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The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

by Abraham Cahan · English · Gutenberg #39166 · 707,575 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

Author: Abraham Cahan


        
Release date: March 16, 2012 [eBook #39166]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE TERROR AND THE RED: A NOVEL OF REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA ***




Produced by Rosanna Murphy, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









THE WHITE TERROR AND THE RED




    THE WHITE TERROR
    AND
    THE RED

    A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

    BY
    A. CAHAN
    Author of "Yekl" and "The Imported Bridegroom."

    [Illustration]

    NEW YORK
    A. S. BARNES & COMPANY
    1905




    Copyright, 1905
    BY A. S. BARNES & COMPANY

    _All rights reserved_

    _Published February, 1905_
    _Second Printing, February, 1905_
    _Third Printing, March, 1905_




CONTENTS.


    CHAPTER                                    PAGE

          I. An Affront to His Czar               1

         II. The White Terror                    14

        III. Pievakin Pleads Guilty              20

         IV. The "Demonstration"                 28

          V. Pavel's First Step                  40

         VI. A Meeting on New Terms              57

        VII. "Terrorism Without Violence"        62

       VIII. Makar's Canvass                     76

         IX. A Day Underground                   81

          X. The Czar's Escape                   93

         XI. A Mysterious Arrest                 97

        XII. A Bewildering Encounter            103

       XIII. A Gendarme's Sister                112

        XIV. Underground Miroslav               121

         XV. A Warning                          135

        XVI. Clara at Home                      147

       XVII. The Countess' Discovery            151

      XVIII. Pavel at Boyko's Court             160

        XIX. Strawberries                       169

         XX. A "Conspiracy Trip"                178

        XXI. Makar's Father                     187

       XXII. From Cellar to Palace              196

      XXIII. An Unforeseen Suggestion           205

       XXIV. Vladimir Finds His Cause           211

        XXV. Clara Becomes "Illegal"            227

       XXVI. On Sacred Ground                   235

      XXVII. A Postponed Wedding                244

     XXVIII. A Second Courtship                 252

       XXIX. A Hunted Monarch                   260

        XXX. The Mystery of a Shop              267

       XXXI. A Reassuring Search                277

      XXXII. The Red Terror                     287

     XXXIII. The Revelation                     299

      XXXIV. The Czar Takes Courage             310

       XXXV. A Hunted People                    319

      XXXVI. A "Paper from the Czar"            331

     XXXVII. The Defence Committee              339

    XXXVIII. The Nihilist's Guard               357

      XXXIX. The Riot                           371

         XL. Light out of Darkness              389

        XLI. Pavel Becomes "Illegal"            401

       XLII. Ominous Footsteps                  408

      XLIII. A Message Through the Wall         423




THE WHITE TERROR AND THE RED




THE WHITE TERROR AND THE RED.




CHAPTER I.

AN AFFRONT TO HIS CZAR.


Alexander II. passed part of the summer of 1874 in a German
health-resort taking the mineral waters. When not in the castle in which
he was staying with his train he affected the life of an ordinary
citizen. He did so as much from necessity as from choice. Czar or
subject, the same water must be drunk at the same spot and hour by all
who seek its cure. Nor can any distinction be made in the matter of the
walk which the patient is to take after draining his two or three
gobletsful.

The promenade at a watering place is a great parade-ground for the
display of plumage, the gayest and costliest gowns being reserved for
the procession that follows the taking of the remedy; but while the race
is under way and everybody is striving to throw everybody else into the
shade, the fact of their being there pierces each dress as with "X"
rays, showing their flesh to be of the same fragile clay.

So the Czar accepted the levelling effect of the place good-naturedly
and sought diversion in the unsustained role of a common mortal.
Unsustained, because he carried his gigantic, beautiful form with a
graceful self-importance and a martial erectness that betrayed his
incognito even in the open country stretches to which he would stroll
off in search of mild adventure and flirtation.

It was a late afternoon in the valley. The river glittered crimson. The
hills on the other side of the summer town were capped by a sultry haze.
Donkeys used in ascending these hills were trotting about impishly or
standing in stupid row awaiting custom. The sun blazed down upon a
parade of a hundred countries, including a jet black prince from Africa,
a rajah, a Chinaman in dazzling silks, a wealthy Galician Jew in atlas,
and a pasha with German features.

The Czar, his immense figure encased in a light frock coat of excellent
fit, was sauntering along apparently unaccompanied except by his terrier
and cane. When saluted he would raise his straw hat and nod his enormous
well-shaped head with a cordiality that bordered on good-fellowship. He
seemed to relish this exchange of courtesies with people who were not
his subjects in this little republic of physical malady. It was as
though he felt apart from his autocratic self without feeling out of
that pampering atmosphere of deference and attention which was his
second nature; and he gave an effect of inhaling his freedom as one does
the first whiffs of spring air.

As to his fellow patients, they either discovered something majestic in
the very dog that followed him, or were struck by the knuckles of his
ungloved hands, for example, as if it were remarkable that they should
be the same sort of knuckles as their own. He was strikingly well-built
and strikingly handsome. He wore thick close-cropped side whiskers of
the kind that is rarely becoming, but his face they became very well
indeed, adding majesty to a cast of large, clear-cut features. It was
the most monarchical face of its time, and yet it was anything but a
strong face. His imposing side whiskers and moustache left bare a full
sensuous mouth and a plump weak chin; his blueish eyes gave forth
suggestions of melancholy and anguish. Interest in him was whetted by
stories of his passion for Princess Dolgoruki, lady in waiting to the
Czarina; so the women at the watering place tried to decipher the tale
of his liaison in those sad amative eyes of his.

Two refined looking, middle-aged women attracted attention by the
bizarre simplicity with which one of them was attired and coiffured. She
was extremely pale and made one think of an insane asylum or a convent.
She was grey, while her companion had auburn hair and was shorter and
flabbier of figure. They were conversing in French, but it was not their
native tongue. The one with the grey hair was Pani Oginska, a Polish
woman; the other a Russian countess named Anna Nicolayevna Varova
(Varoff). They had first met, in this watering place, less than a
fortnight ago, when a chat, in the course of which they warmed to each
other, led to the discovery that their estates lay in neighbouring
provinces in Little Russia. They were preceded by a slender youth of
eighteen in a broad-brimmed straw hat and a clean-shaven elderly little
man in one of soft grey felt. These were Prince Pavel Alexeyevich
Boulatoff, a son of the countess by a former marriage, and Alexandre
Alexandrovich Pievakin, his private tutor, as well as one of his
instructors at the gymnasium[A] of his native town. Pavel's straw hat
was too sedate for his childish face and was pushed down so low that a
delicately sculptured chin and mouth and the turned up tip of a rudely
hewn Russian nose was all one could see under its vast expanse of yellow
brim. The old man knew no German and this was his first trip abroad, so
his high-born pupil, who had an advantage over him in both these
respects, was explaining things to him, with an air at once patronising
and respectful. Presently Pavel interrupted himself.

  [A] A classical Russian high school modelled after its German
  namesake.

"The Czar!" he whispered, in a flutter. "The Czar!" he repeated over his
shoulder, addressing himself to his mother.

Pievakin raised his glance, paling as he did so, but was so overawed by
the sight that he forthwith dropped his eyes, a sickly expression on his
lips.

When the men came face to face with their monarch they made way and
snatched off their hats as if they were on fire. Countess Varoff,
Pavel's mother, curtseyed deeply, her flaccid insignificant little body
retreating toward the side of the promenade and then sinking to the
ground; while the Polish woman proceeded on her way stiffly without so
much as a nod of her head. The Czar returned the greeting of the Russian
woman gallantly and disappeared in the rear of them.

The group walked on in nervous silence, the two women now in the lead.
When they reached a deserted spot the youth suddenly flushed a violent
red, and, thrusting out his finely chiselled chin at his mother, he
said, in quick pugnacious full-toned accents as out of keeping with his
boyish figure as his hat:

"Mother, you are not going to keep up acquaintance with a person who has
offered an insult to our Czar."

"Paul! What has come over you?" the countess stammered out, colouring
abjectly as she paused.

"I mean just what I say, mother."

The elderly little man by his side looked on sheepishly, the cold sweat
standing in beads on his forehead.

"Don't mind this wild boy, I beg of you," Anna Nicolayevna said to the
Polish woman. "Don't pay the least attention to him. He imagines himself
a full grown man, but he is merely a silly boy and he gives me no end of
trouble. Don't take it ill, _ma chere_." She rattled it off in a great
flurry of embarrassment, straining the boy back tenderly, while she was
condemning him.

"I don't take it ill at all," Pani Oginska answered tremulously. "He's
perfectly right. Your acquaintance has been a great pleasure to me,
countess, but I can see that my company at this place would be very
inconvenient to you. Adieu!"

She walked off toward a row of new cottages, and Anna Nicolayevna, the
countess, stood gazing after her like one petrified.

"You are a savage, Pasha," she whispered, in Russian.

"Why am I? I have done what is right, and you feel it as well as I do,"
he returned hotly, in his sedate, compact, combative voice, looking from
her to his teacher. When he was excited he sputtered out his sentences
in volleys, growling at his listener and seemingly about to flounce off.
This was the way he spoke now. "Why am I a savage? Can you afford to
associate with a woman who will behave in this impudent, in this
rebellious manner toward the Czar? Can you, now?"

"That's neither here nor there," she said, with irritation, as they
resumed their walk. "She is a very unhappy creature. All that she holds
dear has been taken from her. Her husband was hanged during the Polish
rebellion and now her son, a college student, has been torn from her and
is dying in prison of consumption. If you were not so heartless you
would have some pity on her."

"Her husband was hanged and her son is in prison and you wish to
associate with her! Do you really? What do you think of it, Alexandre
Alexandrovich?"

"A very painful incident," Pievakin murmured, wretchedly.

"As if I were eager for her company," she returned, timidly. "As if one
could help the chance acquaintances that fall into one's way while
travelling. Besides, _she_ is no rebel. Indeed, she is one of the most
charming women I ever met, and to hear her story is enough to break a
heart of stone. You have no sympathy, Pasha."

"She is no rebel! Why, if she did in Russia what she did here a minute
ago she would be hustled off to Siberia in short order, and it would
serve her right, too. And because I don't want my mother to go with such
a person I have no sympathy."

"Pardon me, Anna Nicolayevna," Pievakin interposed, with embarrassed
ardour, "but if I were you I should keep out of her way. She is an
unfortunate woman, but, God bless her,--Pasha is right, I think."

"I should say I was," the boy said, triumphantly. "She wouldn't dare do
such a thing in Russia, would she? But then in Russia a woman of that
sort would have no chance to do anything of the kind. Oh, I do hate the
Germans for exposing the Czar to these insults. It is simply terrible,
terrible. Couldn't they arrange it so that he should not have to rub
shoulders with every Tom, Dick and Harry and be exposed to every sort of
affront? And yet when I say so I am a savage and have no heart." He
gnashed his teeth and burst into tears.

"Hush, dear, I didn't mean it. Don't be excited, now."

"But you did mean it; you know you did."

"Sh, calm down, Pasha," the old man besought him, and Pavel's features
softened.

Alexandre Alexandrovich was the only teacher at the high school of whom
Pavel was fond. He was an old-fashioned little man, with cravats of a
former generation and with features and movements which conveyed the
impression that he was forever making ready to bow. His cackling good
humour when the recitations were correct and fluent, his distressed air
when they were not; his mixed timidity and quick temper--these things
are recalled with fond smiles in Miroslav. He was attached to both his
subjects and when put on his mettle by the attention of his class he
really knew how to put life into the dullest lesson. On such occasions
his timid manner would disappear, and he would draw himself up, and go
strutting back and forth with long, defiant steps and hurling out his
sentences like a domineering rooster. It was only when a lesson of this
sort was suddenly disturbed by some sally from a scapegrace of a pupil
that Pievakin would fly into a passion and then he would take to jumping
about, tearing at his own hair, and groaning as though with physical
pain.

Pavel was perhaps the most ardent friend Alexandre Alexandrovich had in
all Miroslav. The young prince was in a singular position at the
gymnasium. Somehow things were always done in a way to make one remember
that he was Prince Boulatoff and a nephew of the governor of the
province of which Miroslav was the capital. He was the only boy who
usually came to school in a carriage and it seemed as though the
imposing vehicle had the effect of isolating him from the other boys. As
to his teachers, they took a peculiar tone with him--one of
ill-concealed reverence which would betray itself with all the more
emphasis when they tried to take him to task. The upshot was that most
of the other pupils, including the only other prince in the class (who
was also the wildest boy in it) kept out of Pavel's way, while those
who did not treated him with a servility that was even more offensive to
him than the aloofness of the rest. He had made several attempts to get
on terms of good fellowship with two or three of the boys he liked, but
his own effort to laugh and frolic with them had jarred on him like a
false note. He had finally settled down to a manner of haughty
reticence, keeping an observant eye on his classmates and finding a
peculiar pleasure in these silent observations.

The only two teachers who did not indulge him were Pievakin and the
teacher of mathematics, a cheerful hunchback with a pale distended face
lit by a pair of comical blue eyes, whom the boys had dubbed "truncated
cone." The teacher of mathematics made Pavel feel his exceptional
position by treating him with special harshness. As to Pievakin, who had
begun by addressing the aristocratic youth with an embarrassed air, he
had gradually adopted toward him a manner of fatherly superiority that
developed in the boy's heart a filial attachment for the old pedagogue.
In order to increase his income Pavel had made him his private tutor,
although he stood high in his class and needed no such assistance, and
this summer, when the old man complained of rheumatism, he had caused
his mother to invite him to the German resort.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they reached their hotel the countess unburdened herself to her
son's tutor of certain memories which interested her now far more than
did her unexpected rupture with the Polish woman. She described a court
ball at St. Petersburg at which the present Czar, then still Czarowitz,
conversed for five minutes with her. She treated the gymnasium teacher
partly as she would her priest, partly as if he were her butler, and
now, in her burst of reminiscence, she overhauled her past to him with
the whole-hearted, childlike abandon which is characteristic of her race
and which put the humble old teacher ill at ease. "He told me to take
good care of my 'pretty eyes and golden eyebrows,'" she said. "And yet
it was for these very eyebrows that Pavel's father disliked me."

She had been the pet daughter of a wealthy nobleman, high in the service
of the ministry for foreign affairs, but Pavel's father, and her living
husband, from whom she was now practically separated, had almost
convinced her that to be disliked was her just share in life. Her
parents and sisters were dead. She had a little boy by her second
marriage, but she was still in love with the shadow of her first
husband, and the son he had left her was the one passion of her life.
Having spent her youth in the two foreign countries to which her
father's diplomatic career took the family, she deprecated, in a dim
unformulated way, many of the things that surrounded her in her native
land. She was unable to reconcile her luminous image of the Emperor with
the mediaeval cruelties that were being perpetrated by his order. She was
at a loss to understand how such a gentle-hearted man could send to the
gallows or to the living graves of Siberia people like the Polish
patriots. The compulsory religion of the Orthodox Russian Church, too,
with its iron-clad organisation and grotesque uniforms, impressed her as
a kind of spiritual gendarmerie. Yet she accepted it all as part of that
panorama of things which whispered the magic word, "Russia." And now the
sight of the Czar had rekindled memories of her better days and stirred
in her a submissive sense of her cheerless fate.

Pavel was meanwhile putting the case of the Polish woman to Onufri, one
of the two servants who accompanied them in their present travels--a
retired hussar with a formidable moustache in front of a pinched
hollow-cheeked face.

"Her highness, your mother, is good as an angel, sir," was Onufri's
verdict.

"And you are stupid as a cork," Pavel snarled. His sense of the
desecration to which the person of his Czar was being subjected by
mingling with people like the widow of a hanged rebel rankled in his
heart. He worked himself up to a state of mind in which the very
similarity in physical appearance between the untitled people with whom
the Czar and born aristocrats like himself and his mother were compelled
to mingle at a place like this resort struck him as an impertinence on
the part of the untitled people.

Later when he lay between two German featherbeds and Onufri brought him
his book and a candle he asked him to take a seat by his bedside.

"Why are you such a deuced fool, Onufri?"

"If I am it is God's business, not mine, nor your highness'."

"Look here, Onufri. How would you like to have all common people black
like those darkies?"

The servant spat out in horror and made the sign of the cross.

"For shame, sir. What harm have the common people done you that you
should wish them a horrid thing like that? And where does your highness
get these cruel thoughts? Surely not from your mother. For shame, sir."

"Idiot that you are, it's mere fancy, just for fun. There ought to be
some difference between noble people and common. There is in some
countries, you know." He told him about castes, the slave trade in
America and passed to the days of chivalry, his favourite topic, until
the retired hussar's head sank and a mighty snore rang out of his bushy
moustache. Pavel flew into a passion.

"Ass!" he shouted, getting half out of bed and shaking him fiercely.
"Why don't I fall asleep when you tell me stories?"

Onufri started and fell to rubbing one eye, while with his other eye he
looked about him, as though he had slept a week. The stories he often
told young Boulatoff mostly related to the days of serfdom, which had
been abolished when Pavel was a boy of five. Onufri's mother had been
flogged to death in the presence of her master, Pavel's grandfather, and
the former hussar would tell the story with a solemnity that reflected
his veneration for the "good old times" rather than grief over the fate
of his mother.

That night Pavel dreamed of a pond full of calves that were splashing
about and laughing in the water. He carried them all home and on his way
there they were transformed into one pair, and the two calves walked
about and talked just like Onufri and the transformation was no
transformation at all, the calves being real calves and negroes at the
same time. When he awoke, in the morning, and it came over him that the
dream had had something to do with Onufri, he was seized with a feeling
of self-disgust. He thought of the Polish woman and his treatment of
her, and this, too, appeared in a new light to him.

Two or three hours later, when the countess returned from her morning
walk Pavel, dressed to go out, grave and mysterious, solemnly handed her
a sealed note from himself.

"Don't open it until I have left," he said. "I am going out for a
stroll."

"What you said yesterday about my being hard-hearted and incapable of
sympathy," the letter read, "left a deep impression on me. I thought of
it almost the first thing this morning as I opened my eyes, and it kept
me thinking all the morning. I looked deep into my soul, I overhauled my
whole ego. I turned it inside out, and--well, I must say I have come to
the conclusion that what you said was not devoid of foundation. Not that
I am prepared to imagine ourselves as having anything to do with a woman
whose family is a family of rebels and who has the audacity to pass our
emperor without bowing; but she is a human being, too, and her
sufferings should have aroused some commiseration in me. I envy you,
mother. Compared to you I really am a hard-hearted, unfeeling brute, and
it makes me very, very unhappy to think of it. My heart is so full at
this moment that I am at a loss to give expression to what I feel, but
you will understand me, darling little mother mine. I do _not_ want to
be hard and cruel, and I want you to help me.

                               "Your struggling son,
                                                         "PAVEL."

When Anna Nicolayevna laid down the letter her large meek grey eyes
first grew red and then filled with tears. She sat with her long slim
arms loosely folded on a davenport, weeping and smiling at once. There
was much charm in her smile, but, barring it and her mass of fine auburn
hair, she was certainly not good looking. She was small, ungainly,
flat-chested, with a large thin-lipped mouth and, in spite of her
beautiful gowns, with a general effect of rustiness.

When Pavel and his mother met at dinner he felt so embarrassed he could
not bring himself to look her in the face.




