The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Secret City, by Hugh Walpole

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Title: The Secret City

Author: Hugh Walpole

Release Date: May 14, 2004 [EBook #12349]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET CITY ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Jeremy Eble and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.

BY HUGH WALPOLE

_STUDIES IN PLACE_
THE SECRET CITY
THE DARK FOREST
THE GOLDEN SCARECROW
THE WOODEN HORSE
MARADICK AT FORTY
THE GODS AND MR. PERRIN

_TWO PROLOGUES_
THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE
FORTITUDE

_THE RISING CITY_
1. THE DUCHESS OF WREXE
2. THE GREEN MIRROR

THE SECRET CITY

A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS

BY

HUGH WALPOLE

AUTHOR OF "FORTITUDE," "THE DARK FOREST," "THE DUCHESS OF WREXE," ETC.

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1919 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

MAJOR JAMES ANNAND (15TH BATTALION 48TH HIGHLANDERS, C.E.F.)

IN RETURN FOR THE GIFT OF HIS FRIENDSHIP

In the eastern quarter dawn breaks, the stars flicker pale.
The morning cock at Ju-nan mounts the wall and crows.
The songs are over, the clock run down, but still the feast is set.
The Moon grows dim and the stars are few; morning has come to the world.
At a thousand gates and ten thousand doors the fish-shaped keys turn;
Round the Palace and up by the Castle, the crows and magpies are flying.

_Cock-Crow Song_. Anon. (1st Century B.C.).

CONTENTS

PART I Vera And Nina

PART II Lawrence

PART III Markovitch And Semyonov

PART I

VERA AND NINA

THE SECRET CITY

VERA AND NINA

I

There are certain things that I feel, as I look through this bundle of
manuscript, that I must say. The first is that of course no writer ever
has fulfilled his intention and no writer ever will; secondly, that
there was, when I began, another intention than that of dealing with my
subject adequately, namely that of keeping myself outside the whole of
it; I was to be, in the most abstract and immaterial sense of the word,
a voice, and that simply because this business of seeing Russian
psychology throu