“I was suddenly dismayed.  ‘How can order come out of this?’ I thought.  ‘They are all mad....  Terrible things are going to happen.’  I was dirty and tired and exhausted.  I fought my way through the mob, found the door.  For a moment I looked back, to that sea of men lit by the last light of the sun.  Then I pushed out, was thrown, it seemed to me, from man to man, and was at last in the air....  Quiet, fires burning in the courtyard, a sky of the palest blue, a few stars, and the people singing the ‘Marseillaise.’

“It was like drinking great draughts of cold water after an intolerable thirst....

“...Hasn’t Tchekov said somewhere that Russians have nostalgia but no patriotism?  That was never true of me—­can’t remember how young I was when I remember my father talking to me about the idea of Russia.  I’ve told you that he was by any kind of standard a bad man.  He had, I think, no redeeming points at all—­but he had, all the same, that sense of Russia.  I don’t suppose that he put it to any practical use, or that he even tried to teach it to his pupils, but it would suddenly seize him and he would let himself go, and for an hour he would be a fine master—­of words.  And what Russian is ever more than that at the end?

“He spoke to me and gave me a picture of a world inside a world, and this inside world was complete in itself.  It had everything in it—­beauty, wealth, force, power; it could be anything, it could do anything.  But it was held by an evil enchantment as though a wicked magician had it in thrall, and everything slept as in Tchaikowsky’s Ballet.  But one day, he told me, the Prince would come and kill the Enchanter, and this great world would come into its own.  I remember that I was so excited that I couldn’t bear to wait, but prayed that I might be allowed to go out and find the Enchanter... but my father laughed and said that there were no Enchanter now, and then I cried.  All the same I never lost my hope.  I talked to people about Russia, but it was never Russia itself they seemed to care for—­it was women or drink or perhaps freedom and socialism, or perhaps some part of Russia, Siberia, or the Caucasus—­but my world they none of them believed in.  It didn’t exist they said.  It was simply my imagination that had painted it, and they laughed at me and said it was held together by the lashes of the knout, and when those went Russia would go too.  As I grew up some of them thought that I was revolutionary, and they tried to make me join their clubs and societies.  But those were no use to me.  They couldn’t give me what I wanted.  They wanted to destroy, to assassinate some one, or to blow up a building.  They had no thought beyond destruction, and that to me seemed only the first step.  And they never think of Russia, our revolutionaries.  You will have noticed that yourself, Ivan Andreievitch.  Nothing so small and trivial as Russia!  It must be the whole world or nothing at all.  Democracy...  Freedom... the Brotherhood of Man!  Oh, the terrible harm that words have done to Russia!  Had the Russians of the last fifty years been born without the gift of speech we would be now the greatest people on the earth!