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Tourists in all the Intourist hotels in all the principal towns of Soviet Russia exchange the same fragments of conversation.

"Have you done Moscow yet?"

"No, I'm going there to-morrow night. I came in by Odessa. I've done Kharkov and Rostov and Kiev."

"Ah, then you're going out by sea from Leningrad. Unless you're flying from Moscow?"

"No, I shall be going by sea. Have you done Odessa and the south?"

"No, I've done the Caucasus. You should do the Caucasus. What is Odessa like?"

"Odessa is delightful. The hotel at Rostov was good except for the cockroaches. The food was bad at Kharkov.'

"Ah, there was a Frenchman here yesterday who had just come from Kharkov, and he said the food wasn't good."

And at this gratifying coincidence everybody looks pleased.

Sometimes it is a little like the survivors of a shipwreck meeting on a fragment of desert island.

"Are you still all right for soap?"

"Yes, I shall just last out till Kiev. What about you?"

"Oh, I'm all right. I brought a great deal. But my ink is pretty low."

"There's an American lady who can let you have ink. She gave me some in Leningrad and she's coming on here. She had safety-pins too."

"How marvelous! Perhaps she'd like some soda-mints or aspirins. I have heaps of those."

"I dare say. Or Keatings. Or perhaps you could lend her a book."

People part at Moscow and meet again, sometimes most unwillingly, at Yalta. They ask one another how they have been getting on, and if they met the French astronomer and the English journalist and the noisy young Finns with the portable gramophone. Those who met at Leningrad, and were in the same train coming from Moscow, and parted gracefully at Tillls only to be once more confronted with one another at Gorki, are bound by some unwritten law to sit at the same table for meals. At first, I often wondered whether they really like to do this, or if they just feel obliged to do it for old sake's sake. Later on I fall under the same spell, and the question is answered.

In Moscow I meet Peter—but not as one meets stray French astronomers and English journalists and gramophone-playing Finns. It is a meeting that was arranged—incredibly, as it now seems—in Bloomsbury, some four months ago. I have had the name of his hotel and the dates when he expects to be there in my diary ever since I left England.

His dates have been altered—so have mine—all knowledge of him is denied at the Metropole Hotel, where he ought to be—and Intourist tells me: (1) That there are no letters for me and no messages, (2) That if there were I couldn't have them because it is a Day of Rest.

It is anything but a Day of Rest for me, whatever it may be for Moscow.

I have traveled all night, and walked about looking for Peter half the day, and I have not yet got used to having my luncheon between three and five o'clock in the afternoon, and the hotel to which I have been sent is on one side of the Red Square—which no trams traverse—and everything else in Moscow is on the other side.

All the same, the Red Square is very beautiful, and they are quite right to allow no trams there. In the evening I walk across it once more, and admire the huge walls and towers of the Kremlin and the long row of fir-trees against the gray stone and the pure, beautiful lines of the Lenin Mausoleum, perfectly placed before the great fort, and the strange, Byzantine domes and whorls and minarets of the ancient Basil Cathedral.

Sentinels with fixed bayonets guard the Mausoleum, and there are long, long queues of people—they must number hundreds—waiting to pass inside. From the top of the Kremlin flutters the red flag, and from somewhere beneath it a light strikes upward, so that the brave scarlet color shows as plainly against the clear evening sky as it did in the morning sunlight.

One walks across the Red Square more safely than anywhere else in Moscow. Not as regards one's feminine virtue (that, I think, would be safe anywhere in Russia, were I a quarter of my present age and as alluring as Venus), but simply as regards life and limb.

Everywhere else the traffic is shattering, and the comrades, running for their lives in every direction—as well they may—are a menace. So are the trams, which bucket along on uneven rails and draw up with a slow jerk which gives a misleading impression altogether. One feels that here are deliberate, rather uncertain trams, that may very likely require a good strong push from somebody before starting at all.

And on the contrary, hardly have they stopped and hardly have hundreds of Comrades fought their way out of them than a bell clangs and they start off again, leaving hundreds more biting and kicking and pushing their way inside, hanging on the step and very often being violently shoved off it again.

The tram-question—one of the less picturesque and endearing characteristics of the new regime—is complicated in Moscow by the reconstructions that are going on everywhere. Whole streets are lying more or less inside-out, caverns yawn in the middle of roads, scaffolding suddenly blocks up pavements, and irrelevant-seeming pyramids of earth and loose stones and rubble rise up in quite unexpected places.

