and Vera Michailovna declared that she could have lodgers
no longer, and a terrible blow this was to Ivan Petrovitch. Then
suddenly, towards the end of 1916, she changed her mind and announced to
the Embassy that she was ready for any one whom they could send her.
Henry Bohun was offered, accepted, and prepared for. Ivan Petrovitch was
a happy man once more.

I never discovered that Markovitch was much consulted in these affairs.
Vera Michailovna "ran" the flat financially, industrially, and
spiritually. Markovitch meanwhile was busy with his inventions. I have,
as yet, said nothing about Nicolai Leontievitch's inventions. I
hesitate, indeed, to speak of them, although they are so essential, and
indeed important a part of my story. I hesitate simply because I do not
wish this narrative to be at all fantastic, but that it should stick
quite honestly and obviously to the truth. It is certain moreover that
what is naked truth to one man seems the falsest fancy to another, and
after all I have, from beginning to end, only my own conscience to
satisfy. The history of the human soul and its relation to divinity
which is, I think, the only history worth any man's pursuit must push
its way, again and again, through this same tangled territory which
infests the region lying between truth and fantasy; one passes suddenly
into a world that seems pure falsehood, so askew, so obscure, so twisted
and coloured is it. One is through, one looks back and it lies behind
one as the clearest truth. Such an experience makes one tender to other
men's fancies and less impatient of the vague and half-defined
travellers' tales that other men tell. Childe Roland is not the only
traveller who has challenged the Dark Tower.

In the Middle Ages Nicolai Leontievitch Markovitch would have been
called, I suppose, a Magician--a very half-hearted and unsatisfactory
one he would always have been--and he would have been most certainly
burnt at the stake before he had accomplished any magic worthy of the
name. His inventions, so far as I saw anything of them, were innocent
and simple enough. It was the man himself rather than his inventions
that arrested the attention. About the time of Bohun's arrival upon the
scene it was a new kind of ink that he had discovered, and for many
weeks the Markovitch flat dripped ink from every pore. He had no
laboratory, no scientific materials, nor, I think, any profound
knowledge. The room where he worked was a small box