Tomorrow Will Come

I

THE Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed — we heard of it through a sequence of rumors. Peace bells rang in Europe — we knew nothing of their peal until a long time after. Our newspaper was the tongue of the bread queue, our frontier the granite girdle of the Nicholas Quay. We lived on the Vassily Island, and the outside world threatened too much for us to undertake light-hearted excursions. Even bridges and outlying streets were not safe. The dreadful music of machine guns had long been stilled; not so the occasional shot in the dark.

There was only one terrible urgency — food. Rent had ceased. Mother’s small income, which came from the Imperial Chancery, had also ceased the very first day of the Revolution. We had nothing else. Some fortunate ones, their bank resources denied them, could fall back on what valuable things they had within their homes. We had the slenderest possessions imaginable, and their total worth was little enough. People of the ancien régime bought expensive food by selling furs, plate, and jewels; our few silver spoons and our pathetically tiny hoard of trinkets would not have supported us for a month. Others spent time and substance in devising means of escape. Such a venture was beyond us; sums quoted by occasional acquaintances made us feel dizzy.

‘We can’t escape,’ said my mother, ‘we must see it through’; and she added, ‘I am not being heroic, but commonplace. There is nothing else for us to do.’

I had forgotten about Oxford and history by that time; I had forgotten that a daily paper used to be a pleasant thing to see in the morning. I had forgotten most things except God, who had given me a mother to learn from. She never preached: she lived, and from her I was now learning day by day that life could be not merely possible but even worthwhile in spite of cold, darkness, hunger, and inevitable dirt.

Nobody ever molested us in the onewindowed room with two iron bedsteads, trunks, and a great padlock on the door. Midnight searches, ‘legally’ organized by the Red Guards, passed us by. But the porter had long since gone from his lodge, the great block was open to all and any marauders, and an ordinary key would not have been enough to check them.

Anna Feodorovna, fat, florid, fifty, and nice, was a midwife who had her room farther down the passage. She was a peasant woman, unlettered, rough, and slightly too communicative about her work, but she succeeded in placing my first literary job in my hands, at a publishing firm where her niece did charwork. A few publishers were still left in Petrograd, though the one I went to was a new one, fired by a novel and grandiose ambition to acquaint the Russian masses with European classics in ‘proletarian dress.’ The offices were in the back yard of an extremely ancient building. I opened the door, and found myself in a room packed with paper and humanity. Did I know any English? They wanted several poems translated: their own people knew no English. Would I do the work?

A sandy-moustached little man told me to follow him into a second drab room, also packed with papers, books, and people. Another man stood by the window, reading a proof. The sandy moustache grew voluble. ‘She can do it. . . . Splendid!’ ‘Splendid,’rejoined the proofreader, without a glance at me. ‘Tell her the rates and give the books.’

I brushed the titles with a cautious glance. ‘All these? . . . Yes, but . . .’ I saw myself buried in them for months, if not years — Coleridge, Swinburne, something of Byron, and Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. The sandy moustache realized that he had been talking in a fog. ‘You’ll have to put the Russian equivalent under the English words — in pencil, please, but legibly. We’ll pay you’ — it worked out at something like a farthing for six lines, but it seemed wealth to me. ‘ Sign for them.’ He thrust a narrow paper slip under my nose. I signed. He barely looked at the signature. ‘You’ll be paid as soon as these are brought back.’ He pushed me towards the door. They had not asked for my address, and I ran down the Nevsky, the volumes in my arms.

It was a bitingly cold February. I worked mostly in bed, my hands wrapped in odds and ends of wool and rug to make up for the gloves we owned no longer. ‘Write in pencil, but legibly.’ A pencil was something dearer than flour. I had a few left from those remote pre-1917 days. But, as I came to the end of Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, I saw that pencils used themselves up with a ruthless rapidity.

We had no clock, and I knew it was midnight by the sudden rush of darkness. I groped round my bed, depositing pencils and books in safety. I fell asleep, imagining another day among lovely words and great ideas. At last the volumes were done. The journey to the Nevsky was repeated. The sandy moustache furnished me with another gray slip for the cashier. I had some money and more books.

