CHAPTER XVITHE WHITE ONE
SHE rose and crossed to him; and Ivan and Nicolai slipped out. She was dressed as he had seen her in this same room a week before—in the coarse, quilted jacket and head-swathing shawl of a factory girl.
Their hands gripped. He had never known before what the grip of a hand could be. Nor how glowing a pair of blue eyes.
“I thought you were sick!” he cried.
“Only a pretense,” she smiled.
He drew a breath of relief. “But even though you are well, how did you manage to come here?”
“The time had come for me to stop being Princess Valenko—so I just stopped.”
“Ah, I see. You have at length given up all that!”
“No—not yet.”
“Then how did you manage to leave home?—how did you dare?”
They sat down together on the couch, peasant and working-girl. Drexel now noticed that a lamp was burning, and that without the window was blackness; plainly he had slept the whole day.
“As soon as you told me last night where Borodinis,” she began, “I complained to my father about feeling a fever coming on. I urged him to take me home at once, so that I could have the proper attention in case the fever developed seriously. I sent for my own doctor; I said I would have no other. He is a friend—a revolutionist. He found I had a high fever; he ordered day and night nurses—also revolutionists; he said that my condition was so serious that no one should be allowed to see me—not even my father.
“I waited till the way was made clear for me, then in these clothes I slipped out through the servants’ entrance. Until further notice the nurses will be keeping night and day watch upon Princess Valenko; they will order special food for her; the doctor will visit her two or three times a day, and issue bulletins regarding her condition. And in the meantime—here I am.”
“Wonderful!” laughed Drexel.
“Now about yourself,” she said. “That is vastly more important.”
Drexel at first tried to give a mere bald outline, but she impatiently demanded details of all that had happened since she had saved the day by walking forth to face the captain and the prince. So he told everything; how he had found Borodin’s whereabouts; how he had been trapped by the prince, and almost by the captain; of his flight with the countess and their pursuit; of his escape disguised as a peasant. And if since yesterday he had passedthrough dangers, the look with which she regarded him was payment a thousandfold.
“Forgive me for what I said in this room a week ago,” she besought him.
“Forgive you?” he cried. “Why, it was I——”
“No, no!” she interrupted. “There is a side to you I then no more than glimpsed. I now see that it is really the larger side—perhaps it is really the whole man. Since I then said unjust things, I now want to say that you are generous, strong, resourceful, brave, resolute, true.”
Her look might mean no more than warm and grateful comradeship—and yet, his heart leaped daringly. “I only hope that what you say is the truth,” he stammered joyously.
“I do not know how much of a democrat you are—yet,” she continued; “but you are the type of man we need to help set Russia free. And that makes me regret that we must lose you.”
“Lose me!”
“Yes. For you must now leave us.”
“Why?”
“Prince Berloff has discovered that you are aiding us. He is after you—and not only for that, but plainly for some private reason. The only safe plan for you is to join your uncle’s family; he dare not touch you then. Never leave them.”
“Never leave them? But I want to help you!”
“Do you not see that he will have you watched?That if you come to us spies will follow you, and discover us?”
“Yes.” He thought a moment. “I see, then, there is only one way.”
“I thought you would see it.”
“But not the way you mean. Not to go back. But to stay among you. To live the underground life. Won’t you let me?”
“But the danger!”
“Won’t you let me?” he repeated.
“You mean it?” The blue eyes shone with an even brighter glow into the gray ones. “You do! Ah—perhaps you will help set Russia free!”
It was on Drexel’s tongue to say it was not Russia—but he remembered the scene of a week ago in this room, and held back his words.
“Now that you have learned where my brother is, we must begin the next step, to try to free him,” she went on. “Our Central Committee is ready to strike at once. We discuss plans to-night. I go from here to The White One.”
“The White One!” exclaimed Drexel. “You know The White One?”
“Well.”
“I have heard no name more often since I’ve been in Russia. Might I ask what he is like?”
“Forgive me—I cannot tell even you. Only the Central Committee and a very few others, persons who have been tested by fire and water, know who The White One is.”
She paused, then said hesitant: “Possibly, after all, you may see for yourself. I told about your saving me and your offer to help us, and The White One was very much interested. By what you have done you have earned and proved the right to be trusted, and when I tell all—who knows? At any rate, I was going to ask you to walk there with me.”
