eached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble
of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the
houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable
barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress
of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky,
the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature,
and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring,
sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand
varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers,
a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and
portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on
to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of
introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They
were "away," the porters said, and they continued to be "away,"--it was
the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed
themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to
explain themselves and things about them exhaustively. One young student
took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of
the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the
old French cannons were still under repair. "The assassin stood just
here. The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that
was where they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped
up. He was mixed with the horses...."

Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to
ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. "And after the
revolution," he asked, "what then?..." Then they waved their hands, and
failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.

He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it
was one and the same process, which involved riots in