The Secret City | Page 6

tapped the
wall.
He sat down in the faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was the

room hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that in
Petrograd.... 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 to
the mere mortals who interfere with their stealthy concerns. Henry
dreamt; 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 the
hotel seemed to open and to close, black little figures moving like ants
up and down across the winding ways. He saw innumerable carafes and
basins and beds, the wall-paper whistling, the rats scuttling, and lines of
cigarette-ends, black and yellow, moving in trails like worms across the
boards. All men like worms, like ants, like rats and the gleaming water
trickling interminably down the high black wall. Of course he was tired
after his long journey, hungry too, and depressed.... He awoke to find
the Ancient Mariner watching him. He screamed. The Mariner
reassured him with a toothless smile, gripped him by the arm and
showed him the bathroom.
"_Pajaluista!_" said the Mariner.
Although Henry had learnt Russian, so unexpected was the
pronunciation of this familiar word that it was as though the old man
had said "Open Sesame!"....

V
He felt happy and consoled after a bath, a shave, and breakfast. Always
I should think he reacted very quickly to his own physical sensations,
and he was, as yet, too young to know that you cannot lay ghosts by the
simple brushing of your hair and sponging your face. After his
breakfast he lay down on the bed and again fell asleep, but this time not
to dream; he slept like a Briton, dreamless, healthy and clean. He
awoke as sure of himself as ever.... The first incantation had not, you
see, been enough....
He plunged into the city. It was raining with that thick dark rain that
seems to have mud in it before it has fallen. The town was veiled in

thin mist, figures appearing and disappearing, tram-bells ringing, and
those strange wild cries in the Russian tongue that seem at one's first
hearing so romantic and startling, rising sharply and yet lazily into the
air. He plunged along and found himself in the Nevski Prospect--he
could not mistake its breadth and assurance, dull though it seemed in
the mud and rain.
But he was above all things a romantic and sentimental youth, and he
was determined to see this country as he had expected to see it; so he
plodded on, his coat-collar up, British obstinacy in his eyes and a little
excited flutter in his heart whenever a bright colour, an Eastern face, a
street pedlar, a bunched-up, high-backed coachman, anything or any
one unusual presented itself.
He saw on his right a great church; it stood back from the street, having
in front of it a desolate little arrangement of bushes and public seats
and winding paths. The church itself was approached by flights of steps
that disappeared under the shadow of a high dome supported by vast
stone pillars. Letters in gold flamed across the building above the
pillars.
Henry passed the intervening ground and climbed the steps. Under the
pillars before the heavy, swinging doors were two rows of beggars;
they were dirtier, more touzled and tangled, fiercer and more ironically
falsely submissive than any beggars that, he had ever seen. He
described one fellow to me, a fierce brigand with a high black hat of
feathers, a soiled Cossack coat and tall dirty red leather boots; his eyes
were fires, Henry said. At any rate that is what Henry liked to think
they were. There was a woman with no legs and a man with neither
nose nor ears. I am sure that they watched Henry with supplicating
hostility. He entered the church and was instantly swallowed up by a
vast multitude.
He described to me afterwards that it was as though he had been pushed
(by the evil, eager fingers of the beggars no doubt) into deep water. He
rose with a gasp, and was first conscious of a strange smell of dirt and
tallow and something that he did not know, but was afterwards to
recognise as the scent of sunflower seed. He was pushed upon, pressed

and pulled, fingered and crushed. He did not mind--he was glad--this
was what he wanted. He looked about him and found that he and all the
people round him were swimming in a hazy golden mist flung into the
air from the thousands of lighted candles that danced in the breeze
blowing through the building. The whole vast shining floor