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The boy soldier in Wrangel’s retreat walked up the carriage-track which led to the Villa Mimosa, half a mile from the road to Sebastopol. He had seen only six months of civil war, which seemed like six years if one counts time by experience of life and death and fatigue and misery. Yet it had not all been miserable. He had had the comradeship of older men who had been kind to him, like Sacha Dolin. He had laughed with them sometimes. He had marvelled at their gaiety, their indifference to hardship, their contempt for death. There had been good fellows in his company—intellectuals and gentle souls belonging to good families of the old régime, though they looked like ragamuffins in tattered uniforms. He had had wonderful conversations with some of them, who were great talkers about life, and art, and love, and human ideals, and the ironies of fate, though sometimes they had frozen his blood by their stories of cruelty and horror. He had found his manhood in this campaign which had ended now in this stampede to the sea. There was nothing he didn’t know, he thought, about human nature at its worst and best. There was nothing he didn’t know about hunger and filth and bodily discomfort.

He was verminous as he walked up this carriage-drive to his family villa. He itched all over. He hadn’t washed for weeks. His feet were blistered by marching in broken boots. His right boot hurt him most and sent shooting pains up his legs. His stomach was aching for food. Not that he felt hungry. He was past that. He only felt weak and lightheaded and silly.

He was almost certain that his mother and sisters would be waiting for him in the villa. They would never leave until he had rejoined them. They would know that he was on his way back with the retreating army. They would wait until the very last moment for him.

At the turn of the drive, when he came in sight of the house which had been the paradise of his boyhood on summer holidays from St. Petersburg, he started running, or, rather, stumbling forward at a dog-trot. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and still light on this last day of October—too soon for lamps to be lit, though dusk was creeping into the garden. He noticed that there were cart-tracks across the front lawn. Some wooden packing-cases filled with parcels wrapped up in newspaper were on the gravel path below the loggia. The front door was open.

Young Markov stood still and felt his heart knocking against his ribs in a queer thumping way. He cried out in a harsh voice, unlike his own voice as he knew it:

“Mother! ... Olga! ... Tania! ...”

It was very still in the garden. Not a breath of wind stirred through the palm trees or the magnolia bushes. A faint scent of flowers came to his nostrils. Years afterwards, in Berlin and Paris, and London and New York, he remembered that faint scent of flowers, the last roses of the year, as it had come to him when he stood for the last time in his mother’s garden of this villa in the Crimea which had been his paradise as a boy.

He went into the hall and shouted out again.

“Mother! ... Miss Browne! ... Tania! ...”

There was no answer.

He stumbled over something outside the drawing-room door, which was wide open. It was a pair of girl’s shoes. They belonged to Tania. They were her dancing shoes.

There was a litter in the drawing-room, with open packing-cases half filled and then left with bits of straw on the carpet round them. Some of his father’s books were piled on the floor by the piano. On the piano lid—the Bechstein on which his mother had played his accompaniments when he was learning the violin—were a number of miniatures in little frames of tarnished gilt. They were the portraits of his mother’s family, his great uncles and aunts who had belonged to the Court of Vienna. She had always been so proud of them. It was a family joke—his mother’s Austrian ancestors with their powdered hair and old-fashioned costumes.

The ormolu clock had fallen from the mantelpiece and lay smashed in the fire-place. A pair of long white gloves—Olga had worn them at parties—lay on one of the rugs. They had been trampled by muddy boots.

Markov, this young soldier of a broken army, gave a hard sob and put one hand across his eyes. His family had fled. He was alone in this house. The paradise of his boyhood was now an empty shell and all its happiness had gone. He was alone in Red Russia. Never again, perhaps, would he see his mother, or Tania, or Olga, or Miss Browne.

The window-panes rattled with the tremor of distant gun-fire. The Red batteries were at work again.

The boy strode into other rooms, staring round them with searching eyes. They were all disordered with the signs of hurried packing which had been unfinished and then abandoned. He went upstairs and stood in his own room. This was undisturbed and exactly as he had left it six months ago when he joined Wrangel’s army as a young recruit. His bed was made, with the top sheet turned down from the pillow. It was six months since he had slept in a bed. The sheets looked incredibly white and clean.

