PARMET now gave most of his time to the secret movement, making himself useful in a variety of ways. His great unrealised ambition, however, was to work in an underground printing office—an offence which at the period was punished by a long term of penal servitude in Siberia. He had a feeling as though nothing one did for the movement could be regarded as a vital service to the cause of free speech as long as it fell short of typesetting in a secret printing establishment. He had applied for work of this kind several times, but his proverbial absent-mindedness stood in his way. Being in the habit of reading some book or newspaper as he walked through the streets, he would sometimes catch himself drinking in the contents of some “underground” publication in this manner. Once as he stood on a street corner intent upon a revolutionary leaflet, he heard an infuriated whisper:
“Imbecile! Scoundrel!”
When he raised his eyes he saw the ample back of a compactly built man dressed in citizen’s clothes except for a broad military cap with a red band. This was “the Janitor,” so nicknamed because he made it his business to go the rounds of “conspiracy houses” every morning and to pick a quarrel with those of their occupants who had neglected to furnish their windows with safety signalsor were guilty of some other manifestation of “Russian breadth.” The episode antedated the above conversation between Makar and Pavel by two months, and the medical student had not seen the Janitor since. He dreaded to meet him. At this minute, however, he was just the man he wanted to see, for it was he who had taken the initiative in getting the Dandy into the Third Section. Accordingly, Pavel had no sooner left him than he betook himself to a place at which he expected to find that revolutionist. The place was the lodging of a man who was known in the organisation as Purring Cat—a nickname based on his shaggy eyebrows and moustache. His face was almost entirely overgrown with hair. Short of stature, with a thick dark beard that reached down to his knees and with blue eyes that peered up from under his stern eyebrows, this formidable looking little man, the nearest approach to the wax-works version of a Russian Nihilist, was the gentlest soul on the Executive Committee. Besides Purring Cat and the Janitor, Makar found in the room Andrey, an extremely tall man with Tartarian features.
The Janitor greeted Makar with a volley of oaths, stuttering as he spoke, as was usually the case when he was angry.
“You have no business to be here,” he fulminated. “You are just the man to bring a spy in tow. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if you had one at your heels now.”
“Come, don’t fume,” Makar pleaded, confusedly. “I won’t be absent-minded any more. I have taken myself in hand. Besides, my absent-mindedness is not without its redeeming feature. You see, I am the last man to be suspected of being on my guard; so the spies would never bother me.”
Andrey and Purring Cat smiled. The Janitor startedto do the same, but changed his mind. Instead, he broke into a more violent fit of temper and a more painful stutter than before. His compact figure was of medium height, his face very blond, with prominent eyes and well-trimmed red beard. His military cap matched the passport of a retired army officer under which he was registered at the police station. He was supposed to be employed at some civil tribunal, and every morning, on the stroke of eleven he would leave his lodgings, a portfolio under his arm, his military cap slightly cocked—the very personification of the part he acted. The name in his passport was Polivanoff. His real name was Michailoff, and under that name he was wanted by the gendarmes in prominent connection with several attempts on the life of the Czar. He had once escaped from under arrest and on another occasion he had managed to disappear from a railroad train while it was being searched for him. He was one of the ablest and bravest men in the party. His un-Russian punctuality and indefatigable attention to detail; his practical turn of mind and the way he had of nagging his friends for their lack of these qualities, were common topics of banter among the Terrorists. He had made a special study of every lane and court in the capital by which one might “trash” one’s trail. He not only shadowed his fellow revolutionists to see if they were aware of being shadowed or whether they dressed in accordance with the type implied by their false passports, but he also made a practice of spying over the spies of the Third Section. With this end in view, he had once rented a room across the street from that office—an institution that would have given millions for his head. Here he would sit for hours at his window, scrutinising every new personwho entered the building so as to be able to keep track of their movements afterward. Having thus discovered a boarding house in which lived an important officer of the secret service he had sent the Dandy to hire a room there. The desired appointment had then been obtained without difficulty.
When Makar had laid the practical part of his scheme before the three men, the Janitor fixed his prominent eyes on him and said, without stammering:
“And you are just the chap to do it, aren’t you?”
“And why not? It certainly doesn’t need much adroitness and vigilance to get arrested.”
“The devil it does not. A fellow like you would get ten men arrested before he fooled the measliest cub spy in the Third Section. Better keep your hands off.”
“Oh, well, if the escape was really a sure thing, the matter might be arranged,” Purring Cat interposed, charitably, in a low, gentle voice. “Only this is scarcely the time for it.” Whereupon Makar, feeling encouraged, launched out to describe his far-reaching scheme in detail. The look of the Janitor’s prominent eyes, however, disturbed him, so that he expounded the plan in a rather nerveless way; when he had finished, the Janitor declared:
“He’s certainly crazy.”
Purring Cat’s blue eyes looked up under their bushy brows, as he said, gravely:
“There may be something in it, though, theoretically at least. In reality, however, I am afraid that general state of chaos would rebound upon ourselves. The government may get its spies into our circles until one does not know who is who. It may become a double-edged weapon, this ‘babel of distrust.’ As to that prison scheme it might be tried some day. Only don’t be in a hurry, Makar.”
“And what is your opinion?” Makar addressed himself to Andrey solicitously.
Andrey who was a man of few words, and spoke with a slight lisp, said he had no definite opinion to offer, but, when Makar pressed him hard, he said:
“Well, we have one man there” (meaning the Third Section), “so let us not make the mistake of the woman who cut her hen open in order to get at all her eggs at once. Still, if the scheme could be worked in some of the provinces, it might be worth while. It all depends on circumstances, of course.”
Makar longed to see Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St. Petersburg. She had taken an active part in one of the most daring rescues and was celebrated for the ingenuity and motherly devotion with which she gave herself to the “Red Cross” work of the party, supplying political prisoners with provisions and keeping them in secret communication with their relatives. It was the story of this young noblewoman’s life which afterwards inspired Turgeneff’s prose poem,The Threshold. Makar thought she might take an active interest in his scheme, but she was overwhelmed with other work and inaccessible.
ABOUT a week had elapsed, when Pavel read in his morning paper of the hanging of three revolutionists in Odessa: two Gentiles and a Jew. He had never met these men, but he knew that two of them had not been implicated in anything more violent than the diffusion of socialist ideas. Also that the parents of the one who belonged to the Jewish race were under arrest, condemned to be exiled to Siberia for no other crime than their having given birth to an enemy of the existing régime.
Pavel moved about his room with a sob of helpless fury in his throat. He found feverish satisfaction in the thought that he had some chemicals in his overcoat which he was to carry to the dynamite shop of the Terrorists. The explosives to be made from it were intended for a new attempt upon the life of the Emperor. Not being directly connected with the contemplated attack, neither he nor the dynamite makers of the organisation had any clear idea about the plot, which was in the hands of a special sub-committee, Alexandre’s place having been taken by another man; but he did know that preparations were under way in the Winter Palace.