But the third expedition was shorn of all that glory. The sandy moustache was nowhere to be seen. Those who rushed about, proofs and manuscripts in their hands, ignored me. I found the cashier’s warren and handed over the finished work. He almost swept the books aside. ‘You mustn’t come here, you mustn’t come here’ — he sounded fussy and annoyed. ‘I have not been paid for these,’ I ventured to insist, and he measured me with an ironical look. ‘Well, what about coming tomorrow? Leave these here. Nobody will gobble them up.’ I came the next day and once more — at my third visit I found the door boarded up, and a brief notice announced that the publishing firm had closed down.

‘Never mind, little pigeon.’ Anna Feodorovna refused to see any calamity in my experience. ‘Something will turn up.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Come to the hospital. We want a lot of writing done in the office.’

I sent my application to the hospital board. In spite of the prevailing chaos, even Anna Feodorovna could not interfere there. They took about a fortnight to consider my application. It seemed life or death to me — because of my mother.

It was late April, the winter had gone — a winter of cold, dark, and hunger. Pack ice had vanished from the face of the Neva, and I could see young grass pushing up here and there between the cracks in the pavements. The only trees down the length of the Bolshoy Prospect were breaking into leaf, and it seemed almost easy to glean new hope and strength from all the beauty waking up from the soil. But the winter had been such a thief. It had stolen things that spring seemed unable to bring back — strength and health of so many people in the city. I only knew that stairs seemed so much to Mother, that tiny efforts brought more and more exhaustion, that the worn, sapped flesh seemed more and more in the ascendant where once the spirit had moved so firmly and triumphantly.

At last I received word that they had approved of my application. I found myself almoner at the Stock Exchange Hospital. I knew little about my duties, but the matron, obviously tired of considering an endless queue of applicants, said that it would be a blessing to find someone who could read and write. The pay was slender, but in those days nobody gauged a job in directly monetary terms. There were generous food rations — millet, flour, condensed milk, and even sugar on occasion. I began my work the day after one such distribution. The matron tried to get me my share in advance, but she failed, and I had something like thirteen days to wait for the next ‘food day.’ Some dates become graven in the memory — nineteenth of April to the second of May.

I had my work to take my mind away from the dread I could no longer escape at home. Also our life was rudely interrupted by the sudden going of Anna Feodorovna: her sister having been taken ill in Moscow, she ‘wangled’ a railway ticket and left. The block on the Bolshoy Prospect held no more friends. But ‘on the second of May, ‘ I kept repeating to myself, ‘ I shall see Mother eating properly, and then it will be summer, and things must get better next winter: nothing could be worse than the last one.’

Early in the morning of the second of May, I left her in bed by the opened window; the lilac tree in the courtyard was in breaking bud. ‘When the lilac is in bloom, I always wish we lived on the ground floor,’ I said to her. An indeterminate old body on the floor below would, I knew, look after her few wants during the day — a good third of my rations had already been mortgaged that way. And I went to work, an empty sack slung over my shoulder.

It was a very busy day. I got off about seven in the evening, and then there was the distribution of food. I came back to the house on the Bolshoy Prospect. The chairman of the house committee met me in the doorway. He stopped.

‘Two whole rooms, haven’t you? Well, you’ll have to look for smaller quarters now that your mother is dead.’

‘I must go upstairs! ‘ I must have said something of the kind when he checked me.

‘We have had her taken away. The Stock Exchange Hospital mortuary . . . aren’t you working there? I might have remembered and sent word to you.’

I spent that night on a bench in a consulting room at the Hospital, the useless food bundles lying on the floor beside me. The matron knew and would not object. People were all the kinder because I could not respond to any kindness.

II

I had a decent job and enough food, but I had no home. About a week later a thin, sallow-faced patient, wife of a chemist, came up to my desk and whispered that she had a room to spare. I went to them, and in their poky flat I stayed till July. Their kindness beggared all description. They refused to accept either money or food for rent.

