“But I loved Russia from end to end.  The farthest villages in Siberia, the remotest hut beyond Archangel, from the shops in the Sadovaya to the Lavra at Kieff, from the little villages on the bank of the Volga to the woods round Tarnopol—­all, all one country, one people, one world within a world.  The old man to whom I was secretary discovered this secret hope of mine.  I talked one night when I was drunk and told him everything.  I mentioned even the Enchanter and the Sleeping Beauty!  How he laughed at me!  He would never leave me alone.  ’Nicolai Leontievitch believes in Holy Russia!’ he would say.  ’Not so much Holy, you understand, as Bewitched.  A Fairy Garden, ladies, with a sleeping beauty in the middle of it.  Dear me, Nicolai Leontievitch, no wonder you are heart-free!’

“How I hated him and his yellow face and his ugly stomach!  I would have stamped on it with delight.  But that made me shy.  I was afraid to speak of it to any one, and I kept to myself.  Then Vera came and she didn’t laugh at me.  The two ideas grew together in my head.  Vera and Russia!  The two things in my life by which I stood—­because man must have something in life round which he may nestle as a cat curls up by the fire.

“But even Vera did not seem to care for Russia as Russia.  ’What can Siberia be to me?’ she would say.  ’Why, Nicholas, it is no more than China.’

“But it was more than China; when I looked at it on the map I recognised it as though it were my own country.  Then the war came and I thought the desire of my heart was fulfilled.  At last men talked about Russia as though she truly existed.  For a moment all Russia was united, all classes, rich and poor, high and low.  Men were patriotic together as though one heart beat through all the land.  But only for a moment.  Divisions came, and quickly things were worse than before.  There came Tannenburg and afterwards Warsaw.

“All was lost....  Russia was betrayed, and I was a sentimental fool.  You know yourself how cynical even the most sentimental Russians are—­that is because if you stick to facts you know where you are, but ideas are always betraying you.  Life simply isn’t long enough to test them, that’s all, and man is certainly not a patient animal.

“At first I watched the war going from bad to worse, and then I shut myself in and refused to look any longer.  I thought only of Vera and my work.  I would make a great discovery and be rich, and then Vera at last would love me.  Idiot!  As though I had not known that Vera would not love for that kind of reason....  I determined that I would think no more of Russia, that I would be a man of no country.  Then during those last weeks before the Revolution I began to be suspicious of Vera and to watch her.  I did things of which I was ashamed, and then I despised myself for being ashamed.

“I am a man, I can do what I wish.  Even though I am imprisoned I am free....  I am my own master.  But all the same, to be a spy is a mean thing, Ivan Andreievitch.  You Englishmen, although you are stupid, you are not mean.  It was that day when your young friend, Bohun, found me looking in your room for letters, that in spite of myself I was ashamed.