ts, all looking ill-fitting as
though they were never meant to be worn, and then the little dirty shops
poked in between the grand ones, the shop with rubber goods and the
shop with an Aquarium, gold-fish and snails and a tortoise, and the shop
with oranges and bananas. Then, too, there was the Arcade with the
theatre where they acted _Romance_ and _Potash and Perlmutter_ (almost
as they do in London), and on the other side of the street, at the
corner of the Sadovia, the bazaar with all its shops and its trembling
mist of people. I watched the Nevski, and saw how it slipped into the
Neva with the Red Square on one side of it, and S. Isaac's Square on the
other, and the great station at the far end of it, and about these two
lines the Neva and the Nevski, the whole town sprawled and crept, ebbed
and flowed. Away from the splendour it stretched, dirty and decrepit and
untended, here piles of evil flats, there old wooden buildings with
cobbled courts, and the canals twisting and creeping up and down through
it all. It was all bathed, as I looked down upon it, in coloured mist.
The air was purple and gold and light blue, fading into the snow and ice
and transforming it. Everywhere there were the masts of ships and the
smell of the sea and rough deserted places--and shadows moved behind the
shadows, and yet more shadows behind _them_, so that it was all
uncertain and unstable, and only the river knew what it was about.

Over the whole town Semyonov and I moved together, and the ice and snow
silenced our steps, and no one in the whole place spoke a word, so that
we had to lower our voices and whispered....

XV

Suddenly I was better. I quite recovered from my fever and only lay
still on my bed, weak, and very hungry. I was happy, happy as I had not
been since I came to Petrograd. I felt all the luxury of convalescence
creeping into my bones. All that I need do was to lie there and let
people feed me and read a little if it did not make my head ache. I had
a water-colour painted by Alexander Benois on the wall opposite me, a
night in the Caucasus, with a heavy sweep of black hill, a deep blue
steady sky, and a thin grey road running into endless distance. A
pleasing picture, with no finality in its appeal--intimate too, so that
it was one's own road and one's own hill. I had bought it extravagantly,
at last year's "_Mir Eskoustva_," and now I was pleased at my
extravagance.

Marfa was very good to me, feeding me, and