“I daresay.”

“Perhaps all the dead people are crowding round here now.  Why isn’t any one out walking?”

“I suppose they are all frightened by what they’ve heard, and think it better to stay at home.”

We were walking down the Morskaia, and our feet gave out a ringing echo.

“Let’s keep up with them,” Nina said.  When we had joined the others I found that they were both silent—­Lawrence very red, Vera pale.  We were all feeling rather weary.  A woman met us.  “You aren’t allowed to cross the Nevski,” she said; “the Cossacks are stopping everybody.”  I can see her now, a stout, red-faced woman, a shawl over her head, and carrying a basket.  Another woman, a prostitute I should think, came up and joined us.

“What is it?” she asked us.

The stout woman repeated in a trembling, agitated voice, “You aren’t allowed to cross the Nevski.  The Cossacks are stopping everybody.”

The prostitute shook her head in her alarm, and little flakes of powder detached themselves from her nose. “Bozhe moi—­bozhe moi!” she said, “and I promised not to be late.”

Vera then, very calmly and quietly, took command of the situation.  “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.  Under the moon it flowed, with proud tranquillity, so far as the eye could see between its high black banks of silent houses.

At intervals of about a hundred yards the Cossack pickets, like ebony statues on their horses, guarded the way.  Down the whole silver expanse not one figure was to be seen; so beautiful was it under the high moon, so still, so quiet, so proud, that it was revealing now for the first time its real splendour.  At no time of the night or day is the Nevski deserted.  How happy it must have been that night!...

For us, it was as though we hesitated on the banks of a river.  I felt a strange superstition, as though something said to me, “You cross that and you are plunged irrevocably into a new order of events.  Go home, and you will avoid danger.”  Nina must have had something of the same feeling, because she said: 

“Let’s go home.  They won’t let us cross.  I don’t want to cross.  Let’s go home.”

But Vera said firmly, “Nonsense!  We’ve gone so far.  We’ve got the tickets.  I’m going on.”

I felt the note in her voice, superstitiously, as a kind of desperate challenge, as though she had said: 

“Well, you see nothing worse can happen to me than has happened.”

Lawrence said roughly, “Of course, we’re going on.”

The prostitute began, in a trembling voice, as though we must all of necessity understand her case: