The Secret City. Hugh Walpole
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At this point I am inevitably reminded of that other Englishman who, two years earlier than Bohun, had arrived in Russia with his own pack of dreams and expectations.
But John Trenchard, of whose life and death I have tried elsewhere to say something, was young Bohun’s opposite, and I do not think that the strange unexpectedness of Russia can he exemplified more strongly than by the similarity of appeal that she could make to two so various characters. John was shy, self-doubting, humble, brave, and a gentleman—Bohun was brave and a gentleman, but the rest had yet to be added to him. How he would have patronised Trenchard if he had known him! And yet at heart they were not perhaps so dissimilar. At the end of my story it will be apparent, I think, that they were not.
That journey from Newcastle to Bergen, from Bergen to Torneo, from Torneo to Petrograd is a tiresome business. There is much waiting at Custom-houses, disarrangement of trains and horses and meals, long wearisome hours of stuffy carriages and grimy window-panes. Bohun I suspect suffered, too, from that sudden sharp precipitance into a world that knew not Discipline and recked nothing of the Granta. Obviously none of the passengers on the boat from Newcastle had ever heard of Discipline. They clutched in their hands the works of Mr. Oppenheim, Mr. Compton Mackenzie, and Mr. O’Henry and looked at Bohun, I imagine, with indifferent superiority. He had been told at the Foreign Office that his especial travelling companion was to be Jerry Lawrence. If he had hoped for anything from this direction one glance at Jerry’s brick-red face and stalwart figure must have undeceived him. Jerry, although he was now thirty-two years of age, looked still very much the undergraduate. My slight acquaintance with him had been in those earlier Cambridge days, through a queer mutual friend, Dune, who at that time seemed to promise so magnificently, who afterwards disappeared so mysteriously. You would never have supposed that Lawrence, Captain of the University Rugger during his last two years, Captain of the English team through all the Internationals of the season 1913–14, could have had anything in common, except football, with Dune, artist and poet if ever there was one. But on the few occasions when I saw them together it struck me that football was the very least part of their common ground. And that was the first occasion on which I suspected that Jerry Lawrence was not quite what he seemed. …
I can imagine Lawrence standing straddleways on the deck of the Jupiter, his short thick legs wide apart, his broad back indifferent to everything and everybody, his rather plump, ugly, good-natured face staring out to sea as though he saw nothing at all. He always gave the impression of being half asleep, he had a way of suddenly lurching on his legs as though in another moment his desire for slumber would be too strong for him, and would send him crashing to the ground. He would be smoking an ancient briar, and his thick red hands would be clasped behind his back. …
No encouraging figure for Bohun’s aestheticism.
I can see as though I had been present Bohun’s approach to him, his patronising introduction, his kindly suggestion that they should eat their meals together, Jerry’s smiling, lazy acquiescence. I can imagine how Bohun decided to himself that “he must make the best of this chap. After all, it was a long tiresome journey, and anything was better than having no one to talk to. …” But Jerry, unfortunately, was in a bad temper at the start. He did not want to go out to Russia at all. His father, old Stephen Lawrence, had been for many years the manager of some works in Petrograd, and the first fifteen years of Jerry’s life had been spent in Russia. I did not, at the time when I made Jerry’s acquaintance at Cambridge, know this; had I realised it I would have understood many things about him which puzzled me. He never alluded to Russia, never apparently thought of it, never read a Russian book, had, it seemed, no connection of any kind with any living soul in that country.
Old Lawrence retired, and took a fine large ugly palace in Clapham to end his days in. …
Suddenly, after Lawrence had been in France for two years, had won the Military Cross there and, as he put it, “was just settling inside his skin,” the authorities realised his Russian knowledge, and decided to transfer him to the British Military Mission in Petrograd. His anger when he was sent back to London and informed of this was extreme. He hadn’t the least desire to return to Russia, he was very happy where he was, he had forgotten all his Russian; I can see him, saying very little, looking like a sulky child and kicking his heel up and down across the carpet.
“Just the man we want out there, Lawrence,” he told me somebody said to him; “keep them in order.”
“Keep them in order!” That tickled his sense of humour. He was to laugh frequently, afterwards, when he thought of it. He always chewed a joke as a cow chews the cud.
So that he was in no pleasant temper when he met Bohun on the decks of the Jupiter. That journey must have had its humours for any observer who knew the two men. During the first half of it I imagine that Bohun talked and Lawrence slumbered. Bohun patronised, was kind and indulgent, and showed very plainly that he thought his companion the dullest and heaviest of mortals. Then he told Lawrence about Russia; he explained everything to him, the morals, psychology, fighting qualities, strengths, and weaknesses. The climax arrived when he announced: “But it’s the mysticism of the Russian peasant which will save the world. That adoration of God. …”
“Rot!” interrupted Lawrence.
Bohun was indignant. “Of course if you know better—” he said.
“I do,” said Lawrence, “I lived there for fifteen years. Ask my old governor about the mysticism of the Russian peasant. He’ll tell you.”
Bohun felt that he was justified in his annoyance. As he said to me afterwards: “The fellow had simply been laughing at me. He might have told me about his having been there.” At that time, to Bohun, the most terrible thing in the world was to be laughed at.
After that Bohun asked Jerry questions. But Jerry refused to give himself away. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve forgotten it all. I don’t suppose I ever did know much about it.”
At Haparanda, most unfortunately, Bohun was insulted. The Swedish Customs Officer there, tired at the constant appearance of self-satisfied gentlemen with Red Passports, decided that Bohun was carrying medicine in his private bags. Bohun refused to open his portmanteau, simply because he “was a Courier and wasn’t going to be insulted by a dirty foreigner.” Nevertheless “the dirty foreigner” had his way and Bohun looked rather a fool. Jerry had not sympathised sufficiently with Bohun in this affair. … “He only grinned,” Bohun told me indignantly afterwards. “No sense of patriotism at all. After all, Englishmen ought to stick together.”
Finally, Bohun tested Jerry’s literary knowledge. Jerry seemed to have none. He liked Fielding, and a man called Farnol and Jack London.
He never read poetry. But, a strange thing, he was interested in Greek. He had bought the works of Euripides and Aeschylus in the Loeb Library, and he thought them “thundering good.” He had never read a word of any Russian author. “Never Anna? Never War and Peace? Never Karamazov? Never Tchehov?”
No, never.
Bohun gave him up.
IV
It should be obvious enough then that they hailed their approaching separation with relief. Bohun had been promised by one of the secretaries at the Embassy that rooms would be found for him. Jerry intended to “hang out” at one of the hotels. The “Astoria” was, he believed, the right place.
“I shall go to the ‘France’ for to-night,” Bohun declared, having lived, it would seem, in Petrograd all his days. “Look me up, old man, won’t you?”
Jerry smiled his slow smile. “I will,” he said. “So long.”
We will now follow the adventures of Henry. He had in him, I know, a tiny, tiny creature with sharp ironical eyes and