IN June of that year, shortly before Makar escaped from prison, the unhappy Empress of Russia died after a long illness that was generally ascribed to her many years of jealousy and anguish. The Czar signified his intention to enter into morganatic wedlock with Princess Dolgoruki at once. His sons and brothers remonstrated with him, pleading for a postponement of the marriage until the end of a year’s mourning; but he was passionately devoted to the princess, with whom he had been on terms of intimacy for the past few years; he was determined to have these relations legitimatised, and, in view of the unrelenting campaign of the Terrorists, he felt that he could not do so too soon. Several members of the imperial family then went on a foreign tour, and the wedding was quietly solemnised on July 31 in Livadia, Crimea, where the Czar and his bride remained for a long honeymoon.
Pavel’s and Clara’s wedding was to take place in the early part of October. The relations of the sexes among the Nihilists were based upon the highest ideals of purity, and the marriage bond was sacred in the best sense of the word, but they were not given to celebrating their weddings. When a couple became man and wife the fact was recognised as tacitly as it was made known, the adoption by the bride of her husband’s name being out of the question ina world in which passports and names were apt to be changed every day. Still, there were exceptions, and Pavel insisted upon being one of these. In his overflowing bliss he often cast the spartanism of the movement to the winds, and now he was bent upon indulging himself in the “romanticism†of having his wedding proclaimed at a gathering of his most intimate friends. This was to be done at the close of an important revolutionary meeting, at the same lodgings where we once saw Pavel, Zachar and My Lord at a gathering of military officers. A high government official who occupied the first floor of the same building was giving an elaborate reception which kept the house porters busy and the street in front crowded with carriages and idlers; so the central organisation of the Party of the Will of the People took advantage of the occasion and held one of its general meetings under cover of the excitement. The assemblage, which was made up of about sixty or seventy persons of both sexes, comprised nearly every member of the Executive Committee in town, and some candidates for admission to the Executive who were allowed to participate in its deliberations without a vote. Most of the revolutionists present had taken part in attempts on the life of the Czar, as also in some of the recent assassinations. One man, a southerner, was the hero of the most sensational rescue during the past few years, having snatched from the Kieff prison, in which he had contrived to obtain the position of head keeper, three leaders of an extensive revolutionary plot. This man, the Janitor and Purring Cat now constituted the Governing Board (a sub-committee clothed with dictatorial powers) of the Terrorists’ Executive.
The police were hunting for the people here gathered throughout the empire. Had the present meeting beendiscovered by spies the whole movement would have been seriously crippled for a considerable time. Indeed, the complex conspiracies of the Will of the People were an element of fatal weakness as well as a manifestation of fascinating strength. The Terror absorbed the best resources of the party, necessitating highly centralised organisation, with the threads of a scattered national propaganda in the hands of a few “illegals†who were liable to be seized at any moment.
The street was full of police, but these had all they could do to salute the distinguished guests of the first floor and to take care of the carriages and the crowd of curiosity seekers.
Partly through Pavel’s influence and partly because she was an “illegal†and had produced a very favourable impression, Clara had made the acquaintance of many of the revolutionary leaders and been admitted as a probationary member of the Executive Committee. The present gathering was the first general meeting of the central body she had attended.
“So this is the Executive Committee!†she was saying to herself. This, then, was the mysterious force that people were talking about in timid whispers; that the Czar dreaded; that was going to make everybody free and good and happy. This was it, and she was attending its meeting. She could scarcely believe her senses that she actually was there. She knew many of the members, but she had never seen several of them together. The present meeting almost benumbed her with a feeling of reverence, awe, and gratitude. Even those she had met often since her arrival in St. Petersburg seemed different beings now, as though spiritualised into that mysterious force that seemed mightier than the Czar and holier than divinity.An overpowering state of exaltation, of something akin to the ecstasy of a woman upon taking the veil, came over her. Pavel was dearer than ever to her, but in her present mood their love impressed her as a jarring note. Self-sacrifice, not personal happiness, was what appealed to her, and by degrees she keyed herself up to a frame of mind in which her prospective married life seemed a gross profanation of the sanctuary to which she had been admitted.
“Let us postpone it, Pasha dear,†she whispered to him, with a thrilling sense of sacrificing her happiness to the cause.
“Why?†he demanded in perplexity.
They went into the adjoining room. “What is the trouble? What’s the trouble?†he demanded, light-heartedly.
“No trouble at all, dearest,†she answered affectionately. “You are dearer than ever to me, but pray let us postpone it.â€
“But there must be some reason for it,†he said with irritation.
“Don’t be vexed, Pashenka. There is really no special reason. I simply don’t feel like being married—yet. I want to give my life to the movement, Pasha. I am enjoying too much happiness as it is.†She uttered it in grave, measured, matter-of-fact accents, but her hazel eyes reflected the uplifted state of her soul.
“Oh!†he exclaimed with a mixed sense of relief and adoration. “If that’s what you mean, all I can say is that I am not worthy of you, Clara; but of course, the question of giving our lives to the cause has nothing to do with the question of our belonging to each other. Or, rather, it’s one and the same thing.â€
She made no reply. The very discussion of the subject jarred on her.
“You are in a peculiar mood now, and you are an angel, anyhow, but to-morrow you’ll see the matter in a different light.â€
“At any rate, let us postpone it, Pashenka.†And she led the way back to the meeting room.
Many of the company knew of the expected announcement, and when they heard that it was not to take place they felt sorely disappointed. When the business of the meeting had been disposed of, a Terrorist named Sablin waggishly drank the health of Mlle. Yavner and the social revolution, to the accompaniment of the rapturous band of the first floor, and then he began to improvise burlesque verses on her as a newcomer, with allusions to her power over Pavel. This revolutionist was one of the “twin poets†of the party, his muse, which had a weakness for satire, being the gayer of the two. The “grave bard,†whose name was Morosoff, was in Switzerland now. The two were great chums. As always, Sablin was the great convivial spirit of the company. When he was not versifying, he was making jokes, telling anecdotes or trying to speakLittle-Russian to Purring Cat, who, being fromLittleRussia, answered his questions with smiling passivity. Some of his rhymes related to Purring Cat’s interminable side-whiskers, Zachar’s habit of throwing out his chest as he walked, the reticence of the tall man with the Tartarian face, and, above all, the Janitor’s explosions of wrath when one “was not continually leering around for spies.â€
The Janitor cursed him good-humouredly, without stuttering, and resumed his discussion with a man who looked like the conventional image of Christ, and with Urie, thetall blond man with typical Great-Russian features who had introduced Pavel to the Nihilist world and whom he still called “Godfather.†The gay poet then took to versifying on the “three blond beards†of this trio.
