry and Vera? What of
Nicholas? What of Semyonov...?

"Rat," I said, "this afternoon I am going out!"

"Very well, Barin," he said, "I, too, have an engagement."

In the afternoon I crept out like an old sick man. I felt strangely shy
and nervous. When I reached the corner of Ekateringofsky Canal and the
English Prospect I decided not to go in and see the Markovitches. For
one thing I shrank from the thought of their compassion. I had not
shaved for many days. I was that dull sickly yellow colour that offends
the taste of all healthy vigorous people. I did not want their pity.
No.... I would wait until I was stronger.

My interest in life was reviving with every step that I took. I don't
know what I had expected the outside world to be. This was April 14. It
was nearly a month since the outburst of the Revolution, and surely
there should be signs in the streets of the results of such a cataclysm.
There were, on the surface, no signs. There was the same little cinema
on the canal with its gaudy coloured posters, there was the old woman
sitting at the foot of the little bridge with her basket of apples and
bootlaces, there was the same wooden hut with the sweets and the fruit,
the same figures of peasant women, soldiers, boys hurrying across the
bridge, the same slow, sleepy Isvostchick stumbling along carelessly.
One sign there was. Exactly opposite the little cinema, on the other
side of the canal, was a high grey block of flats. This now was starred
and sprayed with the white marks of bullets. It was like a man marked
for life with smallpox. That building alone was witness to me that I had
not dreamt the events of that week.

The thaw made walking very difficult. The water poured down the sides of
the houses and gurgled in floods through the pipes. The snow was
slippery under the film of gleaming wet, and there were huge pools at
every step. Across the middle of the English Prospect, near the Baths,
there was quite a deep lake....

I wandered slowly along, enjoying the chill warmth of the soft spring
sun. The winter was nearly over! Thank God for that! What had happened
during my month of illness? Perhaps a great Revolutionary army had been
formed, and a mighty, free, and united Russia was going out to save the
world! Oh, I did hope that it was so! Surely that wonderful white week
was a good omen. No Revolution in history had started so well as this
one....

I found my way at last very slowly to the end of the Quay, and the sight
of the round towers of my favourite church was like the reassuring smile
of an old friend. The sun was dropping low over the Neva. The whole vast
expanse of the river was coloured very faintly pink. Here, too, there
was the film of the water above the ice; the water caught the colour,
but the ice below it was grey and still. Clouds of crimson and orange
and faint gold streamed away in great waves of light from the sun. The
long line of buildings and towers on the farther side was jet-black; the
masts of the ships clustering against the Quay were touched at their
tips with bright gold. It was all utterly still, not a sound nor a
movement anywhere; only one figure, that of a woman, was coming slowly
towards me. I felt, as one always does at the beginning of a Russian
spring, a strange sense of expectation. Spring in Russia is so sudden
and so swift that it gives an overwhelming impression of a powerful
organising Power behind it. Suddenly the shutters are pulled back and
the sun floods the world! Upon this afternoon one could feel the urgent
business of preparation pushing forward, arrogantly, ruthlessly. I don't
think that I had ever before realised the power of the Neva at such
close quarters. I was almost ashamed at the contrast of its struggle
with my own feebleness.

I saw then that the figure coming towards me was Nina.



III

As she came nearer I saw that she was intensely preoccupied. She was
looking straight in front of her but seeing nothing. It was only when
she was quite close to me that I saw that she was crying. She was making
no sound. Her mouth was closed; the tears were slowly, helplessly,
rolling down her cheeks.

She was very near to me indeed before she saw me; then she looked at me
closely before she recognised me. When she saw that it was I, she
stopped, fumbled for her handkerchief, which she found, wiped her eyes,
then turned away from me and looked out over the river.

"Nina, dear," I said, "what's the matter?"

She didn't answer; at length she turned round and said:

"You've been ill again, haven't you?"

One cheek had a dirty tear-stain on it, which made her inexpressibly
young and pathetic and helpless.

"Yes," I said, "I have."

She caught her breath, put out her hand, and touched my arm.

