The Secret City Part 5

"I like that man. One could trust him."

"Yes, one could," I answered her.

IX

I must return now to young Henry Bohun. I would like to arouse your sympathy for him, but sympathy's a dangerous medicine for the young, who are only too ready, so far as their self-confidence goes, to take a mile if you give them an inch. But with Bohun it was simply a case of re-delivering, piece by piece, the mile that he had had no possible right to imagine in his possession, and at the end of his relinquishment he was as naked 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 s.p.a.ce, its power of reducing the human figure to a sudden speck of insignificance, its strange lights and shadows, its waste s.p.a.ces 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 n.o.body 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 Emba.s.sy 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body. 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 t.i.tle.

He tried a play at the Alexander Theatre; it was, he saw, by Andreeff, 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 Andre 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, Lanceray, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sa.s.sination, 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 superst.i.tion and melodrama, the body flung out at last so easily and swiftly, on to the frozen river. How many souls must have asked themselves that day--"Why, if this is so easy, do we not proceed further? A man dies more simply than you thought--only resolution... only resolution."

I know that that evening I found it impossible to remain in my lonely rooms; I went round to the Markovitch flat. I found Vera Michailovna and Bohun preparing to go out; they were alone in the flat. He looked at me apprehensively. I think that I appeared to him at that time a queer, moody, ill-disposed fellow, who was too old to understand the true character of young men's impetuous souls. It may be that he was right....

"Will you come with us, Ivan Andreievitch?" Vera Michailovna asked me.

"We're going to the little cinema on Ekateringofsky--a piece of local colour for Mr. Bohun."

"I'll come anywhere with you," I said. "And we'll talk about Rasputin."

Bohun was only too ready. The affair seemed to his romantic soul too good to be true. Because we none of us knew, at that time, what had really happened, a fine field was offered for every rumour and conjecture.

Bohun had collected some wonderful stories. I saw that, apart from Rasputin, he was a new man--something had happened to him. It was not long before I discovered that what had happened was that Vera Michailovna had been kind to him. Vera's most beautiful quality was her motherliness. I do not intend that much-abused word in any sentimental fas.h.i.+on. She did not shed tears over a dirty baby in the street, nor did she drag decrepit old men into the flat to give them milk and fifty kopecks,--but let some one appeal to the strength and bravery in her, and she responded magnificently. I believe that to be true of very many Russian women, who are always their most natural selves when something appeals to the best in them. Vera Michailovna had a strength and a security in her protection of souls weaker than her own that had about it nothing forced or pretentious or self-conscious--it was simply the natural woman acting as she was made to act. She saw that Bohun was lonely and miserable and, now that the first awkwardness was pa.s.sed and he was no longer a stranger, she was able, gently and un.o.btrusively, to show him that she was his friend. I think that she had not liked him at first; but if you want a Russian to like you, the thing to do is to show him that you need him. It is amazing to watch their readiness to receive dependent souls whom they are in no kind of way qualified to protect--but they do their best, and although the result is invariably bad for everybody's character, a great deal of affection is created.

As we walked to the cinema she asked him, very gently and rather shyly, about his home and his people and English life. She must have asked all her English guests the same questions, but Bohun, I fancy, gave her rather original answers. He let himself go, and became very young and rather absurd, but also sympathetic. We were, all three of us, gay and silly, as one very often suddenly is, in Russia, in the middle of even disastrous situations. It had been a day of most beautiful weather, the mud was frozen, the streets clean, the sky deep blue, the air harshly sweet. The night blazed with stars that seemed to swing through the haze of the frost like a curtain moved, very gently, by the wind. The Ekateringofsky Ca.n.a.l was blue with the stars lying like sc.r.a.ps of quicksilver all about it, and the trees and houses were deep black in outline above it. I could feel that the people in the street were happy.

The murder of Rasputin was a sign, a symbol; his figure had been behind the scenes so long that it had become mythical, something beyond human power--and now, behold, it was not beyond human power at all, but was there like a dead stinking fish. I could see the thought in their minds as they hurried along: "Ah, he is gone, the dirty fellow--_Slava Bogu_--the war will soon be over."

I, myself, felt the influence. Perhaps now the war would go better, perhaps Stunner and Protopopoff and the rest of them would be dismissed, and clean men... it was still time for the Czar.... And I heard Bohun, in his funny, slow, childish Russian: "But you understand, Vera Michailovna, that my father knows nothing about writing, nothing at all--so that it wouldn't matter very much what he said.... Yes, he's military--been in the Army always...."

Along the ca.n.a.l the little trees that in the spring would be green flames were touched now very faintly by silver frost. A huge barge lay black against the blue water; in the middle of it the rain had left a pool that was not frozen and under the light of a street lamp blazed gold--very strange the sudden gleam.... We pa.s.sed the little wooden shelter where an old man in a high furry cap kept oranges and apples and nuts and sweets in paper. One candle illuminated his little store. He looked out from the darkness behind him like an old prehistoric man. His shed was peaked like a c.o.c.ked hat, an old fat woman sat beside him knitting and drinking a gla.s.s 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. Then Bohun again:

"No, I write very slowly--yes, I correct an awful lot...."

We stumbled amongst the darkness of the cobbles; where pools had been the ice crackled beneath our feet, then the snow scrunched.... I loved the sound, the sharp clear scent of the air, the pools of stars in the sky, the pools of ice at our feet, the blue like the thinnest gla.s.s stretched across the sky. I felt the poignancy of my age, of the country where I was, of Bohun's youth and confidence, of the war, of disease and death--but behind it all happiness at the strange sense that I had to-night, that came to me sometimes from I knew not where, that the undercurrent of the river of life was stronger than the eddies and whirlpools on its surface, that it knew whither it was speeding, and that the purpose behind its force was strong and true and good....

