yet with so stealthy a plan,
against this man she could do nothing....

Nevertheless she determined to fight for Nicholas to the last--to fight
for Nicholas, to bring back Nina, these were now the two great aims of
her life; and whilst they were being realised her love for Lawrence must
be passive, passive as a deep passionate flame beats with unwavering
force in the heart of the lamp....

They had made me promise long before that I would spend Easter Eve with
them and go with them to our church on the Quay. I wondered now whether
all the troubles of the last weeks would not negative that invitation,
and I had privately determined that if I did not hear from them again I
would slip off with Lawrence somewhere. But on Good Friday Markovitch,
meeting me in the Morskaia, reminded me that I was coming.

It is very difficult to give any clear picture of the atmosphere of the
town between Revolution week and this Easter Eve, and yet all the seeds
of the later crop of horrors were sewn during that period. Its spiritual
mentality corresponded almost exactly with the physical thaw that
accompanied it--mist, then vapour dripping of rain, the fading away of
one clear world into another that was indistinct, ghostly, ominous. I
find written in my Diary of Easter Day--exactly five weeks after the
outbreak of the Revolution--these words: "From long talks with K. and
others I see quite clearly that Russians have gone mad for the time
being. It's heartbreaking to see them holding meetings everywhere,
arguing at every street corner as to how they intend to arrange a
democratic peace for Europe, when meanwhile the Germans are gathering
every moment force upon the frontiers."

Pretty quick, isn't it, to change from Utopia to threatenings of the
worst sort of Communism? But the great point for us in all this--the
great point for our private personal histories as well as the public
one--was that it was during these weeks that the real gulf between
Russia and the Western world showed itself! Yes, for more than three
years we had been pretending that a week's sentiment and a hurriedly
proclaimed Idealism could bridge a separation which centuries of magic
and blood and bones had gone to build. For three years we tricked
ourselves (I am not sure that the Russians were ever really deceived)
... but we liked the ballet, we liked Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky (we
translated their inborn mysticism into the weakest kind of
sentimentality), we liked t