e forgot his verses and glanced nervously
into the wings as though he expected to be beaten publicly by the
perspiring Jew.

He stammered; his mouth wobbled; he covered it with a dirty hand. He
could not continue.

The audience was sympathetic. They listened in encouraging silence; then
they clapped; then they shouted friendly words to him. You could feel
throughout the room an intense desire that he should succeed. He
responded a little to the encouragement, but could not remember his
verses. He struggled, struggled, did a hurried little breakdown dance,
bowed and vanished into the wings, to be beaten, I have no doubt, by the
Jewish gentleman. We watched a little of the "Drama of the Woman without
a Soul," but the sense of being in a large vat filled with boiling human
flesh into whose depths we were pressed ever more and more deeply was at
last too much for us, and we stumbled our way into the open air. The
black shadow of the barge, the jagged outline of the huddled buildings
against the sky, the black tower at the end of the canal, all these swam
in the crystal air.

We took deep breaths of the freshness and purity; cheerful noises were
on every side of us, the band and laughter; a church bell with its deep
note and silver tinkle; the snow was vast and deep and hard all about
us. We walked back very happily to Anglisky Prospect. Vera Michailovna
said good-night to me and went in. Before he followed her, Bohun turned
round to me:

"Isn't she splendid?" he whispered. "By God, Durward, I'd do anything
for her.... Do you think she likes me?"

"Why not?" I asked.

"I want her to--frightfully. I'd do anything for her. Do you think she'd
like to learn English?"

"I don't know," I said. "Ask her."

He disappeared. As I walked home I felt about me the new interaction of
human lives and souls--ambitions, hopes, youth. And the crisis, behind
these, of the world's history made up, as it was, of the same
interactions of human and divine. The fortunes and adventures of the
soul on its journey towards its own country, its hopes and fears,
struggles and despairs, its rejections and joy and rewards--its death
and destruction--all this in terms of human life and the silly
blundering conditions of this splendid glorious earth.... Here was Vera
Michailovna and her husband, Nina and Boris Grogoff, Bohun and Lawrence,
myself and Semyonov--a jumbled lot--with all our pitiful self-important
little histories, our crimes and virtu