…We were all gathered together in the office. I heard one of the Russians say in an agitated whisper, “Don’t turn on the light!… Don’t turn on the light! They can see!”
We were all in half-darkness, our faces mistily white. I could hear Peroxide breathing in a tremulous manner, as though in a moment she would break into hysteria.
“We’ll go into the inside room. We can turn the light on there,” said Burrows. We all passed into the reception-room of the office, a nice airy place with the library along one wall and bright coloured maps on the other. We stood together and considered the matter.
“It’s real!” said Burrows, his red, cheery face perplexed and strained.
“Who’d have thought it?”
“Of course it’s real!” cried Bohun impatiently (Burrows’ optimism had been often difficult to bear with indulgence).
“Now you see! What about your beautiful Russian mystic now?”
“Oh dear!” cried the little Russian typist. “And my mother!… What ever shall I do? She’ll hear reports and think that I’m being murdered. I shall never get across.”
“You’d better stay with me to-night, Miss Peredonov,” said Peroxide firmly. “My flat’s quite close here in Gagarinsky. We shall be delighted to have you.”
“You can telephone to your mother, Miss Peredonov,” said Burrows. “No difficulty at all.”
It was then that Bohun took me aside.
“Look here!” he said. “I’m worried. Vera and Nina were going to the
Astoria to have tea with Semyonov this afternoon. I should think the
Astoria might be rather a hot spot if this spreads. And I wouldn’t trust
Semyonov. Will you come down with me there now?”
“Yes,” I said, “of course I’ll come.”
We said a word to Burrows, put on our Shubas and goloshes, and started down the stairs. At every door there were anxious faces. Out of one flat came a very fat Jew.
“Gentlemen, what is this all about?”
“Riots,” said Bohun.
“Is there shooting?”
“Yes,” said Bohun.
“Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi! And I live over on Vassily Ostrov! What do you advise, Gaspoda? Will the bridges be up?”
“Very likely,” I answered. “I should stay here.”
“And they are shooting?” he asked again.
“They are,” I answered.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen — stay for a moment. Perhaps together we could think…. I am all alone here except for a lady… most unfortunate….”
But we could not stay.
The world into which we stepped was wonderful. The background of snow under the star-blazing sky made it even more fantastic than it naturally was. We slipped into the crowd and, becoming part of it, were at once, as one so often is, sympathetic with it. It seemed such a childish, helpless, and good-natured throng. No one seemed to know anything of arms or directions. There were, as I have already said, many women and little children, and some of the civilians who had rifles looked quite helpless. I saw one boy holding his gun upside down. No one paid any attention to us. There was as yet no class note in the demonstration, and the only hostile cries I heard were against Protopopoff and the police. We moved back into the street behind the Fontanka, and here I saw a wonderful sight. Some one had lighted a large bonfire in the middle of the street and the flames tossed higher and higher into the air, bringing down the stars in flights of gold, flinging up the snow until it seemed to radiate in lines and circles of white light high over the very roofs of the houses. In front of the fire a soldier, mounted on a horse, addressed a small crowd of women and boys. On the end of his rifle was a ragged red cloth.
I could not see his face. I saw his arms wave, and the fire behind him exaggerated his figure and then dropped it into a straggling silhouette against the snow. The street seemed deserted except for this group, although now I could hear distant shouting on every side of me, and the monotonous clap-clap-clap-clap of a machine-gun.
I heard him say, “Tovaristchi! now is your time! Don’t hesitate in the sacred cause of freedom! As our brethren did in the famous days of the French Revolution, so must we do now. All the Army is coming over to our side. The Preobrojenski have come over to us and have arrested their officers and taken their arms. We must finish with Protopopoff and our other tyrants, and see that we have a just rule. Tovaristchi! there will never be such a chance again, and you will repent for ever if you have not played your part in the great fight for freedom!”
So it went on. It did not seem that his audience was greatly impressed. It was bewildered and dazed. But the fire leapt up behind him giving him a legendary splendour, and the whole picture was romantic and unreal like a gaudy painting on a coloured screen.
We hurried through into the Nevski, and this we found nearly deserted. The trams of course had stopped, a few figures hurried along, and once an Isvostchick went racing down towards the river.
