“Well, it seems that Durward isn’t coming. He’s out dining somewhere I expect.”
“Probably,” said Markovitch drily.
There was another pause, then Markovitch broke out with: “I suppose you think I’ve been here trying to steal something.”
“Oh no—oh no—no—” stammered Bohun.
“But I have,” said Markovitch. “You can look round and see. There it is on every side of you. I’ve been trying to find a letter.”
“Oh yes,” said Bohun nervously.
“Well, that seems to you terrible,” went on Markovitch, growing ever fiercer. “Of course it seems to you perfect Englishmen a dreadful thing. But why heed it? … You all do things just as bad, only you are hypocrites.”
“Oh yes, certainly,” said Bohun.
“And now,” said Markovitch with a snarl. “I’m sure you will not think me a proper person for you to lodge with any longer—and you will be right. I am not a proper person. I have no sense of decency, thank God, and no Russian has any sense of decency, and that is why we are beaten and despised by the whole world, and yet are finer than them all—so you’d better not lodge with us any more.”
“But of course,” said Bohun, disliking more and more this uncomfortable scene—“of course I shall continue to stay with you. You are my friends, and one doesn’t mind what one’s friends do. One’s friends are one’s friends.”
Suddenly, then, Markovitch jerked himself forward, “just as though,” Bohun afterwards described it to me, “he had shot himself out of a catapault.”
“Tell me,” he said, “is your English friend in love with my wife?”
What Bohun wanted to do then was to run out of the room, down the dark stairs, and away as fast as his legs would carry him. He had not been in Russia so long that he had lost his English dislike of scenes, and he was seriously afraid that Markovitch was, as he put it, “bang off his head.”
But at this critical moment, he remembered, it seems, my injunction to him, “to be kind to Markovitch—to make a friend of him.” That had always seemed to him before impossible enough, but now, at the very moment when Markovitch was at his queerest, he was also at his most pathetic, looking there in the mist and shadows too untidy and dirty and miserable to be really alarming. Henry then took courage. “That’s all nonsense, Markovitch,” he said. “I suppose by ‘your English friend’ you mean Lawrence. He thinks the world of your wife, of course, as we all do, but he’s not the fellow to be in love. I don’t suppose he’s ever been really in love with a woman in his life. He’s a kindly good-hearted chap, Lawrence, and he wouldn’t do harm to a fly.”
Markovitch peered into Bohun’s face. “What did you come here for, any of you?” he asked. “What’s Russia overrun 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.
“I love Russia and I love my wife, Mr. Bohun—and they’ve both left me. But you aren’t interested in that. Why should you be? Only remember when you’re inclined to laugh at me that I’m like a man in a cockleshell boat—and it isn’t my fault. I was put in it.”
“But I’m never inclined to laugh,” said Bohun eagerly. “I may be young and only an Englishman—but I shouldn’t wonder if I don’t understand better than you think. You try and see. … And I’ll tell you another thing, Nicolai Leontievitch, I loved your wife myself—loved her madly—and she was so good to me and so far above me, that I saw that it was like loving one of the angels. That’s what we all feel, Nicolai Leontievitch, so that you needn’t have any fear—she’s too far above all of us. And I only want to be your friend and hers, and to help you in any way I can.”
(I can see Bohun saying this, very sincere, his cheeks flushed, eager.)
Markovitch held out both his hands.
“You’re right,” he cried. “She’s above us all. It’s true that she’s an angel, and we are all her servants. You have helped me by saying what you have, and I won’t forget it. You are right; I am wasting my time with ridiculous suspicions when I ought to be working. Concentration, that’s what I want, and perhaps you will give it me.”
He suddenly came forward and kissed Bohun on both cheeks. He smelt, Bohun thought, of vodka. Bohun didn’t like the embrace, of course, but he accepted it gracefully.
“Now we’ll go away,” said Markovitch.
“We ought to put things straight,” said Bohun.
“No; I shall leave things as they are,” said Markovitch, “so that he shall see exactly what I’ve done. I’ll write a note.”
He scribbled a note to me in pencil. I have it still. It ran:
Dear Ivan Andreievitch—I looked for a letter from my wife to you. In doing so I was I suppose contemptible. But no matter. At least you see me as I am. I clasp your hand,
They went away together.
II
I was greatly surprised to receive, a few days later, an invitation from Baron Wilderling; he asked me to go with him on one of the first evenings in March to a performance of Lermontov’s Masquerade at the Alexandra Theatre. I say Lermontov, but heaven knows that that great Russian poet was not supposed to be going to have much to say in the affair. This performance had been in preparation for at least ten years, and when such
