“Going away from where?” he asked, laughing.
“From the Markovitches, from all of us, from Petrograd?”
“Yes—I’ve told you already,” he answered. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”
“Then what did you mean by telling Vera—”
“Never you mind, Ivan Andreievitch. Don’t worry your poor old head with things that are too complicated for you—a habit of yours, I’m afraid. Just believe me when I say that I’ve come to say good-bye. I have an intuition that we shall never talk together again. I may be wrong. But my intuitions are generally correct.”
I noticed then that his face was haggard, his eyes dark, the light in them exhausted as though he had not slept.... I had never before seen him show positive physical distress. Let his soul be what it might, his body seemed always triumphant.
“Whether your intuition is right or no,” I said, “thisisthe last time. I never intend to speak to you again if I can help it. The day that I hear that you have really left us, never to return, will be one of the happiest days of my life.”
Semyonov gave me a strange look, humorous, ironical, and, upon my word, almost affectionate: “That’s very sad what you say, Ivan Andreievitch—if you mean it. And I suppose you mean it, because you English always do mean what you say.... But it’s sad because, truly, I have friendly feelings towards you, and you’re almost the only man in the world of whom I could say that.”
“You speak as though your friendship were an honour,” I said hotly. “It’s a degradation.”
He smiled. “Now that’s melodrama, straight out of your worst English plays.Andhow bad they can be!... But you hadn’t always this vehement hatred. What’s changed your mind?”
“I don’t know that Ihavechanged my mind,” I answered. “I think I’ve always disliked you. But there at the Front and in the Forest you were brave and extraordinarily competent. You treated Trenchard abominably, of course—but he rather asked for it in some ways. Here you’ve been nothing but the meanest skunk and sneak. You’ve set out deliberately to poison the lives of some of the best-hearted and most helpless people on this earth.... You deserve hanging, if any murderer ever did!”
He looked at me so mildly and with such genuine interest that I was compelled to feel my indignation a whit melodramatic.
“If you are going,” I said more calmly, “for Heaven’s sake go! Itcan’tbe any pleasure to you, clever and talented as you are, to bait such harmless people as Vera and Nicholas. You’ve done harm enough. Leave them, and I forgive you everything.”
“Ah, of course your forgiveness is of the first importance to me,” he said, with ironic gravity. “But it’s true enough. You’re going to be bothered with me—Idoseem a worry to you, don’t I?—for only a few days more. And how’s it going to end, do you think? Who’s going to finish me off? Nicholas or Vera? Or perhaps our English Byron, Lawrence? Or even yourself? Have you your revolver with you? I shall offer no resistance, I promise you.”
Suddenly he changed. He came closer to me. His weary, exhausted eyes gazed straight into mine: “Ivan Andreievitch, never mind about the rest—never mind whether you do or don’t hate me, that matters to nobody. What I tell you is the truth. I have come to you, as I have always come to you, like the moth to the flame. Why am I always pursuing you? Is it for the charm and fascination of your society? Your wit? Your beauty? I won’t flatter you—no, no, it’s because you alone, of all these fools here, knew her. You knew her as no one else alive knew her. She liked you—God knows why! At least I do know why—it was because of her youth and innocence and simplicity, because she didn’t know a wise man from a fool, and trusted all alike.... But you knew her, you knew her. You remember her and can talk of her. Ah, how I’ve hungered, hungered, to talk to you about her! Sometimes I’ve come all this way and then turned back at the door. How I’ve prayed that it might have been some other who knew her, some real man, not a sentimental, gloomy old woman like yourself, Ivan Andreievitch. And yet you have your points. You have in you the things that she saw—you are honest, you are brave.... You are like a good English clergyman. But she!... I should have had some one with wit, with humour, with a sense of life about her. All the things, all the little things—the way she walked, her clothes, her smile—when she was cross! Ah, she was divine when she was cross!... Ivan Andreievitch, be kind to me! Think for a moment less of your morals, less of your principles—and talk to me of her! Talk to me of her!”
He had drawn quite close to me; he looked like a madman—I have no doubt that, at that moment, he was one.
“I can’t!... I won’t!” I answered, drawing away. “She is the most sacred memory I have in my life. I hate to think of her with you. And that because you smirch everything you touch. I have no feeling of jealousy....”
“You? Jealousy!” he said, looking at me scornfully. “Why should you be jealous?”
“I loved her too,” I said.
He looked at me. In spite of myself the colour flooded my face. He looked at me from head to foot—my plainness, my miserable physique, my lameness, my feeble frame—everything was comprehended in the scorn of that glance.
“No,” I said, “you need not suppose that she ever realised. She did not. I would have died rather than have spoken of it. But I will not talk about her. I will not.”
He drew away from me. His face was grave; the mockery had left it.
“Oh, you English, how strange you are!... In trusting, yes.... But the things you miss! I understand now many things. I give up my desire. You shan’t smirch your precious memories.... And you, too, must understand that there has been all this time a link that has bound us.... Well, that link has snapped. I must go. Meanwhile, after I am gone, remember that there is more in life, Ivan Andreievitch, than you will ever understand. Who am I?... Rather ask, what am I? I am a Desire, a Purpose, a Pursuit—what you like. If another suffer for that I cannot help it, and if human nature is so weak, so stupid, it is right that it should suffer. But perhaps I am not myself at all, Ivan Andreievitch. Perhaps this is a ghost that you see.... What if the town has changed in the night and strange souls have slipped into our old bodies?
“Isn’t there a stir about the town? Is it I that pursue Nicholas, or is it my ghost that pursues myself? Is it Nicholas that I pursue? Is not Nicholas dead, and is it not my hope of release that I follow?... Don’t be so sure of your ground, Ivan Andreievitch. You know the proverb: ‘There’s a secret city in every man’s heart. It is at that city’s altars that the true prayers are offered.’ There has been more than one Revolution in the last two months.”
He came up to me:
“Do not think too badly of me, Ivan Andreievitch, afterwards. I’m a haunted man, you know.”
He bent forward and kissed me on the lips. A moment later he was gone.
That Tuesday night poor young Bohun will remember to his grave—and beyond it, I expect.
He came in from his work about six in the evening and found Markovitch and Semyonov sitting in the dining-room. Everything was ordinary enough. Semyonov was in the armchair reading a newspaper; Markovitch was walking very quietly up and down the farther end of the room. He wore faded blue carpet slippers; he had taken to them lately. Everything was the same as it had always been. The storm that had raged all day had now died down, and a very pale evening sun struck little patches of colour on the big table with the fading table-cloth, on the old brown carpet, on the picture of the old gentleman with bushy eyebrows, on Semyonov’s musical-box, on the old knick-knacks and the untidy shelf of books. (Bohun looked especially to see whether the musical-box were still there. It was there on a little side-table.) Bohun, tired with his long day’s efforts to shove the glories of the British Empire down the reluctant throats of the indifferent Russians, dropped into the other armchair with a tattered copy of Turgenieff’sHouse of Gentle-folks, and soon sank into a state of half-slumber.
