rincess G.; these--with their psychology never would let me come
closer. I am an intruder to their caste.

Before--in Petrograd--we all have had this very same fear of our
select caste for a newcomer, just as these have. In our midst the man
who tried to break in would be caught right away. Now I understand
this little, mean, reptile impulse of catering to the one whom you
seek, this feeling that the parvenu must have felt, this sensation of
the necessity of flattering, for which one blushes in the nights,
for which one can't sleep and turns endlessly in warm cushions. The
parvenu! Pushkin said:

... and an exchange of silent glance
Forever took away his chance....

It was enough for us to look at each other--and the parvenu would not
come near us any more. Here--instead of the poetical form of Pushkin I
must recollect the words of the Tumen cook:

"You liar! Hate your face of a gentry!"

Isn't it a correct translation from my Russian into theirs?

Well,--I'd rather stop my scratchings: Tobolsk.

40

"Do not write too much," said a walking corpse clad in rags, seating
himself near me on a soft pack of his baggage. "It is better to forget
all about it. Why do you do it? What _is_ the use?" His suffering face
was not at all familiar to me,--so, when he asked me, "Haven't we
met before?"--I said No. He looked to me like one of those Siberian
peasants. Then, under the coat of dirt, under his rags and an old
Orenburg shawl, I really saw something familiar.

"Perhaps we met," I said. "Petrograd?"

"Yes, indeed," he bowed his old head and sighed. "I used to go very
often to the French Theatre. You remember 'L'Aiglon?' Can I chat with
you a bit? This silence is simply killing me. Four months of silence!
Don't you think, mister writer, of what a sweet, what a wonderful
word 'revenge' is? If you write--do write about it! Revenge for having
cleaned the streets, for having been thrown out of every Embassy,
every Legation, every Consulate--whose three sons are sleeping there,
on the Prussian Frontier--forever?--when I begged them to help me
and let me go to Paris only to die near my wife? Revenge! Just to see
England--torn to pieces, France--robbed, Japan--licking our feet,--to
see them separately doing what we suffer combinedly. They all betrayed
us, they sold us, they mock at us! We are paying for our readiness to
save Serbia. We are dying for it--and I do not regret it. I know that
from our dead body, fro