The White Terror and The Red Part 18

"Pasha, you are the man I saw on the bridge," she said. "You are a Nihilist."

"Sh-h, don't be agitated, mother dear, I beg of you," he replied with tender emphasis. "I am going to tell you all. Only first compose yourself, mamma darling, and hear me out. Yes, I'm what you call a Nihilist, but I am not the man you saw."

"You a Nihilist, Pasha!" she whispered, staring at him, as though a great physical change had suddenly come over him. "Anyhow, you have nothing to do with the man they have arrested?"

He shook his head and she felt relieved. His avowal of being a Nihilist was so startling a confession to make, that she believed all he said. He was a Nihilist, then--a Nihilist in the abstract; something shocking, no doubt, but remote, indefinite, vague. The concrete Nihilism contained in the picture of a man disguised as a laborer and having some thing to do with the fellow under arrest--that would have been quite another matter.

He told her the story of his conversion in simple, heart-felt eloquence; he pictured the reign of police terror, the slow ma.s.sacre of school-children in the political dungeons, the brutal fleecing and maltreatment of a starving peasantry.

"I found myself in a new world, mother," he said. "It was a world in which the children of refined, well-bred families fervently believed that he who did not work for the good of the common people was not a man of real honour. Indeed, of what use has the n.o.bility been to the world?

They are a lot of idlers, _mamman_, a lot of good-for-nothings. For centuries we have been living on the fat of the earth, luxuriating in the toil, misery and ignorance of the peasants. It is to their drudgery and squalor that we owe our material and mental well-being. We ought to feel ashamed for living at the expense of these degraded, literally starving creatures; yet we go on living off their wretchedness and even pride ourselves upon doing so. Let us repay our debt to them by working for their real emanc.i.p.ation. We have grown fat on serfdom, so we must give our blood to undo it, to bring about the reign of liberty. This is the sum and substance of our creed, mother. This is the faith that has taken hold of me. It is my religion and will be as long as I live."

In his entire experience as a revolutionary speaker he had never felt as he did at the present moment.

A host of sparrows burst into song and activity, all together, as though at the stroke of a conductor's baton; and at this it seemed as if the flood of perfume had taken a spurt and the sunlight had begun to smile and speak. He went on in the same strain, and she listened as she would to a magic tale that had no bearing upon the personality of her son. His voice, sharp and irascible as it often sounded, was yet melodious in its undercurrent tone of filial devotion. The vital point, indeed, was that at last he was uncovering his soul to her. She was not shocked by what she heard. Rather, she was proud of his readiness to sacrifice himself for an ideal, and what is more, she felt that his world lured her heart also.

"But the Emperor is a n.o.ble soul, Pasha," she said. "He has emanc.i.p.ated the serfs. If there ever was a friend of the common people the present Czar is one."

Her objections found him ready. He had gone over these questions hundreds of times before, and he gave her the benefit of all his former discussions and reading. At times he would borrow a point or two from Zachar's speeches. Touching upon the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs, he contended that Alexander II. had been forced to the measure by the disastrous results of the Crimean War; and that the peasants, having been defrauded of their land, were now worse off than ever.

"Oh, mother," he suddenly exclaimed, "whenever you think of the abolition of serfdom think also of the row of gallows he had erected about that very time for n.o.ble-minded Polish patriots. Do you remember Mme. Oginska, that unfortunate Polish woman we met at the health-resort?

Gallows, gallows, nothing but gallows in his reign."

When she referred to the late war "in behalf of the oppressed Slavonic races of the Balkans," Pavel asked her why the Czar had not first thought of his own oppressed Russians, and whether it was not hypocrisy to send one's slaves to die for somebody else's freedom. The Emperor had secured a const.i.tution for Bulgaria, had he? Why, then, was he hanging those who were striving for one in his own land? A war of emanc.i.p.ation indeed! It was the old Romanoff greed for territory, for conquest, for bloodshed.

