They just looked up as the Cossacks
galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets spat. . . ."
And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide
of the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him
back to Cambridge--changed.
Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving
trouble of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the
hurrying darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it
looked as though it must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking
in the wide and massive Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the
entangling streets, the houses with their strange lettering in black
and gold, the innumerable barbaric churches, the wildly driven
droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the Kremlin, with its bulbous
churches clustering up into the sky, the crosses, the innumerable
gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil, carrying the Russian note
beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and in this setting the
obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing peasants, long-
haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of uniform, a
running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of little
papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a
gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a
perpetual clash and clamour of bells.
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