CHAPTER II.

THE WHITE TERROR.


Miroslav was trisected longitudinally by a clear, cheerful river and by
Kasimir Street, its principal thoroughfare, which contained most of its
public buildings and best shops. The middle one of the three sections
thus formed was the home of the higher nobility and the official class;
the district across the bridge from here was inhabited by Christian
burghers and workmen, with here and there a clay hovel, the home of a
peasant family, gleaming white in the distant outskirts; while the hilly
quarter beyond Kasimir Street was the seat of Jewish industry and Jewish
poverty, part of this neighbourhood being occupied by the market places
and "the Paradise," as the slums of the town were called ironically. The
governor's house, which faced Governor's Prospect--a small square with a
fountain in the centre--and Anna Nicolayevna's were the two most
imposing buildings in Miroslav.

The countess' residence was the only structure in town that had a
colonnaded front. The common people called it the Palace and the section
of Kasimir Street it faced the Pillars. The sidewalk opposite was the
favourite promenade of the younger generation, and every afternoon, in
auspicious weather, it glittered with the uniforms of army officers and
gymnasium boys. The Palace was built by her grandfather in the closing
days of the previous century. It abutted on a long narrow lane formed
on one side by Anna Nicolayevna's garden and leading to Theatre Square,
where stood the playhouse and the Nobles' Club. When the white rigidity
of these buildings was relieved by the grass of its lawns and the
foliage of its trees the spot was the joy of the town.

During the winter of the year following the countess' sojourn at the
German watering place, Miroslav was stirred by a sensation, the central
figure of which was Pavel's tutor, the instructor of geography and
history in the local gymnasium, Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin. Pavel
was then in the graduating class.

Besides being connected with the male gymnasium Pievakin taught at the
female high school of Miroslav. The town was fond of him and he was fond
of the town and upon the whole he was contented. One of the things that
galled him was the fact that his superior, the newly appointed director
of the school, was his inferior both in years and in civil rank.
Pievakin was a "councillor of state," while Novikoff, the head of the
male gymnasium, was only a "collegiate assessor." Novikoff was a
painstaking, narrow-minded functionary, superciliously proud of his
office and slavishly loyal to the letter of the law. He was a slender,
dark-complexioned man of forty, but he tried to look much older and
heavier. He copied the Czar's side-whiskers, walked like a corpulent
grandee, perpetually pulling at his waistcoat as though he were burdened
by a voluminous paunch, and interlarded his speech with aphorisms from
the Latin Grammar.

One day as the director strutted ponderously along one of the two
corridors, the word "parliament" fell on his ear. It was Pievakin's
voice. The old man was explaining something to his class with great
ardour. Novikoff paused, his lordly walk congealing into the picture of
dignified attention. The next minute, however, his grandeur melted away.
His face expressed unfeigned horror. Pievakin was drawing an effusive
parallel between absolute monarchies and limited. This was distinctly in
violation of the Circular of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment
enjoining teachers of geography, in cases of this kind, to adhere
strictly to the bare terminology of the approved text-book without
venturing into anything like an elucidation. Not that Pievakin was
betraying any partiality for limited monarchies. Indeed, to him the
distinction between the two forms of government was neither of more nor
of less interest than the difference between a steppe and a prairie or a
simoon and a hurricane. It appealed to him because it was geography, and
in his ecstasy over the lesson all thought of the Ministry and its
Circulars had escaped his mind.

That afternoon he was summoned to the director's office on the floor
below.

Novikoff was at his large, flat-topped desk, studiously absorbed in some
papers. He silently motioned the teacher of geography to a seat, and
went on with his feigned work. After a lapse of some minutes he
straightened up, played a few scales upon the brass buttons of his
uniform, and said:

"It pains me to have to say it, Alexandre Alexandrovich, but these are
queer times and the passions of youth should be moderated, held in
check, suppressed, not aroused. The imagination of one's pupils is not
to be trifled with, Alexandre Alexandrovich."

He paused mournfully. The little old man, who had not the least idea
what he was driving at, waited in consternation. The room was
overheated, and the pause had an overpowering effect on him. He felt on
the verge of fainting.

"The point is," Novikoff resumed, with a sudden spurt in his voice,
"that in your class work you sometimes suffer yourself to say things
that cannot but be regarded as dangerous. Dangerous particularly in view
of the evil influences at work among the young of our generation; in
view of the very sad fact that college students will disguise themselves
as peasants----"

"What do you mean, sir?" Pievakin burst out, reddening violently. "How
dare you liken me to those fellows? I was serving the Czar while you
were still a whippersnapper. I'm a councillor of state, sir. How dare
you make these insinuations?"

"I expected as much," Novikoff answered, nervously polishing his
buttons. "Defying one's superior is of a piece with the views you're
trying to instill into the minds of your scholars."

"What is of a piece with what? Speak out, sir," Pievakin shrieked.

"Bridle your temper, sir. I can't allow that."

"Then tell me what it's all about," the teacher of history and geography
said in a queer, half-beseeching, half-threatening voice.

"Well, this morning you were expatiating upon the blessings of a
constitutional government. Yes, sir. There are no spies to eavesdrop on
one in this building, but it seems you never speak so loud nor with so
much gusto as when you get to the subject of constitutions and
parliaments and things of that kind."

"It isn't true. I merely said a word or two on the various forms of
government. It's practically all in Smirnoff's Geography."

"'Practically'! It's against the law. I am very sorry, but it becomes my
duty to report it to the curator."

Here Pievakin, losing control of himself, shouted "Spy!" and
"Scoundrel!" and darted out of the room.

This happened at a time when the "peasantist" movement, the peaceful,
unresisting stage in the history of what is commonly known as Nihilism,
was at its height. The educated young generation was in an ecstasy of
altruism. It was the period of "going to the people," when hundreds of
well-bred men and women, children of the nobility, would don peasant
garb and go to share the life of the tillers of the soil, teaching them
to read, talking to them of universal love, liberty and equality. The
government punished this "going to the people" with Asiatic severity.
Russia has no capital punishment for the slaying of common mortals, the
average penalty for murder being about ten years of penal servitude in
Siberia; and this penalty the courts were often ordered to impose on
absolutely peaceable missionaries, on university students who
practically did the same kind of work as that pursued by the "university
settlements" in English-speaking countries. There were about one
thousand of these propagandists in the political prisons of the empire,
and their number was growing. They were kept in solitary confinement in
cold, damp cells. Scores of them went insane or died of consumption,
scurvy or suicide before their cases came up for trial.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pievakin's house was searched by gendarmes, but no "underground"
literature was discovered there. He was not arrested, but spies shadowed
his movements and about a month after the domiciliary visit he was
officially notified by the curator's office that he was to be
transferred to the four-year "progymnasium" of a small town a
considerable distance off. This implied that his work was to be
restricted to boys of fourteen and less in a town out of the way of
"dangerous tendencies." He grew thin and haggard and a certain look of
fright never left his eye. The other instructors at the gymnasium, all
except one, and many of his private acquaintance plainly shunned him. He
had become one of those people with whom one could not come in contact
without attracting the undesirable attention of the police. One of those
who were not afraid to be seen in his company was the "truncated cone."
"My crooked back is the only one that does not bend," the deformed man
would joke. The tacit philosophy of his attitude toward the world seemed
to be something like this: "You people won't consider me one of you. I
am only a hunchback, something like an elf, and you will take many an
unwelcome truth from me which you would resent in one like yourselves.
So let us proceed on this understanding."

When Boulatoff heard that his favourite teacher was to be exiled to a
small town "to render him harmless," he was shocked. Alexandre
Alexandrovich Pievakin was the last man in the world he would have
suspected to be guilty of seditious agitation. His only idol at school
was thus shattered. Pievakin had not the courage to visit the countess'
house now, and Pavel, on his part, held aloof from him. The old man was
hateful to him, not only as a rebel, but also as an impostor and a
hypocrite. He felt duped. His blood rankled with disgust and resentment.
At the same time the situation did not seem quite clear to him.
Something puzzled him, although he could not have put his finger on it.




CHAPTER III.

PIEVAKIN PLEADS GUILTY.


A lesson in Latin was in progress. The teacher was a blond Czech. Pavel
looked at him intently, trying to follow the exercises, but he only
became the more aware of the foreigner's struggles with Russian and made
the discovery that his clumsy carriage, as he walked up and down the
room, was suggestive of a peasant woman trying to catch a chicken. His
thoughts passed to Pievakin and almost at the same instant a question
flashed into his brain: If Pievakin was unreliable politically, why,
then, was he getting off so easily? How was it that instead of being cut
off from the living world, instead of being thrown into a dungeon to
waste and perish, as was done with all fellows of that sort, he was
merely transferred to another school?

The bell sounded. The Czech put his big flat record-book under his arm
and left the room. Most of the pupils went out soon after. The two long
corridors were bubbling with boys in blue, a-glitter with nickel-plated
buttons and silver galloon, some laughing over their experience with the
lesson just disposed of, others eagerly reviewing the one soon to be
recited. Pievakin passed along. The pupils bowed to him with curious
sympathetic looks, and he returned their salutes with an air of mixed
timidity and gratitude. Presently the teacher of mathematics emerged
from one of the glass doors, his deformity bulging through the blue
broadcloth of his uniform.

"Alexandre Alexandrovich!" he shouted demonstratively, and catching up
with him he threw his arm around his waist.

Pavel, who had been watching the scene, was about to return to his
class-room so as to avoid bowing to Pievakin, when, by a sudden impulse,
he saluted the two teachers, and advancing to meet them, with that
peculiar air of politeness which reminded his classmates of his equipage
and the colonnade in front of his mother's mansion, he accosted the
instructor of history and geography, turning pale as he did so:

"May I speak to you, Alexandre Alexandrovich?" When the mathematician
had withdrawn, he inquired in a tone of pain and concern: "What has
happened, Alexandre Alexandrovich?"

"Oh, I'm in trouble, prince," the old man faltered. He had never
addressed the youth by his title before, and there was a note of abject
supplication in his voice, as if the boy could help him. His face had a
pinched, cowed look.

"But, Alexandre Alexandrovich, it's a terrible thing they are accusing
you of. You've been so dear to me, Alexandre Alexandrovich. I want to
know all. I cannot rest, Alexandre Alexandrovich."

"The story is easily told. A misfortune has befallen me. While touching
upon the constitutional form of government, I was somewhat carried away.
That I don't deny. I know it was wrong of me, but I assure you, prince,
I meant no harm."

It sounded as though he were a pleading pupil and the boy before him his
teacher.

Pavel was touched and perplexed.

"But that's in the text-book, Alexandre Alexandrovich."

"To be sure it is. Only the text-book merely uses the term without
explaining it, while I, absent-mindedly, proceeded to do so, which is
against the rules, and, as ill luck would have it, I warmed up a bit.
When I was first asked about it I was not aware of having done any
wrong. I was so shocked, in fact, I lost my temper. That was the worst
of it. I am a ruined man, prince. Thirty-six years have I served the
Czar and there is not a blemish on my record."

"But why should you call yourself a ruined man, Alexandre
Alexandrovich," Pavel said impetuously. "I don't see why it should be
too late to straighten it all out. I'm going to see my uncle. Or, better
still, my mother will see him. We can't let it go that way. We should
all be a lot of scoundrels if we did. I'm going to tell him so."

"Do it, prince, if you can," the old man said with shamefaced eagerness.
"I shall never forget it."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Pavel came home he found his mother's sleigh in front of the main
entrance, her coachman in dazzling attire, waiting with pompous
stolidity. When the liveried porter threw the door open to him and he
entered the vestibule he saw coming down the immense staircase his
mother and his five-year-old half-brother, Kostia, dressed for their
afternoon drive, Anna Nicolayevna in her furs and the little fellow in
the costume of a Caucasian horseman, which became his grave little face
charmingly. Following at some distance, with a smile of admiration, half
servile, half sincere, on her fresh German face, was Kostia's governess.
She was not dressed for a drive. She was merely going to see her charge
off.

"Mother, I am afraid I shall have to detain you," Pavel said, solemnly.
"I wish to speak to you about Alexandre Alexandrovich."

"Won't it keep?" she asked, with a facetious gesture.

"Don't make fun of it, mother," he reproached her. "It's a serious
matter. My head is in a whirl."

Kostia was burning to show himself in public in his new Circassian cap
and when he saw his mother yield he screwed up his face for a cry, but
he forthwith straightened it out again. He scarcely ever cried in
Pavel's presence for fear of being called "damsel" by him--an
appellation he dreaded more than being locked up alone in the
schoolroom.

They went into Anna Nicolayevna's favorite sitting-room, a square
chamber furnished and decorated in tan, in no particular style, but with
an eye to the combined suggestions of old-time solidity and latter-day
elegance. It was the embodiment of rest and silence, an effect to which
two life-sized bronze statues--a Diana and a Venus de Medici--and the
drowsy ticking of an ancient clock contributed not a little. It was
known as the English room because its former furnishings had been
modelled after London standards.

Pavel painted Pievakin as a penitent, broken spirit till Anna
Nicolayevna's eyes grew red.

"Still, maybe he does hold dangerous views?" she asked.

"Dangerous nothing! It's all nonsense. He's more loyal than Novikoff
anyhow, for Novikoff is a soulless, attitudinising nincompoop, while he
is the kindliest, most conscientious, most soulful man in the world."

"Unfortunately all this has nothing to do with loyalty," she said,
sadly. "This is a very queer world, Pasha. It's just like those
wretches who would do away with czars to be warm-hearted and good to
everybody. They don't believe there ought to be rich and poor, either.
When you come across a man of this sort keep away from him, Pasha."

"But what has that got to do with Pievakin?" he shouted. "The very sight
of a Nihilist would be enough to frighten him out of his wits. I want
you to tell it all to uncle, _mamman_. Give him no peace until he
promises you to write to the curator about the poor old man."

The governor of Miroslav was a Boulatoff, being a cousin of Pavel's
deceased father; but he was also related to the young man by marriage to
his mother's sister, who had died less than a year ago. Anna Nicolayevna
promised to see her brother-in-law the next morning, but Pavel would not
wait. He pleaded, he charged her with heartlessness, tapping the thick
rug with his foot and shaking all over as he spoke, until she agreed to
go at once.

While she was gone Pavel and Kostia went into the ball room and played
"hunter and partridge," a game of the gymnasium boys' inventing. They
had not been many minutes at it before Pavel had forgotten all about the
errand on which he had despatched his mother and the vast ball room
echoed with his voluminous laughter. His great pleasure was to tease
Kostia until the little boy's mouth would begin to twitch, and then to
shake his finger at him and say: "Better not cry, Kostia, or you know
what I am going to call you." Whereupon Kostia would make a desperate
effort to look nonchalantly grave and Pavel would burst into a new roar
of merriment.

Anna Nicolayevna came back converted to a rigorous point of view, and
although her son had no difficulty in convincing her once again that
Pievakin deserved mercy, he made up his mind to see his uncle himself,
and he did so the very next morning.

Governor Boulatoff was a massive, worn, blinking old satrap, shrewd,
tight-fisted, and, what was quite unusual for a man of his class, with
an eye to business. His nose was extremely broad and fleshy, his hair
was elaborately dressed, and altogether he looked like a successful old
comedian. Bribe-giving was as universal in Miroslav as tipping was in
its leading cafe. One could not turn round without showing "gratitude."
The wheels of government would not move in the desired direction unless
they were greased, the price of this "grease" or "gratitude" varying all
the way from a ten-copeck piece to ten or fifteen thousand rubles.
Governor Boulatoff, who had come to Miroslav a ruined man, was now the
largest land-owner in the province. Whenever he was in need of ready
cash he would galvanize into a new lease of life some defunct piece of
anti-Jewish legislation. This was known among the other officials as
"pressing the spring"--the spring of the Jewish pocketbook, that is, the
invariable effect of the proceeding being the appearance of a delegation
with a snug piece of Jewish "gratitude." He was continually sneering at
the powers behind the throne, and mildly striving for recognition; yet
so comfortable did he feel in this city of gardens, card-playing and
"gratitude," from which "the Czar was too far off and God too high up,"
that he was in mortal fear lest the promotion which he coveted should
come in the form of a transfer to a more important province.

Pavel found him in his imposing "den." The old potentate was in his
morning gown, freshly bathed, shaved and coiffured and smelling of
pomade and cigarette smoke.

"Well, my little statesman," he greeted him in French. "What brings you
so early this morning? Aren't you going to school at all?" He called him
statesman because of his ambition to follow in the footsteps of his
diplomatic grandfather.

"I shall stay away from the first three lessons," Pavel answered. "I
cannot rest, uncle. I want to speak to you about that unfortunate man."

The governor was very fond of Pavel, but he persisted in treating him as
a boy, and the only serious talk young Boulatoff got out of him
regarding Pievakin was an exhortation to give "men of that sort a wide
berth."

"But, uncle----"

"Don't argue," the governor interrupted him, blinking as he spoke. "This
is not the kind of thing for a boy of your station to get mixed up in."

"Oh, it's enough to drive one crazy. The poor man is sincerely
repentant, uncle. He'll never do it again, uncle."

"I see you're quite excited over it. Just the kind of effect fellows of
that stamp will have on the mind of a boy. This is just where the danger
comes in. Don't forget your name, Pasha. Come, throw it all out of your
clever little head. There's a good boy."

"Uncle darling, he'll never do it again. Let him stay where he is."

"You're a foolish boy. Whether he'll do it again or no, his very
presence in this town would be a source of danger. Whoever sets his eyes
on him will say to himself: 'Here is the man who once talked of the way
people live under a constitution.' So you see he'll be a reminder of
unlawful ideas. We have no use for fellows of this sort. They are like
living poison. Do you see the point? Let your teacher thank his stars
the case was not put in the hands of the gendarmes entirely, or he
would be sent to a colder place."

All this the governor said in the playful manner of one conversing with
a child and, by way of clinching the matter, he explained that he had
nothing to do with the case and that it was under the jurisdiction of
the "curator of educational district."

Pavel was in despair and his being treated as a boy threw him into a
rage, but he held himself in check for Pievakin's sake.

"Oh, the curator will do anything you ask of him, uncle," he said in a
tone of entreaty and resentment at once.

"You don't want your uncle to write letters begging for a fellow who was
foolish enough to get mixed up in such an affair as that, do you? I used
to think you really cared for your uncle."

Pavel contracted his forehead and put out his chin sullenly.




CHAPTER IV.

THE "DEMONSTRATION."


At the hour of Pievakin's departure the Miroslav railway station was
crowded with gymnasium pupils of both sexes, but Pavel was not among
them. He had not been informed that such a gathering was in
contemplation at all.

Alexandre Alexandrovich, a satchel slung across his breast, wan and
haggard, but flushed with excitement, was bustling about in a listless,
mechanical way. He was accompanied by his large family and the teacher
of mathematics. A number of gendarmes, stalwart, bewhiskered,
elaborately formidable, were pacing up and down the large waiting room.
The gendarmerie is the political police of the Czar. It forms a special
military organisation quite distinct from the police proper. A detail of
such gendarmes, proportionate to the importance of the place, is to be
found in every railroad station of the country. On this occasion,
however, the presence of the gendarmes seemed to have some special
bearing upon the nature of the scene. They were all big strapping
fellows. Their jingling spurs, red epaulets and icy silence belonged to
the same category of things as the terrible political prisons of
Kharkoff and St. Petersburg; as the clinking of convict-chains, as the
frozen wastes of Siberia.

