XI
I realise that the moment has come in my tale when the whole interest of my narrative centres in Markovitch. Markovitch is really the point of all my story as I have, throughout, subconsciously, recognised. The events of that wonderful Tuesday when for a brief instant the sun of freedom really did seem to all of us to break through the clouds, that one day in all our lives when hopes, dreams, Utopias, fairy tales seemed to be sober and realistic fact, those events might be seen through the eyes of any of us. Vera, Nina, Grogoff, Semyonov, Lawrence, Bohun and I, all shared in them and all had our sensations and experiences. But my own were drab and ordinary enough, and from the others I had no account so full and personal and true as from Markovitch. He told me all about that great day afterwards, only a short time before that catastrophe that overwhelmed us all, and in his account there was all the growing suspicion and horror of disillusion that after-events fostered in him. But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night, watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea, he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before he had finished his tale he was right back in that fantastic world that had burst at the touch like bubbles in the sun. I will give his account, as accurately as possible in his own words. I seldom interrupted him, and I think he soon forgot that I was there. He had come to me that night in a panic, for reasons which will be given later and I, in trying to reassure him, had reminded him of that day, when the world was suddenly Utopia.
“That did exist, that world,” I said. “And once having existed it cannot now be dead. Believe, believe that it will come back.”
“Come back!” He shook his head. “Even if it is still there I cannot go back to it. I will tell you, Ivan Andreievitch, what that day was … and why now I am so bitterly punished for having believed in it. Listen, what happened to me. It occurred, all of it, exactly as I tell you. You know that, just at that time, I had been worrying very much about Vera. The Revolution had come I suppose very suddenly to everyone; but truly to myself, because I had been thinking of Vera, it was like a thunderclap. It’s always been my trouble, Ivan Andreievitch, that I can’t think of more than one thing at once, and the worry of it has been that in my life there has been almost invariably more than one thing that I ought to think of. … I would think of my invention, you know, that I ought to get on with it a little faster. Because really—it was making a sort of cloth out of bark that I was working at; as every day passed, I could see more and more clearly that there was a great deal in this particular invention, and that it only needed real application to bring it properly forward. Only application as you know is my trouble. If I could only shut my brain up. …”
He told me then, I remember, a lot about his early childhood, and then the struggle that he had had to see one thing at once, and not two or three things that got in the way and hindered him from doing anything. He went on about Vera.
“You know that one night I had crept up into your room, and looked to see whether there were possibly a letter there. That was a disgraceful thing to do, wasn’t it? But I felt then that I had to satisfy myself. I wonder whether I can make you understand. It wasn’t jealousy exactly, because I had never felt that I had had any very strong right over Vera, considering the way that she had married me; but I don’t think I ever loved her more than I did during those weeks, and she was unattainable. I was lonely, Ivan Andreievitch, that’s the truth. Everything seemed to be slipping away from me, and in some way Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov seemed to accentuate that. He was always reminding me of one day or another when I had been happy with Vera long ago—some silly little expedition we had taken—or he was doubtful about my experiments being any good, or he would recall what I had felt about Russia at the beginning of the war. … All in a very kindly way, mind you. He was more friendly than he had ever been, and seemed to be altogether softer-hearted. But he made me think a great deal about Vera. He talked often so much. He thought that I ought to look after her more, and I explained that that wasn’t my right.
“The truth is that ever since Nina’s birthday-party I had been anxious. I knew really that everything was right. Vera is of course the soul of honour—but something had occurred then which made me. …
“Well, well, that doesn’t matter now. The only point is that I was thinking of Vera a great deal, and wondering how I could make her happy. She wasn’t happy. I don’t know how it was, but during those weeks just before the Revolution we were none of us happy. We were all uneasy as though we expected something were going to happen—and we were all suspicious. …
“I only tell you this because then you will see why it was that the Revolution broke upon me with such surprise. I had been right inside myself, talking to nobody, wanting nobody to talk to me. I get like that sometimes, when words seem to mean so much that it seems dangerous to throw them about. … And perhaps it is. But silence is dangerous too. Everything is dangerous if you are unlucky by nature. …
“I had been indoors all that Monday working at my invention, and thinking about Vera, wondering whether I’d speak to her, then afraid of my temper (I have a bad temper), wanting to know what was the truth, thinking at one moment that if she cared for someone else that I’d go away … and then suddenly angry and jealous, wishing to challenge him, but I am a ludicrous figure to challenge anyone, as I very well know. Semyonov had been to see me that morning, and he had just sat there without saying anything. I couldn’t endure that very long, so I asked him what he came for and he said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ I felt as though he were spying and I became uneasy. Why should he come so often now? And I was beginning to think of him when he wasn’t there. It was as though he thought he had a right over all of us, and that irritated me. … Well, that was Monday. They all came late in the afternoon and told me all the news. They had been at the Astoria. The whole town seemed to be in revolt, so they said.
