The White Terror and The Red Part 12

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 n.o.blewoman whose daughter was married to the a.s.sistant-procureur. In higher circles she was looked down upon as a social outcast, so that Anna Nicolayevna's visits to her had a surrept.i.tious 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 a.s.sistant-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, n.o.body 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 const.i.tution may be all very well in Germany or France," she said.

"This is Russia, not Germany or France or England, thank G.o.d. Yet those wretches will go around stirring up discontent. On my way home from Moscow last winter I heard a pa.s.senger 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 a.s.sistant-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 misp.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sed 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 bra.s.s b.u.t.tons of a soldier-pa.s.senger 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 encompa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sing artisan in top-boots and with gla.s.s b.u.t.tons 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 pa.s.sed. 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 pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.e 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 gla.s.s b.u.t.tons 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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.sumed 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 compa.s.sion. 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.p.a.cious 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.