CHAPTER XVIITHE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
SONYA had taken her stand beside the wheeled chair, her hand lightly upon The White One’s shoulder. As Drexel gazed upon the two women, side by side, and gathered the significance of the pair, a tremor of awe ran through all his being. Sisters in purpose, these two generations: one who had given all, one ready to give all. Sisters in purpose—yet what a contrast! Sonya, fresh, young, lithely erect; the other pale, old, shrivelled, twisted by a despot’s vengeful torture.
The White One bent upon him all-reading eyes, deep-set in purple hollows; and Drexel had the feeling that to her his soul was large print. After a moment she held out to him a withered hand. Though weak, its grasp was firm.
“We owe you much, Mr. Drexel,” she said, in a firm, resonant voice. “We are grateful; but as yet we can pay you in thanks alone.”
“That should be enough,” he managed to say. “Yet I should also like something else.”
“And that?”
“If I have helped, then to be allowed to help you further.”
“So Sonya has told me.” Again those eyes peered from their purple hollows into his soul. “Pardon me if I seem to speak discourteously, but you do not care much for the principles for which we are struggling.”
“I do not know what my principles are,” he said frankly. “I used to have opinions, definite ones—a week ago. But now they are all unsettled and I seem to be awhirl with new ones. But this I do know: I am with you in this fight, and with you with all my heart!”
The White One slowly nodded, “Yes, I know we can trust you, and I know you are too useful a person to be refused. You have shown both.”
She looked at the three men. “I say yes. What do you say?”
“Yes,” they responded.
She again gave Drexel her withered hand. “Then you shall help us,” said she.
Whereupon Sonya and the three men clasped hands with him. He now learned the two men he had before seen were Dr. Razoff, a distinguished physician, and Pestel, a leader of the working-people. The third was an official in the Ministry of the Interior, which he had entered five years before for the purpose of gaining advance knowledge of the Government’s proposed action against the revolutionists. His name was Sabatoff, and as one of his functions was to secure and hold for use Government blanks of all kinds, together with counterfeits of theseals necessary to make them authoritative, he was known as “The Keeper of the Seals.”
The Central Committee met here under the very eyes of the police, but the police suspected nothing. They knew this old woman well enough under her true name of Madame Nikitin, for her long history was written down in their records; but she was to them a negligible person whose harm was long since spent—little more than a corpse awaiting a delayed sepulture. They knew that Dr. Razoff called frequently, but he was her attending physician. They knew of Sabatoff’s visits, but he was her man of affairs. Pestel they knew only as an irregular servant who came in to do the rough work in her apartment. They never guessed that this little coterie, seemingly summoned hither by routine business relations, were the people that the police of all Russia was exerting its every wile to discover and make prisoners.
They all drew about The White One and began to discuss what should be their plan to free Borodin from the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul. “First we shall hear what Sonya has to propose,” said The White One. “Since we have chosen her as leader in this affair, and since Borodin is her brother, she has given more thought to a plan than any of us.”
They all looked at Sonya and waited. “I have a plan—yes,” she said. “But it is one I dislike, one I would suggest only as a last resort. Let us first discuss other possibilities.”
“How about your father?” suggested Sabatoff. “As military governor he has absolute authority over political prisoners. He loves you, I know; but how about his son? If he were told who Borodin is, would he do anything?”
She slowly shook her head. “It would be useless to appeal to father in his behalf.”
“Then strategy is our only course,” Sabatoff declared. “We must get some of our comrades introduced into the Fortress as guards, and through them manage his escape.”
“There is a bare chance that might succeed if we had time for it,” returned Sonya. “But it would take months. In the meantime the police may any day discover Borodin is Borski, and discovery will be followed by immediate execution. Whatever we do we must do at once.”
“If we could only take the Fortress by force—blow it up—wipe it off the earth!” growled Pestel.
All echoed that grim wish. But how achieve it? Force might do for weaker prisons they all agreed, but what force less than an uprisen nation could subdue Peter and Paul? A Paris mob overthrew the Bastille, yes—but the Bastille was a house of cards compared to that granite citadel beside the Neva.
“We will do that some day—never fear!” said The White One. “But at present we must have some other plan. What is yours, Sonya?”
