He pursued his advantage.  “It’s all nonsense to suppose people think of politics because they are in ’em.  As well suppose that the passengers on a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war.  Before men can think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day.  Before they can think of others, they must be sure about themselves.  First of all, food; the private, the personal economic worry.  Am I safe for food?  Then sex, and until one is tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied, how can one care for other people, or for next year or the Order of the World?  How can one, Benham?”

He seized the illustration at hand.  “Here we are in Warsaw—­not a month after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging.  Windows have still to be mended, smashed doors restored.  There’s blood-stains still on some of the houses.  There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the Ochrana prison.  This morning there were executions.  Is it anything more than an eddy in the real life of the place?  Watch the customers in the shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the passing women.  They are all swallowed up again in their own business.  They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets spat. . . .”

And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to Cambridge—­changed.

Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to disregard Prothero.  He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying darknesses of an approaching storm.  In those days it looked as though it must be an overwhelming storm.  He was drinking in the wide and massive Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky, the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil, carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells.  Benham had brought letters of introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed.  They were “away,” the porters said, and they continued to be “away,”—­it was the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed themselves extraordinarily anxious