Zachar made the most noise, dancing cossack hops till the floor shook under his feet, singing at the top of his lungs, filling the large room with deafening guffaws. Baska, the light complexioned “housewife†of the dynamite shop, who looked like a peasant woman, was the greatest giggler of all the women present. Grisha, her passport husband at that shop, and her real husband—a thin man with Teutonic features, known among the revolutionists as “the Germanâ€â€”were also there.
Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St. Petersburg, sat by Clara’s side, smiling her hearty good wishes upon her. She looked like a happy little girl, Sophia, her prominent cheeks aglow, and her clear blue self-possessed eyes full of affection and sweet-spirited penetration. She was engaged to Zachar, and Pavel’s courtship had enlisted her tender interest. There were several other women at the gathering, two or three of them decidedly good-looking.
There was an unpublished poem, “Virgin Soil,â€by the“gay bard,†which Clara had heard him recite and which portrayed, among other things, a Nihilist woman becoming a mother in her isolated cell. Her child is wrested from her arms to perish, and she goes insane. The episode, which is part of a bitter satire on a certain official, is based on fact. As Clara now thought of it and beheld the demented woman nursing a rag, a shudder passed through her frame.
“Cheer up, Clara! Cheer up!†Zachar thundered. “We don’t want any long faces to-night.â€
Clara smiled, a sorry smile, and Zachar went on hopping and laughing. But when Sophia stroked her hand, smilingly, Clara buried her face in her bosom and gave way to a quick sob.
“What does it mean?†Pavel asked.
“Nothing,†Clara answered, gleaming through her tears.
There were four or five Jews in the assemblage, but Makar was not among them. His cherished dream had been realised at last. He was working in a secret printing office. Establishments of this sort were guarded with special solicitude, so in view of his absent-mindedness, Makar never left the place for fear of bringing back some spy. The other revolutionists who worked in the same printing shop and who were registered at the police station as residents of the house had each his or her day off. Makar alone was not registered. The porters of the house had never seen him, and the composing room was his prison.
The only other Jewess in the room was a dark insignificant looking woman named Hessia Helfman. She was touchingly bashful, so that at one time Clara had offered to befriend her. She had soon discovered, however, that the dark little Jewess was in charge of a most important conspiracy station. On closer acquaintance Hessia had proved to be quite talkative and of an extremely affectionate nature. Clara’s attachment to her had become greater still when she had learned that Purring Cat was her husband. The great thing was that he was a Gentile and a nobleman, although not a prince. Clara had told herself that the equality of Jew and Gentile and their intermarriage among socialists was a matter of course and that the circumstance attracted no special attention on her part, but she knew that it did.
As she now looked at Hessia and her husband, she said to herself, with a great sense of relief: “She is as good as I, anyhow. If she could marry the man she loves I can.â€
But her joy in this absolution from her self-imposed injunction soon faded away. To sacrifice her happiness seemed to her the highest happiness this evening. She would surpass Hessia. If there was a world in which platonic relations were called for theirs was that world. The image of a demented woman fondling a rag in her prison cell came back to her.
THE Czar was still inLivadiawith his bride, abandoning himself to his second youth with a passion that was tinged with the pathos of imminent tragedy, when Count Loris-Melikoff telegraphed to him a plea for the lives of two revolutionists who had been sentenced to death, one of these being Alexandre, the man in whose lodgings the gendarmes had found a diagram of the Imperial dining hall. The distinguished Armenian was contemplating reforms which he expected to leave no room for terrorism, and it was for the sake of these measures as well as of the Emperor himself, that he was averse to having the bitterness of the revolutionists quickened by new executions. If they only let the Czar live until those projects had been carried out, he thought, their conspiracies would lose all reason of existence; at any rate, the surreptitious support which they received from men of high social position would be withdrawn.
But his despatch was followed by one from the Czarowitz, who, echoing the views of the anti-Melikoff party at court, urged his father not to show signs of weakness, and the sentence was allowed to stand.
At about nine o’clock in the morning of a cold autumn day, a fortnight after the meeting of the Executive Committeewhich Clara attended, Pavel stood on a chair nailing a clothes rack to the wall. The room was Clara’s. It was on the fifth floor of a house near a corner, with windows commanding the two intersecting streets, where her window signals could be seen at a considerable distance. She rented it furnished, with samovar service, but the curtains and some bits of bric-à -brac had been bought by Pavel who took more interest in these things and was handier about the house than she. He himself lived in the house of a distant relative, an elderly widow, who took great pride in him and had no doubt that he led the life of the average young man of his class, that is to say, he spent his nights and his mamma’s rubles on an endless crop of wild oats. To Clara’s landlady he was known as a brother of hers. On the present occasion he had found his fiancée out, but a mark on the door had told him that she would soon be back. Presently she came in. She wore a tall fur cap and her cheeks gleamed, exhaling the freshness of girlish health and of the cold weather of the street, but she looked grave. Pavel threw away his hammer and pounced down upon her with open arms. She repulsed him gently.
“Stop,†she whispered, drearily, unbuttoning her cloak and drawing a newspaper from its inner pocket. “There is terrible news this morning.â€
The execution of Alexandre and the other revolutionist had taken place the day before, and the newspapers were allowed to print a very brief account of it—how they bade each other good-bye on the scaffold and how, when Alexandre saw the death-shroud on his friend, his eyes filled with tears. The two condemned men had been great chums for several years, Alexandre having once wrested the other from a convoy. Now they died together.
As Pavel read the account of the double execution, standing by the window, a flush of overpowering despair shot into his chest and diffused itself through his legs.
“They have choked them after all,†he gasped out.
Clara, who sat at a table watching him, dropped her head on her folded arms, in a paroxysm of quick, bitter sobbing.
The few details in the newspaper report gave vividness to the grewsome scene. The two executed men had been among Pavel’s most intimate friends. The image of Alexandre, his arms pinioned, looking on with tears while a white shroud was being slipped over his fellow-prisoner, was tearing at his heart with cruelinsistence.
“Oh, it’s terrible, Clarochka!†he moaned, dropping by her side, nestling to her, and bursting into tears in her bosom. Then, getting up, he took to walking back and forth, vehemently. “They have choked them, the blood-drinkers,†he muttered. “They have done it after all.†He fell silent, pacing the floor in despair, and then burst out once again: “They have choked them, the vampires.â€
“But war is war,†she said, for something to say to him, her own face distorted with her struggle against a flow of tears.
“Oh, I don’t know. All I do know is that they have been murdered, that they are no more.†A minute or two later he turned upon her with a look full of ghastly malice. “War did you say? The government can’t have enough of it, can it? Well, it shall have all the war it wants. The party has only shown it the blossoms; the berries are still to come.â€
The world seemed to be divided into those who had known the two executed men personally and those whohad not. For the moment there seemed to be little in common between him and Clara. She strained him to a seat by her side on the sofa again, clasping one of his hands in both of hers, and kissed him on the cheek, wetting his temple with her tears.
