t was just as though
there were an evil smell in the flat, he explained to me. "It seemed to
hang over everything. Things looked the same and yet they weren't the
same at all."

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. His mind travelled back
to his own first arrival in Petrograd, that first sleep at the "France"
with the dripping water and the crawling rats, the plunge into the Kazan
Cathedral, and everything that followed.

He did not see, of course, his own progress since that day, or the many
things that Russia had already done for him, but he did feel that such
situations as the one he was now sharing were, to-day, much more in the
natural order of things than they would have been four months before....

He dozed off and then was awakened, sharply, abruptly, by the sound of
Markovitch's padded feet. There could be no mistaking them; very softly
they went past Bohun's door, down the passage towards the dining-room.
He sat up in bed, and all the other sounds of the night seemed suddenly
to be accentuated--the dripping of the tap, the blowing of the wind, and
even the heavy breathing of old Sacha, who always slept in a sort of
cupboard near the kitchen, with her legs hanging out into the passage.
Sudde