He had spent
a golden October in North Italy with his mother, and escaped from
the glowing lassitude of Venice for some days of climbing in the
Eastern Alps. In January, in an outbreak of enquiry, he had gone
with Lionel Maxim to St. Petersburg and had eaten zakuska,
brightened his eyes with vodka, talked with a number of charming
people of the war that was then imminent, listened to gipsy singers
until dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent and stately of
capitals, and returned with Lionel, discoursing upon autocracy and
assassination, Japan, the Russian destiny, and the government of
Peter the Great. That excursion was the most after his heart of all
the dispersed employments of his first year. Through the rest of
the winter he kept himself very fit, and still further qualified
that nervous dislike for the horse that he had acquired from
Prothero by hunting once a week in Essex. He was incurably a bad
horseman; he rode without sympathy, he was unready and convulsive at
hedges and ditches, and he judged distances badly. His white face
and rigid seat and a certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle
earned him the singular nickname, which never reached his ears, of
the "Galvanized Corpse.
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