All at once most of the bespurred men disappeared. After an absence of
two or three minutes they came back, considerably re-enforced.

"All gymnasium pupils, ladies and gentlemen, will please leave the
station," they called out.

About one-half of the throng struck out for the doors as if the place
were on fire. Some fifteen or twenty pupils stood still, frowning upon
the guardians of the Czar's safety, in timid defiance. The rest, a crowd
of about two hundred, made a lunge in the direction of the corner where
Alexandre Alexandrovich and his family were pottering about some light
baggage, when three lusty gendarmes planted themselves in front of the
little old man.

"Go home, ladies and gentlemen, go home!" Pievakin besought his friends,
waving his hands and stamping his feet desperately.

"Have we no right to say good-bye to our own teacher?" one boy ventured.

"Not allowed!" a gendarme answered, sternly. "Get out, get out!"

The crowd surged back; but at this point a young feminine voice,
sonorous with indignation and distress, rose above the din of the
scramble:

"Good heavens! Can it be that we shall leave without saying good-bye to
our dear teacher? All they say of him is a lie, a malicious lie. They're
a lot of knaves, and he is the best man in the world. Let them arrest us
if they will, let them kill us. It would be a shame if we went away like
traitors to our dear teacher."

The rest was lost in a hubbub of shouts and shrieks. In their effort to
get at the speaker, who was shielded by the other pupils, the gendarmes
were beating young women with their sheathed swords or pulling them by
the hair. With the exception of a few who had skulked out through back
doors, the young people now all stood their ground, ready to fight.

"Arrest us all!" they yelled. "We all say the same thing."

"Yes, Alexandre Alexandrovich is the best man in the world. There!"

"A better man than Novikoff!"

"Novikoff is a hypocrite and a rogue!"

In the commotion the gendarmes lost sight of the girl they were about to
arrest. She could not have left the room, but then it was not easy to
tell her from any of the other girls. The gendarmes had seen her at a
distance, and all they could say was that she was blonde. In their
eagerness to pick her out, they were rudely scanning every young woman
in the waiting-room. Had she been arrested it would have gone hard with
her. As good luck would have it, however, Major Safonoff, the officer in
command of the railroad gendarmes, was the brother of one of the girls
present. He was a plump, good-natured bachelor, and his devotion to his
sister, who had been under his care since she was a year old, was a
source of jests and anecdotes. When it occurred to him that the
conflict, which was beginning to look like a serious affair, was likely
to cause trouble to his sister, he hastened to make light of it.

"Go home, ladies and gentlemen," he said, in a remonstrative amicable
voice, taking the matter in his own hands.

His friendly tone and his smiling fat face, added to the tacit
understanding that the girl who had made the speech was not to be
persecuted, acted as a balm; but the flattering notion that the
gendarmes had surrendered kindled new fighting blood.

"Your men have hit ladies. They've no right to hit anybody. They're a
lot of brutes. All we wanted was to say good-bye to Alexandre
Alexandrovich."

"But that's impossible, so what's the use getting excited, gentlemen?
Better go home."

The pupils obeyed, in a leisurely way, as though leaving of their own
accord.

       *       *       *       *       *

During the following few weeks this "victory" over the gendarmes was the
great topic of discussion. The personality of the girl who "started the
demonstration" was emblazoned with the halo of heroism. The curious part
of it was that only a minority of those who had participated in the
scene had any idea who she was. When the crowd at the railroad station
had dispersed, the handful that knew her whispered her name to some of
those who did not, so that the number of pupils in the secret was by now
comparatively large, but it was a "revolutionary" secret, so it was
guarded most zealously against unreliable pupils as well as against the
authorities.

One of the page-proofs of the _Miroslav Messenger_ that were sent to the
censor at midnight contained the following paragraph:

"Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin, for many years instructor of History
and Geography at our male gymnasium, left for his new place of service
yesterday afternoon. A large number of gymnasium pupils were at the
railway station."

The entire paragraph was stricken out, so that the _Messenger_ next
morning contained not the remotest reference to the departure of the old
teacher.

When Pasha heard what had happened at the railway station his heart
sank.

"I must speak to you, mother," he gasped out, bursting into her room,
after school time. When her companion, a dried-up little Frenchwoman
with a thriving streak of black moustache, had withdrawn, he said:
"Mother, I am a miserable egoist and a scoundrel." He told her the story
of Pievakin's departure. His dear old teacher was in trouble, the victim
of a cruel injustice, yet he, Pasha, had not even thought of going to
see him off. Everybody had been there except him. But what tantalised
him more than anything else was the fact that a girl was the only person
who had taken a brave noble stand in the old man's behalf. This hurt his
knightly sense of honour cruelly. He should have been on the scene and
done exactly what that girl had done.

"I'm an egoist and a coward, _mamman_. I hate myself. Oh, I do hate
myself!"

Anna Nicolayevna's eyes grew red. She had an impulse to fold him in her
arms and to offer to take him to Pievakin's new place so that he might
protest his sympathy and affection for the old man, but her instinct
told her that this would be improper. Oh, there were so many things that
made a strong appeal to one's better feelings which were considered
improper. So she emitted a sigh of resignation and said nothing.

Pavel was pacing the floor so vehemently that he came near running into
and knocking down the life-sized Diana. He walked with rapid heavy steps
until his brain grew dizzy and his despair was dulled as from the effect
of drink. Suddenly the situation rushed back upon him.

"I tell you what, mother, he's too good for them," he said, stopping in
front of her. "He is better than uncle, anyhow."

"Hush, you mustn't say that."

"The devil I mustn't. It's true."

"You are impossible, Pasha. Can't you calm down?"

"I'll tell you calmly, then: uncle is a bribe-taker and a heartless
egoist. There."

"Dear me," she said, in consternation.

"But you know he is, mother. And do you call that loyalty to the Czar?
Pievakin is pure as an infant. If the Czar knew the real character of
both, he would know that the poor man could give uncle points in
loyalty."

A few days after this conversation the governor dined at "The Palace,"
as Countess Varoff's residence was known among the common people of
Miroslav. Pavel refused to leave his room. When Anna Nicolayevna pleaded
his uncle's affection for him, he said:

"His affection be hanged. Who wants the affection of a bribe-taker who
will let an honest man perish? Look here, mother, you have no business
to tell him I have a headache. I want him to know the truth. Tell him
it's men like himself, bribe-takers, cowards, who spread sedition, not
men like Pievakin. 'Living poison,' indeed! Tell him he is a lump of
living poison himself. Oh, I hate him, I do hate him."

His brain was working feverishly. The image of Pievakin with three
gendarmes between him and a crowd of pupils haunted him. Why could he
not be pardoned? Was there no mercy in this world? His sense of the
cruelty of the thing and of his own helplessness seized him as with a
violent clutch again and again.

Once, as he was reviewing the situation for the thousandth time, a voice
in him exclaimed: "Pardoned? What was Pievakin to be pardoned for? What
had he done? Why should it be wrong to dwell on the vital features of
parliamentary government? Such governments existed, didn't they? And if
they did, then why should one be forbidden to explain their essence?"
For the first time did his attention fix itself on this point, and
questions came crowding upon him. Where was the sense of having such
terms as "limited monarchy" in the text-book at all, if the pupils were
not to be told what this meant? Above all, why should the government be
afraid of such explanations? There seemed to be something cowardly,
sneaking, about all this which jarred on Pavel's sense of the knightly
magnificence of the Czar and left him with a bad taste in the mouth, as
the phrase is.

Alexandre Alexandrovich, then, had done no wrong, and yet he had been
banished as "living poison," treated by everybody as a criminal, until
he came to believe himself one. Why, of course he was better than
Novikoff. Novikoff was a self-seeking, posing wretch, and all the other
teachers were cringing and crouching before him; and these insects
turned their backs upon Alexandre Alexandrovich! Corruption passed for
loyalty, and a really good man was persecuted, hunted down like a wild
beast, trampled upon. "Trampled upon, trampled upon, trampled upon!"
Pavel whispered audibly, stamping his foot and gnashing his teeth as he
did so.

The only gleam of light was the veiled figure of that gymnasium girl.
She alone had had sympathy and courage enough to raise her voice for the
poor man. "Why, she is a perfect heroine," he said in his aching heart.

At the gymnasium he felt his loneliness more keenly than ever. Wherever
he saw a cluster of boys, he felt sure they were whispering about the
gendarmes and the girl who had made the "speech" at the railroad
station. His pride was gone. He now saw himself an outcast, shut out of
the most important things life contained.

The leader of the "serious-minded" boys in Pavel's class was an underfed
Jewish youth, with an anaemic chalky face and a cold intelligent look,
named Elkin. To Pavel he had always been repugnant. Since Pievakin's
departure, however, the aristocratic boy had looked at his classmates in
a new light, and Elkin now even inspired him with respect.

"Who is the girl that made that speech at the station?" he asked simply.
The two had scarcely ever spoken before.

Elkin gave Boulatoff a stare of freezing irony, as who should say: "What
do you think of the assurance of this man?" and then, dropping his eyes,
he asked:

"What girl?" When he spoke his lips assumed the form of two obtuse
angles, exposing to view a glistening lozenge of white teeth.

"Look here, Elkin, I want to know who that girl is and all about the
whole affair, and if you think I ought not to know it because--well,
because I am a Boulatoff and my uncle is the governor, I can assure you
that if I had been there I should have acted as she did. What's more, I
hate myself for not having been there."

"I don't know what you're talking about," replied Elkin. "As to your
hating yourself, that's your own affair."

"Well, however I may feel toward myself, I certainly have nothing but
contempt for a man like you," Pasha snapped back, paling. "But if you
think you can keep it from me, you're mistaken."

Elkin sized him up with a look full of venom, as he said:

"Pitiful wretch! How are you going to find it out? Through the political
spies?"

Pavel turned red. It was with a great effort that he kept himself from
striking Elkin. After a pause he said:

"Now, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that you are a knave."

"Besides," said Elkin, as though finishing an interrupted remark, "most
of the gymnasium girls who saw Alexandre Alexandrovich off are daughters
of poor, humble people, so of what interest would it have been to a man
in your position?"

Boulatoff stood still for a few moments, and then said under his breath:

"Well, you're a fool as well as a knave," and turned away.

The heroine of the demonstration was hateful to him now. She and Elkin
seemed to stand at the head of the untitled classes all arrayed against
him. He retired into himself deeper than ever. He abhorred her because
she had done the right thing, and each time his sympathy for Pievakin
welled up he hated himself for not having been at the station, and her
for having been there. He sought relief in charging Elkin with
cowardice. "What did he do there?" he would say to himself. "To think of
a lot of fellows running away when they are told they can't say good-bye
to their martyred teacher, and a girl being the only one who has courage
enough to act properly. And now that she has done it this coward has the
face to give himself airs, as if he were entitled to credit for her
courage. If I had been there I should not have run away as Elkin and his
crew did."

This placed Elkin and his followers on one side of the line and Pavel
and the girl on the other. So what right had that coward of a Jew to
place himself between her and him?

       *       *       *       *       *

Toward spring, some two months after the old teacher's departure, and
when the incident was beginning to grow dim in the public mind, the
sensation was suddenly revived and greatly intensified by an
extraordinary piece of news that came from the town to which Pievakin
had been transferred: The Third Section of His Majesty's Own Office--the
central political detective bureau of the empire--had taken up the case,
with the result that the action of the Department of Public Instruction
had been repudiated as dangerously inadequate. The idea of a man like
Pievakin participating in the education of children! Accordingly, the
poor old man was now under arrest, condemned to be transported to
Viatka, a thinly populated province in the remote north, where he was to
live under police surveillance, as a political exile strictly debarred
from teaching, even in private families.

Pavel was stunned. He received the news as something elemental. He could
find fault with his uncle, but the government at St. Petersburg was a
sublime abstract force, bathed in the effulgence of the Czar's
personality. It was no more open to condemnation than a thunderstorm or
a turbulent sea. But the incident made an ineffaceable impression upon
him. It left him with the general feeling that there was something
inherently cruel in the world. And the picture of a pretty girl boldly
raising her voice for poor Pievakin in the teeth of formidable-looking
gendarmes and in the midst of a crowd of panic-stricken men remained
imbedded in his fancy as the emblem of brave pity. An importunate sense
of jealousy nagged him. He often caught himself dreaming of situations
in which he appeared in a role similar to the one she had played at the
railroad station.

His perceptions and sensibilities took a novel trend.

One day, for example, as he walked through Theatre Square, he paused to
watch an apple-faced ensign, evidently fresh from the military school,
lecture a middle-aged sergeant. The youthful officer sat on a bench,
swaggeringly leaning back, his new sword gleaming by his side, as he
questioned the soldier who stood at attention, the picture of
embarrassment and impotent rage. A young woman, probably the sergeant's
wife, sweetheart, or daughter, stood aside, looking on wretchedly.
Seated on a bench directly across the walk were two pretty gymnasium
girls. It was clear that the whole scene had been gotten up for their
sake, that the ensign had stopped the poor fellow, who was old enough to
be his father, and was now putting him through this ordeal for the sole
purpose of flaunting his authority before them. When the sergeant had
been allowed to go his way, but before he was out of hearing, Pavel
walked up to the ensign and said aloud:

"I wish to tell you, sir, that you tormented that poor man merely to
show off."

"Bravo!" said the two gymnasium girls, clapping their hands with all
their might; "bravo!"

The ensign sprang to his feet, his apple-cheeks red as fire. "What do
you mean by interfering with an officer--in the performance of his
duty?" he faltered. He apparently knew that the young man before him was
a nephew of the governor.

"Nonsense! You were not performing any duties. You were parading. That's
what you were doing."

The two girls burst into a ringing laugh, whereupon the ensign stalked
off, mumbling something about having the gymnasium boy arrested.

"Mother," he said, when he came home. "The world is divided into
tormentors and victims."

Anna Nicolayevna gave a laugh that made her rusty face interesting. "And
what are you--a tormentor or a victim?" she asked. "At any rate you had
better throw these thoughts out of your mind. They lead to no good,
Pasha."




CHAPTER V.

PAVEL'S FIRST STEP.


When Pavel arrived in St. Petersburg, in the last days of July, his
recent tribulations seemed a thing of the faded past. The capital was a
fascinating setting for the great university which he was soon to enter
and in which he was bent upon drinking deep of the deepest mysteries of
wisdom. His "certificate of maturity"--his gymnasium diploma--was a
solemn proclamation of his passage from boyhood to manhood--a change
which seemed to assert itself in everything he did. He ate maturely,
talked maturely, walked maturely. He felt like a girl on the eve of her
wedding day.

He had not been in the big city for six years, and so marked was the
distinction between it and the southern town from which he hailed, that
to his "mature" eyes it seemed as if they were seeing it for the first
time. The multitude of large lusty men, heavily bearded and wearing
blouses of flaming red; the pink buildings; the melodious hucksters; the
cherry-peddlars, with their boards piled with the succulent fruit on
their shoulders; the pitchy odor of the overheated streets; the soft,
sibilant affectations in the speech of the lower classes; the bustling
little ferry-boats on the Neva--all this, sanctified by the presence of
the university buildings across the gay river, made his heart throb with
a feeling as though Miroslav were a foreign town and he were treading
the soil of real Russia at last.

He matriculated at the Section of Philology and History, St. Petersburg.
Before starting on his studies, however, he went off on a savage debauch
with some aristocratic young relatives. The debauch lasted a fortnight,
and cost his mother a small fortune. When he came to the university at
last, weary of himself and his relatives, he settled down to a winter of
hard work. But the life at the university disturbed his peace of mind.
He found the students divided into "crammers," "parquette-scrapers" and
"radicals." The last named seemed to be in the majority--a bustling,
whispering, preoccupied crowd with an effect of being the masters of the
situation. There was a vast difference between Elkin and his followers
and these people. Pavel knew that the university was the hotbed of the
secret movement, of which he was now tempted to know something. There
was no telling who of his present classmates might prove a candidate for
the gallows. The wide-awake, whispering, mysterious world about him
reminded him of the Miroslav girl and of his rebuff upon trying to
discover who she was. When he made an attempt to break through the magic
circle in which that world was enclosed his well-cared-for appearance
and high-born manner went against him. A feeling of isolation weighed on
his soul that was much harder to bear than his ostracism at the
gymnasium had been. Harder to bear, because the students who kept away
from him here struck him as his superiors, and because he had a humble
feeling as though it were natural that they should hold aloof from him.
And the image of that Miroslav girl seemed to float over these
whispering young men, at once luring and repulsing him. He often went
about with a lump in his throat.

One day he met a girl named Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a former
governor of the Province of St. Petersburg and the granddaughter of a
celebrated cabinet minister. She was a strong-featured, boyish-looking
little creature, with grave blue eyes beneath a very high forehead. He
had known her when he was a child. There was something in her general
appearance now and in the few words she said to him which left a
peculiar impression on Pavel. As he thought of her later it dawned upon
him that she might belong to the same world as those preoccupied,
whispering fellow-students of his. He looked her up the same day.

"I should like to get something to read, Sophia Lvovna," he said,
colouring. "Some of the proscribed things, I mean." Then he added, with
an embarrassed frown, "Something tells me you could get it for me. If I
am mistaken, you will have to excuse me."

The governor's daughter fixed her blue eyes on him as she said, simply:

"All right. I'll get you something."

She lent him a volume of the "underground" magazine _Forward!_ and some
other prints. The tales of valour and martyrdom which he found in these
publications, added to the editorials they contained calling upon the
nobility to pay the debt they owed to the peasantry by sacrificing
themselves for their welfare, literally intoxicated him.

"Dear Mother and Comrade," he wrote in a letter home, "I have come to
the conclusion that the so-called nobility to which I belong has never
done anything useful. For centuries and centuries and centuries we have
been living at the expense of those good, honest, overworked people, the
peasantry. It is enough to drive one to suicide. Yes, mamma darling, we
are a race of drones and robbers. The ignorant, unkempt moujiks that we
treat like beasts are in reality angels compared to us. There is
something in them--in their traditions and in the inherent purity of
their souls--which should inspire us with reverence. Yet they are
literally starved and three-fourths of their toil goes to maintain the
army and the titled classes."

Further down in the same letter he said: "Every great writer in the
history of our literature has been in prison or exiled. Our noblest
thinker and critic, Chernyshevsky, is languishing in Siberia. Why? Why?
My hair stands erect when I think of these things."

When it came to posting the letter, it dawned upon him that such
sentiments were not to be trusted to the mails, and, feeling himself a
conspirator, he committed the epistle to the flames.

