Nevertheless his own “sickness” was not the principal affair.  The point was the sense of danger that seemed now to tinge with its own faint stain every article in the room.  Bohun’s hatred of Semyonov was so strong that he felt as though he would never be able to speak to him again; but it was not really of Semyonov that he was thinking.  His thoughts were all centred round Markovitch.  You must remember that for a long time now he had considered himself Markovitch’s protector.  This sense of his protection had developed in him an affection for the man that he would not otherwise have felt.  He did not, of course, know of any of Markovitch’s deepest troubles.  He could only guess at his relations with Vera, and he did not understand the passionate importance that he attached to his Russian idea.  But he knew enough to be aware of his childishness, his simplicity, his naivete, and his essential goodness.  “He’s an awfully decent sort, really,” he used to say in a kind of apologetic defence.  The very fact of Semyonov’s strength made his brutality seem now the more revolting.  “Like hitting a fellow half your size"....

He saw that things in that flat were approaching a climax, and he knew enough now of Russian impetuosity to realise that climaxes in that country are, very often, no ordinary affairs.  It 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.