the band beyond the curtain were cries and calls and loud roars of laughter.  The soldiers embraced the girls, and the children, their fingers in their mouths, wandered from bench to bench, and a mangy dog begged wherever he thought that he saw a kindly face.  All the faces were kindly—­kindly, ignorant, and astoundingly young.  As I felt that youth I felt also separation; I and my like could emphasise as we pleased the goodness, docility, mysticism even of these people, but we were walking in a country of darkness.  I caught a laugh, the glance of some women, the voice of a young soldier—­I felt behind us, watching us, the thick heavy figure of Rasputin.  I smelt the eastern scent of the sunflower seeds, I looked back and glanced at the impenetrable superiority of the two policemen, and I laughed at myself for the knowledge that I thought I had, for the security upon which I thought that I rested, for the familiarity with which I had fancied I could approach my neighbours....  I was not wise, I was not secure, I had no claim to familiarity....

The lights were down and we were shown pictures of Paris.  Because the cinema was a little one and the prices small the films were faded and torn, so that the Opera and the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre and the Seine danced and wriggled and broke before our eyes.  They looked strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd semi-civilisation in which we were living.  There were comments all around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a party....  The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head swam a little and I seemed to see Rasputin, swelling in his black robe, catching us all into its folds, sweeping us up into the starlight sky.  We were under the flare of the light again.  I caught Bohun’s happy eyes; he was talking eagerly to Vera Michailovna, not removing his eyes from her face.  She had conquered him; I fancied as I looked at her that her thoughts were elsewhere.

There followed a Vaudeville entertainment.  A woman and a man in peasants’ dress came and laughed raucously, without meaning, their eyes narrowly searching the depths of the house, then they stamped their feet and whirled around, struck one another, laughed again, and vanished.

The applause was half-hearted.  Then there was a trainer of dogs, a black-eyed Tartar with four very miserable little fox-terriers, who shivered and trembled and jumped reluctantly through hoops.  The audience liked this, and cried and shouted and threw paper pellets at the dogs.  A stout perspiring Jew in a shabby evening suit came forward and begged for decorum.  Then there appeared a stout little man in a top hat who wished to recite verses of, I gathered, a violent indecency.  I was uncomfortable about Vera Michailovna, but I need not have been.  The indecency was of no importance to her, and she was interested in the human tragedy of the performer.  Tragedy it was.  The man was hungry and dirty and not far from tears.  He forgot his verses and glanced nervously into the wings as though he expected to be beaten publicly by the perspiring Jew.