He went on:  “...  I could not be there all day, I thought that I would go on to the Duma.  I flowed on with the crowd.  We were a great river swinging without knowing why, in one direction and only interrupted, once and again, by the motor lorries that rattled along, the soldiers shouting to us and waving their rifles, and we replying with cheers.  I heard no firing that morning at all.  They said, in the crowd, that many thousands had been killed last night.  It seemed that on the roof of nearly every house in Petrograd there was a policeman with a machine-gun.  But we marched along, without fear, singing.  And all the time the joy in my heart was rising, rising, and I was checking it, telling myself that in a moment I would be disappointed, that I would soon be tricked as I had been so often tricked before.  But I couldn’t help my joy, which was stronger than myself....

“It must have been early afternoon, so long had I been on the road, when I came at last to the Duma.  You saw yourself, Ivan Andreievitch, that all that week the crowd outside the Duma was truly a sea of people with the motor lorries that bristled with rifles for sea-monsters and the gun-carriages for ships.  And such a babel!  Every one talking at once and nobody listening to any one.

“I don’t know now how I pushed through into the Court, but at last I was inside and found myself crushed up against the doors of the Palace by a mob of soldiers and students.  Here there was a kind of hush.

“When the door of the Palace opened there was a little sigh of interest.  At intervals armed guards marched up with some wretched pale dirty Gorodovoi whom they had taken prisoner—­”

Nicholas Markovitch paused again and again.  He had been looking out to the sea over whose purple shadows the sky pale green and studded with silver stars seemed to wave magic shuttles of light, to and fro, backwards and forwards.

“You don’t mind all these details, Ivan Andreievitch?  I am trying to discover, for my own sake, all the details that led me to my final experience.  I want to trace the chain link by link...nothing is unimportant...”

I assured him that I was absorbed by his story.  And indeed I was.  That little, uncouth, lost, and desolate man was the most genuine human being whom I had ever known.  That quality, above all others, stood forth in him.  He had his secret as all men have their secret, the key to their pursuit of their own immortality....But Markovitch’s secret was a real one, something that he faced with real bravery, real pride, and real dignity, and when he saw what the issue of his conduct must be he would, I knew, face it without flinching.