It was at that moment that I saw Boris Grogoff come in.  He stood in the doorway looking about him, and he had the strangest air of a man walking in his sleep, so bewildered, so rapt, so removed was he.  He stared about him, looked straight at me, but did not recognise me; finally, when a waiter showed him a table, he sat down still gazing in front of him.  The waiter had to speak to him twice before he ordered his meal, and then he spoke so strangely that the fellow looked at him in astonishment.  “Guess that chap’s seen the Millennium,” remarked my American.  “Or he’s drunk, maybe.”

This appearance had the oddest effect on me.  It was as though I had been given a sudden conviction that after all there was something behind this disturbance.  I saw, during the whole of the rest of that day, Grogoff’s strange face with the exalted, bewildered eyes, the excited mouth, the body tense and strained as though waiting for a blow.  And now, always when I look back I see Boris Grogoff standing in the doorway of the “Cave de la Grave” like a ghost from another world warning me.

In the afternoon I had a piece of business that took me across the river.  I did my business and turned homewards.  It was almost dark, and the ice of the Neva was coloured a faint green under the grey sky; the buildings rose out of it like black bubbles poised over a swamp.  I was in that strange quarter of Petrograd where the river seems, like some sluggish octopus, to possess a thousand coils.  Always you are turning upon a new bend of the ice, secretly stretching into darkness; strange bridges suddenly meet you, and then, where you had expected to find a solid mass of hideous flats, there will be a cluster of masts and the smell of tar, and little fierce red lights like the eyes of waiting beasts.

I seemed to stand with ice on every side of me, and so frail was my trembling wooden bridge that it seemed an easy thing for the ice, that appeared to press with tremendous weight against its banks, to grind the supports to fragments.  There was complete silence on every side of me.  The street to my left was utterly deserted.  I heard no cries nor calls—­only the ice seemed once and again to quiver as though some submerged creature was moving beneath it.  That vast crowd on the Nevski seemed to be a dream.  I was in a world that had fallen into decay and desolation, and I could smell rotting wood, and could fancy that frozen blades of grass were pressing up through the very pavement stones.  Suddenly an Isvostchick stumbled along past me, down the empty street, and the bumping rattle of the sledge on the snow woke me from my laziness.  I started off homewards.  When I had gone a little way and was approaching the bridge over the Neva some man passed me, looked back, stopped and waited for me.  When I came up to him I saw to my surprise that it was the Rat.  He had his coat-collar turned over his ears and his dirty fur cap pulled down over his forehead.  His nose was very red, and his thin hollow cheeks a dirty yellow colour.