The trams do their gallant best, and often remind me of the story of Jules Verne in which the driver of a passenger-train negotiated a precipice by previously going full steam ahead and causing the train to jump the chasm. The trams too do something like that, but even so they have to make colossal detours, and every few days their route is, without any warning, altered, because the old route has become impassable.

In Leningrad there were hardly any cars. In Moscow there are a great many, and they all go hell-for-leather and make a point of sounding their horns only at the very last minute when the lives of the walking comrades positively hang by a thread.

In Moscow, as in Leningrad, people throng the streets. They keep on walking; they are like Felix the Cat. The Intourist guides, as usual, point out how purposeful they all are, how they walk with an object. One guide, more honest or less well-trained than the others, tells me that the housing shortage is very acute, and so perhaps it is more agreeable to spend one's free time in the street rather than in the home. A kind of Scylla or Charybdis.

These grim impressions dawn upon me little by little as I cross the Red Square, for perhaps the fourth time in twenty-four hours, to make another assault on the Metropole and Peter.

To my own unbounded astonishment, I am successful. There is a note from Peter. It has, I have no doubt, been there all along. It says that he is at the National Hotel. Have I got to cross the Red Square all over again? It is very beautiful, but I don't seem to care about crossing it again just yet.

I haven't got to. The National Hotel is only a few hundred yards from the Metropole.

If Peter and I were in London I should not run, like an excited hare, up four flights of stairs to his bedroom. Old friends as we are, I shouldn't scream aloud with joy at the sight of him, nor he at the sight of me. In Moscow, however, we do all these things. We behave, in a word, almost like two foreigners.

And we talk and we talk and we talk.

Our impressions of Soviet Russia, most fortunately, coincide. We have had identical experiences with fleas, guides, indiscreet indulgence in Russian bread, and the non-arrival of letters from home.

We offer each other soap, biscuits, Bromo, and soda-mints. It is almost like two Eastern potentates exchanging gifts, especially when Peter generously says that I shall have his clothes-brush when he leaves—I forgot to pack mine—and I, in return, gracefully offer to wash his pocket handkerchiefs when I do my own. And I stay and have supper with him—at about eleven p.m.—and at one o'clock in the morning cross the Red Square once more.

My bedroom window overlooks the river. I am pleased about it until I notice that a particularly zealous form of reconstruction is taking place on the bank, and that Comrades in vast numbers are operating a huge drill. They are a night-shift, and a kind of mieux de fa mort overtakes them at two in the morning, when they evolve a special series of noises, indicative of terrific energy. Then it all dies away and the next shift doesn't begin till seven o'clock.

II

Peter is under the auspices of an organization which takes an interest in literary tourists and the organization is very kind to him, and gives him theater tickets and special facilities and a guide all to himself. These benefits he shares with me.

I am secretly terrified of the guide, who is youngish and very tough and has a swivel eye. She has lived in the United States and says that she once hiked from Denver, Colorado, to California. It can't have been half as exhausting as hiking from one end of Moscow to the other, which is our daily achievement.

We visit museums and picture galleries and crèches and factories and schools and clinics. We see, at a rough estimate, a hundred thousand busts of Lenin and ninety thousand pictures of Stalin.

The guide has a curious habit of leading us briskly along over the cobbles, round such bits of reconstruction as lie in our way, for some time, and then abruptly stopping while she asks a passer-by the way to wherever she is taking us. This always turns out to be in some quite opposite direction to the one in which we are going. All is à refaire, and we turn round and begin all over again.

The result, not unnaturally, is that we always arrive late for our appointments.

"The Little Monster has no sense of time," says Peter—this being the endearing sobriquet by which he refers to the guide.

"And she evidently hasn't any bump of locality at all. Some people haven't," I say—having the best of reasons for knowing what I'm talking about.

Peter only replies, not unjustifiably, that to have no sense of time and no sense of direction seems to him a poor equipment with which to set up as a guide.

Sometimes we board a tram together. It is invariably bunged to the roof with pale, grimy, heavily built comrades, too tightly jammed together for strap-hanging to be necessary, or even possible. No one sits down. There are people sitting when one gets in, but I think it is because they have got wedged there and can't move.

On one occasion the Little Monster, startlingly and suddenly, says in my ear:

"A pregnant woman may go in the front part of the tram, where there is more room. It is a law."

