re. The old woman bit and scratched and kicked, making
sounds all the time like a kettle just on the boil. Suddenly, when he
thought that Nina had had time to get well away, he gave the old woman a
very unceremonious push which sent her back against Grogoff's chief
cabinet, and he had the comfort to hear the whole of this crash to the
ground as he closed the door behind him. Out in the street he found
Nina, and soon afterwards an Isvostchick. She crouched up close against
him, staring in front of her, saying nothing, shivering and
shivering.... As he felt her hot hand shake inside his, he vowed that he
would never leave her again. I don't believe that he ever will.

So he took her home, and his Knight Errantry was justified at last.

XVI

These events had for a moment distracted my mind, but as soon as I was
alone I felt the ever-increasing burden of my duty towards Markovitch.

The sensation was absolutely dream-like in its insistence on the one
hand that I should take some kind of action, and its preventing me, on
the other, from taking any action at all. I felt the strange inertia of
the spectator in the nightmare, who sees the house tumbling about his
head and cannot move. Besides, what action could I take? I couldn't
stand over Markovitch, forbid him to stir from the flat, or imprison
Semyonov in his room, or warn the police... besides, there were now no
police. Moreover, Vera and Bohun and the others were surely capable of
watching Markovitch. Nevertheless something in my heart insisted that it
was I who was to figure in this.... Through the dusk of the streets, in
the pale ghostly shadows that prelude the coming of the white nights, I
seemed to see three pursuing figures, Semyonov, Markovitch, and myself.
I was pursuing, and yet held.

I went back to my flat, but all that night I could not sleep. Already
the first music of the May Day processions could be heard, distant
trumpets and drums, before I sank into uneasy, bewildered slumber.

I dreamt then dreams so fantastic and irresolute that I cannot now
disentangle them. I remember that I was standing beside the banks of the
Neva. The river was rising, flinging on its course in the great
tempestuous way that it always has during the first days of its release
from the ice. The sky grew darker--the water rose. I sought refuge in
the top gallery of a church with light green domes, and from here I
watched the flood, first as it covered the quays, tumbling in