“Do you know, dearest, I really had a lurking hope they would be spared,†he said. “I was ashamed to say so, but I did. But no! they choked them. They choked them. Idiots that they are. They imagine they can hang every honest man in the country.â€
“Loris-Melikoff is even worse than the Czar. His liberalism is nothing but hypocrisy. There can no longer be any question about it.â€
“He is a rogue of the deepest dye. He is a bungling hypocrite, an abominable liar and a mangy coward, that’s what he is. But to the devil with him! This is not the point. Oh, nothing is the point. Nothing except that they have been murdered.â€
He went to see some of the revolutionists with whom he had shared the intimacy of the dead men.
Left alone, Clara began to pace the floor slowly. Not having known either Alexandre or the man who had died with him, she was exempt from that acute agony of grief which was her lover’s; but there was the image of two men in death-shrouds, a stirring image of martyrdom, before her vision. Pity, the hunger of revenge and a loftier feeling—the thirst of self-sacrifice to the cause of liberty—swelled her heart. Back and forth she walked, slowly, solemnly, her hands gently clasped behind her, her soul in a state of excitement that was coupled with a peculiar state of physical tranquillity, her mind apparently seeing things with a perspicacity the like of which it had never enjoyed before. Her future, her duties, herrelation to the rest of the world, her whole life—all was wonderfully clear to her, and in spite of her anguish over the death of the two men she felt singularly happy. It seemed to be a matter of course that her party would now undertake some new plot, one exceeding in boldness and magnitude all its predecessors. Many lives would have to be staked. She would offer hers. Matrimony was out of the question at a time like this. She conjured that image of the insane woman clasping a rag to her bosom in support of her position. She longed to be near Pavel again. In her mind she embraced him tenderly, argued with him, opened her soul to him. It was all so clear. Her mind was so firmly made up. She fondly hoped she would make Pavel see it all in the same light.
The explanation took place the next time he called on her, a few days later.
“Oh, we shall all have to offer our lives,†he replied. “But for God’s sake love me, Clanya. It will drive me crazy if you don’t.â€
“But I do, I do. I love you with every fibre of my being, Pasha. What has put it in your head to doubt it?â€
“Oh, I don’t know. All I do know is that as long as my life is mine I cannot exist without you. I am frightfully lonely and that stands in the way of my work. Dash it, I feel just as I did last summer before I took courage to tell you that I was insanely in love with you.â€
She drew him to her, with a smile at once of happiness and amusement.
“Poor boy! It’s enough to break one’s heart. Poor little dear!†she joked affectionately.
“I knew you would be making fun of me,†he said, yearning upon her. “Love me, Clanya, do love me, with all your heart. I cannot live apart from you, I cannot,upon my word I cannot,†he concluded piteously, like a child.
“Do you imagine it’s easy for me to be away from you?†she retorted earnestly. “I can’t be a single hour without you without missing you, without feverishly waiting to see you again. As if you did not know it! But what can we do? Is this the only sacrifice we are ready to make?â€
A fortnight had passed. Unknown to her lover, Clara had spoken to the Janitor, intimating her readiness to offer her life, and asking for one of the most dangerous assignments the Governing Board could give her. She was waiting for an answer, when the startling news spread among the revolutionists that the Janitor was in the hands of the enemy and that the capture of that maniac of caution had been the result of a most insane piece of recklessness.
His arrest was one of the heaviest losses the party had yet sustained. At the same time the government found a new source of uneasiness in it. A large quantity of dynamite and some other things confiscated at his lodgings pointed to a vigorous renewal of terroristic activity. Another plot on the life of the Emperor seemed to be hatching in the capital, yet all efforts of the police and the gendarmes in this connection were futile. Indeed, the circumstances of the Janitor’s arrest only furnished new proof of the ineptitude and shiftlessness of those whose business it was to ferret out Nihilism.
A few days before the Janitor was taken the police received word about two portraits which had been left for reproduction at a well-known photograph gallery and in which the photographer had recognised the two Nihilistswho had recently been hanged. Instead of a detective being detailed, however, to lie in wait for the unknown man, the proprietor of the gallery was simply ordered to notify the police when he came for his pictures. The unknown man was the Janitor. When he called for the photographs, an awkward attempt was made to detain him which aroused his suspicion. He pleaded haste and made for the door. When a porter barred his way he scared him off by thrusting his hand into an empty pistol-pocket. A similar order for photographs of the two executed Terrorists had been given by him to another well-known photographer next door to the former place, and it was when he called there, a day or two after his narrow escape at the adjoining gallery, that he was seized by detectives.
When his landlady heard that her “star†lodger, the punctilious government official and retired army officer, was neither an official nor a retired officer, but a leading Nihilist, she fainted. The gendarmes had been hunting for him since he broke away from his captors on his way to prison one evening more than two years before. They had heard that it was he who subsequently organised the railroad plot near Moscow; also that he had been connected with the assassination of the chief of gendarmes and with the shooting at the Czar in front of the Winter Palace. Yet he had freely moved about the streets of St. Petersburg these two years, the busiest agitator and conspirator in the city, until, in a moment of morbid foolhardiness, he practically surrendered himself to the police.
When Clara heard of his arrest, she clapped her hands together, Yiddish fashion. “If the Janitor has been arrested as a result of carelessness,†she exclaimed, “theneveryone of us ought to hold himself in readiness to be taken at any moment.â€
She repeated the remark the next time she saw Pavel, adding:
“The idea of being a married woman under such conditions!â€
“Oh, that’s anidée fixeof yours,†he said, testily.
She gave him a look and dropped her eyes, resentfully.
The peace-offering came from him.
“Whew, what a cloud!†he said, pointing at her glum face. “Won’t there be a single rift in it? Not a wee bit of a one for a single ray to come through?â€
She smiled, heartily.
THE ministers were reporting to the Czar who had recently returned from Livadia. They were admitted one at a time. As they sat chatting under breath in the blue waiting room, with the white reflection of the snow that was falling outside, upon their faces, these elderly men, whose names were associated in millions of minds with the notion of infinite dignity and power, looked like a group of anxious petitioners in the vestibule of some official.