I wonder whether she thinks I am going to make a fraudulent attempt to take advantage of this concession. But I don't. I remain where I am, leaning heavily on the shoulder of a man in a blouse, with somebody's portfolio digging into the small of my back, and an enormous female Comrade grasping my elbow with one hand and wiping the sweat off her face with the other.

I often think of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

The tram jerks and jolts and stops, and more people get in, and the Little Monster—who isn't more than five feet high—disappears from view altogether. This time I think of the House of Stone, in The Four Feathers and how those who fell down there never got up again. A mind well-stored with literary references is said to be a great comfort to the possessor. I think my references must be of the wrong kind.

Peter, who is a large young man and stands like the Rock of Gibraltar in the tram, is much more of a comfort to me than any number of literary references. He always knows when to get out, which I never do, and the guide seldom.

Getting out of the tram is a very tense and difficult business. Every inch of the way has to be fought for, and there is always a sporting chance that the tram will start again before the people in front of one will let one go through, or the people behind one have ceased to try to push past. I carry a bruise on one ankle for days, where one of the more impetuous Comrades gave me a vigorous kick, in order that I should get out of his way.

I ask Peter if he knew about the pregnant women going in the front of the tram, and he says Yes, but he doesn't see how they're to get there. Neither do I unless they confide their pretty secret to the conductor and he or she passes it on to all the comrades in the tram, and a way is cleared. (Like Charlotte Bronte when she went to a party, and everybody stood up and made way for her.)

"We might ask the Little Monster," Peter suggests. Any delicacy which either of us has ever possessed at home has long since left us. There are no inhibitions in Russia.

It is in a spirit of simple camaraderie that he and I and the Little Monster go together to a clinic for the welfare of mothers and babies—actually a most excellent institution, admirably organized—and are given much full and intelligent physiological information, with Lenin—aged three—looking benevolently down on us from the wall.

As there is practically no wall in Moscow from which I have not seen Lenin looking down—either as an infant or as an elderly man exhorting the workers (there is no intervening stage), I have ceased to notice him consciously; but on this occasion I prefer him to the other pictures with which the walls are covered.

I prefer him to the unwholesome-looking red and blue maps of the human organism. I prefer him to the things in bottles on a shelf. I prefer him, a thousand times, to the masterpiece which the woman doctor who is showing us round, has kept to the last.

"This tumor is one of the largest we have ever..." I say it is interesting—which I suppose it is, if I could bring myself to look at it, which I can't—and Peter says nothing. I think he is stunned. He is looking with a fixed, unnatural intensity at an artificial tomato, carrot, apple, and beetroot in a little case. Necessary items in the diet of infants, says the notice.

I think perhaps if one had seen all this—not the tumor, which can't be essential to anybody's education except a medical student's—but all the maps and photographs and measurements and the instructions—at a much earlier age, before one had grown squeamish and when one's curiosity was young and strong, it might have been a very good thing.

It does give vital information, and it does give it in a scientific, impersonal way, and it does stress the importance of bodily hygiene.

"Are school-children ever brought here to be taught physiological and biological facts?"

"Yes, often. They come in groups."

The last piece of information is superfluous. The Comrades, especially the school-children, go everywhere in groups. They are taught from the very beginning to lead the collective life.

Peter and I agree that the mother-and-babies Welfare Clinic is one of the best things we have seen in the Soviet Union, and that we approve of the visits there of the school-children—with a mental reservation excluding the tumor.

From the Clinic the Little Monster takes us—going first in the wrong direction but afterward recovering herself—to the Court of Marriages and Divorces. It consists of a desk in a little room, with a middle-aged woman in charge, and two plants that look like india-rubber-plants in pots in the doorway, each tied up with a pale, frail bow of papery white ribbon—like the ghosts of dead bridal decorations.

There are, as usual, Comrades sitting about and waiting, and the guide says that they have come either to register their marriage or to get a divorce. They all look to me equally unexhilarated, and nearly all of them are holding small children.

A young Russian is at the desk, and has said something, and it has been written down in a ledger, and he has, in his Russian way, settled down on to a hard-looking stool as if for life.

"He has just got a divorce," says the guide, and she asks him a great many questions about his private affairs and translates his answers. (I am, and always have been, thoroughly aghast at the way in which private individuals in Russia are turned inside-out for the benefit of tourists; but I am bound to say that they never seem to raise any objection.)

