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The orchestra of the Petits Champs lost one of its members, who died of pneumonia in a garret room of the house in which the Markov family had obtained unfurnished lodgings. Michael sat with him when he was taken ill, and his mother nursed him until he died after five days and nights. It was very sad, because he was a nice fellow who had once been an actor in the Moscow Arts Theatre. But his death left a place vacant which Michael filled, after an introduction to the leader of the orchestra by Vera Sokolova.

“For an amateur you don’t play too badly,” said this friendly man, who was a first-class conductor. “At least I hope you will spare me the excruciating agonies I suffer from some members of my orchestra, who play as though they were hyenas and jackals. The noises they produce torture my unfortunate ears until I want to utter screams of pain.”

“I think I can find my way about a line of music,” said Michael modestly. “If I get on to the wrong note I will play it very softly.”

“The drums drown a good deal,” said the great man. “My drummers have well-developed muscles. They ought to have been blacksmiths.”

Michael felt proud when he came home to his family and announced that he had obtained this job. The pay was not magnificent. It was less than that of an office-boy in the City of London, but in Constantinople it would help to pay for bread and soup.

“It’s a start,” said Michael. “I feel tremendously pleased with the idea that I have begun a career. If I practise hard I may become a violinist like Kreisler. It opens a wonderful vista of fame and fortune.”

He spoke with smiling eyes, but not without serious ambition in his secret mind.

“Hurry up, then,” said Olga. “I am greatly in need of some new underclothes.”

“And I,” said Tania, “wish to buy some new books. I have read all I have until I know them by heart.”

Michael’s mother was pleased with him, with a little emotion because this boy would have to work very hard in that place, the Petits Champs, which she disliked very much after all she had heard from Vera Sokolova.

“We shan’t see much of you,” she told him, “and I shall feel very lonely without you in this awful city.”

It was quite true that Michael’s family didn’t see much of him now that he had a place in the orchestra. The Petits Champs didn’t close down until two o’clock in the morning, and there were always afternoon rehearsals, more trying and tiring than the evening performances because of Sorokin’s desperate efforts to teach music to ex-officers and other amateurs. It was an exhausting process for him. A man of fine and sensitive ear, he suffered exceedingly. A man of excitable temperament, he wore himself out by his storms of rage, agony, and emotion. He smashed his baton repeatedly, trying to get the right rhythm from this orchestra. He screamed at them. He wept before them. He laughed like a demented man. He made hideous faces at them, expressing the torture of his own soul.

“O God of mercy!” he cried. “Have you no ears? Have you no sense of time? I give you the beat and you ignore me. I say play softly, and you make the din of devils. I show by my hands, by my body, by every vibration in my being, how you should play that line, and by the living God you take no notice and do the very opposite. You are not thinking of what you play. You are probably having visions of beef-steaks and gross meats. You are thinking of the women you loved, or of the Bolsheviks you killed. You are strangling Red devils when you should be playing the angelic music of Schubert. You are wondering whether your uncles and aunts have been executed by Djerjinsky when you should be concentrating on Moszkowski’s masterpiece. You inflict Chinese tortures upon me. You have no more music in your souls than fat Turks or German sausages. Oh God! That first violin is playing like a strangled cat, like a dying seal, like a pig’s bladder pricked by a pin.”

Over and over again there were scenes like that, interrupted by violent quarrels in the orchestra who blamed one another for the horrible orgies of sound produced by the general effect or suddenly resented the abuse of their leader and rose in a body, threatening to go on strike or to hurl poor Sorokin into the Bosphorus.

Michael had one compensation, which was also a pain. Every night he saw Vera Sokolova. Over the body of his violin he saw her come on to the stage in her leopard skin, or in less clothes than that. She had a grace and rhythm which he found beautiful to watch. In her Greek dance she was like a primitive thing of the woods, a wild-eyed maenad, a child of Nature, filled with the vibrations of life which move in all that lives. He was aware that she excited the audience, that horrible audience of seamen and riff-raff and dissolute men and vile women whom he came to hate, whom he hated most because they watched the beauty of Vera with leering eyes. They clapped her with thunderous applause. They demanded a repetition of her leopard-skin dance when she was panting and exhausted, as Michael could see from his place below the footlights. Drunken sailors called out foul words to her. Young Turks stared and smiled at her. It was, thought Michael, disgusting and degrading.

He told her so several times when he had the chance of talking to her now and then, but she put her hand on his arm and laughed, and called him Puritan and German and foolishly non-Russian.

“This is my apprenticeship,” she told him. “I’m learning something every time I appear. And I rejoice that I can give a little pleasure to an audience like this. One day perhaps I shall appear in Paris or Berlin. Then I shall remember these nights in the Petits Champs, with you down there in the orchestra, looking anxious and not too well fed, my poor Michael—our days of trial and poverty—the days when we needed courage and hope.”

“I hate this place,” said Michael. “There is evil in it. It stinks of vice.”