“Well, now, we seem to be out of it,” said Bohun, with a sigh of relief. “I must say I’m not sorry. I don’t mind France, where you can tell which is the front and which the back, but this kind of thing does get on one’s nerves. I daresay it’s only local. We shall find them all as easy as anything at the Astoria, and wondering what we’re making a fuss about.”
At that moment we were joined by an English merchant whom we both knew, a stout elderly man who had lived all his life in Russia. I was surprised to find him in a state of extreme terror. I had always known him as a calm, conceited, stupid fellow, with a great liking for Russian ladies. This pastime he was able as a bachelor to enjoy to the full. Now, however, instead of the ruddy, coarse, self-confident merchant there was a pallid, trembling jelly-fish.
“I say, you fellows,” he asked, catching my arm. “Where are you off to?”
“We’re off to the Astoria,” I answered.
“Let me come with you. I’m not frightened, not at all — all the same I don’t want to be left alone. I was in the 1905 affair. That was enough for me. Where are they firing — do you know?”
“All over the place,” said Bohun, enjoying himself. “They’ll be down here in a minute.”
“Good God! Do you really think so? It’s terrible — these fellows — once they get loose they stick at nothing…. I remember in 1905…. Good heavens! Where had we better go? It’s very exposed here, isn’t it?”
“It’s very exposed everywhere,” said Bohun. “I doubt whether any of us are alive in the morning.”
“Good heavens! You don’t say so! Why should they interfere with us?”
“Oh, rich, you know, and that kind of thing. And then we’re Englishmen.
They’ll clear out all the English.”
“Oh, I’m not really English. My mother was Russian. I could show them my papers….”
Bohun laughed. “I’m only kidding you, Watchett,” he said. “We’re safe enough. Look, there’s not a soul about!” We were at the corner of the Moika now; all was absolutely quiet. Two women and a man were standing on the bridge talking together. A few stars clustered above the bend of the Canal seemed to shift and waver ever so slightly through a gathering mist, like the smoke of blowing candles.
“It seems all right,” said the merchant, sniffing the air suspiciously as though he expected to smell blood. We turned towards the Morskaia. One of the women detached herself from the group and came to us.
“Don’t go down the Morskaia,” she said, whispering, as though some hostile figure were leaning over her shoulder. “They’re firing round the Telephone Exchange.” Even as she spoke I heard the sharp clatter of the machine-gun break out again, but now very close, and with an intimate note as though it were the same gun that I had heard before, which had been tracking me down round the town.
“Do you hear that?” said the merchant.
“Come on,” said Bohun. “We’ll go down the Moika. That seems safe enough!”
How strangely in the flick of a bullet the town had changed! Yesterday every street had been friendly, obvious, and open; they were now no longer streets, but secret blind avenues with strange trees, fantastic doors, shuttered windows, a grinning moon, malicious stars, and snow that lay there simply to prevent every sound. It was a town truly beleaguered as towns are in dreams. The uncanny awe with which I moved across the bridge was increased when the man with the women turned towards me, and I saw that he was — or seemed to be — that same grave bearded peasant whom I had seen by the river, whom Henry had seen in the Cathedral, who remained with one, as passing strangers sometimes do, like a symbol or a message or a threat.
He stood, with the Nevski behind him, calm and grave, and even it seemed a little amused, watching me as I crossed. I said to Bohun, “Did you ever see that fellow before?”
Bohun turned and looked.
“No,” he said.
“Don’t you remember? The man that first day in the Kazan?”
“They’re all alike,” Bohun said. “One can’t tell….”
“Oh, come on,” said the merchant. “Let’s get to the Astoria.”
We started down the Moika, past that faded picture-shop where there are always large moth-eaten canvases of cornfields under the moon and Russian weddings and Italian lakes. We had got very nearly to the little street with the wooden hoardings when the merchant gripped my arm.
“What’s that?” he gulped. The silence now was intense. We could not hear the machine-gun nor any shouting. The world was like a picture smoking under a moon now red and hard. Against the wall of the street two women were huddled, one on her knees, her head pressed against the thighs of the other, who stood stretched as though crucified, her arms out, staring on to the Canal. Beside a little kiosk, on the space exactly in front of the side street, lay a man on his face. His bowler-hat had rolled towards the kiosk; his arms were stretched out so that he looked oddly like the shadow of the woman against the wall.
Instead of one hand there was a pool of blood. The other hand with all the fingers stretched was yellow against the snow.