It seems that the young Russian is not pleased with his wife. She reproaches him, rather strangely, with spending his money on amusements and on presents for her. It makes her, she complains, into a slave. They quarrel. He has, without telling her anything about it, got a divorce. When she reproaches him this evening because he wishes to take her out to a cinema or a café, he will simply confront her with the fait accompli.

"It is very simple," says the Little Monster, looking unspeakably superior. She knows that in capitalist countries nothing, least of all divorce, is as simple as that.

"Are marriages equally simple?"

"Yes, they are. This couple with the two children have come to register their marriage."

The husband with the divorce smiles at us very amiably and makes way for the couple with the two children. Some people might think that it is a little late in the day for them to come and register their marriage. But the guide, after the usual questions and answers, is able to explain it all.

They have been eight years together. If they should get tired of each other and decide to separate it will be very much simpler to make arrangements for the welfare of the children if the marriage has been registered. So here they are.

The whole thing—barring the questions of the guide and her translations of the replies to us—takes about five minutes. We have witnessed a wedding in Moscow.

I wonder, sentimentally, whether the woman—who is sufficiently middle-aged to remember the old days—gives a thought to a new dress and music and flowers and a wedding party.

I don't suppose she does. I see her grasp one child by the hand, and the husband takes the other, and they depart, without so much as a vestige of Mendelssohn's Wedding March to encourage them.

Peter, who collects information much more assiduously than I do, asks intelligent questions, and enters the answers in a little book, and the woman at the desk—I suppose she is the Registrar—is very obliging and only breaks off once or twice to divorce or marry a few people who drift in and out.

As I return to my hotel—by way of the Kremlin, the fir trees, the Mausoleum, and the Basil Cathedral—I reflect that Moscow, whether through its fault or my own, has a most depressing effect on me. I think it's partly the number of Comrades who walk the streets and throng the trams and stand in queues outside the shops and the cinemas, all looking rather drab and unwashed and solemn. And one has caught such depressing glimpses, through unshaded windows, of dormitories with beds packed like sardines. Besides, it is never exhilarating to see such quantities of wholesale destruction going on as is necessitated by the Soviet determination to make a completely new city of Moscow.

I quite see that wonders have been achieved in a very short time. I haven't any doubt that the condition of the workers before the Revolution was abominable beyond description. I haven't really any serious doubts that they are working toward a better state of things than they have ever known.

But I have a bourgeois longing to see gaily dressed shop windows, and perhaps gaily dressed people in the streets as well, and to see more individualism and less collectivism—and, in a word, there seems to me to be a total absence of fun in Moscow.

Beauty, there is. In some of the buildings that have survived, in the Ballet, in the Gallery of Western Art, in many of the theater productions. "Romeo and Juliet" was a beautiful production. So was "Eugene Onegin" at the Opera.

Probably I have come to Moscow in quite the wrong spirit. I am making the mistake of comparing its newly begun institutions—of which, God wot, I have seen plenty of examples—with similar institutions in England and in America. Absurd and unreasonable.

The Soviet institutions—clinics, welfare centers, schools, crèches, hospitals—are all working under difficulties and are all hampered by lack of experience and lack of appliances. (They handicap themselves still further by a cast-iron determination to accept no outside criticism whatever and by assuming that perfection has already been achieved, which is far from being the case.)

A recollection—inaccurate, as usual—comes to my mind of some uncivil aphorism of Dr. Johnson's about women writing books or pursuing any other intellectual avocation.

"It is like a dog that walks upon its hind legs, sir. We do not ask whether the thing be well or ill done. The wonder is that it should be done at all." I am sure that I had better remember about Dr. Johnson and the dog when I try to collect my impressions of Soviet Russia.

III

At eleven o'clock at night an American acquaintance of Peter's appears and suggests taking us to pay a call on a man who writes books—a Russian. He has said that he will be at home between twelve and one.

He isn't, and we all settle down in his kitchen—situated on the staircase, and which he shares with five other families in the same building—and wait for his arrival.

At a quarter to one he comes, bringing three friends—a woman and two men.

We all sit in the bed-sitting room and talk. There ought to be a samovar, but there isn't. Only a wireless. I think my ideas are out of date.

The conversation is about the law concerning abortion (naturally, for it is the most popular topic in Russia), the new Metro, a poet who has annoyed the Government by one of his poems and has been sent as a punishment to work at the construction of a new bridge across the Neva—where he will surely be of no use whatever—and the state of literature in England.

