obscurity, against my will, against my courage, against my own knowledge of myself, circumstances were demanding that I should advance and act.  It was of no avail to myself that I should act unwisely, that I should perhaps only precipitate a crisis that I could not help.  I was forced to act when I would have given my soul to hold aloof, and in this town, whose darkness and light, intrigue and display, words and action, seemed to derive some mysterious force from the very soil, from the very air, the smallest action achieved monstrous proportions.  When you have lived for some years in Russia you do not wonder that its citizens prefer inaction to demonstration—­the soil is so much stronger than the men who live upon it.

Nevertheless, for a fortnight I did nothing.  Private affairs of an especially tiresome kind filled my days—­I saw neither Lawrence nor Vera, and, during that period, I scarcely left my rooms.

There was much expectation in the town that February 14th, when the Duma was appointed to meet, would be a critical day.  Fine things were said of the challenging speeches that would be made, of the firm stand that the Cadet party intended to take, of the crisis with which the Court party would be faced.

Of course nothing occurred.  It may be safely said that, in Russian affairs, no crisis occurs, either in the place or at the time, or in the manner in which it is expected.  Time with us here refuses to be caught by the throat.  That is the revenge that it takes on the scorn with which, in Russia, it is always covered.

On the 20th of February I received an invitation to Nina’s birthday party.  She would be eighteen on the 28th.  She scribbed at the bottom of Vera’s note: 

Dear Durdles—­If you don’t come I will never forgive you.—­Your loving Nina.

The immediate problem was a present.  I knew that Nina adored presents, but Petrograd was now no easy place for purchases, and I wished, I suppose as a kind of tribute to her youth and freshness and colour, to give her something for which she would really care.  I sallied out on a wonderful afternoon when the town was a blaze of colour, the walls dark red, dark brown, violet, pink, and the snow a dazzling glitter of crystal.  The bells were ringing for some festival, echoing as do no other bells in the world from wall to wall, roof to roof, canal to canal.  Everybody moved as though they were inspired with a gay sense of adventure, men and women laughing; the Isvostchicks surveying possible fares with an eye less patronising and lugubrious than usual, the flower women and the beggars and the little Chinese boys and the wicked old men who stare at you as though they were dreaming of Eastern debauches, shared in the sun and tang of the air and high colour of the sky and snow.

I pushed my way into the shop in the Morskaia that had the coloured stones—­the blue and azure and purple stones—­in the window.  Inside the shop, which had a fine gleaming floor, and an old man with a tired eye, there were stones of every colour, but there was nothing there for Nina—­all was too elaborate and grand.