So he took her home, and his Knight Errantry was justified at last.
XVI
These events had for a moment distracted my mind, but as soon as I was alone I felt the ever-increasing burden of my duty towards Markovitch.
The sensation was absolutely dreamlike in its insistence on the one hand that I should take some kind of action, and its preventing me, on the other, from taking any action at all. I felt the strange inertia of the spectator in the nightmare, who sees the house tumbling about his head and cannot move. Besides, what action could I take? I couldn’t stand over Markovitch, forbid him to stir from the flat, or imprison Semyonov in his room, or warn the police … besides, there were now no police. Moreover, Vera and Bohun and the others were surely capable of watching Markovitch. Nevertheless something in my heart insisted that it was I who was to figure in this. … Through the dusk of the streets, in the pale ghostly shadows that prelude the coming of the white nights, I seemed to see three pursuing figures, Semyonov, Markovitch, and myself. I was pursuing, and yet held.
I went back to my flat, but all that night I could not sleep. Already the first music of the May Day processions could be heard, distant trumpets and drums, before I sank into uneasy, bewildered slumber.
I dreamt then dreams so fantastic and irresolute that I cannot now disentangle them. I remember that I was standing beside the banks of the Neva. The river was rising, flinging on its course in the great tempestuous way that it always has during the first days of its release from the ice. The sky grew darker—the water rose. I sought refuge in the top gallery of a church with light green domes, and from here I watched the flood, first as it covered the quays, tumbling in cascades of glittering water over the high parapet, trickling in little lines and pools, then rising into sheeted levels, then billowing in waves against the walls of the house, flooding the doors and the windows, until so far as the eye could reach there were only high towers remaining above its grasp. I do not know what happened to my security, and saw at length the waters stretch from sky to sky, one dark, tossing ocean.
The sun rose, a dead yellow; slowly the waters sank again, islands appeared, stretches of mud and waste. Heaving their huge bodies out of the ocean, vast monsters crawled through the mud, scaled and horned, lying like logs beneath the dead sun. The waters sank—forests rose. The sun sank and there was black night, then a faint dawn, and in the early light of a lovely morning a man appeared standing on the beach, shading his eyes, gazing out to sea. I fancied that in that strong bearded figure I recognised my peasant, who had seemed to haunt my steps so often. Gravely he looked round him, then turned back into the forest. …
Was my dream thus? Frankly I do not know—too neat an allegory to be true, perhaps—and yet there was something of this in it. I know that I saw Boris, and the Rat, and Vera, and Semyonov, and Markovitch, appearing, vanishing, reappearing, and that I was strongly conscious that the submerged and ruined world did not touch them, and was only a background to their own individual activities. … I know that Markovitch seemed to come to me again and cry, “Be patient … be patient. … Have faith … be faithful!”
I know that I woke struggling to keep him with me, crying out that he was not to leave me, that that way was danger. … I woke to find my room flooded with sunshine, and my old woman looking at me with disapproval.
“Wake up, Barin,” she was saying, “it’s three o’clock.”
“Three o’clock?” I muttered, trying to pull myself together.
“Three in the afternoon … I have some tea for you.”
When I realised the time I had the sensation of the wildest panic. I jumped from my bed, pushing the old woman out of the room. I had betrayed my trust! I had betrayed my trust! I felt assured that some awful catastrophe had occurred, something that I might have prevented. When I was dressed, disregarding my housekeeper’s cries, I rushed out into the street. At my end of the Ekaterinsgofsky Canal I was stopped by great throngs of men and women returning homewards from the procession. They were marching, most of them, in ordered lines across the street, arm in arm, singing the “Marseillaise.”
Very different from the procession a few weeks before. That had been dumb, cowed, bewildered. This was the movement of a people conscious of their freedom, sure of themselves, disdaining the world. Everywhere bands were playing, banners were glittering, and from the very heart of the soil, as it seemed, the “Marseillaise” was rising.
Although the sun only shone at brief intervals, there was a sense of spring warmth in the air. For some time I could not cross the street, then I broke through and almost ran down the deserted stretch of the Canal. I arrived almost breathless at the door in the English Prospect. There I found Sacha watching the people and listening to the distant bands.
“Sacha!” I cried, “is Alexei Petrovitch at home?”
“No, Barin,” she answered, looking at me in some surprise. “He went out about a quarter of an hour ago.”
“And Nicholas Markovitch?”
“He went out just now.”
“Did he tell you where he was going?”
“No, Barin, but I heard Alexei Petrovitch tell him, an hour back, that he was going to Katerinhof.”
I did not listen to more. I turned and went. Katerinhof was a park, ten
