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There would remain, I believe, for ever those dull Jaeger undergarments in the windows of the bazaar, and the bound edition of Tchekov in the book-shop just above the Moika, and the turtle and the gold-fish in the aquarium near Elisseieff; and whilst those things were there I could not believe in melodrama. And we did not believe.
"We'll go and see," she said, "what is really the truth." We turned up the side street to the Moika Canal, which lay like powdered crystal under the moon. Not a soul was in sight. There arrived then one of the most wonderful moments of my life. The Nevski Prospect, that broad and mighty thoroughfare, stretched before us like a great silver river. It was utterly triumphantly bare and naked.
I went round to the Regina, which used to be one of the best hotels in the town, but those of us who had rooms there were complaining so bitterly that I did not stay with them, but went off along the Moika to the Nevsky and so back to my own hotel. The streets, like the hotel, were only half lit, and hardly any of the houses had a lighted window.
One of the few individual dwelling-houses which linger on the Nevsky Prospekt, and which presents us with a fine specimen of the rococo style which Rastrelli so persistently served up at the close of the eighteenth century, is that of the Counts Stroganoff, at the lower quay of the Moika.
Opposite the Stroganoff house, on the upper Moika quay, rises the large, reddish-yellow Club of the Nobility, representing still another fashion in architecture, which was very popular during the last century for palaces and grand mansions, the Corinthian peristyle upon a solid, lofty basement.
"That's it," said Vera, speaking it seemed to herself. "So it always is with us. All revolutions in Russia end this way " An unmounted Cossack came forward to us. "No hanging about there," he said. "Cross quickly. No one is to delay." We moved to the other side of the Moika bridge.
Then I left with all haste for the capital. On arrival I learnt at the Ministry of the Interior that a policeman on night duty along the Moika Canal had heard shots and cries coming from a house belonging to the young Prince Felix Youssoupoff, who had married a cousin of the Tsar, and who was well known in London, where he passed each "season."
Even as she spoke I heard the sharp clatter of the machine-gun break out again, but now very close, and with an intimate note as though it were the same gun that I had heard before, which had been tracking me down round the town. "Do you hear that?" said the merchant. "Come on," said Bohun. "We'll go down the Moika. That seems safe enough!"
"I'm only kidding you, Watchett," he said. "We're safe enough. Look, there's not a soul about!" We were at the corner of the Moika now; all was absolutely quiet. Two women and a man were standing on the bridge talking together. A few stars clustered above the bend of the Canal seemed to shift and waver ever so slightly through a gathering mist, like the smoke of blowing candles.
We started down the Moika, past that faded picture-shop where there are always large moth-eaten canvases of cornfields under the moon and Russian weddings and Italian lakes. We had got very nearly to the little street with the wooden hoardings when the merchant gripped my arm. "What's that?" he gulped. The silence now was intense. We could not hear the machine-gun nor any shouting.
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