The White Guard Part 3

'Ni-kolka!' Someone's voice boomed out through the fog and black spots, and it took Alexei several seconds to realise that the voice was his own. 'Nikolka!' he repeated. A white lavatory wall swung open and turned green. 'G.o.d, how sickening, how disgusting. I swear I'll never mix vodka and wine again. Nikol . . .'

'Ah-ah', Myshlaevsky groaned hoa.r.s.ely and sat down on the floor.

A black crack widened and through it appeared Nikolka's head and chevron.

'Nikol. . . help me to get him up. There, pick him up like this, under his arm.'

'Poor fellow', muttered Nikolka shaking his head sympathetically and straining himself to pick up his friend. The half-lifeless body slithered around, twitching legs slid in every direction and the lolling head hung like a puppet's on a string. Tonk-tank went the clock, as it fell off the wall and jumped back into place again. Bunches of flowers danced a jig in the vase. Elena's face was flushed with red patches and a lock of hair dangled over her right eyebrow.

'That's right. Now put him to bed.'

'At least wrap him in a bathrobe. He's indecent like that with me around. You d.a.m.ned fools - you can't hold your drink. Viktor! Viktor! What's the matter with you? Vik . . .'

'Shut up, Elena. You're no help. Listen, Nikolka, in my study . . . there's a medicine bottle ... it says "Liquor ammonii", you can tell because the corner of the label's torn off . . . anyway, you can't mistake the smell of sal ammoniac.'

'Yes, right away . . .'

'You, a doctor - you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Alexei. ..'

'All right, I know . . .'

'What? Has his pulse stopped?'

'No, he's just pa.s.sed out.'

'Basin!'

'Ah-aah 'Christ!'

Violent reek of ammonia. Karas and Elena held Myshlaevsky's mouth open. Nikolka supported him while Alexei twice poured white cloudy liquid into his mouth.

'Aah . . . ugh . . . urkhh . . .'

'The snow . . .'

'G.o.d almighty. Can't be helped, though. Only way to do it . . .'

On his forehead lay a wet cloth dripping water, below it the swivelling, bloodshot whites of his eyes under half-closed lids, bluish shadows around the sharpened nose. For an anxious quarter of an hour, b.u.mping each other with their elbows, they strove with the vanquished officer until he opened his eyes and croaked: 'Aah ... let me go . . .'

'Right. That's better. He can stay and sleep here.'

Lights went on in all the rooms and beds were quickly made up.

'Leonid, you'd better sleep in here, next to Nikolka's room.'

'Very well.'

Copper-red in the face but cheerful, Shervinsky clicked his spurs and, bowing, showed the parting in his hair. Elena's white hands fluttered over the pillows as she arranged them on the divan.

'Please don't bother ... I can make up the bed myself.'

'Nonsense. Stop tugging at that pillow - I don't need your help.'

'Please let me kiss your hand ...'

'What for?'

'Grat.i.tude for all your trouble.'

'I can manage without hand-kissing for the moment . . . Nikolka, you're sleeping in your own bed. Well, how is he?'

'He's all right, sleeping it off.' Two camp beds were made up in the room leading to Nikolka's, behind two back-to-back bookcases. In Professor Turbin's family the room was known as the library.

