The Secret City

by Sir Hugh Walpole

  XIV

  Next day I fell ill. I had felt unwell for several weeks, and now I wokeup to a bad feverish cold, my body one vast ache, and at the same timeimpersonal, away from me, floating over above me, sinking under me, tiedto me only by pain....

  I was too utterly apathetic to care. The old woman who looked after myrooms telephoned to my doctor, a stout, red-faced jolly man, who cameand laughed at me, ordered me some medicine, said that I was in a highfever, and left me. After that, I was, for several days, caught into aworld of dreams and nightmares. No one, I think, came near me, save myold woman, Marfa, and a new acquaintance of mine, the Rat.

  The Rat I had met some weeks before outside my house. I had beenreturning one evening, through the dark, with a heavy bag of books whichI had fetched from an English friend of mine who lodged in theMillionnaya. I had had a cab for most of the distance, but that hadstopped on the other side of the bridge--it could not drive amongst therubbish pebbles and spars of my island. As I staggered along with my baga figure had risen, as it seemed to me, out of the ground and askedhuskily whether he could help me. I had only a few steps to go, but heseized my burden and went in front of me. I submitted. I told him mydoor and he entered the dark passage, climbed the rickety stairs andentered my room. Here we were both astonished. He, when I had lighted mylamp, was staggered by the splendour and luxury of my life, I, as Ilooked at him, by the wildness and uncouthness of his appearance. He wasas a savage from the centre of Africa, thick ragged hair and beard, apowerful body in rags, and his whole attitude to the world primeval andutterly primitive. His mouth was cruel; his eyes, as almost always withthe Russian peasant, mild and kindly. I do not intend to take up muchspace here with an account of him, but he did, after this first meeting,in some sort attach himself to me. I never learned his name nor where helived; he was I should suppose an absolutely abominable plunderer andpirate and ruffian. He would appear suddenly in my room, stand by thedoor and talk--but talk with the ignorance, naivete, brutal simplicityof an utterly abandoned baby. Nothing mystical or beautiful about theRat. He did not disguise from me in the least that there was no crimethat he had not committed--murder, rape, arson, immorality of the mosthideous, sacrilege, the basest betrayal of his best friends--he was notonly savage and outlaw, he was deliberate anarchist and murderer. He hadno redeeming point that I could anywhere discover. I did not in theleast mind his entering my room when he pleased. I had there nothing ofany value; he could take my life even, had he a mind to that.... Thenaive abysmal depths of his depravity interested me. He formed a kind ofattachment to me. He told me that he would do anything for me. He had astrange tact which prevented him from intruding upon me when I wasoccupied. He was as quick as any cultured civilised cosmopolitan to seeif he was not wanted. He developed a certain cleanliness; he told me,with an air of disdainful superiority, that he had been to the publicbaths. I gave him an old suit of mine and a pair of boots. He veryseldom asked for anything; once and again he would point to somethingand say that he would like to have it; if I said that he could not heexpressed no disappointment; sometimes he stole it, but he alwaysacknowledged that he had done so if I asked him, although he would liestupendously on other occasions for no reason at all.

  "Now you must bring that back," I would say sternly.

  "Oh no, Barin.... Why? You have so many things. Surely you will notobject. Perhaps I will bring it--and perhaps not."

  "You must certainly bring it," I would say.

  "We will see," he would say, smiling at me in the friendliest fashion.

  He was the only absolutely happy Russian I have ever known. He had nopassages of despair. He had been in prison, he would be in prison again.He had spasms of the most absolute ferocity. On one occasion I thoughtthat I should be his next victim, and for a moment my fate hung, Ithink, in the balance. But he changed his mind. He had a real liking forme, I think. When he could get it, he drank a kind of furniture polish,the only substitute in these days for vodka. This was an absolutelykilling drink, and I tried to prove to him that frequent indulgence init meant an early decease. That did not affect him in the least. Deathhad no horror for him although, I foresaw, with justice as after eventsproved, that if he were faced with it he would be a very desperatecoward. He liked very much my cigarettes, and I gave him these oncondition that he did not spit sunflower seeds over my floor. He kepthis word about this.

  He chatted incessantly, and sometimes I listened and sometimes not. Hehad no politics and was indeed comfortably ignorant of any sort ofgeography or party division. There were for him only the rich and thepoor. He knew nothing about the war, but he hoped, he frankly told me,that there would be anarchy in Petrograd, so that he might rob andplunder.

  "I will look after you then, Barin," he answered me, "so that no oneshall touch you." I thanked him. He was greatly amused by my Russianaccent, although he had no interest in the fact that I was English, nordid he want to hear in the least about London or any foreign town.Marfa, my old servant, was, of course, horrified at thisacquaintanceship of mine, and warned me that it would mean both my deathand hers. He liked to tease and frighten her, but he was never rude toher and offered sometimes to help her with her work, an offer that shealways indignantly refused. He had some children, he told me, but he didnot know where they were. He tried to respect my hospitality, neverbringing any friends of his with him, and only once coming when he wasthe worse for drink. On that occasion he cried and endeavoured toembrace me. He apologised for this the next day.

