“But then if you perish,” Pavel answered gayly, “there won’t be anybody to arrange that escape.”
“That’s true,” she replied forlornly. She was a healthy, good-looking woman with a smile so exultantly silly that Pavel could not bear to look at it. Every time that smile of hers brightened her full-blooded face, he dropped his eyes.
There was the risk of his being recognised by somebody in the street. Then, too, Makar’s lodgings might have been discovered by the police and made a trap of. The errand was full of risks, but this only stimulated a feeling in which Pavel’s passion for this sort of adventure was coupled with a desire to vindicate himself before his own conscience by sharing in Makar’s dangers.
The trip was devoid of all adventure, however. Even his meeting with his mother was lost on him. He wassincerely contemplating the blind beggar at that moment.
Makar’s landlady was a garrulous Jewess. When she learned that her lodger had been taken ill at the house of a friend and that the workingman had been sent for his things and to pay the bill, she launched out into an effusion of bad Russian that taxed Pavel’s patience sorely. She exacted the address of Makar’s friend, so as to send the patient some of her marvellous preserves. The prince left with the trunk on his shoulder—an excellent contrivance for screening his face from view—but it proved too heavy, and when he came across a truckman who agreed to take him and his load part of the way to his destination he was glad to be relieved of the burden.
While he was in the next room, shedding his disguise, Masha’s aunt bombarded him with impatient shouts and giggles. When he had opened the trunk at last she insisted upon helping him examine its contents, whereupon she handled each article she lifted out as she might a holy relic; and when the trunk proved to contain nothing of a compromising quality even Pavel felt disappointed. Mme. Shubeyko overwhelmed him with questions, one of which was:
“Look here, Boulatoff, why shouldn’t the people rise and put an end to the rule of despotism at once? What on earth are we waiting for?”
“If the people were all like you they would have done so long ago,” he answered, with a hearty laugh. He warmed to her in an amused way and felt like calling her auntie; only that smile of hers continued to annoy him.
PAVEL dined at the major’s house. He was in high spirits, but the hour of his expected meeting with the girl of the Pievakin demonstration was drawing near, and his impatience was getting keener every minute. He reached the place, a little house occupied by a government clerk named Orlovsky and his mother, ahead of time.
“Your name is Boulatoff, is it not?” asked the host, his square Slavic nose curling up with the joy of his welcome. Then, crouching before the absurdest looking samovar Pavel had ever seen, he explained that his mother had gone to his sister’s for the night, as she did very often to avoid the noise of his gatherings. In the centre of a bare round table lay an enormous loaf of rye bread and a great wedge of sugar, near which stood an empty candy box, apparently used as a sugar bowl. Pavel divined that at least one-half of Orlovsky’s salary was spent on the tea, bread and butter on which his guests regaled themselves while they talked liberty.
“I’m only a private of the revolution,” Orlovsky said, trying to blow two charcoals into flame until his face glowed like the coals and his eyes looked bleared. “But if there is anything I can do command me.” At his instance the two addressed each other in the familiar diminutives of their Christian names—“Pasha” and “Aliosha.”While Aliosha was struggling with his smoking samovar, Pasha set to work cutting up the sugar.
“Wait till you have seen our crowd,” said Aliosha, flicking the open side of an old top-boot at the samovar by way of bellows. “I tell you Miroslav is destined to play a prominent part in the liberation of Russia. We have some tip-top fellows and girls. Of course, we’re mere privates in the ranks of the revolution.”
But Pavel’s mind was on the speaker’s sackcoat of checkered grey, which was so tight on him that his prominent thighs were bulging out and the garment seemed on the point of bursting. The sight of it annoyed Pavel in the same way as Mme. Shubeyko’s smile had done, and he asked Orlovsky why he should not unbutton himself, to which the other answered, half in jest, half in earnest, that he was getting so fat that he was beginning to look “like a veritable bourgeois, deuce take it.”
“But it makes a fellow uncomfortable to look at you,” Pavel shouted, irascibly.
“Ah, but that’s a question of personal liberty, old man,” Orlovsky returned in all seriousness. “What right have you, for instance, to impose upon me rules as to how I am to wear my coat?”
“That right which limits the liberty of one man by the liberty of other men. But this is all foolishness, Aliosha. Upon my word it is. The days of hair-splitting are dead and buried. There is plenty of work to do—living, practical work.”
Orlovsky leaped up from his samovar, a fishy look in his eye, and grasping Pavel’s hand he pressed it hard and long. Pavel felt in the presence of the most provincial Nihilism he had ever come across.
Other members of the Circle came. They all knewthe governor’s nephew by sight. Also that he was “a sympathiser,” yet his presence here was a stirring surprise to most of them, although they strove to conceal it. One man, Orlovsky’s immediate superior in office, shook Pavel’s hand with a grimace which seemed to say: “You’re Prince Boulatoff and I am only an ordinary government official, but then all titles and ranks will soon go to smash.” A Jewish gymnasium boy with two bubbling beads for eyes made Pavel’s acquaintance with a preoccupied air, as if in a hurry to get down to more important business. His small, deep-seated eyes spurted either merriment or gloom. Elkin had said there was not enough of them to make one decent-sized eye, and dubbed him “Cyclops,” which had since been the boy’s revolutionary nickname.
Orlovsky’s superior had a vast snow-white forehead that gave his face a luminous, aureole-lit effect, but he was an incurable liar. He was one of the most devoted members of the Circle, however, and recently he had sold all his real estate, turning over the proceeds to the party. As he seated himself a telegraph operator in a dazzling uniform sat down by his side, saying, in a whisper:
“That was an affected look of yours a moment ago.”
“When? What are you talking about?” the man with the sainted forehead asked, colouring.
“You know what. You made a face as if you were not glad to see Boulatoff. You know you were, weren’t you, now?”
“I confess I was.”
“Now I like you, old boy. All that is necessary is to take one’s self in hand. Nothing like self-chastisement.”
“Cyclops” bent over to an army captain with a pair of grandiose side-whiskers and said something in orderto hear himself address a Gentile and an army officer in the familiar “thou.” Another young Jew, a red-headed gymnasium boy named Ginsburg, sat close to the lamp, reading a book with near-sighted eyes, the yellow light playing on his short-clipped red hair. His father was a notorious usurer and the chief go-between in the governor’s bribe-taking and money-lending transactions. Young Ginsburg robbed his father industriously, dedicating the spoils to the socialist movement.
The expectation that that hazy, featureless image which had resided in his mind for the past five years would soon stand forth in the flesh and with the mist lifted made Pavel restless. When a girl with short hair and very sparse teeth told him that Clara Yavner was sure to be around in less than fifteen minutes, his heart began to throb. The girl’s name was Olga Alexandrovna Andronova (Andronoff). She was accompanied by her fiancé, a local judge—a middle-aged man with a mass of fluffy hair. The judge was perceptibly near-sighted, like Ginsburg, only when he screwed up his eyes he looked angry, whereas the short-sightedness of the red-headed young man had a beseeching effect. The two girls were great friends, and Olga spoke of her chum in terms of persuasive enthusiasm. That Boulatoff had special reasons to be interested in Clara Yavner she was not aware.
“What has become of her?” she said, looking at the door impatiently.
“You are adding fuel to my curiosity, Olga Alexandrovna,” Pavel said. “I am beginning to feel somewhat as I once did in the opera, when I was waiting to see Patti for the first time.”
“And when she came out you were not disappointed,were you?” Olga asked, exposing her sparse teeth in a broad, honest smile.
“No,” he laughed.
“Well, neither will you be this time.”
Pavel said to himself humorously: “I am so excited I am afraid I shall fall in love with that girl. But then predictions seldom come true.” Then he added: “And now that I predict it won’t, it will.”
When she came at last he said inwardly: “That’s what she looks like, then! She certainly does not seem to be a fool whatever else she may be.” That was what people usually said upon their first meeting with her: “She seems to be no fool.” She was a fair-complexioned Jewish girl of good height. To those unfamiliar with the many types of her race she might have looked Teutonic. To her own people her face was characteristically Jewish, of the blond, hazel-eyed variety. It was a rather small face, round and with a slightly flattened effect between eyes and mouth that aroused interest. Her good looks were due to a peculiar impression of intelligence and character to which this effect contributed and to the picturesqueness of her colouring—healthy white flesh, clear and firm, set off by an ample crown of fair hair and illuminated by the brown light of intense hazel eyes. She had with her a two-year-old little girl, her sister’s, and accompanying the two was Elkin, from whose manner as he entered the crowded room it was easy to see, first, that he had told Mlle. Yavner of the revolutionary “general” he was going to introduce her to; second, that he was the leader of the Circle and the connecting link between it and revolutionary generals.
“I tried to steal away from her,” she said to Olga,meaning the little girl, “but she ran after us and filled the streets with her cries.” She smiled—an embarrassed smile which made her intelligent face look still more intelligent.
When Boulatoff was introduced to her, by Elkin, she blushed slightly. He watched her with keen curiosity. At the same time the judge’s fiancée was watching him, in the fond hope that he would indorse her opinion of her friend. When Clara averted her face, while speaking to somebody, her features became blurred in Pavel’s mind, and he sought another look at her. Whether Elkin had told her of the effect her “speech” during the Pievakin scene had had on him he had no knowledge.
Some of the men in the gathering made a point of ignoring the little privileges of the sex, treating the girls “as human beings, not as dolls,” but Clara and Olga made a joke of it. When Orlovsky offered the judge’s fiancée a chair next to Clara’s she thanked him much as an “unemancipated” girl would have done; whereupon Mlle. Yavner shook her finger at her, saying merrily:
“You’re getting conservative, Olga. You had better look out.”
The Circle was a loose, informal organisation. There were no fixed rules or ceremonies for the admission of members nor anything like regularly elected officers. Nor, indeed, did the members practise formal communism among themselves, although the property of one was to a considerable extent the property of all.
The gathering to-night was naturally larger than usual, owing to the great news of the day. No one except Pavel knew anything about the arrested man, each wondering whether the others did. To betray inquisitiveness, however, would have been unconspiratorlike, so as they satabout, whispering, in twos or threes, they were at once trying to suppress their curiosity and to draw each other out.
The telegraph operator and Orlovsky’s superior left early in the evening, but there soon came two other members, a sergeant of the captain’s command and a gawky seminarist with a trick of drawing in his neck and throwing out his Adam’s apple when he laughed.
The sergeant took a seat beside his officer and the two fell into conversation about their regiment, while the theological student at once set to plying Pavel with questions. Elkin, in an embroidered Little-Russian shirt, sat smoking a pipe and smiling non-committally. Every little while he would remove the pipe from his mouth, take a grave look at the theologian and resume his pipe and his smile.
The little girl sat on the captain’s lap, quietly playing with his sword until she fell asleep. When Clara beheld the officer struggling to keep his luxurious side-whiskers from waking the child, she took her niece in her arms and carried her, with noiseless kisses, toward the door.
“I’ll soon be back. It isn’t far,” she whispered to Orlovsky, declining his assistance.
The men followed her out of the room with fond glances. More than half of them were in love with her.
When she got back, somewhat short of breath, Boulatoff was describing the general feeling in the universities and among working people. His talk was vague. His rolling baritone rang dry. And now his grip on the subject was weakened still further by the reappearance of the girl in whom, during the first few minutes, he instinctively felt a rival centre of interest. No sooner, however, had the seminarist attacked the party press than the prince becamefurious and made a favourable impression. Once or twice he fell into Zachar’s manner and even used several of his arguments. The seminarist urged his objections chiefly because he wanted to prove to himself and to the others that he was a man of convictions and not one to quail before a revolutionary “general.” But Pavel took him seriously. Once when the seminarist attempted to interrupt him, Clara said, forlornly:
“He’s bound to be right. He’s just bound to be right.”
“Don’t cry,” said Cyclops. Several of the men laughed, and when Clara joined them their eyes betrayed her power over them. Nothing betrays your feelings toward another person more surely than the way you take his merriment.
The most important topic of the evening was a circular letter from the Executive Committee of the Will of the People, as Pavel’s party was called, as to the “preparatory work” that was to pave the way to a final uprising. The discussion was left to the judge, Elkin and Pavel. The gawky seminarist was silent, with an angry air which implied that the arguments one was compelled to follow here were exasperatingly beneath one’s criticism. The others listened spellbound, though some of them scarcely felt convinced. Ingrained in the consciousness of these was the idea of an abstract elemental giant, tremendous and immutable as the northern winter, of which the blind forces of the army were only a personified detail. That this giant should some day, in the near future, cease to be did not clearly appeal to their imagination. The boldness, therefore, with which the judge and Pavel spoke of these things greatly enhanced the fascination of their speeches.
