Elkin gave Boulatoff a stare of freezing irony, as who should say: “What do you think of the assurance of this man?” and then, dropping his eyes, he asked:
“What girl?” When he spoke his lips assumed the form of two obtuse angles, exposing to view a glistening lozenge of white teeth.
“Look here, Elkin, I want to know who that girl is and all about the whole affair, and if you think I ought not to know it because—well, because I am a Boulatoff and my uncle is the governor, I can assure you that if I had been there I should have acted as she did. What’s more, I hate myself for not having been there.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied Elkin. “As to your hating yourself, that’s your own affair.”
“Well, however I may feel toward myself, I certainly have nothing but contempt for a man like you,” Pasha snapped back, paling. “But if you think you can keep it from me, you’re mistaken.”
Elkin sized him up with a look full of venom, as he said:
“Pitiful wretch! How are you going to find it out? Through the political spies?”
Pavel turned red. It was with a great effort that hekept himself from striking Elkin. After a pause he said:
“Now, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that you are a knave.”
“Besides,” said Elkin, as though finishing an interrupted remark, “most of the gymnasium girls who sawAlexandreAlexandrovich off are daughters of poor, humble people, so of what interest would it have been to a man in your position?”
Boulatoff stood still for a few moments, and then said under his breath:
“Well, you’re a fool as well as a knave,” and turned away.
The heroine of the demonstration was hateful to him now. She and Elkin seemed to stand at the head of the untitled classes all arrayed against him. He retired into himself deeper than ever. He abhorred her because she had done the right thing, and each time his sympathy for Pievakin welled up he hated himself for not having been at the station, and her for having been there. He sought relief in charging Elkin with cowardice. “What didhedo there?” he would say to himself. “To think of a lot of fellows running away when they are told they can’t say good-bye to their martyred teacher, and a girl being the only one who has courage enough to act properly. And now that she has done it this coward has the face to give himself airs, as if he were entitled to credit for her courage. If I had been there I should not have run away as Elkin and his crew did.”
This placed Elkin and his followers on one side of the line and Pavel and the girl on the other. So what right had that coward of a Jew to place himself between her and him?
Toward spring, some two months after the old teacher’s departure, and when the incident was beginning to grow dim in the public mind, the sensation was suddenly revived and greatly intensified by an extraordinary piece of news that came from the town to which Pievakin had been transferred: The Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Office—the central political detective bureau of the empire—had taken up the case, with the result that the action of the Department of Public Instruction had been repudiated as dangerously inadequate. The idea of a man like Pievakin participating in the education of children! Accordingly, the poor old man was now under arrest, condemned to be transported to Viatka, a thinly populated province in the remote north, where he was to live under police surveillance, as a political exile strictly debarred from teaching, even in private families.
Pavel was stunned. He received the news as something elemental. He could find fault with his uncle, but the government at St. Petersburg was a sublime abstract force, bathed in the effulgence of the Czar’s personality. It was no more open to condemnation than a thunderstorm or a turbulent sea. But the incident made an ineffaceable impression upon him. It left him with the general feeling that there was something inherently cruel in the world. And the picture of a pretty girl boldly raising her voice for poor Pievakin in the teeth of formidable-looking gendarmes and in the midst of a crowd of panic-stricken men remained imbedded in his fancy as the emblem of brave pity. An importunate sense of jealousy nagged him. He often caught himself dreaming of situations in which he appeared in a rôle similar to the one she had played at the railroad station.
His perceptions and sensibilities took a novel trend.
One day, for example, as he walked through Theatre Square, he paused to watch an apple-faced ensign, evidently fresh from the military school, lecture a middle-aged sergeant. The youthful officer sat on a bench, swaggeringly leaning back, his new sword gleaming by his side, as he questioned the soldier who stood at attention, the picture of embarrassment and impotent rage. A young woman, probably the sergeant’s wife, sweetheart, or daughter, stood aside, looking on wretchedly. Seated on a bench directly across the walk were two pretty gymnasium girls. It was clear that the whole scene had been gotten up for their sake, that the ensign had stopped the poor fellow, who was old enough to be his father, and was now putting him through this ordeal for the sole purpose of flaunting his authority before them. When the sergeant had been allowed to go his way, but before he was out of hearing, Pavel walked up to the ensign and said aloud:
“I wish to tell you, sir, that you tormented that poor man merely to show off.”
“Bravo!” said the two gymnasium girls, clapping their hands with all their might; “bravo!”
The ensign sprang to his feet, his apple-cheeks red as fire. “What do you mean by interfering with an officer—in the performance of his duty?” he faltered. He apparently knew that the young man before him was a nephew of the governor.
“Nonsense! You were not performing any duties. You were parading. That’s what you were doing.”
The two girls burst into a ringing laugh, whereupon the ensign stalked off, mumbling something about having the gymnasium boy arrested.
“Mother,” he said, when he came home. “The world is divided into tormentors and victims.”
Anna Nicolayevna gave a laugh that made her rusty face interesting. “And what are you—a tormentor or a victim?” she asked. “At any rate you had better throw these thoughts out of your mind. They lead to no good, Pasha.”
WHEN Pavel arrived in St. Petersburg, in the last days of July, his recent tribulations seemed a thing of the faded past. The capital was a fascinating setting for the great university which he was soon to enter and in which he was bent upon drinking deep of the deepest mysteries of wisdom. His “certificate of maturity”—his gymnasium diploma—was a solemn proclamation of his passage from boyhood to manhood—a change which seemed to assert itself in everything he did. He ate maturely, talked maturely, walked maturely. He felt like a girl on the eve of her wedding day.
He had not been in the big city for six years, and so marked was the distinction between it and the southern town from which he hailed, that to his “mature” eyes it seemed as if they were seeing it for the first time. The multitude of large lusty men, heavily bearded and wearing blouses of flaming red; the pink buildings; the melodious hucksters; the cherry-peddlars, with their boards piled with the succulent fruit on their shoulders; the pitchy odor of the overheated streets; the soft, sibilant affectations in the speech of the lower classes; the bustling little ferry-boats on the Neva—all this, sanctified by the presence of the university buildings across the gay river, made his heart throb with a feeling as though Miroslav were a foreigntown and he were treading the soil of real Russia at last.
