The Secret City - Hugh Walpole

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And it’s the third time—I won’t see him again—no, I won’t. He—”

      “Good-evening, Nina Michailovna,” I said, smiling. She turned to me.

      “Durdles—Mr. Durdles—only listen. It was all arranged for to-night—the Parisian, and then we were to come straight back—”

      “But your guest—” I began.

      However the torrent continued. The door opened and Boris Grogoff came in. Instantly she turned upon him.

      “There’s your fine friend!” she cried; “Michael Alexandrovitch isn’t coming. Put me off at the last moment, and it’s the third time. And I might have gone to Musikalnaya Drama. I was asked by—”

      “Well, why not?” Grogoff interrupted calmly. “If he had something better to do—”

      Then she turned upon him, screaming, and in a moment they were at it, tooth and nail, heaping up old scores, producing fact after fact to prove, the one to the other, false friendship, lying manners, deceitful promises, perjured records. Vera tried to interrupt, Markovitch said something, I began a remonstrance—in a moment we were all at it, and the room was a whirl of noise. In the tempest it was only I who heard the door open. I turned and saw Henry Bohun standing there.

      I smile now when I think of that moment of his arrival, go fitting to the characters of the place, so appropriate a symbol of what was to come. Bohun was beautifully dressed, spotlessly neat, in a bowler hat a little to one side, a light-blue silk scarf, a dark-blue overcoat. His face wore an expression of dignified self-appreciation. It was as though he stood there breathing blessings on the house that he had sanctified by his arrival. He looked, too, with it all, such a boy that my heart was touched. And there was something good and honest about his eyes.

      He may have spoken, but certainly no one heard him in the confusion.

      I just caught Nina’s shrill voice: “Listen all of you! There you are! You hear what he says! That I told him it was to be Tuesday when, everybody knows—Verotchka! Ah—Verotchka! He says—” Then she paused; I caught her amazed glance at the door, her gasp, a scream of stifled laughter, and behold she was gone!

      Then they all saw. 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. They have few easy social graces, and they are inclined to abandon at once a situation if it is made difficult for them. If it needs an effort to make a guest happy they leave him alone and trust to a providence in whose powers, however, they entirely disbelieve. Bohun was led to his room, his bags being carried by old Sacha, the Markovitch’s servant, and the Dvornik.

      His bags, I remember, were very splendid, and I saw the eyes of Uncle Ivan grow large as he watched their progress. Then with a sigh he drew a chair up to the table and began eating zakuska, putting salt-fish and radishes and sausage on to his place and eating them with a fork.

      “Dyadya, Ivan!” Vera said reproachfully. “Not yet—we haven’t begun. Ivan Andreievitch, what do you think? Will he want hot water?”

      She hurried after him.

      The evening thus unfortunately begun was not happily continued. There was a blight upon us all. I did my best, but I was in considerable pain and very tired. Moreover, I was not favourably impressed with my first sight of young Bohun. He seemed to me foolish and conceited. Uncle Ivan was afraid of him. He made only one attack.

      “It was a very fruitful journey that you had, sir, I hope?”

      “I beg your pardon,” said Bohun.

      “A very fruitful journey—nothing burdensome nor extravagant?”

      “Oh, all right, thanks,” Bohun answered, trying unsuccessfully to show that he was not surprised at my friend’s choice of words. But Uncle Ivan saw that he had not been successful and his lip trembled. Markovitch was silent and Boris Nicolaievitch sulked. Only once towards the end of the meal Bohun interested me.

      “I wonder,” he asked me, “whether you know a fellow called Lawrence? He travelled from England with me. A man who’s played a lot of football.”

      “Not Jerry Lawrence, the international!” I said. “Surely he can’t have come out here?” Of course it was the same. I was interested and strangely pleased. The thought of Lawrence’s square back and cheery smile was extremely agreeable just then.

      “Oh! I’m very glad,” I answered. “I must get him to come and see me. I knew him pretty well at one time. Where’s he to be found?”

      Bohun, with an air of rather gentle surprise, as though he could not help thinking it strange that any one should take an interest in Lawrence’s movements, told me where he was lodging.

      “And I hope you also will find your way to me sometime,”

      I added. “It’s an out-of-place grimy spot, I’m afraid. You might bring Lawrence round one evening.”

      Soon after that, feeling that I could do no more towards retrieving an evening definitely lost, I departed. At the last I caught Markovitch’s eye. He seemed to be watching for something. A new invention perhaps. He was certainly an unhappy man.

       Table of Contents

      I was to meet Jerry Lawrence sooner than I had expected. And it was in this way.

      Two days after the evening that I have just described I was driven to go and see Vera Michailovna. I was driven, partly by my curiosity, partly by my depression, and partly by my loneliness. This same loneliness was, I believe, at this time beginning to affect us all. I should be considered perhaps to be speaking with exaggeration if I were to borrow the title of one of Mrs. Oliphant’s old-fashioned and charming novels and to speak of Petrograd as already “A Beleaguered City”—beleaguered, moreover, in very much the same sense as that other old city was. From the very beginning of the war Petrograd was isolated—isolated not by the facts of the war, its geographical position or any of the obvious causes, but simply by the contempt and hatred with which it was regarded. From very old days it was spoken of as a German town. “If you want to know Russia don’t go to Petrograd.” “Simply a cosmopolitan town like any other.” “A smaller Berlin”—and so on, and so on. This sense of outside contempt influenced its own attitude to the world. It was always at war with Moscow. It showed you when you first arrived its Nevski, its ordered squares, its official buildings as though it would say: “I suppose you will take the same view as the rest. If you don’t wish to look any deeper here you are. I’m not going to help you.”

      As the war developed it lost whatever gaiety and humour it had. After the fall of Warsaw the attitude of the Russian people in general became fatalistic. Much nonsense was talked in the foreign press about “Russia coming back again and again.” “Russia, the harder she was pressed the harder she resisted,” and the ghost of Napoleon retreating from Moscow was presented to every home in Europe; but the plain truth was that, after Warsaw, the temper of the people changed. Things were going wrong once more as they had always gone wrong in Russian history, and as they always would go wrong. Then followed bewilderment. What to do? Whose fault was it all? Shall we blame our blood or our rulers? Our rulers, certainly, as we always, with justice, have blamed them—our blood, too, perhaps. From the fall of Warsaw, in spite of momentary flashes of splendour and courage, the Russians were a blindfolded, naked people, fighting a nation fully armed. Now, Europe was vast continents away, and only Germany, that old Germany whose soul was hateful, whose practical spirit was terribly admirable, was close at hand. The Russian people turned hither and thither, first to its Czar, then to its generals, then to its

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