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The Markovs had been assigned three little rooms at the top of a villa on the edge of the Bosphorus. Formerly they were the servants’ bedrooms of a rich Greek merchant. On one of the walls one of these servants had used a stick of charcoal to draw a bleeding heart transfixed by an arrow, beneath which he had written in Greek the words ‘I love you’, though he had not mentioned his girl’s name. Perhaps it was the expression of a general love for all kind women.

The rooms were barely and uncomfortably furnished, but seemed luxurious to Michael, who had not slept in a bed for six months before arriving on Prinkipo. His mother and Tania slept in one room in truckle beds once used by convalescent soldiers in the War. In another room Miss Browne slept with Olga. The third room, with a wide window looking towards Constantinople over the smooth sea, glorious in sunlight and magical in moonlight, was Michael’s bedroom by night and the family sitting-room by day. For lack of cupboard space in their own rooms, which were hardly large enough to hold their beds, Olga and Tania had encroached upon the dining-room, as they called it. Olga’s stockings—three pairs of them—hung over the back of a deal chair. Tania’s winter petticoat, which she had stuffed into one of the bundles brought away in their flight, was hanging from a nail which she had hammered into the wall with the heel of a slipper. On a wooden shelf above a cheap chest of drawers the two girls had arranged some family photographs and knick-knacks which, by some odd trick of the mind, they had grabbed in the Villa Mimosa in the last moments of terror. There was a photograph of their father as an officer of the Imperial Guards, and one of their mother in Court dress, and one of Tania in her dancing frock, and one of Michael in a sailor-suit at twelve years of age. On a shelf they had put two cheap little vases which had been bought one year at Yalta on a summer excursion, and two paper fans which the girls had taken from a restaurant of Moscow where a gipsy orchestra had played before the tune of life changed to the beat of drums, when they were still children.

The other rooms of the villa were fully inhabited. The Countess Kovaleska and her daughter Paula were in two rooms on the floor below, and next to them was Prince Andreyev with two ex-officers who shared a single room. On the ground floor were four families, once of Moscow, among them being Princess Ivanova, with two little daughters, who shared the biggest room of the villa, divided by a blanket across a line, with two ladies who had once been in the service of the Empress. In the garage was a naval officer named Captain Boris Gronov, with his wife Madeleine, who was a young Frenchwoman.

They were all very helpful to each other, as people are, it seems, when shipwrecked. Princess Ivanova had a samovar with which she made tea for Michael’s mother and the two girls, and any friends who might drop in during the afternoon. Captain Gronov, once of the Imperial Russian Navy, was handy in putting up shelves or hammering in nails and making furniture out of packing-cases. Prince Andreyev, a handsome fellow still wearing the uniform of a cavalry officer, brought back tea and sugar and sweetmeats and pastries, and even bottles of good wine, from Constantinople, to which he made frequent visits. He had sold a diamond ring to a Greek who did business of that kind in the Pera Palace Hotel, robbing his clients—who knew they were being robbed but desired ready money for the necessities of life—with the utmost courtesy and obsequiousness.

Prince Andreyev had taken a fancy to the Markovs. He especially admired the beauty of Olga. He insisted upon their accepting his invitations to supper-parties in his room with other friends, who smoked cigarettes incessantly, recounted the story of their escape from the Bolsheviks at great length, laughed quite a lot over the petty discomforts of their present way of life, and sang songs to the tinkle of the balalaika which Prince Andreyev himself played very well. And now and again between these times of song and laughter, and the handing round of sweetmeats, and the refilling of glasses with cheap wine, there would be those sudden silences which happened so often among the Russian refugees, as though a spectre had appeared among them—the spectre of that Terror back in Russia which had destroyed their old way of life and many of their relatives and friends and all their hopes and dreams. It was a spectre which touched them with the chill finger of dreadful reality. This picnic life could not last for ever. What then? What then, O God of Pity?

Such a silence fell, such a spectre came, one night when Michael had been playing his violin, which he had brought down to Andreyev’s room to try his fingers out after many months.

“You played that well, my dear,” said his mother, after he had finished the ‘Humoreske’. “It brings back happy memories.”

It was a mistake to talk about happy memories. It reminded this little company of homes they would never see again and of relatives and friends now dead or lost in the maelstrom of revolution. The silence came. The spectre stood in the doorway.

A woman shivered. It was Princess Ivanova. Michael found himself looking into the eyes of Sacha Dolin, who sat on the floor in the angle of the room. In Sacha’s eyes there was the remembrance of Lydia, his wife, who had been caught by the Red tide in Moscow.

Andreyev laughed harshly.

“There is still a little wine, my friends. It’s good wine, isn’t it? Why do you all look like lost souls?”

“We are lost souls,” said Sacha Dolin.

Prince Andreyev laughed again, with an impatient shrug of his broad shoulders.