The dynamite shop was kept by a woman with a deep-chested, almost masculine voice, and a man with a squeaky feminine one. They were registered as man and wife.She was the daughter of a priest, but she looked like a woman of the people and dressed like one—a thick-set extremely blonde young woman with coarse yet pleasing features. Her revolutionary name was Baska. Her fictitious husband, who was one of the chemists of the party, was addressed by the revolutionists as Grisha. He had a scholarly face, yet the two had no difficulty in passing among the neighbours for a tradesman or shop clerk and his wife. For the greater reality of the impersonation and as a special precaution against curiosity they made friends with the porter of the house and his wife and with the police roundsman of the neighbourhood, often inviting them to a glass of vodka. The porter of St. Petersburg, like his brother of Paris under the empire, is a political detective “ex-officio.” The two spies and the police officer were thus turned into unconscious witnesses of the young couple’s political innocence, for in the first place they had many an opportunity to convince themselves that their dwelling was free from anything suspicious and, in the second, people who drank vodka and went, moreover, on sprees with the house porter, certainly did not look like Nihilists.
“Good morning, Pavel,” Baska greeted him vivaciously, as she gave his hand a hearty squeeze, while her other hand held a smoking cigarette. “Just in time! I hate to eat my breakfast all alone. Grisha has another bad headache, poor fellow. But I see you, too, have a long face. Where did you get it?”
Pavel smiled lugubriously as he handed her the package. He had not the heart to disturb her good spirits, and she went on chirping and laughing.
Grisha came in, haggard, sickly and trying to smile. The skin of both his hands was off. This, like his frequentheadaches, was the effect of the work he did in these rooms—of inhaling nitroglycerine and kneading dynamite with his bare fists.
Baska gayly told how the porter’s wife had offered her a salve for her “husband,” and how the night before, as Grisha was pouring nitroglycerine into some dynamite “dough,” there was an explosion and the house filled with smoke.
“Our next door neighbour knew at once that our kerosene stove exploded and set fire to a rag,” Baska said with a deep-voiced titter. “She gave me quite a lecture on negligence.”
“She only wondered why there should be such a strange smell to the smoke,” Grisha added, his hand to his head.
As Pavel looked at Baska relishing her tea and her muffin and talking merrily between gulps, a desire took hold of him to spoil her vivacity. It jarred on him to see her enjoy herself while the image of the three new gallows was so vivid in his mind.
“You people don’t seem to know what’s going on in the world,” he said testily. “They have hanged Malinka, Maidanski and Drobiazgin.”
“Have they?” Baska asked paling. She had known two of them personally.
While Pavel took out his newspaper and read the brief despatch, her head sank on the table. Her solid frame was convulsed with sobbing.
“Be calm, be calm,” Grisha entreated, offering her a glass of water. In spite of her excellent physique she was subject to violent hysterical fits which were apt to occur at a time when the proffer of neighbourly sympathy was least desirable.
She told all she remembered of the executed men, whomshe had met in the south. But that was not much; so Pavel went to see Purring Cat who, being a southerner, had detailed information to give him about the three Nihilists. Boulatoff could talk of nothing else that day. When he met Makar, in the afternoon, he said:
“People are being strangled right and left and here you are bent on thatidée fixeof yours.”
“Fine logic, that,” Makar replied. “If myidée fixehad been realised a year ago these men would now be free. But this is not the time to talk about things of that kind.” Instead of mourning the loss of the three revolutionists he was in a solemn, religious sort of mood at the thought of the new human sacrifices offered on the altar of liberty. He was panting to speak about the Jew who had been executed. He was proud of the fact that two men of his race had given their lives for the cause within five months. The other Jewish revolutionist had been executed in Nicolayeff. A letter which he had addressed to the revolutionists a few days before his execution, exhorting them not to waste any of the forces of the movement on attempts to avenge his death, was enshrined in Makar’s heart as the most sacred document in the entire literature of the struggle. But race pride was contrary to the teachings of the movement; so he not only kept these sentiments to himself, but tried to suppress them in his own bosom.
In the evening Pavel took two young cavalry officers of his acquaintance to the house of a retired major where a revolutionary meeting was to be held. They found the major’s drawing room sparkling with military uniforms. The gathering was made up of eight officers, two men in citizen’s clothes, and one woman, the dark long-necked hostess.
Two cheap lithographs, one of General Suvoroff and the other of the reigning monarch, occupied the centre of the best wall, in jarring disharmony with the refined and somewhat Bohemian character of the rest of the room. The two portraits had been put there recently, to bear witness to the political “reliability” of the house. The hostess presided over a pile of yellow aromatic tobacco, rolling cigarettes for her guests and smoking incessantly herself. An idiotic-looking man-servant and a peasant girl fresh from the country kept up a supply of tea, zwiebacks and preserves. Every time they appeared the hostess, whose seat commanded the door, would signal to the company. She did it rather perfunctorily, however, the revolutionary discussion proceeding undisturbed. The cultured, bookish Russian of the assemblage was Greek to the two servants. They talked of the three executions.
Presently two other civilians were announced.
“At last!” the hostess said, getting up from her pile of tobacco in a flutter.
The two newcomers were both above medium height, of solid build and ruddy-faced; but here their similarity of appearance ceased. One of them looked the image of social refinement and elegance, while the clothes and general aspect of the other bespoke a citified, prosperous peasant. His rough top-boots, the red woolen belt round his coat and the rather coarse tint of his florid complexion, like his full Russian beard, proclaimed the son of the unenlightened classes. He was taller than his companion and remarkably well-built, with a shock of dark brown hair thrown back from a high prominent forehead and regular features. He was introduced to the gathering as Zachar. He and the stylish-looking man by his side whose revolutionary nickname was “My Lord,” conveyedthe effect of a bright, shrewd tradesman and a high-class lawyer bent on some legal business.
“If we are late, blame this guide of mine, not me,” Zachar said to the hostess, in a deep, rather harsh baritone, pointing at his companion. “It turned out that he did not know the place very well himself. There is a pilot for you.” He accepted a glass of tea in a silver holder and during the ensuing small talk the room rang with his merriment. His jests were commonplace, but his Russian and all he said betrayed the man of education. The tradesman’s costume was his disguise, and if it became him so well it was because his parents were moujiks. Born in serfdom but brought up as a nobleman at the expense of his former master, this university-bred peasant—a case of extreme rarity—for whom the gendarmes were searching in connection with a bold attempt to blow up an imperial train, loomed in the minds of the revolutionists as the most conspicuous figure of their movement.
“And how is my young philosopher?” he said to Pavel. “I was at your place this morning, but found you out, Pasha.”
“I’ll see you later on,” Pavel said dryly. “Philosopher” referred to the nature of the studies which Pavel’s mother thought him to be pursuing. There was a touch of patronage in the way Zachar used the word, and Pavel resented it.
