The Second Class Passenger Part 33

He stopped. Lucas was pointing at him with the flute across the bowed head of the woman, who crouched over her child at his feet.

"You shall report the matter to the Governor," said Lucas, in the same tone of icy anger. "And I will report it to the Minister."

He touched the woman. "Get up," he said. "Come with me."

He had to repeat it before she understood; she was numb with terror.

She rose with difficulty to her feet, clasping the child, whose wail was now weak with exhaustion. The peering crowd made a ring of brute faces about them, full of menace and mystery, but the new power in him moved them to right and left at his gesture, and they gave him pa.s.sage, with the woman behind him, across the road. The stupefied policeman watched them go, and then ran off to place the matter in the hands of his superior.

Lucas was at his door when the officer whom the policeman had fetched touched him on the elbow. He was a young man; if he had been older Lucas's difficulties might have been increased. He peered in the darkness, and was visible as a narrow, black-moustached face, with heavy eyebrows and a brutal mouth. The one thing that deterred him from brisk action was the fact that Lucas was a foreigner, whose rights and liabilities were therefore uncertain.

"This woman," he said, "is arrested."

Lucas was unlocking the door. He turned with his hand on the key, and the woman touched his arm. Perhaps that touch aided him to use big words. As a resident in Tambov he knew the officer by sight, and had always been a little daunted by his manner of power. In Russia one comes easily to fear the police. But now he was free of fear.

"You be careful," he said. "I saw what was being done."

With his left hand he pushed the door, and it swung open. He motioned the woman to enter, and nodded as he saw her cross the threshold.

The officer vented a click of impatience.

"I tell you----" he began, and moved forward a step. Lucas extended an arm and the hand that held the flute across his chest.

"Back!" he said. "You mustn't enter this house--you know that! You can go to the Governor, if you like, and I will go over his head. But you shall not touch that woman."

"She is arrested," said the officer obstinately, still studying his antagonist. "If you wish to aid her, you must go to the Bureau; but you cannot take her away like this."

"Eh?" Lucas swung round on him; the time was fertile in inspirations.

"Can't I?!" he demanded threateningly. "But I have taken her, man. If you seize her now you must arrest me, too, and then--we shall see!"

"I must do my duty," persisted the other.

"Do it, then," said Lucas, standing square across the door. "Do it, and see if you can explain afterwards how you did it. I am not a woman who can be insulted with safety; my arrest will have to be explained to St. Petersburg, and you will have to pay for it. I saw how she was being handled, and how your duty was being done. I tell you, you're in danger. Be careful!"

"So?" replied the officer slowly. He turned to the folk who were the absorbed audience of this conference. "Move away, there," he commanded harshly. "This is none of your business. Off with you!"

They shifted back reluctantly, and he waited till he could speak unheard by them. Then he turned to Lucas again with a touch of the confidential in his manner.

"What do you want with her?" he asked.

"Want with her?" repeated Lucas, not immediately comprehending. Then, as the man's meaning reached him he trembled. "I don't want her," he cried. "I don't want her. You want her, not I; and you shan't have her. Do you understand? You shan't have her!"

"Shan't I?" retorted the officer, but there was indecision in his voice.

"No!" said Lucas.

There was a pause. Neither of them was sure of himself. The officer found himself in face of a situation which he could not gauge; and it would never do for a provincial police official to attract notice in remote St. Petersburg. For all he knew, this flimsy little man, who had s.n.a.t.c.hed his Jewess from him, might be able to set in motion those mills which grind erring servants of the State into disgrace and ruin. He certainly had a large and authoritative way with him.

"Will you come to the Bureau, then, and speak with the chief?" he suggested. "You see, your action causes a difficulty."

"No, I won't," said Lucas flatly.

He also was in doubt. It seemed to him that he stood in a considerable peril, and he was aware that his mood of high temper was failing him. It needed an effort to maintain an a.s.sured and uncompromising front. Behind him, on the unlighted stairs, the woman breathed heavily. He summoned what he had of stubbornness to uphold him. The affair so far had gone valiantly; he meant that it should continue on the same plane.

He saw the officer hesitate frowningly, and quaked. In a moment the man might make up his mind and seize him; there was an urgent necessity for some action that should quell him. Like all weak men, he saw a resource in violence, and as the officer opened his lips to speak again he interrupted.

"No more!" he shouted. "You have heard what I had to say; that is enough. Now go!"

He pointed frantically with his flute, and the officer, at the sudden lifting of his arm, made a surprised movement, which Lucas misunderstood.

With a cry that was half terror and half ecstasy he smote, and the flute beat the officer's cap down over his eyes.

"Yei Bohu!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the officer, falling back,

Lucas did not wait for him to thrust the cap away and recover himself. He had done his utmost, and the next step must rest with Providence. It was but two paces to the doorway. The officer was not quick enough to see his panic-stricken retirement. He recovered his sight only to see the slam of the door, which seemed to close in his face with a contemptuous and defiant emphasis. It was like a final fist shaken at him to drive home a warning. He shook his head despondently.

On the other side of the door Lucas, fighting with his loud breath, heard his slow footsteps on the cobbles as he departed. He waited, hardly daring to relax his mind to hope, till he heard the party of them drawing off. He was weak with unaccustomed emotions.

What struck him as marvelous was that the woman, whose face he had last seen as a writhen mask of fear, should appear in the light of his room with her calm restored, with nothing but some disorder of her hair and dress to betoken her troubles. Even the child in her arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep. He stared at the pair of them vacantly. His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast monstrous.

The Jewess was watching him. In her dark, serious way she had a certain striking beauty. Her grave eyes waited for him to look at her.

"What is it?" he said at last.

"If I might put the child down," she suggested timidly.

Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom. "My bed is in there," he answered. She lowered her head, as though in obedience to a command he had given, and carried the child out. Lucas watched her go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among other things, a bottle of brandy.

While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back at the child. He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly moving.

She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face, and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge of his coat to her lips.

Lucas stood while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt that reverent and symbolic act of grat.i.tude. But once again, as when on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with great pa.s.sions and mighty emotions. It is the mood of martyrs and heroes. He looked down to her dark eyes, bright with swimming tears, and helped her to her feet.

"You shall be safe here," he told her. "n.o.body shall touch you here."

She believed it utterly; he was a champion sent straight from G.o.d; she had seen him conquering and irresistible. To fear now would be a blasphemy.

"I am quite safe," she agreed. "I am not afraid. To-morrow some of my people will come for me."

He nodded. "There is some food in the cupboard there," he told her.

"Milk, too, if the child wants it. And n.o.body can come up the stairs without meeting me; and if they try, G.o.d help them!"

She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed confidently.

He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom, and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present.

So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found himself on the dark and chilly stairs without so much as a pillow or a blanket to make sleep possible. For lack of anything else in the shape of a weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to have a virtue for quelling police officials.

About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze, chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would still make music. It would not. It is too much to ask of any instrument that has been used as an instrument of war. It had saved a Jewess and her child, magnified its owner into a man of action, and was thenceforth silent for ever.