An exception was made for Count Loris-Melikoff, who was with the Czar during the audiences of all his colleagues. The Supreme Executive Commission over which he had presided had been abolished some four months before. Nominally he was now simply in charge of the Department of the Interior, but in reality he continued to play the part of premier, a position he partly owed to Princess Dolgoruki, the Czar’s young wife, who set great store by his liberal policy. She was said to be a woman of a rather progressive turn of mind, but whether she was or not, her fate hung on the life of her imperial husband and every measure that was calculated to pacify the Nihilists found a ready advocate in her. Indeed, she and the Count were united by a community of personal interests; for he had as many enemies at court as she, and his positiondepended upon the life of Alexander II. as much as hers.
The Czar was receiving the ministers in a chamber of moderate size, finished in sombre colours, with engaged columns of malachite, book-cases of ebony and silver, with carvings representing scenes from Russian history, and a large writing table to match. Statues of bronze and ivory stood between the book-cases and a striking life-size watercolour of Nicholas I. hung on the wall to the right of the Czar’s chair. The falling snow outside was like a great impenetrable veil without beginning or end, descending from some unknown source and disappearing into some equally mysterious region. The room, whose high walls, dismally imposing, were supposed to hold the destinies of a hundred millions of human beings, was filled with lustreless wintry light. The Emperor, tall, erect, broad-shouldered, the image of easy dignity, but pale and with a touch of weariness in his large oval face, wore the undress uniform of a general of infantry. He was sixty-two and he was beginning to look it. He listened to the ministers with constrained attention. He showed exaggerated interest in the affairs of their respective departments, but they could see that his heart was not in their talk, and with unuttered maledictions for the upstart vice-Emperor, they made short work of their errands. They knew that the Interior Department was the only one that commanded the Czar’s interest in those days.
At last the Emperor and his chief adviser were left alone. Both were silent. Loris-Melikoff was as strikingly oriental of feature as Alexander II. was European. Notwithstanding his splendid military career and uniform he had the appearance of a sharp-witted scientist rather than of a warrior. His swarthy complexion, shrewd orientaleyes and huge energetic oriental nose, flanked by greyer and longer side-whiskers than the Czar’s, made him look like a representative of some foreign power.
There was pathos in both. Alexander II. had that passion for life which comes to an old man upon marrying a pretty young woman. Yet foreigners who saw him during this period said that he looked like a hunted man. As to Count Melikoff, his advance had been so rapid, he was surrounded by so many enemies at court, and the changes by which he was trying to save the Czar’s life and his own power, were beset by so many obstacles, that he could not help feeling like the peasant of the story who was made king for one day.
Naturally talkative and genially expansive, the Czar’s manner toward people who were admitted to his intimacy was one of amiable informality. The chief pathos of his fate sprang from the discrepancy between the Czar and the man in him, between a vindictive ruthlessness born of a blind sense of his autocratic honour and an affectionate, emotional nature with less grit than pride. Had he been a common mortal he would have made far more friends than enemies.
Count Loris-Melikoff had become accustomed to feel at home in his presence. At this minute, however, as the Czar was watching the snow flakes, with an air of idle curiosity, the Armenian had an overbearing sense of the distance between them. He knew that the Czar was anxious to talk about the revolutionists and that he hated to do so. His heart contracted with common human pity, yet in the silence that divided them it came over him that the man in front of him was the Czar, and a feeling of awe seized him like the one he used to experience at sight of the Emperor long before he was raised to his presentposition. This feeling passed, however, the moment the Czar began to speak.
“Well?†he said, with sudden directness. “Anything new about that Michailoff fellow?†Alexandre Michailoff was the real name of the Janitor.
“Nothing new so far, your Majesty,†Loris-Melikoff answered obsequiously, yet with something like triumph, as if the powerlessness of the police were only too natural and substantiated his views on the general state of things. “He is one of their chief ringleaders.â€
“And this has been known all along,†the Emperor remarked with sad irony. “Such a thing would be inconceivable in any other capital in Europe.â€
“Quite so. But I feel that in other countries, the capture of miscreants like ours would be due less to the efficiency of the police than to the cordial coöperation of the public. The trouble is that our police is thrown on its own resources, Sire. It is practically fighting those wretches single-handed.â€
The Czar had a fit of coughing, the result of asthma. When it had subsided, he said with an air of suffering:
“Well, that’s your theory. But then their public is not ours. The average Russian is not wide-awake enough to coöperate with the authorities.†He had in mind his own address at Moscow in which he had appealed to the community at large for this very assistance in ferreting out sedition. The Will of the People had come into existence since then.
“Still, if our public were drawn into active coöperation with the Government, if it became habituated to a sense of the monarch’s confidence in itself, it seems reasonable to suppose that the indolence of the community would then disappear. No people is capable of greater loyalty to thethrone than your Majesty’s. All that is needed is to lend to this devotion tangibility. This and this alone would enable your Majesty to cure the evil. What the body politic needs is judicious internal treatment. Surgical operations have proven futile. These are my sincerest convictions, your Majesty.â€
“I know they are,†the Czar answered musingly.
“And the great point is, that with the intelligent classes actively interested in the preservation of law and order, criminal societies of any sort would find themselves without any ground to stand upon.â€
The Czar had another cough, and then he said, flushing:
“There is a simpler way to leave them without ground to stand upon, surgical operations or no surgical operations. Call it what you will. There is no sense in pampering them, Melikoff. Why, in western Europe they execute common murderers. As to a gang of assassins like that, death would be regarded a mild punishment.†He lighted a cigarette, but forthwith extinguished it and went on with emphasis: “We handle them with kid gloves, Melikoff. That’s why they take chances.â€
He spoke with subdued anger, citing the republican uprising led by aristocratic army officers in 1825, which his father (the man whose portrait was on the right wall) quelled by means of field guns. Loris-Melikoff demurred to the comparison, tactfully hinting that there would be no betrayal of weakness in inviting the public to participate in the extermination of crime by showing it signs of increased imperial confidence, and the Czar softened again. He felt that the Armenian knew how to save him and he willingly submitted to his and Princess Dolgoruki’s influence. But Fate was bent on tragedy.