Cyclops, a huge slice of rye bread in his hand, evidently had something to say, but did not know how. He was quoting history, blushing, sputtering, swallowing his owntongue, and finally he lost himself in a jumble of words. Elkin was just the reverse. He was so calm, so glib and so lucid of phrase that as long as his speech lasted one was involuntarily nodding assent; yet when it was over one did not seem to know exactly what he had said or whether he had had anything to say at all. At one point he and the judge locked horns and fought long and hard without clearly understanding each other, until they proved to be arguing on the same side of the issue. Orlovsky, who took it for granted that the theoretical discussion was beyond his mental powers, looked on with stupid admiration. “Here is a bunch of cracks for you!” his beaming face seemed to say.
In the course of a pause Clara whispered something to Olga.
“Why don’t you ask it then?” the short-haired girl answered, aloud.
Clara turned pale, as she began to speak. She went straight to the point, however, and presently cast off all restraint.
“All this is very well,” she said, referring to a certain passage in the circular letter, “provided the local authorities really desert the throne. But suppose they don’t, suppose they prove to be hardened conservatives, devoted slaves of the crown? It seems to me as if we were inclined to take things for granted—counting without the host, as it were.”
“Devoted to the crown!” said the gawky theologian. “The fact is that the high officials are a mere lot of self-seeking curs.”
“Exactly,” Pavel thundered, bringing his hands together enthusiastically.
Elkin removed the pipe from his mouth and bawledout: “Rats rather than curs, I should say; rats that are sure to forsake the ship of state the moment it shows signs of danger.”
The seminarist was annoyed at this attempt to steal the applause from him, but Boulatoff did not like Elkin’s manner and offered him no encouragement. This disarmed the seminarist’s opposition. From this moment on he listened to Pavel with friendly nods, as who should say: “Now you are hitting it; now you are talking sense!”
“Of course,” Pavel resumed, “the pamphlet means we should keep agitating until we are sure of our ground. There is a large liberal-minded class that does not stir merely because it is made up of a lot of cowards. These fellows will rally around our banner the moment the government begins to totter. As to the bureaucracy, it is so decayed, so worm-eaten, that all it knows at present is how to bend double for an increase of salary or promotion in rank. A lot of back-boneless flunkeys, that’s what they are. You don’t actually think they serve the Czar from principle?” he asked, addressing himself to Mlle. Yavner.
“The only principle they care for,” Elkin interposed, “is, ‘To the devil with all principles!’”
“Exactly,”Pavelassented, with some irritation.
“Yes,” the seminarist chimed in, “and when they hear the tocsin of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity—”
“Liberty, Equality and Fiddlesticks!” Clara mimicked him, mildly, signing to him not to interrupt the speaker.
Pavel went on. He spoke at length, looking mostly at her. He was making an effort to convince her that in the event of a revolution the high officials would turn cowards, and her face seemed to be saying: “He’s the nephew of a governor, so he ought to know.”
When the yard windows were thrown open the bewhiskeredcaptain sat down to the piano and struck up an old national tune, to the accompaniment of two male voices. The others continued their talk under cover of the music. Pavel made up his mind that the judge and Clara were the most level-headed members of the Circle, and decided to seek their coöperation in the business which had brought him to Miroslav. Only the judge was the more reposeful of the two, as well as incomparably the better informed. As a rule he was absorbed in his own logic, while Mlle. Yavner was jarred by every false note in others, nervously sensitive to all that went on about her, so that when Cyclops, for example, got tangled in his own verbosity her eyes would cloud up with vexation and she would come to his rescue, summing up his argument in a few clear, unobtrusive sentences. There was a glow of enthusiasm in her look which she was apparently struggling to suppress. Indeed, she was struggling to suppress some feeling or other most of the time. Her outward calm seemed to cover an interior of restlessness.
Pavel’s unbounded faith in the party instilled new faith into her. The great point was that he was a member of the aristocracy. If a man like him had his whole heart in the struggle, the movement was certainly not without foundation. Moreover, Boulatoff was close to the revolutionary centre, and he obviously spoke from personal knowledge. All sorts of questions worried her, many of which were answered at the present gathering, partly by herself, partly by others. The new era, when there would be neither poverty nor oppression, the enchanted era which had won her heart, loomed clearer than ever. At one moment as she sat listening, her blond hair gleaming golden in the lamplight, her face lit up by a look of keen intelligence, Pavel said to himself: “And this Jewishgirl is the one who had the feeling and the courage to make that rumpus over Pievakin! If I became a revolutionist it was the result of gradual development, through the help of conditions, books, people; whereas this girl acted like one, and in the teeth of grave danger, too, purely on the spur of the moment and long before she knew there was any such thing as a revolutionary movement; acted like one while I was still a blind, hard-hearted milksop of a drone.” In the capital he knew a number of girls who were continually taking their lives in their hands and several of whom were like so many saints to him, but then Mlle. Yavner belonged to the realm of his home and his boyhood. What he regarded as an act of heroism on her part was hallowed by that sense of special familiarity and comprehensibility which clings to things like the old well that witnessed our childish games.
She made a very favourable impression on him. If he had been a formal candidate for her hand, come “bride-seeing,” he could not have studied her more closely than he did now. Indeed, so absorbed was he in her that once while she was speaking to him laughingly her words fell on a deaf ear because at that moment he was remarking to himself: “She laughs in a little rising scale, breaking off in a rocket.”
“There must be something in her, then,” he thought “which was the source of that noble feeling and of that courage.” He took to scanning her afresh, as though looking for a reflection of that something in her face, and as he looked at her and thought of the Pievakin “demonstration” it gave him pleasure to exaggerate her instrumentality in his own political regeneration.
Olga had relieved her fiancé at the piano, and later on when she, too, rose from the keyboard, Clara eagerly tookher place. There was no life in Mlle. Yavner’s tones, but the impassioned sway of her head and form as she played told of a soul touched with ecstasy; told of the music which her fingers failed to evoke from the instrument. And the eyes of half a dozen love-stricken men added their rapture to the sounds.
Pavel listened to her melody and breathed the scented night air that came in from the little garden in the yard. He reflected that Clara might visit the warden’s house as a piano teacher. At this it came home to him that Makar was in prison, and that unless he escaped he was a lost man. He was seized with terror. The piano sang of a lonely ship, blue waves, and a starlit night, but to Pavel it spoke of his imprisoned friend and his own anguish. He joined in the chorus with ferocious ardour. His heart was crying for Makar’s liberation and for a thousand other things. When she left the piano stool he leaped up to her.