My duties at the hospital were simple enough. Each outpatient had a card, kept in the files in alphabetical order. On his or her coming, the card had to be taken out of the files and slipped into the appropriate pigeonhole on my desk. There were several of them, each neatly labeled ‘Lungs,’ ‘Skin,’ ‘Oculist,’ ‘Dentist,’ and so on. When the doctors arrived, the sister in charge came to my desk, grabbed the cards, and the patients were called up in their turn. The ambulatory closed at six, but the day’s report had to be made out of the remarks scribbled on the cards by the doctors. Sometimes those reports took two or three hours.

For something like three months the patients were merely cards and voices to me. I worked like fury, but I was unaware of them as separate individuals. Then one morning a fussy sister chose to clean and wash a very dusty mirror hanging on the wall behind my desk. I came in. I saw my face reflected in it. It made me furiously angry for the space of one morning, but very likely the washing of a mirror ended by waking me up. I was not yet twenty-one, and it was a shock to find myself staring at a set and hardened face, and to know it for my own.

‘And this face,’ I thought vaguely, ‘looks out on what?’ On a room full of brooding, smelly, grumbling men and women, who had better remain so many differently colored cards, suggested my impatient, benumbed, and hardened self, as reflected in the mirror. Or else that face looked at a room full of patient and uncomplaining folk who had long ago learned to endure without saying much about it, and who had turned their very endurance into something rare and precious, suggested another barely awakened self, of whose very existence I was still unaware. I could no longer think of them as cards.

One morning a nurse strode up to my desk. I knew her well. She was a violent Communist, untidy and unpunctual; she broke nearly all the rules, was an everpresent thorn in the matron’s flesh, but, by virtue of her membership in the Party, she sat on the hospital committee, had a vote in all medical and clerical appointments, and could not be dismissed from her post under any pretext whatsoever.

Now she elbowed her way through the crowd waiting round the screen, put her arms on the edge of the desk, and demanded to be put down for the dentist. ‘First turn, mind — I am busy today.’

A man on crutches was standing before me, and I was hurrying over his card. A few seconds slipped by, and the girl banged her fist on the desk. Two or three patients looked frightened. A card file clattered to the floor. My assistant stooped to pick it up. Blood leapt to my face.

‘Ivanoff, done! Next, please.’

‘Put me down for the dentist.’ This time she added an unprintable word to her request, and I had to say something. My head over a card box, I snapped that I would ring for the Commandant if she did not move away instantly.

‘Ah, you will, will you? Here is sabotage! I am on duty the whole day and I can’t suit your convenience. Put me down at once for the dentist.’

Next to her stood a quiet elderly woman with her arm in a sling. The girl raised her hand to bang the desk once again. She brought down her fist so suddenly that it missed the desk and fell on the bandaged arm. I heard something like a hurriedly muffled groan, and the girl shouted, ‘What are you making faces for? Think yourself a heroine with all those bandages on? A softy, that’s what you are.’

But she stopped, for, leaning across the desk, I raised my own arm and hit her on her thickly powdered cheek. She staggered back for a second; then, one hand to her cheek, she rushed out of the room screaming ‘Murder!’ with all her lung power, which was considerable.

Hot with fury and shame, I turned to the card files. My hands were trembling. The room was oddly still. It was hard to believe that some fifty or sixty people were in it. But the silence was soon broken by the Commandant, a fussy, stout woman, who ran in. ‘Now what is the trouble?’ she shouted from the door. ‘Surely you never hit her?’

The crowd kept still, though they might have so easily chorused, ‘Oh yes, she did,’ and so put themselves into the good graces of both Commandant and Communist. But they kept silent. I found a shred of courage to answer, ‘I did. She was so insolent and used foul language. That did not matter to me. But she hurt one of my patients, an old woman.’

The committee was summoned. Having refused to apologize for ‘the assault,’ I was fined. ‘The wildcat,’ however, decided to keep away from the ambulatory. A sister arranged for her appointment with the dentist. That no longer concerned me.

When I returned home that night I learned that the chemist and his wife were about to leave. He had been appointed to a job in the South of Russia, and he dared not refuse to go. He had about forty-eight hours given him to get ready. His wife cried and wanted me to keep her Persian shawl. Their modest quarters had already been commandeered by the house committee, ‘and now you’ll have to go and search for another home,’ she said tearfully.

The day they left I found a burly nurse installed behind my desk. She was there instead of me, she said, and I went to see the matron.