As the gathering began to lapse into a graver mood the conversation was expectantly left to Zachar, who by degrees accepted the rôle of the principal speaker of the evening. That he relished this rôle and was fond of a well turned phrase became apparent at once, but the impression soon wore off. He compelled attention.
“The practice of nations being inherited like furnitureor chickens has been out of date for centuries,” he said in the course of a ferocious attack on the existing adjustment of things. “But our party does not demand full justice at once. The Will of the People is not inconsiderate. We are willing to project ourselves into the position of an old chap with whom the love of power has been bred in the bone. All our party does demand, as a first step, is some regard for the rights of the individual; of those rights without which the word civilisation is of a piece with that puerile sort of hypocrisy as our late war with Turkey, when the ambitious old fellow in his unquenchable thirst for territory sent his subjects to die for the liberty of Bulgarians so that their own children at home might be plunged into more abject slavery than ever.
“The government knows, of course, that its days are numbered and that it is only cowardice and incapacity for concerted action which make its brief respite possible. To retreat honourably, before it is too late, to yield to the stern voice of the revolution under some specious pretext—this is the step indicated by the political situation, but then this is not what the ambitious oldster is after. Is there any wonder he has lost his head? So much the better for the revolution. One or two decisive blows and the government will topple over. Thanks to the splendid army section of the Will of the People, on the one hand, and to our powerful Workingmen’s Section, on the other, one hundred resolute men will be enough to seize the Winter Palace, to cut off all egress, arrest the new Czar and, amid the general confusion following the death of the old tyrant, proclaim a provisional government. What a glorious opportunity to serve one’s country!”
His speech lasted an hour and a half. Most of his hearers were recent converts, and these the matter-of-facttone of his utterances took by storm. The Third Section had heard of him as an irresistible agitator. So he was, and the chief secret of his success lay—despite an effect of conscious floridity and bravado—in a sincere depth of conviction manifested by a volcanic vehemence of delivery. His speeches took it for granted that Russia was at the threshold of a great historical change and that his organisation was going to play a leading part in that change. He gathered particular assurance from the fact that the “army section” that had been formed by his efforts included several officers of the court guard whose number he hoped to increase. These court officers it was whom his imagination pictured as “cutting off all egress” at the Winter Palace. The funds of his party included contributions from some high sources. Things seemed to be coming the “Will of the People’s” way. As he spoke his strong physique seemed to be aflame with contagious passion, sweeping along audience and speaker. The harshness of his mighty baritone was gone; his peasant face was beautiful. Words like “party,” “citizen,” “National Assembly,” are winged with the glamour of forbidden fruit in Russia, and when Zachar uttered these words, in accents implying that these things were as good as realised, his audience was enravished. To all of which, in the present instance, should be added the psychological effect of a group of dashing army officers, all members of the nobility, reverently listening to an address by a peasant. He struck one as a giant of energy and courage, of nervous vitality as well as of bodily strength. He had the stuff of a political leader in him. Under favourable conditions he would have left his mark as one of the strong men of the nineteenth century. He carried people along current-fashion rather than magnetised them.
Pavel was the next speaker, but the outraged sense of justice which was the keynote of his impassioned plea, coming as it did upon the heels of Zachar’s peremptory and matter-of-course declarations, sounded out of date.
“Oh, it takes an idiot to talk after you, Zachar,” he said, breaking off in the middle of a sentence. “One feels like being up and doing things, not talking. I wonder why we don’t start for the Winter Palace, at once.”
“That’s the way I feel, too,” chimed in a very young cavalry officer, while two older men in brilliant uniforms, were grasping Zachar each by one hand. The long-necked hostess was brushing the tears from her eyes and calling herself “fool,” for joy.
An artillery officer with bad teeth of whom Pavel could not think without thinking of the rheumatism of which that revolutionist had once complained to him, drew his sword fiercely, the polished steel flaming in the bright light of the room, as he said:
“By Jove!”
“Look at him! Look at him!” Zachar shouted.
“Bridle your passions, old boy,” Pavel put in.
A minute or two later he called the orator into the next room and handed him what looked like a package of tobacco.
Zachar was in high feather over the success of his speech and loath to leave the atmosphere of adoration that surrounded him here; but an important engagement forced him to take his departure.
A quarter of an hour’s ride in a tramcar and a short walk through the moonlit streets brought him to a deserted corner in the vicinity of the Winter Palace, where he was met by a man dressed like an artisan, as tall ashimself, but slimmer of girth, and the two went on trudging along the snow-encrusted sidewalk together. The other man had an expressive sickly face which the pallid glare of the moonlight gave a ghastly look.
“How is your health?” Zachar asked.
“Bad,” the sickly looking man answered, holding out his hand into which Zachar put the package of tobacco, saying:
“See if it isn’t too heavy for a quarter of a pound.”
“It is, rather, but it’ll pass,” the other replied, weighing the package in his hand and then putting it into his pocket. Buried in the tobacco was a small quantity of dynamite.
“It’s too bad you are not feeling well.”
“Yes, my nerves are playing the devil with me. The worst of it is that I have got to keep the stuff under my pillow when I sleep. That gives me headaches.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. The evaporations of that stuff do that as a rule. But can’t you find another place for it?”
“Not for the night. They might go through my trunk then. They are apt to come in at any time. Oh, those surprise visits of theirs keep my wretched nerves on edge all the time.”
While the gendarmerie and the police knew him to be a leader among the revolutionary workmen of the capital and were hunting for him all over the city, this man, whose name was Stepan Khaltourin, had for the past few months been making his home, under the name of Batushkoff, in the same building as the Czar, in the Winter Palace, where his work as a varnisher was highly valued. He was a self-taught mechanic, unusually well-read and clear-headed. Of retiring disposition and a man of few words, with an iron will under a bashful and extremely gentle manner,he was one of the prominent figures of the Will of the People, having been driven to terrorism by the senseless persecutions which he had met at the hands of the authorities in his attempts to educate some of his fellow-workmen. He now lodged, together with other mechanics, in the basement of the Winter Palace, with only one room—the guard-room—between the ceiling over his head and the floor of the Imperial dining hall. Indeed, the frequent raids which a colonel at the head of a group of gendarmes had been making upon that basement since the seizure of “Alexandre’s” diagram were largely a matter of display and red tape. There was more jingling of spurs and flaunting of formidable looking moustaches than actual searching or watching. Nowhere was the incapacity of Russian officialdom illustrated more glaringly than it was in the very home of the Czar. The bold Terrorist for whom the police were looking high and low had found little difficulty in securing employment here, and one of the first things that had attracted his attention in the place was the prevailing state of anarchy and demoralisation he found in it. Priceless gems and relics were scattered about utterly unguarded; stealing was the common practice of the court servants, and orgies at which these regaled their friends from the outside world upon wines from the imperial cellars were a nightly occurrence. Since Alexandre’s arrest the vigilance of the court gendarmes had been greatly increased, so that no servant could enter the palace without being searched; yet Khaltourin contrived to smuggle in a small piece of dynamite every evening, thus gradually accumulating the supply that was needed for the terrible work of destruction he was preparing.