He was touched by the spirit of that peasant worship--the religion of
the "penitent nobility"--which was the spirit of the best unproscribed
literature of the day as well as of the "underground" movement.
Turgeneff owed the origin of his fame to the peasant portraits of his
_Notes of a Huntsman_. Nekrasoff, the leading poet of the period, and a
score of other writers were perpetually glorifying the peasant, going
into ecstasies over him, bewailing him. The peasant they drew was a
creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but shed over him was the golden
halo of idealism. The central doctrine of the movement was a theory that
the survival of the communistic element in the Russian village, was
destined to become the basis of the country's economic and political
salvation; that Russia would leap into an ideal social arrangement
without having to pass through capitalism; that her semi-barbaric
peasant, kindly and innocent as a dove and the martyr of centuries,
carried in his person the future glory, moral as well as material, of
his unhappy country. As to the living peasant, he had no more knowledge
of this adoration of himself (nor capacity to grasp the meaning of the
movement, if an attempt had been made to explain it to him) than a
squirrel has of the presence of a "q" in the spelling of its name.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sophia disappeared from St. Petersburg, and Pavel found himself cut off
from the "underground" world once more. The prints she had left him only
served to excite his craving for others of the same character. The
preoccupied, mysterious air of the "radicals" at the university
tantalised him. He was in a veritable fever of envy, resentment,
intellectual and spiritual thirst. He subscribed liberally to the
various revolutionary funds that were continually being raised under the
guise of charity, and otherwise tried to manifest his sympathy with the
movement, all to no purpose. His contributions were accepted, but his
advances were repulsed. One day he approached a student whom he had once
given ten rubles "for a needy family"--a thin fellow with a very long
neck and the face of a chicken.

"I should like to get something to read," he said, trying to copy the
tone of familiar simplicity which he had used with Sophia. "I have read
one number of _Forward!_ and another thing or two, but that's all I have
been able to get."

"Pardon me," the chicken-face answered, colouring, "I really don't know
what you mean. Can't you get those books in the book-stores or in the
public library?"

Pavel was left with an acute pang of self-pity. He felt like a pampered
child undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of strangers. His mother and
all his relatives thought so much of him, while these fellows, who
would deem it a privilege to talk to any of them, were treating him as
a nobody and a spy. The tears came to his eyes. But presently he
clenched his fists and said to himself, "I _will_ be admitted to their
set."

In his fidget he happened to think of Pani Oginska. As the scene at the
German watering-place came back to him, he was seized with a desire to
efface the affront he had offered her. "How can I rest until I have seen
her and asked her pardon?" he said to himself. "If I were a real man and
not a mere phrase-monger I should start out on the journey at once. But,
of course, I won't do anything of the kind, and writing of such things
is impossible. I _am_ a phrase-maker. That's all I am."

But he soliloquized himself into the reflection that Pani Oginska was
likely to know some of her imprisoned son's friends, if, indeed, she was
not in the "underground" world herself, and the very next morning found
him in a railway car, bound for the south.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pani Oginska's estate was near the boundary line between the province to
which it belonged and the one whose capital was Miroslav, a considerable
distance from a railway station. Pavel covered that distance in a
post-sleigh drawn by a troika. His way lay in the steppe region. It was
a very cold forenoon in mid-winter. The horses' manes were covered with
frost; the postilion was bundled up so heavily that he looked like an
old woman. The sun shone out of a blue, unconcerned sky upon a waste of
eery whiteness. There were ridges of drifts and there were black patches
of bare ground, but the general perspective unfolded an unbroken plane
of snow, a level expanse stretching on either side of the smooth road,
seemingly endless and bottomless, destitute of any trace of life save
for an occasional inn by the roadside or the snow-bound hovel and
outhouses of a shepherd in the distance--a domain of silence and numb
monotony. That this desert of frozen sterility would four or five months
later, be transformed into a world of grass and birds seemed as
inconceivable as the sudden disappearance of the ocean.

The last few versts were an eternity. Pavel's heart leaped with a
foretaste of the exciting interview.

"Lively, my man," he pressed the postilion. "Can't your horses get a
move on them?"

The postilion nodded his muffled head and set up a fierce yelp, for all
the world like a wolf giving chase; whereupon the animals, apparently
scared to death, broke into a desperate gallop, the scud flying, the
sleigh dashing along like an electric car in open country, its bell
ringing frostily.

"That's better," Pavel shouted with a thrill of physical pleasure and
speaking with difficulty for the breakneck speed that seemed to fling
the breath out of his lungs. "That's better, my man. You shall get a
good tip. But where have you learned the trick?"

The postilion gave a muffled grunt of appreciation and went on howling
with all his might.

They passed through a small village. The chimneys of some of the white
clay hovels on either side of the road poured out clouds of sweetish,
nauseating smoke. Wood being scarce in these parts, the peasantry made
fuel of manure.

At last the sleigh swung into the great front yard of Pani Oginska's
manor house. It was greeted by the curious eyes of half a dozen
servants. Pavel entered a warm vestibule with a painted floor, where he
found waiting to meet him Pani Oginska and an aged man with hair as
white as the snow without. He bowed politely and asked, in French, with
nervous timidity:

"Do you remember me, Madame Oginska?"

She screwed up her eyes as she scanned his flushed, frozen face.

"Prince Boulatoff!" she said in a perplexed whisper.

"I have come all the way from St. Petersburg to beg your pardon, Madame
Oginska," he fired out. "I acted like a brute on that occasion. I was an
idiotic boy. Forgive me."

"Have you actually come all the way from St. Petersburg, to tell me
that?" she asked with a hearty peal of laughter. She introduced him to
the white-haired man, her father, who first made a bow full of
old-fashioned dignity and then gave Pavel's cold hand a doddering grasp.

"So you have really come for that express purpose?" Pani Oginska
resumed, while a servant was relieving the newcomer of his fur-lined
coat, fur cap, heavy gloves, muffler and storm shoes. "A case of
compunction, I suppose?"

Her father followed them as far as the open door of a vast, plainly
furnished parlour, and after looming on the threshold for a minute or
two, in an attitude of pained dignity, he bowed himself away. Pani
Oginska gently pressed the young man into a huge, rusty easy-chair, she
herself remaining in a standing posture, her mind apparently divided
between hospitality and an important errand upon which she seemed to
have been bent when he arrived. She wore a furred jacket, her head in a
grey shawl and her feet in heavy top-boots--a costume jarringly out of
accord with her pale, delicate, nunnish face. She made quite a new
impression on the young prince.

"I was blind then," he began, when they were left alone. "My eyes were
closed."

"Oh, you needn't go into detail," she rejoined with an amused look. "I
think I can guess how it has come about. You have caught the contagion,
haven't you?"

"Why call it 'contagion?' It's the truth; it's justice. If I hadn't been
such a silly boy when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, I should
certainly not have acted the way I did."

"A boy? And what are you now, pray? An old man with the weight of
experience on your shoulders?" she asked with motherly gaiety. "Well,
we'll talk it over later on, or, indeed, we'll find better things to
talk about; and meanwhile I want you to excuse me, prince, and make
yourself comfortable without me. You are hungry, of course?"

"Not at all. I had luncheon at the station."

"Well, you shall have some refreshments at any rate, and by and by I
shall be back. I am a rather busy woman, you see. I have to be my own
manager, and there are a thousand and one things to look after, and the
snow is rather deep"--pointing at her heavy boots. "Well, here are some
books and magazines. _Au revoir._" She made for the door, but faced
about again. "By the way, prince, does your mother know of this crazy
trip of yours?"

"I confess she does not," he answered, feeling helplessly like a boy.
"Why?"

"Why! Because she is the best woman in the world, and because it's too
bad you did anything so foolish without letting her know at least. By
the way, this is anything but a desirable place for a young man to
visit. Since my son got into trouble the police have tried to keep an
eye on us; but then the police are so stupid. Still, I am sorry you
didn't first consult your mother. If you boys would only let yourselves
be guided by your mothers you would be spared many a trouble."

"Is that the prime object of life--to guard against harm to oneself?"
Pavel protested.

She fixed him with a look of amusement, and then remarked sadly: "You
_have_ caught the contagion, poor thing. I'll write your mother about
it. Let her put a stop to it if it isn't too late."

He took fire. "I don't know what you are hinting at, Madame Oginska," he
said. Asking her to introduce him to Nihilists seemed out of the
question.

"I am hinting at those 'circles,' prince. You probably belong to one of
them; that's what I am hinting at. Don't you, now?"

"I don't belong to any circles. Nor do I know what you mean, madame."

"Well, well. You have come to ask me not to be offended with you, and
now it seems to be my turn to ask you not to be angry with me. Don't be
uneasy, prince. I shan't write to your mother. Indeed, she couldn't
afford to be in correspondence with me at all. However, if you really
aren't yet mixed up in those dreadful things"--there was a dubious
twinkle in her eye--"you had better keep out of them in the future, too.
Think of your charming mother and take care of yourself, prince. Well, I
have got to go. It's barbaric of me to leave you, but I'll soon be back.
Here are some books and magazines. Or wait, I have another occupation
for you. I want you to meet the best Jew in the world. I want you to
examine him in 'Gentile lore,' as his people would put it. They would
kill me, his people, if they knew he came to read my 'Gentile books.'"

"He is a brainy fellow," she went on, leading the way through a
labyrinth of rooms and corridors, "chockful of that Talmud of theirs,
don't you know. Now that he is married they are trying to make a
business man of him, but he prefers worldly wisdom and that sort of
thing. I let him use my library, the only place he has for his 'unholy'
studies, in fact. He is supposed to come on business here. He lives in a
small town a mile from here."

She was speaking in Russian now, a language she had perfect command of,
but which she spoke with a strong Polish accent, making it sound to
Pavel as though she was declaiming poetry. Twelve years ago, before she
inherited this estate, and when she still lived in Poland, her
birthplace, she could scarcely speak it at all.

She took him into a room whose walls were lined with books, mostly old
and worn, and whose two windows looked out upon a frozen pond in front
of a snow-covered clump of trees.

"Monsieur Parmet, Prince Boulatoff," she said, as a man sprang to his
feet with the air of one startled from mental absorption. He was of
strong, ungainly build, with the peculiar stamp of rabbinical
scholarship on a plump, dark-bearded face. "See how much he knows,
prince. He thinks he can take the examination for a certificate of
maturity and enter the university. But then he thinks he knows
everything." With this she left them to themselves.

Pavel was in a whirl of embarrassment and annoyance, but the abashed
smile of the other mollified him. "What I need more than anything else
is to be examined in Latin and Greek," Parmet said. "I haven't had my
exercises looked over for a long time, and it may be all wrong for all I
know." His Russian had a Yiddish accent. He spoke in low, purring tones
that seemed to soften the heavy outline of his figure. He was a
lumbering mass of physical strength, one of those bearlike giants whom
village people will describe as bending horseshoes like so many blades
of grass or driving nails into a wall with their bare knuckles for a
hammer. His dark-brown eyes shone meekly.

"Have you learned it all by yourself?" Pavel asked.

"Not altogether."

Pavel began with an air of lofty reluctance, but he was soon carried
away by the niceties of the ancient syntax, and his stiffness melted
into didactic animation. As to Parmet, his plump, dark face was an image
of religious ecstasy. Pavel warmed to him. His Talmudic gestures and
intonation amused him.

"There's no trouble about your Latin," he said, familiarly; "no trouble
whatever."

"Isn't there? It was Pani Oginska's son who gave me the first start,"
the other said, blissfully, uttering the name in a lowered voice. "If it
had not been for him I should still be immersed in the depths of
darkness."

"'Immersed in the depths of darkness!' There is a phrase for you! Why
should you use high-flown language like that?"

Parmet smiled, shrugging his shoulders bashfully. "Will you kindly try
me on Greek now?" he said.

"One second. That must have been quite a little while ago when Pani
Oginska's son taught you, wasn't it?"

Parmet tiptoed over to the open door, closed it, tiptoed back and said:
"Not quite two years. If you knew what a man of gold he was! They are
slowly killing him, the murderers. And why? What had he done? He could
not harm a fly. He is all goodness, an angel like his mother. He was of
delicate health when they took him, and now he is melting like a
candle. Why, oh why, should men like him have to perish that way?"

"Isn't it rather risky for you to be coming here?" Pavel demanded,
looking him over curiously.

Parmet smiled, a queer, outlandish smile, at once naive and knowing, as
he replied:

"Risky? No. What does an old-fashioned Jew like myself care about
politics? I am supposed to come here on business. Did you know Eugene?"

"Who is Eugene? Pani Oginska's son?"

"Yes. I thought you knew him."

"I wish I had. People like him are the only ones worth knowing. Most of
the others are scoundrels, humbugs, cold-blooded egoists; that's what
they are."

So talking, they gradually confided to each other the story of their
respective conversions and tribulations. Parmet followed the prince's
tale first with a look of childlike curiosity and then with an air that
betrayed emotion. As he listened he kept rubbing his hand nervously.
When Pavel had concluded, the Jew took to tiptoeing up and down the
room, stopped in front of him and said, with great ardour:

"Don't grieve, my dear man. I may be able to help you. I know a friend
of Eugene's who could put you in touch with the proper persons."

"Is he in St. Petersburg?"

"No, but that's no matter. He can arrange it. He knows somebody there.
I'll see him as soon as I can, even if I have to travel many miles for
it."

Pavel grasped his hand silently.

"Well," the other said. "There was a time when I thought every Christian
hard-hearted and cruel. Now I am ashamed of myself for having harboured
such ideas in my mind. Every Christian whose acquaintance I happen to
make turns out to be an angel rather than a human being."

"Why these compliments?" Pavel snarled. "Most of the Christians I know
are knaves. The whole world is made up of knaves for that matter."

When Pani Oginska came home and saw them together, she said:

"I knew I should find you two making love to each other."

       *       *       *       *       *

A month or two after Pavel's return to St. Petersburg a tall blond young
man with typical Great-Russian features looked him up at the university.

"I have received word from the south about you," he said, without
introducing himself.

"I am pleased to meet you," Pavel returned gruffly, "but I hope I won't
be kept on probation and be subjected to all sorts of humiliations."

"Why, why," the other said, in confusion. "I'll be glad to let you have
any kind of literature there is and to introduce you to other comrades.
That's why I have been looking for you. Why should you take it that
way?"

Pavel's face broke into a smile. "Dashed if I know why I should.
Something possessed me to put on a harsh front. It was mere parading, I
suppose. Don't mind it. What shall I call you?"

"Why--er--oh, call me anything," the other answered, colouring.

"Very well, then. I'll call you Peter; or no, will 'godfather' do? That
is, provided you are really going to be one to me," Pavel said, in a
vain struggle to suppress his exultation.

"It'll be all right," his new acquaintance replied with bashful ardour.

"Godfather, then?"

Godfather introduced him to several other "radicals," who gave him
underground prints and a list of legitimate books for a course of
"serious" reading. He would stay at home a whole week at a time without
dressing or going down for his meals, perusing volume after volume,
paper after paper. When he did dress and go out it was to get more books
or to seek answers to the questions which disturbed his peace. He was in
a state of vernal agitation, in a fever of lofty impulses. And so much
like a conspirator did he feel by now, that he no longer even thought of
opening his mind to his mother. Indeed, the change that had come over
him was so complete that she was not likely to understand him if he had.
To drive her to despair seemed to be the only result he could expect of
such a confession. The secret movement appealed to him as a host of
saints. He longed to be one of them, to be martyred with them. It was
clear to him that some day he would die for the Russian people; die a
slow, a terrible death; and this slow, terrible death impressed him as
the highest pinnacle of happiness.

When his mother came to see him, a year later, she thought he was in
love.

He was in the thick of the movement by that time. He was learning
shoemaking with a view to settling in a village. He would earn his
livelihood in the sweat of his brow, and he would carry the light of his
lofty ideas into the hovels of the suffering peasantry. But his plans in
this direction were never realized. The period of "going to the people"
soon came to an end.

The mothlike self-immolation of university students continued, but the
spirit of unresisting martyrdom could not last. Violence was bound to
result from it.

The next year saw the celebrated "trial of 193," mostly college men and
college women. They were charged with political propaganda, and the bold
stand they took thrilled the country. The actual number tried was,
indeed, much less than 193, for of those who had been kept in prison in
connection with that case as many as seventy had perished in their cold,
damp cells while waiting to be arraigned. Of those who were tried many
were acquitted, but instead of regaining their liberty a large number of
these were transported to Siberia "by administrative order." Moreover,
hundreds of people were slowly killed in the dungeons or exiled to
Siberia without any process of law whatsoever. School children were
buried in these consumption breeding cells; whole families were ruined
because one of their members was accused of reading a socialist
pamphlet. Student girls were subjected to indignities by dissolute
officials--all "by administrative order."

The Russian penal code imposes the same penalty for disfiguring the eyes
of an imperial portrait as it does for blinding a live subject of the
Czar. But political suspects were tortured without regard even to this
code.

It gradually dawned upon the propagandists that instead of being
decimated in a fruitless attempt to get at the common people they should
first devote themselves to an effort in the direction of free speech. By
a series of bold attacks it was expected to extort the desired reforms
from the government. Nothing was lawless, so it was argued, when
directed, in self-defence, against the representatives of a system that
was the embodiment of bloodthirsty lawlessness.

Thus peaceful missionaries became Terrorists. The government inaugurated
a system of promiscuous executions; the once unresisting propagandists
retaliated by assassination after assassination. Socialists were hanged
for disseminating their ideas or for resisting arrest; high officials
were stabbed or shot down for the bloodthirsty cruelty with which they
fought the movement; and finally a series of plots was inaugurated
aiming at the life of the emperor himself.

The White Terror of the throne was met by the Red Terror of the
Revolution.




CHAPTER VI.

A MEETING ON NEW TERMS.


It was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy young
engineer in Kharkoff--a slender little man with eyelids that looked
swollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsy
appearance--was filled with Nihilists come to hear "an important man
from St. Petersburg." The governor of the province had recently been
killed for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of the
local university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made on
the life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement was
asserting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address by
the stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was known
here as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.

The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand,
but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several more
listeners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. He
and Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslav
gymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerably
changed, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin's
face as anaemic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkin
had been expelled from the University for signing some sort of
petition. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionary
business. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, and
his days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for more
than tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to give
lessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man of
spotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certain
kind of magnetism.

When Elkin discovered who the important revolutionist from St.
Petersburg was the blood rushed to his face. It was a most disagreeable
surprise. But Pavel greeted him with a cordiality so free from
consciousness, and his roaring laughter, as he compared the
circumstances of their last quarrel and those that surrounded their
present meeting, was so hearty that Elkin's hostility gave way to a
feeling of elation at being so well received by the lion of the evening.
He was one of the rank and file of the local "Circles," and the
prominence into which Pavel's attention brought him at this meeting, in
the presence of several of his chums, gave him a sense of promotion and
triumph. He wished he could whisper into the ear of everybody present
that this important revolutionist who was known to the gathering as
Nikolai was Prince Boulatoff.

"I am still in the dark as to the identity of that girl," said Pavel.

"I shouldn't keep it from you now," the other returned, exposing an
exultant lozenge of white teeth. "Next time we meet in Miroslav I shall
look her up and introduce you to her. I have not seen her for a long
time. She is quite an interesting specimen."

"I should like to meet her very much," Pavel said earnestly. "I have
been wanting to know something about her all along. You see, if there
were a circle in that blessed out-of-the-way town of ours one might be
able to find out things, but if there is I have not seen anybody who
knows of its existence. I myself have not been there for two years."

"I was there last summer. There is a small circle there. At least there
are several people who get things through me, but that girl I have not
seen for a long time."

"Is it possible? Can it be that you have not tried to get her in?
Really, a Miroslav circle without her seems like Hamlet without the
Prince of Denmark."

"Yes, she is a lass with some grit to her, and with brains too."

"If she is, we ought to get her in. We ought to get her in."

"She was only sixteen when that affair happened."

"Was she? Well, you wouldn't believe it, but my curiosity about that
girl has been smouldering ever since. If it were not for her and for
poor Pievakin I might not be in the movement now."