As the lights went out in the library, in Nikolka's room and in the dining-room, a dark red streak of light crawled out of Elena's bedroom and into the dining-room through a narrow crack in the door. The light pained her, so she had draped her bedside lamp with a dark red theater-cloak. Once Elena used to drive to an evening at the theater in that cloak, once when her arms, her furs and her lips had smelled of perfume, her face had been delicately powdered - and when under the hood of her cloak Elena had looked like Liza in The Queen of Spades. The Queen of Spades. But in the past year the cloak had turned threadbare with uncanny rapidity, the folds grown creased and stained and the ribbons shabby. Still looking like Liza in But in the past year the cloak had turned threadbare with uncanny rapidity, the folds grown creased and stained and the ribbons shabby. Still looking like Liza in The Queen of Spades, The Queen of Spades, auburn-haired Elena now sat on the turned-down edge of her bed in a neglige, her hands folded in her lap. Her bare feet were buried deep in the fur of a well-worn old bearskin rug. Her brief intoxication had gone completely, and now deep sadness enveloped her like a black cloak. From the next room, m.u.f.fled by the bookshelf that had been placed across the closed door, came the faint whistle of Nikolka's breathing and Shervinsky's bold, confident snore. Dead silence from Mysh-Iaevsky and Karas in the library. Alone, with the light s.h.i.+ning on her nightgown and on the two black, blank windows, Elena talked to herself without constraint, sometimes half-aloud, sometimes whispering with lips that scarcely moved. auburn-haired Elena now sat on the turned-down edge of her bed in a neglige, her hands folded in her lap. Her bare feet were buried deep in the fur of a well-worn old bearskin rug. Her brief intoxication had gone completely, and now deep sadness enveloped her like a black cloak. From the next room, m.u.f.fled by the bookshelf that had been placed across the closed door, came the faint whistle of Nikolka's breathing and Shervinsky's bold, confident snore. Dead silence from Mysh-Iaevsky and Karas in the library. Alone, with the light s.h.i.+ning on her nightgown and on the two black, blank windows, Elena talked to herself without constraint, sometimes half-aloud, sometimes whispering with lips that scarcely moved.

'He's gone . . .'

Muttering, she screwed up her dry eyes reflectively. She could not understand her own thoughts. He had gone, and at a time like this. But then he was an extremely level-headed man and he had done the right thing by leaving ... It was surely for the best.

'But at a time like this . . .'

Elena whispered, and sighed deeply.

'What sort of man is he?' In her way she had loved him and even grown attached to him. Now in the solitude of this room, beside these black windows, so funereal, she suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of depression. Yet neither at this moment, nor for the whole eighteen months that she had lived with this man had there been in her heart of hearts that essential feeling without which no marriage can survive - not even such a brilliant match as theirs, between the beautiful, red-haired, golden Elena and a career officer of the general staff, a marriage with theater-cloaks, with perfume and spurs, unenc.u.mbered by children. Married to a sensible, careful Baltic German of the general staff. And yet -what was he really like? What was that vital ingredient, whose lack had created the emptiness in the depth of Elena's soul?

'I know, I know what it is', said Elena to herself aloud. 'There's no respect. Do you realise, Sergei? I have never felt any respect for you', she announced meaningfully to her cloak, raising an admonitory finger. She was immediately appalled at her loneliness, and longed for him to be there at that moment. He had gone. And her brothers had kissed him goodbye. Did they really have to do that? But for G.o.d's sake, what am I saying? What else should they have done? Held back? Of course not. Well, maybe it was better that he shouldn't be here at such a difficult time and he was better gone, but they couldn't have refused to wish him G.o.dspeed. Of course not. Let him go. The fact was that although they had gone through the motions of embracing him, in the depth of their hearts they hated him. G.o.d, yes-they did. All this time you've been lying to yourself and yet when you stop to think for a moment, it's obvious - they hate him. Nikolka still has some remnants of kindness and generosity toward him, but Alexei . . . And yet that's not quite true either. Alexei is kind at heart too, yet he somehow hates him more. Oh my G.o.d, what am I saying? Sergei, what am I saying about you? Suddenly we're cut off . . . He's gone and here am I . . .

'My husband,' she said with a sigh, and began to unb.u.t.ton her neglige, 'my husband . . .'

Red and glowing, her cloak listened intently, then asked: 'But what sort of a man is your husband?'

'He's a swine, and nothing more!' said Alexei Turbin to himself, alone in his room across the lobby from Elena. He had divined what she was thinking and it infuriated him. 'He's a swine - and I'm a weakling. Kicking him out might have been going too far, but I should at least have turned my back on him. To h.e.l.l with him. And it's not because he left Elena at a time like this that he's a swine, that has really very little to do with it - no, it's because of something quite different. But what, exactly? It's only too clear, of course. He's a wax dummy without the slightest conception of decency! Whatever he says, he talks like a senseless fathead - and he's a graduate of the military academy, who are supposed to be the elite of Russia . . .'

