silence irritated me. I fancied to myself that the sea ought to make
some sound, that it was holding itself deliberately quiescent in
preparation for some event. I remember that Marfa and the doctor
prevented me from rising to look from my window that I might see why the
sea was not roaring. Some one said to me in my dreams something about
"Ice," and again and again I repeated the word to myself as though it
were intensely significant. "Ice! Ice! Ice!... Yes, that was what I
wanted to know!" My idea from this was that the floor upon which I
rested was exceedingly thin, made only of paper in fact, and that at any
moment it might give way and precipitate me upon the ice. This terrified
me, and the way that the cold blew up through the cracks in the floor
was disturbing enough. I knew that my doctor thought me mad to remain in
such a place. But above all I was overwhelmed by the figure of Semyonov.
He haunted me in all my dreams, his presence never left me for a single
instant. I could not be sure whether he were in the room or no, but
certainly he was close to me... watching me, sneering at me as he had
so often done before.

I was conscious also of Petrograd, of the town itself, in every one of
its amazingly various manifestations. I saw it all laid out as though I
were a great height above it--the fashionable streets, the Nevski and
the Morskaia with the carriages and the motor-cars and trams, the kiosks
and the bazaars, the women with their baskets of apples, the boys with
the newspapers, the smart cinematographs, the shop in the Morskaia with
the coloured stones in the window, the oculist and the pastry-cook's and
the hairdressers and the large "English shop" at the corner of the
Nevski, and Pivato's the restaurant, and close beside it the art shop
with popular post cards and books on Serov and Vrubel, and the Astoria
Hotel with its shining windows staring on to S. Isaac's Square. And I
saw the Nevski, that straight and proud street, filled with every kind
of vehicle and black masses of people, rolling like thick clouds up and
down, here and there, the hum of their talk rising like mist from the
snow. And there was the Kazan Cathedral, haughty and proud, and the book
shop with the French books and complete sets of Tchekov and Merejkowsky
in the window, and the bridges and the palaces and the square before the
Alexander Theatre, and Elisseieff's the provision shop, and all the
banks, and the shops with gloves and shir