After that she refused to be grave for a moment, danced about the room, singing, and finally vanished, a whirlwind of blue silk.
A week later I was out in the world again. That curious sense of excitement that had first come to me during the early days of my illness burnt now more fiercely than ever. I cannot say what it was exactly that I thought was going to happen. I have often looked back, as many other people must have done, to those days in February and wondered whether I foresaw anything of what was to come, and what were the things that might have seemed to me significant if I had noticed them. And here I am deliberately speaking of both public and private affairs. I cannot quite frankly dissever the two. At the Front, a year and a half before, I had discovered how intermingled the souls of individuals and the souls of countries were, and how permanent private history seemed to me and how transient public events; but whether that was true or no before, it was now most certain that it was the story of certain individuals that I was to record,—the history that was being made behind them could at its best be only a background.
I seemed to step into a city ablaze with a sinister glory. If that appears melodramatic I can only say that the dazzling winter weather of those weeks was melodramatic. Never before had I seen the huge buildings tower so high, never before felt the shadows so vast, the squares and streets so limitless in their capacity for swallowing light and colour. The sky was a bitter changeless blue; the buildings black; the snow and ice, glittering with purple and gold, swept by vast swinging shadows as though huge doors opened and shut in heaven, or monstrous birds hovered, their wings spread, motionless in the limitless space.
And all this had, as ever, nothing to do with human life. The little courtyards with their woodstacks and their coloured houses, carts and the cobbled squares and the little stumpy trees that bordered the canals and the little wooden huts beside the bridges with their candles and fruit—these were human and friendly and good, but they had their precarious condition like the rest of us.
On the first afternoon of my new liberty I found myself in the Nevski Prospect, bewildered by the crowds and the talk and trams and motors and carts that passed in unending sequence up and down the long street. Standing at the corner of the Sadovia and the Nevski one was carried straight to the point of the golden spire that guarded the farther end of the great street. All was gold, the surface of the road was like a golden stream, the canal was gold, the thin spire caught into its piercing line all the colour of the swiftly fading afternoon; the wheels of the carriages gleamed, the flower-baskets of the women glittered like shining foam, the snow flung its crystal colour into the air like thin fire dim before the sun. The street seemed to have gathered on to its pavements the citizens of every country under the sun. Tartars, Mongols, Little Russians, Chinamen, Japanese, French officers, British officers, peasants and fashionable women, schoolboys, officials, actors and artists and business men and priests and sailors and beggars and hawkers and, guarding them all, friendly, urbane, filled with a pleasant self-importance that seemed at that hour the simplest and easiest of attitudes, the Police. “Rum—rum—rum—whirr—whirr—whirr—whirr”—like the regular beat of a shuttle the hum rose and fell, as the sun faded into rosy mist and white vapours stole above the still canals.
I turned to go home and felt some one touch my elbow.
I swung round and there, his broad face ruddy with the cold, was Jerry Lawrence.
I was delighted to see him and told him so.
“Well, I’m damned glad,” he said gruffly. “I thought you might have a grudge against me.”