As to his position within the palace, he played his rôle so well that he was the favourite of gendarmes and servantsalike, often hearing from them stories of the Nihilists and of the great plot to blow up the dining hall that was supposed to have been nipped in the bud.
“Well, how is that old gendarme of yours?” Zachar inquired. “Still teaching you manners?”
“Yes,” Khaltourin answered with a smile. “I am getting sick of his attentions, though. But there is something back of them, it appears. What do you think he’s after? Why, he has a marriageable daughter, so he has taken it into his head to make a son-in-law of me.”
“Ho-ho-ho-ho!” Zachar exploded, restraining a guffaw.
ON Tuesday, February 17th, at about six o’clock in the evening, Pavel and Makar were sauntering through the streets of the Vassili Island. Their conversation languished. While indoors they had had another discussion of Makar’s scheme, a heart-to-heart talk in which Pavel showed signs of yielding; and now that they were out in the snow-dappled night they were experiencing that feeling of embarrassment which is the aftermath of sentimental communion between two men. When they reached the Neva, Pavel cast a glance across, in the direction of the Winter Palace. The frozen river looked infinitely wider than it was. Dotted with lamps and crossed by streams of home-bound humanity, it lay vast, gorgeous, uncanny—a white plain animated with mysterious brightness and mysterious motion. The main part of the capital, on the Palace side of the Neva, was a world of gloom starred with myriads and myriads of lights, each so distinct that one almost felt tempted to count them; all this seemingly as far away as the gold-dotted sky overhead. Makar was huddling himself in his grey military cloak, his bare hands loosely thrust into its sleeves, looking at nothing. Pavel, his furred coat unbuttoned, gazed across the Neva.
“Come on,” the medical student urged, knocking onefoot against the other. “It’s too cold to be tramping around like this.”
“One moment,” Pavel responded, impatiently. He had been visiting this point at the same hour every day for the past week or two. Makar, who did not know of it, relapsed into his revery.
Suddenly there came a dull rolling crash. It burst from the other side, and as Pavel and Makar looked across the river they saw that the lights of the Winter Palace which had been burning a minute ago, were out, leaving a great patch of darkness. The human stream paused. Then came a rush of feet on all sides.
“It’s in the Palace,” Boulatoff whispered; and seizing his companion’s hand at his side he pressed it with furious strength.
The next day the newspapers were allowed to state that the previous evening, as the Czar and a royal guest were about to enter the dining hall through one door and the other members of the imperial family through another, a terrific explosion had occurred, making a hole in the floor ten feet long and six wide; that eleven inmates of the guard room, which was directly under the dining hall, were killed and fifty-seven injured, the Czar’s narrow escape having been due to an accidental delay of the dinner. The explosion had shattered a number of windows and blown out the gas, leaving the palace in complete darkness. Traces of an improvised dynamite mine had been discovered in the basement. Three artisans employed in the palace were arrested, but their innocence was established, while a fourth man, a varnisher named Batushkoff, had disappeared. Now that Batushkoff was gone the Third Section learned that he was no other than Stepan Khaltourin,one of the active revolutionists its agents were looking for.
One week after the explosion the Czar signed a decree which practically placed the government in the hands of a Supreme Executive Commission—a body especially created to cope with the situation and whose head, Count Loris-Melikoff, was invested with all but the powers of a regent. Count Melikoff was neither a Slav nor of noble birth. He was the son of an Armenian merchant. He was a new figure in St. Petersburg, and when his carriage passed along the Neva Prospect his swarthy face with its striking Oriental features were pointed out with expressions of perplexity. Although one of the two principal heroes of the late war with Turkey and recently a governor-general of Kharkoff, he was looked upon as an upstart. The extraordinary powers so suddenly vested in him took the country by surprise.
He was known for the conciliatory policy toward the Nihilists at which he had aimed while he was governor-general of Kharkoff. Accordingly, his promotion to what virtually amounted to dictatorship was universally interpreted as a sign of weakening on the part ofAlexanderII. Indeed, Melikoff’s first pronunciamento from the lofty altitude of his new office struck a note of startling novelty. He spoke of the Czar as showing “increased confidence in his people” and of “public coöperation” as “the main force capable of assisting the government in its effort to restore a normal flow of official life”—utterances that were construed into a pledge of public participation in affairs of state, into an unequivocal hint at representative legislation.
Loris-Melikoff was one of the ablest statesmen Russia had ever produced. He was certainly the only high officialof his time who did not try to prove his devotion to the throne by following in the trodden path of repression. He knew that Russia could not be kept from joining in the march of Western civilisation and he was not going to serve his personal interests by pretending that it could. Instead, he hoped to strengthen his position by winning the Czar over to his own moderate liberalism, by reconciling him to the logic of history. But the logic of history could best have been served by prompt and vigorous action, while the chief of the Supreme Executive Commission was rather slow to move. Nor, indeed, was he free from interference. The Czar was still susceptible to the influence of his unthinking relatives and of his own vindictive nature.
Chaos marked the situation. Loris-Melikoff’s first week in office was signalised by the most cruel act in the entire history of the government’s struggle against Nihilism. A gymnasium boy, seventeen years old (a Jew), was hanged in Kieff for carrying a revolutionary proclamation. The dictator’s professions of liberalism were branded as hypocrisy.
A YOUNG man had been seized with seditious publications. It was the first political arrest in Miroslav, and the report was spreading in a maze of shifting versions. This much seemed certain: the prisoner pretended to be a deaf-mute and so far the gendarmes and the procureur had failed to disclose his identity. The local newspaper dared not publish the remotest allusion to the matter.
Countess Anna Nicolayevna Varova (Varoff) first heard the news from her brother-in-law, the governor, and although the two belonged to that exceptional minority which usually discussed topics of this character in their normal voices, yet it was in subdued tones that the satrap broached the subject. Anna Nicolayevna offered to send for Pavel, who had recently arrived from St. Petersburg, after an absence of three years, but the governor checked her.
“Never mind, Annette,” he said, impatiently, “I’ve dropped in for a minute or two, in passing, don’t you know. He called on me yesterday, Pasha. Quite a man. Tell him he must look in again and let me see how clever he is. Quite a man. How time does fly!” Then sinking his voice, he asked: “Have you heard of the fellowthey’ve bagged? One of those youngsters who are scaring St. Petersburg out of its wits, you know.”
He gave a laugh and fell to blinking gravely.
“What do you mean, George? Did the gendarmes catch a Nihilist?” she asked, in dismay. “Did they? Bless me! That’s all that’s wanted. If there is one there must be a whole nest of them.” She made a gesture of horror—“But who is he, what is he?”
