A silent boy in a black tie with a pale swollen face let me in and without so much as asking my name, turned and walked down the passage. There was a crowd of coats on the rack in the tiny hall. A bunch of snow-wet chrysanthemums lay on the table between two solemn top hats. As no one seemed to come, I knocked at one of the doors, then pushed it open and then shut it again. I had caught a glimpse of a dark-haired little girl, lying fast asleep on a divan, under a mole-skin coat. I stood for a minute in the middle of the hall. I wiped my face which was still wet from snow. I blew my nose. Then I ventured down the passage. A door was ajar and I caught the sound of low voices, speaking in Russian. There were many people in the two large rooms joined by a kind of arch. One or two faces turned towards me vaguely as I strolled in, but otherwise my entry did not arouse the slightest interest. There were glasses with half-finished tea on the table, and a plateful of crumbs. One man in a comer was reading a newspaper. A woman in a grey shawl was sitting at the table with her cheek propped on her hand and a tear-drop on her wrist. Two or three other persons were sitting quite still on the divan. A little girl rather like the one I had seen sleeping was stroking an old dog curled up on a chair. Somebody began to laugh or gasp or something in the adjacent room, where there were more people sitting or wandering about. The boy who had met me in the hall passed carrying a glass of water and I asked him in Russian whether I might speak to Mrs Helene Grinstein.

'Aunt Elena,' he said to the back of a dark slim woman who was bending over an old man hunched up in an armchair. She came up to me and invited me to walk into a small parlour on the other side of the passage. She was very young and graceful with a small powdered face and long soft eyes which appeared to be pulled up towards the temples. She wore a black jumper and her hands were as delicate as her neck.

'Kahk eto oojahsno… isn't it dreadful?' she whispered.

I replied rather foolishly that I was afraid I had called at the wrong moment.

'Oh,' she said, 'I thought…' She looked at me. 'Sit down,' she said, 'I thought I saw your face just now at the funeral…. No? Well, you see, my brother-in-law has died and…. No, no, sit down. It has been an awful day.'

'I don't want to disturb you,' I said, 'I'd better go… I only wanted to talk to you about a relation of mine… whom I think you knew… at Blauberg… but it does not matter….

'Blauberg? I have been there twice,' she said and her face twitched as the telephone began ringing somewhere.

'His name was Sebastian Knight,' I said looking at her unpainted tender trembling lips.

'No, I have never heard that name,' she said, 'no.'

'He was half-English,' I said, 'be wrote books.'

She shook her head and then turned to the door which had been opened by the sullen boy, her nephew.

'Sonya is coming up in half an hour,' he said. She nodded and he withdrew.

In fact I did not know anyone at the hotel,' she continued. I bowed and apologized again.

'But what is your name,' she asked peering at me with her dim soft eyes which somehow reminded me of Clare. 'I think you mentioned it, but today my brain seems to be in a daze…. Ach,' she said when I had told her. 'But that sounds familiar. Wasn't there a man of that name killed in a duel in St Petersburg? Oh, your father? I see. Wait a minute. Somebody… just the other day… somebody had been recalling the case. How funny…. It always happens like that, in heaps. Yes… the Rosanovs…. They knew your family and all that….'

'My brother had a school-fellow called Rosanov,' I said.

'You'll find them in the telephone book,' she went on rapidly, 'you see, I don't know them very well, and I am quite incapable just now of looking up anything.'

She was called away and I wandered alone toward the hall. There I found an elderly gentleman pensively sitting on my overcoat and smoking a cigar. At first he could not quite make out what I wanted but then was effusively apologetic.

Somehow I felt sorry it had not been Helene Grinstein. Although of course she never could have been the woman who had made Sebastian so miserable. Girls of her type do not smash a man's life – they build it. There she had been steadily managing a house that was bursting with grief and had found it possible to attend to the fantastic affairs of a completely superfluous stranger. And not only had she listened to me, she had given me a tip which I then and there followed, and though the people I saw had nothing to do with Blauberg and the unknown woman, I collected one of the most precious pages of Sebastian's life. A more systematic mind than mine would have placed them in the beginning of this book, but my quest had developed its own magic and logic and though I sometimes cannot help believing that it had gradually grown into a dream, that quest, using the pattern of reality for the weaving of its own fancies, I am forced to recognize that I was being led right, and that in striving to render Sebastian's life I must now follow the same rhythmical interlacements.

There seems to have been a law of some strange harmony in the placing of a meeting relating to Sebastian's first adolescent romance in such close proximity to the echoes of his last dark love. Two modes of his life question each other and the answer is his life itself, and that is the nearest one ever can approach a human truth. He was sixteen and so was she. The lights go out, the curtain rises and a Russian summer landscape is disclosed; the bend of a river half in the shade because of the dark fir trees growing on one steep clay bank and almost reaching out with their deep black reflections to the other side which is low and sunny and sweet, with marsh-flowers and silver-tufted grass. Sebastian, his close-cropped head hatless, his loose silk blouse now clinging to his shoulder-blades, now to his chest according to whether he bends or leans back, is lustily rowing in a boat painted a shiny green. A girl is sitting at the helm, but we shall let her remain achromatic: a mere outline, a white shape not filled in with colour by the artist. Dark blue dragonflies in a slow skipping flight pass hither and thither and alight on the flat waterlily leaves. Names, dates, and even faces have been hewn in the red clay of the steeper bank and swifts dart in and out of holes therein. Sebastian's teeth glisten. Then, as he pauses and looks back, the boat with a silky swish slides into the rushes.

'You're a very poor cox,' he says.

The picture changes: another bend of that river. A path leads to the water edge, stops, hesitates, and turns to loop around a rude bench. It is not quite evening yet, but the air is golden and midges are performing a primitive native dance in a sunbeam between the aspen leaves which are quite, quite still at last, forgetful of Judas.

Sebastian is sitting upon the bench and reading aloud some English verse from a black copybook. Then he stops suddenly: a little to the left a naiad's head with auburn hair is seen just above the water, receding slowly, the long tresses floating behind. Then the nude bather emerges on the opposite bank, blowing his nose with the aid of his thumb; it is the long-haired village priest. Sebastian goes on reading to the girl beside him. The painter has not yet filled in the white space except for a thin sunburnt arm streaked from wrist to elbow along its outer side with glistening down.

As in Byron's dream, again the picture changes. It is night. The sky is alive with stars. Years later Sebastian wrote that gazing at the stars gave him a sick and squeamish feeling, as for instance when you look at the bowels of a ripped-up beast. But at the time, this thought of Sebastian's had not yet been expressed. It is very dark. Nothing can be discerned of what is possibly an alley in the park. Sombre mass on sombre mass and somewhere an owl hooting. An abyss of blackness where all of a sudden a small greenish circle moves up: the luminous dial of a watch (Sebastian disapproved of watches in his riper years).