Alexander II. lacked anything but courage. Still, thiscontinuous living under fire had gradually unnerved him. The soldier on the battlefield finds moral support in the presence of thousands of comrades, all facing the same fate as he; whereas he was like a lone man on top of a dynamite pile. And if his perils were shared by those about him, this only added the agonising consciousness that his person carried the shadow of destruction with it, endangering the life of every living being that came near him. He knew, for example, that when he was at the theatre candles were kept ready, in case the lights were blown out by an explosion; that many people stayed away from the playhouse on such occasions for fear of being destroyed along with their sovereign. His pride would not let him feel low-spirited. He very often forced himself to disdain caution, to act with reckless courage. Nevertheless he had a dreary, jaded look. The notion that he, the most powerful of men, the image of grandeur and human omnipotence, should tremble at every sound, wounded his common human pride acutely. The consequence was that this mightiest monarch in the world, the gigantic man of sixty-two, every bit of him an Emperor, was at heart a terror-stricken infant mutely imploring for help. He continued to appear in the streets of the capital, accompanied by his usual escort and to return the salutes of passers-by with his usual air of majestic ease. Now and then he went to the theatre, and occasionally even beyond the scenes for a flirtation with the actresses. But the public knew that besides his large uniformed escort, his carriage was watched by hordes of detectives in citizen’s clothes, and that every inch of the ground which he was to traverse was all but turned inside out for possible signs of danger. And those who were admitted to his presence knew that underneath his grand,free-and-easy bearing was a sick heart and a crushed spirit. That the enemy was an unknown quantity was one of the sources of his growing disquiet. The organised movement might be very large and it might be ridiculously small, but with a latent half-Nihilist in the heart of every subject. He was beginning to realise at last that he knew his people scarcely better than he did the French or the English. He was anxious to make peace with that invisible enemy of his, provided it did not look as if he did.
He was willing to be deceived, and Loris-Melikoff was about to help him deceive himself. But destiny was against them both. He was an honest man, Loris-Melikoff, serious-minded, public-spirited, one of the few able statesmen Russia ever had; but his path was strewn with thorns.
A TALL man with a reddish beard called at one of the police stations of the capital about a cheese store which he was going to open on Little Garden Street. He gave his name as Koboseff. When he had gone the Captain of the station said to one of his roundsmen:
“That fellow doesn’t talk like a tradesman. I asked him a few questions, and his answers were rather too polished for a cheese dealer.†And taking up his pen, he added, with a preoccupied air, “Keep an eye on him, will you?â€
Little Garden Street was part of a route which the Emperor often took on his way to or from his niece’s residence, theMichaïlPalace, and received the special attention of the police.
The roundsman spoke to the agent of the house where Koboseff had rented a basement for his projected shop and dwelling room; whereupon the agent recalled that cheesemonger’s handwriting had struck him as being too good for a man of his class. Inquiry at the town at which Koboseff’s passport was dated brought the information that a document corresponding in every detail to the one in question had actually been issued by the local authorities. Koboseff was thus no invented name, and as the description in the passport agreed with the appearance ofthe man who had rented the basement, the St. Petersburg police saw no ground for further suspicion.
The cheese shop was opened in the early part of January, Koboseff having moved in with a fair-complexioned woman whom he introduced as his wife. Some three or four weeks later the head porter of the house notified the police that Koboseff had boasted of the flourishing state of his business, whereas in reality his shop attracted but very scant custom. At the same time it was pointed out that there was a well-established and prosperous cheese store close by, that the basement occupied by the Koboseffs was scarcely the place one would naturally select for the purpose, and that the rent was strikingly too high for the amount of business Koboseff could expect to do there. To cap the climax, there was some lively gossip among the neighbours about Mme. Koboseff, who had been seen smoking cigarettes—a habit quite unusual for a woman of the lower classes—and who often stayed out all night.
“Koboseff†was Uric Bogdanovich, Pavel’s “Godfather,†and “Mme. Koboseff†was Baska, formerly “housewife†of the dynamite shop and a year previous to that in charge of a house in the south near which Zachar and others attempted to blow up an imperial train.
The cheese shop was often visited by Zachar, Purring Cat, the reticent stalwart man with the Tartarian features, Pavel and other revolutionists. The police kept close watch on the place, but, according to all reports, no suspicious persons were ever seen to enter it. Upon the whole the Koboseffs seemed to be real tradesmen, and as the information concerning their passport was satisfactory, they were not disturbed. A slim little man named Kurilloff who had played the part of errand boy at the cheese shop had been arrested, but his detention had nothing todo with the Koboseffs, and the police of Little Garden Street had no idea of the arrest, while the officers who had made it were unaware of the prisoner’s connection with a suspicious shop.
“If I were you I’d make missus behave,†the head porter of the house once said to Koboseff, speaking of his “wife.â€
“Right you are,†the cheesemonger replied. “Only my old woman is a tough customer to handle, you know. I do tell her she had better mind the house and ought to be ashamed of herself to smoke cigarettes, but she doesn’t care a rap, not she.â€
“I would teach her if she wasmywife.â€
The cheesemonger made a gesture of despair, and the porter said to himself that there was nothing suspicious about him; that he was simply a fellow without backbone and a fool, qualities which seemed to account for Koboseff’s incompetence as a business man.
“Well, Clanya,†Pavel said to Mlle. Yavner, lazily addressing her in the diminutive of his own coining. “I am afraid I shall have to exile you for some time.â€
“Exile me?†she asked absently without lifting her eyes from a heap of type she was sorting and putting up in packages. She sat across the table from the sofa upon which he was cuddling himself drowsily as a cat does before a fireside.
“Yes, that’s what I’ll have to do—pack you off, put you in a box, nail you up tight, stick a label on it and ship you somewhere. ‘To places not so very distant,’†he added, mocking the official phrase used in transporting people to eastern Siberia.
She raised her eyes from her work, her fingers stiff and black with lead dust. “What are you driving at, Pasha?Anything up? Or is it merely one of those jokes under which one must write in big letters: ‘This is a joke?’â€
“Isthata joke?†he asked, and burst into laughter.
She resumed her work. The type she was sorting was intended for a revolutionary printing office, having been sent to St. Petersburg by Masha Safonoff, who had bought it of the foreman of the government’s printing office in Miroslav.
“Oh, to all the diabolical devils with that type of yours, Clanya. Can’t you sit down by a fellow’s side for a minute or two?â€
She got up, washed her hands and complied with his wish. As she played with his hand she noticed the trace of blisters on his palm. Her face darkened; but she asked no questions. After a little she demanded: “What did you mean by ‘exiling’ me?â€
“Oh dash it all, Clanya. It’s something serious. I’ll tell it to you some other time. I’m too lazy to be serious.†He would have preferred to be sprawling like this with her hands in his; luxuriating in the gleam of her intelligent blue eyes and in the feminine atmosphere of her person; but his excuse that it was “too serious†only sharpened her determination to know what it was without delay.
“What is it, Pasha?â€
“There you are,†he said peevishly. “One can’t have a minute’s rest from business, not a minute’s rest.â€
“Why did you hasten to speak of ‘exiling’ me, then?†she retorted tartly. “Why didn’t you keep it to yourself until you were again in a mood for ‘business’?â€
He had not kept it to himself simply because it was not easy for him to keep anything from her. He was more apt to fly into a temper with her than she with him, butin their mutual relations she was the stronger vessel of the two and, in an imperceptible, unformulated way, he was considerably under her thumb. When he heard or saw something new, received some new impression, his first impulse was to share it with her. If an opinion was formed in his mind he wondered, sometimes timidly, whether she would concur with it. Timidly, because in many instances, when he came bubbling over with enthusiasm over some scheme of his own, she had cruelly dampened his fervour by merely extricating the vital point of his argument from a surrounding tangle of roseate phraseology. His great intellectual feast was to be in her room, discussing theories, books, people with her. These discussions, which sometimes lasted for hours, often called forth a snappish, bitter tone on both sides, but they were at once an expression and a fostering agency of that spiritual unity which was one of the chief sources of their happiness in one another.
