He stammered; his mouth wobbled; he covered it with a dirty hand.  He could not continue.

The audience was sympathetic.  They listened in encouraging silence; then they clapped; then they shouted friendly words to him.  You could feel throughout the room an intense desire that he should succeed.  He responded a little to the encouragement, but could not remember his verses.  He struggled, struggled, did a hurried little breakdown dance, bowed and vanished into the wings, to be beaten, I have no doubt, by the Jewish gentleman.  We watched a little of the “Drama of the Woman without a Soul,” but the sense of being in a large vat filled with boiling human flesh into whose depths we were pressed ever more and more deeply was at last too much for us, and we stumbled our way into the open air.  The black shadow of the barge, the jagged outline of the huddled buildings against the sky, the black tower at the end of the canal, all these swam in the crystal air.

We took deep breaths of the freshness and purity; cheerful noises were on every side of us, the band and laughter; a church bell with its deep note and silver tinkle; the snow was vast and deep and hard all about us.  We walked back very happily to Anglisky Prospect.  Vera Michailovna said good-night to me and went in.  Before he followed her, Bohun turned round to me: 

“Isn’t she splendid?” he whispered.  “By God, Durward, I’d do anything for her....  Do you think she likes me?”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I want her to—­frightfully.  I’d do anything for her.  Do you think she’d like to learn English?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Ask her.”

He disappeared.  As I walked home I felt about me the new interaction of human lives and souls—­ambitions, hopes, youth.  And the crisis, behind these, of the world’s history made up, as it was, of the same interactions of human and divine.  The fortunes and adventures of the soul on its journey towards its own country, its hopes and fears, struggles and despairs, its rejections and joy and rewards—­its death and destruction—­all this in terms of human life and the silly blundering conditions of this splendid glorious earth....  Here was Vera Michailovna and her husband, Nina and Boris Grogoff, Bohun and Lawrence, myself and Semyonov—­a jumbled lot—­with all our pitiful self-important little histories, our crimes and virtues so insignificant and so quickly over, and behind them the fine stuff of the human and divine soul, pushing on through all raillery and incongruity to its goal.  Why, I had caught up, once more, that interest in life that I had, I thought, so utterly lost!  I stopped for a moment by the frozen canal and laughed to myself.  The drama of life was, after all, too strong for my weak indifference.  I felt that night as though I had stepped into a new house with lighted rooms and fires and friends waiting for me.  Afterwards, I was so closely stirred by the sense of impending events that I could not sleep, but sat at my window watching the faint lights of the sky shift and waver over the frozen ice....