e fellow"; he might seem a little slow at first, "but
you wait and you will see what kind of a chap he is." Nevertheless Bohun
was not able to be for ever in his company; work separated them, and
then Lawrence lodged with Baron Wilderling on the Admiralty Quay, a long
way from Anglisky Prospect. Therefore, at the end of three weeks, Henry
Bohun discovered himself to be profoundly wretched. There seemed to be
no hope anywhere. Even the artist in him was disappointed. He went to
the Ballet and saw Tchaikowsky's "Swan Lake"; but bearing Diagilev's
splendours in front of him, and knowing nothing about the technique of
ballet-dancing he was bored and cross and contemptuous. He went to
"Eugen Onyegin" and enjoyed it, because there was still a great deal of
the schoolgirl in him; but after that he was flung on to Glinka's
"Russlan and Ludmilla," and this seemed to him quite interminable and to
have nothing to do with the gentleman and lady mentioned in the title.
He tried a play at the Alexander Theatre; it was, he saw, by Andreeff,
whose art he had told many people in England he admired, but now he
mixed him up in his mind with Kuprin, and the play was all about a
circus--very confused and gloomy. As for literature, he purchased some
new poems by Balmont, some essays by Merejkowsky, and Andre Biely's _St.
Petersburg,_ but the first of these he found pretentious, the second
dull, and the third quite impossibly obscure. He did not confess to
himself that it might perhaps be his ignorance of the Russian language
that was at fault. He went to the Hermitage and the Alexander Galleries,
and purchased coloured post-cards of the works of Somov, Benois,
Douboginsky, Lanceray, and Ostroymova--all the quite obvious people. He
wrote home to his mother "that from what he could see of Russian Art it
seemed to him to have a real future in front of it"--and he bought
little painted wooden animals and figures at the Peasants' Workshops and
stuck them up on the front of his stove.

"I like them because they are so essentially Russian," he said to me,
pointing out a red spotted cow and a green giraffe. "No other country
could have been responsible for them."

Poor boy, I had not the heart to tell him that they had been made in
Germany.

However, as I have said, in spite of his painted toys and his operas he
was, at the end of three weeks, a miserable man. Anybody could see that
he was miserable, and Vera Michailovna saw it. She took him in ha