“Well, there is very little to tell about,†he said at last. “Something is under way, and it has been decided to notify all illegals not in it to vacate St. Petersburg until it’s all over.â€
The lines of her fresh-tinted face hardened into an expression of extreme gravity and her fingers grew limp in his grasp. She withdrew them.
“Look at her!†he squeaked in a burst of merriment.
“There is nothing to look at. I am not going.†She dropped her glance. She divined that his blisters had something to do with the digging of a mine in which he took part.
“Is it all settled?â€
“Oh, Pasha! Your jesting is so out of place,†she returned sullenly. “I am not going.â€
“But the air is getting hot in St. Petersburg. Whew! The police are suspicious, of course; they won’t leave a stone unturned.â€
He took hold of her tender girlish hand, but she withdrew it again, with a gesture of impatience.
“There will be something to do for you too later on,†he comforted her, guiltily. “It’s going to be a big thing, the biggest of all. You’ll come back in a month or so.â€
She made no answer.
The two intersecting streets outside reeked and creaked and glittered with the crispness of a typical St. Petersburg frost. It was about ten in the morning, in the early part of January. The little parlour was delightfully warm, with a dim consciousness of sleigh-furs, hack drivers in absurd winter caps, pedestrians huddling themselves and wriggling and grunting for an effeminating background to one’s sense of shelter. The even heat of the white glazed oven seemed to be gleaming and stirring over the surface of the tiles like something animate, giving them an effect of creamy mellowness that went to one’s heart together with the delicious warmth they radiated. Ever and anon a sleigh bell would tinkle past and sink into Pavel’s mood. There was a rhythm to the warm stillness of the room. But Clara’s silence tormented him.
“We’ll discuss it later on, Clanya. I’m too tired now. My brain won’t work. Let us play school,†he pleaded fawningly, in burlesque Russian, mimicking the accent of the Czech who taught Latin at the Miroslav gymnasium.
“Stop that, pray.â€
He made a sorry effort to obey her, and finally she yielded, with a smile and a Jewish shrug. He played a gymnasium teacher and she a pupil. He made her conjugatehis name as she would a verb; made puns on Clanya, which is an unfinished Russian word meaning to bow, to greet, to convey one’s regards; mocked and laughed at her enunciation till his eyes watered. Gradually he drifted into an impersonation of old Pievakin and flew into a passion because her hearty laughter marred the illusion of the performance.
“You do need rest, poor thing,†she said, looking at his haggard, worn face.
“Well, another few weeks and we shall be able to get all the rest we want, if not in a cell, or in a quieter place still, in some foreign resort, perhaps. I really feel confident we are going to win this time.â€
“It’s about time the party did.â€
“It will this time, you may be sure of it. And then—by George, the very sky will feel hot. Everything seems ready for a general uprising. All that is needed is the signal. I can see the barricades going up in the streets.†He gnashed his teeth and shook her by the shoulders exultantly. “Yes, ma’am. And then, Clanya, why, then we won’t have to go abroad for our vacation. One will be able to breathe in Russia then. Won’t we give ourselves a spree, eh? But whether here or abroad, I must take you for a rest somewhere. Will you marry your love-lorn Pashka then? I dare you to say no.â€
“But I don’t want to say no,†she answered radiantly.
They went to dinner together and then they parted. As they shook hands he peered into her face with a rush of tenderness, as though trying to inhale as deep an impression of her as possible in case either of them was arrested before they met again. And, indeed, there was quite an eventful day in store for her.
One of the persons she was to see later in the afternoonwas a man with a Greek name. As she approached the house in which he had his lodgings, she recognised in the gas-lit distance the high forehead and the boyish face of Sophia, the ex-Governor’s daughter. Sophia, or Sonia, as she was fondly called, was bearing down upon her at a brisk, preoccupied walk. As she swept past Clara, without greeting her, she whispered:
“A trap.â€
The lodging of the man with the queer name had been raided, then, and was now held by officers in the hope of ensnaring some of his friends. Clara had been at the place several times and she was afraid that the porter of the house, in case he stood at his post in the gateway at this minute, might recognise her.
The dim opening of the gate loomed as a sickly quadrangular hole exhaling nightmare and ruin. Turning sharply back, however, might have attracted notice; so Clara entered the first gate on her way, four or five houses this side of her destination, and when she reappeared a minute or two later, she took the opposite direction. As she turned the next corner she found herself abreast of a man she had noticed in the streets before. He was fixed in her mind by his height and carriage. Extremely tall and narrow-shouldered, he walked like a man with a sore neck, swinging one of his long arms to and fro as he moved stiffly along. The look he gave her made a very unpleasant impression on her. He let her gain on him a little and then she heard his soft rubber-shod footsteps behind her.
It is a terrible experience, this sense of being dogged as you walk along. It is tantalising enough when your desire to take a look at the man at your heels is only a matter of curiosity which for some reason or other youcannot gratify. Imagine, then, the mental condition of an “illegal†shadowed by a spy or by a man he suspects of being one. He tingles with a desire to quicken pace, yet he must walk on with the same even, calm step; every minute or two he is seized with an impulse to turn on the fellow behind him, yet he must not show the least sign of consciousness as to his existence. It is the highest form of torture, yet it was the daily experience of every active man or woman of the secret organisation; for if the political detectives were spying upon pedestrians right and left, the revolutionists, on their part, were apt to be suspicious with equal promiscuity. Small wonder that some of them, upon being arrested, hailed their prison cell as a welcome place of rest, as a relief from the enervating strain of liberty under the harrowing conditions of underground life. As a matter of fact this wholesale shadowing seldom results in the arrest of a revolutionist. Thousands of innocent people were snuffed to one Nihilist, and the Nihilists profited by the triviality of suspicion. Most arrests were the result of accident.
At the corner of the next large thoroughfare she paused and looked up the street for a tram-car. While doing so Clara glanced around her. The tall man had disappeared. A tram-car came along shortly and she was about to board it when she heard Sonia’s voice once more.
“You’re being shadowed. Follow me.â€
Sonia entered a crowded sausage shop, and led the way to the far end of it in the rear of an impatient throng. Pending her turn to be waited on, she took off her broad-brimmed hat, asking Clara to hold it for her, while she adjusted her hair.
