XII
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 tablecloth, on the old brown carpet, on the picture of the old gentleman with bushy eyebrows, on Semyonov’s musical-box, on the old knickknacks 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 Turgenev’s House of Gentlefolks, 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 the Retch doesn’t put it quite so bluntly. The Novaya Jezn of 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 penknife. 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, his naivete, 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, today, 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 nightdress, 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 candlelight. He held it up close to his eyes as though he were shortsighted 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 someone 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 candlelight) 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 doorknob.
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 nightdress, 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.”