He roused himself from this to hear Semyonov reading extracts from the newspaper. He caught, at first, only portions of sentences. I am writing this, of course, from Bohun’s account of it, and I cannot therefore quote the actual words, but they were incidents of disorder at the Front.
“There!” Semyonov would say, pausing. “Now, Nicholas... What do you say to that? A nice state of things. The Colonel was murdered, of course, although our friend theRetchdoesn’t put it quite so bluntly. TheNovaya Jeznof course highly approves. Here’s another....” This went on for some ten minutes, and the only sound beside Semyonov’s voice was Markovitch’s padding steps. “Ah! here’s another bit!... Now what about that, my fine upholder of the Russian Revolution? See what they’ve been doing near Riga! It says....”
“Can’t you leave it alone, Alexei? Keep your paper to yourself!”
These words came in so strange a note, a tone so different from Markovitch’s ordinary voice, that they were, to Bohun, like a warning blow on the shoulder.
“There’s gratitude—when I’m trying to interest you! How childish, too, not to face the real situation! Do you think you’re going to improve things by pretending that anarchy doesn’t exist? So soon, too, after your beautiful Revolution! How long is it? Let me see... March, April... yes, just about six weeks.... Well, well!”
“Leave me alone, Alexei!... Leave me alone!”
Bohun had with that such a sense of a superhuman effort at control behind the words that the pain of it was almost intolerable. He wanted, there and then, to have left the room. It would have been better for him had he done so. But some force held him in his chair, and, as the scene developed, be felt as though his sudden departure would have laid too emphatic a stress on the discomfort of it.
He hoped that in a moment Vera or Uncle Ivan would come and the scene would end.
Semyonov, meanwhile, continued: “What were those words you used to me not so long ago? Something about free Russia, I think—Russia moving like one man to save the world—Russia with an unbroken front.... Too optimistic, weren’t you?”
The padding feet stopped. In a whisper that seemed to Bohun to fill the room with echoing sound Markovitch said:
“You have tempted me for weeks now, Alexei.... I don’t know why you hate me so, nor why you pursue me. Go back to your own place. If I am an unfortunate man, and by my own fault, that should be nothing to you who are more fortunate.”
“Torment you! I?... My dear Nicholas, never! But you are so childish in your ideas—and are you unfortunate? I didn’t know it. Is it about your inventions that you are speaking? Well, they were never very happy, were they?”
“You praised them to me!”
“Did I?... My foolish kindness of heart, I’m afraid. To tell the truth, I was thankful when you saw things as they were...”
“You took them away from me.”
“I took them away? What nonsense! It was your own wish—Vera’s wish too.”
“Yes, you persuaded both Vera and Nina that they were no good. They believed in them before you came.”
“You flatter me, Nicholas. I haven’t such power over Vera’s opinions, I’m afraid. If I tell her anything she believes at once the opposite. You must have seen that yourself.”
“You took her belief away from me. You took her love away from me.”
Semyonov laughed. That laugh seemed to rouse Markovitch to frenzy. He screamed out. “You have taken everything from me!... You will not leave me alone! You must be careful. You are in danger, I tell you.”
Semyonov sprang up from his chair, and the two men, advancing towards one another, came into Bohun’s vision.
Markovitch was like a madman, his hands raised, his eyes staring from his head, his body trembling. Semyonov was quiet, motionless, smiling, standing very close to the other.
“Well, what are you going to do?” he asked.
Markovitch stood for a moment, his hands raised, then his whole body seemed to collapse. He moved away, muttering something which Bohun could not hear. With shuffling feet, his head lowered, he went out of the room. Semyonov returned to his seat.
To Bohun, an innocent youth with very simple and amiable ideas about life, the whole thing seemed “beastly beyond words.”
“I saw a man torture a dog once,” he told me. “He didn’t do much to it really. Tied it up to a tree and dug into it with a pen-knife. I went home and was sick.... Well, I felt sick this time, too.”
Nevertheless his own “sickness” was not the principal affair. The point was the sense of danger that seemed now to tinge with its own faint stain every article in the room. Bohun’s hatred of Semyonov was so strong that he felt as though he would never be able to speak to him again; but it was not really of Semyonov that he was thinking. His thoughts were all centred round Markovitch. You must remember that for a long time now he had considered himself Markovitch’s protector. This sense of his protection had developed in him an affection for the man that he would not otherwise have felt. He did not, of course, know of any of Markovitch’s deepest troubles. He could only guess at his relations with Vera, and he did not understand the passionate importance that he attached to his Russian idea. But he knew enough to be aware of his childishness, his simplicity, hisnaïveté, and his essential goodness. “He’s an awfully decent sort, really,” he used to say in a kind of apologetic defence. The very fact of Semyonov’s strength made his brutality seem now the more revolting. “Like hitting a fellow half your size”....
He saw that things in that flat were approaching a climax, and he knew enough now of Russian impetuosity to realise that climaxes in that country are, very often, no ordinary affairs. It was just as though there were an evil smell in the flat, he explained to me. “It seemed to hang over everything. Things looked the same and yet they weren’t the same at all.”
His main impression that “something would very soon happen if he didn’t look out,” drove everything else from his mind—but he didn’t quite see what to do. Speak to Vera? To Nicholas? To Semyonov?... He didn’t feel qualified to do any of these things.
He went to bed that night early, about ten o’clock. He couldn’t sleep. His door was not quite closed and he could hear first Vera, then Uncle Ivan, lastly Markovitch go to bed. He lay awake then, with that exaggerated sense of hearing that one has in the middle of the night, when one is compelled, as it were, against one’s will, to listen for sounds. He heard the dripping of the tap in the bathroom, the creaking of some door in the wind (the storm had risen again) and all the thousand and one little uncertainties, like the agitated beating of innumerable hearts that penetrate the folds and curtains of the night. As he lay there he thought of what he would do did Markovitch really go off his head. He had a revolver, he knew. He had seen it in his hand. And then what was Semyonov after? My explanation had seemed, at first, so fantastic and impossible that Bohun had dismissed it, but now, after the conversation that he had just overheard, it did not seem impossible at all—especially in the middle of the night. His mind travelled back to his own first arrival in Petrograd, that first sleep at the “France” with the dripping water and the crawling rats, the plunge into the Kazan Cathedral, and everything that followed.
He did not see, of course, his own progress since that day, or the many things that Russia had already done for him, but he did feel that such situations as the one he was now sharing were, to-day, much more in the natural order of things than they would have been four months before....
