The Secret City | Page 5

know, a
tiny, tiny creature with sharp ironical eyes and pointed springing feet
who watched his poses, his sentimentalities and heroics with

affectionate scorn. This same creature watched him now as he waited to
collect his bags, and then stood on the gleaming steps of the station
whilst the porters fetched an Isvostchick, and the rain fell in long
thundering lines of steel upon the bare and desolate streets.
"You're very miserable and lonely," the Creature said; "you didn't
expect this."
No, Henry had not expected this, and he also had not expected that the
Isvostchick would demand eight roubles for his fare to the "France."
Henry knew that this was the barest extortion, and he had sworn to
himself long ago that he would allow nobody to "do" him. He looked at
the rain and submitted. "After all, it's war time," he whispered to the
Creature.
He huddled himself into the cab, his baggage piled all about him, and
tried by pulling at the hood to protect himself from the elements. He
has told me that he felt that the rain was laughing at him; the cab was
so slow that he seemed to be sitting in the middle of pools and melting
snow; he was dirty, tired, hungry, and really not far from tears. Poor
Henry was very, very young....
He scarcely looked at the Neva as he crossed the bridge; all the length
of the Quay he saw only the hunched, heavy back of the old cabman
and the spurting, jumping rain, the vast stone grave-like buildings and
the high 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
jerk outside the "France" hotel. Here he tried, I am sure, to recover his
dignity, but he was met by a large, stout, eastern-looking gentleman
with peacock feathers in his round cap who smiled gently when he
heard about the eight roubles, and ushered Henry into the dark hall with
a kindly patronage that admitted of no reply.
The "France" is a good hotel, and its host is one of the kindest of
mortals, but it is in many ways Russian rather than Continental in its
atmosphere. That ought to have pleased and excited so sympathetic a
soul as Henry. I am afraid that this moment of his arrival was the first
realisation in his life of that stern truth that that which seems romantic

in retrospect is only too often unpleasantly realistic in its actual
experience.
He stepped into the dark hall, damp like a well, with a whirring
snarling clock on the wall and a heavy glass door pulled by a rope
swinging and shifting, the walls and door and rack with the letters
shifting too. In this rocking world there seemed to be no stable thing.
He was dirty and tired and humiliated. He explained to his host, who
smiled but seemed to be thinking of other things, that he wanted a bath
and a room and a meal. He was promised these things, but there was no
conviction abroad that the "France" had gone up in the world since
Henry Bohun had crossed its threshold. An old man with a grey beard
and the fixed and glittering eye of the "Ancient Mariner" told him to
follow him. How well I know those strange, cold, winding passages of
the "France," creeping in and out across boards that shiver and shake,
with walls pressing in upon you so thin and rocky that the wind
whistles and screams and the paper makes ghostly shadows and signs
as though unseen fingers 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 and cabbage soup, of sunflower seeds and cigarette-ends,
of drainage and patchouli, of, in some odd way, the sea and fish and
wet pavements. It is a smell that will, until I die, be presented to me by
those dark half-hidden passages, warrens of intricate fumbling ways
with boards suddenly rising like little mountains in the path; behind the
wainscot one hears the scuttling of innumerable rats.
The Ancient Mariner showed Henry to his room and left him. Henry
was depressed 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
surface gleaming water trickled. The bare boards showed large and
gaping cracks; there was a washstand, a bed, a chest of drawers, and a
faded padded arm-chair with a hole in it. In the corner near the window
was an Ikon of tinsel and wood; a little round marble-topped table
offered a dusty carafe of water. A heavy red-plush bell-rope