He matriculated at the Section of Philology and History, St. Petersburg. Before starting on his studies, however, he went off on a savage debauch with some aristocratic young relatives. The debauch lasted a fortnight, and cost his mother a small fortune. When he came to the university at last, weary of himself and his relatives, he settled down to a winter of hard work. But the life at the university disturbed his peace of mind. He found the students divided into “crammers,” “parquette-scrapers” and “radicals.” The last named seemed to be in the majority—a bustling, whispering, preoccupied crowd with an effect of being the masters of the situation. There was a vast difference between Elkin and his followers and these people. Pavel knew that the university was the hotbed of the secret movement, of which he was now tempted to know something. There was no telling who of his present classmates might prove a candidate for the gallows. The wide-awake, whispering, mysterious world about him reminded him of the Miroslav girl and of his rebuff upon trying to discover who she was. When he made an attempt to break through the magic circle in which that world was enclosed his well-cared-for appearance and high-born manner went against him. A feeling of isolation weighed on his soul that was much harder to bear than his ostracism at the gymnasium had been. Harder to bear, because the students who kept away from him here struck him as his superiors, and because he had a humble feeling as though it were natural that they should hold aloof from him. And the image of that Miroslav girl seemed to float over these whispering young men, at once luring and repulsing him. He often went about with a lump in his throat.
One day he met a girl named Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a former governor of the Province of St. Petersburg and the granddaughter of a celebrated cabinet minister. She was a strong-featured, boyish-looking little creature, with grave blue eyes beneath a very high forehead. He had known her when he was a child. There was something in her general appearance now and in the few words she said to him which left a peculiar impression on Pavel. As he thought of her later it dawned upon him that she might belong to the same world as those preoccupied, whispering fellow-students of his. He looked her up the same day.
“I should like to get something to read, Sophia Lvovna,” he said, colouring. “Some of the proscribed things, I mean.” Then he added, with an embarrassed frown, “Something tells me you could get it for me. If I am mistaken, you will have to excuse me.”
The governor’s daughter fixed her blue eyes on him as she said, simply:
“All right. I’ll get you something.”
She lent him a volume of the “underground” magazineForward!and some other prints. The tales of valour and martyrdom which he found in these publications, added to the editorials they contained calling upon the nobility to pay the debt they owed to the peasantry by sacrificing themselves for their welfare, literally intoxicated him.
“Dear Mother and Comrade,” he wrote in a letter home, “I have come to the conclusion that the so-called nobility to which I belong has never done anything useful. For centuries and centuries and centuries we have been living at the expense of those good, honest, overworked people, the peasantry. It is enough to drive one to suicide. Yes, mamma darling, we are a race of drones and robbers. Theignorant, unkempt moujiks that we treat like beasts are in reality angels compared to us. There is something in them—in their traditions and in the inherent purity of their souls—which should inspire us with reverence. Yet they are literally starved and three-fourths of their toil goes to maintain the army and the titled classes.”
Further down in the same letter he said: “Every great writer in the history of our literature has been in prison or exiled. Our noblest thinker and critic, Chernyshevsky, is languishing in Siberia. Why? Why? My hair stands erect when I think of these things.”
When it came to posting the letter, it dawned upon him that such sentiments were not to be trusted to the mails, and, feeling himself a conspirator, he committed the epistle to the flames.
He was touched by the spirit of that peasant worship—the religion of the “penitent nobility”—which was the spirit of the best unproscribed literature of the day as well as of the “underground” movement. Turgeneff owed the origin of his fame to the peasant portraits of hisNotes of a Huntsman. Nekrasoff, the leading poet of the period, and a score of other writers were perpetually glorifying the peasant, going into ecstasies over him, bewailing him. The peasant they drew was a creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but shed over him was the golden halo of idealism. The central doctrine of the movement was a theory that the survival of the communistic element in the Russian village, was destined to become the basis of the country’s economic and political salvation; that Russia would leap into an ideal social arrangement without having to pass through capitalism; that her semi-barbaric peasant, kindly and innocent as a dove and the martyr of centuries, carried in his person the future glory, moral as well as material,of his unhappy country. As to the living peasant, he had no more knowledge of this adoration of himself (nor capacity to grasp the meaning of the movement, if an attempt had been made to explain it to him) than a squirrel has of the presence of a “q” in the spelling of its name.
Sophia disappeared from St. Petersburg, and Pavel found himself cut off from the “underground” world once more. The prints she had left him only served to excite his craving for others of the same character. The preoccupied,mysteriousair of the “radicals” at the university tantalised him. He was in a veritable fever of envy, resentment, intellectual and spiritual thirst. He subscribed liberally to the various revolutionary funds that were continually being raised under the guise of charity, and otherwise tried to manifest his sympathy with the movement, all to no purpose. His contributions were accepted, but his advances were repulsed. One day he approached a student whom he had once given ten rubles “for a needy family”—a thin fellow with a very long neck and the face of a chicken.
“I should like to get something to read,” he said, trying to copy the tone of familiar simplicity which he had used with Sophia. “I have read one number ofForward!and another thing or two, but that’s all I have been able to get.”
“Pardon me,” the chicken-face answered, colouring, “I really don’t know what you mean. Can’t you get those books in the book-stores or in the public library?”
Pavel was left with an acute pang of self-pity. He felt like a pampered child undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of strangers. His mother and all his relatives thought so much of him, while these fellows, who woulddeem it a privilege to talk to any of them, were treating him as a nobody and a spy. The tears came to his eyes. But presently he clenched his fists and said to himself, “Iwillbe admitted to their set.”
In his fidget he happened to think of Pani Oginska. As the scene at the German watering-place came back to him, he was seized with a desire to efface the affront he had offered her. “How can I rest until I have seen her and asked her pardon?” he said to himself. “If I were a real man and not a mere phrase-monger I should start out on the journey at once. But, of course, I won’t do anything of the kind, and writing of such things is impossible. Iama phrase-maker. That’s all I am.”
But he soliloquized himself into the reflection that Pani Oginska was likely to know some of her imprisoned son’s friends, if, indeed, she was not in the “underground” world herself, and the very next morning found him in a railway car, bound for the south.
