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The Secret City

by Hugh Walpole · English · Gutenberg #12349 · 709,857 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Secret City

Author: Hugh Walpole


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12349]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET CITY ***

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 tha

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