“What is he doing?” asked Lawrence, standing up.
“In the little hack room,” Andre whispered, as though now he were confiding a terrible secret. “Come quickly...!”
Lawrence followed him; when he had gone a few steps down the passage he heard suddenly a sharp, muffled report.
“What’s that?”
Andre came close to him, his old, seamed face white like plaster.
“He has a rifle in there...” he said. “He’s shooting at them!” Then as Lawrence stepped up to the door of the little room that was Wilderling’s dressing-room, Andre caught his arm—.
“Be careful, Barin.... He doesn’t know what he’s about. He may not recognise you.”
“Oh, that’s all right!” said Lawrence. He pushed the door open and walked in. To give for a moment his own account of it: “You know that room was the rummiest thing. I’d never been into it before. I knew the old fellow was a bit of a dandy, but I never expected to see all the pots and jars and glasses there were. You’d have thought one wouldn’t have noticed a thing at such a time, but you couldn’t escape them,—his dressing-table simply covered,—white round jars with pink tops, bottles of hair-oil with ribbons round the neck, manicure things, heaps of silver things, and boxes with Chinese patterns on them, and one thing, open, with what was mighty like rouge in it. And clothes all over the place—red silk dressing-gown with golden tassels, and red leather slippers!
“I don’t remember noticing any of this at the moment, but it all comes back to me as soon as I begin to think of it—and the room stank of scent!”
But of course it was the old man in the corner who mattered. It was, I think, very significant of Lawrence’s character and his unEnglish-English tradition that the first thing that he felt was the pathos of it. No other Englishman in Petrograd would have seen that at all.