Pani Oginska’s estate was near the boundary line between the province to which it belonged and the one whose capital was Miroslav, a considerable distance from a railway station. Pavel covered that distance in a post-sleigh drawn by a troika. His way lay in the steppe region. It was a very cold forenoon in mid-winter. The horses’ manes were covered with frost; the postilion was bundled up so heavily that he looked like an old woman. The sun shone out of a blue, unconcerned sky upon a waste of eery whiteness. There were ridges of drifts and there were black patches of bare ground, but the general perspective unfolded an unbroken plane of snow, a level expanse stretching on either side of the smooth road, seemingly endless and bottomless, destitute of any trace of life savefor an occasional inn by the roadside or the snow-bound hovel and outhouses of a shepherd in the distance—a domain of silence and numb monotony. That this desert of frozen sterility would four or five months later, be transformed into a world of grass and birds seemed as inconceivable as the sudden disappearance of the ocean.
The last few versts were an eternity. Pavel’s heart leaped with a foretaste of the exciting interview.
“Lively, my man,” he pressed the postilion. “Can’t your horses get a move on them?”
The postilion nodded his muffled head and set up a fierce yelp, for all the world like a wolf giving chase; whereupon the animals, apparently scared to death, broke into a desperate gallop, the scud flying, the sleigh dashing along like an electric car in open country, its bell ringing frostily.
“That’s better,” Pavel shouted with a thrill of physical pleasure and speaking with difficulty for the breakneck speed that seemed to fling the breath out of his lungs. “That’s better, my man. You shall get a good tip. But where have you learned the trick?”
The postilion gave a muffled grunt of appreciation and went on howling with all his might.
They passed through a small village. The chimneys of some of the white clay hovels on either side of the road poured out clouds of sweetish, nauseating smoke. Wood being scarce in these parts, the peasantry made fuel of manure.
At last the sleigh swung into the great front yard of Pani Oginska’s manor house. It was greeted by the curious eyes of half a dozen servants. Pavel entered a warm vestibule with a painted floor, where he found waiting to meet him Pani Oginska and an aged man with hair as white as thesnow without. He bowed politely and asked, in French, with nervous timidity:
“Do you remember me, Madame Oginska?”
She screwed up her eyes as she scanned his flushed, frozen face.
“Prince Boulatoff!” she said in a perplexed whisper.
“I have come all the way from St. Petersburg to beg your pardon, Madame Oginska,” he fired out. “I acted like a brute on that occasion. I was an idiotic boy. Forgive me.”
“Have you actually come all the way from St. Petersburg, to tell me that?” she asked with a hearty peal of laughter. She introduced him to the white-haired man, her father, who first made a bow full of old-fashioned dignity and then gave Pavel’s cold hand a doddering grasp.
“So you have really come for that express purpose?” Pani Oginska resumed, while a servant was relieving the newcomer of his fur-lined coat, fur cap, heavy gloves, muffler and storm shoes. “A case of compunction, I suppose?”
Her father followed them as far as the open door of a vast, plainly furnished parlour, and after looming on the threshold for a minute or two, in an attitude of pained dignity, he bowed himself away. Pani Oginska gently pressed the young man into a huge, rusty easy-chair, she herself remaining in a standing posture, her mind apparently divided between hospitality and an important errand upon which she seemed to have been bent when he arrived. She wore a furred jacket, her head in a grey shawl and her feet in heavy top-boots—a costume jarringly out of accord with her pale, delicate, nunnishface.She made quite a new impression on the young prince.
“I was blind then,” he began, when they were left alone. “My eyes were closed.”
“Oh, you needn’t go into detail,” she rejoined with an amused look. “I think I can guess how it has come about. You have caught the contagion, haven’t you?”
“Why call it ‘contagion?’ It’s the truth; it’s justice. If I hadn’t been such a silly boy when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, I should certainly not have acted the way I did.”
“A boy? And what are you now, pray? An old man with the weight of experience on your shoulders?” she asked with motherly gaiety. “Well, we’ll talk it over later on, or, indeed, we’ll find better things to talk about; and meanwhile I want you to excuse me, prince, and make yourself comfortable without me. You are hungry, of course?”
“Not at all. I had luncheon at the station.”
“Well, you shall have some refreshments at any rate, and by and by I shall be back. I am a rather busy woman, you see. I have to be my own manager, and there are a thousand and one things to look after, and the snow is rather deep”—pointing at her heavy boots. “Well, here are some books and magazines.Au revoir.” She made for the door, but faced about again. “By the way, prince, does your mother know of this crazy trip of yours?”
“I confess she does not,” he answered, feeling helplessly like a boy. “Why?”
“Why! Because she is the best woman in the world, and because it’s too bad you did anything so foolish without letting her know at least. By the way, this is anything but a desirable place for a young man to visit. Since my son got into trouble the police have tried to keep an eye on us; but then the police are so stupid. Still, I am sorryyou didn’t first consult your mother. If you boys would only let yourselves be guided by your mothers you would be spared many a trouble.”
“Is that the prime object of life—to guard against harm to oneself?” Pavel protested.
She fixed him with a look of amusement, and then remarked sadly: “Youhavecaught the contagion, poor thing. I’ll write your mother about it. Let her put a stop to it if it isn’t too late.”
He took fire. “I don’t know what you are hinting at, Madame Oginska,” he said. Asking her to introduce him to Nihilists seemed out of the question.
“I am hinting at those ‘circles,’ prince. You probably belong to one of them; that’s what I am hinting at. Don’t you, now?”
“I don’t belong to any circles. Nor do I know what you mean, madame.”
“Well, well. You have come to ask me not to be offended with you, and now it seems to be my turn to ask you not to be angry with me. Don’t be uneasy, prince. I shan’t write to your mother. Indeed, she couldn’t afford to be in correspondence with me at all. However, if you really aren’t yet mixed up in those dreadful things”—there was a dubious twinkle in her eye—“you had better keep out of them in the future, too. Think of your charming mother and take care of yourself, prince. Well, I have got to go. It’s barbaric of me to leave you, but I’ll soon be back. Here are some books and magazines. Or wait, I have another occupation for you. I want you to meet the best Jew in the world. I want you to examine him in ‘Gentile lore,’ as his people would put it. They would kill me, his people, if they knew he came to read my ‘Gentile books.’”
“He is a brainy fellow,” she went on, leading the way through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, “chockful of that Talmud of theirs, don’t you know. Now that he is married they are trying to make a business man of him, but he prefers worldly wisdom and that sort of thing. I let him use my library, the only place he has for his ‘unholy’ studies, in fact. He is supposed to come on business here. He lives in a small town a mile from here.”
She was speaking in Russian now, a language she had perfect command of, but which she spoke with a strong Polish accent, making it sound to Pavel as though she was declaiming poetry. Twelve years ago, before she inherited this estate, and when she still lived in Poland, her birthplace, she could scarcely speak it at all.
