ey thought the noise had come from there. The
sun was just setting; the bubble clouds were pink, and windows flashed
fire. The rattle of the machine-gun suddenly stopped, and there was a
moment's silence when the only sound in the whole world was the clatter
of the wood-cart turning the corner. I could see to the right of me the
crowds in the Nevski, that had looked like the continual unwinding of a
ragged skein of black silk, break their regular movement and split up
like flies falling away from an opening door.

We were all on the balcony by now--the stout Burrows, Peroxide, and
another lady typist, Watson, the thin and most admirable secretary (he
held the place together by his diligence and order), two Russian clerks,
Henry, and I.

We all leaned over the railings and looked down into the street beneath
us. To our left the Fontanka Bridge was quite deserted--then, suddenly,
an extraordinary procession poured across it. At that same moment (at
any rate it seems so now to me on looking back) the sun disappeared,
leaving a world of pale grey mist shot with gold and purple. The stars
were, many of them, already out, piercing with their sharp cold
brilliance the winter sky.

We could not at first see of what exactly the crowd now pouring over the
bridge was composed. Then, as it turned and came down our street, it
revealed itself as something so theatrical and melodramatic as to be
incredible. Incredible, I say, because the rest of the world was not
theatrical with it. That was always to be the amazing feature of the new
scene into which, without knowing it, I was at that moment stepping. In
Galicia the stage had been set--ruined villages, plague-stricken
peasants, shell-holes, trenches, roads cut to pieces, huge trees
levelled to the ground, historic chateaux pillaged and robbed. But here
the world was still the good old jog-trot world that one had always
known; the shops and hotels and theatres remained as they had always
been. There would remain, I believe, for ever those dull Jaeger
undergarments in the windows of the bazaar, and the bound edition of
Tchekov in the book-shop just above the Moika, and the turtle and the
gold-fish in the aquarium near Elisseieff; and whilst those things were
there I could not believe in melodrama.

And we did not believe. We dug our feet into the snow, and leaned over
the balcony railings absorbed with amused interest. The procession
consisted of a number of motor lorries, and on t