ut those groups, so that the coloured domes of the
churches, the silver network of the stars, the wooden booths, the mist
of candles before the Ikons, the rough painted pictures on the shops
advertising the goods sold within--all these things shared in that crude
idealistic, cynical ignorance, in that fairy-tale of brutality,
goodness, cowardice, and bravery, malice and generosity, superstition
and devotion that was so shortly to be offered to a materialistic,
hard-fighting, brave and unthinking Europe!...

That, however, was not now my immediate business--enough of that
presently. My immediate business, as I very quickly discovered, was to
pluck up enough strength to drag my wretched body home. The events of
the week had, I suppose, carried me along. I was to suffer now the
inevitable reaction. I felt exactly as though I had been shot from a gun
and landed, suddenly, without breath, without any strength in any of my
limbs in a new and strange world. I was standing, when I first realised
my weakness, beside the wooden booths in the Sadovaya. They were all
closed of course, but along the pavement women and old men had baskets
containing sweets and notepaper and red paper tulips offered in memory
of the glorious Revolution. Right across the Square the groups of people
scattered in little dusky pools against the snow, until they touched the
very doors of the church.... I saw all this, was conscious that the
stars and the church candles mingled... then suddenly I had to clutch
the side of the booth behind me to prevent myself from falling. My head
swam, my limbs were as water, and my old so well-remembered friend
struck me in the middle of the spine as though he had cut me in two with
his knife. How was I ever to get home? No one noticed me--indeed they
seemed to my sick eyes to have ceased to be human. Ghosts in a ghostly
world, the snow gleaming through them so that they only moved like a
thin diaphanous veil against the wall of the sky... I clutched my
booth. In a moment I should be down. The pain in my back was agony, my
legs had ceased to exist, and I was falling into a dark, dark pool of
clear jet-black water, at the bottom of which lay a star....

The strange thing is that I do not know who it was who rescued me. I
know that some one came. I know that to my own dim surprise an
Isvostchick was there and that very feebly I got into it. Some one was
with me. Was it my black-bearded peasant? I fancy now that it was. I ca