I do not join in this intelligently. For one thing, I am getting sleepy, and for another, nobody in Russia has ever heard of me as a writer—and wouldn't be interested if he had—as none of my works is political or sociological—so nobody refers to me. Just as I am thinking that with any luck nobody will notice it if I do go to sleep, my host abruptly inquires of me which writer of fiction is leading the younger school in England now? Which indeed?

I must think of a name, and I must try to think of one that will convey something to my hearers into the bargain.

I hope to combine a modicum of truth with a certain amount of diplomacy by saying: "Dreiser."

"Theodore Dreiser?"

"Theodore Dreiser," I repeat firmly, and I really think I have displayed great presence of mind, considering that I am more than half asleep.

"I meant," says my host, "which of the moderns. Theodore Dreiser is the literature of the grandmothers, yes?"

Not of any of the grandmothers I know, he isn't. But I don't say so. Theodore Dreiser and I retire together into the ranks of the grandmothers and are disinterred no more.

Only just before we go away, at three o'clock, the only other woman present asks me rather sharply if I have any silk stockings, aspirins, lip-sticks, cotton frocks, or nail-scissors to sell.

I suppose she thinks it's all I'm fit for—and I am disposed to agree with her, and make a rendezvous for next day, for her to come to my hotel and inspect my belongings.

Shortly afterward I say good-night to Peter at his door and continue on my way—Red Square, Kremlin, Mausoleum, fir trees, Basil Cathedral, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

IV

The Russian lady keeps her word. She much more than keeps it. She not only comes and buys everything that I want to sell, but swoops down on a large number of things that I don't want to sell, and says she'll take them as well. She opens my wardrobe and takes down my frocks, she lifts up the pillow on my bed by a sort of unerring instinct—like a water-diviner—and discloses my pajamas, and she looks inside my sponge-bag. (What can she possibly suppose that I am hiding inside my sponge-bag?)

"Look, I take this ink-bottle off of you as well, and if you have a fountain-pen I take that, and I take for my husband the blue frame (he will not want the photograph; besides it is your children, you will like to keep it) and for myself I take those things what I have already bought, and the red jumper, the pajamas, the two frocks. Have you any boiled sweets?"

No, I haven't any boiled sweets. And nothing will induce me to part with the safety ink-bottle or the blue frame or my only two frocks.

It takes a long while to convince the Russian lady that I really mean this, and I have eventually to concede the red jumper and the pajamas. She still looks so fixedly at the ink-bottle that I become unnerved, and distract her by an offer of meat-juice tablets—for her husband—and handkerchiefs and safety-pins for herself.

She buys them all and pays me in roubles on the spot. When I put the money away in my bag she says she will buy the bag, and when I hastily thrust the bag into my suitcase she says she will buy the suitcase.

I get her out of the room at last by giving her a lip-stick as a sort of bonus, like a pound of tea for a cash sale.

When, in the passage outside, I refer to our morning's work she says, "Hush Not so loud," and I realize that the whole transaction has been an illicit one and that Comrade Stalin would disapprove. We might perhaps even find ourselves, like the ill-conducted poet, constructing a new bridge across the Neva.

All the same, if I'd known what a shortage there is of pretty, brightly colored odds and ends in the Soviet Republic, I think I should have brought a great many more of them with me—and not only for the sake of turning a doubtfully honest rouble out of them either.

V

One morning Peter and I go to Kolominsky escorted by the Little Monster. She says it is an ancient monastery, and when we get there it looks like an ancient monastery but she recants and says it was a Palace of Ivan the Terrible. I don't know which she means. Prefer to think of it as a monastery.

Much the most peaceful spot I have seen in Russia—no Comrades, no reconstruction, not even a picture of Lenin with outstretched arm and clenched fist.

Just as I am sitting on a stone wall under the lime trees and looking down at the fields and the river, the guide tells me that on this exact spot Ivan the Terrible used to watch the peasants being flogged.

It is a great pity she cannot let well alone. However, it is to-day that we hear her, for the first and last time, make a joke. On the way back to the tram, passing through a tiny village, we see a little calf lying on the roadside, with a small pig nuzzling affectionately against it, both of them fast asleep in the sunshine.

Even the swivel eye of the Little Monster softens as she gazes down at them and she says:

"Look! In a Socialist state—no prejudice!"

For the moment, as we all three laugh, she seems quite human.