Silence in the apartment. The streak of light from Elena's room was extinguished. She fell asleep and her thoughts faded away, but for a long time Alexei Turbin sat unhappily at the little writing desk in his little room. The vodka and the hock had violently disagreed with him. He sat looking with red-rimmed eyes at a page of the first book he happened to pick up and tried to read, his mind always flicking senselessly back to the same line: 'Honor is to a Russian but a useless burden . . .'

It was almost morning when he undressed and fell asleep. He dreamed of a nasty little man in baggy check pants who said with a sneer: 'Better not sit on a hedgehog if you're naked! Holy Russia is a wooden country, poor and . . . dangerous, and to a Russian honor is nothing but a useless burden.'

'Get out!' shouted Turbin in his dream. 'You filthy little rat-I'll get you!' In his dream Alexei sleepily fumbled in his desk drawer for an automatic, found it, tried to shoot the horrible little man, chased after him and the dream dissolved.

For a couple of hours he fell into a deep, black, dreamless sleep and when a pale delicate light began to dawn outside the windows of his room that opened on to the verandah, Alexei began to dream about the City.

Four.

Beautiful in the frost and mist-covered hills above the Dnieper, the life of the City hummed and steamed like a many-layered honeycomb. All day long smoke spiralled in ribbons up to the sky from innumerable chimney-pots. A haze floated over the streets, the packed snow creaked underfoot, houses towered to five, six and even seven storeys. By day their windows were black, while at night they shone in rows against the deep, dark blue sky. As far as the eye could see, like strings of precious stones, hung the rows of electric globes suspended high from the elegant curlicues of tall lamp-posts. By day the streetcars rolled by with a steady, comfortable rumble, with their yellow straw-stuffed seats of handsome foreign design. Shouting as they went cabmen drove from hill to hill and fur collars of sable and silver fox gave beauty and mystery to women's faces.

The gardens lay silent and peaceful, weighed down with white virgin snow. And there were more gardens in the City than any other city in the world. They sprawled everywhere, with their avenues of chestnuts, their terraces of maples and limes.

The beautiful hills rising above the Dnieper were made even lovelier by gardens that rose terrace-wise, spreading, at times flaming into colour like a million sunspots, at others basking in the perpetual gentle twilight of the Imperial Gardens, the terrifying drop over the escarpment quite unprotected by the ancient, rotting black beams of the parapet. The sheer hillsides, lashed by snowstorms, fell away to the distant terraces below which in turn spread further and wider, merging into the tree-lined embankments that curved along the bank of the great river. Away and away wound the dark river like a ribbon of forged steel, into the haze, further than the eye could see even from the City's highest eminence, on to the Dnieper Rapids, to the Zaporozhian Sech, to the Chersonese, to the far distant sea.

In winter, more than in any other city in the world, quiet fell over the streets and alleyways of the two halves of the City - the Upper City on the hilltops and the Lower City spread along the curve of the frozen Dnieper - and the City's mechanical roar retreated inside the stone buildings, grew m.u.f.fled and sank to a low hum. All the City's energy, stored up during a summer of suns.h.i.+ne and thunderstorms, was expended in light. From four o'clock in the afternoon light would start to burn in the windows of the houses, in the round electric globes, in the gas street-lamps, in the illuminated house-numbers and in the vast windows of electric power-stations, turning people's thoughts towards the terrifying prospect of man's electric-powered future, those great windows through which could be glimpsed the machines whose desperate, ceaselessly revolving wheels shook the earth to its very core. All night long the City shone, glittered and danced with light until morning, when the lights went out and the City cloaked itself once more in smoke and mist.