“Put it on, and let me have your furcap,â€she gestured.
The homely broad-brimmed hat transformed Clara’sappearance considerably. It made her look shorter and her face seemed larger and older.
“I saw a tall fellow turn you over to one with a ruddy mug. The red man is waiting for you outside now, but I don’t think he had a good look at your face. There is a back door over there.â€
Clara regained the street through the yard, and sure enough, a man with a florid face was leisurely smoking a cigarette at the gate post. He only gave her a superficial glance and went on watching the street door of the shop. She took a public sleigh, ordered the driver to take her to the Liteyny Bridge, changed her destination in the middle of the journey, and soon after she got off she took another sleigh for quite another section of the city. In short, she was “circling,†and when she thought her trail completely “swept away,†she went home on foot.
THE capture of the man with the Greek name proved disastrous to the Executive Committee. It was the first link in a chain of most important arrests. The trap set at his house caught the very tall man with the Tartarian features; this led to the arrest of Purring Cat, and the residence of Purring Cat, in its turn, ensnared a pretentiously dressed man, in whom the superior gendarme officers were amazed to find their own trusted secretary, the man whom Makar knew as “the Dandy.†Makar’s arrest at Miroslav had tended to strengthen the Dandy’s position somewhat, but now that he was in the hands of the enemy himself, it seemed as if the medical student’s sweeping system of “counter-espionage†had burst like a bubble. Makar was in despair. He spoke of new plans, of new sacrifices, until Zachar silenced him.
“All in due time, my dear romanticist,†he said to him. “A month or two later I shall be delighted to be entertained with the fruit of your rich fancy; not now, my boy.â€
The four arrests were a severe blow to the undertaking of which Zachar had been placed in charge. He was overworked, dejected, yet thrilling with nervous activity. But his own days were numbered. An air of impending doom hung over the Czar and his “internal enemies†alike.
Good fortune seemed to attend the state police. Whilethe gendarmes of the capital were celebrating their unexpected haul an intellectual looking man was locked up in a frontier town as a “vagrant,†that is, as a man without a passport, who subsequently proved to be one of the active Terrorists the detectives had long been looking for. He was the “grave bard,†one of the twin poets of the party. Shortly after his arrest the Russian government received word from the police of the German capital that a prominent Russian Nihilist known among his friends as “My Lord,†a sobriquet due to his elegance of personal appearance and address, had spent some time in Berlin and was now on his way to St. Petersburg. A German detective followed the man to the frontier and then, shadowed by Russian spies, he was tracked to a house on the Neva Prospect, the leading street of St. Petersburg. There it was decided to arrest him Friday, March 23.
A little after 4 o’clock of that day Zachar and the ex-Governor’s daughter left their home, where they were registered as brother and sister, and took a sleigh, alighting in front of the Public Library, in the very heart of the city. Instead of entering the library, however, which the sleigh-driver thought to be their destination, they parted, continuing their several journeys on foot.
It was an extremely cold afternoon. The beards of pedestrians and sleigh-drivers and the manes of horses were glued with frost; their breath came in short painful puffs. It was getting dark. The sky was a spotless, almost a warm blue. To look at it you would have wondered where this sharp, all-benumbing cold came from. There was an air of insincerity about the crimson clearness of the afternoon light.
Zachar wore a tall cap of Persian lamb, flattened at the top, and a tight-fitting fur coat. He walked briskly, hischest thrown out, his full pointed beard hoary with frost, his cheeks red with the biting cold.
Presently he found himself shadowed by a man in civilian clothes whom he knew to be a gendarme in disguise. It was evident, however, that the spy was following him merely as a suspicious person without having any idea what sort of man his quarry was, and Zachar, with whom a hunt of this kind was a daily occurrence, had no difficulty in “thrashing his trail.†He was bound for the cheese shop on Little Garden Street. This was within a short walk from the Public Library, yet on this occasion it took him an hour’s “circling†to reach the place.
About ten minutes after Zachar entered the cheesemonger’s basement, the head porter of the house met two police officers round the corner. One of them was the captain of the precinct and the other, one of his roundsmen. The Czar was expected to pass through this street in two days, so one could not be too watchful over a suspicious place like this.
“There is somebody down there now,†the head porter said to the captain, with servile eagerness. “A big fellow with a long pointed beard. I have seen him go down several times before. He looks like a business man, but before he started to go down he stopped to look round.â€
This stopping to look round was, according to a printed police circular, one of the symptoms of Nihilism, so the roundsman was ordered to watch until the suspicious man should re-emerge from the cheese shop.
When the captain had gone the roundsman brushed out his icicled moustache with his finger nails, and said with an air of authority:
“Well, you take your post at the gate and I’ll just go and change my uniform for citizen’s clothes in case it’snecessary to see where that fellow is going. Keep a sharp lookout on that cursed basement until I get back, will you?â€
When he returned, in citizen’s clothes, he found that the suspicious man had left the store and that the head porter had set out after him, leaving his assistant in his place.
“There is another man down there now,†the assistant porter whispered. Presently the new visitor came out of the basement. As he mounted the few steps and then crossed over, through the snow, to a sleigh standing near by, he kept mopping his face with a handkerchief, thus preventing the two spies from getting a look at his features. Seeing that he boarded a hackney-sleigh, the roundsman did the same, ordering the driver to follow along as closely as possible, but at this he lost time in persuading the hackman that he was a policeman in disguise. The two sleighs were flying through the snow as fast as their horses could run. The policeman was far in the rear. For some ten minutes his eyes were riveted to the suspicious man. Presently, however, the vehicle he was shadowing turned a corner, and by the time he reached that point it was gone. All sorts of sleighs, their bells jingling, were gliding along in every direction, but the one he wanted was not among them.
The head porter, who had started after the first man, in the absence of the roundsman, had met with a similar defeat. After awhile the hackman who had driven the second suspicious man returned to his stand. In answer to inquiry he told how his fare had twice changed his destination, finally alighted on a street corner, and turned into a narrow alley.
Meanwhile Zachar had called on My Lord. It was aboutseven o’clock. The two revolutionists sat chatting in a cheerful gas-lit room, when the host was called out into the corridor. As he was long in coming back, Zachar went to the door, prepared for the worst. He found the corridor full of gendarmes and police. It was evident that they had fought shy of raiding My Lord’s apartments for fear of violence, and had been patiently waiting until his visitor should come out of his own accord. Several of the gendarmes made a dash at Zachar, seizing him by both arms. One of these was the spy from whom he had “circled†away near the Public Library, soon after he had taken leave from the ex-Governor’s daughter three hours ago. Zachar’s presence here was a surprise to this gendarme, but the full importance of the man was still unknown to him. The officer in command, however, knew who his prisoner was.