"I see. It needed a little girl to make a convert of a great man like
you. Well, well. That's interesting," Elkin remarked, with a
lozenge-shaped sneer; but he hastened to atone for it by adding,
ardently: "You're right. She should be in the circle. I'll make it my
business to see her next time I am there. I'll go there on purpose, in
fact."

He was always trying to be clever, for the most part with venom in his
attempts. Friend or foe, whatever humour was his was habitually coloured
by an impulse to sting. "For the sake of a pretty word he would not
spare his own father," as a Russian proverb phrases it, and his pretty
words or puns were usually tinctured with malice.

He painted the Miroslav girl in the most attractive colours. It gave
him a peculiar satisfaction to whet Pavel's curiosity and to be able to
say mutely: "Indeed, she is even more interesting than you suppose, yet
while you are so crazy to know her, I, who do know her, have not even
thought of getting her into my Circle."

When Pavel was making his speech Elkin, whose natural inclination was to
disapprove, listened with an air of patronising concurrence. Pavel's
oratory was of the unsophisticated, "hammer-and-tongs," fiery type, yet
its general effect, especially when he assailed existing conditions, was
one of complaint. In spite of the full-throated buzz of his voice and
the ferocious rush of his words, he conveyed the impression of a
schoolboy laying his grievance before his mother.

Before he took leave from his former classmate the two had another talk
of the "heroine of the Pievakin demonstration." It was Elkin who brought
up the subject, which took them back to the time when, from a Nihilist
point of view, he was Pavel's superior. He found him a ready listener.
The student girls of the secret movement, their devotion to the cause,
their pluck, the inhuman sufferings which the government inflicted on
those of them who fell into its hands,--all this was the aureole of
Pavel's ecstasy. His heart had remained spotless, the wild oats he had
sown during the first weeks of his stay in the capital notwithstanding.
The word Woman would fill him with tender whisperings of a felicity
hallowed by joint sacrifices, of love crowned with martyrdom, and it was
part of the soliloquies which the sex would breathe into his soul to
tell himself that he owned his conversion to a girl. But these were
sentimentalities of which the Spartan traditions of the underground
movement had taught him to be ashamed. Moreover, there was really no
time for such things.

During the following summer and fall mines were laid in several places
under railway tracks over which the Emperor was expected to pass. The
revolutionists missed their aim, but the Czar's narrow escape, coupled
with the gigantic scope of the manifold plot, with the skill and the
boldness it implied, and with the fact that the digging of these
subterranean passages had gone on for months without attracting notice,
made a profound impression. Such a display of energy and dexterity on
the part of natives in a country where one was accustomed to trace every
bit of enterprise to some foreign agency, could not but produce a
fascinating effect. The gendarmes were apparently no match for the
Nihilists.




CHAPTER VII.

"TERRORISM WITHOUT VIOLENCE."


One afternoon, in December of the same year, Pavel sat in a student
restaurant, in the capital, eating fried steak and watching the door for
a man with whom he had an appointment. He ate without appetite and
looked fatigued and overworked. He had been out from an early hour,
bustling about on perilous business and dodging spies. It was extremely
exhausting and enervating, this prowling about under the perpetual
strain of danger. He was liable to be arrested at any moment. It was
like living continually under fire.

The restaurant was full of cigarette smoke and noise. Somebody in the
rear of Pavel, who evidently had nothing to say, was addressing somebody
else in high-flown Russian and with great gusto. His fine resonant
voice, of which he was apparently conscious, jarred on Pavel's nerves,
interfering with what little relish he had for his meal. He was eyeing
the design on the frost-covered door-glass and lashing himself into a
fury over the invisible man's phrase-mongery, when he was accosted by a
fair-complexioned young woman:

"Pardon me, but if I am not mistaken you are Prince Boulatoff?"

"That's my name. And with whom have I the pleasure----?"

"Oh, that would really be uninteresting to know. I'll tell you, though,
that I belong to Miroslav."

He reluctantly invited her to a glass of tea, which she accepted,
saying: "It may look as if I were forcing myself upon your acquaintance,
prince, but I really could not help it. Whatever comes from Miroslav is
irresistible to me." And talking rapidly in effervescent, choking
sentences, she told him that her name was Maria Andreevna Safonova
(Safonoff), that she was a student at the Bestusheff Women's College and
that her brother was a major of gendarmes.

Pavel had heard of there being a daughter or a sister of a Miroslav
gendarme officer at the Bestusheff College; also that she made a
favourable impression on her classmates; but he had been too busy to
give the information more than passing notice.

"Is your brother in Miroslav?" he asked.

"Yes, and I can assure you he is a gentleman, even if he is in the
gendarme service. Some day, I hope, he'll give it up. He is really too
good to be in the business."

Pavel ascribed her ebullition to the nature of the subject, but he soon
found that she was in the same state of excitement when a railroad
ticket was the topic. She looked twenty-three but she had the cheeks and
eyes of a chubby infant, while her arms and figure had the lank,
immature effect of a girl of thirteen.

While they sat talking, a dark man in the military uniform of the
Medico-Surgical Academy entered the cafe. It was Parmet, the man Pavel
was waiting for. Finding him engaged, the newcomer passed his table
without greeting him, took a seat in a remote corner and buried himself
in a book.

Mlle. Safonoff did all the talking. She had not sat at Boulatoff's
table half an hour nor said much about Miroslav before she had poured
out some of her most intimate thoughts to him.

"If you think it a pleasure to be the sister of a gendarme officer you
are mistaken," she said. "It is not agreeable to be treated by everybody
as though you had been put at the college to spy upon the girls, is it?
My brother is a better man than the brothers and fathers and
grandfathers of all the other student-girls put together, I assure you,
prince. But then, of course, you may think I'm trying to spy on you,
too."

"No, I don't," said Boulatoff with a laugh, pricking up his ears.

"Don't you, really?" And her eyes bubbled.

"Of course, I don't."

"Oh, if you knew how good he is, my brother. Do you remember the time
when poor Pievakin left Miroslav? I know you do. You were in the eighth
class then. Well, I may as well tell you, prince"--she lowered her
voice--"had it not been for my brother there would have been no end of
arrests at the railroad station. He simply told his men not to make a
fuss. You see, I can confide in you without hesitation, for who would
suspect a Boulatoff of--pardon the word--spying? But I, why, I am the
sister of a gendarme officer, so it is quite natural to suppose, and so
forth and so on, don't you know."

"Do you know the girl who made that speech?"

"There you are," she said dolefully. "I happened to be at the other end
of the room just then. When I tried to find out who she was everybody
was mum. Fancy, my best girl-friend said to me: 'If I were you, Masha, I
shouldn't want to know her name if I could. Suppose you utter it in
sleep and your brother overhears you.' The idiots! They didn't know it
was my brother who saved that girl from being arrested. And, by the way,
if she had been arrested by some of his men, it would not have been hard
for her to escape. I know I am saying more than I should, but I really
can't help it. You have no idea how I feel about these things. And now,
at the sight of you, prince--a man from Miroslav--I seem to be going to
pieces altogether. Well, I don't mean, though, that my brother would
have let her escape. But then I have an aunt, who is related to the
warden of the Miroslav prison by marriage, so she can arrange things
there. Oh, she's the greatest revolutionist you ever saw. Of course, I
don't know whether you sympathise with these things, prince, but I'll
tell you frankly, _I_ do. It was that aunt of mine who talked it into
me. She is simply crazy to do something. She is sorry there are no
political prisoners in Miroslav. If there were she would get them out.
She's just itching for a chance to do something of that sort. And yet
she never met a revolutionist in her life, nor saw a scrap of
underground paper."

To question the ingenuousness of this gush seemed to be the rankest
absurdity. The Russian spies of the period were poor actors. Pavel was
seized by a desire to show her that he, at least, did not suspect her of
spying, and quite forgetting to restrain the "idiotic breadth" of his
Russian nature for which he was often rebuked by a certain member of the
revolutionary Executive Committee who was forever berating his comrades
for their insufficient caution, he slipped a crisp copy of the _Will of
the People_ into her hand.

"Put it into your muff," he said.

The colour surged into her chubby face. Her whole figure seemed tense
with sudden excitement, as though the fine glossy paper in her hand
were charged with electricity.

"How shall I thank you?" she gasped.

Pavel saw a moist glitter in her eyes, and as he got up, his slender
erect little frame, too, seemed charged with electricity. When she had
gone he asked himself whether it had not all been acting, after all. He
cursed himself for his imprudence, but he said: "Oh, well, what must be
will be," and as usual the phrase acted like an effectual incantation on
his frame of mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Parmet had been dubbed Bismarck, because he bore considerable
resemblance to Gambetta. Another nickname, one which he had invented
himself, on a similar theory of contrasts, was Makar. Makar was as
typically Slavic as his face was Semitic. His military uniform, which he
had to wear because his Academy was under the auspices of the War
Department, ill became him. Instead of concealing the rabbinical
expression of his face, it emphasised it. When they came out of the
restaurant, a man, shouldering a stick, was running along the
snow-covered pavement, lighting the street-lamps, as though in dread of
being forestalled by somebody.

"Guess who that girl is," Pavel said.

"Have I heard of her?"

"No. Quite an amusing sort of a damsel. Seething and steaming for all
the world like a samovar. You should have seen her calflike ecstasy when
I handed her something to read. I was afraid she was going to have a
fit."

Makar trotted silently on, continually curling himself in his wretched
grey cloak and striking one foot against the other, to knock the caked
drab-coloured snow off his boots. Pavel wore a new furred coat.

"She may be useful though," Pavel resumed, after a pause. "That is,
provided she is all she seems to be. Her brother is a gendarme major.
What do you think of that?"

"Is he?" Makar asked, looking up at his companion in beatific surprise.

"Yes, and she says he's a good fellow, too. Of course, she's quite a
full-fledged ninny herself, and ought to be taken with a carload of
salt, but she referred to some facts with which I happen to be
familiar." While he was describing the girl's aunt, a passing soldier
saluted Makar, mistaking him for an army officer. Makar, however, was
too absorbed in his companion's talk to be aware of what was going on
about him. Pavel shrieked with laughter. "He must be a pretty raw sort
of recruit to take _you_ for a warrior," he said. When he had finished
his sketch of the woman who was longing to set somebody free, the
medical student paused in the middle of the sidewalk.

"Why, she's a godsend, then," he said.

"Moderate your passions, Mr. Army Officer," Pavel said languidly,
mocking his old gymnasium director. "If she does not turn out to be a
spy we'll see what we can do with her. She strikes me rather favourably,
though."

"Why, you oughtn't to neglect her, Pasha. If I were you I would lose no
time in making her brother's acquaintance. Think of the possibilities of
it!"

"Bridle your exuberance, young man. Her brother lives many miles from
here. He is on the hunt for sedition in the most provincial of
provinces. Want to make a Terrorist of him? Go ahead. He lives in
Miroslav. There."

"In Miroslav!" Makar echoed, with pride in the capital of his native
province.

Presently they entered a courtyard and took to climbing a steep stony
staircase. Strong, inviting odours of cabbage soup and cooked meat
greeted them at several of the landings. Makar's lodging was on the
sixth floor. He had moved in only a few days ago and the chief object of
Pavel's visit was to make a mental note of its location.

The first thing Makar did as he got into the room was to put a pitcher
on one of his two windows. The windows commanded a little side street,
and the pitcher was Makar's safety signal. When he had lit his lamp a
sofa, freshly covered with green oil-cloth, proved to be the best piece
of furniture in the room, the smell of the oil-cloth mingling with the
stale odours of tobacco smoke with which the very walls seemed to be
saturated.

"Ugh, what a room!" Pavel said, sniffing. They talked of a revolutionist
who had recently been arrested and to whom they referred as "Alexandre."
Special importance was attached by the authorities to the capture of
this man, because among the things found at his lodgings was a diagram
of the Winter Palace with a pencil mark on the imperial dining hall. As
the prisoner was a conspicuous member of the Terrorists' Executive
Committee, the natural inference was that another bold plot was under
way, one which had something to do with the Czar's dining room, but
which had apparently been frustrated by the discovery of the diagram.
The palace guard was strongly re-enforced and every precaution was taken
to insure the monarch's safety. Now, the Terrorists had their man in the
very heart of the enemy's camp, and the result of the search of
Alexandre's lodgings was no secret to them. This revolutionist, whose
gloomy face was out of keeping with his carefully pomaded hair, kid
gloves, silk hat, showy clothes and carefully trimmed whiskers a la
Alexander II., was known to Makar as "the Dandy." Less than a year
before he had obtained a position in the double capacity of spy and
clerk, at the Third Section of his Majesty's Own Office, and so liked
was he by his superiors that he had soon been made private secretary to
the head of the secret service, every document of importance passing
through his hands. Since then he had been communicating to the Executive
Committee, now a list of new suspects, now the details of a contemplated
arrest, now a copy of some secret circular to the gendarme offices of
the empire.

While they were thus conversing of Alexandre and the Dandy, Pavel
stretched himself full length on the sofa and dozed off. When he opened
his eyes, about two hours later, he found Parmet tiptoeing awkwardly up
and down the room, his shadow a gigantic crab on the wall. Pavel broke
into a boisterous peal of laughter.

"Here is a figure for you! All that is needed is an artist to set to
work and paint it."

"Are you awake? Look here, Pasha. Your gendarme's sister and her aunt
are haunting my mind."

"Why, why, have you fallen in love with both of them at once?" Pavel
asked as he jumped to his feet and shot his arms toward the ceiling. He
looked refreshed and full of animal spirits.

"Stop joking, Pasha, pray," Makar said in his purring, mellifluous
voice. "It irritates me. It's a serious matter I want to speak to you
about, and here you are bent upon fun." Pavel's story of the gendarme
officer's sister had stirred in him visions of a mighty system of
counter-espionage. He had a definite scheme to propose.

Pavel found it difficult to work himself out of his playful mood until
Makar fell silent and took to pacing the floor resentfully. When he had
desisted, with a final guffaw over Makar's forlorn air, the medical
student, warming up to fresh enthusiasm, said:

"Well, to let that prison stand idle would be criminal negligence. That
girl's aunt must be given a chance."

"What's that?" Pavel said, relapsing into horseplay. "Do you want
somebody nabbed on purpose to give a bored lady something to excite her
nerves?" He finished the interrogation rather limply. It flashed upon
him that what Makar was really aiming at was that some revolutionist
should volunteer to be arrested on a denunciation from the Dandy or some
other member of the party with a view to strengthening its position in
the Third Section.

Makar went on to plead for an organised effort to get into the various
gendarme offices.

"It is a terrible struggle we are in, Pasha. Our best men fall before
they have time to turn round. If we had more revolutionists on the other
side, Alexandre might be a free man now."

"Well, and sooner or later you and I will be where he is now and be
plunged into the sleep of the righteous, and there won't even be a goat
to graze at our graves. Let the dead bury the dead, Makashka. We want
the living for the firing line. We can't afford to let fresh blood turn
sour in a damp cell, if we can help it."

"But this is 'the firing line'," Makar returned with beseeching, almost
with tearful emphasis. "If you only gave me a chance to explain myself.
What I want is to have confusion carried into every branch of the
government; I want the Czar to be surrounded by a masquerade of enemies,
so that his henchmen will suspect each other of being either agents of
the Third Section or revolutionists. Do you see the point? I want the
Czar to be surrounded by a babel of mistrust and espionage. I want him
to be dazed, staggered until he succumbs to this nightmare of suspicion
and hastens to convoke a popular assembly, as Louis XVI. was forced to
do; I want the inhabitants of our tear-drenched country to be treated
like human beings without delay. My scheme practically amounts to a
system or terrorism without violence, and I insist that one good man in
the enemy's camp is of more value than the death of ten spies." His low,
velvety voice rang clear, tremulous with pleading fervour; his face
gleamed with an intellectual relish in his formula of the plan. As he
spoke, he was twisting his mighty fist, opening and closing it again,
Talmud-fashion, in unison with the rhythm of his sentences.

Ejaculations like "visionary!" "phrase-maker!" were on the tip of
Pavel's tongue, but he had not the heart to utter them. Aerial as the
scheme was, Makar's plea had cast a certain spell over him. It was like
listening to a beautiful piece of mythology.

"Let us form a special force of men ready to go to prison, to be
destroyed, if need be," Makar went on. "The loss of one man would mean,
in each case, the saving of twenty. Think how many important comrades a
single leak in the Third Section has saved us. It's a matter of plain
arithmetic."

"Of plain insanity," Pavel finally broke in.

"Don't get excited, Pasha, pray. Can't you let me finish? If I am wrong
you'll have plenty of time to prove it."

His purring Talmudic voice and the smell of the fresh oil-cloth were
unbearable to Pavel now.

"It's like this," Makar resumed. "In the first place [he bent down his
little finger] every honest man is sure to be arrested some day, and
what difference does it make whether the end comes a few months sooner
or a few months later? In the second place [he bent down the next
finger] there must be some more people like that girl's aunt. It is
quite possible that most of those who would be arrested on this plan
would get out, and that itself would be a good thing, for it would add
to the prestige of the party. Everything that reveals the weakness of
the government on the one hand, and the cleverness and daring of our
people on the other, is good for the cause. Every success scored by the
'Will of the People' is a step in the direction of that for which men
like yourself are staking their lives, Pasha. Don't interrupt me, pray.
I'll go a step further. I am of the opinion that under certain
conditions, where an escape is assured, it wouldn't be a bad idea to let
one's self be arrested just in order to add another name to the list of
political gaol-breakers, that is to say, to the list of the government's
fiascos. Every little counts. Every straw increases that weight which
will finally break the back of Russia's despot."

"Do you really mean what you say, Makar? Do you actually want to be
arrested?" Pavel asked.

"Not at all. All I want is that another good man should gain the
confidence of the Third Section and that another political prisoner
should escape."

"And what if all Mlle. Safonoff says turns out to be as idiotic a dream
as all this tommyrot of yours?"

"'If one is afraid of wolves one had better keep out of the woods.' You,
yourself, have taken much greater chances than that, Pasha. If I am
arrested with papers and the worst comes to the worst they won't hang
me."

"I see you take it seriously after all. Well, if you think I'll let you
do anything of the kind you are a fool."

"You can't prevent me from doing what I consider to be right. Nor do I
want anybody else to send the denunciation which is to result in my
arrest. I'll send it myself. All I want is that somebody should claim
credit for it afterward, when I am in prison--on that very day, if
possible. The search and arrest will be ordered from St. Petersburg, and
then some of our men will say at the Third Section that the anonymous
letter was his, adding some details about me. Details can be worked out
later. Where there is a will there is a way. At any rate, I don't expect
anybody but myself to bear the moral responsibility for my arrest."

He talked on in the same strain until Pavel sprang to his feet, flushed
with rage. "It's all posing--that's all there's to it!" he shouted. "On
the surface it means that you are willing to sacrifice yourself without
even attracting attention, but in reality this subtle modesty of yours
is only the most elaborate piece of parading that was ever conceived.
It's love of applause all the way through, and you are willing to stake
your life on it. That's all there is about it."

Makar grew yellow in the face and sweat broke out on his forehead. "In
that case, there's no use talking, of course," he said in a very low
voice. "If I am a humbug I am a humbug."

"And if you are a fool, you are a fool," Pavel rejoined, with a
conciliatory growl.