All again turned their eyes upon Sonya. “Itis very simple. To buy the coöperation of a prison official.”
“Who?”
“The very highest—the governor of Peter and Paul. I have heard that Governor Delwig has fallen into disfavour and is soon to be displaced, and is very bitter about it.” She looked at Sabatoff. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” was the answer.
“You know him?”
“I have met him officially.”
“Do you think he could be bought?”
“Where is the Russian official who cannot—if the price is right!”
They all agreed that Sonya’s suggestion was the best and safest plan. Who should deal with the governor of the Fortress was the next question. The three men all volunteered for the delicate and dangerous task, but Sonya insisted that the mission be given her; of them all she was the one most concerned, the one who would put most soul into it; and at length she had her way.
But where should she arrange to see the governor? If she were to appoint a rendezvous in any cafe, or private house, or street, or even church, he might fear some plot and remain away; or if he came, he would contrive that they should be under the surveillance of a secret guard, and it would be in his power to seize her at any moment. Moreover, even if he were agreeable to her proposal, they mightbe observed by some of the city’s omnipresent spies and fatal suspicion be aroused.
Any plan she could devise that would succeed in gaining her an audience with him required that she should put herself in his power. Hence, what seemed the boldest course was in reality the safest course, and also was the simplest. On some pretense of business she would call upon the governor in the Fortress. If he accepted her proposal, she had taken the course least likely to rouse outside suspicion. If he rejected it, then, to be sure, she was caught in that vast prison trap, but no more securely caught than if seized in street or cafe by the governor’s surveillant guard.
During all this talk The White One leaned back and spoke but little, though she weighed every suggestion. As she had said, Sonya was the leader in this affair, and it was no part of her generalship to reassume an authority that had been vested in a deputy.
So much of the plan settled upon, nothing more could be done till Delwig had been sounded. Sonya and Drexel rose to depart, leaving The White One and the three men to discuss other matters.
Once more the old woman stretched out to him her wasted hand. “Good-night, Mr. Drexel. Do not despair because we have given you nothing to do. Before we are through you may have more than you desire!”
He followed Sonya down into the street, andstill he saw that withered and blanched old figure in the chair. All the time that he had sat watching her, he had wondered who she was and what had been her history; and now as he and Sonya, holding to each other, went careening through the frenzied wind, he asked her. The White One, said Sonya, was the daughter of a scientist famous during the third quarter of the last century, and herself had been a learned and skilled physician. She had become fired with the inspiration for freedom that crept into Russia in the sixties, while she was in the first flush of young womanhood, and ever since had given heart and mind to the cause of liberty. Thirty-five years she had spent in prison or Siberian exile. Her last sentence had been to fifteen years of hard labour in the Siberian mines. Here toil, exposure, the bitter cold, the prison food, the vile living conditions, a flogging she had been given, had at length broken her once strong body. Two years before she had been sent back on a stretcher as a “safe” and negligible person—sent back to die. But her thirty-five years of harsh captivity that had shattered her body, had only strengthened her spirit. She had returned to the struggle of right against might with even greater devotion and intensity.
But she had to be careful, so very careful! Her life hung but by a thread. Besides her paralysis, which bound her prisoner to chair and bed, she had heart trouble, and Dr. Razoff had said that any unusual exertion, any high excitement, would be her end.
By the time Sonya had concluded they were back again in Three Saints’ Court. As they entered the outer of the upstairs rooms a man rose from the table where he had been reading by the light of a single candle. It was Freeman, the terrorist.
“I was told some of you would be back, so I waited,” he said. “I have an idea——”
He recognized Drexel and broke off in surprise. “Why it was to talk about you that I came here! To plan for bringing you here in a day or two, as I had promised. This is better than I had expected! How does it happen you are here?”
Drexel remembered that Freeman was not one of the few in the secret of Sonya’s identity—so he dared not reveal the part she had played.
“I learned a secret from Prince Berloff’s papers,” he answered easily. “I had to flee; you had told me of this place; I came here.”
“It must have been a valuable discovery.” His eyes suddenly flashed. “Not the whereabouts of Borodin?” he said.
Drexel glanced at Sonya. He had gained the information for her; it was for her to decide with whom it should be shared.
