The Secret City Part 9

Next day I fell ill. I had felt unwell for several weeks, and now I woke up to a bad feverish cold, my body one vast ache, and at the same time impersonal, away from me, floating over above me, sinking under me, tied to me only by pain....

I was too utterly apathetic to care. The old woman who looked after my rooms telephoned to my doctor, a stout, red-faced jolly man, who came and laughed at me, ordered me some medicine, said that I was in a high fever, and left me. After that, I was, for several days, caught into a world of dreams and nightmares. No one, I think, came near me, save my old woman, Marfa, and a new acquaintance of mine, the Rat.

The Rat I had met some weeks before outside my house. I had been returning one evening, through the dark, with a heavy bag of books which I had fetched from an English friend of mine who lodged in the Millionnaya. I had had a cab for most of the distance, but that had stopped on the other side of the bridge--it could not drive amongst the rubbish pebbles and spars of my island. As I staggered along with my bag a figure had risen, as it seemed to me, out of the ground and asked huskily whether he could help me. I had only a few steps to go, but he seized my burden and went in front of me. I submitted. I told him my door and he entered the dark pa.s.sage, climbed the rickety stairs and entered my room. Here we were both astonished. He, when I had lighted my lamp, was staggered by the splendour and luxury of my life, I, as I looked at him, by the wildness and uncouthness of his appearance. He was as a savage from the centre of Africa, thick ragged hair and beard, a powerful body in rags, and his whole att.i.tude to the world primeval and utterly primitive. His mouth was cruel; his eyes, as almost always with the Russian peasant, mild and kindly. I do not intend to take up much s.p.a.ce here with an account of him, but he did, after this first meeting, in some sort attach himself to me. I never learned his name nor where he lived; he was I should suppose an absolutely abominable plunderer and pirate and ruffian. He would appear suddenly in my room, stand by the door and talk--but talk with the ignorance, navete, brutal simplicity of an utterly abandoned baby. Nothing mystical or beautiful about the Rat. He did not disguise from me in the least that there was no crime that he had not committed--murder, rape, arson, immorality of the most hideous, sacrilege, the basest betrayal of his best friends--he was not only savage and outlaw, he was deliberate anarchist and murderer. He had no redeeming point that I could anywhere discover. I did not in the least mind his entering my room when he pleased. I had there nothing of any value; he could take my life even, had he a mind to that.... The nave abysmal depths of his depravity interested me. He formed a kind of attachment to me. He told me that he would do anything for me. He had a strange tact which prevented him from intruding upon me when I was occupied. He was as quick as any cultured civilised cosmopolitan to see if he was not wanted. He developed a certain cleanliness; he told me, with an air of disdainful superiority, that he had been to the public baths. I gave him an old suit of mine and a pair of boots. He very seldom asked for anything; once and again he would point to something and say that he would like to have it; if I said that he could not he expressed no disappointment; sometimes he stole it, but he always acknowledged that he had done so if I asked him, although he would lie stupendously on other occasions for no reason at all.

"Now you must bring that back," I would say sternly.

"Oh no, Barin.... Why? You have so many things. Surely you will not object. Perhaps I will bring it--and perhaps not."

"You must certainly bring it," I would say.

"We will see," he would say, smiling at me in the friendliest fashion.

He was the only absolutely happy Russian I have ever known. He had no pa.s.sages of despair. He had been in prison, he would be in prison again.

He had spasms of the most absolute ferocity. On one occasion I thought that I should be his next victim, and for a moment my fate hung, I think, in the balance. But he changed his mind. He had a real liking for me, I think. When he could get it, he drank a kind of furniture polish, the only subst.i.tute in these days for vodka. This was an absolutely killing drink, and I tried to prove to him that frequent indulgence in it meant an early decease. That did not affect him in the least. Death had no horror for him although, I foresaw, with justice as after events proved, that if he were faced with it he would be a very desperate coward. He liked very much my cigarettes, and I gave him these on condition that he did not spit sunflower seeds over my floor. He kept his word about this.

He chatted incessantly, and sometimes I listened and sometimes not. He had no politics and was indeed comfortably ignorant of any sort of geography or party division. There were for him only the rich and the poor. He knew nothing about the war, but he hoped, he frankly told me, that there would be anarchy in Petrograd, so that he might rob and plunder.

"I will look after you then, Barin," he answered me, "so that no one shall touch you." I thanked him. He was greatly amused by my Russian accent, although he had no interest in the fact that I was English, nor did he want to hear in the least about London or any foreign town.