"You need not back out, Pasha. Maybe you are right," Makar rejoined.
"Who is absolutely free from vanity? Human nature is such a complex
mechanism. One may be governed by love of approbation and, perhaps,
also, by a certain adventuresome passion for the danger of the thing.
The great question is whether there is something besides this. No, it is
not all posing, Pasha. There are moments when I ask myself why I should
not live as most people do, but I only have to realise all that is going
on around us; the savage tyranny, the writhing millions, the hunger,
the bottomless darkness, the unuttered groans,--I only have to think of
this and of the dear comrades I have known who have been strangled on
the gallows or are wasting away in the casemates; I need only picture
all this, I say, to feel that even if there be an alloy of selfishness
in my revolutionary interests, yet, in the main, it is this sense of the
Great Wrong which keeps me from nursing my own safety. Do you know that
the dangling corpses of our comrades are never absent from my mind? I am
not without a heart, Pasha."

"Nobody says you are, only you are a confounded dreamer, Makashka,"
Pavel answered. "We have no time for dreams and poetry. Our struggle is
one of hard, terrible prose."

"You are even more of a dreamer than I, Pasha," Makar retorted,
blissfully.

When Makar resumed speaking the last echo of resentment was gone from
his voice. "After all, one gets more than one gives. When I think of the
moments of joy the movement affords me, of the ties of friendship with
so many good people--the cream of the generation, the salt of the earth,
the best children Russia ever gave birth to--when I think of the
glorious atmosphere that surrounds me, of the divine ecstasy with which
I view the future; when I recall all this I feel that I get a sort of
happiness which no Rothschild could buy. To be kept in solitary
confinement is anything but a pleasure, to be sure, but is there nothing
to sweeten one's life there? And how about the thought that over yonder,
outside, there are people who are going on with the struggle and who
think of you sometimes? Sooner or later the government will yield. And
then, oh then somebody--some comrade of ours--will throw the cell-door
open, and I'll join in the celebration of our triumph. Really, Pasha, I
am strong as a bull, and a few years of confinement would not kill me.
While some of our people may die by the hand of the hangman, my life
would be spared. Did you ever stop to think of the time when the cells
of Siberia and of Peter and Paul are thrown open and one says to the
immured comrades, 'Out with you, brothers! You're free! The nation is
free!' Come, another year or two and this will be realised."

"You had better save your sentimentalities for novices," Pavel said.
"And, by the way, your eloquence is certainly of more use than your
dreaming in a dungeon would be."

He was arguing with a rock of stiff-necked will-power.




CHAPTER VIII.

MAKAR'S CANVASS.


Parmet now gave most of his time to the secret movement, making himself
useful in a variety of ways. His great unrealised ambition, however, was
to work in an underground printing office--an offence which at the
period was punished by a long term of penal servitude in Siberia. He had
a feeling as though nothing one did for the movement could be regarded
as a vital service to the cause of free speech as long as it fell short
of typesetting in a secret printing establishment. He had applied for
work of this kind several times, but his proverbial absent-mindedness
stood in his way. Being in the habit of reading some book or newspaper
as he walked through the streets, he would sometimes catch himself
drinking in the contents of some "underground" publication in this
manner. Once as he stood on a street corner intent upon a revolutionary
leaflet, he heard an infuriated whisper:

"Imbecile! Scoundrel!"

When he raised his eyes he saw the ample back of a compactly built man
dressed in citizen's clothes except for a broad military cap with a red
band. This was "the Janitor," so nicknamed because he made it his
business to go the rounds of "conspiracy houses" every morning and to
pick a quarrel with those of their occupants who had neglected to
furnish their windows with safety signals or were guilty of some other
manifestation of "Russian breadth." The episode antedated the above
conversation between Makar and Pavel by two months, and the medical
student had not seen the Janitor since. He dreaded to meet him. At this
minute, however, he was just the man he wanted to see, for it was he who
had taken the initiative in getting the Dandy into the Third Section.
Accordingly, Pavel had no sooner left him than he betook himself to a
place at which he expected to find that revolutionist. The place was the
lodging of a man who was known in the organisation as Purring Cat--a
nickname based on his shaggy eyebrows and moustache. His face was almost
entirely overgrown with hair. Short of stature, with a thick dark beard
that reached down to his knees and with blue eyes that peered up from
under his stern eyebrows, this formidable looking little man, the
nearest approach to the wax-works version of a Russian Nihilist, was the
gentlest soul on the Executive Committee. Besides Purring Cat and the
Janitor, Makar found in the room Andrey, an extremely tall man with
Tartarian features.

The Janitor greeted Makar with a volley of oaths, stuttering as he
spoke, as was usually the case when he was angry.

"You have no business to be here," he fulminated. "You are just the man
to bring a spy in tow. I shouldn't be a bit surprised if you had one at
your heels now."

"Come, don't fume," Makar pleaded, confusedly. "I won't be absent-minded
any more. I have taken myself in hand. Besides, my absent-mindedness is
not without its redeeming feature. You see, I am the last man to be
suspected of being on my guard; so the spies would never bother me."

Andrey and Purring Cat smiled. The Janitor started to do the same, but
changed his mind. Instead, he broke into a more violent fit of temper
and a more painful stutter than before. His compact figure was of medium
height, his face very blond, with prominent eyes and well-trimmed red
beard. His military cap matched the passport of a retired army officer
under which he was registered at the police station. He was supposed to
be employed at some civil tribunal, and every morning, on the stroke of
eleven he would leave his lodgings, a portfolio under his arm, his
military cap slightly cocked--the very personification of the part he
acted. The name in his passport was Polivanoff. His real name was
Michailoff, and under that name he was wanted by the gendarmes in
prominent connection with several attempts on the life of the Czar. He
had once escaped from under arrest and on another occasion he had
managed to disappear from a railroad train while it was being searched
for him. He was one of the ablest and bravest men in the party. His
un-Russian punctuality and indefatigable attention to detail; his
practical turn of mind and the way he had of nagging his friends for
their lack of these qualities, were common topics of banter among the
Terrorists. He had made a special study of every lane and court in the
capital by which one might "trash" one's trail. He not only shadowed his
fellow revolutionists to see if they were aware of being shadowed or
whether they dressed in accordance with the type implied by their false
passports, but he also made a practice of spying over the spies of the
Third Section. With this end in view, he had once rented a room across
the street from that office--an institution that would have given
millions for his head. Here he would sit for hours at his window,
scrutinising every new person who entered the building so as to be able
to keep track of their movements afterward. Having thus discovered a
boarding house in which lived an important officer of the secret service
he had sent the Dandy to hire a room there. The desired appointment had
then been obtained without difficulty.

When Makar had laid the practical part of his scheme before the three
men, the Janitor fixed his prominent eyes on him and said, without
stammering:

"And you are just the chap to do it, aren't you?"

"And why not? It certainly doesn't need much adroitness and vigilance to
get arrested."

"The devil it does not. A fellow like you would get ten men arrested
before he fooled the measliest cub spy in the Third Section. Better keep
your hands off."

"Oh, well, if the escape was really a sure thing, the matter might be
arranged," Purring Cat interposed, charitably, in a low, gentle voice.
"Only this is scarcely the time for it." Whereupon Makar, feeling
encouraged, launched out to describe his far-reaching scheme in detail.
The look of the Janitor's prominent eyes, however, disturbed him, so
that he expounded the plan in a rather nerveless way; when he had
finished, the Janitor declared:

"He's certainly crazy."

Purring Cat's blue eyes looked up under their bushy brows, as he said,
gravely:

"There may be something in it, though, theoretically at least. In
reality, however, I am afraid that general state of chaos would rebound
upon ourselves. The government may get its spies into our circles until
one does not know who is who. It may become a double-edged weapon, this
'babel of distrust.' As to that prison scheme it might be tried some
day. Only don't be in a hurry, Makar."

"And what is your opinion?" Makar addressed himself to Andrey
solicitously.

Andrey who was a man of few words, and spoke with a slight lisp, said he
had no definite opinion to offer, but, when Makar pressed him hard, he
said:

"Well, we have one man there" (meaning the Third Section), "so let us
not make the mistake of the woman who cut her hen open in order to get
at all her eggs at once. Still, if the scheme could be worked in some of
the provinces, it might be worth while. It all depends on circumstances,
of course."

Makar longed to see Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St.
Petersburg. She had taken an active part in one of the most daring
rescues and was celebrated for the ingenuity and motherly devotion with
which she gave herself to the "Red Cross" work of the party, supplying
political prisoners with provisions and keeping them in secret
communication with their relatives. It was the story of this young
noblewoman's life which afterwards inspired Turgeneff's prose poem, _The
Threshold_. Makar thought she might take an active interest in his
scheme, but she was overwhelmed with other work and inaccessible.




CHAPTER IX.

A DAY UNDERGROUND.


About a week had elapsed, when Pavel read in his morning paper of the
hanging of three revolutionists in Odessa: two Gentiles and a Jew. He
had never met these men, but he knew that two of them had not been
implicated in anything more violent than the diffusion of socialist
ideas. Also that the parents of the one who belonged to the Jewish race
were under arrest, condemned to be exiled to Siberia for no other crime
than their having given birth to an enemy of the existing regime.

Pavel moved about his room with a sob of helpless fury in his throat. He
found feverish satisfaction in the thought that he had some chemicals in
his overcoat which he was to carry to the dynamite shop of the
Terrorists. The explosives to be made from it were intended for a new
attempt upon the life of the Emperor. Not being directly connected with
the contemplated attack, neither he nor the dynamite makers of the
organisation had any clear idea about the plot, which was in the hands
of a special sub-committee, Alexandre's place having been taken by
another man; but he did know that preparations were under way in the
Winter Palace.

The dynamite shop was kept by a woman with a deep-chested, almost
masculine voice, and a man with a squeaky feminine one. They were
registered as man and wife. She was the daughter of a priest, but she
looked like a woman of the people and dressed like one--a thick-set
extremely blonde young woman with coarse yet pleasing features. Her
revolutionary name was Baska. Her fictitious husband, who was one of the
chemists of the party, was addressed by the revolutionists as Grisha. He
had a scholarly face, yet the two had no difficulty in passing among the
neighbours for a tradesman or shop clerk and his wife. For the greater
reality of the impersonation and as a special precaution against
curiosity they made friends with the porter of the house and his wife
and with the police roundsman of the neighbourhood, often inviting them
to a glass of vodka. The porter of St. Petersburg, like his brother of
Paris under the empire, is a political detective "ex-officio." The two
spies and the police officer were thus turned into unconscious witnesses
of the young couple's political innocence, for in the first place they
had many an opportunity to convince themselves that their dwelling was
free from anything suspicious and, in the second, people who drank vodka
and went, moreover, on sprees with the house porter, certainly did not
look like Nihilists.

"Good morning, Pavel," Baska greeted him vivaciously, as she gave his
hand a hearty squeeze, while her other hand held a smoking cigarette.
"Just in time! I hate to eat my breakfast all alone. Grisha has another
bad headache, poor fellow. But I see you, too, have a long face. Where
did you get it?"

Pavel smiled lugubriously as he handed her the package. He had not the
heart to disturb her good spirits, and she went on chirping and
laughing.

Grisha came in, haggard, sickly and trying to smile. The skin of both
his hands was off. This, like his frequent headaches, was the effect of
the work he did in these rooms--of inhaling nitroglycerine and kneading
dynamite with his bare fists.

Baska gayly told how the porter's wife had offered her a salve for her
"husband," and how the night before, as Grisha was pouring
nitroglycerine into some dynamite "dough," there was an explosion and
the house filled with smoke.

"Our next door neighbour knew at once that our kerosene stove exploded
and set fire to a rag," Baska said with a deep-voiced titter. "She gave
me quite a lecture on negligence."

"She only wondered why there should be such a strange smell to the
smoke," Grisha added, his hand to his head.

As Pavel looked at Baska relishing her tea and her muffin and talking
merrily between gulps, a desire took hold of him to spoil her vivacity.
It jarred on him to see her enjoy herself while the image of the three
new gallows was so vivid in his mind.

"You people don't seem to know what's going on in the world," he said
testily. "They have hanged Malinka, Maidanski and Drobiazgin."

"Have they?" Baska asked paling. She had known two of them personally.

While Pavel took out his newspaper and read the brief despatch, her head
sank on the table. Her solid frame was convulsed with sobbing.

"Be calm, be calm," Grisha entreated, offering her a glass of water. In
spite of her excellent physique she was subject to violent hysterical
fits which were apt to occur at a time when the proffer of neighbourly
sympathy was least desirable.

She told all she remembered of the executed men, whom she had met in
the south. But that was not much; so Pavel went to see Purring Cat who,
being a southerner, had detailed information to give him about the three
Nihilists. Boulatoff could talk of nothing else that day. When he met
Makar, in the afternoon, he said:

"People are being strangled right and left and here you are bent on that
_idee fixe_ of yours."

"Fine logic, that," Makar replied. "If my _idee fixe_ had been realised
a year ago these men would now be free. But this is not the time to talk
about things of that kind." Instead of mourning the loss of the three
revolutionists he was in a solemn, religious sort of mood at the thought
of the new human sacrifices offered on the altar of liberty. He was
panting to speak about the Jew who had been executed. He was proud of
the fact that two men of his race had given their lives for the cause
within five months. The other Jewish revolutionist had been executed in
Nicolayeff. A letter which he had addressed to the revolutionists a few
days before his execution, exhorting them not to waste any of the forces
of the movement on attempts to avenge his death, was enshrined in
Makar's heart as the most sacred document in the entire literature of
the struggle. But race pride was contrary to the teachings of the
movement; so he not only kept these sentiments to himself, but tried to
suppress them in his own bosom.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the evening Pavel took two young cavalry officers of his acquaintance
to the house of a retired major where a revolutionary meeting was to be
held. They found the major's drawing room sparkling with military
uniforms. The gathering was made up of eight officers, two men in
citizen's clothes, and one woman, the dark long-necked hostess.

Two cheap lithographs, one of General Suvoroff and the other of the
reigning monarch, occupied the centre of the best wall, in jarring
disharmony with the refined and somewhat Bohemian character of the rest
of the room. The two portraits had been put there recently, to bear
witness to the political "reliability" of the house. The hostess
presided over a pile of yellow aromatic tobacco, rolling cigarettes for
her guests and smoking incessantly herself. An idiotic-looking
man-servant and a peasant girl fresh from the country kept up a supply
of tea, zwiebacks and preserves. Every time they appeared the hostess,
whose seat commanded the door, would signal to the company. She did it
rather perfunctorily, however, the revolutionary discussion proceeding
undisturbed. The cultured, bookish Russian of the assemblage was Greek
to the two servants. They talked of the three executions.

Presently two other civilians were announced.

"At last!" the hostess said, getting up from her pile of tobacco in a
flutter.

The two newcomers were both above medium height, of solid build and
ruddy-faced; but here their similarity of appearance ceased. One of them
looked the image of social refinement and elegance, while the clothes
and general aspect of the other bespoke a citified, prosperous peasant.
His rough top-boots, the red woolen belt round his coat and the rather
coarse tint of his florid complexion, like his full Russian beard,
proclaimed the son of the unenlightened classes. He was taller than his
companion and remarkably well-built, with a shock of dark brown hair
thrown back from a high prominent forehead and regular features. He was
introduced to the gathering as Zachar. He and the stylish-looking man by
his side whose revolutionary nickname was "My Lord," conveyed the
effect of a bright, shrewd tradesman and a high-class lawyer bent on
some legal business.

"If we are late, blame this guide of mine, not me," Zachar said to the
hostess, in a deep, rather harsh baritone, pointing at his companion.
"It turned out that he did not know the place very well himself. There
is a pilot for you." He accepted a glass of tea in a silver holder and
during the ensuing small talk the room rang with his merriment. His
jests were commonplace, but his Russian and all he said betrayed the man
of education. The tradesman's costume was his disguise, and if it became
him so well it was because his parents were moujiks. Born in serfdom but
brought up as a nobleman at the expense of his former master, this
university-bred peasant--a case of extreme rarity--for whom the
gendarmes were searching in connection with a bold attempt to blow up an
imperial train, loomed in the minds of the revolutionists as the most
conspicuous figure of their movement.

"And how is my young philosopher?" he said to Pavel. "I was at your
place this morning, but found you out, Pasha."

"I'll see you later on," Pavel said dryly. "Philosopher" referred to the
nature of the studies which Pavel's mother thought him to be pursuing.
There was a touch of patronage in the way Zachar used the word, and
Pavel resented it.

As the gathering began to lapse into a graver mood the conversation was
expectantly left to Zachar, who by degrees accepted the role of the
principal speaker of the evening. That he relished this role and was
fond of a well turned phrase became apparent at once, but the impression
soon wore off. He compelled attention.

"The practice of nations being inherited like furniture or chickens has
been out of date for centuries," he said in the course of a ferocious
attack on the existing adjustment of things. "But our party does not
demand full justice at once. The Will of the People is not
inconsiderate. We are willing to project ourselves into the position of
an old chap with whom the love of power has been bred in the bone. All
our party does demand, as a first step, is some regard for the rights of
the individual; of those rights without which the word civilisation is
of a piece with that puerile sort of hypocrisy as our late war with
Turkey, when the ambitious old fellow in his unquenchable thirst for
territory sent his subjects to die for the liberty of Bulgarians so that
their own children at home might be plunged into more abject slavery
than ever.

"The government knows, of course, that its days are numbered and that it
is only cowardice and incapacity for concerted action which make its
brief respite possible. To retreat honourably, before it is too late, to
yield to the stern voice of the revolution under some specious
pretext--this is the step indicated by the political situation, but then
this is not what the ambitious oldster is after. Is there any wonder he
has lost his head? So much the better for the revolution. One or two
decisive blows and the government will topple over. Thanks to the
splendid army section of the Will of the People, on the one hand, and to
our powerful Workingmen's Section, on the other, one hundred resolute
men will be enough to seize the Winter Palace, to cut off all egress,
arrest the new Czar and, amid the general confusion following the death
of the old tyrant, proclaim a provisional government. What a glorious
opportunity to serve one's country!"

His speech lasted an hour and a half. Most of his hearers were recent
converts, and these the matter-of-fact tone of his utterances took by
storm. The Third Section had heard of him as an irresistible agitator.
So he was, and the chief secret of his success lay--despite an effect of
conscious floridity and bravado--in a sincere depth of conviction
manifested by a volcanic vehemence of delivery. His speeches took it for
granted that Russia was at the threshold of a great historical change
and that his organisation was going to play a leading part in that
change. He gathered particular assurance from the fact that the "army
section" that had been formed by his efforts included several officers
of the court guard whose number he hoped to increase. These court
officers it was whom his imagination pictured as "cutting off all
egress" at the Winter Palace. The funds of his party included
contributions from some high sources. Things seemed to be coming the
"Will of the People's" way. As he spoke his strong physique seemed to be
aflame with contagious passion, sweeping along audience and speaker. The
harshness of his mighty baritone was gone; his peasant face was
beautiful. Words like "party," "citizen," "National Assembly," are
winged with the glamour of forbidden fruit in Russia, and when Zachar
uttered these words, in accents implying that these things were as good
as realised, his audience was enravished. To all of which, in the
present instance, should be added the psychological effect of a group of
dashing army officers, all members of the nobility, reverently listening
to an address by a peasant. He struck one as a giant of energy and
courage, of nervous vitality as well as of bodily strength. He had the
stuff of a political leader in him. Under favourable conditions he would
have left his mark as one of the strong men of the nineteenth century.
He carried people along current-fashion rather than magnetised them.