As we came up a bullet from the Morskaia struck the kiosk.
The woman, not moving from the wall, said, “They’ve shot my husband… he did nothing.”
The other woman, on her knees, only cried without ceasing.
The merchant said, “I’m going back — to the Europe,” and he turned and ran.
“What’s down that street?” I said to the woman, as though I expected her to say “Hobgoblins.” Bohun said, “This is rather beastly…. We ought to move that fellow out of that. He may be alive still.”
And how silly such a sentence when only yesterday, just here, there was the beggar who sold boot-laces, and just there, where the man lay, an old muddled Isvostchick asleep on his box!
We moved forward, and instantly it was as though I were in the middle of a vast desert quite alone with all the hosts of heaven aiming at me malicious darts. As I bent down my back was so broad that it stretched across Petrograd, and my feet were tiny like frogs.
We pulled at the man. His head rolled and his face turned over, and the mouth was full of snow. It was so still that I whispered, whether to Bohun or myself, “God, I wish somebody would shout!” Then I heard the wood of the kiosk crack, ever so slightly, like an opening door, and panic flooded me as I had never known it do during all my time at the Front.
“I’ve no strength,” I said to Bohun.
“Pull for God’s sake!” he answered. We dragged the body a little way; my hand clutched the thigh, which was hard and cold under the stuff of his clothing. His head rolled round, and his eyes now were covered with snow. We dragged him, and he bumped grotesquely. We had him under the wall, near the two women, and the blood welled out and dripped in a spreading pool at the women’s feet.
“Now,” said Bohun, “we’ve got to run for it.”
“Do you know,” said I, as though I were making a sudden discovery, “I don’t think I can.” I leaned back against the wall and looked at the pool of blood near the kiosk where the man had been.
“Oh, but you’ve got to,” said Bohun, who seemed to feel no fear. “We can’t stay here all night.”
“No, I know,” I answered. “But the trouble is — I’m not myself.” And I was not. That was the trouble. I was not John Durward at all. Some stranger was here with a new heart, poor shrivelled limbs, an enormous nose, a hot mouth with no eyes at all. This stranger had usurped my clothes and he refused to move. He was tied to the wall and he would not obey me.
Bohun looked at me. “I say, Durward, come on, it’s only a step. We must get to the Astoria.”
But the picture of the Astoria did not stir me. I should have seen Nina and Vera waiting there, and that should have at once determined me. So it would have been had I been myself. This other man was there…. Nina and Vera meant nothing to him at all. But I could not explain that to Bohun. “I can’t go…” I saw Bohun’s eyes — I was dreadfully ashamed. “You go on…” I muttered. I wanted to tell him that I did not think that I could endure to feel again that awful expansion of my back and the turning my feet into toads.
“Of course I can’t leave you,” he said.
And suddenly I sprang back into my own clothes again. I flung the charlatan out and he flumped off into air.
“Come on,” I said, and I ran. No bullets whizzed past us. I was ashamed of running, and we walked quite quietly over the rest of the open space.
“Funny thing,” I said, “I was damned frightened for a moment.”
“It’s the silence and the houses,” said Bohun.
Strangely enough I remember nothing between that moment and our arrival at the Astoria. We must have skirted the Canal, keeping in the shadow of the wall, then crossed the Saint Isaac’s Square. The next thing I can recall is our standing, rather breathless, in the hall of the Astoria, and the first persons I saw there were Vera and Nina, together at the bottom of the staircase, saying nothing, waiting.
In front of them was a motley crowd of Russian officers all talking and gesticulating together. I came nearer to Vera and at once I said to myself, “Lawrence is here somewhere.” She was standing, her head up, watching the doors, her eyes glowed with anticipation, her lips were a little parted. She never moved at all, but was so vital that the rest of the people seemed dolls beside her. As we came towards them Nina turned round and spoke to some one, and I saw that it was Semyonov who stood at the bottom of the staircase, his thick legs apart, stroking his beard with his hand.
We came forward and Nina began at once —
“Durdles — tell us! What’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. The lights after the dark and the snow bewildered me, and the noise and excitement of the Russian officers were deafening.