She took him into a room whose walls were lined with books, mostly old and worn, and whose two windows looked out upon a frozen pond in front of a snow-covered clump of trees.
“Monsieur Parmet, Prince Boulatoff,” she said, as a man sprang to his feet with the air of one startled from mental absorption. He was of strong, ungainly build, with the peculiar stamp of rabbinical scholarship on a plump, dark-bearded face. “See how much he knows, prince. He thinks he can take the examination for a certificate of maturity and enter the university. But then he thinks he knows everything.” With this she left them to themselves.
Pavel was in a whirl of embarrassment and annoyance, but the abashed smile of the other mollified him. “What I need more than anything else is to be examined in Latin and Greek,” Parmet said. “I haven’t had my exercises looked over for a long time, and it may be all wrong for all I know.” His Russian had a Yiddish accent. He spokein low, purring tones that seemed to soften the heavy outline of his figure. He was a lumbering mass of physical strength, one of those bearlike giants whom village people will describe as bending horseshoes like so many blades of grass or driving nails into a wall with their bare knuckles for a hammer. His dark-brown eyes shone meekly.
“Have you learned it all by yourself?” Pavel asked.
“Not altogether.”
Pavel began with an air of lofty reluctance, but he was soon carried away by the niceties of the ancient syntax, and his stiffness melted into didactic animation. As to Parmet, his plump, dark face was an image of religious ecstasy. Pavel warmed to him. His Talmudic gestures and intonation amused him.
“There’s no trouble about your Latin,” he said, familiarly; “no trouble whatever.”
“Isn’t there? It was Pani Oginska’s son who gave me the first start,” the other said, blissfully, uttering the name in a lowered voice. “If it had not been for him I should still be immersed in the depths of darkness.”
“‘Immersed in the depths of darkness!’ There is a phrase for you! Why should you use high-flown language like that?”
Parmet smiled, shrugging his shoulders bashfully. “Will you kindly try me on Greek now?” he said.
“One second. That must have been quite a little while ago when Pani Oginska’s son taught you, wasn’t it?”
Parmet tiptoed over to the open door, closed it, tiptoed back and said: “Not quite two years. If you knew what a man of gold he was! They are slowly killing him, the murderers. And why? What had he done? He could not harm a fly. He is all goodness, an angel like his mother. He was of delicate health when they took him,and now he is melting like a candle. Why, oh why, should men like him have to perish that way?”
“Isn’t it rather risky for you to be coming here?” Pavel demanded, looking him over curiously.
Parmet smiled, a queer, outlandish smile, at once naïve and knowing, as he replied:
“Risky? No. What does an old-fashioned Jew like myself care about politics? I am supposed to come here on business. Did you know Eugene?”
“Who is Eugene? Pani Oginska’s son?”
“Yes. I thought you knew him.”
“I wish I had. People like him are the only ones worth knowing. Most of the others are scoundrels, humbugs, cold-blooded egoists; that’s what they are.”
So talking, they gradually confided to each other the story of their respective conversions and tribulations. Parmet followed the prince’s tale first with a look of childlike curiosity and then with an air that betrayed emotion. As he listened he kept rubbing his hand nervously. When Pavel had concluded, the Jew took to tiptoeing up and down the room, stopped in front of him and said, with great ardour:
“Don’t grieve, my dear man. I may be able to help you. I know a friend of Eugene’s who could put you in touch with the proper persons.”
“Is he in St. Petersburg?”
“No, but that’s no matter. He can arrange it. He knows somebody there. I’ll see him as soon as I can, even if I have to travel many miles for it.”
Pavel grasped his hand silently.
“Well,” the other said. “There was a time when I thought every Christian hard-hearted and cruel. Now I am ashamed of myself for having harboured such ideas inmy mind. Every Christian whose acquaintance I happen to make turns out to be an angel rather than a human being.”
“Why these compliments?” Pavel snarled. “Most of the Christians I know are knaves. The whole world is made up of knaves for that matter.”
When Pani Oginska came home and saw them together, she said:
“I knew I should find you two making love to each other.”
A month or two after Pavel’s return to St. Petersburg a tall blond young man with typical Great-Russian features looked him up at the university.
“I have received word from the south about you,” he said, without introducing himself.
“I am pleased to meet you,” Pavel returned gruffly, “but I hope I won’t be kept on probation and be subjected to all sorts of humiliations.”
“Why, why,” the other said, in confusion. “I’ll be glad to let you have any kind of literature there is and to introduce you to other comrades. That’s why I have been looking for you. Why should you take it that way?”
Pavel’s face broke into a smile. “Dashed if I know why I should. Something possessed me to put on a harsh front. It was mere parading, I suppose. Don’t mind it. What shall I call you?”
“Why—er—oh, call me anything,” the other answered, colouring.
“Very well, then. I’ll call you Peter; or no, will ‘godfather’ do? That is, provided you are really going to be one to me,” Pavel said, in a vain struggle to suppress his exultation.
“It’ll be all right,” his new acquaintance replied with bashful ardour.
“Godfather, then?”
Godfather introduced him to several other “radicals,” who gave him underground prints and a list of legitimate books for a course of “serious” reading. He would stay at home a whole week at a time without dressing or going down for his meals, perusing volume after volume, paper after paper. When he did dress and go out it was to get more books or to seek answers to the questions which disturbed his peace. He was in a state of vernal agitation, in a fever of lofty impulses. And so much like a conspirator did he feel by now, that he no longer even thought of opening his mind to his mother. Indeed, the change that had come over him was so complete that she was not likely to understand him if he had. To drive her to despair seemed to be the only result he could expect of such a confession. The secret movement appealed to him as a host of saints. He longed to be one of them, to be martyred with them. It was clear to him that some day he would die for the Russian people; die a slow, a terrible death; and this slow, terrible death impressed him as the highest pinnacle of happiness.
When his mother came to see him, a year later, she thought he was in love.
He was in the thick of the movement by that time. He was learning shoemaking with a view to settling in a village. He would earn his livelihood in the sweat of his brow, and he would carry the light of his lofty ideas into the hovels of the suffering peasantry. But his plans in this direction were never realized. The period of “going to the people” soon came to an end.
The mothlike self-immolation of university students continued,but the spirit of unresisting martyrdom could not last. Violence was bound to result from it.