"Oh, you _do_ look ill!... Vera went to ask, and there was a
rough-looking man there who said that no one could see you, but that you
were all right.... One of us ought to have forced a way in--M. Bohun
wanted to--but we've all been thinking of ourselves."

"What's the matter, Nina?" I asked. "You've been crying."

"Nothing's the matter. I'm all right."

"No, you're not. You ought to tell me. You trusted me once."

"I don't trust any one," she answered fiercely. "Especially not
Englishmen."

"What's the matter?" I asked again.

"Nothing.... We're just as we were. Except," she suddenly looked up at
me, "Uncle Alexei's living with us now."

"Semyonov!" I cried out sharply, "living with you!"

"Yes," she went on, "in the room where Nicholas had his inventions is
Uncle Alexei's bedroom."

"Why, in Heaven's name?" I cried.

"Uncle Alexei wanted it. He said he was lonely, and then he just came. I
don't know whether Nicholas likes it or not. Vera hates it, but she
agreed at once."

"And do you like it?" I asked.

"I like Uncle Alexei," she answered. "We have long talks. He shows me
how silly I've been."

"Oh!" I said... "and what about Nicholas' inventions?"

"He's given them up for ever." She looked at me doubtfully, as though
she were wondering whether she could trust me. "He's so funny
now--Nicholas, I mean. You know he was so happy when the Revolution
came. Now he's in a different mood every minute. Something's happened to
him that we don't know about."

"What kind of thing?" I asked.

"I don't know. He's seen something or heard something. It's some secret
he's got. But Uncle Alexei knows."

"How can you tell?"

"Because he's always saying things that make Nicholas angry, and we
can't see anything in them at all.... Uncle Alexei's very clever."

"Yes, he is," I agreed. "But you haven't told me why you were crying
just now."

She looked at me. She gave a little shiver. "Oh, you do look ill!...
Everything's going wrong together, isn't it?"

And with that she suddenly left me, hurrying away from me, leaving me
miserable and apprehensive of some great trouble in store for all of us.



IV

It is impossible to explain how disturbed I was by Nina's news. Semyonov
living in the flat! He must have some very strong reason for this, to
leave his big comfortable flat for the pokiness of the Markovitches'!

And then that the Markovitches should have him! There were already
inhabitants enough--Nicholas, Vera, Nina, Uncle Ivan, Bohun. Then the
inconvenience and discomfort of Nicholas's little hole as a bedroom! How
Semyonov must loathe it!

From that moment the Markovitches' flat became for me the centre of my
drama. Looking back I could see now how all the growing development of
the story had centred round those rooms. I did not of course know at
this time of that final drama of the Thursday afternoon, but I knew of
the adventure with the policeman, and it seemed to me that the flat was
a cup into which the ingredients were being poured one after another
until at last the preparation would be complete, and then....

Oh, but I cared for Nina and Vera and Nicholas--yes, and Jerry too! I
wanted to see them happy and at peace before I left them--in especial
Nicholas.

And Semyonov came closer to them and closer, following some plan of his
own and yet, after all, finally like a man driven by a power,
constructed it might be, out of his own very irony.

I made a kind of bet with fate that by Easter Day every one should be
happy by then.

Next day, the 15th of April, was the great funeral for the victims of
the Revolution. I believe, although of course at that time I had heard
nothing, that there had been great speculation about the day, many
people thinking that it would be an excuse for further trouble, the
Monarchists rising, or the "Soviet" attacking the Provisional
Government, or Milyukoff and his followers attacking the Soviet. They
need not have been alarmed. No one had as yet realised the lengths that
Slavonic apathy may permit itself....