Pavel was the next speaker, but the outraged sense of justice which was
the keynote of his impassioned plea, coming as it did upon the heels of
Zachar's peremptory and matter-of-course declarations, sounded out of
date.

"Oh, it takes an idiot to talk after you, Zachar," he said, breaking off
in the middle of a sentence. "One feels like being up and doing things,
not talking. I wonder why we don't start for the Winter Palace, at
once."

"That's the way I feel, too," chimed in a very young cavalry officer,
while two older men in brilliant uniforms, were grasping Zachar each by
one hand. The long-necked hostess was brushing the tears from her eyes
and calling herself "fool," for joy.

An artillery officer with bad teeth of whom Pavel could not think
without thinking of the rheumatism of which that revolutionist had once
complained to him, drew his sword fiercely, the polished steel flaming
in the bright light of the room, as he said:

"By Jove!"

"Look at him! Look at him!" Zachar shouted.

"Bridle your passions, old boy," Pavel put in.

A minute or two later he called the orator into the next room and handed
him what looked like a package of tobacco.

Zachar was in high feather over the success of his speech and loath to
leave the atmosphere of adoration that surrounded him here; but an
important engagement forced him to take his departure.

       *       *       *       *       *

A quarter of an hour's ride in a tramcar and a short walk through the
moonlit streets brought him to a deserted corner in the vicinity of the
Winter Palace, where he was met by a man dressed like an artisan, as
tall as himself, but slimmer of girth, and the two went on trudging
along the snow-encrusted sidewalk together. The other man had an
expressive sickly face which the pallid glare of the moonlight gave a
ghastly look.

"How is your health?" Zachar asked.

"Bad," the sickly looking man answered, holding out his hand into which
Zachar put the package of tobacco, saying:

"See if it isn't too heavy for a quarter of a pound."

"It is, rather, but it'll pass," the other replied, weighing the package
in his hand and then putting it into his pocket. Buried in the tobacco
was a small quantity of dynamite.

"It's too bad you are not feeling well."

"Yes, my nerves are playing the devil with me. The worst of it is that I
have got to keep the stuff under my pillow when I sleep. That gives me
headaches."

"I shouldn't wonder. The evaporations of that stuff do that as a rule.
But can't you find another place for it?"

"Not for the night. They might go through my trunk then. They are apt to
come in at any time. Oh, those surprise visits of theirs keep my
wretched nerves on edge all the time."

While the gendarmerie and the police knew him to be a leader among the
revolutionary workmen of the capital and were hunting for him all over
the city, this man, whose name was Stepan Khaltourin, had for the past
few months been making his home, under the name of Batushkoff, in the
same building as the Czar, in the Winter Palace, where his work as a
varnisher was highly valued. He was a self-taught mechanic, unusually
well-read and clear-headed. Of retiring disposition and a man of few
words, with an iron will under a bashful and extremely gentle manner,
he was one of the prominent figures of the Will of the People, having
been driven to terrorism by the senseless persecutions which he had met
at the hands of the authorities in his attempts to educate some of his
fellow-workmen. He now lodged, together with other mechanics, in
the basement of the Winter Palace, with only one room--the
guard-room--between the ceiling over his head and the floor of the
Imperial dining hall. Indeed, the frequent raids which a colonel at the
head of a group of gendarmes had been making upon that basement since
the seizure of "Alexandre's" diagram were largely a matter of display
and red tape. There was more jingling of spurs and flaunting of
formidable looking moustaches than actual searching or watching. Nowhere
was the incapacity of Russian officialdom illustrated more glaringly
than it was in the very home of the Czar. The bold Terrorist for whom
the police were looking high and low had found little difficulty in
securing employment here, and one of the first things that had attracted
his attention in the place was the prevailing state of anarchy and
demoralisation he found in it. Priceless gems and relics were scattered
about utterly unguarded; stealing was the common practice of the court
servants, and orgies at which these regaled their friends from the
outside world upon wines from the imperial cellars were a nightly
occurrence. Since Alexandre's arrest the vigilance of the court
gendarmes had been greatly increased, so that no servant could enter the
palace without being searched; yet Khaltourin contrived to smuggle in a
small piece of dynamite every evening, thus gradually accumulating the
supply that was needed for the terrible work of destruction he was
preparing.

As to his position within the palace, he played his role so well that he
was the favourite of gendarmes and servants alike, often hearing from
them stories of the Nihilists and of the great plot to blow up the
dining hall that was supposed to have been nipped in the bud.

"Well, how is that old gendarme of yours?" Zachar inquired. "Still
teaching you manners?"

"Yes," Khaltourin answered with a smile. "I am getting sick of his
attentions, though. But there is something back of them, it appears.
What do you think he's after? Why, he has a marriageable daughter, so he
has taken it into his head to make a son-in-law of me."

"Ho-ho-ho-ho!" Zachar exploded, restraining a guffaw.




CHAPTER X.

THE CZAR'S ESCAPE.


On Tuesday, February 17th, at about six o'clock in the evening, Pavel
and Makar were sauntering through the streets of the Vassili Island.
Their conversation languished. While indoors they had had another
discussion of Makar's scheme, a heart-to-heart talk in which Pavel
showed signs of yielding; and now that they were out in the snow-dappled
night they were experiencing that feeling of embarrassment which is the
aftermath of sentimental communion between two men. When they reached
the Neva, Pavel cast a glance across, in the direction of the Winter
Palace. The frozen river looked infinitely wider than it was. Dotted
with lamps and crossed by streams of home-bound humanity, it lay vast,
gorgeous, uncanny--a white plain animated with mysterious brightness and
mysterious motion. The main part of the capital, on the Palace side of
the Neva, was a world of gloom starred with myriads and myriads of
lights, each so distinct that one almost felt tempted to count them; all
this seemingly as far away as the gold-dotted sky overhead. Makar was
huddling himself in his grey military cloak, his bare hands loosely
thrust into its sleeves, looking at nothing. Pavel, his furred coat
unbuttoned, gazed across the Neva.

"Come on," the medical student urged, knocking one foot against the
other. "It's too cold to be tramping around like this."

"One moment," Pavel responded, impatiently. He had been visiting this
point at the same hour every day for the past week or two. Makar, who
did not know of it, relapsed into his revery.

Suddenly there came a dull rolling crash. It burst from the other side,
and as Pavel and Makar looked across the river they saw that the lights
of the Winter Palace which had been burning a minute ago, were out,
leaving a great patch of darkness. The human stream paused. Then came a
rush of feet on all sides.

"It's in the Palace," Boulatoff whispered; and seizing his companion's
hand at his side he pressed it with furious strength.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day the newspapers were allowed to state that the previous
evening, as the Czar and a royal guest were about to enter the dining
hall through one door and the other members of the imperial family
through another, a terrific explosion had occurred, making a hole in the
floor ten feet long and six wide; that eleven inmates of the guard room,
which was directly under the dining hall, were killed and fifty-seven
injured, the Czar's narrow escape having been due to an accidental delay
of the dinner. The explosion had shattered a number of windows and blown
out the gas, leaving the palace in complete darkness. Traces of an
improvised dynamite mine had been discovered in the basement. Three
artisans employed in the palace were arrested, but their innocence was
established, while a fourth man, a varnisher named Batushkoff, had
disappeared. Now that Batushkoff was gone the Third Section learned that
he was no other than Stepan Khaltourin, one of the active
revolutionists its agents were looking for.

One week after the explosion the Czar signed a decree which practically
placed the government in the hands of a Supreme Executive Commission--a
body especially created to cope with the situation and whose head, Count
Loris-Melikoff, was invested with all but the powers of a regent. Count
Melikoff was neither a Slav nor of noble birth. He was the son of an
Armenian merchant. He was a new figure in St. Petersburg, and when his
carriage passed along the Neva Prospect his swarthy face with its
striking Oriental features were pointed out with expressions of
perplexity. Although one of the two principal heroes of the late war
with Turkey and recently a governor-general of Kharkoff, he was looked
upon as an upstart. The extraordinary powers so suddenly vested in him
took the country by surprise.

He was known for the conciliatory policy toward the Nihilists at which
he had aimed while he was governor-general of Kharkoff. Accordingly, his
promotion to what virtually amounted to dictatorship was universally
interpreted as a sign of weakening on the part of Alexander II. Indeed,
Melikoff's first pronunciamento from the lofty altitude of his new
office struck a note of startling novelty. He spoke of the Czar as
showing "increased confidence in his people" and of "public cooperation"
as "the main force capable of assisting the government in its effort to
restore a normal flow of official life"--utterances that were construed
into a pledge of public participation in affairs of state, into an
unequivocal hint at representative legislation.

Loris-Melikoff was one of the ablest statesmen Russia had ever produced.
He was certainly the only high official of his time who did not try to
prove his devotion to the throne by following in the trodden path of
repression. He knew that Russia could not be kept from joining in the
march of Western civilisation and he was not going to serve his personal
interests by pretending that it could. Instead, he hoped to strengthen
his position by winning the Czar over to his own moderate liberalism, by
reconciling him to the logic of history. But the logic of history could
best have been served by prompt and vigorous action, while the chief of
the Supreme Executive Commission was rather slow to move. Nor, indeed,
was he free from interference. The Czar was still susceptible to the
influence of his unthinking relatives and of his own vindictive nature.

Chaos marked the situation. Loris-Melikoff's first week in office was
signalised by the most cruel act in the entire history of the
government's struggle against Nihilism. A gymnasium boy, seventeen years
old (a Jew), was hanged in Kieff for carrying a revolutionary
proclamation. The dictator's professions of liberalism were branded as
hypocrisy.




CHAPTER XI.

A MYSTERIOUS ARREST.


A young man had been seized with seditious publications. It was the
first political arrest in Miroslav, and the report was spreading in a
maze of shifting versions. This much seemed certain: the prisoner
pretended to be a deaf-mute and so far the gendarmes and the procureur
had failed to disclose his identity. The local newspaper dared not
publish the remotest allusion to the matter.

Countess Anna Nicolayevna Varova (Varoff) first heard the news from her
brother-in-law, the governor, and although the two belonged to that
exceptional minority which usually discussed topics of this character in
their normal voices, yet it was in subdued tones that the satrap
broached the subject. Anna Nicolayevna offered to send for Pavel, who
had recently arrived from St. Petersburg, after an absence of three
years, but the governor checked her.

"Never mind, Annette," he said, impatiently, "I've dropped in for a
minute or two, in passing, don't you know. He called on me yesterday,
Pasha. Quite a man. Tell him he must look in again and let me see how
clever he is. Quite a man. How time does fly!" Then sinking his voice,
he asked: "Have you heard of the fellow they've bagged? One of those
youngsters who are scaring St. Petersburg out of its wits, you know."

He gave a laugh and fell to blinking gravely.

"What do you mean, George? Did the gendarmes catch a Nihilist?" she
asked, in dismay. "Did they? Bless me! That's all that's wanted. If
there is one there must be a whole nest of them." She made a gesture of
horror--"But who is he, what is he?"

"That I know no more than you do."

"Well, it's too bad, it's really too bad. I thought Miroslav was immune
from that plague at least." And seeing his worried look she added: "I
hope it's nothing serious, George."

Governor Boulatoff shook his head. "I don't think it is. Although you
never can tell nowadays. You never can tell," he repeated, blinking
absently. "The Armenian doesn't seem to be cleaning those fellows out
quite so rapidly as one thought he would, does he? They are playing the
devil with things, that's what they are doing." "One" and "they"
referred to the Emperor and his advisers.

"Pooh, they'll weary of that parvenu, it's only a matter of time," she
consoled him.

The old man proceeded to quote from Loris-Melikoff's recent
declarations, which the countess had heard him satirise several times
before. "'In the cooperation of the public,'" he declaimed theatrically,
"'lies the main force capable of assisting the government in its effort
to restore a normal flow of official life.' Do you understand what all
this jugglery means? That we are knuckling down to a lot of ragamuffins.
It means an official confession that the 'flow of official life' has
been checked by a gang of rascally college boys. 'The public is the main
force capable of assisting the government!' Charming, isn't it? Might
as well invite 'the public' to be so kind and elect representatives,
deputies, or what you may call 'em, start a parliament and have it over
with."

Anna Nicolayevna made another attempt to bring the conversation back to
the political prisoner, but her visitor was evidently fighting shy of
the topic.

"Birch-rods, a good, smart flogging, that's what the public needs," he
resumed, passionately gnashing his teeth, in response to his own
thoughts.

"Oh, don't say that, George. After all, one lives in the nineteenth
century."

But this only spurred him on.

The arrest having been ordered from St. Petersburg, the implication was
that the presence of the revolutionist in town had escaped the attention
of the local authorities. So Governor Boulatoff, who had had no
experience in cases of this kind, wondered whether the affair was not
likely to affect his own standing. Besides, the governor of Kharkoff had
recently been killed, and Boulatoff was asking himself whether the
arrest of the unknown man augured the end of his own peace of mind. This
he kept to himself, however, and having found some relief in
animadverting upon the policy of Loris-Melikoff he took leave.

       *       *       *       *       *

The countess was left with a pang of sympathy for her brother-in-law.
Not that she had any clear idea of the political situation at which he
was forever scoffing and carping. She felt sure that his low spirits
were traceable to loneliness, and her compassion for him revived
heart-wringing memories of his dead wife, her sister.

The young prince was out in the garden romping about with Kostia, his
half-brother, now a ten-year-old cadet on sick leave. Anna Nicolayevna
went to take a look at them through the open window of a rear room. The
garden was so jammed with fresh-tinted lilacs, so flooded with their
scent, that it seemed like an explosion of color and fragrance. Two
Germans were at work with picks and spades. From an invisible spot where
a new summer house was being constructed came sounds of sawing and
hammering, while the air near the window rang with a multitudinous
twitter of sparrows. Pavel was trying to force Kostia into a
wheelbarrow, the boy kicking and struggling silently, and a huge shaggy
dog barking at Pavel ferociously.

"Come in, Pasha. I want to speak to you," said Anna Nicolayevna.

The return indoors was a race, in which the gigantic dog took part. The
convalescent little cadet was beaten.

"Wait till I get well," he said.

"Wait nothing. Your excellency will be rolling along like a water-melon
all the same. Good-bye, Monsieur le Water-melon!"

Presently Pavel stood before his mother, mopping his flushed, laughing
face.

"Do you remember his 'express trains' in the garden?" he said. "Now it
is beneath his dignity, to be sure." He was always trying to prove to
himself that the present Kostia and the five-year-old boy he used to
fondle five years ago were one and the same person.

"He's right," said the countess. "He's a baby no longer. It's you who
are acting like one. Uncle has been here. He was in a hurry, so I didn't
send for you." Her serious-minded, intellectual son inspired her with a
certain feeling of timidity. She had not the courage to bring up the
subject of the political arrest. Her mind was so vague on matters of
this kind, while Pavel was apparently so well informed and so profound,
she was sure of making a poor showing. So she told herself that it was
not a proper topic to discuss in a well-ordered family and kept her own
counsel.

"I didn't know he was here," he said.

"Poor man! he seems to be feeling lonely."

Pavel made no reply.

"Why, don't you think he does?"

"What matters it whether I do or not," he said, lightly.

"You haven't a bit of heart, Pasha."

He would not be drawn into conversation, treating everything she said
with an inscrutable, somewhat patronising flippancy that nettled her. At
last he said he was going out.

"'Looking up old chums' again?" she asked. "And does it mean that you
are going to dine out once more?"

"I'll try not to, mother," he answered, with a fond smile in his bright,
aggressive eyes.

His small slender figure, beautifully erect, and his upward-tending,
frank features haunted her long after he left. She felt like a jealous
bride. Otherwise he kept her thoughts tinged with sunshine. A great
attachment on quite new terms had sprung up between mother and son since
his arrival. At the same time he seemed to belong to a world which she
was at a loss to make out. Nor did he appear disinclined to talk of his
life in St. Petersburg--a subject upon which she was continually plying
him with questions. The trouble was that the questions that beset her
mind could no more be formulated than a blind man can formulate his
curiosity as to colour. Moreover, all these questions seemed to come
crowding upon her when Pavel was away and to vanish the moment she set
eyes on him. She told herself that he belonged to a different
generation from hers, that it was the everlasting case of "fathers and
sons." But this only quickened her jealousy of the "sons" and her
despair at being classed with the discarded generation. And the keener
her jealousy, the deeper was her interest in Pasha.




CHAPTER XII.

A BEWILDERING ENCOUNTER.


When Pavel was in St. Petersburg Anna Nicolayevna had missed him only
occasionally. Now that he was with her his absences were a continuous
torture to her. On the present occasion she sought diversion in a visit
to Princess Chertogoff where she expected to hear something about the
mysterious prisoner. Princess Chertogoff was a lame, impoverished
noblewoman whose daughter was married to the assistant-procureur. In
higher circles she was looked down upon as a social outcast, so that
Anna Nicolayevna's visits to her had a surreptitious character and
something of the charm of forbidden fruit. Pavel's mother was fond of
the stir her appearance produced in houses of this kind. The curious
part of it was that the impecunious princess was one of the very few
persons in the world whose presence irritated her. It seemed as though
this irritation had a peculiar attraction for her.

It was an early hour in the afternoon. She was received in the vestibule
by Helene, the assistant-procureur's wife, with an outburst of kisses
and caresses which had something to do with the young woman's expecting
to become a mother. Rising in the background was the hostess, Lydia
Grigorievna Chertogova (Chertogoff) and her gorgeous crutches. She was
large, dark, and in spite of her made-over gowns, imposingly handsome.
Aware of the fantastic majesty which these crutches gave her stalwart
form, she paraded her defect as she did her beautiful dark eyes. At this
moment it seemed as though the high-polished ebony crutches joined her
in beaming at the sight of the distinguished visitor. Helene, a small
woman of twenty-four, usually compact as a billiard ball, was beginning
to resemble an over-ripe apple.

When the three women found themselves in the drawing room Lydia
Grigorievna lost no time in turning the conversation on the arrested
Nihilist. Her son-in-law had carefully abstained from opening his mouth
on the subject, yet she talked about it authoritatively, with an
implication of reserved knowledge of still graver import, but Helene
gave her away.

"Woldemar would not speak about it," she complained, reverently. "'An
affair of state,' he said. You can't get a single word out of him." She
exulted in the part he was playing as an exterminator of the enemies of
the Czar, and in the air-castles she was building as to the promotion to
which the present case was to pave his way.

"But what do they want, those scamps?" Lydia Grigorievna resumed, in
soft, pampered accents. "Would they have us live without a Czar? I
should have them cut to pieces, the rogues. Is it possible that the
government should be powerless to get rid of them? To think of a handful
of striplings keeping cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror."

"Oh, nobody is really afraid of them," Helene retorted, holding her face
to the breeze which came in through an open window.

"But your husband is not yet a cabinet minister, dear," her mother said
with a smile toward the countess.

"Oh, you're always suspecting me of something or other, _mamman_. I was
not thinking of Woldemar at all."