“Allow me to grasp your hand, Clara Rodionovna,” he said, as though thanking her for the merit of her playing. And then, all unmindful of comment, he drew her into a secluded corner and said vehemently:
“I wish also to tell you, Clara Rodionovna, that I have a special reason to be glad of knowing you; for if I have a right to be among good people it is you whom I have to thank for it.” A thick splash of crimson came into her face; but before she had time to put her surprise into words, he poured forth the story of his awakening and how he had all these five years been looking forward to a meeting with her. As he spoke his face bore an expression of ecstatic, almost amorous grimness. The girl was taken by storm. She was literally dazed. An overwhelming, unspoken intimacy established itself between them on the spot.
Olga’s face was a blend of beaming triumph and tense perplexity. The men were making an effort to treat Boulatoff’s sally with discretion, as if it were a bit of revolutionary conspiracy and they knew enough to mind their own business.
IT was one o’clock when the assemblage broke up. They scattered over various sections of the town, Pavel going to his home in the Palace, while Clara, accompanied by Elkin and Orlovsky, set off in the direction of Paradise Town. But whatever the character of the district one was bound for, in their hearts there was the same feeling that they belonged to a higher life than did those who slept behind the closed shutters they were passing. This feeling made them think of their group as a world within a world. Their Circle was a magic one. Somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kieff, Odessa, Siberia, men and women were being slowly tortured, dying on the gallows; a group of brave people still at large—the mysterious Executive Committee—was doing things that thrilled the empire; and they, members of the Miroslav Circle, were the kin of those heroes. As they dispersed through the sleeping town each unconsciously remembered the organisation as so many superior beings dotting a population of human prose.
“He must be quite close to the Centre,” Orlovsky said.
The other two made no answer. It struck Clara as sacrilege to talk of Boulatoff, whose fervent face was vivid before her at this minute. Particularly unbearable was the allusion to the prince to her because it was Orlovskywho made it. The stout government clerk was one of the men in love with her, while she often disliked him to abhorrence. She felt a sincere friendship for him, yet sometimes when he spoke she would be tempted to shut her ears and to gnash her teeth as people do when they hear a window pane scratched. This was one of her causeless hatreds with which she was perpetually struggling.
Orlovsky construed their irresponsiveness as a rebuke for his speaking of the revolutionary “centre” in the street; so he started to tell them about his mother. With Clara by his side his tongue would not rest. Not so Elkin, who nursed his love in morose silence. When they heard the whistle of a distant policeman and the answer of a watchman’s rattle by way of showing that he had not fallen asleep on his post, Orlovsky raised his voice.
“She is getting more pious every day,” he said, as though defying the invisible policeman to find anything seditious in his words.
Clara’s mind was on Boulatoff. The strange avowal of the man whom she had never seen before save through the window of a princely carriage tingled through her veins in a medley of new-born exaltations. Boulatoff did seem to be close to the Executive Committee, and the sentiments of that wonderful body, voiced by this high-born young man, the nephew of the governor of Miroslav, had lit stirring images in her consciousness. Pavel stood out amid the other revolutionists of her acquaintance even as the whole Miroslav Circle did in the midst of the rest of her native town.
The interchange of signals between policeman and watchman which now and then sounded through the stillness of the night reminded her of the unknown man the gendarmes had arrested, of the hard glint of chains,of gallows. She wondered whether Elkin or Boulatoff knew anything about that man. She saw herself rapidly marching toward something at once terrible and divine. She was not the only one who followed this course—that was the great point. The kindest and best people in Miroslav, the best and the wisest in the land, and among them children of governors, of noblemen, were consecrated to that same something which was both terrible and luring. Her heart went out to her comrades known and unknown, and as she beheld a sleepy watchman curled up in the recess of his gateway, she exclaimed without words: “I’m going to die for you—for you and all the other poor and oppressed people in the world.”
Here and there they passed an illuminated window or an open street door, through which they saw Jewish artisans at work. They saw the bent forms of Jewish tailors, they heard the hammer sounds of Jewish carpenters, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, silversmiths; yet all these made no impression upon her. There were about 50,000 Jews in Miroslav and as many asthree-fourthsof them were pinched, half-starved mechanics, working fourteen hours a day, and once or twice a week all night, to live on rye bread and oatmeal soup; yet they made no appeal to her sympathies, while the Gentiles who were huddled up in front of the gates she was passing did. The great Russian writers whose stories and songs had laid the foundation to her love of the masses dealt in Gentiles, not in Jews. Nekrasoff bewailed the misery of the Russian moujik, not of the common people of her own race. Turgeneff’s sketches breathe forth the poetry of suffering in a Great-Russian village, not the tragedy and spiritual beauty of life among the toiling men and women of her own blood. She had never been in Great Russia, in fact; shehad never seen those moujiks in the flesh. Those she had seen were the Little-Russian peasants, who came to Miroslav from the neighbouring villages. Her peasants, therefore, were so many literary images, each with the glamour which radiates from the pages of an adored author. This was the kind of “people” she had in mind when she thought of theWill of the People. The Jewish realities of which her own home was a part had nothing to do with this imaginary world of hers.
Clara’s home was on a small square which was partly used as a cart-stand and in one corner of which, a short distance from Cucumber Market, squatted a policeman’s hut. This was the district of a certain class of artisans and small tradesmen; of harness-makers, trunk-makers, wheelwrights; of dealers in tar, salt, herring, leaf tobacco, pipes, accordions, cheap finery. The air was pungent with a thousand strong odours. The peasants who brought their produce to market were here supplied with necessaries and trinkets. The name of the big market-place extended to the entire locality, and Paradise Town was just beyond the confines of that locality.
The square for which Clara was bound was called Little Market. A gate in the centre of one of its four sides, flanked by goose-yards on one side and by a row of feed-shops and harness-shops on the other, led into a deep and narrow court, known as Boyko’s. At this moment the gate was closed, its wicket, held ajar by a chain, showing black amid the grey gloom of the square.
As Clara and her two escorts came in sight of the spot they saw a man sitting on a low wooden bench near the gate.
“Somebody is waiting for me,” she said gravely. Shethanked them and bade them good-bye and they went their several ways.
The man on the bench rose and went to meet her. As he walked toward her he leaned heavily on his stout, knotty cane—a pose which she knew to be the result of embarrassment. He was a tall, athletic fellow in a long spring overcoat, a broad-brimmed felt hat sloping backward on his head. He bore striking resemblance to Clara; the same picturesque flatness in the middle part of the face, the same expression. Only his hair was dark, and his eyes and mouth were milder than hers. They looked like brother and sister and, indeed, had been brought up almost as such, but they were only cousins. His name was Vladimir Vigdoroff. His family was the better-to-do and the worldlier of the two. When he was a boy of four and he envied certain other two boys because each of them had a little sister, and he had not, he had made one of his cousin. It was his father who subsequently paid for Clara’s education.
