and I had seen enough nobility and self-sacrifice to be
reassured about the true stuff of the human soul. Now all that seemed to
be utterly gone. On the one side my mind was filled with my friends,
John Trenchard and Marie Ivanovna. The sacrifice that they had made
seemed to be wicked and useless. I had lost altogether that conviction
of the continuance and persistence of their souls that I had, for so
long, carried with me. They were dead, dead... simply dead. There at
the Front one had believed in many things. Here in this frozen and
starving town, with every ghost working against every human, there was
assurance of nothing--only deep foreboding and an ominous silence. The
murder of Rasputin still hung over every head. The first sense of
liberty had passed, and now his dirty malicious soul seemed to be
watching us all, reminding us that he had not left us, but was waiting
for the striking of some vast catastrophe that the friends whom he had
left behind him to carry on his work were preparing. It was this sense
of moving so desperately and so hopelessly in the dark that was with me.
Any chance that there had seemed to be of Russia rising from the war
with a free soul appeared now to be utterly gone. Before our eyes the
powers that ruled us were betraying us, laughing at us, selling us. And
we did not know who was our enemy, who our friend, whom to believe, of
whom to take counsel. Peculation and lying and the basest intrigue was
on every side of us, hunger for which there was no necessity, want in a
land packed with everything. I believe that there may have been very
well another side to the picture, but at that time we could not see; we
did not wish to see, we were blindfolded men....

I entered the church and found that the service was over. I passed
through the aisle into the little rounded cup of dark and gold where the
altars were. Here there were still collected a company of people,
kneeling, some of them, in front of the candles, others standing there,
motionless like statues, their hands folded, gazing before them. The
candles flung a mist of dim embroidery upon the walls, and within the
mist the dark figures of the priests moved to and fro. An old priest
with long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and reading
a long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice. There was the scent of
candles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place. The
tawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the cand