The Secret City

was, of course, the inevitable Rat. He came up to my bed in his stealthy, furtive fashion, and looked at me reproachfully. I asked him, my voice sounding to myself strange and very far away, what he was doing there. He answered that if it had not been for him I should be dead. He had come early one morning and found me lying in my bed and no one in the place at all. No one⁠—because the old woman had vanished. Yes, the neighbours had told him. Apparently on that very Thursday she had decided that the Revolution had given her her freedom, and that she was never going to work for anybody ever again. She had told a woman-neighbour that she heard that the land now was going to be given back to everybody, and she was returning therefore to her village somewhere in the Moscow Province. She had not been back there for twenty years. And first, to celebrate her liberty, she would get magnificently drunk on furniture polish.

“I did not see her of course,” said the Rat. “No. When I came, early in the morning, no one was here. I thought that you were dead, barin, and I began collecting your property, so that no one else should take it. Then you made a movement, and I saw that you were alive⁠—so I got some cabbage soup and gave it you. That certainly saved you.⁠ ⁠… I’m going to stay with you now.”

I did not care in the least whether he went or stayed. He chattered on. By staying with me he would inevitably neglect his public duties. Perhaps I didn’t know that he had public duties? Yes, he was now an Anarchist, and I should be astonished very shortly, by the things the Anarchists would do. All the same, they had their own discipline. They had their own processions, too, like anyone else. Only four days ago he had marched all over Petrograd carrying a black flag. He must confess that he was rather sick of it. But they must have processions.⁠ ⁠… Even the prostitutes had marched down the Nevski the other day demanding shorter hours.

But of course I cannot remember all that he said. During the next few days I slowly pulled myself out of the misty dead world in which I had been lying. Pain came back to me, leaping upon me and then receding, finally, on the third day suddenly leaving me altogether. The Rat fed me on cabbage soup and glasses of tea and caviar and biscuits. During those three days he never left me, and indeed tended me like a woman. He would sit by my bed and with his rough hand stroke my hair, while he poured into my ears ghastly stories of the many crimes that he had committed. I noticed that he was cleaner and more civilised. His beard was clipped and he smelt of cabbage and straw⁠—a rather healthy smell. One morning he suddenly took the pail, filled it with water and washed himself in front of my windows. He scrubbed himself until I should have thought that he had no skin left.

“You’re a fine big man, Rat,” I said.

He was delighted with that, and came quite near my bed, stretching his naked body, his arms and legs and chest, like a pleased animal.

“Yes, I’m a fine man, barin,” he said; “many women have loved me, and many will again⁠ ⁠…” Then he went back, and producing clean drawers and vest from somewhere (I suspect that they were mine but I was too weak to care), put them on.

On the second and third days I felt much better. The thaw was less violent, the wood crackled in my stove. On the morning of Wednesday April 14 I got up, dressed, and sat in front of my window. The ice was still there, but over it lay a faint, a very faint, filmy sheen of water. It was a day of gleams, the sun flashing in and out of the clouds. Just beneath my window a tree was pushing into bud. Pools of water lay thick on the dirty melting snow. I got the Rat to bring a little table and put some books on it. I had near me The Spirit of Man, Keats’s Letters, The Roads, Beddoes, and Pride and Prejudice. A consciousness of the outer world crept, like warmth, through my bones.

“Rat,” I said, “who’s been to see me?”

“No one,” said he.

I felt suddenly a ridiculous affront.

“No one?” I asked, incredulous.

“No one,” he answered. “They’ve all forgotten you, barin,” he added maliciously, knowing that that would hurt me.

It was strange how deeply I cared. Here was I who, only a short while before, had declared myself done with the world forever, and now I was almost crying because no one had been to see me! Indeed, I believe in my weakness and distress I actually did cry. No one at all? Not Vera nor Nina nor Jeremy nor Bohun? Not young Bohun even⁠ ⁠… ? And then slowly my brain realised that there was now a new world. None of the old conditions held any longer.

We had been the victims of an earthquake. Now it was⁠—every man for himself! Quickly then there came upon me an eager desire to know what had happened in the Markovitch family. What of Jerry and Vera? What of Nicholas? What of Semyonov⁠ ⁠… ?

“Rat,” I said, “this afternoon I am going out!”

“Very well, barin,” he said, “I, too, have an engagement.”

In the afternoon I crept out like an old sick man. I felt strangely shy and nervous. When I reached the corner of Ekateringofsky Canal and the English Prospect I decided not to go in and see the Markovitches. For one thing I shrank from the thought of their compassion. I had not shaved for many days. I was that dull sickly yellow colour that offends the taste of all healthy vigorous