Near the Nevski is a fine shop of pictures with snow scenes and blue rivers and Italian landscapes, and copies of Repin and Verestchagin, and portraits of the Czar.  I searched here, but all were too sophisticated in their bright brown frames, and their air of being the latest thing from Paris and London.  Then I crossed the road, threading my way through the carriages and motor cars, past the old white-bearded sweeper with the broom held aloft, gazing at the sky, and plunged into the English Shop to see whether I might buy something warm for Nina.  Here, indeed, I could fancy that I was in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury.  A demure English provincialism was over everything, and a young man in a high white collar and a shiny black coat, washed his hands as he told me that “they hadn’t any in stock at the moment, but they were expecting a delivery of goods at any minute.”  Russian shopmen, it is almost needless to say, do not care whether they have goods in stock or no.  They have other things to think about.  The air was filled with the chatter of English governesses, and an English clergyman and his wife were earnestly turning over a selection of woollen comforters.

Nothing here for Nina—­nothing at all.  I hurried away.  With a sudden flash of inspiration I realised that it was in the Jews’ Market that I would find what I wanted.  I snatched at the bulging neck of a sleeping coachman, and before he was fully awake was in his sledge, and had told him my destination.  He grumbled and wished to know how much I intended to pay him, and when I said one and a half roubles, answered that he would not take me for less than three.  I threatened him then with the fat and good-natured policeman who always guarded the confused junction of the Morskaia and Nevski, and he was frightened and moved on.  I sighed as I remembered the days not so long before, when that same coachman would have thought it an honour to drive me for half a rouble.  Down the Sadovya we slipped, bumping over the uneven surface of the snow, and the shops grew smaller and the cinemas more stringent, and the women and men with their barrows of fruit and coloured notepaper and toys more frequent.  Then through the market with the booths and the church with its golden towers, until we stood before the hooded entrance to the Jews’ Paradise.  I paid him, and without listening to his discontented cries pushed my way in.  The Jews’ Market is a series of covered arcades with a square in the middle of it, and in the middle of the square a little church with some doll-like trees.  These arcades are Western in their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern, so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs, the cries, the singing, and the dancing that meets one here it is as though a new world was suddenly born—­a world offensive, dirty, voluble, blackguardly perhaps, but intriguing, tempting, and ironical.  The arcades are generally so crowded that one can move only at a slow pace and, on every side one is pestered by the equivalents of the old English cry:  “What do you lack?  What do you lack?”