“But even then I didn’t realise it. I was thinking of Vera just the same. I looked at her all the evening just as Semyonov had looked at me. And didn’t say anything. … I never wanted her so badly before. I made her sleep with me all that night. She hadn’t done that for a long time, and I woke up early in the morning to hear her crying softly to herself. She never used to cry. She was so proud. I put my arms round her, and she stopped crying and lay quite still. It wasn’t fair what I did, but I felt as though Alexei Petrovitch had challenged me to do it. He always hated Vera I knew. I got up very early and went to my wood. You can imagine I wasn’t very happy. …
“Then suddenly I thought I’d go out into the streets, and see what was happening. I couldn’t believe really that there had been any change. So I went out.
“Do you know of recent years I’ve walked out very seldom? What was it? A kind of shyness. I knew when I was in my own house, and I knew whom I was with. Then I was never a man who cared greatly about exercise, and there was no one outside whom I wanted very much to see. So when I went out that morning it was as though I didn’t know Petrograd at all, and had only just arrived there. I went over the Ekateringofsky Bridge, through the Square, and to the left down the Sadovaya.
“Of course the first thing that I noticed was that there were no trams, and that there were multitudes of people walking along and that they were all poor people and all happy. And I was glad when I saw that. Of course I’m a fool, and life can’t be as I want it, but that’s always what I had thought life ought to be—all the streets filled with poor people, all free and happy. And here they were! … with the snow crisp under their feet, and the sun shining, and the air quite still, so that all the talk came up, and up into the sky like a song. But of course they were bewildered as well as happy. They didn’t know where to go, they didn’t know what to do—like birds let out suddenly from their cages. I didn’t know myself. That’s what sudden freedom does—takes your breath away so that you go staggering along, and get caught again if you’re not careful. No trams, no policemen, no carriages filled with proud people cursing you. … Oh, Ivan Andreievitch, I’d be proud myself if I had money, and servants to put on my clothes, and new women every night, and different food every day. … I don’t blame them—but suddenly proud people were gone, and I was crying without knowing it—simply because that great crowd of poor people went pushing along, all talking under the sunny sky as freely as they pleased.
“I began to look about me. I saw that there were papers posted on the walls. They were those proclamations, you know, of Rodziancko’s new government, saying that while everything was unsettled, Milyukoff, Rodziancko, and the others would take charge in order to keep order and discipline. It seemed to me that there was little need to talk about discipline. Had beggars appeared there in the road I believed that the crowd would have stripped off their clothes and given them, rather than that they should want.
“I stood by one proclamation and read it out to the little crowd. They repeated the names to themselves, but they did not seem to care much. ‘The Czar’s wicked they tell me,’ said one man to me. ‘And all our troubles come from him.’
“ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said another. ‘There’ll be plenty of bread now.’
“And indeed what did names matter now? I couldn’t believe my eyes or my ears, Ivan Andreievitch. It looked too much like Paradise and I’d been deceived so often. So I determined to be very cautious. ‘You’ve been taken in, Nicolai Leontievitch, many many times. Don’t you believe this?’ But I couldn’t help feeling that if only this world would continue, if only the people could always be free and happy and the sun could shine, perhaps the rest of the world would see its folly and the war would stop and never begin again. This thought would grow in my mind as I walked, although I refused to encourage it.
“Motor lorries covered with soldiers came dashing down the street. The soldiers had their guns pointed, but the crowd cheered and cheered, waving hands and shouting. I shouted too. The tears were streaming down my face. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hold the sun and the snow and the people all in my arms fixed so that it should never change, and the world should see how good and innocent life could be.
“On every side people had asked what had really happened, and of course no one knew. But it did not matter. Everyone was so simple. A soldier, standing beside one of the placards was shouting: ‘Tovaristchi! What we must have is a splendid Republic and a good Czar to look after it.’
