"
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.
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