He scarcely looked at the Neva as he crossed the bridge; all the length of the Quay he saw only the hunched, heavy back of the old cabman and the spurting, jumping rain, the vast stone grave-like buildings and the high grey sky.  He drove through the Red Square that swung in the rain.  He was thinking about the eight roubles....  He pulled up with a jerk outside the “France” hotel.  Here he tried, I am sure, to recover his dignity, but he was met by a large, stout, eastern-looking gentleman with peacock feathers in his round cap who smiled gently when he heard about the eight roubles, and ushered Henry into the dark hall with a kindly patronage that admitted of no reply.

The “France” is a good hotel, and its host is one of the kindest of mortals, but it is in many ways Russian rather than Continental in its atmosphere.  That ought to have pleased and excited so sympathetic a soul as Henry.  I am afraid that this moment of his arrival was the first realisation in his life of that stern truth that that which seems romantic in retrospect is only too often unpleasantly realistic in its actual experience.

He stepped into the dark hall, damp like a well, with a whirring snarling clock on the wall and a heavy glass door pulled by a rope swinging and shifting, the walls and door and rack with the letters shifting too.  In this rocking world there seemed to be no stable thing.  He was dirty and tired and humiliated.  He explained to his host, who smiled but seemed to be thinking of other things, that he wanted a bath and a room and a meal.  He was promised these things, but there was no conviction abroad that the “France” had gone up in the world since Henry Bohun had crossed its threshold.  An old man with a grey beard and the fixed and glittering eye of the “Ancient Mariner” told him to follow him.  How well I know those strange, cold, winding passages of the “France,” creeping in and out across boards that shiver and shake, with walls pressing in upon you so thin and rocky that the wind whistles and screams and the paper makes ghostly shadows and signs as though unseen fingers moved it.  There is that smell, too, which a Russian hotel alone, of all the hostelries in the world, can produce, a smell of damp and cabbage soup, of sunflower seeds and cigarette-ends, of drainage and patchouli, of, in some odd way, the sea and fish and wet pavements.  It is a smell that will, until I die, be presented to me by those dark half-hidden passages, warrens of intricate fumbling ways with boards suddenly rising like little mountains in the path; behind the wainscot one hears the scuttling of innumerable rats.

The Ancient Mariner showed Henry to his room and left him.  Henry was depressed at what he saw.  His room was a slip cut out of other rooms, and its one window was faced by a high black wall down whose surface gleaming water trickled.  The bare boards showed large and gaping cracks; there was a washstand, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a faded padded arm-chair with a hole in it.  In the corner near the window was an Ikon of tinsel and wood; a little round marble-topped table offered a dusty carafe of water.  A heavy red-plush bell-rope tapped the wall.