“You here?” Clara said quietly.
He nodded, to say yes, with playful chivalry. They reached the bench in silence, and then he said in a decisive, business-like voice which she knew to be studied:
“I expected to have a talk with you, Clara. That’s why I waited so long. But it’s too late. Can I see you to-morrow?”
“Certainly. Will you drop in in the afternoon?”
He had evidently expected to be detained. He lingered in silence, and she had not the heart to say good-bye. From a neighbouring lane came the buzz-buzz of a candlestick-maker’s lathe. They were both agitated. She had been looking forward to this explanation for some time. They divined each other perfectly. As they now stoodawkwardly without being able either to speak or to part, their minds were in reality saying a good deal to each other.
Until recently she had made her home in her uncle’s house more than she had in her father’s. Her piano stood there, her uncle’s gift, for which there was no room in the basement occupied by her parents. She had kept her books there, received her girl friends and often slept there. But since her initiation into the secret society she had gradually removed her headquarters to her parents’ house, and her visits at Vladimir’s home had become few and far between. Clara had once offered him an underground leaflet, whereupon he had nearly fainted with fright at sight of it. He had burned the paper in terror and indignation, and then, speaking partly like an older brother and partly like the master of the house which she was compromising, he had commanded her never again to go near people who handled literature of that sort. Accustomed to look up to him as her intellectual guide and authority, as the most brilliant man within her horizon, she had listened to his attack upon Nihilism and Nihilists with meek reserve, but the new influences she had fallen under had proven far stronger than his power over her. To relieve him from the hazards of her presence in the house she had little by little removed her books and practically discontinued her visits. In the event of her getting into trouble with the gendarmes her own family was too old-fashioned and uneducated, in a modern sense, to be suspected of complicity. As to Vladimir, he missed her keenly, as did everybody else in the house, but her estrangement had a special sting to it, too, one unconnected with their mutual attachment as cousins who had grown up together. Clara’s consideration for his safety, implyingas it did that he was too timid and too jealous for his personal security to work for the revolution, an inferior being uninitiated into the world of pluck and self-sacrifice to which she, until recently his pupil, belonged, galled him inordinately.
At last he lost control over himself.
“You are playing with fire, Clara,” he said, lingering by the bench.
“I suppose that’s what you want to speak to me about,” she answered with calm earnestness, “but this is hardly the place for a discussion of this sort, Volodia.”[B]
“If you want me to go home you had better say so in so many words. The high-minded interests you are cultivating are scarcely compatible with shyness or lack of frankness, Clara.”
“Don’t be foolish, Volodia. You know you will make fun of yourself for having spoken like that.”
“I didn’t mean to say anything harsh, Clara. But this thing is scarcely ever out of my mind. It’s a terrible fate you have chosen.”
“How do you know I have?” she asked in a meditative tone that implied assent.
“How do I know? Can’t we have a frank, honest talk for once, Clara? Let us go somewhere.”
“We can talk here. To be on the safe side of it, let us talk in Yiddish.”
He made a grimace of repugnance, and seating himself on the bench he went on in nervous Russian.
“You have fallen into company that will do you no good, Clara. If you are arrested it will break the heart of two families. Is there no soul left in you?”
“What put it into your mind that I should be arrested?”she returned, lugubriously. “And is that all one ought to be concerned about? All Russia is in prison.”
“I expected something of that sort. Alluring phrases have made you deaf and blind. It is my duty to try to save you before it is too late.”
He had come for friendly remonstrance, for an open-hearted explanation, but that mood had been shattered the moment he saw her approaching with two of her new friends. He persisted in using the didactic tone he had been in the habit of taking with her, and he could not help feeling how ridiculously out of place it had become. He chafed under a sense of his lost authority, and the impotent superiority of his own manner impelled him to bitterness.
“Is that what you have come for—to rescue me from empty phrases and bad company?”
“Yes, to rescue you from the intoxication of bombast and dangerous company, whether you are in a sarcastic mood or not.”
“And how are you going to do it, pray?” she asked with rather good-natured gaiety.
“Laugh away. Laugh away. Since you took up with those scamps——”
“Scamps! I can’t let you speak like that, Volodia. I don’t know what you mean by ‘taking’ up with them, but if by ‘scamps’ you mean people who are sacrificing themselves——”
“You misunderstand me——”
“If by scamps you mean people who will be tortured or hanged for opposing the tyranny that is crushing us all rather than feather their own nests, then it is useless for us to continue this talk.”
“Be calm, Clara. You don’t wish to misjudge me, doyou? Of course, I needn’t tell you that what you say about sacrificing oneself and all that sort of business is no news to me. Some other time, when you are not excited, I may have something to say about these things——”
“That everlasting ‘something to say!’ People are being throttled, butchered and you—you have ‘something to say.’ We are speaking in two different languages, Volodia.”
“Maybe we are. And I must say you have picked up that new language of yours rather quickly. I am not going to enter into a lengthy discussion with you to-night. All I will say now is this: You know that four Jewish revolutionists have been hanged within the last few months—in Odessa, Nicolayeff, Kieff and St. Petersburg. If you think that does the Jewish people any good I am very sorry.”
“What else would you have Jews do? Roll on feather-beds and collect usury? Would that do ‘the Jewish people’ good?”
“You talk like an anti-Semite, Clara.”
“There is no accounting for tastes. You may call it anti-Semitism. You may be ashamed of four men who die bravely in a terrible struggle against despotism.”
He cast an uneasy look in the direction of the police booth, but his courage failed him to urge her to lower her voice.
“As for me,” she went on, “I certainly am proud of them. I hold their names sacred, yes, sacred, sacred, sacred, do you understand? And if you intend to continue calling such people scamps then there is nothing left for us to say to each other. And, by the way, since when haveyoubeen a champion of ‘the Jewish people’—you whohave taught me to keep away from everything Jewish; you who are shocked by the very sound of Yiddish, by the very sight of a wig or a pair of side-locks; you who are continually boasting of the Gentiles you are chumming with; you who would give all the Jews in the world for one handshake of a Christian?”
