“He looked at me in a sort of way as though, down to his very soul he was astonished at what I had done.  Well, why should I mind that he should be astonished?  He was very young and all wrong in his ideas of life.  Nevertheless that look of his influenced me.  I thought about it afterwards.  Then came Alexei Petrovitch.  I’ve told you already.  He was always hinting at something.  He was always there as though he were waiting for something to happen.  He hinted things about Vera.  It’s strange, Ivan Andreievitch, but there was a day just a week before the Revolution, when I was very nearly jumping up and striking him.  Just to get rid of him so that he shouldn’t be watching me....Why even when I wasn’t there he....

“But what’s that got to do with my walk?  Nothing perhaps.  All the same, it was all these little things that made me, when I walked out of the Duma that evening so queer.  You see I’d been getting desperate.  All that I had left was being taken from me, and then suddenly this Revolution had come and given me back Russia again.  I forgot Alexei Petrovitch and your Englishman Lawrence and the failure of my work—­I remembered, once again, just as I had those first days of the war, Vera and Russia.

“There, in the clear evening air, I forgot all the talk there had been inside the Duma, the mess and the noise and the dust.  I was suddenly happy again, and excited, and hopeful....  The Enchanter had come after all, and Russia was to awake.

“Ah, what a wonderful evening that was!  You know that there have been times—­very, very rare occasions in one’s life—­when places that one knows well, streets and houses so common and customary as to be like one’s very skin—­are suddenly for a wonderful half-hour places of magic, the trees are gold, the houses silver, the bricks jewelled, the pavement of amber.  Or simply perhaps they are different, a new country of new colour and mystery... when one is just in love or has won some prize, or finished at last some difficult work.  Petrograd was like that to me that night; I swear to you, Ivan Andreievitch, I did not know where I was.  I seem now on looking back to have been in places that night, magical places, that by the morning had flown away.  I could not tell you where I went.  I know that I must have walked for miles.  I walked with a great many people who were all my brothers.  I had drunk nothing, not even water, and yet the effect on me was exactly as though I were drunk, drunk with happiness, Ivan Andreievitch, and with the possibility of all the things that might now be.

“We, many of us, marched along, singing the ‘Marseillaise’ I suppose.  There was firing I think in some of the streets, because I can remember now on looking back that once or twice I heard a machine-gun quite close to me and didn’t care at all, and even laughed....  Not that I’ve ever cared for that.  Bullets aren’t the sort of things that frighten me.  There are other terrors....All the same it was curious that we should