The next year saw the celebrated “trial of 193,” mostly college men and college women. They were charged with political propaganda, and the bold stand they took thrilled the country. The actual number tried was, indeed, much less than 193, for of those who had been kept in prison in connection with that case as many as seventy had perished in their cold, damp cells while waiting to be arraigned. Of those who were tried many were acquitted, but instead of regaining their liberty a large number of these were transported to Siberia “by administrative order.” Moreover, hundreds of people were slowly killed in the dungeons or exiled to Siberia without any process of law whatsoever. School children were buried in these consumption breeding cells; whole families were ruined because one of their members was accused of reading a socialist pamphlet. Student girls were subjected to indignities by dissolute officials—all “by administrative order.”
The Russian penal code imposes the same penalty for disfiguring the eyes of an imperial portrait as it does for blinding a live subject of the Czar. But political suspects were tortured without regard even to this code.
It gradually dawned upon the propagandists that instead of being decimated in a fruitless attempt to get at the common people they should first devote themselves to an effort in the direction of free speech. By a series of bold attacks it was expected to extort the desired reforms from the government. Nothing was lawless, so it was argued, when directed, in self-defence, against the representatives of a system that was the embodiment of bloodthirsty lawlessness.
Thus peaceful missionaries became Terrorists. The government inaugurated a system of promiscuous executions;the once unresisting propagandists retaliated by assassination after assassination. Socialists were hanged for disseminating their ideas or for resisting arrest; high officials were stabbed or shot down for the bloodthirsty cruelty with which they fought the movement; and finally a series of plots was inaugurated aiming at the life of the emperor himself.
The White Terror of the throne was met by the Red Terror of the Revolution.
IT was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy young engineer in Kharkoff—a slender little man with eyelids that looked swollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsy appearance—was filled with Nihilists come to hear “an important man from St. Petersburg.” The governor of the province had recently been killed for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of the local university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made on the life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement was asserting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address by the stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was known here as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.
The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand, but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several more listeners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. He and Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslav gymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerably changed, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin’s face as anæmic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkin had been expelled from the University for signing somesort of petition. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionary business. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, and his days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for more than tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to give lessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man of spotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certain kind of magnetism.
When Elkin discovered who the important revolutionist from St. Petersburg was the blood rushed to his face. It was a most disagreeable surprise. But Pavel greeted him with a cordiality so free from consciousness, and his roaring laughter, as he compared the circumstances of their last quarrel and those that surrounded their present meeting, was so hearty that Elkin’s hostility gave way to a feeling of elation at being so well received by the lion of the evening. He was one of the rank and file of the local “Circles,” and the prominence into which Pavel’s attention brought him at this meeting, in the presence of several of his chums, gave him a sense of promotion and triumph. He wished he could whisper into the ear of everybody present that this important revolutionist who was known to the gathering as Nikolai was Prince Boulatoff.
“I am still in the dark as to the identity of that girl,” said Pavel.
“I shouldn’t keep it from you now,” the other returned, exposing an exultant lozenge of white teeth. “Next time we meet in Miroslav I shall look her up and introduce you to her. I have not seen her for a long time. She is quite an interesting specimen.”
“I should like to meet her very much,” Pavel said earnestly. “I have been wanting to know something about her all along. You see, if there were a circle in that blessedout-of-the-way town of ours one might be able to find out things, but if there is I have not seen anybody who knows of its existence. I myself have not been there for two years.”
“I was there last summer. There is a small circle there. At least there are several people who get things through me, but that girl I have not seen for a long time.”
“Is it possible? Can it be that you have not tried to get her in? Really, a Miroslav circle without her seems like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.”
“Yes, she is a lass with some grit to her, and with brains too.”
“If she is, we ought to get her in. We ought to get her in.”
“She was only sixteen when that affair happened.”
“Was she? Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but my curiosity about that girl has been smouldering ever since. If it were not for her and for poor Pievakin I might not be in the movement now.”
“I see. It needed a little girl to make a convert of a great man like you. Well, well. That’s interesting,” Elkin remarked, with a lozenge-shaped sneer; but he hastened to atone for it by adding, ardently: “You’re right. She should be in the circle. I’ll make it my business to see her next time I am there. I’ll go there on purpose, in fact.”
He was always trying to be clever, for the most part with venom in his attempts. Friend or foe, whatever humour was his was habitually coloured by an impulse to sting. “For the sake of a pretty word he would not spare his own father,” as a Russian proverb phrases it, and his pretty words or puns were usually tinctured with malice.
He painted the Miroslav girl in the most attractive colours.It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to whet Pavel’s curiosity and to be able to say mutely: “Indeed, she is even more interesting than you suppose, yet while you are so crazy to know her, I, who do know her, have not even thought of getting her into my Circle.”
When Pavel was making his speech Elkin, whose natural inclination was to disapprove, listened with an air of patronising concurrence. Pavel’s oratory was of the unsophisticated, “hammer-and-tongs,” fiery type, yet its general effect, especially when he assailed existing conditions, was one of complaint. In spite of the full-throated buzz of his voice and the ferocious rush of his words, he conveyed the impression of a schoolboy laying his grievance before his mother.
Before he took leave from his former classmate the two had another talk of the “heroine of the Pievakin demonstration.” It was Elkin who brought up the subject, which took them back to the time when, from a Nihilist point of view, he was Pavel’s superior. He found him a ready listener. The student girls of the secret movement, their devotion to the cause, their pluck, the inhuman sufferings which the government inflicted on those of them who fell into its hands,—all this was the aureole of Pavel’s ecstasy. His heart had remained spotless, the wild oats he had sown during the first weeks of his stay in the capital notwithstanding. The word Woman would fill him with tender whisperings of a felicity hallowed by joint sacrifices, of love crowned with martyrdom, and it was part of the soliloquies which the sex would breathe into his soul to tell himself that he owned his conversion to a girl. But these were sentimentalities of which the Spartan traditions of the underground movement had taught him to be ashamed. Moreover, there was really no time for such things.
During the following summer and fall mines were laid in several places under railway tracks over which the Emperor was expected to pass. The revolutionists missed their aim, but the Czar’s narrow escape, coupled with the gigantic scope of the manifold plot, with the skill and the boldness it implied, and with the fact that the digging of these subterranean passages had gone on for months without attracting notice, made a profound impression. Such a display of energy and dexterity on the part of natives in a country where one was accustomed to trace every bit of enterprise to some foreign agency, could not but produce a fascinating effect. The gendarmes were apparently no match for the Nihilists.