But the brightest light of all was the white cross held by the gigantic statue of St Vladimir atop Vladimir Hill. It could be seen from far, far away and often in summer, in thick black mist, amid the osier-beds and tortuous meanders of the age-old river, the boatmen would see it and by its light would steer their way to the City and its wharves. In winter the cross would glow through the dense black clouds, a frozen unmoving landmark towering above the gently sloping expanse of the eastern bank, whence two vast bridges were flung across the river. One, the ponderous Chain Bridge that led to the right-bank suburbs, the other high, slim and urgent as an arrow that carried the trains from where, far away, crouched another city, threatening and mysterious: Moscow.

In that winter of 1918 the City lived a strange unnatural life which is unlikely ever to be repeated in the twentieth century. Behind the stone walls every apartment was overfilled. Their normal inhabitants constantly squeezed themselves into less and less s.p.a.ce, w.i.l.l.y-nilly making way for new refugees crowding into the City, all of whom arrived across the arrow-like bridge from the direction of that enigmatic other city.

Among the refugees came gray-haired bankers and their wives, skilful businessmen who had left behind their faithful deputies in Moscow with instructions to them not to lose contact with the new world which was coming into existence in the Muscovite kingdom; landlords who had secretly left their property in the hands of trusted managers; industrialists, merchants, lawyers, politicians. There came journalists from Moscow and Petersburg, corrupt, grasping and cowardly. Prost.i.tutes. Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young h.o.m.os.e.xuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and p.a.w.nbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres. Squeezing its way through the crack, this ma.s.s of people converged on the City.

All spring, beginning with the election of the Hetman, refugees had poured into the City. In apartments people slept on divans and chairs. They dined in vast numbers at rich men's tables. Countless little restaurants were opened which stayed open for business until far into the night, cafes which sold both coffee and women, new and intimate little theatres where the most famous actors bent themselves into contortions to raise a laugh among the refugees from two capitals. That famous theatre, the Lilac Negro, was opened and a gorgeous night club for poets, actors and artists called Dust and Ashes kept its cymbals ringing on Nikolaevsky Street until broad daylight. New magazines sprang up overnight and the best pens in Russia began writing articles in them abusing the Bolsheviks. All day long cab-drivers drove their pa.s.sengers from restaurant to restaurant, at night the band would strike up in the cabaret and through the tobacco smoke glowed the unearthly beauty of exhausted, white-faced, drugged prost.i.tutes.

The City swelled, expanded, overflowed like leavened dough rising out of its baking-tin. The gambling clubs rattled on until dawn, where some gamblers were from Petersburg and others from the City itself, others still were stiff, proud German majors and lieutenants whom the Russians feared and respected, card-sharpers from Moscow clubs and Russo-Ukrainian landlords whose lives and property hung by a thread. At Maxim's cafe a plump, fascinating Roumanian made his violin whistle like a nightingale; his gorgeous eyes sad and languorous with bluish whites, and his hair like velvet. The lights, shaded with gypsy shawls, cast two sorts of light - white electric light downwards, orange light upwards and sideways. The ceiling was draped starlike with swathes of dusty blue silk, huge diamonds glittered and rich auburn Siberian furs shone from dim, intimate corners. And it smelled of roasted coffee, sweat, vodka and French perfume.

All through the summer of 1918 the cab-drivers did a roaring trade and the shop windows were crammed with flowers, great slabs of rich filleted sturgeon hung like golden planks and the two-headed eagle glowed on the labels of sealed bottles of Abrau, that delicious Russian champagne. All that summer the pressure of newcomers mounted - men with gristly-white faces and grayish, clipped toothbrush moustaches, operatic tenors with gleaming polished boots and insolent eyes, ex-members of the State Duma in pince-nez, wh.o.r.es with resounding names. Billiard players took girls to shops to buy them lipstick, nail-polish, and ladies' panties in gauzy chiffon, cut out in the most curious places.

