with my friends, John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna.  The sacrifice that they had made seemed to be wicked and useless.  I had lost altogether that conviction of the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for so long, carried with me.  They were dead, dead... simply dead.  There at the Front one had believed in many things.  Here in this frozen and starving town, with every ghost working against every human, there was assurance of nothing—­only deep foreboding and an ominous silence.  The murder of Rasputin still hung over every head.  The first sense of liberty had passed, and now his dirty malicious soul seemed to be watching us all, reminding us that he had not left us, but was waiting for the striking of some vast catastrophe that the friends whom he had left behind him to carry on his work were preparing.  It was this sense of moving so desperately and so hopelessly in the dark that was with me.  Any chance that there had seemed to be of Russia rising from the war with a free soul appeared now to be utterly gone.  Before our eyes the powers that ruled us were betraying us, laughing at us, selling us.  And we did not know who was our enemy, who our friend, whom to believe, of whom to take counsel.  Peculation and lying and the basest intrigue was on every side of us, hunger for which there was no necessity, want in a land packed with everything.  I believe that there may have been very well another side to the picture, but at that time we could not see; we did not wish to see, we were blindfolded men....

I entered the church and found that the service was over.  I passed through the aisle into the little rounded cup of dark and gold where the altars were.  Here there were still collected a company of people, kneeling, some of them, in front of the candles, others standing there, motionless like statues, their hands folded, gazing before them.  The candles flung a mist of dim embroidery upon the walls, and within the mist the dark figures of the priests moved to and fro.  An old priest with long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and reading a long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice.  There was the scent of candles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place.  The tawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the candle-light, and an echo of the cold wind creeping up the long dark aisle blew the light about so that the gilt was like flashing piercing eyes.  I wrapped my Shuba closely about me, and stood there lost in a hazy, indefinite dream.

I was comforted and touched by the placid, mild, kindly faces of those standing near me.  “No evil here....”  I thought.  “Only ignorance, and for that others are responsible.”