The Secret City Part 15

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

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

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

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

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

Near the Nevski is a fine shop of pictures with snow scenes and blue rivers and Italian landscapes, and copies of Repin and Verestchagin, and portraits of the Czar. I searched here, but all were too sophisticated in their bright brown frames, and their air of being the latest thing from Paris and London. Then I crossed the road, threading my way through the carriages and motor cars, past the old white-bearded sweeper with the broom held aloft, gazing at the sky, and plunged into the English Shop to see whether I might buy something warm for Nina. Here, indeed, I could fancy that I was in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury. A demure English provincialism was over everything, and a young man in a high white collar and a shiny black coat, washed his hands as he told me that "they hadn't any in stock at the moment, but they were expecting a delivery of goods at any minute."

Russian shopmen, it is almost needless to say, do not care whether they have goods in stock or no. They have other things to think about. The air was filled with the chatter of English governesses, and an English clergyman and his wife were earnestly turning over a selection of woollen comforters.

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

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

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

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

The Jew in charge of it wanted twice as much as I was ready to give, and we argued for ten minutes before a kindly and appreciative crowd. At last we arranged a compromise, and I moved away, pleased and satisfied.

I stepped out of the arcade and faced the little Square. It was, at that instant, fantastic and oddly coloured; the sun, about to set, hung in the misty sky a perfect round crimson globe, and it was perched, almost maliciously, just above the tower of the little church.

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

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

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

XX

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

"Now, Ivan Andreievitch," he said, "this is very pleasant... very....

You elude me, you know, which is unkind with two so old acquaintances.

Of course I know that you dislike me, and I don't suppose that I have the highest opinion of _you_, but, nevertheless, we should be interested in one another. Our common experience...." He broke off with a little shiver, and pulled his fur coat closer around him.

I knew that all that I wanted was to break away. We had pa.s.sed quickly on leaving the Market into some of the meanest streets of Petrograd.

This was the Petrograd of Dostoeffsky, the Petrograd of "Poor Folk" and "Crime and Punishment" and "The Despised and Rejected."... Monstrous groups of flats towered above us, and in the gathering dusk the figures that slipped in and out of the doors were furtive shadows and ghosts. No one seemed to speak; you could see no faces under the spare pale-flamed lamps, only hear whispers and smell rotten stinks and feel the snow, foul and soiled under one's feet....

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

"Nothing!" He laughed. "What about my delightful nieces and their home circle? You were always one to shrink from the truth, Ivan Andreievitch.

You fancy that you can sink into the bosom of a charming family and escape the disadvantages.... Not at all. There are always disadvantages in a Russian family. _I_ am the disadvantage in this one." He laughed again, and insisted on taking my arm once more. "If you feel so strongly about me, Durward" (when he used my surname he always accented the second syllable very strongly) "all you have to do is to cut my niece Vera out of your visiting list. That, I imagine, is the last thing that you wish. Well, then--"

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

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

"That is a lie!" I cried.

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

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

"No," Semyonov replied, "I was wrong. He does not know it--he suspects.

And my nephew-in-law in a state of suspicion is a delightful study."

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

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

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

"You are wrong, my friend," he said, "if you imagine that there is no amus.e.m.e.nt for me in the study of my family. It _is_ my family, you know.

I have none other. Perhaps it has never occurred to you, Durward, that possibly I am a lonely man."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He put his hand on my arm again.

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

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