Bohun was indignant. “Of course if you know better—” he said.
“I do,” said Lawrence, “I lived there for fifteen years. Ask my old governor about the mysticism of the Russian peasant. He’ll tell you.”
Bohun felt that he was justified in his annoyance. As he said to me afterwards: “The fellow had simply been laughing at me. He might have told me about his having been there.” At that time, to Bohun, the most terrible thing in the world was to be laughed at.
After that Bohun asked Jerry questions. But Jerry refused to give himself away. “I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve forgotten it all. I don’t suppose I ever did know much about it.”
At Haparanda, most unfortunately, Bohun was insulted. The Swedish Customs Officer there, tired at the constant appearance of self-satisfied gentlemen with Red Passports, decided that Bohun was carrying medicine in his private bags. Bohun refused to open his portmanteau, simply because he “was a Courier and wasn’t going to be insulted by a dirty foreigner.” Nevertheless “the dirty foreigner” had his way and Bohun looked rather a fool. Jerry had not sympathised sufficiently with Bohun in this affair.... “He only grinned,” Bohun told me indignantly afterwards. “No sense of patriotism at all. After all, Englishmen ought to stick together.”
Finally, Bohun tested Jerry’s literary knowledge. Jerry seemed to have none. He liked Fielding, and a man called Farnol and Jack London.
He never read poetry. But, a strange thing, he was interested in Greek. He had bought the works of Euripides and Aeschylus in the Loeb Library, and he thought them “thundering good.” He had never read a word of any Russian author. “Never Anna? Never War and Peace? Never Karamazov? Never Tchehov?”
No, never.
Bohun gave him up.