‘I have to do what I am told,’ she sniffed into her handkerchief. ‘There will be a fortnight’s rations in advance. I feel sure you will find something else. Of course, if things go too badly, I might be able to manage a pound of bread for you now and again. You will let me know, won’t you?’ And she whisked out her handkerchief again, and I knew that if she had had her will I should never have lost that job. So I thanked her warmly and went out.

III

About six hours of daylight were left. It meant that I had six hours to find a home and, unaccountably, I wasted one of those hours on a visit to the housing committee of the local commissariat. They were neither rude nor unkind, but they had no home to offer me. ‘What about the place where you are working?’ suggested a mild-faced clerk. ‘They should be able to provide for you.’ When I mentioned having lost that job, he shook his head. The unemployed, it seemed, had to shift for themselves. The housing committee were hard put to it to find shelter for those who worked. . . .

I halted at the buildings of the exImperial Institute of Mines. I remembered that my father had once been connected with the Institute. The place seemed empty and quiet, and no uniformed porter came out to pepper me with inquiries. I went on through the huge untidy courtyard; myriads of grimy windowpanes looked at me blindly from the four sides of the building. The place seemed inhuman, deserted, as frozen as a lump of quartz in prehistoric ice. ‘I wonder if anyone is living here,’ I thought, when I saw a woman come out from one of the doorways.

She was of middle height, with a broad pale face. Over a loose fur coat she wore a thick gray shawl, and yards of bright yellow stuff were swathed round her head. She shuffled along, her hands stuffed into a shabby astrakhan muff. She took no notice of me, but I ran up to her.

‘ I am sorry. Could you tell me please if Madame X still lives here?’

I might have asked her whether she carried dangerous explosives in her muff. She dropped it in the snow, and staggered back, her blue-veined hands raised to her face.

‘I am Madame X,’ she said thickly. ‘What can you want with me?’

I had never met her before. Now the yellow turban, the pale gray eyes, the thick voice, and the abrupt gesture with which she seized my wrist made me feel frightened. Haltingly I told her who I was, and she listened, her face unchanged. Then she let go of my hand, and picked up the muff.

‘Why didn’t you say so at once? ‘ She dropped into rapid, nervous French. ‘You frightened a poor old woman out of her wits. I thought you were one of the enemies. ... Of course I remember your father. He was a great friend of my poor husband. How sad life is! You look rather like your father. Where are you living now?’

The question fanned the ashes of hope into a faint flame. I told her about my plight.

‘ Of course you are coming here. It is very providential. I am all alone in an enormous flat. There are twelve rooms and no servants to keep anything tidy. Yes, come at once.’

Of the twelve big rooms, some were still furnished, while others stood bleak and bare except for a profusion of dust and cobwebs. In the drawing room was a small tin stove, its clumsy funnel thrust through a broken windowpane. It had been lit in the morning, so she told me, but the great room was cold and damp. The smoke almost stifled me at first. I rubbed it out of my eyes. I could see little else than dust. Velvet-covered chairs and sofas, tables and whatnots, floor boards, were all coated with it. Pictures and mirrors were daubs of yellow-gray. A big table was littered with saucepans, cups and plates, and several chipped teapots. Everything was soiled. Each teacup had a generous coating of dark brown sediment at the bottom. A heel of a rye loaf had grown green with mildew. But I stood under a roof; dust and dirt could be remedied in time.

So I left Madame X alone in her dusty kingdom, ran back to the hospital, and told the matron of my good fortune. In less than an hour I returned, pushing a sledge piled high with my belongings and rations. Through the thick curtain of smoke in the drawing room I saw Madame X get up and come forward, and I thought, ‘ She is certainly queer, but she has a kind heart.’

I laid my bundles on the least littered table. She had got ‘tea’ ready for me, and, sipping the weak strawberry-leaf concoction out of a Dresden cup, I told her that I was looking for a job.

The innocent remark annoyed Madame X. The whole world, she said acidly, was either looking for a job or else doing one. Most jobs were quite futile. Hers, of course, differed from all the others.