“That I know no more than you do.”
“Well, it’s too bad, it’s really too bad. I thought Miroslav was immune from that plague at least.” And seeing his worried look she added: “I hope it’s nothing serious, George.”
Governor Boulatoff shook his head. “I don’t think it is. Although you never can tell nowadays. You never can tell,” he repeated, blinking absently. “The Armenian doesn’t seem to be cleaning those fellows out quite so rapidly as one thought he would, does he? They are playing the devil with things, that’s what they are doing.” “One” and “they” referred to the Emperor and his advisers.
“Pooh, they’ll weary of that parvenu, it’s only a matter of time,” she consoled him.
The old man proceeded to quote from Loris-Melikoff’s recent declarations, which the countess had heard him satirise several times before. “‘In the coöperation of the public,’” he declaimed theatrically, “‘lies the main force capable of assisting the government in its effort to restore a normal flow of official life.’ Do you understand what all this jugglery means? That we are knuckling down to a lot of ragamuffins. It means an official confession that the ‘flow of official life’ has been checked by a gang of rascally college boys. ‘The public is the main force capableof assisting the government!’ Charming, isn’t it? Might as well invite ‘the public’ to be so kind and elect representatives, deputies, or what you may call ’em, start a parliament and have it over with.”
Anna Nicolayevna made another attempt to bring the conversation back to the political prisoner, but her visitor was evidently fighting shy of the topic.
“Birch-rods, a good, smart flogging, that’s what the public needs,” he resumed, passionately gnashing his teeth, in response to his own thoughts.
“Oh, don’t say that, George. After all, one lives in the nineteenth century.”
But this only spurred him on.
The arrest having been ordered from St. Petersburg, the implication was that the presence of the revolutionist in town had escaped the attention of the local authorities. So Governor Boulatoff, who had had no experience in cases of this kind, wondered whether the affair was not likely to affect his own standing. Besides, the governor of Kharkoff had recently been killed, and Boulatoff was asking himself whether the arrest of the unknown man augured the end of his own peace of mind. This he kept to himself, however, and having found some relief in animadverting upon the policy of Loris-Melikoff he took leave.
The countess was left with a pang of sympathy for her brother-in-law. Not that she had any clear idea of the political situation at which he was forever scoffing and carping. She felt sure that his low spirits were traceable to loneliness, and her compassion for him revived heart-wringing memories of his dead wife, her sister.
The young prince was out in the garden romping about with Kostia, his half-brother, now a ten-year-old cadet onsick leave. Anna Nicolayevna went to take a look at them through the open window of a rear room. The garden was so jammed with fresh-tinted lilacs, so flooded with their scent, that it seemed like an explosion of color and fragrance. Two Germans were at work with picks and spades. From an invisible spot where a new summer house was being constructed came sounds of sawing and hammering, while the air near the window rang with a multitudinous twitter of sparrows. Pavel was trying to force Kostia into a wheelbarrow, the boy kicking and struggling silently, and a huge shaggy dog barking at Pavel ferociously.
“Come in, Pasha. I want to speak to you,” said Anna Nicolayevna.
The return indoors was a race, in which the gigantic dog took part. The convalescent little cadet was beaten.
“Wait till I get well,” he said.
“Wait nothing. Your excellency will be rolling along like a water-melon all the same. Good-bye, Monsieur le Water-melon!”
Presently Pavel stood before his mother, mopping his flushed, laughing face.
“Do you remember his ‘express trains’ in the garden?” he said. “Now it is beneath his dignity, to be sure.” He was always trying to prove to himself that the present Kostia and the five-year-old boy he used to fondle five years ago were one and the same person.
“He’s right,” said the countess. “He’s a baby no longer. It’s you who are acting like one. Uncle has been here. He was in a hurry, so I didn’t send for you.” Her serious-minded, intellectual son inspired her with a certain feeling of timidity. She had not the courage to bring up the subject of the political arrest. Her mind was so vagueon matters of this kind, while Pavel was apparently so well informed and so profound, she was sure of making a poor showing. So she told herself that it was not a proper topic to discuss in a well-ordered family and kept her own counsel.
“I didn’t know he was here,” he said.
“Poor man! he seems to be feeling lonely.”
Pavel made no reply.
“Why, don’t you think he does?”
“What matters it whether I do or not,” he said, lightly.
“You haven’t a bit of heart, Pasha.”
He would not be drawn into conversation, treating everything she said with an inscrutable, somewhat patronising flippancy that nettled her. At last he said he was going out.
“‘Looking up old chums’ again?” she asked. “And does it mean that you are going to dine out once more?”
“I’ll try not to, mother,” he answered, with a fond smile in his bright, aggressive eyes.
His small slender figure, beautifully erect, and his upward-tending, frank features haunted her long after he left. She felt like a jealous bride. Otherwise he kept her thoughts tinged with sunshine. A great attachment on quite new terms had sprung up between mother and son since his arrival. At the same time he seemed to belong to a world which she was at a loss to make out. Nor did he appear disinclined to talk of his life in St. Petersburg—a subject upon which she was continually plying him with questions. The trouble was that the questions that beset her mind could no more be formulated than a blind man can formulate his curiosity as to colour. Moreover, all these questions seemed to come crowding upon her when Pavel was away and to vanish the moment she set eyes onhim. She told herself that he belonged to a different generation from hers, that it was the everlasting case of “fathers and sons.” But this only quickened her jealousy of the “sons” and her despair at being classed with the discarded generation. And the keener her jealousy, the deeper was her interest in Pasha.
WHEN Pavel was in St. Petersburg Anna Nicolayevna had missed him only occasionally. Now that he was with her his absences were a continuous torture to her. On the present occasion she sought diversion in a visit to Princess Chertogoff where she expected to hear something about the mysterious prisoner. Princess Chertogoff was a lame, impoverished noblewoman whose daughter was married to the assistant-procureur. In higher circles she was looked down upon as a social outcast, so that Anna Nicolayevna’s visits to her had a surreptitious character and something of the charm of forbidden fruit. Pavel’s mother was fond of the stir her appearance produced in houses of this kind. The curious part of it was that the impecunious princess was one of the very few persons in the world whose presence irritated her. It seemed as though this irritation had a peculiar attraction for her.
It was an early hour in the afternoon. She was received in the vestibule by Hélène, the assistant-procureur’s wife, with an outburst of kisses and caresses which had something to do with the young woman’s expecting to become a mother. Rising in the background was the hostess, Lydia Grigorievna Chertogova (Chertogoff) and her gorgeous crutches. She was large, dark, and in spite of her made-overgowns, imposingly handsome. Aware of the fantastic majesty which these crutches gave her stalwart form, she paraded her defect as she did her beautiful dark eyes. At this moment it seemed as though the high-polished ebony crutches joined her in beaming atthesight of the distinguished visitor. Hélène, a small woman of twenty-four, usually compact as a billiard ball, was beginning to resemble an over-ripe apple.
