The Secret City

by Sir Hugh Walpole

  IV

  It should be obvious enough then that they hailed their approachingseparation with relief. Bohun had been promised by one of thesecretaries at the Embassy that rooms would be found for him. Jerryintended to "hang out" at one of the hotels. The "Astoria" was, hebelieved, the right place.

  "I shall go to the 'France' for to-night," Bohun declared, having lived,it would seem, in Petrograd all his days. "Look me up, old man, won'tyou?"

  Jerry smiled his slow smile. "I will," he said. "So long."

  We will now follow the adventures of Henry. He had in him, I know, atiny, tiny creature with sharp ironical eyes and pointed springing feetwho watched his poses, his sentimentalities and heroics withaffectionate scorn. This same creature watched him now as he waited tocollect his bags, and then stood on the gleaming steps of the stationwhilst the porters fetched an Isvostchick, and the rain fell in longthundering lines of steel upon the bare and desolate streets.

  "You're very miserable and lonely," the Creature said; "you didn'texpect this."

  No, Henry had not expected this, and he also had not expected that theIsvostchick would demand eight roubles for his fare to the "France."Henry knew that this was the barest extortion, and he had sworn tohimself long ago that he would allow nobody to "do" him. He looked atthe rain and submitted. "After all, it's war time," he whispered to theCreature.

  He huddled himself into the cab, his baggage piled all about him, andtried by pulling at the hood to protect himself from the elements. Hehas told me that he felt that the rain was laughing at him; the cab wasso slow that he seemed to be sitting in the middle of pools and meltingsnow; he was dirty, tired, hungry, and really not far from tears. PoorHenry was very, very young....

  He scarcely looked at the Neva as he crossed the bridge; all the lengthof the Quay he saw only the hunched, heavy back of the old cabman andthe spurting, jumping rain, the vast stone grave-like buildings and thehigh 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 jerkoutside the "France" hotel. Here he tried, I am sure, to recover hisdignity, but he was met by a large, stout, eastern-looking gentlemanwith peacock feathers in his round cap who smiled gently when he heardabout the eight roubles, and ushered Henry into the dark hall with akindly patronage that admitted of no reply.

  The "France" is a good hotel, and its host is one of the kindest ofmortals, but it is in many ways Russian rather than Continental in itsatmosphere. That ought to have pleased and excited so sympathetic a soulas Henry. I am afraid that this moment of his arrival was the firstrealisation in his life of that stern truth that that which seemsromantic in retrospect is only too often unpleasantly realistic in itsactual experience.

  He stepped into the dark hall, damp like a well, with a whirringsnarling clock on the wall and a heavy glass door pulled by a ropeswinging and shifting, the walls and door and rack with the lettersshifting too. In this rocking world there seemed to be no stable thing.He was dirty and tired and humiliated. He explained to his host, whosmiled but seemed to be thinking of other things, that he wanted a bathand a room and a meal. He was promised these things, but there was noconviction abroad that the "France" had gone up in the world since HenryBohun had crossed its threshold. An old man with a grey beard and thefixed and glittering eye of the "Ancient Mariner" told him to followhim. How well I know those strange, cold, winding passages of the"France," creeping in and out across boards that shiver and shake, withwalls pressing in upon you so thin and rocky that the wind whistles andscreams and the paper makes ghostly shadows and signs as though unseenfingers 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 andcabbage soup, of sunflower seeds and cigarette-ends, of drainage andpatchouli, of, in some odd way, the sea and fish and wet pavements. Itis a smell that will, until I die, be presented to me by those darkhalf-hidden passages, warrens of intricate fumbling ways with boardssuddenly rising like little mountains in the path; behind the wainscotone hears the scuttling of innumerable rats.

  The Ancient Mariner showed Henry to his room and left him. Henry wasdepressed 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 surfacegleaming water trickled. The bare boards showed large and gaping cracks;there was a washstand, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a faded paddedarm-chair with a hole in it. In the corner near the window was an Ikonof tinsel and wood; a little round marble-topped table offered a dustycarafe of water. A heavy red-plush bell-rope tapped the wall.

  He sat down in the faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was theroom hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that inPetrograd.... I myself am aware of what walls and streets and rivers,engaged on their own secret life in that most secret of towns, can do tothe mere mortals who interfere with their stealthy concerns. Henrydreamt; he was never afterwards able to tell me of what he had dreamt,but it had been a long heavy cobwebby affair, in which the walls of thehotel seemed to open and to close, black little figures moving like antsup and down across the winding ways. He saw innumerable carafes andbasins and beds, the wall-paper whistling, the rats scuttling, and linesof cigarette-ends, black and yellow, moving in trails like worms acrossthe boards. All men like worms, like ants, like rats and the gleamingwater trickling interminably down the high black wall. Of course he wastired after his long journey, hungry too, and depressed.... He awoke tofind the Ancient Mariner watching him. He screamed. The Marinerreassured him with a toothless smile, gripped him by the arm and showedhim the bathroom.

  "_Pajaluista!_" said the Mariner.

  Although Henry had learnt Russian, so unexpected was the pronunciationof this familiar word that it was as though the old man had said "OpenSesame!"....