“And they all cheered him and laughed and sang. I turned up one of the side streets on to the Fontanka, and here I saw them emptying the rooms of one of the police. That was amusing! I laugh still when I think of it. Sending everything out of the windows—underclothes, ladies’ bonnets, chairs, books, flowerpots, pictures, and then all the records, white and yellow and pink paper, all fluttering in the sun like so many butterflies. The crowd was perfectly peaceful, in an excellent temper. Isn’t that wonderful when you think that for months those people had been starved and driven, waiting all night in the street for a piece of bread, and that now all discipline was removed, no more policemen except those hiding for their lives in houses, and yet they did nothing, they touched no one’s property, did no man any harm. People say now that it was their apathy, that they were taken by surprise, that they were like animals who did not know where to go, but I tell you, Ivan Andreievitch, that it was not so. I tell you that it was because just for an hour the soul could come up from its dark waters and breathe the sun and the light and see that all was good. Oh, why cannot that day return? Why cannot that day return? …”
He broke off and looked at me like a distracted child, his brows puckered, his hands beating the air. I did not say anything. I wanted him to forget that I was there.
He went on: “… I could not be there all day, I thought that I would go on to the Duma. I flowed on with the crowd. We were a great river swinging without knowing why, in one direction and only interrupted, once and again, by the motor lorries that rattled along, the soldiers shouting to us and waving their rifles, and we replying with cheers. I heard no firing that morning at all. They said, in the crowd, that many thousands had been killed last night. It seemed that on the roof of nearly every house in Petrograd there was a policeman with a machine-gun. But we marched along, without fear, singing. And all the time the joy in my heart was rising, rising, and I was checking it, telling myself that in a moment I would be disappointed, that I would soon be tricked as I had been so often tricked before. But I couldn’t help my joy, which was stronger than myself. …
“It must have been early afternoon, so long had I been on the road, when I came at last to the Duma. You saw yourself, Ivan Andreievitch, that all that week the crowd outside the Duma was truly a sea of people with the motor lorries that bristled with rifles for sea-monsters and the gun-carriages for ships. And such a babel! Everyone talking at once and nobody listening to anyone.
“I don’t know now how I pushed through into the Court, but at last I was inside and found myself crushed up against the doors of the Palace by a mob of soldiers and students. Here there was a kind of hush.
“When the door of the Palace opened there was a little sigh of interest. At intervals armed guards marched up with some wretched pale dirty Gorodovoi whom they had taken prisoner—”
Nicholas Markovitch paused again and again. He had been looking out to the sea over whose purple shadows the sky pale green and studded with silver stars seemed to wave magic shuttles of light, to and fro, backwards and forwards.
“You don’t mind all these details, Ivan Andreievitch? I am trying to discover, for my own sake, all the details that led me to my final experience. I want to trace the chain link by link … nothing is unimportant …”
I assured him that I was absorbed by his story. And indeed I was. That little, uncouth, lost, and desolate man was the most genuine human being whom I had ever known. That quality, above all others, stood forth in him. He had his secret as all men have their secret, the key to their pursuit of their own immortality. … But Markovitch’s secret was a real one, something that he faced with real bravery, real pride, and real dignity, and when he saw what the issue of his conduct must be he would, I knew, face it without flinching.
He went on, but looking at me now rather than the sea—looking at me with his grave, melancholy, angry eyes. “… After one of these convoys of prisoners the door remained for a moment open, and I seeing my chance slipped in after the guards. Here I was then in the very heart of the Revolution; but still, you know, Ivan Andreievitch, I couldn’t properly seize the fact, I couldn’t grasp the truth that all this was really occurring and that it wasn’t just a play, a pretence, or a dream … yes, a dream … especially a dream … perhaps, after all, that was what it was. The Circular Hall was piled high with machine-guns, bags of flour, and provisions of all kinds. There were some armed soldiers of course and women, and beside the machine guns the floor was strewn with cigarette ends and empty tins and papers and bags and cardboard boxes and even broken bottles. Dirt and Desolation! I remember that it was then when I looked at that floor that the first little suspicion stole into my heart—not a suspicion so much as an uneasiness. I wanted at once myself to set to work to clean up all the mess with my own hands.
“I didn’t like to see it there, and no one caring whether it were there or no.
“In the Catherine Hall into which I peered there was a vast mob, and this huge mass of men stirred and coiled and uncoiled like some huge ant-heap. Many of them, as I watched, suddenly turned into the outer hall. Men jumped on to chairs and boxes and balustrades, and soon, all over the place there were speakers, some shouting, some shrieking, some with tears rolling down their cheeks, some swearing, some whispering as though to themselves … and all the regiments came pouring in from the station, tumbling in like puppies or babies with pieces of red cloth tied to their rifles, some singing, some laughing, some dumb with amazement … thicker and thicker and thicker … standing round the speakers with their mouths open and their eyes wide, pushing and jostling, but good-naturedly, like young dogs.
