The Secret City by Hugh Walpole — Read

That Thursday was March 15. I was conscious of my existence again on Sunday, April 1st. I opened my eyes and saw that there was a thaw. That was the first thing of which I was aware -- that water was apparently dripping on every side of me. It is a strange sensation to lie on your bed very weak, and very indifferent, and to feel the world turning to moisture all about you. My ramshackle habitation had never been a very strong defence against the outside world. It seemed now to have definitely decided to abandon the struggle. The water streamed down the panes of my window opposite my bed. One patch of my ceiling (just above my only bookcase, confound it! ) was coloured a mouldy grey, and from this huge drops like elephant's tears, splashed monotonously. (Already The Spirit of Man was disfigured by a long grey streak, and the green back of Galleon's Roads was splotched with stains.) Someone had placed a bucket near the door to catch a perpetual stream flowing from the corner of the room. Down into the bucket it pattered with a hasty, giggling, hysterical jiggle. I rather liked the companionship of it. I didn't mind it at all. I really minded nothing whatever. I sighed my appreciation of my return to life. My sigh brought someone from the corner of my room and that someone was, of course, the inevitable Rat. He came up to my bed in his stealthy, furtive fashion, and looked at me reproachfully. I asked him, my voice sounding to myself strange and very far away, what he was doing there. He answered that if it had not been for him I should be dead. He had come early one morning and found me lying in my bed and no one in the place at all. No one -- because the old woman had vanished. Yes, the neighbours had told him. Apparently on that very Thursday she had decided that the Revolution had given her her freedom, and that she was never going to work for anybody ever again. She had told a woman-neighbour that she heard that the land now was going to be given back to everybody, and she was returning therefore to her village somewhere in the Moscow Province. She had not been back there for twenty years. And first, to celebrate her liberty, she would get magnificently drunk on furniture polish.

"I did not see her of course," said the Rat. "No. When I came, early in the morning, no one was here. I thought that you were dead, barin, and I began collecting your property, so that no one else should take it. Then you made a movement, and I saw that you were alive -- so I got some cabbage soup and gave it you. That certainly saved you. I'm going to stay with you now."