He dozed off and then was awakened, sharply, abruptly, by the sound of Markovitch’s padded feet. There could be no mistaking them; very softly they went past Bohun’s door, down the passage towards the dining-room. He sat up in bed, and all the other sounds of the night seemed suddenly to be accentuated—the dripping of the tap, the blowing of the wind, and even the heavy breathing of old Sacha, who always slept in a sort of cupboard near the kitchen, with her legs hanging out into the passage. Suddenly no sound! The house was still, and, with that, the sense of danger and peril was redoubled, as though the house were holding its breath as it watched....
Bohun could endure it no longer; he got up, put on his dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, and went out. When he got as far as the dining-room door he saw that Markovitch was standing in the middle of the room with a lighted candle in his hand. The glimmer of the candle flung a circle, outside which all was dusk. Within the glimmer there was Markovitch, his hair rough and strangely like a wig, his face pale yellow, and wearing an old quilted bed-jacket of a purple green colour. He was in a night-dress, and his naked legs were like sticks of tallow.
He stood there, the candle shaking in his hand, as though he were uncertain as to what he would do next. He was saying something to himself, Bohun thought.
At any rate his lips were moving. Then he put his hand into the pocket of his bed-coat and took out a revolver. Bohun saw it gleam in the candle-light. He held it up close to his eyes as though he were short-sighted and seemed to sniff at it. Then, clumsily, Bohun said, he opened it, to see whether it were loaded, I suppose, and closed it again. After that, very softly indeed, he shuffled off towards the door of Semyonov’s room, the room that had once been the sanctuary of his inventions.
All this time young Bohun was paralysed. He said that all his life now, in spite of his having done quite decently in France, he would doubt his capacity in a crisis because, during the whole of this affair, he never stirred. But that was because it was all exactly like a dream. “I was in the dream, you know, as well as the other fellows. You know those dreams when you’re doing your very damnedest to wake up—when you struggle and sweat and know you’ll die if something doesn’t happen—well, it was like that, except that I didn’t struggle and swear, but just stood there, like a painted picture, watching....”
Markovitch had nearly reached Semyonov’s door (you remember that there was a little square window of glass in the upper part of it) when he did a funny thing. He stopped dead as though some one had rapped him on the shoulder. He stopped and looked round, then, very slowly, as though he were compelled, gazed with his nervous blinking eyes up at the portrait of the old gentleman with the bushy eyebrows. Bohun looked up too and saw (it was probably a trick of the faltering candle-light) that the old man was not looking at him at all, but steadfastly, and, of course, ironically at Markovitch. The two regarded one another for a while, then Markovitch, still moving with the greatest caution, slipped the revolver back into his pocket, got a chair, climbed on to it and lifted the picture down from its nail. He looked at it for a moment, staring into the cracked and roughened paint, then hung it deliberately back on its nail again, but with its face to the wall. As he did this his bare, skinny legs were trembling so on the chair that, at every moment, he threatened to topple over. He climbed down at last, put the chair back in its place, and then once more turned towards Semyonov’s door.
When he reached it he stopped and again took out the revolver, opened it, looked into it, and closed it. Then he put his hand on the door-knob.
It was then that Bohun had, as one has in dreams, a sudden impulse to scream: “Look out! Look out! Look out!” although, Heaven knows, he had no desire to protect Semyonov from anything. But it was just then that the oddest conviction came over him, namely, an assurance that Semyonov was standing on the other side of the door, looking through the little window and waiting. He could not have told, any more than one can ever tell in dreams, how he was so certain of this. He could only see the little window as the dimmest and darkest square of shadow behind Markovitch’s candle, but he was sure that this was so. He could even see Semyonov standing there, in his shirt, with his thick legs, his head a little raised, listening...
For what seemed an endless time Markovitch did not move. He also seemed to be listening. Was it possible that he heard Semyonov’s breathing?... But, of course, I have never had any actual knowledge that Semyonov was there. That was simply Bohun’s idea....
Then Markovitch began very slowly, bending a little, as though it were stiff and difficult, to turn the handle. I don’t know what then Bohun would have done. He must, I think, have moved, shouted, screamed, done something or other. There was another interruption. He heard a quick, soft step behind him. He moved into the shadow.
It was Vera, in her night-dress, her hair down her back.
She came forward into the room and whispered very quietly: “Nicholas!”
He turned at once. He did not seem to be startled or surprised; he had dropped the revolver at once back into his pocket. He came up to her, she bent down and kissed him, then put her arm round him and led him away.
When they had gone Bohun also went back to bed. The house was very still and peaceful. Suddenly he remembered the picture. It would never do, he thought, if in the morning it were found by Sacha or Uncle Ivan with its face to the wall. After hesitating he lit his own candle, got out of bed again, and went down the passage.
“The funny thing was,” he said, “that I really expected to find it just as it always was, face outwards.... as though the whole thing really had been a dream. But it wasn’t. It had its face to the wall all right. I got a chair, turned it round, and went back to bed again.”
That night, whether as a result of my interview with Semyonov I do not know, my old enemy leapt upon me once again. I had, during the next three days, one of the worst bouts of pain that it has ever been my fortune to experience. For twenty-four hours I thought it more than any man could bear, and I hid my head and prayed for death; during the next twenty-four I slowly rose, with a dim far-away sense of deliverance; on the third day I could hear, in the veiled distance, the growls of my defeated foe....
Through it all, behind the wall of pain, my thoughts knocked and thudded, urging me to do something. It was not until the Friday or the Saturday that I could think consecutively. My first thought was driven in on me by the old curmudgeon of a doctor, as his deliberate opinion that it was simply insanity to stay on in those damp rooms when I suffered from my complaint, that I was only asking for what I got, and that he, on his part, had no sympathy for me. I told him that I entirely agreed with him, that I had determined several weeks ago to leave these rooms, and that I thought that I had found some others in a different, more populated part of the town. He grunted his approval, and, forbidding me to go out for at least a week, left me. At least a week!... No, I must be out long before that. Now that the pain had left me, weak though I was, I was wildly impatient to return to the Markovitches. Through all these last days’ torments I had been conscious of Semyonov, seen his hair and his mouth and his beard and his square solidity and his tired, exhausted eyes, and strangely, at the end of it all, felt the touch of his lips on mine. Oddly, I did not hate Semyonov; I saw quite clearly that I had never hated him—something too impersonal about him, some sense, too, of an outside power driving him. No, I did not hate him, but God! how I feared him—feared him not for my own sake, but for the sake of those who had—was this too arrogant?—been given as it seemed to me,—into my charge.
