e with a sinister glory. If that
appears melodramatic I can only say that the dazzling winter weather of
those weeks was melodramatic. Never before had I seen the huge buildings
tower so high, never before felt the shadows so vast, the squares and
streets so limitless in their capacity for swallowing light and colour.
The sky was a bitter changeless blue; the buildings black; the snow and
ice, glittering with purple and gold, swept by vast swinging shadows as
though huge doors opened and shut in heaven, or monstrous birds hovered,
their wings spread, motionless in the limitless space.

And all this had, as ever, nothing to do with human life. The little
courtyards with their woodstacks and their coloured houses, carts and
the cobbled squares and the little stumpy trees that bordered the canals
and the little wooden huts beside the bridges with their candles and
fruit--these were human and friendly and good, but they had their
precarious condition like the rest of us.

On the first afternoon of my new liberty I found myself in the Nevski
Prospect, bewildered by the crowds and the talk and trams and motors and
carts that passed in unending sequence up and down the long street.
Standing at the corner of the Sadovia and the Nevski one was carried
straight to the point of the golden spire that guarded the farther end
of the great street. All was gold, the surface of the road was like a
golden stream, the canal was gold, the thin spire caught into its
piercing line all the colour of the swiftly fading afternoon; the wheels
of the carriages gleamed, the flower-baskets of the women glittered like
shining foam, the snow flung its crystal colour into the air like thin
fire dim before the sun. The street seemed to have gathered on to its
pavements the citizens of every country under the sun. Tartars, Mongols,
Little Russians, Chinamen, Japanese, French officers, British officers,
peasants and fashionable women, schoolboys, officials, actors and
artists and business men and priests and sailors and beggars and hawkers
and, guarding them all, friendly, urbane, filled with a pleasant
self-importance that seemed at that hour the simplest and easiest of
attitudes, the Police. "Rum--rum--rum--whirr--whirr--whirr--whirr"--like
the regular beat of a shuttle the hum rose and fell, as the sun faded
into rosy mist and white vapours stole above the still canals.

I turned to go home and felt some one touch my elbow.

I swung round and there