"
"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.
Pages:
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232