The Secret City Part 29

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, "G.o.d, 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 G.o.d'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 b.u.mped 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 s.p.a.ce.

"Funny thing," I said, "I was d.a.m.ned 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 antic.i.p.ation, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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!