The book-shelves were untouched. There were his editions of Russian and English and German novelists. Miss Browne had given him David Copperfield for his twelfth birthday. He had read it three times. Tania and Olga had given him The Three Musketeers in French.

In this room he had thought a lot and dreamed a lot, the thoughts and dreams of boyhood to whom the world was still beautiful and romantic with the lure of life’s adventure, heroical and mysterious. He had had his hours of passion here. He had broken his heart—as it seemed then—because Vera Tereschenka had refused to kiss him and flirted with another boy. That was during the first years of the War, which had seemed very far away—so far away that it did not touch the spirit of youth, safe in the Crimea.

Michael Markov stood in this bedroom whose windows looked out to a dusky garden.

“All this is dead!” he said aloud to himself. “It’s all dead. I’m alone. I’m very frightened.”

He was very frightened that he would never see his people again and that he would be caught in this lonely house by the Red soldiers, who would certainly kill him. It was a fear that came to him suddenly, with a panic which took the strength from his limbs, like a man on a narrow ledge above a precipice. He sat down on the edge of the bed with his hands hanging between his knees and a cold sweat on his forehead and in the palms of his hands—the sweat of fear.

The windows rattled again with the noise of gun-fire, closer now. Some living thing touched one of his legs. It was a Persian kitten, which rubbed itself about his leg and mewed. It was the only other living thing in this deserted house, and it gave him a kind of comfort for an instant.

“Poor mite!” he said. “Poor mite. You also are lonely.”

He staggered up and walked stiffly across the room. On a shelf above his writing-table was his violin in its case. He played rather well. For a time he had had a passion for music. This old fiddle was a beauty. His father had given it to him before the War. He stared at it doubtfully. In that unknown future before him he might find this thing useful. It might be worth taking. There was just a chance he might get to Sebastopol before the Reds got him. He might find his mother and sisters again. He might go on living.

Along the road to Sebastopol this boy in a ragged blouse tucked inside his belt, and broken boots which hurt his feet like red-hot irons, walked with a violin under his arm. The tide of fugitives was still surging towards the sea. He fell into step with them at a funeral pace, though there was need for hurry. The Red cavalry could not be far behind.

A girl walked by his side and talked to him now and then. Her father and mother were somewhere ahead. She had had to lag behind because her feet were bad.

“Shall we be too late to get on any boat?” she asked.

“I hope not,” said Michael. “I hope to meet my family in Sebastopol. My mother and sisters.”

“If there’s no room on the boats I shall drown myself,” said the girl. “I would rather be dead than fall into the hands of the Reds.”

“After all, they are Russians,” said Michael. “Perhaps after a while there will be peace in Russia. They will only shoot us officers and people of importance.”

“I shall drown myself,” said the girl. “They’re monsters.”

“What’s your name?” asked Michael politely. “Mine is Michael Pavlovitch Markov. We may meet again some day.”

The girl’s name was Lydia Vorochevsky. Her father was an actor in the Moscow Arts Theatre.

“I have heard of him,” said Michael.

In front of him some peasant women were walking. One of them carried a baby. Suddenly she swayed and fell face forward on the road, dropping the baby, which gave a scream.

“She is dead!” cried one of the peasant women, in a voice of anguish. The fugitives huddled together more closely in order not to step on the body of the dead girl. It was Michael who picked up the child and gave it to a woman.

“There are the lights of Sebastopol,” said Lydia Vorochevsky.

Ahead of them through the darkness there was a rosy glow in the sky.

“I’m desperate to find my mother and sisters,” said Michael. “Excuse me if I hurry on.”

He pushed his way forward, shouldering aside one of the peasant women, who cursed him with foul words. Presently he heard the rattle of carts and the creaking of wheels in the streets of the seaport. A ship’s siren hooted. In the darkness there was the noise of many voices. Somewhere women were screaming and wailing. There was the beat of heavy feet on cobble-stones and a party of British seamen marched down towards the docks. People were sleeping on door-steps. Family groups were camped in the narrow streets.

Sebastopol was crowded to suffocation by an army of fugitives and a rabble of soldiers in terror of their lives.