ONE afternoon, in December of the same year, Pavel sat in a student restaurant, in the capital, eating fried steak and watching the door for a man with whom he had an appointment. He ate without appetite and looked fatigued and overworked. He had been out from an early hour, bustling about on perilous business and dodging spies. It was extremely exhausting and enervating, this prowling about under the perpetual strain of danger. He was liable to be arrested at any moment. It was like living continually under fire.
The restaurant was full of cigarette smoke and noise. Somebody in the rear of Pavel, who evidently had nothing to say, was addressing somebody else in high-flown Russian and with great gusto. His fine resonant voice, of which he was apparently conscious, jarred on Pavel’s nerves, interfering with what little relish he had for his meal. He was eyeing the design on the frost-covered door-glass and lashing himself into a fury over the invisible man’s phrase-mongery, when he was accosted by a fair-complexioned young woman:
“Pardon me, but if I am not mistaken you are Prince Boulatoff?”
“That’s my name. And with whom have I the pleasure——?”
“Oh, that would really be uninteresting to know. I’ll tell you, though, that I belong to Miroslav.”
He reluctantly invited her to a glass of tea, which she accepted, saying: “It may look as if I were forcing myself upon your acquaintance, prince, but I really could not help it. Whatever comes from Miroslav is irresistible to me.” And talking rapidly in effervescent, choking sentences, she told him that her name was Maria Andreevna Safonova (Safonoff), that she was a student at the Bestusheff Women’s College and that her brother was a major of gendarmes.
Pavel had heard of there being a daughter or a sister of a Miroslav gendarme officer at the Bestusheff College; also that she made a favourable impression on her classmates; but he had been too busy to give the information more than passing notice.
“Is your brother in Miroslav?” he asked.
“Yes, and I can assure you he is a gentleman, even if he is in the gendarme service. Some day, I hope, he’ll give it up. He is really too good to be in the business.”
Pavel ascribed her ebullition to the nature of the subject, but he soon found that she was in the same state of excitement when a railroad ticket was the topic. She looked twenty-three but she had the cheeks and eyes of a chubby infant, while her arms and figure had the lank, immature effect of a girl of thirteen.
While they sat talking, a dark man in the military uniform of the Medico-Surgical Academy entered the café. It was Parmet, the man Pavel was waiting for. Finding him engaged, the newcomer passed his table without greeting him, took a seat in a remote corner and buried himself in a book.
Mlle. Safonoff did all the talking. She had not sat atBoulatoff’s table half an hour nor said much about Miroslav before she had poured out some of her most intimate thoughts to him.
“If you think it a pleasure to be the sister of a gendarme officer you are mistaken,” she said. “It is not agreeable to be treated by everybody as though you had been put at the college to spy upon the girls, is it? My brother is a better man than the brothers and fathers and grandfathers of all the other student-girls put together, I assure you, prince. But then, of course, you may think I’m trying to spy on you, too.”
“No, I don’t,” said Boulatoff with a laugh, pricking up his ears.
“Don’t you, really?” And her eyes bubbled.
“Of course, I don’t.”
“Oh, if you knew how good he is, my brother. Do you remember the time when poor Pievakin left Miroslav? I know you do. You were in the eighth class then. Well, I may as well tell you, prince”—she lowered her voice—“had it not been for my brother there would have been no end of arrests at the railroad station. He simply told his men not to make a fuss. You see, I can confide in you without hesitation, for who would suspect a Boulatoff of—pardon the word—spying? But I, why, I am the sister of a gendarme officer, so it is quite natural to suppose, and so forth and so on, don’t you know.”
“Do you know the girl who made that speech?”
“There you are,” she said dolefully. “I happened to be at the other end of the room just then. When I tried to find out who she was everybody was mum. Fancy, my best girl-friend said to me: 'If I were you, Masha, I shouldn’t want to know her name if I could. Suppose you utter it in sleep and your brother overhears you.’ Theidiots! They didn’t know it was my brother who saved that girl from being arrested. And, by the way, if she had been arrested by some of his men, it would not have been hard for her to escape. I know I am saying more than I should, but I really can’t help it. You have no idea how I feel about these things. And now, at the sight of you, prince—a man from Miroslav—I seem to be going to pieces altogether. Well, I don’t mean, though, that my brother would have let her escape. But then I have an aunt, who is related to the warden of the Miroslav prison by marriage, so she can arrange things there. Oh, she’s the greatest revolutionist you ever saw. Of course, I don’t know whether you sympathise with these things, prince, but I’ll tell you frankly,Ido. It was that aunt of mine who talked it into me. She is simply crazy to do something. She is sorry there are no political prisoners in Miroslav. If there were she would get them out. She’s just itching for a chance to do something of that sort. And yet she never met a revolutionist in her life, nor saw a scrap of underground paper.”
To question the ingenuousness of this gush seemed to be the rankest absurdity. The Russian spies of the period were poor actors. Pavel was seized by a desire to show her that he, at least, did not suspect her of spying, and quite forgetting to restrain the “idioticbreadth” of his Russian nature for which he was often rebuked by a certain member of the revolutionary Executive Committee who was forever berating his comrades for their insufficient caution, he slipped a crisp copy of theWill of the Peopleinto her hand.
“Put it into your muff,” he said.
The colour surged into her chubby face. Her whole figure seemed tense with sudden excitement, as though the fineglossy paper in her hand were charged with electricity.
“How shall I thank you?” she gasped.
Pavel saw a moist glitter in her eyes, and as he got up, his slender erect little frame, too, seemed charged with electricity. When she had gone he asked himself whether it had not all been acting, after all. He cursed himself for his imprudence, but he said: “Oh, well, what must be will be,” and as usual the phrase acted like an effectual incantation on his frame of mind.
Parmet had been dubbed Bismarck, because he bore considerable resemblance to Gambetta. Another nickname, one which he had invented himself, on a similar theory of contrasts, was Makar. Makar was as typically Slavic as his face was Semitic. His military uniform, which he had to wear because his Academy was under the auspices of the War Department, ill became him. Instead of concealing the rabbinical expression of his face, it emphasised it. When they came out of the restaurant, a man, shouldering a stick, was running along the snow-covered pavement, lighting the street-lamps, as though in dread of being forestalled by somebody.
