MARKOVITCH AND SEMYONOV.
I
On the evening of that very afternoon, Thursday, I again collapsed. Iwas coming home in the dusk through a whispering world. All over thestreets, everywhere on the broad shining snow, under a blaze of stars sosharp and piercing that the sky seemed strangely close and intimate, thetalk went on. Groups everywhere and groups irrespective of all classdistinction--a well-to-do woman in rich furs, a peasant woman with ashawl over her head, a wild, bearded soldier, a stout, importantofficer, a maid-servant, a cab-driver, a shopman--talking, talking,talking, talking.... The eagerness, the ignorance, the odd fairy-taleworld spun about those groups, so that the coloured domes of thechurches, the silver network of the stars, the wooden booths, the mistof candles before the Ikons, the rough painted pictures on the shopsadvertising the goods sold within--all these things shared in that crudeidealistic, cynical ignorance, in that fairy-tale of brutality,goodness, cowardice, and bravery, malice and generosity, superstitionand devotion that was so shortly to be offered to a materialistic,hard-fighting, brave and unthinking Europe!...
That, however, was not now my immediate business--enough of thatpresently. My immediate business, as I very quickly discovered, was topluck up enough strength to drag my wretched body home. The events ofthe week had, I suppose, carried me along. I was to suffer now theinevitable reaction. I felt exactly as though I had been shot from a gunand landed, suddenly, without breath, without any strength in any of mylimbs in a new and strange world. I was standing, when I first realisedmy weakness, beside the wooden booths in the Sadovaya. They were allclosed of course, but along the pavement women and old men had basketscontaining sweets and notepaper and red paper tulips offered in memoryof the glorious Revolution. Right across the Square the groups of peoplescattered in little dusky pools against the snow, until they touched thevery doors of the church.... I saw all this, was conscious that thestars and the church candles mingled... then suddenly I had to clutchthe side of the booth behind me to prevent myself from falling. My headswam, my limbs were as water, and my old so well-remembered friendstruck me in the middle of the spine as though he had cut me in two withhis knife. How was I ever to get home? No one noticed me--indeed theyseemed to my sick eyes to have ceased to be human. Ghosts in a ghostlyworld, the snow gleaming through them so that they only moved like athin diaphanous veil against the wall of the sky... I clutched mybooth. In a moment I should be down. The pain in my back was agony, mylegs had ceased to exist, and I was falling into a dark, dark pool ofclear jet-black water, at the bottom of which lay a star....
The strange thing is that I do not know who it was who rescued me. Iknow that some one came. I know that to my own dim surprise anIsvostchick was there and that very feebly I got into it. Some one waswith me. Was it my black-bearded peasant? I fancy now that it was. I caneven, on looking back, see him sitting up, very large and still, onethick arm holding me. I fancy that I can still smell the stuff of hisclothes. I fancy that he talked to me, very quietly, reassuring me aboutsomething. But, upon my word, I don't know. One can so easily imaginewhat one wants to be true, and now I want, more than I would then everhave believed to be possible, to have had actual contact with him. It isthe only conversation between us that can ever have existed: never,before or after, was there another opportunity. And in any case therecan scarcely have been a conversation, because I certainly said nothing,and I cannot remember anything that he said, if indeed he said anythingat all. At any rate I was there in the Sadovaya, I was in a cab, I wasin my bed. The truth of the rest of it any one may decide forhimself....
The Secret City Page 37