‘It is most providential that you should have come here. Now we can begin working together, and between us we shall put the devil under our feet.’ She rapidly dispatched the last of the buns and looked at me with something like strange satisfaction. I had a curious fleeting feeling as though she were seeing a blank wall in me and preparing to start her own picture on it. I said nothing. There was no point in getting frightened. Unprompted, Madame X proceeded to enlighten me.

‘My dear father was a doctor. This used to belong to him. It is full of most lovely poisons. I am fighting the devil with them’ — and she snapped open the lid of a shabby leather box. I saw row upon row of grayish glass bottles, filled with tablets of different shapes and colors. For all I knew, they might have been dangerous poison. Again, they might have been harmless enough, but I judged it wiser not to offer immediate comment. Madame X picked up one of the little bottles and fondled it lovingly.

IV

I went on tramping in search of a job. I was lucky enough to find two days’ employment sweeping the snow in front of a house in one of the Lines on the Vassily Island. I cut bread one day for the local store, the bread man having hurt his thumb with a ten-pound weight. I minded a house for a few nights when the man assigned to the job had to go to a hospital. Yet all these were so many stopgaps, maddening in their brief insecurity. There seemed nothing permanent left in the world.

One afternoon in December I came back after several hours of fruitless search for work. I had not had even a casual job for more than a week. It was a day when the frost all but killed the birds in the air, and I found the little stove had nearly burned itself out. My stupidly benumbed fingers proved clumsy with logs and matches. The wood was damp. The matches were pitifully few, and I had to use them very sparingly. But at last one of the sticks caught fire. The mere sight of that slender orangeblue tongue shooting upwards brought on a foolishly emotional reaction.

I nursed the fire, squatting in front of the stove, and I indulged in a reckless outburst of self-pity. It was all coming to an end, I said to myself. If you did no work, you starved, and there was no work to be had. I had offered my services as charwoman at one of the commissariats, but I must have looked too much of a weak reed: they merely shrugged and said they knew I could not possibly cope with the work. Yet I knew I could do anything, because I wanted to live with all the passion in me, and it looked as though nobody else wanted me to go on.

At twenty-one, tears are sometimes good. They were certainly good then. I cried until I felt that nothing could be either worse or better: I found myself groping in a shadowy no-man’s-land where little mattered at all.

But Madame X was back in the room. I looked up. She shuffled no longer, but walked, her head erect.

‘Thank heaven I have caught him at last,’ she cried, clapping her hands. ‘Just imagine, he is in the dining room. I have locked the door on him, but of course anything might happen in a moment. We must act at once. Get up and don’t look stupid. I have no time to explain. He is far more cunning than we know. Come on! ‘

I jumped to my feet, conscious that another bat had invaded Madame X’s belfry.

‘Didn’t you hear me? The devil has got into the furniture in the dining room. Something dreadful will happen unless we act at once. We must take everything out of the room and dump it somewhere in the yard. I don’t care who finds the things. They will be welcome to the devil in them. I refuse to harbor him under my roof.’

Slowly, and gasping at each step, we dragged the enormous mahogany table down the stairs. Nothing but the middle of the yard would satisfy Madame X, and to the middle of the yard we transplanted the devil’s portable habitat, sweat beading our faces in spite of the frost. Then back to the flat for the chairs! After the sixth had been taken to join the table, I got a stitch in my side. Madame X grumbled but accomplished the work alone, and came back to the drawing room panting, sweating, and triumphant.

Within the next few days the devil chose to spread his fleeting perch all over the flat. All the furniture of a bedroom went one evening, but the pile in the yard kept getting smaller and smaller, whatever we dumped on it. In those days some people reaped vast profits out of the madness of others. Furniture, even if useless as such, was always good for fuel.

Having played his pranks about the flat and laid bare almost every room, the devil decided to invade the drawing room. His activities had perforce to cease on the evening when we sat on suitcases and my pile of blankets was spread on the bare floor boards. My sofa and her bed had gone earlier in the afternoon. But Madame X was exultant.

Christmas was coming near. I had spent something like five weeks with Madame X. I was not sure if I could pass another week under her roof. It seemed almost imperative to start looking for another perch as well as for a job.