“Everywhere, you know, men were forming committees, committees for social right, for a just Peace, for Women’s Suffrage, for Finnish Independence, for literature and the arts, for the better treatment of prostitutes, for education, for the just division of the land. I had crept into my corner, and soon as the soldiers came thicker and thicker, the noise grew more and more deafening, the dust floated in hazy clouds. The men had their kettles and they boiled tea, squatting down there, sometimes little processions pushed their way through, soldiers shouting and laughing with some white-faced policeman in their midst. Once I saw an old man, his shuba about his ears, stumbling with his eyes wide open, and staring as though he were sleepwalking. That was Stürmer being brought to judgement. Once I saw a man so terrified that he couldn’t move, but must be prodded along by the rifles of the soldiers. That was Pitirim. …
“And the shouting and screaming rose and rose like a flood. Once Rodziancko came in and began shouting, ‘Tovaristchi! Tovaristchi! …’ but his voice soon gave away, and he went back into the Salle Catherine again. The Socialists had it their way. There were so many, and their voices were so fresh and the soldiers liked to listen to them. ‘Land for everybody!’ they shouted. ‘And Bread and Peace! Hurrah! Hurrah!’ cried the soldiers.
“ ‘That’s all very well,’ said a huge man near me. ‘But Nicholas is coming, and tomorrow he will eat us all up!’
“But no one seemed to care. They were all mad, and I was mad too. It was the drunkenness of dust. It got in our heads and our brains. We all shouted. I began to shout too, although I didn’t know what it was that I was shouting.
“A grimy soldier caught me round the neck and kissed me. ‘Land for everybody!’ he cried. ‘Have some tea, Tovaristch!’ and I shared his tea with him.
“Then through the dust and noise I suddenly saw Boris Grogoff! That was an astonishing thing. You see I had dissociated all this from my private life. I had even, during these last hours, forgotten Vera, perhaps for the very first moment since I met her. She had seemed to have no share in this—and then suddenly the figure of Boris showed me that one’s private life is always with one, that it is a secret city in which one must always live, and whose gates one will never pass through, whatever may be going on in the world outside. But Grogoff! What a change! You know, I had always patronised him, Ivan Andreievitch. It had seemed to me that he was only a boy with a boy’s crude ideas. You know his fresh face with the way that he used to push back his hair from his forehead, and shout his ideas. He never considered anyone’s feelings. He was a complete egoist, and a man, it seemed to me, of no importance. But now! He stood on a bench and had around him a large crowd of soldiers. He was shouting in just his old way that he used in the English Prospect, but he seemed to have grown in the meantime, into a man. He did not seem afraid any more. I saw that he had power over the men to whom he was speaking. … I couldn’t hear what he said, but through the dust and heat he seemed to grow and grow until it was only him whom I saw there.
“ ‘He will carry off Nina’ was my next thought—ludicrous there at such a time, in such a crowd, but it is exactly like that that life shifts and shifts until it has formed a pattern. I was frightened by Grogoff. I could not believe that the new freedom, the new Russia, the new world would be made by such men. He waved his arms, he pushed back his hair, the men shouted. Grogoff was triumphant: ‘The New World … Novaya Jezn, Novaya Jezn!’5 I heard him shout.
“The sun before it set flooded the hall with light. What a scene through the dust! The red flags, the women and the soldiers and the shouting!
“I was suddenly dismayed. ‘How can order come out of this?’ I thought. ‘They are all mad. … Terrible things are going to happen.’ I was dirty and tired and exhausted. I fought my way through the mob, found the door. For a moment I looked back, to that sea of men lit by the last light of the sun. Then I pushed out, was thrown, it seemed to me, from man to man, and was at last in the air. … Quiet, fires burning in the courtyard, a sky of the palest blue, a few stars, and the people singing the ‘Marseillaise.’
“It was like drinking great draughts of cold water after an intolerable thirst. …
“… Hasn’t Chekhov said somewhere that Russians have nostalgia but no patriotism? That was never true of me—can’t remember how young I was when I remember my father talking to me about the idea of Russia. I’ve told you that he was by any kind of standard a bad man. He had, I think, no redeeming points at all—but he had, all the same, that sense of Russia. I don’t suppose that he put it to any practical use, or that he even tried to teach it to his pupils, but it would suddenly seize him and he would let himself go, and for an hour he would be a fine master—of words. And what Russian is ever more than that at the end?
