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
Mi