by Hugh Walpole
“Oh, a premonition,” I said, disappointed. “Is nothing settled?”
“No, not definitely. It depends on others.”
“Have you told Vera and Nicholas?”
“No — in fact, only last night Vera begged me to go away, and I told her that I would love to do anything to oblige her, but this time I was afraid that I couldn’t help her. I would be compelled, alas, to stay on indefinitely.”
“Look here, Semyonov,” I said, “stop that eternal fooling. Tell me honestly — are you going or not?”
“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, “this is the 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. And how bad they can be!… But you hadn’t always this vehement hatred. What’s changed your mind?”
“I don’t know that I have changed 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! It can’t be 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 — I do seem 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.
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 fa
ding 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’s House 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 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 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, his naïveté, 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 natu
ral 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….”