“Well, I am prepared to take abuse, too, to-night. As to my hatred of Yiddish and side-locks, that does no harm to anybody. If all Jews dropped their antediluvian ways and became assimilated with the Russian population half of the unfortunate Jewish question would be solved.”
“Oh, this kind of talk is really enough to drive one mad. The whole country is choking for breath, and here you are worrying over the Jewish question. But then—since when haveyoubeen interested in the Jews and their ‘question?’”
“Whether I have or not, I never helped to aggravate it as those ‘heroes’ of yours do. If there are some few rights which the Jew still enjoys, they, too, will be taken away from him on account of that new-fangled heroism which has turned your head.”
“Nobody has any ‘rights.’ Everybody is trampled upon, everybody. That’s what those ‘scamps’ are struggling to do away with.”
“Everybody has to die for that matter, yet who cares to die an unnatural death? If the Jews were oppressed like all others and no more, it would be another matter, but they are not. Theirs is an unnatural oppression.”
“Well, that’s what those ‘scamps’ are struggling for: to do away with every sort of oppression. Would you have the Jews keep out of that struggle? Would you have them take care of their own precious skins, and later on,when life becomes possible in Russia, to come in for a share of the fruit of a terrible fight that they carefully stayed away from?”
“Those are dreams, Clara. Dreams and phrases, phrases and dreams. That’s all you have learned of your new friends. Do you deny the existence of a Jewish question?”
She scrutinised his face in the grey half-tones of the gathering dawn and said calmly:
“Look here, Volodia, you know you are seizing at this ‘Jewish question’ as a drowning man does at a straw. You know you have no more interest in it than I have.”
“I am certainly not delighted to see it exist, if that’s what you mean.”
“May I be frank with you, Volodia? All the Jews of the world might cease to exist, for all you care.”
“It isn’t true. All I want is that they should become Russians, cultured Russians.”
“Well, as for me there is only one question—the question of plain common justice and plain elementary liberty. When this has been achieved there won’t be any such thing as a Jewish, Polish or Hottentot question. Yes, those ‘scamps’ are the only real friends the Jews have.”
“But one cannot live on the golden mist of that glorious future of yours, Clara. It takes a saint to do that. Every-day mortals cannot help thinking of equal rights before the law in the sordid present.”
“Think away! Much good will it do the Jews. The only kind of equal rights possible to-day is for Jew and Gentile to die on the same gallows for liberty. That’s the ‘scamps’’ view ofit.”At this the word struck her in conjunction with the images of Boulatoff, Olga, thejudge, and the other members of the Circle, whereupon she burst out, with a stifled sob in her voice: “How dare you abuse those people?”
Not only had she broken loose from his tutelage, but he had found himself on the defensive. They had changed rôles. The pugnacious tone of conviction, almost of inspiration, with which she parried his jibes nonplussed him. Usually a bright talker, he was now colourless and floundering. And the more he tried to work himself back to his old-time mastery the more helplessly at a disadvantage he appeared.
“I don’t recognise you, Clara,” he said. “They have mesmerised you, those phrase-makers.”
She leaped to her feet. “I don’t intend to hear any more of this abuse,” she said. “And the idea of you finding fault with phrase-makers! you of all men, you to whom a well-turned phrase is dearer than all else in the world! If they make phrases they are willing to suffer for them at least.”
“Oh well, they have made a perfect savage of you,” he retorted under his breath. “Good night.”
She was left with a sharp twinge of compunction, but she had barely dived under the wicket chain when her thoughts reverted to Boulatoff and what he had said to her.
AT Boyko’s Court the chilly dawn lit up a barricade of wheels, axles, and bodies of peasant waggons. Through wide cracks of a fence came the shifting light of a lantern and the sleepy cackling of geese. At the far end of the deep narrow court hung the pulley chains and bucket of a roofed well. Clara went through a spacious subterranean passage, dark as a pocket and filled with the odour of paint. It was crowded with stacks of trunks, finished and unfinished, but she steered clear of them without having to feel her way.
A door swung open, revealing a dimly lighted low-ceiled interior. The odour of sleep mingled with the odours of paint and putty.
“Is that you, Tamara?” asked a tall, erect, half-naked old woman in Yiddish, Tamara being the Jewish name which had been arbitrarily transformed, at Vladimir’s instance, into Clara.
“Yes, mamma darling,” Clara replied.
“Master of the universe! You get no sleep at all.”
The girl kissed her mother gayly. “You know what papa says,” she rejoined, “‘sleep is one sixtieth of death.’ Life is better, mamma dear.”
“I have not studied any of your Gentile books, yet I know enough to understand that to be alive is betterthan to be dead,” the tall, erect old woman said without smiling. “But if you want to be alive you must sleep. Go to bed, go to bed.”
There were between them relations of quizzical comradeship, implying that each treated the interests of the other with patronising levity, with the reservation of a common ground upon which they met on terms of equality and ardent friendship.
“By the way,” the old woman added, yawning, “Volodia was here. He wants to see you.”
“I know. I found him at the gate.”
“Very well, then, go to bed, go to bed.”
“Is father asleep?”
At this a red-bearded little man in yellow drawers and a white shirt open at the neck and exposing a hairy breast, burst from an open side door.
“How can one sleep when one is not allowed to?” he fired out. “May she sink into the earth, her ungodly books and all. I’ll break every unclean bone in you. Who ever heard of a girl roaming around as late as that?”
“Hush,” his wife said with a faint smile, as she urged him back to their bed-room, much as she would a child.
The family occupied one large basement room, the better part of which was used as a trunk-maker’s shop and a kitchen, two narrow strips of its space having been partitioned off for bed-rooms. It was Hannah, Clara’s mother, who conducted the trunk business. The bare wooden boxes came from a carpenter’s shop and she had them transformed into trunks at her house. Clara’s father spent his days and evenings in a synagogue, studying the Talmud “for its own sake.” There were other such scholars in Miroslav, the wife in each case supporting the family by engaging in earthly business, whileher husband was looking after their common spiritual welfare in the house of God. Clara’s mother was generally known as “Hannah the trunk-maker,” or “Hannah the Devil.” In her very humble way she was a shrewd business woman, tireless, scheming, and not over-scrupulous, but her nickname had originated long before she was old enough to be a devil on Cucumber Market. She was a little girl when there appeared in the neighbourhood what Anglo-Saxons would call “Jack the Window-Smasher.” Window-pane after window-pane was cracked without there being the remotest clue to the source of the mischief. The bewigged old women said it was an evil spirit, and engaged a “master of the name” to exorcise it from the community; but the number of broken windows continued to grow. The devil proved to be Hannah, and the most startling thing about the matter, according to the bewigged women of the neighbourhood, was this, that when caught in the act, she did not even cry, but just lowered her eyes and frowned saucily.