Marfa, my old servant, was, of course, horrified at this acquaintanceship of mine, and warned me that it would mean both my death and hers. He liked to tease and frighten her, but he was never rude to her and offered sometimes to help her with her work, an offer that she always indignantly refused. He had some children, he told me, but he did not know where they were. He tried to respect my hospitality, never bringing any friends of his with him, and only once coming when he was the worse for drink. On that occasion he cried and endeavoured to embrace me. He apologised for this the next day.

They would try to take him soon, he supposed, for a soldier, but he thought that he would be able to escape. He hated the Police, and would murder them all if he could. He told me great tales of their cruelty, and he cursed them most bitterly. I pointed out to him that society must be protected, but he did not see why this need be so. It was, he thought, wrong that some people had so much and others so little, but this was as far as his social investigations penetrated.

He was really distressed by my illness. Marfa told me that one day when I was delirious he cried. At the same time he pointed out to her that, if I died, certain things in my rooms would be his. He liked a silver cigarette case of mine, and my watch chain, and a signet ring that I wore. I saw him vaguely, an uncertain shadow in the mists of the first days of my fever. I was not, I suppose, in actual fact, seriously ill, and yet I abandoned myself to my fate, allowing myself to slip without the slightest attempt at resistance, along the easiest way, towards death or idiocy or paralysis, towards anything that meant the indifferent pa.s.sivity of inaction. I had bad, confused dreams. The silence irritated me. I fancied to myself that the sea ought to make some sound, that it was holding itself deliberately quiescent in preparation for some event. I remember that Marfa and the doctor prevented me from rising to look from my window that I might see why the sea was not roaring. Some one said to me in my dreams something about "Ice," and again and again I repeated the word to myself as though it were intensely significant. "Ice! Ice! Ice!... Yes, that was what I wanted to know!" My idea from this was that the floor upon which I rested was exceedingly thin, made only of paper in fact, and that at any moment it might give way and precipitate me upon the ice. This terrified me, and the way that the cold blew up through the cracks in the floor was disturbing enough. I knew that my doctor thought me mad to remain in such a place. But above all I was overwhelmed by the figure of Semyonov.

He haunted me in all my dreams, his presence never left me for a single instant. I could not be sure whether he were in the room or no, but certainly he was close to me... watching me, sneering at me as he had so often done before.

I was conscious also of Petrograd, of the town itself, in every one of its amazingly various manifestations. I saw it all laid out as though I were a great height above it--the fashionable streets, the Nevski and the Morskaia with the carriages and the motor-cars and trams, the kiosks and the bazaars, the women with their baskets of apples, the boys with the newspapers, the smart cinematographs, the shop in the Morskaia with the coloured stones in the window, the oculist and the pastry-cook's and the hairdressers and the large "English shop" at the corner of the Nevski, and Pivato's the restaurant, and close beside it the art shop with popular post cards and books on Serov and Vrubel, and the Astoria Hotel with its shining windows staring on to S. Isaac's Square. And I saw the Nevski, that straight and proud street, filled with every kind of vehicle and black ma.s.ses of people, rolling like thick clouds up and down, here and there, the hum of their talk rising like mist from the snow. And there was the Kazan Cathedral, haughty and proud, and the book shop with the French books and complete sets of Tchekov and Merejkowsky in the window, and the bridges and the palaces and the square before the Alexander Theatre, and Elisseieff's the provision shop, and all the banks, and the shops with gloves and shirts, all looking ill-fitting as though they were never meant to be worn, and then the little dirty shops poked in between the grand ones, the shop with rubber goods and the shop with an Aquarium, gold-fish and snails and a tortoise, and the shop with oranges and bananas. Then, too, there was the Arcade with the theatre where they acted _Romance_ and _Potash and Perlmutter_ (almost as they do in London), and on the other side of the street, at the corner of the Sadovia, the bazaar with all its shops and its trembling mist of people. I watched the Nevski, and saw how it slipped into the Neva with the Red Square on one side of it, and S. Isaac's Square on the other, and the great station at the far end of it, and about these two lines the Neva and the Nevski, the whole town sprawled and crept, ebbed and flowed. Away from the splendour it stretched, dirty and decrepit and untended, here piles of evil flats, there old wooden buildings with cobbled courts, and the ca.n.a.ls twisting and creeping up and down through it all. It was all bathed, as I looked down upon it, in coloured mist.

