THE WHITE GUARD

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In that winter of 1918 the City lived a strange u

Among the refugees came gray-haired bankers and their wives, skilful businessmen who had left behind their faithful deputies in Moscow with instructions to them not to lose contact with the new world which was coming into existence in the Muscovite kingdom; landlords who had secretly left their property in the hands of trusted managers; industrialists, merchants, lawyers, politicians. There came journalists from Moscow and Petersburg, corrupt, grasping and cowardly. Prostitutes. Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young homosexuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres. Squeezing its way through the crack, this mass of people converged on the City.

All spring, begi

The City swelled, expanded, overflowed like leavened dough rising out of its baking-tin. The gambling clubs rattled on until dawn, where some gamblers were from Petersburg and others from the City itself, others still were stiff, proud German majors and lieutenants whom the Russians feared and respected, card-sharpers from Moscow clubs and Russo-Ukrainian landlords whose lives and property hung by a thread. At Maxim's cafe a plump, fascinating Roumanian made his violin whistle like a nightingale; his gorgeous eyes sad and languorous with bluish whites, and his hair like velvet. The lights, shaded with gypsy shawls, cast two sorts of light - white electric light downwards, orange light upwards and sideways. The ceiling was draped starlike with swathes of dusty blue silk, huge diamonds glittered and rich auburn Siberian furs shone from dim, intimate corners. And it smelled of roasted coffee, sweat, vodka and French perfume.

All through the summer of 1918 the cab-drivers did a roaring trade and the shop windows were crammed with flowers, great slabs of rich filleted sturgeon hung like golden planks and the two-headed eagle glowed on the labels of sealed bottles of Abrau, that delicious Russian champagne. All that summer the pressure of newcomers mounted - men with gristly-white faces and grayish, clipped toothbrush moustaches, operatic tenors with gleaming polished boots and insolent eyes, ex-members of the State Duma in pince-nez, whores with resounding names. Billiard players took girls to shops to buy them lipstick, nail-polish, and ladies' panties in gauzy chiffon, cut out in the most curious places.

They sent off letters through the only escape-hole across turbulent, insecure Poland (not one of them, incidentally, had the slightest idea what was going on there or even what sort of place this new country - Poland - was) to Germany, that great nation of honest Teutons - begging for visas, transferring money, sensing that before long they would have to flee Russian territory altogether to where they would be finally and utterly safe from the terrible civil war and the thunder of Bolshevik regiments. They dreamed of France, of Paris, in anguish at the thought that it was extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible to get there. And there were other thoughts, vague and more frightening, which would suddenly come to mind in sleepless nights on divans in other people's apartments.

'And what if. . . what if that steel cordon were to snap . . . And the gray hordes poured in. The horror . . .'

These thoughts would come at those times when from far, far away came the dull thump of gunfire: for some reason firing went on outside the City throughout the whole of that glittering, hot summer, when those gray, metallic Germans kept the peace all around, whilst in the City itself they could hear the perpetual muffled crack of rifle-fire on the outskirts. Who was shooting at whom, nobody knew. It happened at night. And by day people were reassured by the occasional sight of a regiment of German hussars trotting down the main street, the Kreshchatik, or down Vladimir Street. And what regiments they were! Fur busbies crowning proud faces, scaly brass chinstraps clasping stone-hard jaws, the tips of red 'Kaiser Wilhelm' moustaches pointing upward like twin arrows. Squadrons of horses advancing in tight ranks of four, powerful seventeen-hand chestnuts, all six hundred troopers encased in blue-gray tunics like the cast-iron uniforms on the statues of their ponderous Germanic heroes that adorned the city of Berlin.

People who saw them were cheered and reassured, and jeered at the distant Bolsheviks, who were furiously grinding their teeth on the other side of the barbed wire along the border.

They hated the Bolsheviks, but not with the kind of aggressive hatred which spurs on the hater to fight and kill, but with a cowardly hatred which whispers around dark corners. They hated by night, choking with anxiety, by day in restaurants reading newspapers full of descriptions of Bolsheviks shooting officers and bankers in the back of the neck with Mausers, and how the Moscow shopkeepers were selling horsemeat infected with glanders. All of them - merchants, bankers, industrialists, lawyers, actors, landlords, prostitutes, ex-members of the State Council, engineers, doctors and writers, felt one thing in common-hatred.

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And there were officers, officers who had fled from the north and from the west - the former front line - and they all headed for the City. There were very many of them and their numbers increased all the time. They risked their lives to come because being officers, mostly pe