  They would try to take him soon, he supposed, for a soldier, but hethought that he would be able to escape. He hated the Police, and wouldmurder them all if he could. He told me great tales of their cruelty,and he cursed them most bitterly. I pointed out to him that society mustbe protected, but he did not see why this need be so. It was, hethought, wrong that some people had so much and others so little, butthis was as far as his social investigations penetrated.

  He was really distressed by my illness. Marfa told me that one day whenI was delirious he cried. At the same time he pointed out to her that,if I died, certain things in my rooms would be his. He liked a silvercigarette case of mine, and my watch chain, and a signet ring that Iwore. I saw him vaguely, an uncertain shadow in the mists of the firstdays of my fever. I was not, I suppose, in actual fact, seriously ill,and yet I abandoned myself to my fate, allowing myself to slip withoutthe slightest attempt at resistance, along the easiest way, towardsdeath or idiocy or paralysis, towards anything that meant theindifferent passivity of inaction. I had bad, confused dreams. Thesilence irritated me. I fancied to myself that the sea ought to makesome sound, that it was holding itself deliberately quiescent inpreparation for some event. I remember that Marfa and the doctorprevented me from rising to look from my window that I might see why thesea was not roaring. Some one said to me in my dreams something about"Ice," and again and again I repeated the word to myself as though itwere intensely significant. "Ice! Ice! Ice!... Yes, that was what Iwanted to know!" My idea from this was that the floor upon which Irested was exceedingly thin, made only of paper in fact, and that at anymoment it might give way and precipitate me upon the ice. This terrifiedme, and the way that the cold blew up through the cracks in the floorwas disturbing enough. I knew that my doctor thought me mad to remain insuch a place. But above all I was overwhelmed by the figure of Semyonov.He haunted me in all my dreams, his presence never left me for a singleinstant. I could not be sure whether he were in the room or no, butcertainly he was close to me... watching me, sneering at me as he hadso often done before.

  I was conscious also of Petrograd, of the town itself, in every one ofits amazingly various manifestations. I saw it all laid out as though Iwere a great height above it--the fashionable streets, the Nevski andthe Morskaia with the carriages and the motor-cars and trams, the kiosksand the bazaars, the women with their baskets of apples, the boys withthe newspapers, the smart cinematographs, the shop in the Morskaia withthe coloured stones in the window, the oculist and the pastry-cook's andth
e hairdressers and the large "English shop" at the corner of theNevski, and Pivato's the restaurant, and close beside it the art shopwith popular post cards and books on Serov and Vrubel, and the AstoriaHotel with its shining windows staring on to S. Isaac's Square. And Isaw the Nevski, that straight and proud street, filled with every kindof vehicle and black masses of people, rolling like thick clouds up anddown, here and there, the hum of their talk rising like mist from thesnow. And there was the Kazan Cathedral, haughty and proud, and the bookshop with the French books and complete sets of Tchekov and Merejkowskyin the window, and the bridges and the palaces and the square before theAlexander Theatre, and Elisseieff's the provision shop, and all thebanks, and the shops with gloves and shirts, all looking ill-fitting asthough they were never meant to be worn, and then the little dirty shopspoked in between the grand ones, the shop with rubber goods and theshop with an Aquarium, gold-fish and snails and a tortoise, and the shopwith oranges and bananas. Then, too, there was the Arcade with thetheatre where they acted _Romance_ and _Potash and Perlmutter_ (almostas they do in London), and on the other side of the street, at thecorner of the Sadovia, the bazaar with all its shops and its tremblingmist of people. I watched the Nevski, and saw how it slipped into theNeva with the Red Square on one side of it, and S. Isaac's Square on theother, and the great station at the far end of it, and about these twolines the Neva and the Nevski, the whole town sprawled and crept, ebbedand flowed. Away from the splendour it stretched, dirty and decrepit anduntended, here piles of evil flats, there old wooden buildings withcobbled courts, and the canals twisting and creeping up and down throughit all. It was all bathed, as I looked down upon it, in coloured mist.The air was purple and gold and light blue, fading into the snow and iceand transforming it. Everywhere there were the masts of ships and thesmell of the sea and rough deserted places--and shadows moved behind theshadows, and yet more shadows behind _them_, so that it was alluncertain and unstable, and only the river knew what it was about.

  Over the whole town Semyonov and I moved together, and the ice and snowsilenced our steps, and no one in the whole place spoke a word, so thatwe had to lower our voices and whispered....