They sent off letters through the only escape-hole across turbulent, insecure Poland (not one of them, incidentally, had the slightest idea what was going on there or even what sort of place this new country - Poland - was) to Germany, that great nation of honest Teutons - begging for visas, transferring money, sensing that before long they would have to flee Russian territory altogether to where they would be finally and utterly safe from the terrible civil war and the thunder of Bolshevik regiments. They dreamed of France, of Paris, in anguish at the thought that it was extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible to get there. And there were other thoughts, vague and more frightening, which would suddenly come to mind in sleepless nights on divans in other people's apartments.

'And what if. . . what if that steel cordon were to snap . . . And the gray hordes poured in. The horror . . .'

These thoughts would come at those times when from far, far away came the dull thump of gunfire: for some reason firing went on outside the City throughout the whole of that glittering, hot summer, when those gray, metallic Germans kept the peace all around, whilst in the City itself they could hear the perpetual m.u.f.fled crack of rifle-fire on the outskirts. Who was shooting at whom, n.o.body knew. It happened at night. And by day people were rea.s.sured by the occasional sight of a regiment of German hussars trotting down the main street, the Kreshchatik, or down Vladimir Street. And what regiments they were! Fur busbies crowning proud faces, scaly bra.s.s chinstraps clasping stone-hard jaws, the tips of red 'Kaiser Wilhelm' moustaches pointing upward like twin arrows. Squadrons of horses advancing in tight ranks of four, powerful seventeen-hand chestnuts, all six hundred troopers encased in blue-gray tunics like the cast-iron uniforms on the statues of their ponderous Germanic heroes that adorned the city of Berlin.

People who saw them were cheered and rea.s.sured, and jeered at the distant Bolsheviks, who were furiously grinding their teeth on the other side of the barbed wire along the border.

They hated the Bolsheviks, but not with the kind of aggressive hatred which spurs on the hater to fight and kill, but with a cowardly hatred which whispers around dark corners. They hated by night, choking with anxiety, by day in restaurants reading newspapers full of descriptions of Bolsheviks shooting officers and bankers in the back of the neck with Mausers, and how the Moscow shopkeepers were selling horsemeat infected with glanders. All of them - merchants, bankers, industrialists, lawyers, actors, landlords, prost.i.tutes, ex-members of the State Council, engineers, doctors and writers, felt one thing in common-hatred.

And there were officers, officers who had fled from the north and from the west - the former front line - and they all headed for the City. There were very many of them and their numbers increased all the time. They risked their lives to come because being officers, mostly penniless and bearing the ineradicable stamp of their profession, they of all refugees had the greatest difficulty in acquiring forged papers to enable them to get across the frontier. Yet they did manage to cross the line and appeared in the City with hunted looks, lousy and unshaven, without badges of rank, and adopted any expedient which enabled them to stay alive and eat. Among them were old inhabitants of the City who had returned home with the same idea in their minds as Alexei Turbin - to rest, recuperate and start again by building a new life, not a soldier's life but an ordinary human existence; there were also hundreds of others for whom staying in Petersburg or Moscow was out of the question. Some of them - the Cuira.s.siers, Chevalier Guards, Horse Guards and Guards Lancers - swam easily in the murky sc.u.m of the City's life in that troubled time. The Hetman's bodyguard wore fantastic uniforms and at the Hetman's tables there was room for up to two hundred people with slicked-down hair and mouthfuls of decayed yellow teeth with gold fillings. Anyone who was not found a place in the Hetman's bodyguard was found an even softer billet by women in expensive fur coats in opulent, panelled apartments in Lipki, the most exclusive part of town, or settled into restaurants or hotel rooms.

Others, such as staff-captains of shattered and disbanded regiments of the line, or hussars who had been in the thick of the fighting like Colonel Nai-Turs, hundreds of ensigns and second lieutenants, former students like Karas, their careers ruined by the war and the revolution, and first lieutenants, who had also enlisted from university but who could never go back and study, like Viktor Myshlaevsky. In their stained gray coats, with still unhealed wounds, with a torn dark strip on each shoulder where their badges of rank had been, they arrived in the City and they slept on chairs, in their own homes or in other people's, using their greatcoats as blankets. They drank vodka, roamed about, tried to find something to do and boiled with anger. It was these men who hated the Bolsheviks with the kind of direct and burning hatred which could drive them to fight.

