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“We Russians are a very strange people,” said Michael to his sister Tania, after his first exploration of Prinkipo. “A stranger coming here to see us would think we hadn’t a care in the world! One can’t get away from the incessant strumming of these balalaikas. Everybody is dancing and laughing. Don’t they ever think of our Russian tragedy and all the horrors from which we have just escaped? Look at those girls!”

A cavalcade of donkeys trotted by. On their backs were some Russian girls, screaming with laughter.

Michael and Tania looked at a group of their fellow refugees. They were dancing on bare boards laid down on the grass. A volunteer orchestra of ex-officers was playing for them—American jazz music which had swept the world after the War.

Tania had her hand on her brother’s arm and smiled up at his serious face, watching this scene.

“You’re a puritan, Michael! You’re not truly Russian. It’s because of mother’s Austrian blood in you. Now I am all Russian. What is yesterday or tomorrow? Why not laugh today, until we weep?”

“We’re gipsies,” said Michael thoughtfully. “Olga was right. This island is like a gipsy camp. But why doesn’t Olga come out and enjoy the sunshine?”

“Olga is washing her underclothes,” said Tania. “She’s going to hang them out in the garden of the villa.”

“I’m afraid about mother,” said Michael. “She looks so tired and so frail. I don’t think she slept last night. I thought I heard her weeping.”

Tania sighed, and then laughed.

“Poor mother! She’s not in the least Russian. She can’t stop worrying, even when the sun shines, about the past and the future.”

“Holy Saints!” cried Michael with sudden excitement. “There’s Sacha Dolin! I thought I should never see him again.”

It was the comrade with whom he had walked on the last retreat. He stood still and raised his hands at the sight of Michael, and then held out his arms. Michael fell into them. The two men embraced and kissed each other. They had tears in their eyes.

Sacha Dolin held his young friend at arm’s length. “We are both here! I thought the Reds had got you, my comrade. I thought you were dead by now.”

“I found my family,” said Michael. “This is my sister Tania. I’ve told her a lot about you.”

Sacha Dolin took Tania’s outstretched hand and raised it to his lips, and spoke with emotion:

“Your brother has the face of the young David. We love each other.”

There were other meetings like that on Prinkipo. Friends who had been separated since the beginning of the Revolution found themselves together again, like shipwrecked people cast upon this island in the Bosphorus. Some of them, who had fled from Russia long before the last retreat, had been there for more than a year, which seemed like half a lifetime. It was like an endless picnic, very pleasant at first, very amusing—Paradise after the terror of the last days in Russia—and then demoralizing, aimless, and squalid. Dainty ladies of the old régime washed their linen and hung it in the gardens of their villas, as Olga was now doing. They combed their hair on the verandahs and walked with bare feet through the grass, and on summer days bathed, after undressing behind the trees which overhung the water’s edge. Men who had been princes, or officers of the Imperial Guards, or bankers or merchants, or idlers or dreamers, mended their socks and their shirts after a few lessons from their women, and became carpenters or cobblers, proud of their handiwork, which wasn’t too good.

All day long, and far into the night, there was music of the balalaika by the volunteer orchestra of ex-officers. There were donkey races on the sands. There was love-making under the trees and in the moonlight of this enchanted island. These ex-officers of the White Armies with their blouses outside their trousers, tightly belted, still wore the long boots of their soldiering days, even if they had had to put new soles to them or buy new ones in the bazaars of Stamboul. They still kept straight backs, except when they bent a hundred times a day over the little plump hands or long white hands of women who had been great ladies of the Imperial Court and had now been shipwrecked in that sea of defeat which had cast them out of Russia. They still believed that Lenin’s Russia would not last, and that one day they would all go back again after the Red Terror had passed. At least, they hoped this would happen, except in moments of despair and self-pity when they knew it would never happen.