The air was purple and gold and light blue, fading into the snow and ice and transforming it. Everywhere there were the masts of ships and the smell of the sea and rough deserted places--and shadows moved behind the shadows, and yet more shadows behind _them_, so that it was all uncertain and unstable, and only the river knew what it was about.

Over the whole town Semyonov and I moved together, and the ice and snow silenced our steps, and no one in the whole place spoke a word, so that we had to lower our voices and whispered....

XV

Suddenly I was better. I quite recovered from my fever and only lay still on my bed, weak, and very hungry. I was happy, happy as I had not been since I came to Petrograd. I felt all the luxury of convalescence creeping into my bones. All that I need do was to lie there and let people feed me and read a little if it did not make my head ache. I had a water-colour painted by Alexander Benois on the wall opposite me, a night in the Caucasus, with a heavy sweep of black hill, a deep blue steady sky, and a thin grey road running into endless distance. A pleasing picture, with no finality in its appeal--intimate too, so that it was one's own road and one's own hill. I had bought it extravagantly, at last year's "_Mir Eskoustva_," and now I was pleased at my extravagance.

Marfa was very good to me, feeding me, and being cross with me to make me take an interest in things, and acting with wonderful judgement about my visitors. Numbers of people, English and Russian, came to see me--I had not known that I had so many friends. I felt amiable to all the world, and hopeful about it, too. I looked back on the period before my illness as a bad dream.

People told me I was foolish to live out in this wretched place of mine, where it was cold and wild and lonely. And then when they came again they were not so sure, and they looked out on the ice that shone in waves and shadows of light under the sun, and thought that perhaps they too would try. But of course, I knew well that they would not....

As I grew stronger I felt an intense and burning interest in the history that had been developing when I fell ill. I heard that Vera Michailovna and Nina had called many times. Markovitch had been, and Henry Bohun and Lawrence.

Then, one sunny afternoon, Henry Bohun came in and I was surprised at my pleasure at the sight of him. He was shocked at the change in me, and was too young to conceal it.

"Oh, you do look bad!" were his first words as he sat down by my bed. "I say, are you comfortable here? Wouldn't you rather be somewhere with conveniences--telephone and lifts and things?"

"Not at all!" I answered. "I've got a telephone. I'm very happy where I am."

"It is a queer place," he said. "Isn't it awfully unhealthy?"

"Quite the reverse--with the sea in front of it! About the healthiest spot in Petrograd!"

"But I should get the blues here. So lonely and quiet. Petrograd is a strange town! Most people don't dream there's a queer place like this."

"That's why I like it," I said. "I expect there are lots of queer places in Petrograd if you only knew."

He wandered about the room, looking at my few pictures and my books and my writing-table. At last he sat down again by my bed.

"Now tell me all the news," I said.

"News?" he asked. He looked uncomfortable, and I saw at once that he had come to confide something in me. "What sort of news? Political?"

"Anything."

"Well, politics are about the same. They say there's going to be an awful row in February when the Duma meets--but then other people say there won't be a row at all until the war is over."

"What else do they say?"

"They say Protopopoff is up to all sorts of tricks. That he says prayers with the Empress and they summon Rasputin's ghost.... That's all rot of course. But he does just what the Empress tells him, and they're going to enslave the whole country and hand it over to Germany."

"What will they do that for?" I asked.

"Why, then, the Czarevitch will have it--under Germany. They say that none of the munitions are going to the Front, and Protopopoff's keeping them all to blow up the people here with."

"What else?" I asked sarcastically.

"No, but really, there's something in it, I expect." Henry looked serious and important. "Then on the other hand, Clutton-Davies says the Czar's absolutely all right, dead keen on the war and hates Germany...

_I_ don't know--but Clutton-Davies sees him nearly every day."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Oh, food's worse than ever! Going up every day, and the bread queues are longer and longer. The Germans have spies in the queues, women who go up and down telling people it's all England's fault."

"And people are just the same?"

"Just the same; Donons' and the Bear are crowded every day. You can't get a table. So are the cinematographs and the theatres. I went to the Ballet last night."

"What was it?"

"'La fille mal gardee'--Karsavina dancing divinely. Every one was there."

This closed the strain of public information. I led him further.

"Well, Bohun, what about our friends the Markovitches?" I asked. "How are you getting on there?"

He blushed and looked at his boots.

"All right," he said. "They're very decent."