sleep would not return to me. The self-criticism and
self-distrust that were always attacking me and paralysing my action
sprang upon me now and gripped me. What was I to do? How was I to act? I
saw Vera and Nina and Lawrence and, behind them, smiling at me,
Semyonov. They were asking for my help, but they were, in some strange,
intangible way, most desperately remote. When I read now in our papers
shrill criticisms on our officials, our Cabinet, our generals, our
propagandists, our merchants, for their failure to deal adequately with
Russia, I say: Deal adequately? First you must catch your bird... and
no Western snare has ever caught the Russian bird of paradise, and I
dare prophesy that no Western snare ever will. Had I not broken my
heart in the pursuit, and was I not as far as ever from attainment? The
secret of the mystery of life is the isolation that separates every man
from his fellow--the secret of dissatisfaction too; and the only purpose
in life is to realise that isolation, and to love one's fellow-man
because of it, and to show one's own courage, like a flag to which the
other travellers may wave their answer; but we Westerners have at least
the waiting comfort of our discipline, of our materialism, of our
indifference to ideas. The Russian, I believe, lives in a world of
loneliness peopled only by ideas. His impulses towards self-confession,
towards brotherhood, towards vice, towards cynicism, towards his belief
in God and his scorn of Him, come out of this world; and beyond it he
sees his fellow-men as trees walking, and the Mountain of God as a
distant peak, placed there only to emphasise his irony.

I had wanted to be friends with Nina and Vera--I had even longed for
it--and now at the crisis when I must rise and act they were so far away
from me that I could only see them, like coloured ghosts, vanishing into
mist.

I would go at once and see Vera and there do what I could. Lawrence must
return to England--then all would be well. Markovitch must be
persuaded.... Nina must be told.... I slept and tumbled into a
nightmare of a pursuit, down endless streets, of flying figures.

Next day I went to Vera. I found her, to my joy, alone. I realised at
once that our talk would be difficult. She was grave and severe, sitting
back in her chair, her head up, not looking at me at all, but beyond
through the window to the tops of the trees feathery with snow against
the sky of egg-shell blue. I am always beaten b