and impoverished a soul as any life with youth and health on its side can manage to sustain. He was very miserable during these first weeks, and then it must be remembered that Petrograd was, at this time, no very happy place for anybody. Bohun was not a coward—he would have stood the worst things in France without flinching—but he was neither old enough nor young enough to face without a tremor the queer world of nerves and unfulfilled expectation in which he found himself. In the first place, Petrograd was so very different from anything that he had expected. Its size and space, its power of reducing the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights and shadows, its waste spaces and cold, empty, moonlit squares, its jumble of modern and mediaeval civilisation, above all, its supreme indifference to all and sundry—these things cowed and humiliated him. He was sharp enough to realise that here he was nobody at all. Then he had not expected to be so absolutely cut off from all that he had known. The Western world simply did not seem to exist. The papers came so slowly that on their arrival they were not worth reading. He had not told his friends in England to send his letters through the Embassy bag, with the result that they would not, he was informed, reach him for months.
Of his work I do not intend here to speak—it does not come into this story—but he found that it was most complicated and difficult, and kicks rather than halfpence would be the certain reward. And Bohun hated kicks. …
Finally, he could not be said to be happy in the Markovitch flat. He had, poor boy, heard so much about Russian hospitality, and had formed, from the reading of the books of Mr. Stephen Graham and others, delightful pictures of the warmest hearts in the world holding out the warmest hands before the warmest samovars. In its spirit that was true enough, but it was not true in the way that Bohun expected it.
The Markovitches, during those first weeks, left him to look after himself because they quite honestly believed that that was the thing that he would prefer. Uncle Ivan tried to entertain him, but Bohun found him a bore, and with the ruthless intolerance of the very young, showed him so. The family did not put itself out to please him in any way. He had his room and his latchkey. There was always coffee in the morning, dinner at half-past six, and the samovar from half-past nine onwards. But the Markovitch family life was not turned from its normal course. Why should it be?
And then he was laughed at. Nina laughed at him. Everything about him seemed to Nina ridiculous—his cold bath in the morning, his trouser-press, the little silver-topped bottles on his table, the crease in his trousers, his shining neat hair, the pearl pin in his black tie, his precise and careful speech, the way that he said “Nu tak … Spasebo … gavoreet … gariachy …” She was never tired of imitating him; and very soon he caught her strutting about the dining-room with a man’s cap on her head, twisting a cane and bargaining with an Isvostchick—this last because, only the evening before, he had told them with great pride of his cleverness in that especial direction. The fun was good-natured enough, but it was, as Russian chaff generally is, quite regardless of sensitive feelings. Nina chaffed everybody and nobody minded, but Bohun did not know this, and minded very much indeed. He showed during dinner that evening that he was hurt, and sat over his cabbage soup very dignified and silent. This made every one uncomfortable, although Vera told me afterwards that she found it difficult not to laugh. The family did not make themselves especially pleasant, as Henry felt they ought to have done—they continued the even tenor of their way. He was met by one of those sudden cold horrible waves of isolated terror with which it pleases Russia sometimes to overwhelm one. The snow was falling; the town was settling into a suspicious ominous quiet. There was no light in the sky, and horrible winds blew round the corners of abandoned streets. Henry was desperately homesick. He would have cut and run, had there been any possible means of doing it. He did not remember the wild joy with which he had heard, only a few weeks before, that he was to come to Petrograd. He had forgotten even the splendours of Discipline. He only knew that he was lonely and frightened and home-sick. He seemed to be without a friend in the world.
But he was proud. He confided in nobody. He went about with his head up, and every one thought him the most conceited young puppy who had ever trotted the Petrograd streets. And, although he never owned it even to himself, Jerry Lawrence seemed to him now the one friendly soul in all the world. You could be sure that Lawrence would be always the same; he would not laugh at you behind your back, if he disliked something he would say so. You knew where you were with him, and in the uncertain world in which poor Bohun found himself that simply was everything. Bohun would have denied it vehemently if you told him that he had once looked down on Lawrence, or despised him for his inartistic mind. Lawrence was “a fine fellow”; he might seem a little slow at first, “but you wait and you will see what kind of a chap he is.” Nevertheless Bohun was not able to be for ever in his company; work separated them, and then Lawrence lodged with Baron Wilderling on the Admiralty Quay, a long way from Anglisky Prospect. Therefore, at the end of three weeks, Henry Bohun discovered himself to be profoundly wretched. There seemed to be no hope anywhere. Even the artist in him was disappointed. He went to the Ballet and saw Tchaikowsky’s “Swan Lake”; but bearing Diagilev’s splendours in front of him, and knowing nothing about the technique of ballet-dancing he was bored and cross and contemptuous. He went to “Eugen Onyegin” and enjoyed it, because there was still a great deal of the schoolgirl in him; but after that he was flung on to Glinka’s “Russlan and Ludmilla,” and this seemed to him quite interminable and to have nothing to do with the gentleman and lady mentioned in the title. He tried a play at the Alexander Theatre; it was, he saw, by Andréeff, whose art he had told many people in England he admired, but now he mixed him up in his mind with Kuprin, and the play was all about a circus—very confused and gloomy. As for literature, he purchased some new poems by Balmont, some essays by Merejkowsky, and André Biely’s St. Petersburg, but the first of these he found pretentious, the second dull, and the third quite impossibly obscure. He did not confess to himself that it might perhaps be his ignorance of the Russian language that was at fault. He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries, and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois, Douboginsky, Lançeray, and Ostroymova—all the quite obvious people. He wrote home to his mother “that from what he could see of Russian Art it seemed to him to have a real future in front of it”—and he bought little painted wooden animals and figures at the Peasants’ Workshops and stuck them up on the front of his stove.
“I like them because they are so essentially Russian,” he said to me, pointing out a red spotted cow and a green giraffe. “No other country could have been responsible for them.”
Poor boy, I had not the heart to tell him that they had been made in Germany.
However, as I have said, in spite of his painted toys and his operas he was, at the end of three weeks, a miserable man. Anybody could see that he was miserable, and Vera Michailovna saw it. She took him in hand, and at once his life was changed. I was present at the beginning of the change.
It was the evening of Rasputin’s murder. The town of course talked of nothing else—it had been talking, without cessation, since two o’clock that afternoon. The dirty, sinister figure of the monk with his magnetic eyes, his greasy beard, his robe, his girdle, and all his other properties, brooded gigantic over all of us. He was brought into immediate personal relationship with the humblest, most insignificant creature in the city, and with him incredible shadows and shapes, from Dostoeffsky, from Gogol, from Lermontov, from Nekrasov—from whom you please—all the shadows of whom one is eternally subconsciously aware in Russia—faced us and reminded us that they were not shadows but realities.
The details of his murder were not accurately known—it was only sure that, at last, after so many false rumours of attempted assassination, he was truly gone, and this world would be bothered by his evil presence no longer.
Pictures formed in one’s mind as one listened. The day was fiercely cold, and this seemed to add to the horror of it all—to the Hoffmannesque fantasy of the party, the lights, the supper, and the women, the murder with its mixture of religion and superstition and melodrama, the body flung out at last so easily and swiftly, on to