I tramped towards the Quay, dimly thinking of a certain commissariat I had so far left untried. Suddenly I heard a gruff voice behind me: ‘Can you use one of those machines for writing on?’

I swung around and answered without thinking, ‘You mean a typewriter? Of course I can.’ I suppose I should have given the same answer if asked whether I could build bridges.

‘Then come along and help me. I am like a bear in a bog.’

He looked a ‘chance’ man, a peasant washed on the urban shore by the tide of the new régime. But his eyes were not hostile, and I followed him to the basement of a house in the Eighth Line. The room was apparently used as an office and a living room. From its gloomy depths an untidy woman emerged, stifling a yawn. Her waxen face looked a mask in the shadows. She said nothing, but stood, arms akimbo, challenging me with a piercing look from her small eyes. He hurried me to the end of the room, to a table facing a grimy square apology of a window where a rusty typewriter lorded it over an ocean of ledgers, papers, envelopes, ink bottles, and innumerable scraps of soiled pink blotting paper. It was so noisy at the office, he muttered, that he preferred working at home. He had held his present job for about a fortnight, and had the machine brought over a few days ago, and then found he could do nothing with it.

‘Unemployed, are you? Well, I can’t give you a state job; this is something private — see? Will you work here from nine till four? There will be victuals and a bit of money now and then.’

I pretended to hesitate. Was it a safe job? Could I have something in writing? He exploded.

‘None of that, citizen. . . . Private, I told you. . . . Take it or leave it.’

I took it.

Stepan could hardly wield a pen to scrawl his own signature, let alone work a typewriter. His wife was quite illiterate and regarded any paper covered with writing with the gravest suspicion. But her bark was far worse than her bite. As soon as she saw that I did not prowl about the basement, rummaging in the chests and lockers, she offered me a glass of well-sugared real tea, a buttered roll, and a thick slice of sausage.

I set to clearing up the desk. Agafia ensconced herself at the opposite end of the room. She had some mending in her lap, and she never ceased munching. In about an hour she offered me another ‘snack.’ When an old rheumatic clock announced the noon hour, she bestirred herself to get the dinner ready. We sat down to an incredible meal of cabbage soup, sausages, potatoes, and walnut cheese, halva — all of it washed down by several glasses of tea.

In those days delicacies like wheaten flour, eggs, butter, sardines, jam, even cocoa and chocolate, were still to be had in the city, but people had to get doctors’ prescriptions to receive them from a special depot. If a doctor certified that you were suffering from, say, acute appendicitis, some liver disorder, or even gout, you might be solaced with a tin of Norwegian sardines or else a slab of German chocolate. The prescription, issued by specially appointed doctors, had to be countersigned by officials detailed to deal with such matters. Each district had its own ‘prescription’ store, guarded day and night by armed sentries. Stepan was managing one such store on the Vassily Island.

Of course he stole from the store. They all did. Some doctors plied a successful trade in issuing prescriptions; no price could have been considered too high for soap or chocolate, and there was no other way of obtaining them — unless people belonged to the privileged party circle. Stepan stole as much as and sometimes more than he needed. But he hardly ever made any bones about it. Once, giving me a cake of soap, he said by way of a polite explanation, ‘If I hadn’t clapped my eyes on it, that devil Vanka would have grabbed it. And why should he have had it? He got a lion’s share the last time we had soap in. I told him my turn must come round sometimes. No, he didn’t argue. . . . Thieves we all are, and thieves should not quarrel.’

The work proved monotonous. A list of supplies was sent over from the headquarters, and I had to make about seven copies of each list. At the end of the day Stepan returned with the chits about supplies distributed during the day, and he made it plain that all embezzled things were to be entered as ‘loss in transit and error in stocktaking at headquarters.’ The seven copies meant typing every list seven times over — Stepan’s stock of stationery included no carbon paper. But such details were unimportant. I worked in luxurious warmth and I fed like an Andersen princess. At the end of the week Agafia had compassion on my poorly shod feet, the big toe of my left foot having gone almost black with several near frostbites.

‘I shall give you a pound of butter for the New Year. You can exchange it for a pair of good felt boots. But if there should be a raid and you get caught, mind, don’t say where the butter comes from. You would not like to have my husband stood against the wall, would you?’