I remembered that Monday was the 30th of April, and that, on that evening, there was to be a big Allied meeting at the Bourse, at which our Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, the Belgian Consul, and others, were to speak. I had promised to take Vera to this. Tuesday the 1st of May was to see a great demonstration by all the workmen’s and soldiers’ committees. It was to correspond with the Labour demonstrations arranged to take place on that day all over Europe, and the Russian date had been altered to the new style in order to provide for this. Many people considered that the day would be the cause of much rioting, of definite hostility to the Provisional Government, of anti-foreign demonstrations, and so on; others, idealistic Russians, believed that all the soldiers, the world over, would on that day throw down their arms and proclaim a universal peace....
I for my part believed that it would mark the ending of the first phase of the Revolution and the beginning of the second, and that for Russia at any rate it would mean the changing from a war of nations into a war of class—in other words, that it would mean the rising up of the Russian peasant as a definite positive factor in the world’s affairs.
But all that political business was only remotely, at that moment, my concern. What I wanted to know was what was happening to Nicholas, to Vera, to Lawrence, and the others. Even whilst I was restlessly wondering what I could do to put myself into touch with them, my old woman entered with a letter which she said had been brought by hand.
The letter was from Markovitch.
I give this odd document here exactly as I received it. I do not attempt to emphasise or explain or comment in any way. I would only add that no Russian is so mad as he seems to any Englishman, and no Englishman so foolish as he seems to any Russian.
I must have received this letter, I think, late on Sunday afternoon, because I was, I remember, up and dressed, and walking about my room. It was written on flimsy grey paper in pencil, which made it difficult to read. There were sentences unfinished, words misspelt, and the whole of it in the worst of Russian handwritings. Certain passages, I am, even now, quite unable to interpret:
It ran as follows:
Dear Ivan Andreievitch—Vera tells me that you are ill again. She has been round to enquire, I think. I did not come because I knew that if I did I should only talk about my own troubles, the same as you’ve always listened to, and what kind of food is that for a sick man? All the same, that is just what I am doing now, but reading a letter is not like talking to a man; you can always stop and tear the paper when perhaps it would not be polite to ask a man to go. But I hope, nevertheless, that you won’t do that with this—not because of any desire I may have to interest you in myself, but because of something of much more importance than either of us, something I want you to believe—something youmustbelieve.... Don’t think me mad. I am quite sane sitting here in my room writing.... Every one is asleep. Every one but not everything. I’ve been queer, now and again, lately... off and on. Do you know how it comes? When the inside of the world goes further and further within dragging you after it, until at last you are in the bowels of darkness choking. I’ve known such moods all my life. Haven’t you known them? Lately, of course, I’ve been drinking again. I tell you, but I wouldn’t own it to most people. But they all know, I suppose.... Alexei made me start again, but it’s foolish to put everything on to him. If I weren’t a weak man he wouldn’t be able to do anything with me, would he? Do you believe in God, and don’t you think that He intended the weak to have some compensation somewhere, because it isn’t their fault that they’re weak, is it! They can struggle and struggle, but it’s like being in a net. Well, one must just make a hole in the net large enough to get out of, that’s all. And now, ever since two days ago, when I resolved to make that hole, I’ve been quite calm. I’m as calm as anything now writing to you. Two days ago Vera told me that he was going back to England.... Oh, she was so good to me that day, Ivan Andreievitch. We sat together all alone in the flat, and she had her hand in mine, just as we used to do in the old days when I pretended to myself that she loved me. Now I know that she did not, but the warmer and more marvellous was her kindness to me, her goodness, and nobility. Do you not think, Ivan Andreievitch, that if you go deep enough in every human heart, there is this kernel of goodness, this fidelity to some ideal. Do you know we have a proverb: “In each man’s heart there is a secret town at whose altars the true prayers are offered!” Even perhaps with Alexei it is so, only there you must go very deep, and there is no time.
But I must tell you about Vera. She told me so kindly that he was going to England, and that now her whole life would be led in Nina and myself. I held her hand very close in mine and asked her, Was it really true that she loved him. And she said, yes she did, but that that she could not help. She said that she had spoken with him, and that they had decided that it would be best for him to go away. Then she begged my forgiveness for many things, because she had been harsh or cross,—I don’t know what things.... Oh, Ivan Andreievitch,sheto beg forgiveness ofme!
But I held her hand closer and closer, because I knew that it was the last time that I would be able so truly to hold it. How could she not see that now everything was over—everything—quite everything! Am I one to hold her, to chain her down, to keep her when she has already escaped? Is that the way to prove my fidelity to her?
Of course I did not speak to her of this, but for the first time in all our years together, I felt older than her and wiser. But of course Alexei saw it. How he heard I do not know, but that same day he came to me and he seemed to be very kind.
I don’t know what he said, but he explained that Vera would always be unhappy now, always, longing and waiting and hoping.... “Keep him here in Russia!” he whispered to me. “She will get tired of him then—they will tire of one another; but if you send him away....” Oh! he is a devil, Ivan Andreievitch, and why has he persecuted me so? What have I ever done to him? Nothing... but for weeks now he has pursued me and destroyed my inventions, and flung Russia in my face and made Nina, dear Nina, laugh at me, and now, when the other things are finished, he shows me that Vera will be unhappy so long as I am alive. What have I ever done, Ivan Andreievitch? I am so unimportant, why has he taken such a trouble? To-day I gave him his last chance... or last night... it is four in the morning now, and the bells are already ringing for the early Mass. I said to him:
“Will you go away? Leave us all for ever? Will you promise never to return?”
He said in that dreadful quiet sure way of his: “No, I will never go away until you make me.”
Vera hates him. I cannot leave her alone with him, can I? I (here there are three lines of illegible writing)... so I will think again and again of that last time when we sat together and all the good things that she said. What greatness of soul, what goodness, what splendour! And perhaps after all I am a fortunate man to be allowed to be faithful to so fine a grandeur! Many men have poor ambitions, and God bestows His gifts with strange blindness, I often think. But I am tired, and you too will be tired. Perhaps you have not got so far. I must thank you for your friendship to me. I am very grateful for it. And you, if afterwards you ever think of me, think that I always wished to... no, why should you think of me at all? But think of Russia! That is why I write this. You love Russia, and I believe that you will continue to love Russia whatever she will do. Never forget that it is because she cares so passionately for the good of the world that she makes so many mistakes. She sees farther than other countries, and she cares more. But she is also more ignorant. She has never been allowed to learn anything or to try to do anything for herself.
You are all too impatient, too strongly aware of your own conditions, too ignorant of hers! Of course there are wicked men here and many idle men, but every country has such. You must not judge her by that nor by all the talk you hear. We talk like blind men on a dark road.... Do you believe that there are no patriots here? Ah! how bitterly I have been disappointed during these last weeks! It has broken my heart... but do not let your heart be broken. You can wait. You are young. Believe in Russian patriotism, believe in Russian future, believe in Russian soul.... Try to be patient and understand that she is blindfolded, ignorant, stumbling... but the glory will come; I can see it shining far away!... It is not for me, but for you—and for Vera... for Vera... Vera....
