We walked out into the Moscow streets, and all the while the old monk talked most energetically, and made astonishing gestures. One moment he saw a large triangle on a poster and spat to one side as he passed. “The symbol of the masons,” said he. “To-day the Cross is fighting the triangle, that is one meaning of the war. Do you know, many of the stewards of the old vodka shops were secretly masons, and it was found that they cut out on the floor underneath the shop counters, a cross--so that the drunkards might trample it under foot.” Yevgeny’s large intellectual face with wizened white eyebrows, and fine eyes at the bottom of caverns of wrinkled flesh, was full of animation, his gap-toothed mouth blurted the long torrent of words which it could hardly control, his long black gown from neck to ankles flapped in the wind. I was sorry to have to part with him again so soon. But I promised to re-find him when I returned to Moscow. He came with me to the Kursky station. “God meant that we should meet again,” said he. “It was a miracle. All my life is full of miracles.” He told me the miracles of his birth. His mother was one of the serfs. She married, but was eight years childless. This caused her great grief, and she did not cease to pray to God that she might bear a child. “If it be a boy, he shall be either a soldier or a monk,” she promised God. Interesting that she should feel that to be a soldier was also to be consecrated to God. Yevgeny was born, and when he grew up he volunteered to be a soldier, and went to fight the Turks. He was wounded, and as he lay on the battlefield in great pain, and facing death, he promised his life to God. He then rapidly recovered, and, fulfilling his promise, entered a monastery. Since then all his life he has allowed himself to be guided by visions and inspirations rather than by reason. In the vague light in the train, all the passengers were quarrelling over places, and the porters were struggling with baskets and bundles. The old monk stood on the grey platform and embraced me very warmly, and then I stepped up, and the third bell tinkled and the whistle blew, and the train slowly ran out--leaving Yevgeny at the far end of the platform and the space of unoccupied rails behind the train, momentarily increasing. VII A RUSSIAN COUNTESS I MADE a journey into the depths of one of the central provinces and visited Countess X. She had been in England when the war broke out, and before she could get back to Russia her husband had volunteered and had already been taken prisoner by the Germans. In her it was possible to visualise something of the personal tragedy of the war. A charming and rather beautiful woman, the war commenced when she was on the threshold of life, when, as she said, life seemed to promise so much. She is only thirty-four, and is yet white-haired and deaf and feels herself becoming older every month. “When my husband comes back he will find me an old woman.”