And there were officer cadets. When the revolution broke out there were four officer-cadet schools in the City - an engineers' school, an artillery school and two infantry schools. They were closed and broken up to a rattle of gunfire from mutinous soldiery and boys just out of high school and first-year students were thrown out on to the street crippled and wounded. They were not children and not adults, neither soldiers nor civilians, but boys like the seventeen-year-old Nikolka Turbin . . .

'Of course I'm delighted to think that the Ukraine is under the benevolent sway of the Hetman. But I have never yet been able to discover, and in all probability never will until my dying day, just exactly who is this invisible despot with a t.i.tle that sounds more appropriate to the seventeenth century than the twentieth.'

'Yes - exactly who is he, Alexei?'

'An ex-officer of the Chevalier Guards, a general, rich landowner, his name is Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky . . .'

By some curious irony of fate and history his election, held in April 1918, took place in a circus-a fact which will doubtless provide future historians with abundant material for humor. The people, however, in particular the settled inhabitants of the City who had already experienced the first shocks of civil war, not only failed to see the humor of the situation but were unable to discern any sense in it at all. The election had taken place with bewildering speed. Before most people knew it had happened it was all over -and G.o.d bless the Hetman. What did it matter anyway, just so long as there was meat and bread in the market and no shooting in the streets, and so long - above all - as the Bolsheviks were kept out and the common people were kept from looting. Well, more or less all of this was put into effect under the Hetman - indeed to a considerable degree. At least the Moscow and Petersburg refugees and the majority of people in the City itself, even though they laughed at the Hetman's curious state and like Captain Talberg called it a ludicrous operetta, sincerely blessed the Hetman, and said to themselves 'G.o.d grant that it lasts for ever'.

But whether it could last for ever, no one could say - not even the Hetman himself.

For the fact was that although life in the City went on with apparent normality - it had a police force, a civil service, even an army and newspapers with various names - not a single person in it knew what was going on around and about the City, in the real Ukraine, a country of tens of millions of people, bigger than France. They not only knew nothing about the distant parts of the country, but they were even, ridiculous though it seems, in utter ignorance of what was happening in the villages scattered about twenty or thirty miles away from the City itself. They neither knew nor cared about the real Ukraine and they hated it with all their heart and soul. And whenever there came vague rumors of events from that mysterious place called 'the country', rumors that the Germans were robbing the peasants, punis.h.i.+ng them mercilessly and mowing them down by machine-gun fire, not only was not a single indignant voice raised in defense of the Ukrainian peasants but, under silken lampshades in drawing-rooms, they would bare their teeth in a wolfish grin and mutter: 'Serve them right! And a bit more of that sort of treatment wouldn't do 'em any harm either. I'd give it 'em even harder. That'll teach them to have a revolution - didn't want their own masters, so now they can have a taste of another!'

'You're so mistaken . . .'

'What on earth d'you mean, Alexei? They're nothing more than a bunch of animals. The Germans'll show 'em . . .'

The Germans were everywhere. At least, they were all over the Ukraine; but away to the north and east beyond the furthest line of the blue-brown forest were the Bolsheviks. Only these two forces counted.

Five.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, a third force appeared on the vast chessboard. A poor chess-player, having fenced himself off from his opponent with a line of p.a.w.ns (an appropriate image, as Germans in their steel helmets look very like p.a.w.ns) will surround his toy king with his stronger pieces - his officers. But suddenly the opponent's queen finds a sly way in from the side, advances to the back line and starts to knock out p.a.w.ns and knights from the rear and checks the terrified king. In the queen's wake comes a fast-moving bishop, the knights zig-zag into action and in no time the wretched player is doomed, his wooden king checkmated.

All of this happened very quickly, but not suddenly, and not before the appearance of certain omens.