Here the letter ended; only scrawled very roughly across the paper the letters N.M....
As soon as I had finished reading the letter I went to the telephone and rang up the Markovitches’ flat. Bohun spoke to me. I asked him whether Nicholas was there, he said, “Yes, fast asleep in the arm-chair,” Was Semyonov there? “No, he was dining out that night.” I asked him to remind Vera that I was expecting to take her to the meeting next day, and rang off. There was nothing more to be done just then. Two minutes later there was a knock on my door and Vera came in.
“Why!” I cried. “I’ve just been ringing up to tell you that, of course, I was coming on Monday.”
“That is partly what I wanted to know,” she said, smiling. “And also I thought that you’d fancied we’d all deserted you.”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t expect you round here every time I’m ill. That would be absurd. You’ll be glad to know at any rate that I’ve decided to give up these ridiculous rooms. I deserve all the illness I get so long as I’m here.”
“Yes, that’s good,” she answered. “How you could have stayed so long—” She dropped into a chair, closed her eyes and lay back. “Oh, Ivan Andreievitch, but I’m tired!”
She looked, lying there, white-faced, her eyelids like grey shadows, utterly exhausted. I waited in silence. After a time she opened her eyes and said, suddenly:
“We all come and talk to you, don’t we? I, Nina, Nicholas, Sherry (she meant Lawrence), even Uncle Alexei. I wonder why we do, because we never take your advice, you know.... Perhaps it’s because you seem right outside everything.”
I coloured a little at that.
“Did I hurt you?... I’m sorry. No, I don’t know that I am. I don’t mind now whether I hurt any one. You know that he’s going back to England?”
I nodded my head.
“He told you himself?”
“Yes,” I said.
She lay back in her chair and was silent for a long time.
“You think I’m a noble woman, don’t you. Oh yes, you do! I can see you just thirsting for my nobility. It’s what Uncle Alexei always says about you, that you’ve learnt from Dostoieffsky how to be noble, and it’s become a habit with you.”
“If you’re going to believe—” I began angrily.
“Oh, I hate him! I listen to nothing that he says. All the same, Durdles, this passion for nobility on your part is very irritating. I can see you now making up the most magnificent picture of my nobility. I’m sure if you were ever to write a book about us all, you’d write of me something like this: ‘Vera Michailovna had won her victory. She had achieved her destiny.... Having surrendered her lover she was as fine as a Greek statue!’ Something like that.... Oh, I can see you at it!”
“You don’t understand—” I began.
“Oh, but I do!” she answered. “I’ve watched your attitude to me from the first. You wanted to make poor Nina noble, and then Nicholas, and then, because they wouldn’t either of them do, you had to fall back upon me: memories of that marvellous woman at the Front, Marie some one or other, have stirred up your romantic soul until it’s all whipped cream and jam—mulberry jam, you know, so as to have the proper dark colour.”
“Why all this attack on me?” I asked. “What have I done?”
“You’ve done nothing,” she cried. “We all love you, Durdles, because you’re such a baby, because you dream such dreams, see nothing as it is.... And perhaps after all you’re right—your vision is as good as another. But this time you’ve made me restless. You’re never to see me as a noble woman again, Ivan Andreievitch. See me as I am, just for five minutes! I haven’t a drop of noble feeling in my soul!”
“You’ve just given him up,” I said. “You’ve sent him back to England, although you adore him, because your duty’s with your husband. You’re breaking your heart—”
“Yes, I am breaking my heart,” she said quietly. “I’m a dead woman without him. And it’s my weakness, my cowardice, that is sending him away. What would a French woman or an English woman have done? Given up the world for their lover. Given up a thousand Nicholases, sacrificed a hundred Ninas—that’s real life. That’s real, I tell you. What feeling is there in my soul that counts for a moment beside my feeling for Sherry? I say and I feel and I know that I would die for him, die with him, happily, gladly. Those are no empty words.
“I who have never been in love before, I am devoured by it now until there is nothing left of me—nothing.... And yet I remain. It is our weakness, our national idleness. I haven’t the strength to leave Nicholas. I am soft, sentimental, about his unhappiness. Pah! how I despise myself.... I am capable of living on here for years with husband and lover, going from one to another, weeping for both of them. Already I am pleading with Sherry that he should remain here. We will see what will happen. We will see what will happen! Ah, my contempt for myself! Without bones, without energy, without character.
“But this is life, Ivan Andreievitch! I stay here, I send him away because I cannot bear to see Nicholas suffer. And I do not care for Nicholas. Do you understand that? I never loved him, and now I have a contempt for him—in spite of myself. Uncle Alexei has done that. Oh yes! He has made a fool of Nicholas for months, and although I have hated him for doing that, I have seen, also, what a fool Nicholas is! But he is a hero, too. Makehimas noble as you like, Ivan Andreievitch. You cannot colour it too high. He is the real thing and I am the sham.... But oh! I do not want to live with him any more, I am tired of him, his experiments, his lamentations, his weakness, his lack of humour—tired of him, sick of him. And yet I cannot leave him, because I am soft, soft without bones, like my country, Ivan Andreievitch.... My lover is strong. Nothing can change his will. He will go, will leave me, until he knows that I am free. Then he will never leave me again.
“Perhaps I will get tired of his strength one day—it may be—just as now I am tired of Nicholas’s weakness. Everything has its end.
“But no! he has humour, and he sees life as it is. I shall be able always to tell him the truth. With Nicholas it is always lies....”
She suddenly sprang up and stood before me.
“Now, do you think me noble?” she cried.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Ah! you are incorrigible! You have drunk Dostoieffsky until you can see nothing but God and the moujik! But I am alive, Ivan Andreievitch, not a heroine in a book! Alive, alive, alive! Not one of your Lisas or Annas or Natashas. I’m alive enough to shoot Uncle Alexei and poison Nicholas—but I’m soft too, soft so that I cannot bear to see a rabbit killed... and yet I love Sherry so that I am blind for him and deaf for him and dead for him—when he is not there. My love—the only one of my life—the first and the last—”
She flung out her arms:
“Life! Now! Before it is too late! I want it, I want him, I want happiness!”
She stood thus for a moment, staring out to the sea. Then her arms dropped, she laughed, fastening her cloak—
“There’s your nobility, Ivan Andreievitch—theatrical, all of it. I know what I am, and I know what I shall do. Nicholas will live to eighty; I also. I shall hate him, but I shall he in an agony when he cuts his finger. I shall never see Sherry again. Later, he will marry a fresh English girl like an apple.... I, because I am weak, soft putty—I have made it so.”