Rabbi Rachmiel, as Clara’s father was addressed by strangers, was innocent of “things of the world” as an infant—a hot-tempered, simple-minded scholar, with the eyes and manner of a tiger and the heart of a dove. His wife tied his shirt-strings, helped him on with his socks and boots, and generally took care of him as she might of a baby. When he spoke of worldly things to her, she paid no heed to his talk. When he happened to drop a saying from the Talmud she would listen reverently for more, without understanding a word of what he said.
Had Clara been a boy her father would have sooner allowed her to be burned alive than to be taught “Gentile wisdom.” But woman is out of the count in the Jewishchurch, so he neither interfered nor tried to understand the effect that Gentile education was having on her.
Father, mother and daughter represented three distinct worlds, Clara being as deeply engrossed in her “Gentile wisdom” as Rabbi Rachmiel was in his Talmud, or as her mother in her trunks. That the girl belonged to a society that was plotting against the Czar the old people had not the remotest idea, of course.
Besides Clara and her married sister the old couple had two sons, one of them a rabbi in a small town and the other a merchant in the same place.
Clara put out the smoky light of a crude chimneyless little lamp (with a piece of wire to work the wick up and down), which had been left burning for her. A few streaks of raw daylight crept in through the shutters, falling on a pair of big rusty shears fastened to the top of a wooden block, on a heap of sheet-iron, and on several rows of old Talmudic folios which lined the stretch of wall between Clara’s partition and one of the two windows.
AS Pavel mounted the majestic staircase of his mother’s residence he became aware that an abstract facial expression was all his memory retained of Mlle. Yavner’s likeness. He coveted another glance at her much as a man covets to hear again a new song that seems to be singing itself in his mind without his being able to reproduce it.
He found his mother sitting up for him, on the verge of a nervous collapse. She took him to a large, secluded room, the best in the vast house fortête-à-têtepurposes. It was filled with mementoes, the trophies of her father’s diplomatic career, with his proud collection of rare and costly inkstands, and with odds and ends of ancient furniture, each with a proud history as clear-cut as the pedigree of a high-born race-horse.
Anna Nicolayevna had planned to lead up to the main question diplomatically, but she was scarcely seated on a huge, venerable couch (which made her look smaller than ever) than she turned pale and blurted out in a whisper:
“Did you cross the bridge this afternoon?”
“No. Why?” He said this with fatigued curiosity and looking her full in the face.
She dropped her glance. “I thought I saw you there.”
“You were mistaken, then, but what makes you look souneasy? I did not go in that direction at all, but suppose I did. Why, what has happened?”
She cowed before the insistence of his interrogations and beat a retreat.
“I am not uneasy at all. I must have been mistaken, then. It is about Kostia I have been wanting to speak to you. It is quite a serious matter. You see he is too delicate for the military schools. So I was thinking of putting him in the gymnasium, but then many of the boys there are children of undesirable people. One can’t be too careful these days.” She was now speaking according to her carefully considered program, and growing pale once more, she fixed him with a searching glance, as she asked: “You must have heard of the man the gendarmes caught, haven’t you?”
“Oh, you mean the fellow who would not open his mouth,” he said with a smile. “Quite a sensation for a town like this. In St. Petersburg or Moscow they catch them so often it has ceased to be news.”
She went on to speak of the evil of Nihilism, Pavel listening with growing interest, like a man who had given the matter some consideration. Poor Anna Nicolayevna! She was no match for him.
Finally he got up. “Well, I don’t really know,” he said. “It seems to me the trouble lies much deeper than that,mamman. Those fellows, the Nihilists, don’t amount to anything in themselves. If it were not for that everlasting Russian helplessness of ours they could do no more harm than a group of flies. Our factories and successful farms are all run by Germans; we simply can’t take care of the least thing.”
“But what have factories and farms to do with the pranks of demoralised boys?”
He smiled. “But if we were not a helpless, shiftless nation a handful of boys couldn’t frighten us, could they?”
“Very well. Let us suppose you are a minister. What would you do?”
“What would I do? I shouldn’t let things come to such a pass, to begin with.”
He was tempted to cast circumspection to the winds and to thunder out his real impeachment of existing conditions. This, however, he could not afford; so he felt like a boat that is being rowed across stream with a strong current to tempt her downward. He was sailing in a diagonal direction. Every now and then he would let himself drift along, only presently to take up his oars and strike out for the bank again. He spoke in his loud rapid way. Every now and again he would break off, fall to pacing the floor silently and listening to the sound of his own voice which continued to ring in his ears, as though his words remained suspended in the air.
Anna Nicolayevna—a curled-up little heap capped by an enormous pile of glossy auburn hair, in the corner of a huge couch—followed him intently. Once or twice she nodded approval to a severe attack upon the government, without realising that he was speaking against the Czar. She was at a loss to infer whether he was opposed to the new advisers of the Emperor in the same way in which her brother-in-law and the ultra-conservative Slavophiles were opposed to them or whether he was some kind of liberal. He certainly seemed to tend toward the Slavophiles in his apparent hatred of foreigners.
“They’ll kill him, those murderous youngsters, they are sure to kill him,” he shouted at one point, speaking of the Czar. “And who is to blame? Is such a state of things possible anywhere in Western Europe?”
Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as she shrank deeper into the corner of the couch.
She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Her pity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom and glint of martyrdom on his face—the face of Alexander II. Quite apart from this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasy of thought and feeling—of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. She was in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be a weightier personage than ever. The haze that enveloped him was thickening. Nevertheless his strictures upon Russia’s incapacity left her rankling with a desire to refute them. That national self-conceit which breeds in every child the conviction that his is the greatest country in the world and that its superiority is cheerfully conceded by all other nations, reasserted itself in the countess with resentful emphasis. To be sure, all the skill, ingenuity and taste of the refined world came from abroad, but this did not lessen her contempt for foreigners any more than did the fact that all acrobats and hair-dressers were Germans or Frenchmen. Her childhood had been spent in foreign countries and she knew their languages as well as she did her own; nevertheless her abstraction of a foreigner was a man who spoke broken Russian—a lisping, stammering, cringing imbecile. She revolted to think of Russia as being inferior to wretches of this sort, and when the bridge incident swept back upon her in all the clearness of fact, her blood ran chill again. “He is the man I saw in the waggon after all,” she said to herself, in dismay.
