But of course I cannot remember all that he said.  During the next few days I slowly pulled myself out of the misty dead world in which I had been lying.  Pain came back to me, leaping upon me and then receding, finally, on the third day suddenly leaving me altogether.  The Rat fed me on cabbage soup and glasses of tea and caviare and biscuits.  During those three days he never left me, and indeed tended me like a woman.  He would sit by my bed and with his rough hand stroke my hair, while he poured into my ears ghastly stories of the many crimes that he had committed.  I noticed that he was cleaner and more civilised.  His beard was clipped and he smelt of cabbage and straw—­a rather healthy smell.  One morning he suddenly took the pail, filled it with water and washed himself in front of my windows.  He scrubbed himself until I should have thought that he had no skin left.

“You’re a fine big man, Rat,” I said.

He was delighted with that, and came quite near my bed, stretching his naked body, his arms and legs and chest, like a pleased animal.

“Yes, I’m a fine man, Barin,” he said; “many women have loved me, and many will again...”  Then he went back, and producing clean drawers and vest from somewhere (I suspect that they were mine but I was too weak to care), put them on.

On the second and third days I felt much better.  The thaw was less violent, the wood crackled in my stove.  On the morning of Wednesday April 14 I got up, dressed, and sat in front of my window.  The ice was still there, but over it lay a faint, a very faint, filmy sheen of water.  It was a day of gleams, the sun flashing in and out of the clouds.  Just beneath my window a tree was pushing into bud.  Pools of water lay thick on the dirty melting snow.  I got the Rat to bring a little table and put some books on it.  I had near me The Spirit of Man, Keats’s Letters, The Roads, Beddoes, and Pride and Prejudice.  A consciousness of the outer world crept, like warmth, through my bones.

“Rat,” I said, “who’s been to see me?”

“No one,” said he.

I felt suddenly a ridiculous affront.

“No one?” I asked, incredulous.

“No one,” he answered.  “They’ve all forgotten you, Barin,” he added maliciously, knowing that that would hurt me.

It was strange how deeply I cared.  Here was I who, only a short while before, had declared myself done with the world for ever, and now I was almost crying because no one had been to see me!  Indeed, I believe in my weakness and distress I actually did cry.  No one at all?  Not Vera nor Nina nor Jeremy nor Bohun?  Not young Bohun even...?  And then slowly my brain realised that there was now a new world.  None of the old conditions held any longer.

We had been the victims of an earthquake.  Now it was—­every man for himself!  Quickly then there came upon me an eager desire to know what had happened in the Markovitch family.  What of Jerry and Vera?  What of Nicholas?  What of Semyonov...?