“It’s a part of life,” said Vera. “It won’t touch us if we keep ourselves pure.”

Yet it touched this girl Vera one night in a way that was very displeasing to Michael. She was one of the programme sellers between her dances and had slipped on a frock which was supposed to be in the style of a Russian peasant girl, though peasant-girls are not so dainty in the fields. Michael had his eyes on her as she moved about, offering her programmes to naval men of three fleets, British, French, and American—and to the ordinary groups of Turks, Greeks, and Armenians. She chatted with some of them gaily, as part of her business, making them laugh—and Michael felt a surge of jealousy. Then rage took possession of him. It was when Vera was talking to an elderly Turk, rather distinguished-looking in his red cap. He wore a monocle and looked like one of the officers who had fought at Gallipoli during the War, as no doubt he had. He fixed his monocle and smiled at Vera. Suddenly he put his arm round her waist and drew her close to him and kissed her. For a moment she struggled and after releasing herself smacked him across the face with the back of her hand. He didn’t seem to like it. The monocle fell from his eye. He seized her wrist very tightly and twisted her arm so that she gave a cry of pain. Michael was within a few yards of her. He was playing second fiddle in Schubert’s ‘Marche Militaire’. He was half-way through that stirring piece, conducted by Sorokin with a dramatic baton.

Michael let his bow drop, thrust his violin on to an empty chair by his side and leapt over the rail dividing the orchestra from the audience. In a second he was on the Turk and using his fists like sledge hammers.

Vera gave a scream. Other women in the audience screamed. Two English seamen, fuddled by their drink, were delighted with this diversion and hit two inoffensive Greeks just to get a fight up. An American sailor said, “We won the War,” to an English petty-officer, who struck him on the jaw. Six American sailors resented this treatment of a messmate and attacked the English petty-officer and his group at one of the tables. Some ex-officers of the Imperial Russian Army, acting as waiters, endeavoured to restore order and were involved in a free fight which was joined by several Italians, a young Jew from the bazaar in Stamboul, and a Smyrniot carpet seller. Three Turks leapt down from their box next to the stage and endeavoured to fight their way towards their compatriot with the monocle who had been assaulted by Michael and was bleeding at the nose.

The orchestra went on playing. The drums beat louder. A cornet-player, watching the affray with considerable interest, lost his place in the music and produced the wrong notes very loudly. An English seaman jumped over the rail of the orchestra and put his arm round the neck of a Russian ex-officer who played the ’cello, who was put off his stroke by this affectionate caress. Sorokin shouted, waved his baton, swore Russian oaths, and tried to control his musicians.

It was pandemonium, which lasted for twenty minutes, until the appearance of the military police. Then suddenly there was calm. Michael resumed his seat, bleeding slightly from a wound on the forehead which he had received by falling against the sharp end of a table when flung in that direction by the tall Turk with the monocle. Vera had disappeared behind the scenes. Five minutes later she reappeared on the stage dressed as Columbine and looking as though she had just come from a woodland grove in fairyland.

Sorokin bent down to Michael during the Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’ which he was conducting. He spoke softly but intensely:

“You are an imbecile, Markov! You are a madman! You are like most Russians, a savage of the lowest species. A cannibal! A bandit! Don’t you realize that we may lose our licence from the International Police and get condemned as a disorderly house? Then we shall all starve. Then we shall kill you as the cause of our starvation.”

Michael blinked his eyes but continued to play Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Song’.

He did not regret his action. He would do it again if any swine molested Vera.

Between the acts and behind the scenes when the orchestra were given ten minutes for tea and cigarettes, Sorokin resumed his denunciations. He threatened to turn Michael out of his orchestra.

“I am sorry,” said Michael, “but I am an ex-officer who fought under Wrangel.”

“Exactly,” said Sorokin. “You have become accustomed to murders and massacres.”

“As an ex-officer,” said Michael proudly and angrily, “I defend women when I see them molested by brute beasts.”

“As an ex-officer,” said Sorokin, “you ought to have been in the nursery with a nanny who would smack your backside. In any case you play the violin like a street-corner musician. You have no more ear than a turnip. You are one of my Chinese torturers.”

“On the contrary,” said Michael, white to the lips, “I play extremely well, considering that I am conducted by a madman and play in a lunatic asylum.”

Vera arrived at this moment and took hold of Michael’s hand.

“It was very noble of you,” she said. “You were like a mediaeval knight rescuing a damsel in distress. I hope Mr. Sorokin has been congratulating you on your gallant rescue of his dancing-girl.”

Sorokin laughed—all his anger gone.

“I’ve been swearing at him like a prison warder. Perhaps I allowed my temper to get the better of me.”

He caught hold of Michael and pulled him to his great chest, kissed him on both cheeks, slapped him on the right shoulder, and thrust his fingers through Michael’s hair.

“It was after all superb,” he said. “I’m only sorry that I couldn’t watch the battle. It reached Homeric heights, judging by the din behind me.”