“I am ready,” said Drexel springing up.
“In those clothes?”
Drexel for the first moment since waking thought of what he wore, and of him who waited for the garments.
“What shall I do?” he cried. And he told her of leaving the peasant at the station twelve hours before.
“Believe me,” she returned, “he is patiently sitting there, his left leg over his right leg, his wrong-side-out cap on his left knee. Ivan will take the clothes to him. The outfit Ivan bought for you is on the table. I will wait for you in the next room.”
Half an hour later, Drexel, in a cheap, ready-made suit and overcoat, and with a forged passport describing him as a mechanic, walked out of the court with Sonya. He was now truly entering upon the underground life; he was one of those who were being hunted down craftily, ruthlessly by Prince Berloff’s vast secret army; his life might any moment be snuffed out. Yet he felt an intense exhilaration; he felt that he and Sonya would defeat the prince,despite all his cunning, despite his myriads of spies.
A furious wind was raging in from the Gulf of Finland, armed with an icy snow that stabbed the face like tiny daggers. As they bent away against it, her arm through his, he asked her what had occurred when the countess had been returned to Berloff’s house the night before, but she had not seen the countess. They spoke of Captain Nadson, against whom in particular they must ever be on the watch; and Sonya told him of the captain’s own company of gendarmes, known as “Nadson’s Hundred,” who had been recruited for the most merciless work from the lowest and fiercest types of men.
As they came out upon the Palace Bridge they paused, despite the gale, and gazed to where, a few hundred yards up the Neva, stood the mighty fortress-prison of Saints Peter and Paul. They could not see it with their eyes, but they sensed its fear-compelling form: a huge, low, irregular oblong of massive granite walls, moat-surrounded, washed on one side by the Neva’s flood, with cannon scowling blackly forth. This grim pile was the prison that held Borodin, perhaps in some dungeon beneath the water’s level. And it was this grim pile, separated from the Czar’s palace by only the river’s width, in the centre of Russia’s troop-filled capital—it was this that they two, a man and a woman, with a few others proposed to rob of its chief prisoner.
“That is a symbol of all Russia,” she murmured with subdued passion. “Russia is just one great jail; at best the position of the people is merely that of prisoners on parole. The Czar is not a ruler. He is merely head-jailer.”
They traversed the long bridge, went by the Winter Palace, and turned south past the Cathedral of St. Isaac. After walking a quarter of an hour Sonya paused.
“We part here for the present. Go into that little shop across the street, and spend ten minutes in making some purchase. When you come out, look at the windows on the third floor above the door I enter. If the curtains are still down, you are to return. If one is up a few inches, it will mean that The White One desires to see you.”
Drexel watched her enter a door half a block ahead, then he crossed to the shop and bought a package of cheap tea. When he came out he looked up at the windows. Light shone from beneath one of the curtains.
He crossed eagerly, his pulses in a tumult—for in a moment he was to stand face to face with this famous mystery. His mind guessed wildly at what figure he should find. Perhaps some great professor, whose ethics or mathematics were only a mask for this his real activity. Perhaps some noted general from the Czar’s army. Perhaps even some mighty nobleman, hiding his identity beneath this vague and fearsome name.
He climbed the stairs and knocked. Sonya admitted him and led him through a short hallway into a plainly furnished room. Here were three men, and a figure in a wheeled chair. Drexel swept the three men with swift, tense wonder. Two were the men he had seen with Sonya in the house in Three Saints’ Court, the third he saw for the first time. Which of the three was it?
“This is Mr. Drexel,” said Sonya. She took his arm and led him forward. “And this is The White One.”
It was to the wheeled chair that she led him. Drexel looked at the chair and stood amazed. For The White One, the leader feared and hated by the Government, the master mind, the very heart of the revolution, was a woman!
Aye, and an invalid at that! Her hands were twisted, her body bent, and he had no guess of what infirmities lay hid beneath the rug that warmed her lower body. But disease had stayed its withering hands at her shoulders. Such a head it had never been his fortune to look upon before: a pale, deep-wrinkled face, powerful, patient, austere, mighty with purpose, yet in it a tremendous, lofty love; and crowning her head, and falling unconfined upon her shoulders, a mass of soft short hair as white as the virgin snow.
The White One—well named indeed!