en, her allies; we were
now her servants.

By Russia every one of us, sitting in that huge room, meant something
different. To Goga she was home, a white house on the Volga, tennis,
long evenings, early mornings, holidays in a tangled wilderness of
happiness. To Sister K---- she was "Holy Russia," Russia of the
Kremlin, of the Lavra, of a million ikons in a million little streets,
little rooms, little churches. To Sister Sofia she was Petrograd with
cafes, novels by such writers as Verbitzkaia and our own Jack London,
the cinematograph, and the Islands on a fine evening in May. To the
student like a white fish she was a platform for frantic speeches,
incipient revolutions, little untidy hysterical meetings in a dirty
room in a back street, newspapers, the incapacities of the Douma, the
robberies and villainies of the Government. To Anna Petrovna she was
comfortable, unspeculative, friendly "home." To Nikitin she was the
face of one woman upon whose eyes his own were always fixed. To Marie
Ivanovna she was a flaming glorious wonder, mystical, transplendent,
revealed in every blade of grass, every flash of sun across the sky,
every line of the road, the top of every hill.

And to Trenchard and myself? For Trenchard she had, perhaps, taken to
herself some part of his beloved country. He has told me--and I will
witness in myself to the truth of this--that he never in his life felt
more burningly his love for England than at this first moment of his
consciousness of Russia. The lanes and sea of his remembered vision
were not far from that dirty, disordered town in Galicia--and for both
of them he was rendering his service.

At any rate there we sat, huddled together, reflected in the countless
looking-glasses as a helpless miserable "lot," falling into long
silences, hoping for the coming of Molozov with later news, listening
to the confusion in the street below. Marie Ivanovna with her hands
behind her back and her head up walked, nervously, up and down the
long room. Her eyes stared beyond us and the place, striving perhaps
to find some reason why life should so continually insist on being a
different thing from her imaginings of it.

Lighted by the hot sun, blown upon by the dust, her figure, tall,
thin, swaying a little in its many reflections, had the determined
valour of some Joan of Arc. But Joan of Arc, I thought to myself, had
at least some one definite against whom to wave her white banner; we
were fighting du