the glance of some women, the voice of a young
soldier--I felt behind us, watching us, the thick heavy figure of
Rasputin. I smelt the eastern scent of the sunflower seeds, I looked
back and glanced at the impenetrable superiority of the two policemen,
and I laughed at myself for the knowledge that I thought I had, for the
security upon which I thought that I rested, for the familiarity with
which I had fancied I could approach my neighbours.... I was not wise, I
was not secure, I had no claim to familiarity....

The lights were down and we were shown pictures of Paris. Because the
cinema was a little one and the prices small the films were faded and
torn, so that the Opera and the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre and
the Seine danced and wriggled and broke before our eyes. They looked
strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd
semi-civilisation in which we were living. There were comments all
around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a
party.... The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head swam
a little and I seemed to see Rasputin, swelling in his black robe,
catching us all into its folds, sweeping us up into the starlight sky.
We were under the flare of the light again. I caught Bohun's happy eyes;
he was talking eagerly to Vera Michailovna, not removing his eyes from
her face. She had conquered him; I fancied as I looked at her that her
thoughts were elsewhere.

There followed a Vaudeville entertainment. A woman and a man in
peasants' dress came and laughed raucously, without meaning, their eyes
narrowly searching the depths of the house, then they stamped their feet
and whirled around, struck one another, laughed again, and vanished.

The applause was half-hearted. Then there was a trainer of dogs, a
black-eyed Tartar with four very miserable little fox-terriers, who
shivered and trembled and jumped reluctantly through hoops. The audience
liked this, and cried and shouted and threw paper pellets at the dogs. A
stout perspiring Jew in a shabby evening suit came forward and begged
for decorum. Then there appeared a stout little man in a top hat who
wished to recite verses of, I gathered, a violent indecency. I was
uncomfortable about Vera Michailovna, but I need not have been. The
indecency was of no importance to her, and she was interested in the
human tragedy of the performer. Tragedy it was. The man was hungry and
dirty and not far from tears. H