lls, pictures of Hampstead and St. Albans and Kew
Gardens that looked strangely satisfactory and homely to me, and rather
touching and innocent. There were several young women clicking away at
typewriters, and maps of the Western front, and a colossal toy map of
the London Tube, and a nice English library with all the best books from
Chaucer to D.H. Lawrence and from the _Religio Medici_ to E.V. Lucas'
_London_.

Everything seemed clean and simple and a little deserted, as though the
heart of the Russian public had not, as yet, quite found its way there.
I think "guileless" was the adjective that came to my mind, and
certainly Burrows, the head of the place--a large, red-faced, smiling
man with glasses--seemed to me altogether too cheerful and pleased with
life to penetrate the wicked recesses of Russian pessimism.

I went into Bohun's room and found him very hard at work in a serious,
emphatic way which only made me feel that he was playing at it. He had a
little bookcase over his table, and I noticed the _Georgian Book of
Verse_, Conrad's _Nostromo_, and a translation of Ropshin's _Pale
Horse_.

"Altogether too pretty and literary," I said to him; "you ought to be
getting at the peasant with a pitchfork and a hammer--not admiring the
Intelligentzia."

"I daresay you're right," he said, blushing. "But whatever we do we're
wrong. We have fellows in here cursing us all day. If we're simple we're
told we're not clever enough; if we're clever we're told we're too
complicated. If we're militant we're told we ought to be
tender-hearted, and if we're tender-hearted we're told we're
sentimental--and at the end of it all the Russians don't care a damn."

"Well, I daresay you're doing some good somewhere," I said indulgently.

"Come and look at my view," he said, "and see whether it isn't
splendid."

He spoke no more than the truth. We looked across the Canal over the
roofs of the city--domes and towers and turrets, grey and white and
blue, with the dark red walls of many of the older houses stretched like
an Arabian carpet beneath white bubbles of clouds that here and there
marked the blue sky. It was a scene of intense peace, the smoke rising
from the chimneys, Isvostchicks stumbling along on the farther banks of
the Canal, and the people sauntering in their usual lazy fashion up and
down the Nevski. Immediately below our window was a skating-rink that
stretched straight across the Canal. There were some figures, like