The charm of her presence, the appealing charm of a pretty young woman
about to become a mother, added itself to the tenderness and mystery of
spring. Lydia Grigorievna addressed another smile to the countess, but
Anna Nicolayevna dropped her glance. The princess went on raging at the
revolutionists. In reality, however, that handful of striplings who
"kept cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror" had stirred up a
curiosity in her that sprang from anything but indignation or contempt.
She was hankering for a specimen of their literature, of those
publications the very handling of which was apt to bring death. Her
thirst in this direction was all the keener because she felt sure that
some of the Nihilist papers that had been confiscated at the arrest of
the unknown man were upstairs in her son-in-law's desk.

"A constitution may be all very well in Germany or France," she said.
"This is Russia, not Germany or France or England, thank God. Yet those
wretches will go around stirring up discontent. On my way home from
Moscow last winter I heard a passenger say that if we had less bribery
and more liberty and popular education we would be as good as any nation
in Western Europe. I knew at once he was a Nihilist. You can tell one by
the first word he utters. I confess I was afraid to sit near him. He had
grey side-whiskers, but maybe they were just stuck on. Oh, I should show
them no mercy."

She was all flushed and ill at ease. She received no encouragement. Her
sugared enunciation and the false ring of what she said grated on her
hearer's nerves. Anna Nicolayevna listened in silence. The lame princess
was a sincere woman coated with a layer of insincerity. But the
countess thought her the embodiment of affectation and hated her,
bizarre beauty, enunciation, altered gowns, crutches and all.

Lydia Grigorievna was interrupted by the appearance of the
assistant-procureur himself. He was tall and frail with a long straight
straw-coloured mane and pontifical gestures. His figure made one think
of length in the abstract. As you looked at him he seemed to be
continually growing in height. Helene had fallen in love with him
because he resembled the baron in a play she had seen in Moscow.

"I've just looked in to bid you good afternoon, countess," he said. "I
saw your carriage through the window. But unfortunately--_business
before pleasure_." It was one of two or three English phrases which he
kept for occasions of this character and which he mispronounced with
great self-confidence.

When Anna Nicolayevna got into the street she felt as though she had
emerged from the suffocating atmosphere of some criminal den. In the May
breeze, however, and at sight of the river her spirits rose. She
dismissed her carriage. When she reached the macadamised bank and caught
the smell of the water it was borne in upon her afresh that it was
spring. She had passed this very spot, in a sleigh only a short while
ago, it seemed. Lawns and trees had been covered with snow then; all had
been stiff with the stiffness of death; whereas now all was tenderly
alive with verdure and bloom, and wild-flowers smiled upon her at every
turn. Here it struck her as though spring had just been born; born in
full attire overnight. Flushed and radiant, with her rusty chin in the
air and her flat chest slightly thrown out, spinning her parasol, she
was briskly marching along, a broad streak of water to the right of her,
a row of orchards to the left. The river beamed. From somewhere
underneath she heard the clanking of chains of lumber-horses,
accompanied by the yell of boys. The greased wooden screws of a receding
cable-ferry were squirming in the air like two erect snakes of silver;
the brass buttons of a soldier-passenger burned like a column of flames.
All this and the lilac-laden breeze and Anna Nicolayevna's soul were
part of something vast, swelling with light and joy. But the breath of
spring is not all joy. Nature's season of love is a season of yearning.
One feels like frisking and weeping at once. Spring was with us a year
ago, but the interval seems many years. It is like revisiting one's home
after a long absence: the scenes of childhood are a source of delight
and depression at once. It is like hearing a long forgotten song: the
melody, however gay, has a dismal note in it. Anna Nicolayevna had not
been out many minutes when she began to feel encompassed by an immense
melancholy to which her heart readily responded. There was a vague
longing in the clear blue sky, in the gleaming water, in the patches of
grass on either side of the public promenade, in the distant outlines
across the river, but above all in the overpowering freshness of the
afternoon air. The travail of an unhappy soul seemed to be somewhere
nearby. A look of loneliness came into her eyes. She was burning to see
Pavel, to lay bare her soul to him.

When a passing artisan in top-boots and with glass buttons in his
waistcoat reverently took off his flat cap she returned the salute with
motherly fervour and slackened her pace to a more dignified gait. "I'm
respected and loved by the people," she mentally boasted to Pavel.

Arrived at the bridge, she paused to hand a twenty-copeck piece to a
blind beggar who sat on the ground by the tollman's booth. He apparently
recognised her by the way her gloved hand put the coin in his hand. She
had given him alms as long as she could remember, and usually he made no
more impression on her than the lamp-posts she passed. This time,
however, it came back to her how her mother used to send her out of
their carriage with some money for him. She paused to look at him and to
listen to his song. She recalled him as a man of thirty or forty with
thick flaxen hair. Now he was gray and bald. "Great heavens! how time
does fly!" she exclaimed in her heart, feeling herself an old woman. The
blind man seemed to be absorbed in his song. All blind beggars look
alike and they all seem to be singing the same doleful religious tune,
yet this man, as he sat with his eyes sealed and his head leaned against
the parapet, gave her a novel sensation. He was listening to his own
tones, as if they came from an invisible world, like his own, but one
located somewhere far away.

Anna Nicolayevna gave him a ruble and passed on. Followed by the
beggar's benedictions, she made to turn into the street which formed the
continuation of the bridge, when an approaching flour truck brought her
to a halt. Besides several sacks of meal the waggon carried a cheap old
trunk, and seated between the trunk and the driver was--Pavel; Pavel
uncouthly dressed in the garb of an artisan. His rudimentary beard was
covered with dust; his legs, encased in coarse grimy topboots, were
dangling in the air. The visor of his flat cap was pushed down over his
eyes, screening them from the red afternoon sun which sparkled and
glowed in the glass buttons of his vest. It certainly was Pavel. Anna
Nicolayevna was panic-stricken. She dared not utter his name.

The toll paid, the truck moved on. The countess followed her son with
her eyes, until a cab shut him out of view, and then she remained
standing for some time, staring at the cab. "What does it all mean?" she
asked herself with sickening curiosity. Finally her eye went to the
water below. She gazed at its rippling stretches of black and masses of
shattered silver; at a woman slapping a heap of wash with a wash-beater,
at a long raft slowly gliding toward the bridge. "Is he disguised? What
does it all mean? Was it really Pasha?"

Doubt dawned in her mind. In her eagerness to take another look at the
man on the truck she raised her eyes. After waiting for some moments she
saw the waggon with the two men as it appeared and forthwith disappeared
at the other end of the bridge. The thought of the arrested man stunned
her. Was Pavel a Nihilist? The image of her son had assumed a new, a
forbidding expression.

The revolutionists moved about on the verge of martyrdom, and as the
mere acquaintance with one of their number meant destruction, the
imagination painted them as something akin to living shadows, as beings
whose very touch brought silence and darkness. People dared not utter
the word "Nihilist" or "revolutionist" aloud. Anna Nicolayevna belonged
to the privileged few, but at this moment she dreaded so much as to
think of her son by these ghastly names. It now appeared to Anna
Nicolayevna that all through her call at Lydia Grigorievna's she had had
a presentiment of an approaching calamity. She took the first cab that
came along.

"As fast as you can drive," she said.

The moment Anna Nicolayevna got home she inquired whether Pavel was in
his room, and when the porter said that his Highness had not been back
since he had left, in the morning, a fresh gust of terror smote her
heart and brain. She stole into his room. On the table lay a German
pamphlet on Kant and a fresh number of the _Russian Messenger_, the
ultra-conservative magazine published in Moscow. In several places the
leaves were cut. A Nihilist was the last person in the world one would
expect to read this organ of Panslavists. What Anna Nicolayevna did not
know was that the cut pages of the conservative magazine, which Pavel
had received from St. Petersburg the day before, contained a hidden
revolutionary message. Here and there a phrase, word, or a single
letter, was marked, by means of an inkstain, abrasion or what looked
like the idle penciling of a reader, these forming half a dozen
consecutive sentences.

Anna Nicolayevna was perplexed and her perplexity gave her a new thrill
of hope. She was in a quiver of impatience to see her son and have it
all out.

The dinner hour came round and Pavel was not there. She could not eat.
Every little while she paused to listen for a ring of the door bell. She
sent a servant to his room to see if he had not arrived unheard. He had
not.

The other people at table were Kostia, in huge red shoulder-straps which
made his well-fitting uniform look too large for him; Kostia's old
tutor, a powerful looking German with a bashful florid face, and the
countess' own old governess, an aged Frenchwoman with a congealed smile
on her bloodless lips. This restlessness of the countess when Pavel was
slow in coming was no news to them, but this time she seemed to feel
particularly uneasy. Silence hung over them. The Frenchwoman's dried-up
smile turned to a gleam of compassion. The German ate timidly. This
man's services had practically ceased when Kostia entered the cadet
corps, but Anna Nicolayevna retained him in the house for his quiet
piety. She had a feeling that so far as the intelligent classes were
concerned the simple forms of Protestantism were more compatible with
religious sincerity than were the iron-bound formalities of her native
church. So, with her heart thirsting for spiritual interest, she found
intense pleasure in her theological conversations with this well-read,
narrow-minded, honest Lutheran, whose religious convictions she envied.




CHAPTER XIII.

A GENDARME'S SISTER.


When Pavel told his mother that he was going out he expected to meet
Makar, who had been in Miroslav for the past four days. Once again he
was going to plead with him to give up his scheme. The affair kept Pavel
in bad humour, but that morning his mind was occupied by the thought
that there was an interesting meeting in store for him. In the evening
he was to make the acquaintance of Clara Yavner, the heroine of the
Pievakin "demonstration."

On his way down the spacious corridor he was stopped by Onufri, his
cheeks still hollower and his drooping moustache still longer and
considerably greyer than of yore. Pavel had once tried to make a convert
of him, but found him "too stupid for abstract reasoning." Onufri was
polishing the floor. As Pavel came past he faced half way about and gave
him a stern look from under his bushy eyebrows.

"They've pinched a gentleman, the blood-guzzlers." Saying which he fell
to dancing on his foot-cushions again.

"What do you mean?" Pavel asked, turning white as he paused.

"You know what I mean, sir. You know you do," answered Onufri, going on
with his work.

"Is it true? Who made the arrest? Gendarmes?"

"That's it. I wouldn't bother your Highness if the police'd nabbed a
common crook, would I?"

The servant bent on his young master a long look of sympathetic
reproach, adding under his breath:

"You had better give it all up, sir. Better let it go to the devil."

"Give up what? What on earth are you prating about, Onufri?"

A few minutes later, while Pavel was destroying some papers in his room,
the door swung open and in came Onufri. The old man burst into tears and
dropped to his knees.

"Take pity, sir," he wailed, kissing Pavel's fingers. "You've played
with fire long enough, sir. If they put you in prison, the murderers,
and sent you away it would kill her Highness, your mother."

"Get up, Onufri. I have no patience with you just now, really I
haven't."

"It's bad enough when your Highness takes chances in another town, but
if you're mixed up in this here thing, sir----"

"I'm not mixed up 'in this here thing.' Don't bother me. Come, get up.
Up with you, now. There is a good fellow!"

The old hussar obeyed distressedly.

Instead of going to the place where he expected to see Makar, Pavel went
to the house of Major Safonoff, the gendarme officer, an
uncomfortable-looking frame building across the river. As he approached
it, Masha, the major's sister, who stood at a second story window at
that moment, apparently waiting for somebody, burst out beckoning to him
and stamping her feet. Her excited gesticulations drew the attention of
a knife-grinder and two little girls. Pavel dropped his eyes. "She is a
perfect idiot," he said to himself in a rage, "and I am another one. The
idea of taking up with such a creature!"

"Didn't you torture me!" she greeted him on the staircase. "I thought my
heart was going to snap. Don't be uneasy. I have dismissed our servant.
There is nobody around." When they reached the low-ceiled parlor, she
sank her voice and said solemnly, yet with a certain note of triumph:
"He was arrested at four o'clock yesterday on the railway tracks. The
gendarme office had information that he was in the habit of taking walks
there. I happened to be away--think of it! At a time like that I was
away. Else I should have let you know at once, of course. Anyhow, he's
there."

"You say it as if it was something to rejoice in," Pavel remarked,
disguising his rage. "It's quite a serious matter, Maria Gavrilovna."

Mlle. Safonoff stared. "But we'll get him out. Why, are you afraid we
mayn't? I see you're depressed and that makes me miserable, too. Really
it does."

"Do I look depressed? Well, I must confess I rather am. It's no laughing
matter, Maria Gavrilovna," he said, flushing.

"Oh, well, if you are going to talk like that. That is I myself haven't
the slightest doubt about it. Only you frighten me so. If this thing is
going to last another week it will drive me mad." Her childish eyes
shone with tears. "Why should you take such a gloomy view of it? I must
say it's cruel of you, Pavel Vassilyevich. Everything is just as I
expected. He is as good as free, I assure you."

Pavel answered, by way of consoling himself as well as her: "Well, maybe
I do take it too hard. Our chances seem to be good, and--well, we must
get him out. That's all there is to it."

"Of course we must. Now I like you, Boulatoff. We must and we will, and
when the story is published--oh, I do wish we could get out special
proclamations!--anyhow, won't it make a stir!" She paused and then
resumed, in a new burst of frankness, "I know what makes you uneasy
about me. The great trouble with me is my lack of tact, isn't it? If I
had that I would be all right. That's what worries you about me in this
affair, isn't it, now? You're afraid I may make a mess of the whole
business. I know you are. Well, and I don't blame you, either. The
Safonoffs have never been distinguished for their heads. When it happens
to be a matter of hearts, we hold our own, but brains, well--." She gave
a laugh. "I tell you what, Boulatoff, I'm afraid of you, and I don't
care to bear the brunt of this important affair. Anyhow, I want you to
keep an eye on me. I'll do all you want me to, but you must take the
responsibility off my shoulders, else I'll go crazy. What makes you
smile? You think I'm crazy already, don't you?"

"I wasn't smiling at all. So far you have managed things beautifully. I
confess I'm getting impatient. Well, I do feel wretched, Maria
Gavrilovna."

She grasped his hand, shook it silently and whispered: "Don't be uneasy.
We shall win."

When Safonoff came home at the lunch hour he told of the excitement at
the gendarme office. His manner toward Boulatoff was a non-committal
mixture which seemed to say: "You and I understand each other perfectly,
don't we? Still, if you think you can get me to call a spade a spade or
to help you you are mistaken."

His compact, well-fed figure had the shape of a plum. He was
perpetually mimicking somebody or chuckling and his speech was full of
gaps, many of his sentences being rendered in dumb show.

"My chief may get in trouble for having ordered the arrest too soon," he
said. "We were to let the prisoner--" (he brandished his hand to
represent a man going around at large) "for some time, so as to let him
show us with whom he is acquainted. But my chief--" (he struck an
attitude meant to caricature a decrepit, coughing, old fellow) "was all
of a tremble for fear the canary-bird might take wing. You see he had
never arrested a political before. You should have seen our men when we
took that chap on the railroad track. They were more frightened than he,
I assure you, prince. They thought he was going to--" (he aimed an
imaginary dagger at Pavel and burst into laughter). "Monsieur Unknown is
certainly no coward whatever else he may be. You should have seen the
look of surprise and contempt he gave me!"

Pavel beamed while Masha's face wore a pained expression. "It's time you
had left this nasty business of yours, Andrusha," she said.

When Andrusha reached the assistant procureur's part in the case he
sketched off a pompous imbecile. There was no love lost between the
public attorney and the gendarme officers, so Safonoff described, with
many a gurgle of merriment, how, during the attempted examination of the
prisoner, Zendorf, the assistant procureur (he burlesqued an obeisance
as the epitome of snobbishness) had tried to impress his uniformed
rivals with his intellectual and social superiority.

"You see, my chief is a rough and ready sort of customer. Whatever else
he may be, frills and fakes are not in his line. So he went right at it.
'Speak up,' he squeaked at the prisoner, 'speak up, or I'll have your
mouth opened for you.' So Zendorf called him gently to order and fixed
his dignified peepers at the prisoner. He expected to cast some sort of
spell over him, I suppose, but it was no go. As to me, I was just
choking. As bad luck would have it I took it into my head at that moment
that the best way to make that fellow talk would be to have his armpits
tickled till he roared. Well, I had to leave the room to have my giggle
out."

Safonoff was indifferent to his sister's revolutionary ventures because
he never vividly realised the danger she incurred. His mind retained the
most lifelike impressions, but its sensitiveness was of the photographic
kind; it was confined to actual experiences. He had no imagination for
the future. He was an easy-going man, incapable of fear. People often
arrived at the conclusion that he was "a fool after all." But then there
are fools who are endowed with a keen perception and a lively sense of
character.

Speaking of the warden of the jail, Safonoff impersonated a cringing,
hand-kissing, crafty time-server. He had never met a convert Jew or
convert Pole who was not an adventurer and an all-round knave, he said,
and Rodkevitch was the most typical convert Pole he had ever come
across. The sight of money took his breath away, gave him the vertigo,
made his eyes start from their sockets. Rustle a crisp paper ruble in
his ear and he will faint away.

"He's a candidate for Siberia anyhow and he needs money to pull him out
of some of the roguish schemes he is tangled up in. The contractors who
furnish his prisoners sand for flour and garbage for potatoes are his
partners in some of his outside swindles also. Do you understand,
prince?" The question was put with special emphasis, which Pavel
interpreted as a direct hint at the possibility of bribing the warden.

It occurred to Boulatoff that Makar's luggage was quite likely to
contain some incriminating papers or other things that might aggravate
the case. To fear this in view of Makar's notorious absent-mindedness
was quite reasonable. But this was not all. He had been bent upon making
his arrest as important in the eyes of the Third Section as possible,
and Pavel was almost certain he had left something in his lodgings on
purpose. "You never know what you are at with a crazy, obstinate
bull-dog like that," he thought in a qualm of anxiety.

When Safonoff had gone Pavel wrote a note to his imprisoned friend
asking for the address of his lodgings.

"Can you get this to him, and an answer brought back?" he demanded of
Mlle. Safonoff in a peremptory tone.

"I think so. My aunt will probably get it through. I am almost sure of
it, in fact."

"There you are. You're _almost_ sure. Was this enough to let a man put
himself in the hands of the Third Section?"

Mlle. Safonoff hurried out of the house in dumb dismay. After an
interval of less than an hour, which to Pavel seemed a year, she burst
into the parlour, accompanied by an older woman, whom she introduced as
her aunt, Daria Stepanovna Shubeyko. Both were breathless with
excitement. They had the desired address, the sum Makar owed his
landlady and another note to the landlady. Pavel's heart swelled with
joy and gratitude, but he did not show it.

"Very well," he said, with a preoccupied scowl. "And now for that trunk
of his."

The two women went on to describe, continually interrupting each other,
their plans for setting Makar free, but Pavel checked them.

"We'll discuss it all afterwards," he said. "What we need at this minute
is a coarse suit of clothes, something to make a fellow look like a
workman or porter. We must clear his room before his landlady has
notified the police of his disappearance." The costume was brought by
Masha. When Pavel emerged from the major's bedroom transformed into a
laborer, Masha's aunt applauded so violently that he could not resist
gnashing his teeth at her.

"Excuse me, but I've never seen a real man of action before," she
pleaded. "Now I feel newly born, really I do. I tell you what,
Boulatoff, I'll go with you. In case of trouble I may be of some use,
you know. We can't afford to let an active man like you perish."

"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 was sincerely 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.




CHAPTER XIV.

UNDERGROUND MIROSLAV.


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 knew the 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 order to 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
fiance, 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 fiancee
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 fiancee a chair next 

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