The Secret City by Hugh Walpole — Read

I was to meet Jerry Lawrence sooner than I had expected. And it was in this way.

Two days after the evening that I have just described I was driven to go and see Vera Michailovna. I was driven, partly by my curiosity, partly by my depression, and partly by my loneliness. This same loneliness was, I believe, at this time beginning to affect us all. I should be considered perhaps to be speaking with exaggeration if I were to borrow the title of one of Mrs. Oliphant's old-fashioned and charming novels and to speak of Petrograd as already "A Beleaguered City" -- beleaguered, moreover, in very much the same sense as that other old city was. From the very beginning of the war Petrograd was isolated -- isolated not by the facts of the war, its geographical position or any of the obvious causes, but simply by the contempt and hatred with which it was regarded. From very old days it was spoken of as a German town. "If you want to know Russia don't go to Petrograd. " "Simply a cosmopolitan town like any other. " "A smaller Berlin" -- and so on, and so on. This sense of outside contempt influenced its own attitude to the world. It was always at war with Moscow. It showed you when you first arrived its Nevski, its ordered squares, its official buildings, as though it would say: "I suppose you will take the same view as the rest. If you don't wish to look any deeper here you are. I'm not going to help you."