Nina went on, her face lit. “Can’t you tell us anything? We haven’t heard a word. We came just in an ordinary way about four o’clock. There wasn’t a sound, and then, just as we were sitting down to tea, they all came bursting in, saying that all the officers were being murdered, and that Protopopoff was killed, and that—”
“That’s true anyway,” said a young Russian officer, turning round to us excitedly. “I had it from a friend of mine who was passing just as they stuck him in the stomach. He saw it all; they dragged him out of his house and stuck him in the stomach—”
“They say the Czar’s been shot,” said another officer, a fat, red-faced man with very bright red trousers, “and that Rodziancko’s formed a government…”
I heard on every side such words as “People — Rodziancko — Protopopoff — Freedom,” and the officer telling his tale again. “And they stuck him in the stomach just as he was passing his house…”
Through all this tale Vera never moved. I saw, to my surprise, that Lawrence was there now, standing near her but never speaking. Semyonov stood on the stairs watching.
Suddenly I saw that she wanted me.
“Ivan Andreievitch,” she said, “will you do something for me?” She spoke very low, and her eyes did not look at me, but beyond us all out to the door.
“Certainly,” I said.
“Will you keep Alexei Petrovitch here? Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Bohun can see us home. I don’t want him to come with us. Will you ask him to wait and speak to you?”
I went up to him. “Semyonov,” I said, “I want a word with you, if I may—”
“Certainly,” he said, with that irritating smile of his, as though he knew exactly of what I was thinking.
We moved up the dark stairs. As we went I heard Vera’s clear, calm voice:
“Will you see us home, Mr. Lawrence?… I think it’s quite safe to go now.”
We stopped on the first floor under the electric light. There were two easy-chairs there, with a dusty palm behind them. We sat down.
“You haven’t really got anything to say to me,” he began.
“Oh yes, I have,” I said.
“No… You simply suggested conversation because Vera asked you to do so.”
“I suggested a conversation,” I answered, “because I had something of some seriousness to tell you.”
“Well, she needn’t have been afraid,” he went on. “I wasn’t going home with them. I want to stop and watch these ridiculous people a little longer…. What had you got to say, my philosophical, optimistic friend?”
He looked quite his old self, sitting stockily in the chair, his strong thighs pressing against the cane as though they’d burst it, his thick square beard more wiry than ever, and his lips red and shining. He seemed to have regained his old self-possession and confidence.
“What I wanted to say,” I began, “is that I’m going to tell you once more to leave Markovitch alone. I know the other day — that alone—”
“Oh that!” he brushed it aside impatiently. “There are bigger things than that just now, Durward. You lack, as I have always said, two very essential things, a sense of humour and a sense of proportion. And you pretend to know Russia whilst you are without those two admirable gifts!
“However, let us forget personalities…. There are better things here!”
As he spoke two young Russian officers came tumbling up the stairs. They were talking excitedly, not listening to one another, red in the face and tripping over their swords. They went up to the next floor, their voices very shrill.
“So much for your sentimental Russia,” said Semyonov. He spoke very quietly. “How I shall love to see these fools all toppled over, and then the fools who toppled them toppled in their turn.
“Durward, you’re a fool too, but you’re English, and at least you’ve got a conscience. I tell you, you’ll see in these next months such cowardice, such selfishness, such meanness, such ignorance as the world has never known — and all in the name of Freedom! Why, they’re chattering about freedom already downstairs as hard as they can go!”
“As usual, Semyonov,” I answered hotly, “you believe in the good of no one. If there’s really a Revolution coming, which I still doubt, it may lead to the noblest liberation.”
“Oh, you’re an ass!” he interrupted quietly. “Nobility and the human race! I tell you, Ivan Andreievitch of the noble character, that the human race is rotten; that it is composed of selfishness, vice, and meanness; that it is hypocritical beyond the bounds of hypocrisy, and that of all mean cowardly nations on this earth the Russian nation is the meanest and most cowardly!… That fine talk of ours that you English slobber over! — a mere excuse for idleness, and you’ll know it before another year is through. I despise mankind with a contempt that every day’s fresh experience only the more justifies. Only once have I found some one who had a great soul, and she, too, if I had secured her, might have disappointed me…. No, my time is coming. I shall see at last my fellowmen in their true colours, and I shall even perhaps help them to display them. My worthy Markovitch, for example—”
“What about Markovitch?” I asked sharply.
He got up, smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“He shall be driven by ghosts,” he answered, and turned off to the stairs.
He looked back for a moment. “The funny thing is, I like you, Durward,” he said.