“What is your name?†he addressed himself to Zachar, with the exaltation of a man come upon a precious find. He knew but too well how anxious the government was to capture him, but he had come here to arrest My Lord without the remotest idea of finding this revolutionary giant in the place.
“Krasnoff,†Zachar answered with dignity, in his deep-chested voice.
“I beg your pardon,†the officer returned, with a twinkle in his eye. “I once had the pleasure of arresting you. Your name is Andrey Ivanovitch Jeliaboff.â€
“Oh, in that case I am pleased to meet you,†the prisoner said with playful chivalry.
Jeliaboff’s arrest made a joyous stir not only in the gendarmerie, but also at court. Apart from the attempt to blow up an imperial train in the south, in which he had played the leading part, he had been described to theauthorities as the most gifted and effective agitator in the movement.
The police at Little Garden Street were unaware of all this, but the conduct of the two men who had visited the cheese shop that afternoon seemed decidedly suspicious and lent a glare of colour to the irrelevancies that seemed to enfold the place.
The next morning Pavel called on the Koboseffs. As he entered the cheese store he saw that the adjoining room was crowded with police officers. In his first shock he was only conscious of the gleam of uniforms, of Urie’s and somebody else’s voice and of his own sick despair. But the sick feeling ebbed away, leaving him in a state of desperate, pugnacious tranquillity, his mind on the revolver in his pocket.
“Hello there!†he shouted, with the self-satisfied disrespect of a man of the better classes addressing one of the lower, and at this he surveyed the store with an air of contempt, as much as to say: “What a den I did strike!â€
“Wife,†he heard Urie’s voice, “there is a gentleman in the shop.â€
Baska, who had been calmly emptying a barrel of cheese into some boxes, wiped her hands upon her apron and stepped behind the counter.
“Is your Holland cheese any good?†Pavel asked, sniffing. “Are you sure you can give me a pound of decent stuff?â€
She waited on him, simply, and after some more sniffing, at the wrapping paper as well as the cheese, he let her make up the package. As he walked toward the door his heart stood still for an instant.
He was allowed to go. Whether he was followed byspies he did not know. At all events, when he approached his “legal†residence at the house of his high-born relative, after an hour’s “circling,†he felt perfectly free from shadowing. He was greatly perplexed to think of the way Urie and Baska had been allowed to continue in their rôle of a cheesemonger couple; but, at all events, even if the true character of their shop had not yet been discovered by the police officers he had seen there, it seemed to be a matter of minutes when it would be.
In the morning of that day, a few hours before Pavel called on the Koboseffs, the police captain of the Little GardenStreetprecinct had asked the prefect of St. Petersburg to have the cheese shop examined under the guise of a sanitary inspection. He was still uninformed of the arrest of the big fellow with the pointed beard, much less of the fact that he had proved to be one of the chieftains of the revolutionary organisation, but the story of the two suspicious-looking visitors at the cheese shop and their “circling†had made him uneasy. The Czar was expected to pass through Little Garden Street on Sunday, which was the next day, and one could not ascertain the real character of the Koboseffs and their business too soon. Nevertheless the prefect was slow to appreciate the situation. Indeed, it is quite characteristic of the despotic chaos of a regime like Russia’s that on the one hand people are thrown into jail to perish there on the merest whim of some gendarme, and, on the other, action is often prevented by an excess of red tape and indolence in cases where there is ground for the gravest suspicion. While hundreds of schoolboys and schoolgirls were wasting away in damp, solitary cells because they had been suspected of reading some revolutionary leaflet, the occupantsof this basement, in whose case suspicion was associated with the idea of a plot on the life of the Czar, had not even been subjected to the summary search and questioning to which every resident in Russia is ever liable.
Finally, after considerable pleading on the part of the police captain, General Mrovinsky, a civil engineer of the Health Department, an elderly man with a kindly, genial face, was assigned to make the feigned inspection.
“Your Excellency will please see if they are not digging a mine there,†the police captain said to him, respectfully. “The Emperor often passes that shop when he goes to the Riding Schools or to the Michaïl Palace, and that cheese dealer and his wife are quite a suspicious-looking couple. His Majesty is expected to pass the place to-morrow.â€
The general entered the cheese shop accompanied by the police captain, the captain’s lieutenant and the head porter of the house. Koboseff came out of the inner rooms to meet them. He turned pale, but this seemed natural.
“His Excellency represents the Health Department,†said the captain. “There is dampness in the next house, and His Excellency wishes to see if your place is all right.â€
“I am sorry to trouble you,†said General Mrovinsky, kindly. “But dampness is a bad thing to have in one’s house, you know.â€
“There is none here that I know of, sir,†Koboseff replied deferentially, “but, of course, a fellow must not be too sure, sir.â€
Baska stood in a corner of the shop, bending over a barrel. While the officers talked to Urie she threw a glance at the visitors over her shoulder and resumed her work.
The uniformed civil engineer made a close examination of the walls. The one facing the street was covered with planking, and Koboseff explained that he had had it done as a safeguard against dampness, but that there was none.
“But then cheese crumbs are apt to get into the cracks,†urged General Mrovinsky, taking hold of one of the shelves along that wall. “They would decay there, don’t you know, and that would be almost as bad as dampness, wouldn’t it?†He then inspected the two living rooms. In the second of these he found a pile of hay.
“It’s from our cheese barrels,†Koboseff explained; and pointing at another pile he added: “And that’s coke, sir.â€
General Mrovinsky picked up a coal, examined it, threw it back and wiped his fingers with some of the hay.
“Everything is all right,†he said to the police officers, with a look of intelligence. He led the way back to the store and then back again to the middle room. Here he took a firm hold of the planking that lined the wall under the street window. He tried to wrench it off, but it would not yield, and he let it go.
“Everything is all right,†he said to the captain, seating himself on a sofa. A trunk and some pieces of furniture were moved from their places and then put back. The general knew a merchant by the name of Koboseff, so he asked the cheese dealer if he was a relative of his. Urie said no, and after some conversation about the cheese business in general the officials went away.
“There is no mine in that place. You can make yourself perfectly easy about it,†Mrovinsky said to the captain, as they made their way to the adjoining basement.
It was while they were conversing leisurely, the old generalseated on the lounge, that Pavel came in. He was watched narrowly, but he played his part well, and as the engineer had already intimated to the police officers that there was nothing suspicious about the premises he was not even shadowed.
Thus reassured, the police of the locality set to work preparing Little GardenStreetfor the Czar’s drive to the Riding School. This included an investigation as to the character of the occupants of all the other shops and residences facing the street, as well as getting the pavement in good repair.