“Any chance of that?”
“Not now. Bolshevism is busted. They want help from the outside world. That’s why they’ve let me stay and let you come. Things are changing pretty rapidly. I’ll tell you all about it presently. First the Foreign Office, and Mr. Weinstein.”
He hailed a droschke, spoke a few words of Russian—amazing fellow!—and Bertram found himself driving through Moscow at night, with Christy by his side. Moscow—or some fantastic city of a dream after a goblet of absinthe? The moon was up, and shone brightly down upon a vision of white palaces, red walls, turreted gateways, tall bell-towers, and clusters of pear-shaped domes, all golden and glistening in the white moonlight. Under the gateways were deep caverns of blackness, and high walls with fan-shaped battlements flung black shadows across broad squares all flooded with the moon’s milky radiance. The droschke, pulled by a lean and wiry horse, lurched over cobbled roads like a boat in a rough sea, and pitched into holes and pitfalls which more than once brought the horse to its knees. Under a gateway, very narrow, with a turret overhead, a red lamp was burning, and there seemed to be an altar in the little chamber at the side, glinting with gilt candlesticks. The driver pulled off his fur cap, and crossed himself.
“The shrine of the Iberian Virgin,” said Christy. “A thousand years old, and more powerful than Lenin in the peasant mind!”
There was a great open square on the other side of the gateway, below a steep wall of red brick. At one end of it was a fantastic church, with a twisted dome painted in all the colours of the rainbow. In the high wall were arched gateways, lit by hanging lanterns, guarded by Red soldiers whose bayonets flashed like quicksilver. At one angle of the wall was an open staircase of red brick, leading to a high turret. Each of its steps was clear-cut by a light behind, with strange theatrical effect. Beyond seemed an endless vista of golden cupolas, surmounted by shining crosses, above white walls, all glamorous and shadow-haunted.
“The Kremlin,” said Christy. “From that high tower—old Ivan Velike—Napoleon saw Moscow burning, and read his doom in its smoke and flame. We’re passing through the Red Square. Every stone of it has been wet with blood. Those walls have looked down on a thousand years of human cruelty—not ended yet. . . .”
“A cut-throat looking place,” said Bertram, and shivered a little. There were few people about. There was no sound in the city except the klip-clop of the lean horse, and the footsteps of sentries pacing under the Kremlin walls.
“It holds the biggest drama in the world,” answered Christy. “What’s happening here is going to alter history everywhere. Peace or war, perhaps civilisation itself, is going to be decided by the brain that is working at this hour of midnight, beyond those walls. The ruthless brain of a fanatic who is also a realist. He experiments with human nature like a vivisector with guinea-pigs, without compassion, in the interests of science. To prove or disprove a theory.”
“Lenin?”
“Lenin. . . . Genius or maniac? Damned if I know!”