She turned away from me, staring desperately at the wall. When she looked back to me her face was grey.
She smiled. “What a baby you are!... But take care of yourself. Don’t come on Monday if it’s bad weather. Good-bye.”
She went.
After a bad, sleepless night, and a morning during which I dozed in a nightmareish kind of way, I got up early in the afternoon, had some tea, and about six o’clock started out.
It was a lovely evening; the spring light was in the air, the tufted trees beside the canal were pink against the pale sky, and thin layers of ice, like fragments of jade, broke the soft blue of the water. How pleasant to feel the cobbles firm beneath one’s feet, to know that the snow was gone for many months, and that light now would flood the streets and squares! Nevertheless, my foreboding was not raised, and the veils of colour hung from house to house and from street to street could not change the realities of the scene.
I climbed the stairs to the flat and found Vera waiting for me. She was with Uncle Ivan, who, I found to my disappointment, was coming with us.
We started off.
“We can walk across to the Bourse,” she said. “It’s such a lovely evening, and we’re a little early.”
We talked of nothing but the most ordinary things; Uncle Ivan’s company prevented anything else. To say that I cursed him is to put it very mildly. He had been, I believe, oblivious of all the scenes that had occurred during the last weeks. If the Last Judgement occurred under his very nose, and he had had a cosy meal in front of him, he would have noticed nothing. The Revolution had had no effect on him at all; it did not seem strange to him that Semyonov should come to live with them; he had indeed fancied that Nicholas had not “been very well” lately, but then Nicholas had always been an odd and cantankerous fellow, and he, as he told me, never paid too much attention to his moods. His one anxiety was lest Sacha should be hindered from her usual shopping on the morrow, it being May Day, when there would be processions and other tiresome things. He hoped that there was enough food in the house.
“There will be cold cutlets and cheese,” Vera said.
He told me that he really did not know why he was going to this meeting. He took no interest in politics, and he hated speeches, but he would like to see our Ambassador. He had heard that he was always excellently dressed....
Vera said very little. Her troubles that evening must have been accumulating upon her with terrible force—I did not know, at that time, about her night-scene with Nicholas. She was very quiet, and just as we entered the building she whispered to me:
“Once over to-morrow—”
I did not catch the rest. People pressed behind us, and for a moment we were separated; we were not alone again. I have wondered since what she meant by that, whether she had a foreboding or some more definite warning, or whether she simply referred to the danger of riots and general lawlessness. I shall never know now.
I had expected a crowded meeting, but I was not prepared for the multitude that I found. We entered by a side-door, and then passed up a narrow passage, which led us to the reserved seats at the side of the platform. I had secured these some days before. In the dark passage one could realise nothing; important gentlemen in frock-coats, officers, and one or two soldiers, were hurrying to and fro, with an air of having a great deal to do, and not knowing at all how to do it. Beyond the darkness there was a steady hum, like the distant whirr of a great machine. There was a very faint smell in the air of boots and human flesh. A stout gentleman with a rosette in his buttonhole showed us to our seats. Vera sat between Uncle Ivan and myself. When I looked about me I was amazed. The huge hall was packed so tightly with human beings that one could see nothing but wave on wave of faces, or, rather, the same face, repeated again and again and again, the face of a baby, of a child, of a credulous, cynical dreamer, a face the kindest, the naïvest, the cruellest, the most friendly, the most human, the most savage, the most Eastern, and the most Western in the world.
That vast presentation of that reiterated visage seemed suddenly to explain everything to me. I felt at once the stupidity of any appeal, and the instant necessity for every kind of appeal. I felt the negation, the sudden slipping into insignificant unimportance of the whole of the Western world—and, at the same time, the dismissal of the East. “No longer my masters” a voice seemed to cry from the very heart of that multitude. “No longer will we halt at your command, no longer will your words be wisdom to us, no longer shall we smile with pleasure at your stories, and cringe with fear at your displeasure; you may hate our defection, you may lament our disloyalty, you may bribe us and smile upon us, you may preach to us and bewail our sins. We are no longer yours—WE ARE OUR OWN—Salute a new world, for it is nothing less that you see before you!...”
And yet never were there forces more unconscious of their destiny—utterly unselfconscious as animals, babies, the flowers of the field. Still there to be driven, perhaps to be persuaded, to be whipped, to be cajoled, to be blinded, to be tricked and deceived, drugged and deafened—but not for long! The end of that old world had come—the new world was at hand—“Life begins to-morrow!”
The dignitaries came upon the platform, and, beyond them all, in distinction, nobility, wisdom was our own Ambassador. This is no place for a record of the discretion and tact and forbearance that he had shown during those last two years. To him had fallen perhaps the most difficult work of all in the war. It might seem that on broad grounds the Allies had failed with Russia, but the end was not yet, and in years to come, when England reaps unexpected fruit from her Russian alliance, let her remember to whom she owed it. No one could see him there that night without realising that there stood before Russia, as England’s representative, not only a great courtier and statesman, but a great gentleman, who had bonds of courage and endurance that linked him to the meanest soldier there.
I have emphasised this because he gave the note to the whole meeting. Again and again one’s eyes came back to him and always that high brow, that unflinching carriage of the head, the nobility and breeding of every movement gave one reassurance and courage. One’s own troubles seemed small beside that example, and the tangled morality of that vexed time seemed to be tested by a simpler and higher standard.
It was altogether a strange affair. At first it lacked interest, some member of the Italian Embassy spoke, I think, and then some one from Serbia. The audience was apathetic. All those bodies, so tightly wedged together that arms and legs were held in an iron vice, stayed motionless, and once and again there would be a short burst of applause or a sibilant whisper, but it would be something mechanical and uninspired. I could see one soldier, in the front row behind the barrier, a stout fellow with a face of supreme good humour, down whose forehead the sweat began to trickle; he was patient for a while, then he tried to raise his hand. He could not move without sending a ripple down the whole front line. Heads were turned indignantly in his direction. He submitted; then the sweat trickled into his eyes. He made a superhuman effort and half raised his arm; the crowd pushed again and his arm fell. His face wore an expression of ludicrous despair....
The hall got hotter and hotter. Soldiers seemed to be still pressing in at the back. The Italian gentleman screamed and waved his arms, but the faces turned up to his were blank and amiably expressionless.
“It is indeed terribly hot,” said Uncle Ivan.
Then came a sailor from the Black Sea Fleet who had made himself famous during these weeks by his impassioned oratory. He was a thin dark-eyed fellow, and he obviously knew his business. He threw himself at once into the thick of it all, paying no attention to the stout frock-coated gentlemen who sat on the platform, dealing out no compliments, whether to the audience or the speakers, wasting no time at all. He told them all that they had debts to pay, that their honour was at stake, and that Europe was watching them. I don’t know that that Face that stared at him cared very greatly for Europe, but it is certain that a breath of emotion passed across it, that there was a stir, a movement, a response....
