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Oliver Alden sat one night at dinner with Sacha Dolin in a Russian restaurant not far from the steps leading up from the Galata Bridge. He had met this man several times on the island of Prinkipo in the sitting-room of the Markov family on the attic floor of a Turkish villa which was now like a slum tenement. He had been attracted by Dolin’s haggard face and moody eyes and long silences which he broke now and then by words of harsh irony spoken with a smile.

“If I could know all that passes in that man’s mind,” thought Alden, “I should get closer to the Russian tragedy and all that history which lies behind a blanket of fog.”

He saw that this man of thirty or so was devoted to the mother of young Markov, and very charming in his manner to that boy who had been his comrade on the last retreat. Another thing in his favour was that he had been a painter before the War, and Alden had a soft spot in his heart for all artists who loved beauty which had been banished from the world by war and revolution. He met Dolin one evening in Constantinople, striding gloomily along the Grand Rue de Pera in a shabby old uniform clumsily patched.

“It would be a favour to me if you would dine with me,” said Alden, stopping in front of him and speaking in French. “I’m a lonely man this evening, and I hate loneliness.”

Sacha Dolin was startled for a moment and seemed to come out of a dream.

“I shan’t be good company,” he answered. “I have the cafard. As you know, that means an extreme form of self-pity. Nevertheless it’s kind of you to offer me a dinner. To a Russian refugee that is a pleasant invitation.”

“We’ll talk about Art,” said Alden.

“Then we shall be talking about something that has died,” answered Dolin.

The restaurant was crowded with the usual types. That is to say it was crowded with French, Italian, and English officers, special correspondents from foreign newspapers waiting for history to happen, commercial travellers, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, with pretty ladies of various nationalities, and two or three young Turks. One could get good food here. The chef, as Alden knew, had once been the captain of the Czar’s yacht. He was a very good cook. The waitresses were Russian women of the old régime, some of them of high rank, it appeared, when now and then a Russian ex-officer came into the restaurant and bowed over their hands before taking his place, or when a Russian girl accompanied by some foreign officer curtsied to one of the women who afterwards served her meal.

Sacha Dolin was one of those who bowed low and kissed the hand of a grey-haired little woman who brought the menu to Alden’s table.

“You! My dear Sacha!” she exclaimed. “Someone told me you had been killed.”

“It’s only my soul that is dead, Princess,” answered Dolin. “My body still walks about and gets hungry. My English friend here has been good enough to invite me to dine.”

“How is Lydia?” asked the Princess.

Sacha Dolin went very pale for a moment.

“Lydia is in Moscow,” he said. “She couldn’t get away. I shall never see her again.”

The little princess with the grey hair—she was Princess Ozlova—raised her hands.

“Oh, God of pity!” she cried.

They were speaking in Russian, which Alden could understand after a year in Russian ports from the White Sea to the Black Sea.

“That little lady has a sweet face,” said Alden presently, when she was called away by one of her ladies.

“I painted her portrait ten years ago,” said Dolin. “She had a fine house in St. Petersburg and a summer palace at Yalta. Now she serves in this eating-place. Some of those young women used to go to her dances. I used to fall in love with them, or at least pretend to fall in love with them. They knew Lydia, who became my wife. She was the prettiest of them all, and left her rich family to marry a poor painter. We were absurdly happy until the War came. Life was like a fairly tale, and I even made a bit of money.”

During the course of the dinner several of the young waiting women came up to him, and each time he rose and kissed their hands. Each time in their rapid Russian the name of Lydia was spoken with pity for this man who had lost his wife.