He literally bore her down by a gush of arguments, facts, images. Now and again he would pause, sit looking at the gra.s.s in grim silence, and then, burst into another torrent of oratory. It was said of Zachar that a single speech of his was enough to make a convert of the most hopeless conservative. Pavel was far from possessing any such powers of pleading eloquence, when his audience was made up of strangers, but he certainly scored a similar victory by the appeal which he was now addressing to his mother.

He went to order coffee. When he returned, reveille was sounding in the barracks.

"There you have it!" he said. "Do you know what that sound means? It means that the youngest, the best forces of the country are turned into weapons of human butchery."

The bra.s.s notes continued, somewhat cracked at times, but loud and vibrant with imperious solemnity.

"It means, too, that people are forced to keep themselves in chains at the point of their own bayonets," he added.

The next few days were spent by the countess in reading "underground"

literature. She was devouring paper after paper and pamphlet after pamphlet with tremulous absorption. The little pile before her included scientific treatises, poetry and articles of a polemical nature, and she read it all; but she was chiefly interested in the hair-breadth escapes, pluck and martyrdom of the revolutionists. The effect this reading had on her was something like the thrilling experience she had gone through many years ago when she was engrossed in the Lives of Saints.

"It makes one feel twenty years younger," she said to Pavel, bashfully, as she laid down a revolutionary print and took the gla.s.ses off her tired eyes one forenoon.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PAVEL AT BOYKO'S COURT.

Clara was introduced to Mme. Shubeyko, the warden's sister-in-law, and to her niece, the gendarme officer's sister. At first communication with Makar was held by means of notes concealed in cigarettes and carried to and fro by one of the warders, who received half a ruble per errand; but Clara was soon installed in the warden's house. Once or twice Pavel spoke with Makar directly, by means of handkerchief signals based on the same code as the telegraph language which political prisoners rap out to each other through their cell walls. These signals Pavel sent from the top of a hill across the river from Makar's cell window. To allay suspicion he would wave his handkerchief toward Masha or Clara, who stood for the purpose on a neighbouring hill, giving the whole proceeding the appearance of a flirtation. As to Makar, his cell was in an isolated part of the prison, facing the outer wall. Still, this mode of communication was exasperatingly slow and attended by some risks after all, and Pavel had recourse to it only in case of extreme necessity, although to the prisoner it was a welcome diversion.

One day, when Clara, Masha and Pavel were together, he said to the gendarme officer's sister, with mystifying gaiety:

"Well, have you discovered the heroine of the Pievakin demonstration?"

He regretted the question before it had left his lips. Clara was annoyed.

"No, why?" Masha asked, looking from him to her.

"I have the honour to introduce--" he said, colouring. For some reason Masha did not seem to be agreeably impressed by the announcement, and Clara did not fail to notice it.

As it was rather inconvenient for the son of Countess Varoff to be seen at the house of a major of gendarmes, Clara was to report to him at the residence of her parents. In the depth of the markets and the Jewish quarter his ident.i.ty was unlikely to be known. Clara had lived at the warden's house about a fortnight when Pavel's first visit at the trunk shop took place. She offered him a rude chair in the small s.p.a.ce between the part.i.tion of her bed-room and the window by the wall that was lined with the worn folios of her father's meagre library. The room was pervaded by odours of freshly planed wood, putty and rusty tin which the breath of spring seemed to intensify rather than to abate.

Motl, Hannah's sole employe, was hammering away at his bindings and courting attention by all sorts of vocal quirks and trills. During the Days of Awe, the solemn festivals of autumn, he sang in a synagogue choir; so he never ceased a.s.serting his musical talents. As Clara's visitor took no heed of his flourishes he proceeded to imitate domestic animals, church bells, a street organ playing a selection from Il Trovatore, and a portly captain drilling his men, but all to no purpose.

As the noise he was making was a good cover for their talk, she did not stop him. At any rate, Motl scarcely understood any Russian.

"I have only seen him at a distance," Clara said, meaning the prisoner.

"But I know that he eats and sleeps well, and looks comfortable."

"He would look comfortable if you tied him up in a sack. Is he still 'dumb'?"