“He spoke to me and gave me a picture of a world inside a world, and this inside world was complete in itself. It had everything in it—beauty, wealth, force, power; it could be anything, it could do anything. But it was held by an evil enchantment as though a wicked magician had it in thrall, and everything slept as in Tchaikovsky’s Ballet. But one day, he told me, the Prince would come and kill the Enchanter, and this great world would come into its own. I remember that I was so excited that I couldn’t bear to wait, but prayed that I might be allowed to go out and find the Enchanter … but my father laughed and said that there were no Enchanter now, and then I cried. All the same I never lost my hope. I talked to people about Russia, but it was never Russia itself they seemed to care for—it was women or drink or perhaps freedom and socialism, or perhaps some part of Russia, Siberia, or the Caucasus—but my world they none of them believed in. It didn’t exist they said. It was simply my imagination that had painted it, and they laughed at me and said it was held together by the lashes of the knout, and when those went Russia would go too. As I grew up some of them thought that I was revolutionary, and they tried to make me join their clubs and societies. But those were no use to me. They couldn’t give me what I wanted. They wanted to destroy, to assassinate someone, or to blow up a building. They had no thought beyond destruction, and that to me seemed only the first step. And they never think of Russia, our revolutionaries. You will have noticed that yourself, Ivan Andreievitch. Nothing so small and trivial as Russia! It must be the whole world or nothing at all. Democracy … Freedom … the Brotherhood of Man! Oh, the terrible harm that words have done to Russia! Had the Russians of the last fifty years been born without the gift of speech we would be now the greatest people on the earth!
“But I loved Russia from end to end. The farthest villages in Siberia, the remotest hut beyond Archangel, from the shops in the Sadovaya to the Lavra at Kiev, from the little villages on the bank of the Volga to the woods round Tarnopol—all, all one country, one people, one world within a world. The old man to whom I was secretary discovered this secret hope of mine. I talked one night when I was drunk and told him everything. I mentioned even the Enchanter and the Sleeping Beauty! How he laughed at me! He would never leave me alone. ‘Nicolai Leontievitch believes in Holy Russia!’ he would say. ‘Not so much Holy, you understand, as Bewitched. A Fairy Garden, ladies, with a sleeping beauty in the middle of it. Dear me, Nicolai Leontievitch, no wonder you are heart-free!’
“How I hated him and his yellow face and his ugly stomach! I would have stamped on it with delight. But that made me shy. I was afraid to speak of it to anyone, and I kept to myself. Then Vera came and she didn’t laugh at me. The two ideas grew together in my head. Vera and Russia! The two things in my life by which I stood—because man must have something in life round which he may nestle as a cat curls up by the fire.
“But even Vera did not seem to care for Russia as Russia. ‘What can Siberia be to me?’ she would say. ‘Why, Nicholas, it is no more than China.’
“But it was more than China; when I looked at it on the map I recognised it as though it were my own country. Then the war came and I thought the desire of my heart was fulfilled. At last men talked about Russia as though she truly existed. For a moment all Russia was united, all classes, rich and poor, high and low. Men were patriotic together as though one heart beat through all the land. But only for a moment. Divisions came, and quickly things were worse than before. There came Tannenburg and afterwards Warsaw.
“All was lost. … Russia was betrayed, and I was a sentimental fool. You know yourself how cynical even the most sentimental Russians are—that is because if you stick to facts you know where you are, but ideas are always betraying you. Life simply isn’t long enough to test them, that’s all, and man is certainly not a patient animal.
“At first I watched the war going from bad to worse, and then I shut myself in and refused to look any longer. I thought only of Vera and my work. I would make a great discovery and be rich, and then Vera at last would love me. Idiot! As though I had not known that Vera would not love for that kind of reason. … I determined that I would think no more of Russia, that I would be a man of no country. Then during those last weeks before the Revolution I began to be suspicious of Vera and to watch her. I did things of which I was ashamed, and then I despised myself for being ashamed.
“I am a man, I can do what I wish. Even though I am imprisoned I am free. … I am my own master. But all the same, to be a spy is a mean thing, Ivan Andreievitch. You Englishmen, although you are stupid, you are not mean. It was that day when your young friend, Bohun, found me looking in your room for letters, that in spite of myself I was ashamed.