Oliver Alden, old Carthusian, who knew the countryside round Godalming, and was now, by a freak of fate, in naval uniform, studied this scene around him, and these characters who moved about in it, like a play-goer watching a drama from the stalls. This man by his side had been through frightful adventures. He had seen into the very depths of the hells that men make for themselves. A few years ago these Russian women had been the maids of honour and the ladies-in-waiting of the Court in St. Petersburg. They had had their summer palaces in the Crimea. They had driven to the music of sleigh-bells down the Nevsky Prospekt, wrapped in rich furs. Peasants had bowed and crossed themselves in the presence of these gentlewomen. They had had English and French and German governesses. Now they were kitchen-maids and serving-maids in a Turkish restaurant. In St. Petersburg now members of the proletariat were sitting in the Imperial box at the Opera. In Moscow a group of fanatics under Lenin, their chief—a man of genius with a sardonic humour—were living in the Kremlin, inventing and proclaiming a new system of society, according to the gospel of Karl Marx. Djerjinsky—the man of terror—was executing thousands of ex-aristocrats and bourgeois, and social democrats, suspected of being hostile to this creed. They were more intolerant of heresy than the Orthodox Church under its mediaeval tyranny. They were as ruthless of political opposition as the Czars who had sent droves of exiles to Siberia. In the name of Communism human nature was to be forced into the same mould, and in the name of Democracy free thought and speech were to be suppressed. So said these ex-officers of the White Armies with whom Alden had talked for more than a year.

He talked now with this man at his side, this tragic-eyed man who said that Art had died, who said that his soul had died though his body walked about.

“How is it,” asked Alden, “that so many of your fellow Russians still have a certain gaiety in this exile? Look at that pretty girl over there, laughing with those English officers. She’s not pretending to laugh. She looks as if she hadn’t a care in the world! I’ve noticed it several times before. They laugh and dance on the island of Prinkipo, though less than three weeks ago some of them were in a panic-stricken flight.... Have some more wine, my dear fellow.”

Dolin raised his glass and drank some more wine. A little colour made his haggard face less like a death-mask.

He answered in French, which was the language they were speaking.

“It’s partly our Russian character,” he explained. “But it is mostly human nature. Shipwrecked people are quite gay, I’m told, when they reach dry land after the storm-tossed sea. And there is, one must confess, a certain pleasure—a certain relief for a time—in being liberated from the conventionalities of civilization. Nothing matters except life itself. There’s no shame in being ragged if all one’s friends are in rags. To satisfy one’s hunger is magnificent if one has escaped from starvation. I am very pleased with myself just now. This bortsch is excellent, especially when it is served on white linen and when one sits in a chair before a table. In the company of one’s friends one finds a little courage—even a little gaiety. When one weeps it is alone and in one’s heart. But we Russians have the gift of living for the moment. Some of us will spend all we have for an hour’s pleasure, knowing that in the next hour we shall be penniless. That, of course, is idiotic. It is also Russian. We are like that. We are primitive like that. We are, of course, uncivilized.”

Alden laughed.

“You have the habit of saying you’re uncivilized! And yet most of these women here speak three or four languages and have read many good books, and love music, and talk with very keen intelligence. You have a passion for intellectual truth. At least you don’t blink at stark facts of life. Is that uncivilized? Take some more wine, Dolin.”

Sacha Dolin filled his glass. It was a good French burgundy. It warmed him and made him less melancholy.

“One hears good talk among Russians,” he admitted. “That is because we are nearer to the earth than most educated people in Western cultures. We have learnt to talk and argue, and even think, now and then. When we talk we think that we have done something. With us words are as good as deeds. But we are still peasants, with the peasant soul and the peasant knowledge of life’s cruelties and hardships and passions. We know how near human nature is to the animals. In Paris and Berlin, and doubtless in London, people of good class are more divorced from the old earth, and pretend, with more success, that they have escaped from the animal stage.”

“What about Russian mysticism?” asked Alden.

Sacha Dolin smiled.

“It’s true that the Russian soul is filled with mysticism. It is also at the mercy of superstition, which perhaps is the same. We believe in Fate. We are afraid of God’s wrath if we sin, though we keep on sinning. We are aware of being very close to the secret forces which lie behind the veil of the things we see and touch. We are afraid of the devils inside ourselves. We believe in signs and symbols. But isn’t that a proof that we are like savages—that indeed we still belong to the steppes and the forest, though we may have been born in St. Petersburg? I’ve seen the savage in the Russian soul. I have seen the devils of which he is afraid. This, my dear sir, is admirable wine. I once drank wine like this in Paris when I was an art student. There was a little restaurant behind the Madeleine ...”

