“What’s that?” he gulped.  The silence now was intense.  We could not hear the machine-gun nor any shouting.  The world was like a picture smoking under a moon now red and hard.  Against the wall of the street two women were huddled, one on her knees, her head pressed against the thighs of the other, who stood stretched as though crucified, her arms out, staring on to the Canal.  Beside a little kiosk, on the space exactly in front of the side street, lay a man on his face.  His bowler-hat had rolled towards the kiosk; his arms were stretched out so that he looked oddly like the shadow of the woman against the wall.

Instead of one hand there was a pool of blood.  The other hand with all the fingers stretched was yellow against the snow.

As we came up a bullet from the Morskaia struck the kiosk.

The woman, not moving from the wall, said, “They’ve shot my husband... he did nothing.”

The other woman, on her knees, only cried without ceasing.

The merchant said, “I’m going back—­to the Europe,” and he turned and ran.

“What’s down that street?” I said to the woman, as though I expected her to say “Hobgoblins.”  Bohun said, “This is rather beastly....  We ought to move that fellow out of that.  He may be alive still.”

And how silly such a sentence when only yesterday, just here, there was the beggar who sold boot-laces, and just there, where the man lay, an old muddled Isvostchick asleep on his box!

We moved forward, and instantly it was as though I were in the middle of a vast desert quite alone with all the hosts of heaven aiming at me malicious darts.  As I bent down my back was so broad that it stretched across Petrograd, and my feet were tiny like frogs.

We pulled at the man.  His head rolled and his face turned over, and the mouth was full of snow.  It was so still that I whispered, whether to Bohun or myself, “God, I wish somebody would shout!” Then I heard the wood of the kiosk crack, ever so slightly, like an opening door, and panic flooded me as I had never known it do during all my time at the Front.

“I’ve no strength,” I said to Bohun.

“Pull for God’s sake!” he answered.  We dragged the body a little way; my hand clutched the thigh, which was hard and cold under the stuff of his clothing.  His head rolled round, and his eyes now were covered with snow.  We dragged him, and he bumped grotesquely.  We had him under the wall, near the two women, and the blood welled out and dripped in a spreading pool at the women’s feet.

“Now,” said Bohun, “we’ve got to run for it.”

“Do you know,” said I, as though I were making a sudden discovery, “I don’t think I can.”  I leaned back against the wall and looked at the pool of blood near the kiosk where the man had been.

“Oh, but you’ve got to,” said Bohun, who seemed to feel no fear.  “We can’t stay here all night.”

“No, I know,” I answered.  “But the trouble is—­I’m not myself.”  And I was not.  That was the trouble.  I was not John Durward at all.  Some stranger was here with a new heart, poor shrivelled limbs, an enormous nose, a hot mouth with no eyes at all.  This stranger had usurped my clothes and he refused to move.  He was tied to the wall and he would not obey me.