"Broadway—good old Broadway," he replied indulgently.
"Ah, yes. B-r-r-oadway. And I will dance all night. I dance magnificently. Is it not so, Meester? Yes, I will go to New York and become just like an American."
After dinner we went to a wrestling-match, and "Meester" took the Princess, radiant and vivacious and paying all the bills, back to the Continental.
Since July war has come nearer Kiev. The hospitals are full of maimed and wounded soldiers who fought to defend Russia. They made a bulwark of their breasts. It was as though one single giant breast, hundreds of versts broad, thrust itself between the Germans and home.
And it is winter now. The days are short with an icy, gray mist from the Dnieper, and flurries of snow. There is a shortage of coal, and we sit shivering in our apartment. We drag the covers off the beds and wrap ourselves up in them while we read books from the circulating library or play three-handed bridge. The wind rattles the windows and streaks the panes with snow and rain. But however dirty they get, they must remain unwashed till spring; for they are sealed for the winter with putty, and you can open only one small pane at the top. The apartment is darker than ever. Not once does the sun shine into our rooms. We see the sunlight in the street, but the dark shadow of the building lengthens minute by minute, stretching itself across the street and reaching up over the convent wall like the smothering black hand of a giant, till only the tips of the cypresses and poplars in the gardens are red in the late sunlight.
At tea-time we go to "François's" or to some other little sweet-shop, in order to get warm. There, we drink glass after glass of weak tea and eat little Polish cakes, and look over the English and French periodicals.
It is dark when we go out into the street again, and the air is frosty. The officers wear short gray coats, braided and lined with fur, and fur caps. The women are muffled in seal and sable, which make the skin look clear and white and their eyes brilliant. Even the peasants wear sheepskin coats, bell-shaped and richly embroidered. Marie has winter clothes, but the warmest thing I possess is my traveling suit I wore here in June, which has been getting thinner and thinner ever since. My feet, in low summer pumps, are swollen and burning with chilblains. I must get some high shoes when our next money comes. You see, that is the trouble. We are promised our passports from day to day, and, expecting to go at any time, we try to get along with what money we have, and wait to buy clothes till we get back to Bucharest. But our passports are not given us and our money gets low. We are waiting for money now, and, of course, a cold snap has set in just when we can't possibly buy anything. Peter's summer suit hangs on him in folds. The heaviest iron couldn't crease it into even temporary shape. When we went to the cinematograph last night he wore Marie's black fur coat to keep from freezing.
"Look at that man," we heard a woman say in the street. "He's wearing a woman's coat!"
Yes, we go from café to cinematograph and try and keep warm.
I've never liked moving pictures before. Here they are presented differently than in America. Some of the plays I've seen have the naïveté and simplicity of a confession. Others interpret abnormal, psychopathic characters whose feelings and thoughts are expressed by the actors with a fine and vivid realism. There is the exultation of life, and the despair, the aggression and apathy, the frivolity and the revolt. The action is taken slowly. There are no stars. You look at the screen as though you were looking at life itself. And the films don't always have happy endings, because life isn't always kind. It often seems senseless and cruel and crushes men's spirits. I wish we could have these films in America instead of the jig-saw puzzles I've seen.