Glancing silently at the broad, glistening countenance of the doctor, with its expression of pawky defiance, and at his smugly triumphant smile, Roshchin turned to the window.
Out there, enveloped in the blizzard, an immense crowd was tramping by—arm in arm, in groups, shouting and laughing. Greatcoats, wadded jackets, women, little boys, passed in endless procession, the real, the dingy Russia....
Where did they all come from?
The back of Roshchin's silvery head, tense and indignant, seemed to sink into his shoulders.
Katya put her cheek against his shoulder.
The life passing outside the window was quite incomprehensible to her.
"Look, Vadim!" she said, "how happy their faces are! Is it really the end of the war?
It's hard to believe in anything so marvellous."
Roshchin moved away from her, clenching his fist behind his back. His mouth was set in a cruel line....
"Just you wait!"
Five men, in crumpled jackets and shirts of army cloth, were sitting at a table in a small, vaulted chamber.
Their faces were dark from want of sleep.
Telephones and glass tumblers stood about, among the papers, cigarette butts, and bits of bread with which the scorched baize on the table was littered.
Occasionally the door into the long corridor opened letting in a buzz of talk, and a broad-shouldered military man wearing a cartridge belt would bring in a heap of papers for signature.
The chairman, the fifth man at the table, a stocky individual in a short grey jacket, sat in an armchair too high for him, and seemed to be dozing.
His left hand rested on his forehead, covering the eyes and nose; all that could be seen of his face was a straight mouth with bristly moustache, and an unshaven cheek with twitching muscles.
Only those who knew him well could discern between the interstices of the fingers so wearily covering his face, the keen, shrewd glances he kept casting at the speaker, and at the faces of the other three.
The telephones rang incessantly.
The same broad-shouldered military man with the cartridge belt would lift the receiver, and jerk out, under his breath:
"Sovnarcom....
Meeting....
Impossible...." From time to time somebody in the corridor bumped against the door, and the brass knob would be turned.
Outside, the wind from the sea raged, beating rain and particles of frozen snow against the windowpanes.
The speaker finished what he was saying.
The men around the table sat with drooping heads or supported them on their hands.
The chairman moved his hand higher up his bald skull, and scribbled a note, underlining one word so violently that the pen went through the paper.
He threw the note to the man sitting next but one, a gaunt individual with a black moustache and bristling hair.
The latter read it, smiled into his moustache, and wrote a reply on the note....
The chairman, looking out of the window at the raging blizzard, quietly tore up the note into little bits.
"The speaker is right—we have no army, and no supplies," he said in a rather muffled voice. "We are moving in a vacuum.
The Germans are advancing, and will continue to advance.
The speaker is right."
He was interrupted by several people speaking at once: "But this is the end! What's to be done? Capitulate? Go underground?"
"What's to be done?" he narrowed his eyes. "Fight!
Fight ruthlessly!
Defeat the Germans!
If we can't beat them now—we will retreat to Moscow.
And if the Germans take Moscow, we'll retreat to the Urals.
We'll create a Ural-Kuznetsk Republic.
There's coal and iron there, and a militant proletariat.
We'll evacuate the Petrograd workers there.
That'll go fine.
And if need be, we'll retreat all the way to Kamchatka.
One thing must never be lost sight of—we must preserve the flower of the working class, we mustn't let it be destroyed.
And we'll occupy Petrograd and Moscow again.... The situation will change again and again in the west.... It's not the Bolshevik way to hang one's head and tear one's hair...."
He sprang out of the high chair with surprising vivacity, ran—his hands in his pockets—to the folding oak doors, and opened one leaf.
The gaunt faces of Petrograd workers, their eyes glowing in the dim light of the corridor, turned towards him out of the steaming atmosphere. He raised a big ink-stained hand:
"Comrades, the socialist native land is in danger...!"
* II *
Early in the winter two streams of humanity were continually meeting at the South-Russian railway junctions.