One day in May, when the City awoke looking like a pearl set in turquoise and the sun rose up to shed its light on the Hetman's kingdom; when the citizens were already going about their little affairs like ants; and sleepy shop-a.s.sistants had begun opening the shutters, a terrible and ominous sound boomed out over the City. No one had ever heard a noise of quite that pitch before - it was unlike either gunfire or thunder - but so powerful that many windows flew open of their own accord and every pane rattled. Then the sound was repeated, boomed its way around the Upper City, rolled down in waves towards Podol, the Lower City, crossed the beautiful deep-blue Dnieper and vanished in the direction of distant Moscow. It was followed instantly by shocked and bloodstained people running howling and screaming down from Pechyorsk, the Upper City. And the sound was heard a third time, this time so violently that windows began shattering in the houses of Pechyorsk and the ground shook underfoot. Many people saw women running in nothing but their underclothes and shrieking in terrible voices. The source of the sound was soon discovered. It had come from Bare Mountain outside the City right above the Dnieper, where vast quant.i.ties of ammunition and gunpowder were stored. There had been an explosion on Bare Mountain.

For five days afterwards they lived in terror, expecting poison gas to pour down from Bare Mountain. But the explosions ceased, no gas came, the bloodstained people disappeared and the City regained its peaceful aspect in all of its districts, with the exception of a small part of Pechyorsk where several houses had collapsed. Needless to say the German command set up an intensive investigation, and needless to say the City learned nothing of the cause of the explosions. Various rumors circulated.

'It was done by French spies.'

'No, the explosion was produced by Bolshevik spies.'

In the end people simply forgot about the explosions.

The second omen occurred in summer, when the City was swathed in rich, dusty green foliage, thunder cracked and rumbled and the German lieutenants consumed oceans of soda-water. The second omen was truly appalling.

One day on Nikolaevsky Street, in broad daylight, just beside the cab-stand, no less a person than the commander-in-chief of the German forces in the Ukraine, that proud and inviolable military pro-consul of Kaiser Wilhelm, Field Marshal Eichhorn was shot dead! His a.s.sa.s.sin was, of course, a workman and, of course, a socialist. Twenty-four hours after the death of the Field Marshal the Germans had hanged not only the a.s.sa.s.sin but even the cab driver who had driven him to the scene of the incident. This did nothing, it is true, towards resurrecting the late distinguished Field Marshal, but it did cause a number of intelligent people to have some startling thoughts about the event.

That evening, for instance, gasping by an open window and unb.u.t.toning his tussore s.h.i.+rt, Vasilisa had sat over a cup of lemon tea and said to Alexei Turbin in a mysterious whisper: 'When I think about all these things that have been happening I can't help coming to the conclusion that our lives are extremely insecure. It seems to me that the ground (Vasilisa waved his stubby little fingers in the air) is s.h.i.+fting under the Germans' feet.

Just think . . . Eichhorn . . . and where it happened. See what I mean.' (Vasilisa's eyes looked frightened.) Alexei listened, gave a grim twitch of his cheek and went.

Yet another omen appeared the very next morning and burst upon Vasilisa himself. Early, very early, when the sun was sending one of its cheerful beams down into the dreary bas.e.m.e.nt doorway that led from the backyard into Vasilisa's apartment, he looked out and saw the omen standing in the sunlight. She was incomparable in the glow of her thirty years, the glittering necklace on her queenly neck, her shapely bare legs, her generous, resilient bosom. Her teeth flashed, and her eyelashes cast a faint, lilac-colored shadow on her cheeks.

'Fifty kopecks today', said the omen in a lilac-colored voice, pointing to her pail of milk.

'What?' exclaimed Vasilisa plaintively. 'For pity's sake, Yav-dokha - forty the day before yesterday, forty-five yesterday and now today it's fifty. You can't go on like this.'

'It's not my fault. Milk's dear everywhere', replied the lilac voice. 'They tell me in the market it's fetching a rouble in some places.'