CHAPTER IV
MESHES
“Why, yes, Maria!” I exclaimed, “the way Mrs. Marsh bore up was just wonderful to see! Twelve miles in deep snow, heavy marching through thickets and scrub, over ditches and dykes, stumps and pitfalls, with never a word of complaint, as though it were a picnic! You’d never have dreamt she was just out of prison.”
“Yes, of course,” said Maria, proudly, “that would be just like her. And where is she now, Ivan Ilitch?”
“On the way to England, I guess.”
I was back again in Red Petrograd after a brief stay in Finland. That little country was supposed to be the headquarters of the Russian counter-revolution, which meant that everyone who had a plan to overthrow the Bolsheviks (and there were almost as many plans as there were patriots) conspired with as much noise as possible to push it through to the detriment of everybody else’s. So tongues wagged fast and viciously, and any old cock-and-bull story about anybody else was readily believed, circulated, and shouted abroad. You got it published if you could, and if you couldn’t (the papers, after all, had to draw the line somewhere), then you printed it yourself in the form of a libellous pamphlet. I felt a good deal safer in Petrograd, where I was thrown entirely on my own resources, than in Helsingfors, where the appearance of a stranger in a café or restaurant in almost anybody’s company was sufficient to set the puppets of a rival faction in commotion, like an ant-nest when a stone is dropped on it.
So I hid, stayed at a room in a private house, bought my own food or frequented insignificant restaurants, and was glad when I was given some money for expenses and could return to my friends Maria, Stepanovna, the Journalist, and others in Petrograd.
“How did you get back here, Ivan Ilitch?”
“Same old way, Maria. Black night. Frozen river. Deep snow. Everything around—bushes, trees, meadows—still and grey-blue in the starlight. Finnish patrols kept guard as before—lent me a white sheet, too, to wrap myself up in. Sort of cloak of invisibility, like in the fairy tales. So while the Finns watched through the bushes, I shuffled across the river, looking like Cæsar’s ghost.”
Maria was fascinated. “And did nobody see you?”
“Nobody, Maria. To make a good story I should have knocked at the door of the Red patrol and announced myself as the spirit of His Late Imperial Majesty, returned to wreak vengeance, shouldn’t I? But I didn’t. Instead of that I threw away the sheet and took a ticket to Petrograd. Very prosaic, wasn’t it? I’ll have some more tea, please.”