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By Root 417 0

time had slipped by like a flash, their father the professor had died, and they had all grown, but the clock remained the same and went on chiming. They had all grown used to the idea that if by some miracle that clock ever fell off the wall, it would be as sad as if a beloved voice had died and nothing could ever be hung there in its place. But clocks are fortunately quite immortal, as immortal as the Shipwright of Saardam, and however bad the times might be, the tiled Dutch stove, like a rock of wisdom, was always there to radiate life and warmth.

The stove; the furniture covered in old red velvet; the beds with their shiny brass knobs; the worn carpets and tapestries, some plain red, some patterned, one with a picture of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, another showing Louis XIV reclining beside a silken lake in paradise; the Turkish carpets with their gorgeous oriental curlicues which had danced in front of little Nikolka's eyes when he was once delirious from scarlet fever; the bronze lamp and its shade; the finest bookshelves in the world full of books that smelled mysteriously of old chocolate with their Natasha Rostovs and their Captain's Daughters, gilded cups, silver, portraits, drapes: all seven of those crammed, dusty rooms in which the young Turbins had been raised; all this, at a time of great hardship, was bequeathed to the children by their mother who as she lay gasping, her strength failing, had clutched the hand of the weeping Elena and said:

'Go on living . . . and be kind to one another . . .'

#

Hut how, how were they to go on living? Alexei Turbin, the eldest and a doctor, was twenty-eight, Elena twenty-four. Her husband Captain Talberg was thirty-one, and Nikolka seventeen and a half. Their life had been darkened at its very dawning. Cold winds had long been blowing without cease from the north and the longer they persisted the worse they grew. The eldest Turbin had returned to his native city after the first blast had shaken the hills above the Dnieper. Now, they thought, it will stop and we can start living the kind of life they wrote about in those chocolate-smelling books. But the opposite happened and life only grew more and more terrible. The snow-storm from the north howled and howled, and now they themselves could sense a dull, subterranean rumbling, the groaning of an anguished land in travail. As 1918 drew to an end the threat of danger drew rapidly nearer.

# The time was coming when the walls would fall away, the terrified falcon fly away from the Tsar's white sleeve, the light in the bronze lamp would go out and the Captain's Daughter would be burned in the stove. And though the mother said to her children 'Go on living', their lot would be to suffer and die.

One day at twilight, soon after their mother's funeral, Alexei Turbin called on Father Alexander and said:

'It has been a terrible blow for us, Father Alexander. Grief like ours is even harder to bear when times are so bad . .. The worst is, you see, that I'd only just come home from the war and we were looking forward to straightening things out and leading a reasonable life, but now . . .'

He stopped and as he sat at the table in the half light he stared thoughtfully into the distance. Branches of the churchyard trees overshadowed the priest's little house. It was as if just out there, beyond the walls of his cramped, book-lined study was the edge of a tangled, mysterious, springtime forest. From outside came the muffled evening hum of the City and the smell of lilac.

'What can we do?' muttered the priest awkwardly. (He always felt embarrassed when he had to talk to people.) 'It is the will of God.'

'Perhaps all this will come to an end one day? Will things be any better, then, I wonder?' asked Turbin of no one in particular.

The priest shifted in his armchair.

'Yes, say what you like, times are bad, very bad', he mumbled. 'But one mustn't lose heart . . .'

Then drawing it out of the black sleeve of his cassock he suddenly laid his white hand on a pile of books, and opened the topmost one at the place marked by a bright embroidered