let loose upon the world! Where were their
leaders? Who, indeed, would their leaders be? The sun sometimes broke
through for a moment, but the light that it threw on their faces only
made them more pallid, more death-like. They did not laugh nor joke as
our people at home would have done.... I believe that very few of them
had any idea why they were there....

Suddenly the word came down the lines to move forward. Very slowly,
wailing their little tune, they advanced.

But the morning was growing old and I must at once see Vera. I had made
up my mind, during the night, to do anything that lay in my power to
persuade Vera and Nina to leave their flat. The flat was the root of all
their trouble, there was something in its atmosphere, something gloomy
and ominous. They would be better at the other end of the town, or,
perhaps, over on the Vassily Ostrov. I would show Vera that it was a
fatal plan to have Semyonov to live with them (as in all probability she
herself knew well enough), and their leaving the flat was a very good
excuse for getting rid of him. I had all this in my head as I went
along. I was still feeling ill and feeble, and my half-hour's stand in
the market-place had seriously exhausted me. I had to lean against the
walls of the houses every now and then; it seemed to me that, in the
pale watery air, the whole world was a dream, the high forbiding flats
looking down on to the dirty ice of the canals, the water dripping,
dripping, dripping.... No one was about. Every one had gone to join in
the procession. I could see it, with my mind's eye, unwinding its huge
tails through the watery-oozing channels of the town, like some
pale-coloured snake, crawling through the misty labyrinths of a marsh.

In the flat I found only Uncle Ivan sitting very happily by himself at
the table playing patience. He was dressed very smartly in his English
black suit and a black bow tie. He behaved with his usual elaborate
courtesy to me but, to my relief, on this occasion, he spoke Russian.

It appeared that the Revolution had not upset him in the least. He took,
he assured me, no interest whatever in politics. The great thing was "to
live inside oneself," and by living inside oneself he meant, I gathered,
that one should be entirely selfish. Clothes were important, and food
and courteous manners, but he must say that he could not see that one
would be very much worse off even though one were ruled by the
Germans--one might, ind