The Secret City. Hugh Walpole

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

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      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