The Secret City | Page 7

was
covered with peasants, pressed, packed together. Peasants, men and
women--he did not see a single member of the middle-class. In front of
him under the altar there was a blaze of light, and figures moved in the
blaze uncertainly, indistinctly. Now and then a sudden quiver passed
across the throng, as wind blows through the corn. Here and there men
and women knelt, but for the most part they stood steadfast, motionless,
staring in front of them. He looked at them and discovered that they
had the faces of children--simple, trustful, unintelligent, unhumorous
children,--and eyes, always kindlier than any he had ever seen in other
human beings. They stood there gravely, with no signs of religious
fervour, with no marks of impatience or weariness and also with no
evidence of any especial interest in what was occurring. It might have
been a vast concourse of sleep-walkers.
He saw that three soldiers near to him were holding hands....
From the lighted altars came the echoing whisper of a monotonous
chant. The sound rose and fell, scarcely a voice, scarcely an appeal,
something rising from the place itself and sinking back into it again
without human agency.
After a time he saw a strange movement that at first he could not
understand. Then watching, he found that unlit candles were being
passed from line to line, one man leaning forward and tapping the man
in front of him with the candle, the man in front passing it, in his turn,
forward, and so on until at last it reached the altar where it was lighted
and fastened into its sconce. This tapping with the candles happened
incessantly throughout the vast crowd. Henry himself was tapped, and
felt suddenly as though he had been admitted a member of some secret
society. He felt the tap again and again, and soon he seemed to be
hypnotised by the low chant at the altar and the motionless silent crowd
and the dim golden mist. He stood, not thinking, not living, away, away,

questioning nothing, wanting nothing....
He must of course finish with his romantic notion. People pushed
around him, struggling to get out. He turned to go and was faced, he
told me, with a remarkable figure. His description, romantic and
sentimental though he tried to make it, resolved itself into nothing more
than the sketch of an ordinary peasant, tall, broad, black-bearded,
neatly clad in blue shirt, black trousers, and high boots. This fellow
stood apparently away from the crowd, apart, and watched it all, as you
so often may see the Russian peasant doing, with indifferent gaze. In
his mild blue eyes Bohun fancied that he saw all kinds of things--power,
wisdom, prophecy--a figure apart and symbolic. But how easy in
Russia it is to see symbols and how often those symbols fail to justify
themselves! Well, I let Bohun have his fancies. "I should know that
man anywhere again," he declared. "It was as though he knew what
was going to happen and was ready for it." Then I suppose he saw my
smile, for he broke off and said no more.
And here for a moment I leave him and his adventures.

VI
I must speak, for a moment, of myself. Throughout the autumn and
winter of 1914 and the spring and summer of 1915 I was with the
Russian Red Cross on the Polish and Galician fronts. During the
summer and early autumn of 1915 I shared with the Ninth Army the
retreat through Galicia. Never very strong physically, owing to a
lameness of the left hip from which I have suffered from birth, the
difficulties of the retreat and the loss of my two greatest friends gave
opportunities to my arch-enemy Sciatica to do what he wished with me,
and in October 1915 I was forced to leave the Front and return to
Petrograd. I was an invalid throughout the whole of that winter, and
only gradually during the spring of 1916 was able to pull myself back
to an old shadow of my former vigour and energy. I saw that I would
never be good for the Front again, but I minded that the less now in that
the events of the summer of 1915 had left me without heart or desire,

the merest spectator of life, passive and, I cynically believed,
indifferent. I was nothing to any one, nor was any one anything to me.
The desire of my heart had slipped like a laughing ghost away from my
ken--men of my slow warmth and cautious suspicion do not easily
admit a new guest....
Moreover during this spring of 1916 Petrograd, against my knowledge,
wove webs about my feet. I had never shared the common belief that
Moscow was the only town in Russia. I had always