He sat down, there was a roar of applause; he regarded them contemptuously. At that moment I caught sight of Boris Grogoff. I had been on the watch for him. I had thought it very likely that he would be there. Well, there he was, at the back of the crowd, listening with a contemptuous sneer on his face, and a long golden curl poking out from under his cap.
And then something else occurred—something really strange. I was conscious, as one sometimes is in a crowd, that I was being stared at by some one deliberately. I looked about me, and then, led by the attraction of the other’s gaze, I saw quite close to me, on the edge of the crowd nearest to the platform, the Rat.
He was dressed rather jauntily in a dark suit with his cup set on one side, and his hair shining and curled. His face glittered with soap, and he was smiling in his usual friendly way. He gazed at me quite steadily. My lips moved very slightly in recognition. He smiled and, I fancy, winked.
Then, as though he had actually spoken to me, I seemed to hear him say:
“Well, good-bye.... I’m never coming to you again. Good-bye, good-bye.”
It was as definite a farewell as you can have from a man, more definite than you will have from most, as though, further, he said: “I’m gone for good and all. I have other company and more profitable plunder. On the back of our glorious Revolution I rise from crime to crime.... Good-bye.”
I was, in sober truth, never to speak to him again. I cannot but regret that on the last occasion when I should have a real opportunity of looking him full in the face, he was to offer me a countenance of friendly good-humour and amiable rascality.
I shall have, until I die, a feeling of tenderness....
I was recalled from my observation of Grogoff and the Rat by the sensation that the waters of emotion were rising higher around me. I raised my eyes and saw that the Belgian Consul was addressing the meeting. He was a stout little man, with eye-glasses and a face of no importance, but it was quite obvious at once that he was most terribly in earnest. Because he did not know the Russian language he was under the unhappy necessity of having a translator, a thin and amiable Russian, who suffered from short sight and a nervous stammer.
He could not therefore have spoken under heavier disadvantages, and my heart ached for him. It need not have done so. He started in a low voice, and they shouted to him to speak up. At the end of his first paragraph the amiable Russian began his translation, sticking his nose into the paper, losing the place and stuttering over his sentences. There was a restless movement in the hall, and the poor Belgian Consul seemed lost. He was made, however, of no mean stuff. Before the Russian had finished his translation the little man had begun again. This time he had stepped forward, waving his glasses and his head and his hand, bending forward and backward, his voice rising and rising. At the end of his next paragraph he paused and, because the Russian was slow and stammering once again, went forward on ids own account. Soon he forgot himself, his audience, his translator, everything except his own dear Belgium. His voice rose and rose; he pleaded with a marvellous rhythm of eloquence her history, her fate, her shameful devastation. He appealed on behalf of her murdered children, her ravished women, her slaughtered men.
He appealed on behalf of her Arts, her Cathedrals, and libraries ruined, her towns plundered. He told a story, very quietly, of an old grandfather and grandmother murdered and their daughter ravished before the eyes of her tiny children. Here he himself began to shed tears. He tried to brush them back. He paused and wiped his eyes.... Finally, breaking down altogether, he turned away and hid his face....
I do not suppose that there were more than a dozen persons in that hall who understood anything of the language in which he spoke. Certainly it was the merest gibberish to that whole army of listening men. Nevertheless, with every word that he uttered the emotion grew tenser. Cries—little sharp cries like the bark of a puppy—broke out here and there. “Verrno! Verrno! Verrno! (True! True! True!)” Movements, like the swift finger of the wind on the sea, hovered, wavered, and vanished....
He turned back to them, his voice broken with sobs, and he could only cry the one word “Belgia... Belgia... Belgia”... To that they responded. They began to shout, to cry aloud. The screams of “Verrno... Verrno” rose until it seemed that the roof would rise with them. The air was filled with shouts, “Bravo for the Allies.” “Soyousniki! Soyousniki!” Men raised their caps and waved them, smiled upon one another as though they had suddenly heard wonderful news, shouted and shouted and shouted... and in the midst of it all the little rotund Belgian Consul stood bowing and wiping his eyes.
How pleased we all were! I whispered to Vera: “You see! They do care! Their hearts are touched. We can do anything with them now!”
Even Uncle Ivan was moved, and murmured to himself “Poor Belgium! Poor Belgium!”
How delighted, too, were the gentlemen on the platform. Smiling, they whispered to one another, and I saw several shake hands. A great moment. The little Consul bowed finally and sat down.
Never shall I forget the applause that followed. Like one man the thousands shouted, tears raining down their cheeks, shaking hands, even embracing! A vast movement, as though the wind had caught them and driven them forward, rose, lifted them, so that they swayed like bending corn towards the platform, for an instant we were all caught up together. There was one great cry: “Belgium!”
The sound rose, fell, sunk into a muttering whisper, died to give way to the breathless attention that awaited the next speaker.
I whispered to Vera: “I shall never forget that. I’m going to leave on that. It’s good enough for me.”
“Yes,” she said, “we’ll go.”
“What a pity,” whispered Uncle Ivan, “that they didn’t understand what they were shouting about.”
We slipped out behind the platform; turned down the dark long passage, hearing the new speaker’s voice like a bell ringing beyond thick walls, and found our way into the open.
The evening was wonderfully fresh and clear. The Neva lay before us like a blue scarf, and the air faded into colourless beauty above the dark purple of the towers and domes. Vera caught my arm: “Look!” she whispered. “There’s Boris!” I knew that she had on several occasions tried to force her way into his flat, that she had written every day to Nina (letters as it afterwards appeared, that Boris kept from her). I was afraid that she would do something violent.
“Wait!” I whispered, “perhaps Nina is here somewhere.”
Grogoff was standing with another man on a small improvised platform just outside the gates of the Bourse.
As the soldiers came out (many of them were leaving now on the full tide of their recent emotions) Grogoff and his friend caught them, held them, and proceeded to instruct their minds.
I caught some of Grogoff’s sentences: “Tovaristchi!” I heard him cry, “Comrades! Listen to me. Don’t allow your feelings to carry you away! You have serious responsibilities now, and the thing for you to do is not to permit sentiment to make you foolish. Who brought you into this war? Your leaders? No, your old masters. They bled you and robbed you and slaughtered you to fill their own pockets. Who is ruling the world now? The people to whom the world truly belongs? No, the Capitalists, the money-grubbers, the old thieves like Nicholas who is now under lock and key... Capitalists... England, France... Thieves, Robbers....