When the three women found themselves in the drawing room Lydia Grigorievna lost no time in turning theconversationon the arrested Nihilist. Her son-in-law had carefully abstained from opening his mouth on the subject, yet she talked about it authoritatively, with an implication of reserved knowledge of still graver import, but Hélène gave her away.
“Woldemar would not speak about it,” she complained, reverently. “‘An affair of state,’ he said. You can’t get a single word out of him.” She exulted in the part he was playing as an exterminator of the enemies of the Czar, and in the air-castles she was building as to the promotion to which the present case was to pave his way.
“But what do they want, those scamps?” Lydia Grigorievna resumed, in soft, pampered accents. “Would they have us live without a Czar? I should have them cut to pieces, the rogues. Is it possible that the government should be powerless to get rid of them? To think of a handful of striplings keeping cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror.”
“Oh, nobody is really afraid of them,” Hélène retorted, holding her face to the breeze which came in through an open window.
“But your husband is not yet a cabinet minister, dear,” her mother said with a smile toward the countess.
“Oh, you’re always suspecting me of something or other,mamman. I was not thinking of Woldemar at all.”
The charm of her presence, the appealing charm of a pretty young woman about to become a mother, added itself to the tenderness and mystery of spring. Lydia Grigorievna addressed another smile to the countess, but Anna Nicolayevna dropped her glance. The princess went on raging at the revolutionists. In reality, however, that handful of striplings who “kept cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror” had stirred up a curiosity in her that sprang from anything but indignation or contempt. She was hankering for a specimen of their literature, of those publications the very handling of which was apt to bring death. Her thirst in this direction was all the keener because she felt sure that some of the Nihilist papers that had been confiscated at the arrest of the unknown man were upstairs in her son-in-law’s desk.
“A constitution may be all very well in Germany or France,” she said. “This is Russia, not Germany or France or England, thank God. Yet those wretches will go around stirring up discontent. On my way home from Moscow last winter I heard a passenger say that if we had less bribery and more liberty and popular education we would be as good as any nation in Western Europe. I knew at once he was a Nihilist. You can tell one by the first word he utters. I confess I was afraid to sit near him. He had grey side-whiskers, but maybe they were just stuck on. Oh, I should show them no mercy.”
She was all flushed and ill at ease. She received no encouragement. Her sugared enunciation and the false ring of what she said grated on her hearer’s nerves. Anna Nicolayevna listened in silence. The lame princess was a sincere woman coated with a layer of insincerity. Butthe countess thought her the embodiment of affectation and hated her, bizarre beauty, enunciation, altered gowns, crutches and all.
Lydia Grigorievna was interrupted by the appearance of the assistant-procureur himself. He was tall and frail with a long straight straw-coloured mane and pontifical gestures. His figure made one think of length in the abstract. As you looked at him he seemed to be continually growing in height. Hélène had fallen in love with him because he resembled the baron in a play she had seen in Moscow.
“I’ve just looked in to bid you good afternoon, countess,” he said. “I saw your carriage through the window. But unfortunately—business before pleasure.” It was one of two or three English phrases which he kept for occasions of this character and which he mispronounced with great self-confidence.
When Anna Nicolayevna got into the street she felt as though she had emerged from the suffocating atmosphere of some criminal den. In the May breeze, however, and at sight of the river her spirits rose. She dismissed her carriage. When she reached the macadamised bank and caught the smell of the water it was borne in upon her afresh that it was spring. She had passed this very spot, in a sleigh only a short while ago, it seemed. Lawns and trees had been covered with snow then; all had been stiff with the stiffness of death; whereas now all was tenderly alive with verdure and bloom, and wild-flowers smiled upon her at every turn. Here it struck her as though spring had just been born; born in full attire overnight. Flushed and radiant, with her rusty chin in the air and her flat chest slightly thrown out, spinning her parasol, she was briskly marching along, a broad streak of water to the right of her, a row of orchards to the left. Theriver beamed. From somewhere underneath she heard the clanking of chains of lumber-horses, accompanied by the yell of boys. The greased wooden screws of a receding cable-ferry were squirming in the air like two erect snakes of silver; the brass buttons of a soldier-passenger burned like a column of flames. All this and the lilac-laden breeze and Anna Nicolayevna’s soul were part of something vast, swelling with light and joy. But the breath of spring is not all joy. Nature’s season of love is a season of yearning. One feels like frisking and weeping at once. Spring was with us a year ago, but the interval seems many years. It is like revisiting one’s home after a long absence: the scenes of childhood are a source of delight and depression at once. It is like hearing a long forgotten song: the melody, however gay, has a dismal note in it. Anna Nicolayevna had not been out many minutes when she began to feel encompassed by an immense melancholy to which her heart readily responded. There was a vague longing in the clear blue sky, in the gleaming water, in the patches of grass on either side of the public promenade, in the distant outlines across the river, but above all in the overpowering freshness of the afternoon air. The travail of an unhappy soul seemed to be somewhere nearby. A look of loneliness came into her eyes. She was burning to see Pavel, to lay bare her soul to him.
When a passing artisan in top-boots and with glass buttons in his waistcoat reverently took off his flat cap she returned the salute with motherly fervour and slackened her pace to a more dignified gait. “I’m respected and loved by the people,” she mentally boasted to Pavel.
Arrived at the bridge, she paused to hand a twenty-copeck piece to a blind beggar who sat on the ground by the tollman’s booth. He apparently recognised her by theway her gloved hand put the coin in his hand. She had given him alms as long as she could remember, and usually he made no more impression on her than the lamp-posts she passed. This time, however, it came back to her how her mother used to send her out of their carriage with some money for him. She paused to look at him and to listen to his song. She recalled him as a man of thirty or forty with thick flaxen hair. Now he was gray and bald. “Great heavens! how time does fly!” she exclaimed in her heart, feeling herself an old woman. The blind man seemed to be absorbed in his song. All blind beggars look alike and they all seem to be singing the same doleful religious tune, yet this man, as he sat with his eyes sealed and his head leaned against the parapet, gave her a novel sensation. He was listening to his own tones, as if they came from an invisible world, like his own, but one located somewhere far away.
Anna Nicolayevna gave him a ruble and passed on. Followed by the beggar’s benedictions, she made to turn into the street which formed the continuation of the bridge, when an approaching flour truck brought her to a halt. Besides several sacks of meal the waggon carried a cheap old trunk, and seated between the trunk and the driver was—Pavel; Pavel uncouthly dressed in the garb of an artisan. His rudimentary beard was covered with dust; his legs, encased in coarse grimy topboots, were dangling in the air. The visor of his flat cap was pushed down over his eyes, screening them from the red afternoon sun which sparkled and glowed in the glass buttons of his vest. It certainly was Pavel. Anna Nicolayevna was panic-stricken. She dared not utter his name.