“Guess who that girl is,” Pavel said.
“Have I heard of her?”
“No. Quite an amusing sort of a damsel. Seething and steaming for all the world like a samovar. You should have seen her calflike ecstasy when I handed her something to read. I was afraid she was going to have a fit.”
Makar trotted silently on, continually curling himself in his wretched grey cloak and striking one foot against the other, to knock the caked drab-coloured snow off his boots. Pavel wore a new furred coat.
“She may be useful though,” Pavel resumed, after apause. “That is, provided she is all she seems to be. Her brother is a gendarme major. What do you think of that?”
“Is he?” Makar asked, looking up at his companion in beatific surprise.
“Yes, and she says he’s a good fellow, too. Of course, she’s quite a full-fledged ninny herself, and ought to be taken with a carload of salt, but she referred to some facts with which I happen to be familiar.” While he was describing the girl’s aunt, a passing soldier saluted Makar, mistaking him for an army officer. Makar, however, was too absorbed in his companion’s talk to be aware of what was going on about him. Pavel shrieked with laughter. “He must be a pretty raw sort of recruit to takeyoufor a warrior,” he said. When he had finished his sketch of the woman who was longing to set somebody free, the medical student paused in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Why, she’s a godsend, then,” he said.
“Moderate your passions, Mr. Army Officer,” Pavel said languidly, mocking his old gymnasium director. “If she does not turn out to be a spy we’ll see what we can do with her. She strikes me rather favourably, though.”
“Why, you oughtn’t to neglect her, Pasha. If I were you I would lose no time in making her brother’s acquaintance. Think of the possibilities of it!”
“Bridle your exuberance, young man. Her brother lives many miles from here. He is on the hunt for sedition in the most provincial of provinces. Want to make a Terrorist of him? Go ahead. He lives in Miroslav. There.”
“In Miroslav!” Makar echoed, with pride in the capital of his native province.
Presently they entered a courtyard and took to climbing a steep stony staircase. Strong, inviting odours of cabbagesoup and cooked meat greeted them at several of the landings. Makar’s lodging was on the sixth floor. He had moved in only a few days ago and the chief object of Pavel’s visit was to make a mental note of its location.
The first thing Makar did as he got into the room was to put a pitcher on one of his two windows. The windows commanded a little side street, and the pitcher was Makar’s safety signal. When he had lit his lamp a sofa, freshly covered with green oil-cloth, proved to be the best piece of furniture in the room, the smell of the oil-cloth mingling with the stale odours of tobacco smoke with which the very walls seemed to be saturated.
“Ugh, what a room!” Pavel said, sniffing. They talked of a revolutionist who had recently been arrested and to whom they referred as “Alexandre.” Special importance was attached by the authorities to the capture of this man, because among the things found at his lodgings was a diagram of the Winter Palace with a pencil mark on the imperial dining hall. As the prisoner was a conspicuous member of the Terrorists’ Executive Committee, the natural inference was that another bold plot was under way, one which had something to do with the Czar’s dining room, but which had apparently been frustrated by the discovery of the diagram. The palace guard was strongly re-enforced and every precaution was taken to insure the monarch’s safety. Now, the Terrorists had their man in the very heart of the enemy’s camp, and the result of the search of Alexandre’s lodgings was no secret to them. This revolutionist, whose gloomy face was out of keeping with his carefully pomaded hair, kid gloves, silk hat, showy clothes and carefully trimmed whiskersà laAlexander II., was known to Makar as “the Dandy.” Less than a year before he had obtained a position in the double capacityof spy and clerk, at the Third Section of his Majesty’s Own Office, and so liked was he by his superiors that he had soon been made private secretary to the head of the secret service, every document of importance passing through his hands. Since then he had been communicating to the Executive Committee, now a list of new suspects, now the details of a contemplated arrest, now a copy of some secret circular to the gendarme offices of the empire.
While they were thus conversing of Alexandre and the Dandy, Pavel stretched himself full length on the sofa and dozed off. When he opened his eyes, about two hours later, he found Parmet tiptoeing awkwardly up and down the room, his shadow a gigantic crab on the wall. Pavel broke into a boisterous peal of laughter.
“Here is a figure for you! All that is needed is an artist to set to work and paint it.”
“Are you awake? Look here, Pasha. Your gendarme’s sister and her aunt are haunting my mind.”
“Why, why, have you fallen in love with both of them at once?” Pavel asked as he jumped to his feet and shot his arms toward the ceiling. He looked refreshed and full of animal spirits.
“Stop joking, Pasha, pray,” Makar said in his purring, mellifluous voice. “It irritates me. It’s a serious matter I want to speak to you about, and here you are bent upon fun.” Pavel’s story of the gendarme officer’s sister had stirred in him visions of a mighty system of counter-espionage. He had a definite scheme to propose.
Pavel found it difficult to work himself out of his playful mood until Makar fell silent and took to pacing the floor resentfully. When he had desisted, with a final guffaw over Makar’s forlorn air, the medical student, warming up to fresh enthusiasm, said:
“Well, to let that prison stand idle would be criminal negligence. That girl’s aunt must be given a chance.”
“What’s that?” Pavel said, relapsing into horseplay. “Do you want somebody nabbed on purpose to give a bored lady something to excite her nerves?” He finished the interrogation rather limply. It flashed upon him that what Makar was really aiming at was that some revolutionist should volunteer to be arrested on a denunciation from the Dandy or some other member of the party with a view to strengthening its position in the Third Section.
Makar went on to plead for an organised effort to get into the various gendarme offices.
“It is a terrible struggle we are in, Pasha. Our best men fall before they have time to turn round. If we had more revolutionists on the other side, Alexandre might be a free man now.”
“Well, and sooner or later you and I will be where he is now and be plunged into the sleep of the righteous, and there won’t even be a goat to graze at our graves. Let the dead bury the dead, Makashka. We want the living for the firing line. We can’t afford to let fresh blood turn sour in a damp cell, if we can help it.”
