“Then suddenly I thought I’d go out into the streets, and see what was happening.  I couldn’t believe really that there had been any change.  So I went out.

“Do you know of recent years I’ve walked out very seldom?  What was it?  A kind of shyness.  I knew when I was in my own house, and I knew whom I was with.  Then I was never a man who cared greatly about exercise, and there was no one outside whom I wanted very much to see.  So when I went out that morning it was as though I didn’t know Petrograd at all, and had only just arrived there.  I went over the Ekateringofsky Bridge, through the Square, and to the left down the Sadovaya.

“Of course the first thing that I noticed was that there were no trams, and that there were multitudes of people walking along and that they were all poor people and all happy.’  And I was glad when I saw that.  Of course I’m a fool, and life can’t be as I want it, but that’s always what I had thought life ought to be—­all the streets filled with poor people, all free and happy.  And here they were!... with the snow crisp under their feet, and the sun shining, and the air quite still, so that all the talk came up, and up into the sky like a song.  But of course they were bewildered as well as happy.  They didn’t know where to go, they didn’t know what to do—­like birds let out suddenly from their cages.  I didn’t know myself.  That’s what sudden freedom does—­takes your breath away so that you go staggering along, and get caught again if you’re not careful.  No trams, no policemen, no carriages filled with proud people cursing you....  Oh, Ivan Andreievitch, I’d be proud myself if I had money, and servants to put on my clothes, and new women every night, and different food every day....  I don’t blame them—­but suddenly proud people were gone, and I was crying without knowing it—­simply because that great crowd of poor people went pushing along, all talking under the sunny sky as freely as they pleased.

“I began to look about me.  I saw that there were papers posted on the walls.  They were those proclamations, you know, of Rodziancko’s new government, saying that while everything was unsettled, Milyukoff, Rodziancko, and the others would take charge in order to keep order and discipline.  It seemed to me that there was little need to talk about discipline.  Had beggars appeared there in the road I believed that the crowd would have stripped off their clothes and given them, rather than that they should want.

“I stood by one proclamation and read it out to the little crowd.  They repeated the names to themselves, but they did not seem to care much.  ‘The Czar’s wicked they tell me,’ said one man to me.  ’And all our troubles come from him.’

“‘It doesn’t matter,’ said another.  ‘There’ll be plenty of bread now.’