“You are right,” said she.
Freeman seized Drexel’s hand. “Splendid! Splendid! This is doing even more than I proposed to you!”
His lean face glowed with a sinister light, and he suggested, as one detail of their plan, that PrinceBerloff be “executed” and the “execution” be left to him; but Sonya opposed that sanguinary course. Whereupon he volunteered several suggestions bearing upon their immediate plan of freeing Borodin; and although Drexel felt an inward shrinking, he had to acknowledge that Freeman was an adviser of wonderful shrewdness, of endless expedient, of intimate acquaintance with the conditions with which their plan must deal. Drexel would have preferred to work with an ally of less fearsome temperament, but that he was an ally of supreme efficiency there was no denying.
“You seemed to have some hesitation about Mr. Freeman at that conference in this room a week ago,” remarked Drexel, when the terrorist had gone.
“It is a peculiarity of our hunted underground life that we hardly know whom to trust,” was Sonya’s reply. “We are always suspecting one another. And for the moment we were not certain about him. He is too ruthless, he may be over-bold, but we can hardly doubt his sincerity. You remember the scene between him and Prince Berloff in the Hotel Europe.”
“I was present,” said Drexel.
“His course there was rash—but it proved that, whatever his faults, he is sincere, and it brushed away whatever suspicions may have risen in our minds.”
Presently Sonya withdrew to the lower floor, where she had a room in the quarters of the housekeeperand his wife, and Drexel went to bed in the adjoining room. The next day Sonya was for going straight to the governor, but she took the precaution to call up the Fortress by telephone to learn whether he was in. He was at the Ministry of the Interior for the day, she was told, and had left word that he could not be seen till the morrow. This postponement of action was a heavy disappointment to her but there was nothing for it but to wait.
Toward the end of the afternoon Sonya went out with the housekeeper’s wife, and Drexel was left to his thoughts. It was not long before the countess came into his mind. Even though it had been for the best, he felt a sharp, accusing shame over his desertion of her, and he wondered what had befallen her after he had leaped from the sleigh two nights before.
It occurred to him that perhaps he could gain some hint of her fate by applying to one of her servants, and he went out to a public telephone and called up her apartment house. To his surprise the voice that answered was the countess’s. In reply to his questions she said that if he would come to her she would tell him all.
She was awaiting him in her drawing-room, pale and rather worn, but no less richly handsome than usual. She had, however, nothing of her rallying good humour, her air of confident, luxurious grace. She told him that she had fallen into the hands of Captain Nadson and the Cossacks and had beentaken by the captain privately before Prince Berloff. The prince had been most harsh with her, but to save his guests the unpleasantness of being involved in a scandal, he had decided to keep the matter secret for the present. They had all returned to St. Petersburg that day, except the prince; and she, though apparently free, was under what amounted to domiciliary arrest.
What had happened was of course a little otherwise. When taken before Prince Berloff, she had told the story of her failure, and how she had struggled to prevent Drexel’s escape, and had been corroborated by the captain and by the bruised arms which she exhibited. The prince, bitterly disappointed as he was, had to attribute the failure to Drexel’s quickness of brain and body.
Drexel told her in turn how he had got back to St. Petersburg.
“I know you have not returned to your hotel, for I called it up,” said she. “Where have you gone?”
Her pallor deepened as he answered her.
“And so you are in the midst of a revolutionary plot!” she breathed. “But how did you know of that house?”
Once more he was forced to give her an evasive reply. “Mr. Freeman told me of it.”
She gazed at him for several moments, and appalling fear grew upon her. He was going right forward with this plot she had lured him into—this plot against his life!
Suddenly she stretched out a jewelled hand and caught his arm. “Please—please do not go back to that house!” she cried.
He stared at her. “Why?”
“Please do not. I beg of you.”
“But why?” he asked. “Only two days ago you urged me into this plan.”
“I did not then realize the danger!”
“I did. And I realize it now.”
But not all the danger, she wanted to cry out. But to warn him of the whole of his danger would be to reveal to him the truth about herself.
“And I am quite ready to face it,” he assured her. “I shall see this affair through to the end.”
She turned ghastly white. If she spoke, he would spurn her, despise her. If she did not——
But she dared not speak.