act when I
would have given my soul to hold aloof, and in this town, whose darkness
and light, intrigue and display, words and action, seemed to derive some
mysterious force from the very soil, from the very air, the smallest
action achieved monstrous proportions. When you have lived for some
years in Russia you do not wonder that its citizens prefer inaction to
demonstration--the soil is so much stronger than the men who live upon
it.

Nevertheless, for a fortnight I did nothing. Private affairs of an
especially tiresome kind filled my days--I saw neither Lawrence nor
Vera, and, during that period, I scarcely left my rooms.

There was much expectation in the town that February 14th, when the Duma
was appointed to meet, would be a critical day. Fine things were said of
the challenging speeches that would be made, of the firm stand that the
Cadet party intended to take, of the crisis with which the Court party
would be faced.

Of course nothing occurred. It may be safely said that, in Russian
affairs, no crisis occurs, either in the place or at the time, or in the
manner in which it is expected. Time with us here refuses to be caught
by the throat. That is the revenge that it takes on the scorn with
which, in Russia, it is always covered.

On the 20th of February I received an invitation to Nina's birthday
party. She would be eighteen on the 28th. She scribbed at the bottom of
Vera's note:

Dear Durdles--If you don't come I will never forgive you.--Your loving
Nina.

The immediate problem was a present. I knew that Nina adored presents,
but Petrograd was now no easy place for purchases, and I wished, I
suppose as a kind of tribute to her youth and freshness and colour, to
give her something for which she would really care. I sallied out on a
wonderful afternoon when the town was a blaze of colour, the walls dark
red, dark brown, violet, pink, and the snow a dazzling glitter of
crystal. The bells were ringing for some festival, echoing as do no
other bells in the world from wall to wall, roof to roof, canal to
canal. Everybody moved as though they were inspired with a gay sense of
adventure, men and women laughing; the Isvostchicks surveying possible
fares with an eye less patronising and lugubrious than usual, the flower
women and the beggars and the little Chinese boys and the wicked old men
who stare at you as though they were dreaming of Eastern debauches,
shared in the sun and tang of the air and high colour