"Oh," I heard Bohun say, "I'm not really very young, Vera Michailovna.

After all, it's what you've done rather than your actual years...."

"You're older than you'll ever be again, Bohun, if that's any consolation to you," I said.

We had arrived. The cinema door blazed with light, and around it was gathered a group of soldiers and women and children, peering in at a soldiers' band, which, placed on benches in a corner of the room, played away for its very life. Outside, around the door were large bills announcing "The Woman without a Soul, Drama in four parts," and there were fine pictures of women falling over precipices, men shot in bedrooms, and parties in which all the guests shrank back in extreme horror from the heroine. We went inside and were overwhelmed by the band, so that we could not hear one another speak. The floor was covered with sunflower seeds, and there was a strong smell of soldiers' boots and bad cigarettes and urine. We bought tickets from an old Jewess behind the pigeon-hole and then, pus.h.i.+ng the curtain aside, stumbled into darkness. Here the smell was different, being, quite simply that of human flesh not very carefully washed. Although, as we stumbled to some seats at the back, we could feel that we were alone, it had the impression that mult.i.tudes of people pressed in upon us, and when the lights did go up we found that the little hall was indeed packed to its extremest limit.

No one could have denied that it was a cheerful scene. Soldiers, sailors, peasants, women, and children crowded together upon the narrow benches. There was a great consumption of sunflower seeds, and the narrow pa.s.sage down the middle of the room was littered with fragments.

Two stout and elaborate policemen leaned against the wall surveying the public with a friendly if superior air. There was a tremendous amount of noise. Mingled with the strains of the band beyond the curtain were cries and calls and loud roars of laughter. The soldiers embraced the girls, and the children, their fingers in their mouths, wandered from bench to bench, and a mangy dog begged wherever he thought that he saw a kindly face. All the faces were kindly--kindly, ignorant, and astoundingly young. As I felt that youth I felt also separation; I and my like could emphasise as we pleased the goodness, docility, mysticism even of these people, but we were walking in a country of darkness. I caught a laugh, the glance of some women, the voice of a young soldier--I felt behind us, watching us, the thick heavy figure of Rasputin. I smelt the eastern scent of the sunflower seeds, I looked back and glanced at the impenetrable superiority of the two policemen, and I laughed at myself for the knowledge that I thought I had, for the security upon which I thought that I rested, for the familiarity with which I had fancied I could approach my neighbours.... I was not wise, I was not secure, I had no claim to familiarity....

The lights were down and we were shown pictures of Paris. Because the cinema was a little one and the prices small the films were faded and torn, so that the Opera and the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre and the Seine danced and wriggled and broke before our eyes. They looked strange enough to us and only accented our isolation and the odd semi-civilisation in which we were living. There were comments all around the room in exactly the spirit of children before a conjurer at a party.... The smell grew steadily stronger and stronger... my head swam a little and I seemed to see Rasputin, swelling in his black robe, catching us all into its folds, sweeping us up into the starlight sky.

We were under the flare of the light again. 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. A woman and a man in peasants' dress came and laughed raucously, without meaning, their eyes narrowly searching the depths of the house, then they stamped their feet and whirled around, struck one another, laughed again, and vanished.

The applause was half-hearted. Then there was a trainer of dogs, a black-eyed Tartar with four very miserable little fox-terriers, who s.h.i.+vered and trembled and jumped reluctantly through hoops. The audience liked this, and cried and shouted and threw paper pellets at the dogs. A stout perspiring Jew in a shabby evening suit came forward and begged for decorum. Then there appeared a stout little man in a top hat who wished to recite verses of, I gathered, a violent indecency. I was uncomfortable about Vera Michailovna, but I need not have been. The indecency was of no importance to her, and she was interested in the human tragedy of the performer. Tragedy it was. The man was hungry and dirty and not far from tears. He forgot his verses and glanced nervously into the wings as though he expected to be beaten publicly by the perspiring Jew.

He stammered; his mouth wobbled; he covered it with a dirty hand. He could not continue.

The audience was sympathetic. They listened in encouraging silence; then they clapped; then they shouted friendly words to him. You could feel throughout the room an intense desire that he should succeed. He responded a little to the encouragement, but could not remember his verses. He struggled, struggled, did a hurried little breakdown dance, bowed and vanished into the wings, to be beaten, I have no doubt, by the Jewish gentleman. We watched a little of the "Drama of the Woman without a Soul," but the sense of being in a large vat filled with boiling human flesh into whose depths we were pressed ever more and more deeply was at last too much for us, and we stumbled our way into the open air. The black shadow of the barge, the jagged outline of the huddled buildings against the sky, the black tower at the end of the ca.n.a.l, all these swam in the crystal air.

We took deep breaths of the freshness and purity; cheerful noises were on every side of us, the band and laughter; a church bell with its deep note and silver tinkle; the snow was vast and deep and hard all about us. We walked back very happily to Anglisky Prospect. Vera Michailovna said good-night to me and went in. Before he followed her, Bohun turned round to me:

"Isn't she splendid?" he whispered. "By G.o.d, Durward, I'd do anything for her.... Do you think she likes me?"

"Why not?" I asked.

"I want her to--frightfully. I'd do anything for her. Do you think she'd like to learn English?"

"I don't know," I said. "Ask her."