The Secret City

by Sir Hugh Walpole

  XI

  On Christmas Eve, late in the evening, I went into a church. It was myfavourite church in Petrograd, rising at the English Prospect end of theQuay, with its white rounded towers pure and quiet and modest.

  I had been depressed all day. I had not been well, and the weather washarsh, a bitterly cold driving wind beating down the streets andstroking the ice of the canal into a dull grey colour. Christmas seemedto lift into sharper, bitterer irony the ghastly horrors of this endendless war. Last Christmas I had been too ill to care, and theChristmas before I had been at the Front when the war had been young andfull of hope, and I had seen enough nobility and self-sacrifice to bereassured about the true stuff of the human soul. Now all that seemed tobe utterly gone. On the one side my mind was filled with my friends,John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna. The sacrifice that they had madeseemed to be wicked and useless. I had lost altogether that convictionof the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for solong, carried with me. They were dead, dead... simply dead. There atthe Front one had believed in many things. Here in this frozen andstarving town, with every ghost working against every human, there wasassurance of nothing--only deep foreboding and an ominous silence. Themurder of Rasputin still hung over every head. The first sense ofliberty had passed, and now his dirty malicious soul seemed to bewatching us all, reminding us that he had not left us, but was waitingfor the striking of some vast catastrophe that the friends whom he hadleft behind him to carry on his work were preparing. It was this senseof 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 warwith a free soul appeared now to be utterly gone. Before our eyes thepowers that ruled us were betraying us, laughing at us, selling us. Andwe did not know who was our enemy, who our friend, whom to believe, ofwhom to take counsel. Peculation and lying and the basest intrigue wason every side of us, hunger for which there was no necessity, want in aland packed with everything. I believe that there may have been verywell another side to the picture, but at that time we could not see; wedid not wish to see, we were blindfolded men....

  I entered the church and found that the service was over. I passedthrough the aisle into the little rounded cup of dark and gold where thealtars 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. Thecandles flung a mist of dim embroidery upon the walls, and within themist the dark figures of the priests moved to and fro. An old priestwith long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and readinga long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice. There was the scent ofcandles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place. Thetawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the candle-light, and an echo ofthe cold wind creeping up the long dark aisle blew the light about sothat the gilt was like flashing piercing eyes. I wrapped my Shubaclosely about me, and stood there lost in a hazy, indefinite dream.

  I was comforted and touched by the placid, mild, kindly faces of thosestanding near me. "No evil here...." I thought. "Only ignorance, and forthat others are responsible."

  I was lost in my dream and I did not know of what I was dreaming. Thepriest's voice went on, and the lights flickered, and it was as thoughsome one, a long way off, were trying to give me a message that it wasimportant that I should hear, important for myself and for others. Therecame over me, whence I know not, a sudden conviction of the fearfulpower of Evil, a sudden realisation, as though I had been shownsomething, a scene or a picture or writing which had brought this hometo me.... The lights seemed to darken, the priest's figure faded, and Ifelt as though the message that some one had been trying to deliver tome had been withdrawn. I waited a moment, looking about me in abewildered fashion, as though I had in reality just woken from sleep.Then I left the church.

  Outside the cold air was intense. I walked to the end of the Quay andleaned on the stone parapet. The Neva seemed vast like a huge, white,impending shadow; it swept in a colossal wave of frozen ice out to thefar horizon, where tiny, twinkling lights met it and closed it in. Thebridges that crossed it held forth their lights, and there were thegleams, like travelling stars, of the passing trams, but all these wereutterly insignificant against the vast body of the contemptuous ice. Onthe farther shore the buildings rose in a thin, tapering line, lookingas though they had been made of black tissue paper, against the solidweight of the cold, stony sky. The Peter and Paul Fortress, the towersof the Mohammedan Mosque were thin, immaterial, ghostly, and the wholeline of the town was simply a black pencilled shadow against the ice,smoke that might be scattered with one heave of the force of the river.The Neva was silent, but beneath that silence beat what force and power,what contempt and scorn, what silent purposes?

  I saw then, near me, and gazing, like myself, on to the river the tall,broad figure of a peasant, standing, without movement, black against thesky.

  He seemed to dominate the scene, to be stronger and more contemptuousthan the ice itself, but also to be in sympathy with it.

  I made some movement, and he turned and looked at me. He was a fine man,with a black beard and noble carriage. He passed down the Quay and Iturned towards home.