Some of the people left the restaurant. A Greek girl laughed loudly when the man who was paying for her dinner overturned a chair. He was a young naval officer who had drunk a little more than was good for him. The chef who had been the captain of the Czar’s yacht came in from the kitchen to eat his own dinner.

“Tell me,” said Alden, “what happened in Russia when Denikin seemed to have the game in his hands? Why did the White Armies retreat when they were close to Moscow? What were your own experiences, my dear Dolin? It’s all a mystery to me, though I’ve talked with many Russians.”

“I will try to tell you,” said Dolin. “Give me a few cigarettes, my dear friend. It’s all very difficult to tell. I can’t talk unless I smoke.”

He smoked one cigarette after another and drank more wine. He talked in excellent French. He went on talking for two hours, while other people came to feed and others left, and Russian waitresses who had been ladies of St. Petersburg became flushed and tired in the heat of this room and in this long service at tables. The Princess gave a little scream when one of them dropped some plates. The ex-captain of the Czar’s yacht accepted a cigar from an American naval man. A mouse ran across the floor and frightened the women. Prince Andreyev, who had fallen in love with Olga Markova, strode into the restaurant and saluted the company with his hand to his fur cap, and kissed the hand of the Princess, and ordered a bottle of champagne which he drank at his own table, having sold a ring that day to his benevolent Greek who changed trinkets into Turkish pounds and robbed him politely.

And all the time Sacha Dolin talked and tried to tell Oliver Alden the things that had happened in Russia when the White Armies were fighting the Reds.

He had been one of the first volunteers when Kornilov, the little old Eagle, had raised his standard in the South. Kornilov had embraced him, and had then turned to a group of other men.

“Gentlemen,” said old Kornilov, facing them with a sombre laugh, “we are not many, I admit. I thought the Russian Imperial Army had three hundred thousand officers. Where are the rest?”

There were only six hundred of them at first, all ex-officers of the old army, as they had escaped from the Reds in broken boots and ragged shirts. Some of them wore goloshes and patent-leather shoes, and even women’s cloaks. They had six guns drawn by lean horses which they had captured from the Bolsheviks, and one armoured car, and an ambulance or two. It was the small beginning of an army which, before the tide turned, captured the best part of Russia. They were joined by Cossack cavalry under Kaledin. Later still they were joined by the Kuban Cossacks.

They captured many villages after hand to hand slaughter merciless on both sides. It was followed by the Campaign of Ice. This man, Sacha Dolin, had been among those who followed Markov, a very gallant fellow, across a frozen river. They were up to their necks in the ice-cold water. They held their rifles high above their heads. Some of them held on to the stirrup leathers of Circassian cavalry. They smashed their way into Ekaterinodar and fought across furniture piled in the streets, which ran with blood before they had turned out the Bolsheviks.

There was no mercy between Reds and Whites, no chivalry, no compassion. They were all Russians, but on one side were men whose fathers and brothers had been executed in batches, and whose mothers and sisters were in hiding like hunted creatures. On the other side were men who had fought in the War without arms or ammunition because of corruption behind the lines, and who had suddenly turned and said: “Our enemy is not in front of us but behind.” Among them were men whose fathers and forefathers had suffered long ages of serfdom, which had kept the people in beastlike ignorance, in filth and misery, at the mercy of rulers who shot them dead or had them flogged with Cossack whips if they dared to claim any human rights.

“I tell you the truth,” said Dolin.... “This wine is very good.”

General Denikin succeeded Kornilov when that old warrior was killed by a shell.

“Denikin was stiff-necked,” said Sacha Dolin. “He was intolerant of all but the old Czarist ideas, and quarrelled with those who believed in a Republic, as many of us did. He couldn’t ride the whirlwind or bring order out of chaos.”

He had a great chance. He got supplies from Britain and France. His armies gathered in strength. Twenty thousand British troops landed at Batoum and held a defensive line to protect Georgia and Azerbaijan and Armenia from the Red Terror.

“I was with the transports,” said Alden.

Dolin nodded.

“It was the last chance of Imperial Russia. We thought we could roll back the Reds. For a time they rolled back. But many of our officers were still frivolous and still—shall I say—Russian. They preferred to make love to their women behind the lines. Supplies never reached the front-line troops.”

