One instant more, and there were glimpses below us
of the rotting pine copses and mossy bogs surrounding
Petersburg. We bent our course straight to the
south; sky, earth, all grew gradually darker and darker.
The sick night; the sick daylight; the sick town—all
were left behind us.
XXIII
We flew more slowly than usual, and I was able to
follow with my eyes the immense expanse of my native
land gradually unfolding before me, like the unrolling
of an endless panorama. Forests, copses, fields,
ravines, rivers—here and there villages
and churches—and again fields and forests
and copses and ravines.... Sadness came over me,
and a kind of indifferent dreariness. And I was
not sad and dreary simply because it was Russia I was
flying over. No. The earth itself, this flat
surface which lay spread out beneath me; the whole
earthly globe, with its populations, multitudinous,
feeble, crushed by want, grief and diseases, bound
to a clod of pitiful dust; this brittle, rough crust,
this shell over the fiery sands of our planet, overspread
with the mildew we call the organic, vegetable kingdom;
these human flies, a thousand times paltrier than flies;
their dwellings glued together with filth, the pitiful
traces of their tiny, monotonous bustle, of their
comic struggle with the unchanging and inevitable,
how revolting it all suddenly was to me. My heart
turned slowly sick, and I could not bear to gaze longer
on these trivial pictures, on this vulgar show....
Yes, I felt dreary, worse than dreary. Even pity
I felt nothing of for my brother men: all feelings
in me were merged in one which I scarcely dare to
name: a feeling of loathing, and stronger than
all and more than all within me was the loathing—for
myself.
‘Cease,’ whispered Alice, ’cease,
or I cannot carry you. You have grown heavy.’
‘Home,’ I answered her in the very tone
in which I used to say the word to my coachman, when
I came out at four o’clock at night from some
Moscow friends’, where I had been talking since
dinner-time of the future of Russia and the significance
of the commune. ‘Home,’ I repeated,
and closed my eyes.
XXIV
But I soon opened them again. Alice seemed huddling
strangely up to me; she was almost pushing against
me. I looked at her and my blood froze at the
sight. One who has chanced to behold on the face
of another a sudden look of intense terror, the cause
of which he does not suspect, will understand me.
By terror, overmastering terror, the pale features
of Alice were drawn and contorted, almost effaced.
I had never seen anything like it even on a living
human face. A lifeless, misty phantom, a shade,...
and this deadly horror....
‘Alice, what is it?’ I said at last.
‘She ... she ...’ she answered with an
effort. ‘She.’
‘She? Who is she?’
‘Do not utter her name, not her name,’
Alice faltered hurriedly. ’We must escape,
or there will be an end to everything, and for ever....
Look, over there!’