It doesn't last. She becomes as hortatory and tiresome as ever long before the tram has lurched back into Moscow with us, and makes us get off at the wrong stop, so that we have to walk several additional miles to Peter's hotel.

"It still seems odd to be lunching at four o'clock."

"Yes, doesn't it? Shall you have Bortsch again to-day?"

"Yes, I like it."

"How fortunate you are. But their fish is better than their meat, and the ice cream is good."

"Excellent. Much, much better than the compote."

"Oh, the compote!"

We do not describe the compote to each other. It is not necessary, as we have met it, both here and in Leningrad, at every meal. We know all about the rather tough, acid little fruits in the top of the glass dish and the sliced apple below and the two rather consoling little bits of tinned apricot at the very bottom. Curious, how very much one seems to think and talk about one's food in Moscow.

Also one's drink. The mineral water is good but expensive. The ordinary, plain water—what, in any other country, would be the drinking-water—arrives on the table boiled. And very well-advised too. But either the boiling or its own natural properties have turned it pale yellow and given it a strange smell and a very peculiar taste. The remaining alternative, since neither of us drinks wine, and the beer—which is excellent—is a ruinous price—is tea in a glass.

Meals, it is scarcely necessary to say, take a very long time in Russia. Hours elapse between the moment of sitting down, and detaching from its book the coupon that represents food, and the moment when the waiter comes to take one's order. Hours more between each course. (The coupon entitles one to three courses. I have never tried to ask for a second helping, but I don't think the coupon would run to it.)

The tea comes at the very end, and is always much too hot to drink, and so necessitates another long wait.

Sometimes Peter and I talk like the thoughtful and intelligent people we really are, and discuss Socialism, and Communism, and tell each other that we really ought to have seen Russia before the Revolution in order to judge of the vast improvement effected. (When Peter says this to me it is very reasonable. When I say it to him it is simply idiotic, as before the Revolution he was an infant in the nursery.)

Sometimes we discuss our neighbors.

"I saw that man over there when I was in Batum. He speaks Dutch."

"Does he? Yes, he looks as though he might. There are some Germans at my hotel. They've made friends with Mrs. Pansy Baker and she went with them to see an abortion clinic—and a boot-factory."

"What fun. Have you seen a single pretty woman yet in Russia?"

"No. Have you?"

"No."

Once, when a blonde with black eyelashes and a tightly fitting white frock comes in and sits down all by herself at the table next to ours, Peter hisses at me through his teeth:

"If ever there was one, I'll take my oath that's one of what we know there aren't any of in Russia!"

I understand him perfectly.

In Russia now, we have repeatedly been told, there are no prostitutes.

They have all been collected and placed in a sort of Home of Rest, like aged horses in England.

It is, I believe, possible to go and visit them. I suppose if we ever do, they will be expected to answer any indiscreet question that any of us may, through the guide, elect to ask them.

I think, on the whole, I won't visit the prostitutes.

Sometimes Peter and I just talk about England, and Hartland Quay, and the Fourth of June at Eaton, and people we both know in London or Devonshire. It feels like looking back into another life, and on those occasions—which are generally in the small hours of the morning after a gruelling day of trams, comrades, museums, clinics, and factories—I go past the Kremlin, the fir trees, and the Mausoleum without so much as noticing them. I go on down the hill, and past the reconstruction on the river-bank, where the drill is hard at it, and into my hotel.

The dining room is brightly lit and full of people, and a little orchestra is playing "Sous les Toits de Paris"—as it does nightly.

I look in as I go by.

Mrs. Pansy Baker, the American communist, it at a table with her Germans, talking to them very earnestly. She is saying: "I have had a sad life."

I think this must be the beginning of a reference to Mr. Baker. Very likely he too has had a sad life.

In my bedroom is one cockroach. I don't like it at all. But it is headed toward the door, which I civilly hold open for it, and out it goes. A lull in the reconstruction work has set in, and I think what a good moment this will be in which to go to sleep.

The orchestra, now playing something very odd that I keep on thinking I know but can't identify, is nothing. Sometimes I win this nightly race with the reconstruction, sometimes I don't.

To-night it has only reculé pour mieux sauter, And they have got quite a new tool to work with—something like a hammer, dropping slowly down a flight of steps, over and over again, one step at a time. At last it drops once too often, and they don't pick it up again.

We are back once more at "Sous les Toits de Paris." Sur les lits de Moscou...