The Secret City

by Hugh Walpole

He was the only absolutely happy Russian I have ever known. He had no passages 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 substitute 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 passivity 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 masses 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 canals 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.