“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“You know when something queer’s going on inside a house you seem to notice the furniture of the rooms much more than you ordinarily do.  I remember once a fellow’s piano making me quite sick whenever I looked at it.  I didn’t know why; I don’t know why now, but the funny thing is that another man who knew him once said exactly the same thing to me about it.  He felt it too.  Of course we’re none of us quite normal just now.  The whole town seems to be turning upside down.  I’m always imagining there are animals in the canals; and don’t you notice what lots of queer fellows there are in the Nevski now, and Chinese and Japs—­all sorts of wild men.  And last night I had a dream that all the lumps of ice in the Nevski turned into griffins and went marching through the Red Square eating every one up on their way....”  Bohun laughed.  “That’s because I’d eaten something of course—­too much paskha probably.

“But, seriously, I came in this evening at five o’clock, and the first thing I noticed was that little red lacquer musical box of Semyonov’s.  You know it.  The one with a sports-man in a top hat and a horse and a dog on the lid.  He brought it with some other little things when he moved in.  It’s a jolly thing to look at, but it’s got two most irritating tunes.  One’s like ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland.’  You said yourself the other day it would drive you mad if you heard it often.  Well, there it was, jangling away in its self-sufficient wheezy voice.  Semyonov was sitting in the armchair reading the newspaper, Markovitch was standing behind the chair with the strangest look on his face.  Suddenly, just as I came in he bent down and I heard him say:  ’Won’t you stop the beastly thing?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Semyonov, and he went across in his heavy plodding kind of way and stopped it.  I went off to my room and then, upon my word, five minutes after I heard it begin again, thin and reedy through the walls.  But when I came back into the dining-room there was no one there.  You can’t think how that tune irritated me, and I tried to stop it.  I went up to it, but I couldn’t find the hinge or the key.  So on it went, over and over again.  Then there’s another thing.  Have you ever noticed how some chairs will creak in a room, just as though some one were sitting down or getting up?  It always, in ordinary times, makes you jump, but when you’re strung up about something—!  There’s a chair in the Markovitches’ dining-room just like that.  It creaks more like a human being than anything you ever heard, and to-night I could have sworn Semyonov got up out of it.  It was just like his heavy slow movement.  However, there wasn’t any one there.  Do you think all this silly?” he asked.

“No, indeed I don’t,” I answered.

“Then there’s a picture.  You know that awful painting of a mid-Victorian ancestor of Vera’s—­a horrible old man with bushy eyebrows and a high, rather dirty-looking stock?”