“But thisis‘the firing line’,” Makar returned with beseeching, almost with tearful emphasis. “If you only gave me a chance to explain myself. What I want is to have confusion carried into every branch of the government; I want the Czar to be surrounded by a masquerade of enemies, so that his henchmen will suspect each other of being either agents of the Third Section or revolutionists. Do you see the point? I want the Czar to be surrounded by a babel of mistrust and espionage. I want him to be dazed, staggered until he succumbs to this nightmare of suspicion and hastens to convoke a popular assembly, asLouis XVI. was forced to do; I want the inhabitants of our tear-drenched country to be treated like human beings without delay. My scheme practically amounts to a system or terrorism without violence, and I insist that one good man in the enemy’s camp is of more value than the death of ten spies.” His low, velvety voice rang clear, tremulous with pleading fervour; his face gleamed with an intellectual relish in his formula of the plan. As he spoke, he was twisting his mighty fist, opening and closing it again, Talmud-fashion, in unison with the rhythm of his sentences.
Ejaculations like “visionary!” “phrase-maker!” were on the tip of Pavel’s tongue, but he had not the heart to utter them. Aerial as the scheme was, Makar’s plea had cast a certain spell over him. It was like listening to a beautiful piece of mythology.
“Let us form a special force of men ready to go to prison, to be destroyed, if need be,” Makar went on. “The loss of one man would mean, in each case, the saving of twenty. Think how many important comrades a single leak in the Third Section has saved us. It’s a matter of plain arithmetic.”
“Of plain insanity,” Pavel finally broke in.
“Don’t get excited, Pasha, pray. Can’t you let me finish? If I am wrong you’ll have plenty of time to prove it.”
His purring Talmudic voice and the smell of the fresh oil-cloth were unbearable to Pavel now.
“It’s like this,” Makar resumed. “In the first place [he bent down his little finger] every honest man is sure to be arrested some day, and what difference does it make whether the end comes a few months sooner or a few months later? In the second place [he bent down the next finger]there must be some more people like that girl’s aunt. It is quite possible that most of those who would be arrested on this plan would get out, and that itself would be a good thing, for it would add to the prestige of the party. Everything that reveals the weakness of the government on the one hand, and the cleverness and daring of our people on the other, is good for the cause. Every success scored by the ‘Will of the People’ is a step in the direction of that for which men like yourself are staking their lives, Pasha. Don’t interrupt me, pray. I’ll go a step further. I am of the opinion that under certain conditions, where an escape is assured, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let one’s self be arrested just in order to add another name to the list of political gaol-breakers, that is to say, to the list of the government’s fiascos. Every little counts. Every straw increases that weight which will finally break the back of Russia’s despot.”
“Do you really mean what you say, Makar? Do you actually want to be arrested?” Pavel asked.
“Not at all. All I want is that another good man should gain the confidence of the Third Section and that another political prisoner should escape.”
“And what if all Mlle. Safonoff says turns out to be as idiotic a dream as all this tommyrot of yours?”
“‘If one is afraid of wolves one had better keep out of the woods.’ You, yourself, have taken much greater chances than that, Pasha. If I am arrested with papers and the worst comes to the worst they won’t hang me.”
“I see you take it seriously after all. Well, if you think I’ll let you do anything of the kind you are a fool.”
“You can’t prevent me from doing what I consider to be right. Nor do I want anybody else to send the denunciation which is to result in my arrest. I’ll send itmyself. All I want is that somebody should claim credit for it afterward, when I am in prison—on that very day, if possible. The search and arrest will be ordered from St. Petersburg, and then some of our men will say at the Third Section that the anonymous letter was his, adding some details about me. Details can be worked out later. Where there is a will there is a way. At any rate, I don’t expect anybody but myself to bear the moral responsibility for my arrest.”
He talked on in the same strain until Pavel sprang to his feet, flushed with rage. “It’s all posing—that’s all there’s to it!” he shouted. “On the surface it means that you are willing to sacrifice yourself without even attracting attention, but in reality this subtle modesty of yours is only the most elaborate piece of parading that was ever conceived. It’s love of applause all the way through, and you are willing to stake your life on it. That’s all there is about it.”
Makar grew yellow in the face and sweat broke out on his forehead. “In that case, there’s no use talking, of course,” he said in a very low voice. “If I am a humbug I am a humbug.”
“And if you are a fool, you are a fool,” Pavel rejoined, with a conciliatory growl.
“You need not back out, Pasha. Maybe you are right,” Makar rejoined. “Who is absolutely free from vanity? Human nature is such a complex mechanism. One may be governed by love of approbation and, perhaps, also, by a certain adventuresome passion for the danger of the thing. The great question is whether there is something besides this. No, it is not all posing, Pasha. There are moments when I ask myself why I should not live as most people do, but I only have to realise all that is going on aroundus; the savage tyranny, the writhing millions, the hunger, the bottomless darkness, the unuttered groans,—I only have to think of this and of the dear comrades I have known who have been strangled on the gallows or are wasting away in the casemates; I need only picture all this, I say, to feel that even if there be an alloy of selfishness in my revolutionary interests, yet, in the main, it is this sense of the Great Wrong which keeps me from nursing my own safety. Do you know that the dangling corpses of our comrades are never absent from my mind? I am not without a heart, Pasha.”
“Nobody says you are, only you are a confounded dreamer, Makashka,” Pavel answered. “We have no time for dreams and poetry. Our struggle is one of hard, terrible prose.”
“You are even more of a dreamer than I, Pasha,” Makar retorted, blissfully.
When Makar resumed speaking the last echo of resentment was gone from his voice. “After all, one gets more than one gives. When I think of the moments of joy the movement affords me, of the ties of friendship with so many good people—the cream of the generation, the salt of the earth, the best children Russia ever gave birth to—when I think of the glorious atmosphere that surrounds me, of the divine ecstasy with which I view the future; when I recall all this I feel that I get a sort of happiness which no Rothschild could buy. To be kept in solitary confinement is anything but a pleasure, to be sure, but is there nothing to sweeten one’s life there? And how about the thought that over yonder, outside, there are people who are going on with the struggle and who think of you sometimes? Sooner or later the government will yield. And then, oh then somebody—some comrade of ours—willthrow the cell-door open, and I’ll join in the celebration of our triumph. Really, Pasha, I am strong as a bull, and a few years of confinement would not kill me. While some of our people may die by the hand of the hangman, my life would be spared. Did you ever stop to think of the time when the cells of Siberia and of Peter and Paul are thrown open and one says to the immured comrades, ‘Out with you, brothers! You’re free! The nation is free!’ Come, another year or two and this will be realised.”
“You had better save your sentimentalities for novices,” Pavel said. “And, by the way, your eloquence is certainly of more use than your dreaming in a dungeon would be.”
He was arguing with a rock of stiff-necked will-power.