"Verotchka--Verotchka--I didn't mean anything. I didn't indeed. I love you. I love you. You know that I do. I was only angry and wicked. Oh, I'll never forgive myself. Verotchka--get up--don't kneel to me like that...!"

She was interrupted by a knock on the outer hall door. To both of them that sound must have been terribly alarming. Vera said afterwards, that "at once we realised that it was the knock of some one more frightened than we were."

In the first place, no one ever knocked, they always rang the rather rickety electric bell--and then the sound was furtive and hurried, and even frantic; "as though," said Vera, "some one on the other side of the door was breathless."

The sisters stood, close together, for quite a long time without moving.

The knocking ceased and the room was doubly silent. Then suddenly it began again, very rapid and eager, but m.u.f.fled, almost as though some one were knocking with a gloved hand.

Vera went then. She paused for a moment in the little hall, for again there was silence and she fancied that perhaps the intruder had given up the matter in despair. But, no--there it was again--and this third time seemed to her, perhaps because she was so close to it, the most urgent and eager of all. She went to the door and opened it. There was no light in the pa.s.sage save the dim reflection from the lamp on the lower floor, and in the shadow she saw a figure cowering back into the corner behind the door.

"Who is it?" she asked. The figure pushed past her, slipping into their own little hall.

"But you can't come in like that," she said, turning round on him.

"Shut the door!" he whispered. "_Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi_.... Shut the door."

She recognised him then. He was the policeman from the corner of their street, a man whom they knew well. He had always been a pompous little man, stout and short of figure, kindly so far as they knew, although they had heard of him as cruel in the pursuit of his official duties.

They had once talked to him a little and he explained: "I wouldn't hurt a fly, G.o.d knows," he had said, "of myself, but a man likes to do his work efficiently--and there are so many lazy fellows about here."

He prided himself, they saw, on a punctilious attention to duty. When he had to come there for some paper or other he was always extremely polite, and if they were going away he helped them about their pa.s.sports. He told them on another occasion that "he was pleased with life--although one never knew of course when it might come down upon one--"

Well, it had come down on him now. A more pitiful object Vera had never seen. He was dressed in a dirty black suit and wore a shabby fur cap, his padded overcoat was torn.

But the overwhelming effect of him was terror. Vera had never before seen such terror, and at once, as though the thing were an infectious disease, her own heart began to beat furiously. He was shaking so that the fur cap, which was too large for his head, waggled up and down over his eye in a ludicrous manner.

His face was dirty as though he had been crying, and a horrid pallid grey in colour.

His collar was torn, showing his neck between the folds of his overcoat.

Vera looked out down the stairs as though she expected to see something.

The flat was perfectly still. There was not a sound anywhere. She turned back to the man again, he was crouching against the wall.

"You can't come in here," she repeated. "My sister and I are alone. What do you want?... What's the matter?"

"Shut the door!... Shut the door!... Shut the door!..." he repeated.

She closed it. "Now what is it?" she asked, and then, hearing a sound, turned to find that Nina was standing with wide eyes, watching.

"What is it?" Nina asked in a whisper.

"I don't know," said Vera, also whispering. "He won't tell me."

He pushed past them then into the dining-room, looked about him for a moment, then sank into a chair as though his legs would no longer support him, holding on to the cloth with both hands.

The sisters followed him into the dining-room.

"Don't shiver like that!" said Vera, "tell us why you've come in here?"...

His eyes looked past them, never still, wandering from wall to wall, from door to door.

"They're after me..." he said. "That's it--I was hiding in our cupboard all last night and this morning. They were round there all the time breaking up our things.... I heard them shouting. They were going to kill me. I've done nothing--O G.o.d! what's that?"

"There's no one here," said Vera, "except ourselves."

"I saw a chance to get away and I crept out. But I couldn't get far....

I knew you would be good-hearted... good-hearted. Hide me somewhere--anywhere!... and they won't come in here. Only until the evening. I've done no one any harm.... Only my duty...."

He began to snivel, taking out from his coat a very dirty pocket-handkerchief and dabbing his face with it.

The odd thing that they felt, as they looked at him, was the incredible intermingling of public and private affairs. Five minutes before they had been pa.s.sing through a tremendous crisis in their personal relationship. The whole history of their lives together, flowing through how many years, through how many phases, how many quarrels, and happiness and adventures had reached here a climax whose issue was so important that life between them could never be the same again.

So urgent had been the affair that during that hour they had forgotten the Revolution, Russia, the war. Moreover, always in the past, they had a.s.sumed that public life was no affair of theirs. The Russo-j.a.panese War, even the spasmodic revolt in 1905, had not touched them except as a wind of ideas which blew so swiftly through their private lives that they were scarcely affected by it.

Now in the person of that trembling, shaking figure at their table, the Revolution had come to them, and not only the Revolution, but the strange new secret city that Petrograd was... the whole ground was quaking beneath them.

And in the eyes of the fugitive they saw what terror of death really was. It was no tale read in a story-book, no recounting of an adventure by some romantic traveller, it was _here_ with them in the flat and at any moment....

It was then that Vera realised that there was no time to lose--something must be done at once.

"Who's pursuing you?" she asked, quickly. "Where are they?"

He got up and was moving about the room as though he was looking for a hiding-place.

"All the people.... Everybody!" He turned round upon them, suddenly striking, what seemed to them, a ludicrously grand att.i.tude.

"Abominable! That's what it is. I heard them shouting that I had a machine-gun on the roof and was killing people. I had no machine-gun. Of course not. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I had one. But there they were. That's what they were shouting! And I've always done my duty.

What's one to do? Obey one's superior officer? Of course, what he says one does. What's life for?... and then naturally one expects a reward.

Things were going well with me, very well indeed--and then this comes.

It's a degrading thing for a man to hide for a day and a night in a cupboard." His teeth began to chatter then so that he could scarcely speak. He seemed to be shaking with ague.

He caught Vera's hand. "Save me--save me!" he said. "Put me somewhere.... I've done nothing disgraceful. They'll shoot me like a dog--"

The sisters consulted.

"What are we to do?" asked Nina. "We can't let him go out to be killed."

"No. But if we keep him here and they come in and find him, we shall all be involved.... It isn't fair to Nicholas or Uncle Ivan...."

"We can't let him go out."

"No, we can't," Vera replied. She saw at once how impossible that was.

Were he caught outside and shot they would feel that they had his death for ever on their souls.

"There's the linen cupboard," she said.

She turned round to Nina. "I'm afraid," she said, "if you hide here, you'll have to go into another cupboard. And it can only be for an hour or two. We couldn't keep you here all night."

He said nothing except "Quick. Take me." Vera led him into her bedroom and showed him the place. Without another word he pressed in amongst the clothes. It was a deep cupboard, and, although he was a fat man, the door closed quite evenly.

It was suddenly as though he had never been, Vera went back to Nina.