The toll paid, the truck moved on. The countess followed her son with her eyes, until a cab shut him out ofview, and then she remained standing for some time, staring at the cab. “What does it all mean?” she asked herself with sickening curiosity. Finally her eye went to the water below. She gazed at its rippling stretches of black and masses of shattered silver; at a woman slapping a heap of wash with a wash-beater, at a long raft slowly gliding toward the bridge. “Is he disguised? What does it all mean? Was it really Pasha?”
Doubt dawned in her mind. In her eagerness to take another look at the man on the truck she raised her eyes. After waiting for some moments she saw the waggon with the two men as it appeared and forthwith disappeared at the other end of the bridge. The thought of the arrested man stunned her. Was Pavel a Nihilist? The image of her son had assumed a new, a forbidding expression.
The revolutionists moved about on the verge of martyrdom, and as the mere acquaintance with one of their number meant destruction, the imagination painted them as something akin to living shadows, as beings whose very touch brought silence and darkness. People dared not utter the word “Nihilist” or “revolutionist” aloud. Anna Nicolayevna belonged to the privileged few, but at this moment she dreaded so much as to think of her son by these ghastly names. It now appeared to Anna Nicolayevna that all through her call at Lydia Grigorievna’s she had had a presentiment of an approaching calamity. She took the first cab that came along.
“As fast as you can drive,” she said.
The moment Anna Nicolayevna got home she inquired whether Pavel was in his room, and when the porter said that his Highness had not been back since he had left, in the morning, a fresh gust of terror smote her heart and brain. She stole into his room. On the table lay a Germanpamphlet on Kant and a fresh number of theRussian Messenger, the ultra-conservative magazine published in Moscow. In several places the leaves were cut. A Nihilist was the last person in the world one would expect to read this organ of Panslavists. What Anna Nicolayevna did not know was that the cut pages of the conservative magazine, which Pavel had received from St. Petersburg the day before, contained a hidden revolutionary message. Here and there a phrase, word, or a single letter, was marked, by means of an inkstain, abrasion or what looked like the idle penciling of a reader, these forming half a dozen consecutive sentences.
Anna Nicolayevna was perplexed and her perplexity gave her a new thrill of hope. She was in a quiver of impatience to see her son and have it all out.
The dinner hour came round and Pavel was not there. She could not eat. Every little while she paused to listen for a ring of the door bell. She sent a servant to his room to see if he had not arrived unheard. He had not.
The other people at table were Kostia, in huge red shoulder-straps which made his well-fitting uniform look too large for him; Kostia’s old tutor, a powerful looking German with a bashful florid face, and the countess’ own old governess, an aged Frenchwoman with a congealed smile on her bloodless lips. This restlessness of the countess when Pavel was slow in coming was no news to them, but this time she seemed to feel particularly uneasy. Silence hung over them. The Frenchwoman’s dried-up smile turned to a gleam of compassion. The German ate timidly. This man’s services had practically ceased when Kostia entered the cadet corps, but Anna Nicolayevna retained him in the house for his quiet piety. She had a feeling that so far as the intelligent classes were concernedthe simple forms of Protestantism were more compatible with religious sincerity than were the iron-bound formalities of her native church. So, with her heart thirsting for spiritual interest, she found intense pleasure in her theological conversations with this well-read, narrow-minded, honest Lutheran, whose religious convictions she envied.
WHEN Pavel told his mother that he was going out he expected to meet Makar, who had been in Miroslav for the past four days. Once again he was going to plead with him to give up his scheme. The affair kept Pavel in bad humour, but that morning his mind was occupied by the thought that there was an interesting meeting in store for him. In the evening he was to make the acquaintance of Clara Yavner, the heroine of the Pievakin “demonstration.”
On his way down the spacious corridor he was stopped by Onufri, his cheeks still hollower and his drooping moustache still longer and considerably greyer than of yore. Pavel had once tried to make a convert of him, but found him “too stupid for abstract reasoning.” Onufri was polishing the floor. As Pavel came past he faced half way about and gave him a stern look from under his bushy eyebrows.
“They’ve pinched a gentleman, the blood-guzzlers.” Saying which he fell to dancing on his foot-cushions again.
“What do you mean?” Pavel asked, turning white as he paused.
“You know what I mean, sir. You know you do,” answered Onufri, going on with his work.
“Is it true? Who made the arrest? Gendarmes?”
“That’s it. I wouldn’t bother your Highness if the police’d nabbed a common crook, would I?”
The servant bent on his young master a long look of sympathetic reproach, adding under his breath:
“You had better give it all up, sir. Better let it go to the devil.”
“Give up what? What on earth are you prating about, Onufri?”
A few minutes later, while Pavel was destroying some papers in his room, the door swung open and in came Onufri. The old man burst into tears and dropped to his knees.
“Take pity, sir,” he wailed, kissing Pavel’s fingers. “You’ve played with fire long enough, sir. If they put you in prison, the murderers, and sent you away it would kill her Highness, your mother.”
“Get up, Onufri. I have no patience with you just now, really I haven’t.”
“It’s bad enough when your Highness takes chances in another town, but if you’re mixed up in this here thing, sir——”
“I’m not mixed up ‘in this here thing.’ Don’t bother me. Come, get up. Up with you, now. There is a good fellow!”
The old hussar obeyed distressedly.
Instead of going to the place where he expected to see Makar, Pavel went to the house of Major Safonoff, the gendarme officer, an uncomfortable-looking frame building across the river. As he approached it, Masha, the major’s sister, who stood at a second story window at that moment, apparently waiting for somebody, burst out beckoning to him and stamping her feet. Her excited gesticulations drew the attention of a knife-grinder and two little girls.Pavel dropped his eyes. “She is a perfect idiot,” he said to himself in a rage, “and I am another one. The idea of taking up with such a creature!”
“Didn’t you torture me!” she greeted him on the staircase. “I thought my heart was going to snap. Don’t be uneasy. I have dismissed our servant. There is nobody around.” When they reached the low-ceiled parlor, she sank her voice and said solemnly, yet with a certain note of triumph: “He was arrested at four o’clock yesterday on the railway tracks. The gendarme office had information that he was in the habit of taking walks there. I happened to be away—think of it! At a time like that I was away. Else I should have let you know at once, of course. Anyhow, he’s there.”
“You say it as if it was something to rejoice in,” Pavel remarked, disguising his rage. “It’s quite a serious matter, Maria Gavrilovna.”
Mlle. Safonoff stared. “But we’ll get him out. Why, are you afraid we mayn’t? I see you’re depressed and that makes me miserable, too. Really it does.”
“Do I look depressed? Well, I must confess I rather am. It’s no laughing matter, Maria Gavrilovna,” he said, flushing.