“He looked at me in a sort of way as though, down to his very soul he was astonished at what I had done. Well, why should I mind that he should be astonished? He was very young and all wrong in his ideas of life. Nevertheless that look of his influenced me. I thought about it afterwards. Then came Alexei Petrovitch. I’ve told you already. He was always hinting at something. He was always there as though he were waiting for something to happen. He hinted things about Vera. It’s strange, Ivan Andreievitch, but there was a day just a week before the Revolution, when I was very nearly jumping up and striking him. Just to get rid of him so that he shouldn’t be watching me. … Why even when I wasn’t there he. …
“But what’s that got to do with my walk? Nothing perhaps. All the same, it was all these little things that made me, when I walked out of the Duma that evening so queer. You see I’d been getting desperate. All that I had left was being taken from me, and then suddenly this Revolution had come and given me back Russia again. I forgot Alexei Petrovitch and your Englishman Lawrence and the failure of my work—I remembered, once again, just as I had those first days of the war, Vera and Russia.
“There, in the clear evening air, I forgot all the talk there had been inside the Duma, the mess and the noise and the dust. I was suddenly happy again, and excited, and hopeful. … The Enchanter had come after all, and Russia was to awake.
“Ah, what a wonderful evening that was! You know that there have been times—very, very rare occasions in one’s life—when places that one knows well, streets and houses so common and customary as to be like one’s very skin—are suddenly for a wonderful half-hour places of magic, the trees are gold, the houses silver, the bricks jewelled, the pavement of amber. Or simply perhaps they are different, a new country of new colour and mystery … when one is just in love or has won some prize, or finished at last some difficult work. Petrograd was like that to me that night; I swear to you, Ivan Andreievitch, I did not know where I was. I seem now on looking back to have been in places that night, magical places, that by the morning had flown away. I could not tell you where I went. I know that I must have walked for miles. I walked with a great many people who were all my brothers. I had drunk nothing, not even water, and yet the effect on me was exactly as though I were drunk, drunk with happiness, Ivan Andreievitch, and with the possibility of all the things that might now be.
“We, many of us, marched along, singing the ‘Marseillaise’ I suppose. There was firing I think in some of the streets, because I can remember now on looking back that once or twice I heard a machine-gun quite close to me and didn’t care at all, and even laughed. … Not that I’ve ever cared for that. Bullets aren’t the sort of things that frighten me. There are other terrors. … All the same it was curious that we should all march along as though there were no danger and the peace of the world had come. There were women with us—quite a number of them I think—and, I believe, some children. I remember that some of the way I carried a child, fast asleep in my arms. How ludicrous it would be now if I, of all men in the world, carried a baby down the Nevski! But it was quite natural that night. The town seemed to me blazing with light. Of course that it cannot have been; there can have only been the stars and some bonfires. And perhaps we stopped at the police-courts which were crackling away. I don’t remember that, but I know that somewhere there were clouds of golden sparks opening into the sky and mingling with the stars—a wonderful sight, flocks of golden birds and behind them a roar of sound like a torrent of water … I know that, most of the night, I had one man especially for my companion. I can see him quite clearly now, although, whether it is all my imagination or not I can’t say. Certainly I’ve never seen him since and never will again. He was a peasant, a bigly made man, very neatly and decently dressed in a workman’s blouse and black trousers. He had a long black beard and was grave and serious, speaking very little but watching everything. Kindly, our best type of peasant—perhaps the type that will one day give Russia her real freedom … one day … a thousand years from now. …
“I don’t know why it is that I can still see him so clearly, because I can remember no one else of that night, and even this fellow may have been my imagination. But I think that, as we walked along, I talked to him about Russia and how the whole land now from Archangel to Vladivostock might be free and be one great country of peace and plenty, first in all the world.
“It seemed to me that everyone was singing, men and women and children. …
“We must, at last, have parted from most of the company. I had come with my friend into the quieter streets of the city. Then it was that I suddenly smelt the sea. You must have noticed how Petrograd is mixed up with the sea, how suddenly, where you never would expect it, you see the masts of ships all clustered together against the sky. I smelt the sea, the wind blew fresh and strong and there we were on the banks of the Neva. Everywhere there was perfect silence. The Neva lay, tranquil, bound under its ice. The black hulks of the ships lay against the white shadows like sleeping animals. The curve of the sky, with its multitude of stars, was infinite.
“My friend embraced me and left me and I stayed alone, so happy, so sure of the peace of the world that I did what I had not done for years, sent up a prayer of gratitude to God. Then with my head on my hands, looking down at the masts of the ships, feeling Petrograd behind me with its lights as though it were the City of God, I burst into tears—tears of happiness and joy and humble gratitude. … I have no memory of anything further.”