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Updated: June 22, 2025
I should have seen Nina and Vera waiting there, and that should have at once determined me. So it would have been had I been myself. This other man was there.... Nina and Vera meant nothing to him at all. But I could not explain that to Bohun. "I can't go..." I saw Bohun's eyes I was dreadfully ashamed. "You go on..." I muttered.
I am a dull and pompous fellow, as Semyonov often tells me; and I hope that I never allowed him to see how deeply I felt the truth of his words. Meanwhile I will begin with a small adventure of Henry Bohun's. Apparently, one evening soon after Nina's party, he found himself about half-past ten in the evening, lonely and unhappy, walking down the Nevski.
We stepped back into Bohun's room and, if I had had any anxieties, they would at once, I think, have been reassured by the unemotional figure of Bohun's typist, a gay young woman with peroxide hair, who was typing away as though for her very life. "Look here, Bohun, can I talk to you alone for a minute?" I asked. The peroxide lady left us.
I caught Bohun's happy eyes; he was talking eagerly to Vera Michailovna, not removing his eyes from her face. She had conquered him; I fancied as I looked at her that her thoughts were elsewhere. There followed a Vaudeville entertainment.
We stood and listened whilst the white mist gathered and grew over the cobbles. Certainly there was a strain of music, very faint and dim, threading through the air. "Well, I must go on," said Bohun. "You go up to the left, don't you? Good-night." I watched Bohun's figure cross the Square.
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.
There was instant silence, a terrible pause, and then Bohun's polite gentle voice: "Is this where Mr. Markovitch lives? I beg your pardon " Great awkwardness followed. It is quite an illusion to suppose that Russians are easy, affable hosts. I know of no people in the world who are so unable to put you at your ease if there is something unfortunate in the air.
Markovitch peered into Bohun's face. "What did you come here for, any of you?" he asked. "What's Russia over-run with foreigners for? We'll clear the lot of you out, all of you...." Then he broke off, with a pathetic little gesture, his hand up to his head. "But I don't know what I'm saying I don't mean it, really. Only things are so difficult, and they slip away from one so.
He looked out from the darkness behind him like an old prehistoric man. His shed was peaked like a cocked hat, an old fat woman sat beside him knitting and drinking a glass of tea.... "I'm sorry, Vera Michailovna, that you can't read English...." Bohun's careful voice was explaining, "Only Wells and Locke and Jack London...." I heard Vera Michailovna's voice.
So, about half-past one, I started off for Bohun's office on the Fontanka. I've said somewhere before, I think, that Bohun's work was in connection with the noble but uphill task of enlightening the Russian public as to the righteousness of the war, the British character, and the Anglo-Russian alliance.
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