I went down about half-past ten to the Square at the end of the Sadovaya
and found it filled with a vast concourse of peasants, not only the
Square was filled, but the Sadovaya as far as the eye could see. They
were arranged in perfect order, about eight in a row, arm in arm. Every
group carried its banner, and far away into the distance one could see
the words "Freedom," "Brotherhood," "The Land for All," "Peace of the
World," floating on the breeze. Nevertheless, in spite of these fine
words, it was not a very cheering sight. The day was wretched--no actual
rain, but a cold damp wind blowing and the dirty snow, half ice and half
water; the people themselves were not inspiring. They were all, it
seemed, peasants. I saw very few workmen, although I believe that
multitudes were actually in the procession. Those strange, pale, Eastern
faces, passive, apathetic, ignorant, childish, unreasoning, stretched in
a great cloud under the grey overhanging canopy of the sky. They raised
if once and again a melancholy little tune that was more wail than
anything else. They had stood there, I was told, in pools of frozen
water for hours, and were perfectly ready to stand thus for many hours
more if they were ordered to do so. As I regarded their ignorance and
apathy I realised for the first time something of what the Revolution
had already done.

A hundred million of these children--ignorant, greedy, pathetic,
helpless, revengeful--let loose upon the world! Where were their
leaders? Who, indeed, would their leaders be? The sun sometimes broke
through for a moment, but the light that it threw on their faces only
made them more pallid, more death-like. They did not laugh nor joke as
our people at home would have done.... I believe that very few of them
had any idea why they were there....

Suddenly the word came down the lines to move forward. Very slowly,
wailing their little tune, they advanced.

But the morning was growing old and I must at once see Vera. I had made
up my mind, during the night, to do anything that lay in my power to
persuade Vera and Nina to leave their flat. The flat was the root of all
their trouble, there was something in its atmosphere, something gloomy
and ominous. They would be better at the other end of the town, or,
perhaps, over on the Vassily Ostrov. I would show Vera that it was a
fatal plan to have Semyonov to live with them (as in all probability she
herself knew well enough), and their leaving the flat was a very good
excuse for getting rid of him. I had all this in my head as I went
along. I was still feeling ill and feeble, and my half-hour's stand in
the market-place had seriously exhausted me. I had to lean against the
walls of the houses every now and then; it seemed to me that, in the
pale watery air, the whole world was a dream, the high forbiding flats
looking down on to the dirty ice of the canals, the water dripping,
dripping, dripping.... No one was about. Every one had gone to join in
the procession. I could see it, with my mind's eye, unwinding its huge
tails through the watery-oozing channels of the town, like some
pale-coloured snake, crawling through the misty labyrinths of a marsh.

In the flat I found only Uncle Ivan sitting very happily by himself at
the table playing patience. He was dressed very smartly in his English
black suit and a black bow tie. He behaved with his usual elaborate
courtesy to me but, to my relief, on this occasion, he spoke Russian.

It appeared that the Revolution had not upset him in the least. He took,
he assured me, no interest whatever in politics. The great thing was "to
live inside oneself," and by living inside oneself he meant, I gathered,
that one should be entirely selfish. Clothes were important, and food
and courteous manners, but he must say that he could not see that one
would be very much worse off even though one were ruled by the
Germans--one might, indeed, be a great deal more comfortable. And as to
this Revolution he couldn't really understand why people made such a
fuss. One class or another class what did it matter? (As to this he was,
I fear, to be sadly undeceived. He little knew that, before the year was
out, he would be shovelling snow in the Morskaia for a rouble an hour.)
So centred was he upon himself that he did not notice that I looked ill.
He offered me a chair, indeed, but that was simply his courteous
manners. Very ridiculous, he thought, the fuss that Nicholas made about
the Revolution--very ridiculous the fuss that he made about
everything....

Alexei had been showing Nicholas how ridiculous he was.

"Oh, has he?" said I. "How's he been doing that?"

Laughing at him, apparently. They all laughed at him. It was his own
fault.

"Alexei's living with us now, you know."

"Yes, I know," I said, "what's he doing that for?"

"He wanted to," said Uncle Ivan simply. "He's always done what he's
wanted to, all his life."

"It makes it a great many of you in one small flat."

"Yes, doesn't it?" said Uncle Ivan amiably. "Very pleasant--although,
Ivan Andreievitch, I will admit to you quite frankly that I've always
been frightened of Alexei. He has such a very sharp tongue. He discovers
one's weak spots in a marvellous manner.... We all have weak spots you
know," he added apologetically.

"Yes, we have," I said.

Then, to my relief, Vera came in. She was very