V

Having successfully expelled the devil and all her furniture from the flat, Madame X fell into absolute inertia. For days she remained unaware of my presence. She crouched on the floor, her pale eyes fixed on the oil stove. She took what food I brought in, and ate it like an automaton. The victuals were varied, plentiful, and good, but Madame X’s face grew pinched and angular. Her chin jutted out till she ended by resembling a witch out of an old engraving. Her dirty hands went pitifully thin. Obviously she could no longer be left to shift for herself. Yet I could not help her very much; she took no notice of me. I decided that I had better consult my new employers.

I did not expect any sympathy from Stepan, but Agafia I felt certain would help.

It was the last day of 1919. I found Madame X sitting on the pile of dirty, dusty rugs which now served her for a bed. She was shaking from head to foot, clenching and unclenching her fists and repeating that once again she had found the devil in the flat.

I was sorry indeed — not about the devil, but for her. And I suppose that pity drove out all fear that night, otherwise I doubt if I could have stayed in that room. Madame X never stopped mumbling. The candle guttered out and the stove went cold. A day’s hard work sent me to sleep. It was still dark when I woke to hear Madame X’s wooden voice mumbling quite close to me, ‘I am going to act now. The devil is in you. Out you go — this very instant.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper which made me go wild with fear. ‘I picked up my muff yesterday, and I heard the words quite clearly: “Get rid of that girl. You’ll score a great victory.”’ She stopped, and I knew that her bony hand was clenching my right shoulder, and it hurt.

Later, I blessed the darkness around me. Had I seen her face at that moment, I might have fainted, and the devil might have ordered her to kill me then and there. As it was, I leapt and felt that she was staggering back. Somehow I wriggled myself free. We did not undress for bed in those days, and of course I didn’t stop to gather my few belongings. Somehow I groped towards the door. In a few minutes I must have been racing across the yard. The dawn was coming, its timid gray fingers beginning to pattern the tall bleak walls.

The bitter blades of the wind from the Quay made me halt for a second. Where could I go? I don’t suppose I could think clearly that morning because it was some time before I remembered Stepan and Agafia. Yes, I would go there and ask them to see that something was done for poor Madame X. She could not be left alone for another night.

Soon I was knocking at the familiar door. For several minutes I heard no sound from within. I began wondering whether they were still asleep when I heard the cautious shuffle of slippered feet. A bolt was drawn and the key grated in the lock. The door opened an inch, and a voice I could hardly recognize as Agafia’s muttered, ‘Go away. What do you want here? Go away,’ and, my teeth chattering, I pleaded with her to let me in.

She breathed heavily. I could not see her face, but I knew she was hesitating. At last she opened the door just wide enough for me to squeeze through. As soon as I was inside, she bolted and locked the door. I looked round and wondered if my own wits had vanished that night.

The room suggested that a herd of frenzied elephants had stampeded up and down its whole length. Chairs and tables were upside down, most of them splintered. Floor boards were ripped up here and there. All the doors of Agafia’s food cupboards were hanging loose on their hinges, their shelves swept bare. There was no Stepan. I stared at her, and her mouth twitched.

‘They came, the fiends — soon after midnight. . . . They took him away. A “thief” they called him, and is there one honest man among them, I ask you? Not a single crumb, not a single thing did they leave behind! Well, I must save Stepan. I am going to Moscow — Feodor will show them what it means interfering with Stepan. They think Moscow is far away. They’ll see, antichrists!’

Suddenly she thrust a couple of bread cards into my hand. ‘Go to the store, there’s a dear, and get me the day’s rations — else I shall have no food for the journey. You may keep them for yourself. Those are January cards, good for the whole month. . . . But you must not stay here. It might be dangerous.

You never can tell — those fiends might be back today. It is all right with me here, though. . . . The store does not open till eight.’

We sat there in the dismantled room waiting for the clock to strike eight. Then I got up. The store was a good ten minutes’ walk from their house. Agafia begged me to be quick. The soles of my worn boots slipped on the snow once or twice as I ran.

