d way, the sea and fish and wet pavements. It
is a smell that will, until I die, be presented to me by those dark
half-hidden passages, warrens of intricate fumbling ways with boards
suddenly rising like little mountains in the path; behind the wainscot
one hears the scuttling of innumerable rats.

The Ancient Mariner showed Henry to his room and left him. Henry was
depressed at what he saw. His room was a slip cut out of other rooms,
and its one window was faced by a high black wall down whose surface
gleaming water trickled. The bare boards showed large and gaping cracks;
there was a washstand, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a faded padded
arm-chair with a hole in it. In the corner near the window was an Ikon
of tinsel and wood; a little round marble-topped table offered a dusty
carafe of water. A heavy red-plush bell-rope tapped the wall.

He sat down in the faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was the
room hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that in
Petrograd.... I myself am aware of what walls and streets and rivers,
engaged on their own secret life in that most secret of towns, can do to
the mere mortals who interfere with their stealthy concerns. Henry
dreamt; he was never afterwards able to tell me of what he had dreamt,
but it had been a long heavy cobwebby affair, in which the walls of the
hotel seemed to open and to close, black little figures moving like ants
up and down across the winding ways. He saw innumerable carafes and
basins and beds, the wall-paper whistling, the rats scuttling, and lines
of cigarette-ends, black and yellow, moving in trails like worms across
the boards. All men like worms, like ants, like rats and the gleaming
water trickling interminably down the high black wall. Of course he was
tired after his long journey, hungry too, and depressed.... He awoke to
find the Ancient Mariner watching him. He screamed. The Mariner
reassured him with a toothless smile, gripped him by the arm and showed
him the bathroom.

"_Pajaluista!_" said the Mariner.

Although Henry had learnt Russian, so unexpected was the pronunciation
of this familiar word that it was as though the old man had said "Open
Sesame!"....

V

He felt happy and consoled after a bath, a shave, and breakfast. Always
I should think he reacted very quickly to his own physical sensations,
and he was, as yet, too young to know that you cannot lay ghosts by the
simple brushing of your hair and sponging your