She portrayed the warden's bed-ridden and voiceless wife who suffered from a disease of the spinal and vocal chords, and the disorder at his house and in the prison. She had always wondered at the frequent cases of political gaol-breaking, but if every gaol were conducted as this one was the number would be much larger, she thought. That vodka was quite openly sold and bought in every common gaol in the empire was no news to her, but this was a trifle compared to what she had heard of Rodkevich's administration. One of his gaolers had told her of imprisoned thieves whom he would give leave of absence in order that he might confiscate part of their booty when they came back.

"Yes, I think he is a man who would go into any kind of scheme that offered money, or--excitement," she said, gravely; and she added with a smile: "He might even become a man of principle if there were money in it."

"He won't give 'a political' 'leave of absence,' though, will he?" Pavel joked. "Still, upon the whole, it looks rather encouraging."

"I think it does."

"Do you?" And his eyes implored her for a more enthusiastic prediction of success.

"Indeed I do," she answered soberly. "But whether I do or not, we must go to work and get him out."

"This damsel is certainly not without backbone," he said to himself.

He had familiarised himself with the details in the case of almost every revolutionist who had escaped or attempted to escape from prison. Some of these had made their way through an underground pa.s.sage; others had pa.s.sed the gateman in the disguise of a soldier or policeman; still others had been wrenched from their convoy, while being taken to the gendarme office or a photograph gallery. Prince Kropotkin had simply made a desperate break for liberty while the gates of the prison hospital in which he was confined stood open, a cab outside bearing him off to a place of safety. Another political prisoner regained his freedom by knocking down a sentinel with bra.s.s knuckles, while still another, who was awaiting death in Odessa, would have made his escape by means of planks laid from his cell window to the top of the prison fence, had not these planks proved to be too flimsy. In one place an imprisoned army officer slipped away under cover of a flirtation in which a girl prisoner had engaged the warden. A revolutionist named Myshkin had tried to liberate Chernishevsky, the celebrated critic, by appearing at the place of his banishment, in far-away Siberia, in the guise of a gendarme officer with an order for the distinguished exile, and a similar scheme had been tried on the warden of a prison in European Russia. Both these attempts had failed, but then in the case in hand there was the hope of Rodkevich, the warden, acting as a willing victim. Pavel said he would impersonate one of the gendarmes.

"Some of the gaolers may know you," Mlle. Yavner objected.

"That's quite unlikely, I was away so long. Besides, the thing would have to be done in the evening anyhow. I must be on hand. It will be necessary."

"You might be recognised after all," she insisted, shyly.

Another project was to have a rope thrown over the prison fence, in a secluded corner of the yard. This was to be done at a signal from within, while Makar was out for exercise, in the charge of a bribed guard. The guard was to raise an alarm when it was too late, telling how his prisoner knocked him down and was hoisted out of sight. Or Makar might be smuggled out in a barrel on some provision waggon, the prescribed examination of the vehicle being performed by a friendly gaoler. Whatever plan they took up, Pavel insisted on playing the leading part in it. He was for taking Makar away in a closed carriage, if need be under cover of pistol shots. Clara urged that in the event the equipage had to wait for some time, its presence about the prison was sure to arouse dangerous curiosity. Altogether she was in favour of a quiet and simple proceeding. Safonoff's house was within easy distance from the prison, so if Masha could undertake to keep her brother away from home, Clara would prefer to have Makar walk quietly to that place, as a first resort, thence to be taken, thoroughly disguised, to the "conspiracy house" of the Circle. But Pavel picked the proposition to pieces.

Since her initiation into the warden's house Clara had been in a peculiarly elevated state of mind, her whole attention being absorbed in her mission in which she took great pride. This uplifted mood of hers she strove to suppress, and the clear-headed, matter-of-fact way in which she faced the grave dangers of her task animated Pavel with a feeling of intimate comradeship as well as admiration.

As they now sat in the cleanest and brightest corner of the trunk shop he was vaguely sensible of a change in her appearance. Then he noticed that instead of the dark woolen dress she had worn at the time of their previous meetings she had on a fresh blouse of a light-coloured fabric.

To be seen in a new colour is in itself becoming to a woman, but this blouse of Clara's was evidently a tribute to spring. Her face seemed to be suffused with the freshness of the month.