There was nearly an hour to wait for my turn at the store. I grew restive, thinking of Agafia’s probable anxiety over the delay. At last I seized the enormous chunks of rough gray-brown bread — quite obviously those rations must have been very special ones — and started running back to the Eighth Line.

Rounding a corner, I slipped off the pavement on to the street. I lost my balance and fell, the bread still clutched in my arms. There may have been a shout, but I heard it come from a remote distance, and I felt that it did not concern me.

VI

I was in a hospital, and I had no business to be there. Where were Agafia’s bread cards? She had no other food for the journey to Moscow. And there was Madame X, convinced of the devil’s presence in her flat. And I was lying in a warm bed, while Agafia thought me a common thief and Madame X was left uncared for and alone. I remembered falling in the street, but the recollection came in a very muddled fashion, something wholly disconnected from the earlier happenings of the day.

My body seemed whole enough, but I found something strange about my left foot. It seemed rather too big, something that had never before belonged to the rest of my body, and I guessed that I must have broken my ankle. This comforted me. A few broken bones meant staying on in the hospital. By virtue of an accident, home and food of a kind would be mine for several weeks.

‘I am glad they brought you here. But please go to sleep again.’

The nurse should not have spoken in English if she meant me to go to sleep. My eyes opened wide. I saw a vaguely familiar face, but the name eluded me.

‘We have met,’ I whispered very slowly, ‘but where?’

‘You must promise to sleep if I tell you. I used to nurse at the AngloRussian Hospital. We met there often enough. Once you told me all about the history of some imaginary country you wanted to write. But I thought you were British and had gone with the rest of them.’

‘You are Sister Esther.’

‘Yes. There will be plenty of time to talk later on. You must sleep.’

She vanished. I lay with my eyes closed. But sleep was impossible. The world had changed again: it held a friend whom I could tell about Agafia and Madame X. But Sister Esther must not vanish; I opened my eyes and saw her at the end of the long room. I slept.

Early in February they decided I was fit to be discharged. Esther was not on duty that morning. Another sister brought the news to me, a fussy, blackbrowed woman with mind and manner tied up in tidy knots of red tape. The surgeon said I was ready to go, and the hospital would lend me a crutch. There was a long waiting list, and they had no room for purely convalescent cases. I asked dully, ‘When is Sister Esther coming on duty?’

‘I am not talking about any sister,’ she snapped. ‘I was saying that the nurse will bring your clothes in an hour. You may stay till dinner, but we must have the bed ready by one o’clock.’ And she marched away, formal, fussy, and starchy.

All too soon, the food wagon was wheeled in. I received my portion and ate it at the table. Immediately afterwards the black-browed sister sailed up to me. ‘Finished?’ she asserted rather than asked. ‘You are not a patient now, and visitors are not allowed in today. You must go. You will sign for the crutch and bring it back later on.’

‘Yes, I will sign for the crutch and bring it back later on,’ answered my voice.

Could I really hobble all the long way to the Petrograd Side? That grand woman, called Elena something Vlagina, might give me a job, or again she might not. Perhaps Sister Esther might think of something. Surely not! Sister Esther had done so much. I could not worry her about anything else. It was more than enough that she had come in, a friend, a human being, a wonder, and . . . ‘Splendid, Liebchen, I am just in time to take you home.’ Esther, unfamiliar in a rough tweed coat, was by the table.

‘But I have no home,’ I answered in English, and the starchy sister snapped again, ‘Now then, are you ready?’ and I murmured, looking away from Esther, ‘I have no home — but of course I’ll manage somehow. You see, winter is over.’

The next moment that bleak, ochrepainted ward was turned into an anteroom of some fairy palace. There was the sun, of course, and it rioted all over the plain deal table, the chipped enameled plate, and the tin mug, and the softly violet moss shone and gleamed with purple and gold. The sun and the moss were real, because Esther was saying, ‘Don’t be silly. Of course you have a home. It’s only a very small room, but there is enough space for a second bed. I’d have told you before, but I’d no chance to talk it over with Mrs. Strauss till this morning.’

The black-browed sister frowned in disgust.

‘She must go this very instant, Sister Esther. If the doctor were to come in . . . I really can’t have people crying in the ward.’

(To be concluded)