“Belgium? What is Belgium to you? Did you swear to protect her people? Does England, who pretends such loving care for Belgium, does she look after Ireland? What about her persecution of South Africa? Belgium? Have you heard what she did in the Congo?...”
As the men came, talking, smiling, wiping their eyes, they were caught by Grogoff’s voice. They stood there and listened. Soon they began to nod their heads. I heard them muttering that good old word “Verrno! Verrno!” again. The crowd grew. The men began to shout their approval. “Aye! it’s true,” I heard a solder near me mutter. “The English are thieves”; and another “Belgium?... After all I could not understand a word of what that little fat man said.”
I heard no more, but I did not wonder now at the floods that were rising and rising, soon to engulf the whole of this great country. The end of this stage of our story was approaching for all of us.
We three had stood back, a little in the shadow, gazing about to see whether we could hail a cab.
As we waited I took my last look at Grogoff, his stout figure against the purple sky, the masts of the ships, the pale tumbling river, the black line of the farther shore. He stood, his arms waving, his mouth open, the personification of the disease from which Russia was suffering.
A cab arrived. I turned, said as it were, my farewell to Grogoff and everything for which he stood, and went.
We drove home almost in silence. Vera, staring in front of her, her face proud and reserved, building up a wall of her own thoughts.
“Come in for a moment, won’t you?” she asked me, rather reluctantly I thought. But I accepted, climbed the stairs and followed Uncle Ivan’s stubby and self-satisfied progress into the flat.
I heard Vera cry. I hurried after her and found, standing close together, in the middle of the room Henry Bohun and Nina!
With a little sob of joy and shame too, Nina was locked in Vera’s arms.
This is obviously the place for the story, based, of course, on the very modest and slender account given me by the hero of it, of young Bohun’s knightly adventure. In its inception the whole affair is still mysterious to me. Looking back from this distance of time I see that he was engaged on one knightly adventure after another—first Vera, then Markovitch, lastly Nina. The first I caught at the very beginning, the second I may be said to have inspired, but to the third I was completely blind. I was blind, I suppose, because, in the first place, Nina had, from the beginning, laughed at Bohun, and in the second, she had been entirely occupied with Lawrence.
Bohun’s knight-errantry came upon her with, I am sure, as great a shock of surprise as it did upon me. And yet, when you come to think of it, it was the most natural thing. They were the only two of our party who had any claim to real youth, and they were still so young that they could believe in one ideal after another as quick as you can catch goldfish in a bowl of water. Bohun would, of course, have indignantly denied that he was out to help anybody, but that, nevertheless, was the direction in which his character led him; and once Russia had stripped from him that thin coat of self-satisfaction, he had nothing to do but mount his white charger and enter the tournament.
I’ve no idea when he first thought of Nina. He did not, of course, like her at the beginning, and I doubt whether she caused him any real concern, too, until her flight to Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once telling her she ought to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose. At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off to a fellow like Grogoff!
He thought of it the more seriously when he saw the agony Vera was in. She did not ask him to help her, and so he did nothing; but he watched her efforts, the letters that she wrote, the eagerness with which she ravished the post, her fruitless visits to Grogoff’s flat, her dejected misery over her failure. He began himself to form plans, not, I am convinced, from any especial affection for Nina, but simply because he had the soul of a knight, although, thank God, he didn’t know it. I expect, too, that he was pretty dissatisfied with his knight-errantries. His impassioned devotion to Vera had led to nothing at all, his enthusiasm for Russia had led to a most unsatisfactory Revolution, and his fatherly protection of Markovitch had inspired apparently nothing more fruitful than distrust. I would like to emphasise that it was in no way from any desire to interfere in other people’s affairs that young Bohun undertook these Quests. He had none of my own meddlesome quality. He had, I think, very little curiosity and no psychological self-satisfaction, but he had a kind heart, an adventurous spirit, and a hatred for the wrong and injustice which seemed just now to be creeping about the world; but all this, again thank God, was entirely subconscious. He knew nothing whatever about himself.
The thought of Nina worried him more and more. After he went to bed at night, he would hear her laugh and see her mocking smile and listen to her shrill imitations of his own absurdities. She had been the one happy person amongst them all, and now—! Well, he had seen enough of Boris Grogoff to know what sort of fellow he was. He came at last to the conclusion that, after a week or two she would be “sick to death of it,” and longing to get away, but then “her pride would keep her at it. She’d got a devil of a lot of pride.” He waited, then, for a while, and hoped, I suppose, that some of Vera’s appeals would succeed. They did not; and then it struck him that Vera was the very last person to whom Nina would yield—just because she wanted to yield to her most, which was pretty subtle of him and very near the truth.
No one else seemed to be making any very active efforts, and at last he decided that he must do something himself. He discovered Grogoff’s address, went to the Gagarinskaya and looked up at the flat, hung about a bit in the hope of seeing Nina. Then he did see her at Rozanov’s party, and this, although he said nothing to me about it at the time, had a tremendous effect on him. He thought she looked “awful.” All the joy had gone from her; she was years older, miserable, and defiant. He didn’t speak to her, but from that night he made up his mind. Rozanov’s party may be said to have been really the turning-point of his life. It was the night that he came out of his shell, grew up, faced the world—and it was the night that he discovered that he cared about Nina.
The vision of her poor little tired face, her “rather dirty white dress,” her “grown-up” hair, her timidity and her loneliness, never left him for a moment. All the time that I thought he was occupied only with the problem of Markovitch and Semyonov, he was much more deeply occupied with Nina. So unnaturally secretive can young men be!
At last he decided on a plan. He chose the Monday, the day of the Bourse meeting, because he fancied that Grogoff would be present at that and he might therefore catch Nina alone, and because he and his fellow-propagandists would be expected also at the meeting and he would therefore be free of his office earlier on that afternoon. He had no idea at all how he would get into the flat, but he thought that fortune would be certain to favour him. He always thought that.
Well, fortune did. He left the office and arrived in the Gagarinskaya about half-past five in the evening. He walked about a little, and then saw a bearded tall fellow drive up in an Isvostchick. He recognised this man as Lenin, the soul of the anti-Government party, and a man who was afterwards to figure very prominently in Russia’s politics. This fellow argued very hotly with the Isvostchick about his fare, then vanished through the double doors. Bohun followed him. Outside Grogoff’s flat Lenin waited and rang the bell. Bohun waited on the floor below; then, when he heard the door open, he noiselessly slipped up the stairs, and, as Lenin entered, followed behind him whilst the old servant’s back was turned helping Lenin with his coat. He found, as he had hoped, a crowd of cloaks and a Shuba hanging beside the door in the dark corner of the wall. He crept behind these. He heard Lenin say to the servant that, after all, he would not take off his coat, as he was leaving again immediately. Then directly afterwards Grogoff came into the hall.