She went to bed, but tossed about in an agony of restlessness. When the darkness of her room began to thinand the brighter objects loomed into view, she slipped on a wrapper and seated herself at a window, courting composure in the blossom-scented air that came up from the garden; but all to no purpose. Ever and anon, after a respite of tranquillity she would be seized with a new rush of consternation. Pasha was the man she had seen on the bridge, disguised as an artisan; he was a Nihilist.
While Anna Nicolayevna was thus harrowed with doubt, Pavel was pacing his room, his heart on the point of bursting with a desire to see his mother again and to make a clean breast of it. The notion of her being outwitted and made sport of touched him with pity. Come what might, his poor noble-hearted mother must be kept in the dark no longer. She would appreciate his feelings. He would plead with her, with tears in his eyes he would implore her to open her eyes to the appalling inhumanity of the prevailing adjustment of things. And as he visioned himself making this plea to her, his own sense of the barbarity of the existing regime set his blood simmering in him, and quickened his desire to lay it all before his mother.
Presently somebody rapped on his door. It was Anna Nicolayevna.
“I must speak to you, Pasha; I can’t get any sleep,” she said.
They went into a newly-built summer house. The jumble of colour and redolence was invaded with light that asserted its presence like a great living spirit. The orchard seemed to be worlds away from itself.
As a precaution, they spoke in French.
“Pasha, you are the man I saw on the bridge,” she said. “You are a Nihilist.”
“Sh-h, don’t be agitated, mother dear, I beg of you,”he replied with tender emphasis. “I am going to tell you all. Only first compose yourself, mamma darling, and hear me out. Yes, I’m what you call a Nihilist, but I am not the man you saw.”
“You a Nihilist, Pasha!” she whispered, staring at him, as though a great physical change had suddenly come over him. “Anyhow, you have nothing to do with the man they have arrested?”
He shook his head and she felt relieved. His avowal of being a Nihilist was so startling a confession to make, that she believed all he said. He was a Nihilist, then—a Nihilist in the abstract; something shocking, no doubt, but remote, indefinite, vague. The concrete Nihilism contained in the picture of a man disguised as a laborer and having some thing to do with the fellow under arrest—that would have been quite another matter. He told her the story of his conversion in simple, heart-felt eloquence; he pictured the reign of police terror, the slow massacre of school-children in the political dungeons, the brutal fleecing and maltreatment of a starving peasantry.
“I found myself in a new world, mother,” he said. “It was a world in which the children of refined, well-bred families fervently believed that he who did not work for the good of the common people was not a man of real honour. Indeed, of what use has the nobility been to the world? They are a lot of idlers,mamman, a lot of good-for-nothings. For centuries we have been living on the fat of the earth, luxuriating in the toil, misery and ignorance of the peasants. It is to their drudgery and squalor that we owe our material and mental well-being. We ought to feel ashamed for living at the expense of these degraded, literally starving creatures; yet we go on living off their wretchedness and even pride ourselves upon doing so. Letus repay our debt to them by working for their real emancipation. We have grown fat on serfdom, so we must give our blood to undo it, to bring about the reign of liberty. This is the sum and substance of our creed, mother. This is the faith that has taken hold of me. It is my religion and will be as long as I live.”
In his entire experience as a revolutionary speaker he had never felt as he did at the present moment.
A host of sparrows burst into song and activity, all together, as though at the stroke of a conductor’s baton; and at this it seemed as if the flood of perfume had taken a spurt and the sunlight had begun to smile and speak. He went on in the same strain, and she listened as she would to a magic tale that had no bearing upon the personality of her son. His voice, sharp and irascible as it often sounded, was yet melodious in its undercurrent tone of filial devotion. The vital point, indeed, was that at last he was uncovering his soul to her. She was not shocked by what she heard. Rather, she was proud of his readiness to sacrifice himself for an ideal, and what is more, she felt that his world lured her heart also.
“But the Emperor is a noble soul, Pasha,” she said. “He has emancipated the serfs. If there ever was a friend of the common people the present Czar is one.”
Her objections found him ready. He had gone over these questions hundreds of times before, and he gave her the benefit of all his former discussions and reading. At times he would borrow a point or two from Zachar’s speeches. Touching upon the emancipation of the serfs, he contended that Alexander II. had been forced to the measure by the disastrous results of the Crimean War; and that the peasants, having been defrauded of their land, were now worse off than ever.
“Oh, mother,” he suddenly exclaimed, “whenever you think of the abolition of serfdom think also of the row of gallows he had erected about that very time for noble-minded Polish patriots. Do you remember Mme. Oginska, that unfortunate Polish woman we met at the health-resort? Gallows, gallows, nothing but gallows in his reign.”
When she referred to the late war “in behalf of the oppressed Slavonic races of the Balkans,” Pavel asked her why the Czar had not first thought of his own oppressed Russians, and whether it was not hypocrisy to send one’s slaves to die for somebody else’s freedom. The Emperor had secured a constitution for Bulgaria, had he? Why, then, was he hanging those who were striving for one in his own land? A war of emancipation indeed! It was the old Romanoff greed for territory, for conquest, for bloodshed.
He literally bore her down by a gush of arguments, facts, images. Now and again he would pause, sit looking at the grass in grim silence, and then, burst into another torrent of oratory. It was said of Zachar that a single speech of his was enough to make a convert of the most hopeless conservative. Pavel was far from possessing any such powers of pleading eloquence, when his audience was made up of strangers, but he certainly scored a similar victory by the appeal which he was now addressing to his mother.
He went to order coffee. When he returned, reveille was sounding in the barracks.
“There you have it!” he said. “Do you know what that sound means? It means that the youngest, the best forces of the country are turned into weapons of human butchery.”
The brass notes continued, somewhat cracked at times, but loud and vibrant with imperious solemnity.
“It means, too, that people are forced to keep themselves in chains at the point of their own bayonets,” he added.
The next few days were spent by the countess in reading “underground” literature. She was devouring paper after paper and pamphlet after pamphlet with tremulous absorption. The little pile before her included scientific treatises, poetry and articles of a polemical nature, and she read it all; but she was chiefly interested in the hair-breadth escapes, pluck and martyrdom of the revolutionists. The effect this reading had on her was something like the thrilling experience she had gone through many years ago when she was engrossed in the Lives of Saints.
“It makes one feel twenty years younger,” she said to Pavel, bashfully, as she laid down a revolutionary print and took the glasses off her tired eyes one forenoon.