“I took out some supplies for your nurses,” said Alden. “They were used by the mistresses of staff officers.”

Dolin overturned his wine-glass and the white cloth was stained red.

“That was terrible!” he said. “That was another crime which God wouldn’t forgive.”

He took no notice of the overturned wine-glass.

“What happened then?” asked Alden.

Sacha Dolin stared across the restaurant at its whitewashed walls, as though staring into the past.

“In the north Kolchak had an army of a hundred thousand men, who advanced to a depth of two hundred and fifty miles, driving the Red Armies before them. I saw nothing of that. I was with Denikin, that man of narrow mind. He persecuted any officials who had supported the independence of the Ukraine or Georgia, because he believed as a fanatic in an indivisible Russia. He made many enemies. We didn’t bring pardon and peace with us but the cruel sword of vengeance. The road of the White Armies was lined with men hanged or massacred. On the other side they gouged out the eyes of their prisoners and cut off the fingers of dead women for their rings. I have seen, my friend, the work of the Beast. It is not good to remember.”

He became a little angry and picked up his overturned glass, which Alden refilled.

“Why do you wish me to remember?” he asked. “Why do you tempt me to tell you these atrocious things?”

“I want to know,” said Alden quietly. “We ought to know these things so that they shall never happen again. Tell me why the White Armies retreated when they had most of Russia in their hands?”

“How can I tell you that?” asked Dolin impatiently. “None of us ever knew. We asked each other: Why do we retreat? No one could tell. Some say it was France who deserted us. Some say it was England who betrayed us. Many of my friends still pretend to believe that.”

“And you?” asked Alden.

Sacha Dolin turned and stared into his eyes.

“I don’t say those things because I have a love of truth. Fate was against us, my dear friend. We were fighting against dreams and fears and despairs. There was a dream in the peasant mind—the primitive minds of our peasant soldiers—that Communism might give them liberty and peace. It was a new religion with Lenin as its prophet. They were possessed by fear—fear of new hangings and new massacres. They fell into despair because of all this bloodshed between fellow Russians. As we advanced our Armies became sullen and dispirited. In the enormous distances of Russia our lines became thin and straggling. Districts fell away from their allegiance and rose against us. The general staff tried to close up its lines, but there were no lines. Our men hid themselves in villages and stayed behind. They wandered off to their own regions. They used the Army transport for their families. Up North, Kolchak was heavily defeated. In the South we fell back and withered away. The Circassian division rode away from us. The Cossacks of the Don departed. Our retreat under Denikin was through terror-stricken regions where our troops were lost among the fugitive populations. It was like the end of the world.... It was the end of the world as once we knew it. Did you ask me to drink more wine with you?”

Alden asked him to drink more wine.

“Let us talk about Art,” said Sacha Dolin. “I have a very great worship for your English painter Constable. He saw into the very soul of nature. He loved the beauty of trees. He was in touch with their spirit.”

They talked about Art.

The restaurant was almost empty. The Russian princess and her serving-maids were now having their own dinner at a table in the corner of the room. Presently the door opened again and Alden saw the tall figure of Captain Boris Gronov whom he had met on Prinkipo. He might have been an English naval officer because of his fresh complexion and blue eyes. He was with his French wife, Madeleine—a little dark-haired woman with her black hair looped over her ears in the Russian style. He saluted Sacha Dolin and Oliver Alden, and laughed good-naturedly.

“You have had a good dinner, I hope? My wife and I have come to do a little work for our dear Princess and her ladies. We help with the washing-up, a small service which we are glad to do.”

He disappeared with his wife into the kitchen, after a few words with the Princess.

Sacha Dolin laughed harshly.

“That is what we have come to, we Russians. We are dish-washers. Our women are kitchen wenches. Our officer class do folk-dances in dirty cabarets. We are the nomads of a lost legion. It is all very amusing. As an Englishman you find it very amusing, no doubt?”

“As an Englishman I find it very tragic,” said Alden. “Shall we go and smell the night air?”

Sacha Dolin held his arm and walked stiffly.

“It was a good dinner,” he said. “I thank you a thousand times. I am, I think, a little drunk. That also is good.”

He put his arm round Alden’s shoulder and kissed him on the cheek.