"One can't tell...."

"Oh, come on," said the merchant. "Let's get to the Astoria."

We started down the Moika, past that faded picture-shop where there are
always large moth-eaten canvases of cornfields under the moon and
Russian weddings and Italian lakes. We had got very nearly to the little
street with the wooden hoardings when the merchant gripped my arm.

"What's that?" he gulped. The silence now was intense. We could not hear
the machine-gun nor any shouting. The world was like a picture smoking
under a moon now red and hard. Against the wall of the street two women
were huddled, one on her knees, her head pressed against the thighs of
the other, who stood stretched as though crucified, her arms out,
staring on to the Canal. Beside a little kiosk, on the space exactly in
front of the side street, lay a man on his face. His bowler-hat had
rolled towards the kiosk; his arms were stretched out so that he looked
oddly like the shadow of the woman against the wall.

Instead of one hand there was a pool of blood. The other hand with all
the fingers stretched was yellow against the snow.

As we came up a bullet from the Morskaia struck the kiosk.

The woman, not moving from the wall, said, "They've shot my husband...
he did nothing."

The other woman, on her knees, only cried without ceasing.

The merchant said, "I'm going back--to the Europe," and he turned and
ran.

"What's down that street?" I said to the woman, as though I expected her
to say "Hobgoblins." Bohun said, "This is rather beastly.... We ought to
move that fellow out of that. He may be alive still."

And how silly such a sentence when only yesterday, just here, there was
the beggar who sold boot-laces, and just there, where the man lay, an
old muddled Isvostchick asleep on his box!

We moved forward, and instantly it was as though I were in the middle of
a vast desert quite alone with all the hosts of heaven aiming at me
malicious darts. As I bent down my back was so broad that it stretched
across Petrograd, and my feet were tiny like frogs.

We pulled at the man. His head rolled and his face turned over, and the
mouth was full of snow. It was so still that I whispered, whether to
Bohun or myself, "God, I wish somebody would shout!" Then I heard the
wood of the kiosk crack, ever so slightly, like an opening door, and
panic flooded me as I had never known it do during all my time at the
Front.

"I've no strength," I said to Bohun.

"Pull f