“Life still has its moments. We must forget our past. We must put a steel shutter between those days and these. I invite you all to a party next week—let us say Thursday—if someone will tell me when Thursday comes. I have made friends with a benevolent old Greek who pours money into my hands, in return for a few foolish trinkets. Olga Markova, I beg the honour of your company at my party. It’s my birthday, I believe. If it isn’t, it’s somebody else’s birthday, and I wish to celebrate it. You must persuade your mother and sister to come, as well as your brother Michael, who plays the violin not too badly.”

“I shall be enchanted!” cried Olga. “My mother and sister will, I am sure, be equally delighted. So will Michael.”

“You’ll need your trinkets later on, Andreyev,” said Sacha Dolin from his place on the floor. “They’ll come in handy for bread when the British Government tires of feeding us.”

“Later on?” laughed Prince Andreyev. “I don’t understand those words. Do we Russians ever think of later on, and the day after tomorrow when we may have no bread? That seems to me the thought of an Englishman or a Scotchman, or a French peasant. I am a Russian Prince. Did I think of ‘later on’ when I gave a party to two hundred people at the Hermitage, with a gipsy orchestra and hot-house flowers on every table? Should I have given that amusing party if I had thought of ‘later on’?”

Sacha Dolin glanced at him and gave a slight smile. “That’s true. We didn’t think then of a World War and Red Revolution. At least not men like you, my dear Prince, though I confess I had certain apprehensions.”

“Oh, you were one of those morbid Liberals,” answered the Prince with a contemptuous laugh. “It was you Liberals who were the predecessors of Lenin. It was you who undermined the old régime by liberalizing the aristocracy and even the official classes, so that they put up no resistance to the social upheaval.”

“And it was your type of mind,” Sacha Dolin answered harshly, “which made the peasant and the proletariat see red when they had their chance of revenge. Your parties were too luxurious, my friend, when there was starvation and great misery among the masses.”

Prince Andreyev sprang to his feet, overturning a chair.

“You insult me!” he cried fiercely. “You are talking like a Bolshevik. I kill a Bolshevik when I see him—like a rat.”

Sacha shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

“Just as you like, my dear Prince. It will save me a lot of trouble if you kill me.”

Captain Boris Gronov, that good-natured naval officer, rose quietly and tapped the young Prince on the shoulder.

“There are ladies here. You are giving a party, my friend. We were all very happy a moment ago, drinking your good wine.”

Prince Andreyev breathed hard for a moment. The jumping light in his eyes nickered, softened, and went out. He put a hand across his forehead, as though wiping away his anger.

“One of my ancestors was a gipsy,” he said, like a schoolboy ashamed of his rage. “Pardon me, my dear friends. And I shall expect you all to come to my birthday party on Thursday next at the Pera Palace Hotel. Eight o’clock precisely. I will book places on the boat. We are fourteen, I think. Michael, my dear lad, play something merry.”

Michael played something merry. It was a Gipsy Dance which put its rhythm into the feet and hearts of this company.

“Dance with me, Olga Markova,” said Prince Andreyev.

He came into the middle of the room and folded his arms and clicked his heels together. Olga was sitting on the floor with her head against her mother’s knees, and she sprang up and put her arms akimbo like a peasant girl. She looked charming with her head thrown back and her white throat showing above her white bodice which had been hanging out on the line that day. Captain Boris Gronov clapped his hands to the gipsy rhythm.

“Faster! Faster!” he shouted, as Olga and Andreyev danced.

His little French wife, Madeleine, was sitting next to Miss Browne on one of the beds. She spoke in Russian to the English governess:

“The Russians are like this! They are children. They are gipsies.”

Miss Browne laughed. “That’s what makes them so interesting. In England we don’t have parties like this. In Surrey, where I used to live, the local gentry don’t suddenly get up and dance like peasants after threatening to kill each other. I shall miss all this when I get back to an English vicarage.”

“When are you going back?” asked the French wife of Captain Gronov.

Miss Browne looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Very soon now. But I daren’t tell these poor dears with whom I’ve been living for seven years. I don’t know what they will do without me. You see, I keep them tidy and look after them. And I love them so much that I hate to leave them in the lurch.”

“I want to see Paris again,” said the young Frenchwoman. “There is no civilization except in Paris. Unfortunately my husband has no money for the fare from Constantinople, and my father was killed in the War and left no money.”

“Oh, nobody has any money,” said Miss Browne cheerfully.

Olga was dancing with abandon. Prince Andreyev was sitting on his haunches kicking out his long boots in the style of the old Russian folk-dances. Everybody was laughing except Sacha Dolin, who was staring out of melancholy eyes at some far-off vision, and except Michael’s mother, who was looking at Olga with a kind of nervous apprehension.

“Olga!” she cried. “Not so wild, my dear. Come and sit down again.”

Michael was smiling across the body of his violin at this sister who thought herself beautiful, and was not bad-looking.

There were other evenings like that.