“Oh, well, if you are going to talk like that. That is I myself haven’t the slightest doubt about it. Only you frighten me so. If this thing is going to last another week it will drive me mad.” Her childish eyes shone with tears. “Why should you take such a gloomy view of it? I must say it’s cruel of you, PavelVassilyevich. Everything is just as I expected. He is as good as free, I assure you.”
Pavel answered, by way of consoling himself as well as her: “Well, maybe I do take it too hard. Our chancesseem to be good, and—well, we must get him out. That’s all there is to it.”
“Of course we must. Now I like you, Boulatoff. We must and we will, and when the story is published—oh, I do wish we could get out special proclamations!—anyhow, won’t it make a stir!” She paused and then resumed, in a new burst of frankness, “I know what makes you uneasy about me. The great trouble with me is my lack of tact, isn’t it? If I had that I would be all right. That’s what worries you about me in this affair, isn’t it, now? You’re afraid I may make a mess of the whole business. I know you are. Well, and I don’t blame you, either. The Safonoffs have never been distinguished for their heads. When it happens to be a matter of hearts, we hold our own, but brains, well—.” She gave a laugh. “I tell you what, Boulatoff, I’m afraid of you, and I don’t care to bear the brunt of this important affair. Anyhow, I want you to keep an eye on me. I’ll do all you want me to, but you must take the responsibility off my shoulders, else I’ll go crazy. What makes you smile? You think I’m crazy already, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t smiling at all. So far you have managed things beautifully. I confess I’m getting impatient. Well, I do feel wretched, Maria Gavrilovna.”
She grasped his hand, shook it silently and whispered: “Don’t be uneasy. We shall win.”
When Safonoff came home at the lunch hour he told of the excitement at the gendarme office. His manner toward Boulatoff was a non-committal mixture which seemed to say: “You and I understand each other perfectly, don’t we? Still, if you think you can get me to call a spade a spade or to help you you are mistaken.”
His compact, well-fed figure had the shape of a plum.He was perpetually mimicking somebody or chuckling and his speech was full of gaps, many of his sentences being rendered in dumb show.
“My chief may get in trouble for having ordered the arrest too soon,” he said. “We were to let the prisoner—” (he brandished his hand to represent a man going around at large) “for some time, so as to let him show us with whom he is acquainted. But my chief—” (he struck an attitude meant to caricature a decrepit, coughing, old fellow) “was all of a tremble for fear the canary-bird might take wing. You see he had never arrested a political before. You should have seen our men when we took that chap on the railroad track. They were more frightened than he, I assure you, prince. They thought he was going to—” (he aimed an imaginary dagger at Pavel and burst into laughter). “Monsieur Unknown is certainly no coward whatever else he may be. You should have seen the look of surprise and contempt he gave me!”
Pavel beamed while Masha’s face wore a pained expression. “It’s time you had left this nasty business of yours, Andrusha,” she said.
When Andrusha reached the assistant procureur’s part in the case he sketched off a pompous imbecile. There was no love lost between the public attorney and the gendarme officers, so Safonoff described, with many a gurgle of merriment, how, during the attempted examination of the prisoner, Zendorf, the assistant procureur (he burlesqued an obeisance as the epitome of snobbishness) had tried to impress his uniformed rivals with his intellectual and social superiority.
“You see, my chief is a rough and ready sort of customer. Whatever else he may be, frills and fakes are not in his line. So he went right at it. ‘Speak up,’ hesqueaked at the prisoner, ‘speak up, or I’ll have your mouth opened for you.’ So Zendorf called him gently to order and fixed his dignified peepers at the prisoner. He expected to cast some sort of spell over him, I suppose, but it was no go. As to me, I was just choking. As bad luck would have it I took it into my head at that moment that the best way to make that fellow talk would be to have his armpits tickled till he roared. Well, I had to leave the room to have my giggle out.”
Safonoff was indifferent to his sister’s revolutionary ventures because he never vividly realised the danger she incurred. His mind retained the most lifelike impressions, but its sensitiveness was of the photographic kind; it was confined to actual experiences. He had no imagination for the future. He was an easy-going man, incapable of fear. People often arrived at the conclusion that he was “a fool after all.” But then there are fools who are endowed with a keen perception and a lively sense of character.
Speaking of the warden of the jail, Safonoff impersonated a cringing, hand-kissing, crafty time-server. He had never met a convert Jew or convert Pole who was not an adventurer and an all-round knave, he said, and Rodkevitch was the most typical convert Pole he had ever come across. The sight of money took his breath away, gave him the vertigo, made his eyes start from their sockets. Rustle a crisp paper ruble in his ear and he will faint away.
“He’s a candidate for Siberia anyhow and he needs money to pull him out of some of the roguish schemes he is tangled up in. The contractors who furnish his prisoners sand for flour and garbage for potatoes are his partners in some of his outside swindles also. Do you understand, prince?” The question was put with specialemphasis, which Pavel interpreted as a direct hint at the possibility of bribing the warden.
It occurred to Boulatoff that Makar’s luggage was quite likely to contain some incriminating papers or other things that might aggravate the case. To fear this in view of Makar’s notorious absent-mindedness was quite reasonable. But this was not all. He had been bent upon making his arrest as important in the eyes of the Third Section as possible, and Pavel was almost certain he had left something in his lodgings on purpose. “You never know what you are at with a crazy, obstinate bull-dog like that,” he thought in a qualm of anxiety.
When Safonoff had gone Pavel wrote a note to his imprisoned friend asking for the address of his lodgings.
“Can you get this to him, and an answer brought back?” he demanded of Mlle. Safonoff in a peremptory tone.
“I think so. My aunt will probably get it through. I am almost sure of it, in fact.”
“There you are. You’realmostsure. Was this enough to let a man put himself in the hands of the Third Section?”
Mlle. Safonoff hurried out of the house in dumb dismay. After an interval of less than an hour, which to Pavel seemed a year, she burst into the parlour, accompanied by an older woman, whom she introduced as her aunt, Daria Stepanovna Shubeyko. Both were breathless with excitement. They had the desired address, the sum Makar owed his landlady and another note to the landlady. Pavel’s heart swelled with joy and gratitude, but he did not show it.
“Very well,” he said, with a preoccupied scowl. “And now for that trunk of his.”
The two women went on to describe, continually interrupting each other, their plans for setting Makar free, but Pavel checked them.
“We’ll discuss it all afterwards,” he said. “What we need at this minute is a coarse suit of clothes, something to make a fellow look like a workman or porter. We must clear his room before his landlady has notified the police of his disappearance.” The costume was brought by Masha. When Pavel emerged from the major’s bedroom transformed into a laborer, Masha’s aunt applauded so violently that he could not resist gnashing his teeth at her.
“Excuse me, but I’ve never seen a real man of action before,” she pleaded. “Now I feel newly born, really I do. I tell you what, Boulatoff, I’ll go with you. In case of trouble I may be of some use, you know. We can’t afford to let an active man like you perish.”