The White Terror and The Red Part 31

"I know they are," the Czar answered musingly.

"And the great point is, that with the intelligent cla.s.ses actively interested in the preservation of law and order, criminal societies of any sort would find themselves without any ground to stand upon."

The Czar had another cough, and then he said, flushing:

"There is a simpler way to leave them without ground to stand upon, surgical operations or no surgical operations. Call it what you will.

There is no sense in pampering them, Melikoff. Why, in western Europe they execute common murderers. As to a gang of a.s.sa.s.sins like that, death would be regarded a mild punishment." He lighted a cigarette, but forthwith extinguished it and went on with emphasis: "We handle them with kid gloves, Melikoff. That's why they take chances."

He spoke with subdued anger, citing the republican uprising led by aristocratic army officers in 1825, which his father (the man whose portrait was on the right wall) quelled by means of field guns.

Loris-Melikoff demurred to the comparison, tactfully hinting that there would be no betrayal of weakness in inviting the public to partic.i.p.ate in the extermination of crime by showing it signs of increased imperial confidence, and the Czar softened again. He felt that the Armenian knew how to save him and he willingly submitted to his and Princess Dolgoruki's influence. But Fate was bent on tragedy.

Alexander II. lacked anything but courage. Still, this continuous living under fire had gradually unnerved him. The soldier on the battlefield finds moral support in the presence of thousands of comrades, all facing the same fate as he; whereas he was like a lone man on top of a dynamite pile. And if his perils were shared by those about him, this only added the agonising consciousness that his person carried the shadow of destruction with it, endangering the life of every living being that came near him. He knew, for example, that when he was at the theatre candles were kept ready, in case the lights were blown out by an explosion; that many people stayed away from the playhouse on such occasions for fear of being destroyed along with their sovereign. His pride would not let him feel low-spirited. He very often forced himself to disdain caution, to act with reckless courage. Nevertheless he had a dreary, jaded look. The notion that he, the most powerful of men, the image of grandeur and human omnipotence, should tremble at every sound, wounded his common human pride acutely. The consequence was that this mightiest monarch in the world, the gigantic man of sixty-two, every bit of him an Emperor, was at heart a terror-stricken infant mutely imploring for help. He continued to appear in the streets of the capital, accompanied by his usual escort and to return the salutes of pa.s.sers-by with his usual air of majestic ease. Now and then he went to the theatre, and occasionally even beyond the scenes for a flirtation with the actresses. But the public knew that besides his large uniformed escort, his carriage was watched by hordes of detectives in citizen's clothes, and that every inch of the ground which he was to traverse was all but turned inside out for possible signs of danger. And those who were admitted to his presence knew that underneath his grand, free-and-easy bearing was a sick heart and a crushed spirit. That the enemy was an unknown quant.i.ty was one of the sources of his growing disquiet. The organised movement might be very large and it might be ridiculously small, but with a latent half-Nihilist in the heart of every subject. He was beginning to realise at last that he knew his people scarcely better than he did the French or the English. He was anxious to make peace with that invisible enemy of his, provided it did not look as if he did.

He was willing to be deceived, and Loris-Melikoff was about to help him deceive himself. But destiny was against them both. He was an honest man, Loris-Melikoff, serious-minded, public-spirited, one of the few able statesmen Russia ever had; but his path was strewn with thorns.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

THE MYSTERY OF A SHOP.

A tall man with a reddish beard called at one of the police stations of the capital about a cheese store which he was going to open on Little Garden Street. He gave his name as Koboseff. When he had gone the Captain of the station said to one of his roundsmen:

"That fellow doesn't talk like a tradesman. I asked him a few questions, and his answers were rather too polished for a cheese dealer." And taking up his pen, he added, with a preoccupied air, "Keep an eye on him, will you?"

Little Garden Street was part of a route which the Emperor often took on his way to or from his niece's residence, the Michal Palace, and received the special attention of the police.

The roundsman spoke to the agent of the house where Koboseff had rented a bas.e.m.e.nt for his projected shop and dwelling room; whereupon the agent recalled that cheesemonger's handwriting had struck him as being too good for a man of his cla.s.s. Inquiry at the town at which Koboseff's pa.s.sport was dated brought the information that a doc.u.ment corresponding in every detail to the one in question had actually been issued by the local authorities. Koboseff was thus no invented name, and as the description in the pa.s.sport agreed with the appearance of the man who had rented the bas.e.m.e.nt, the St. Petersburg police saw no ground for further suspicion.

The cheese shop was opened in the early part of January, Koboseff having moved in with a fair-complexioned woman whom he introduced as his wife.

Some three or four weeks later the head porter of the house notified the police that Koboseff had boasted of the flourishing state of his business, whereas in reality his shop attracted but very scant custom.

At the same time it was pointed out that there was a well-established and prosperous cheese store close by, that the bas.e.m.e.nt occupied by the Koboseffs was scarcely the place one would naturally select for the purpose, and that the rent was strikingly too high for the amount of business Koboseff could expect to do there. To cap the climax, there was some lively gossip among the neighbours about Mme. Koboseff, who had been seen smoking cigarettes--a habit quite unusual for a woman of the lower cla.s.ses--and who often stayed out all night.

"Koboseff" was Uric Bogdanovich, Pavel's "G.o.dfather," and "Mme.

Koboseff" was Baska, formerly "housewife" of the dynamite shop and a year previous to that in charge of a house in the south near which Zachar and others attempted to blow up an imperial train.

The cheese shop was often visited by Zachar, Purring Cat, the reticent stalwart man with the Tartarian features, Pavel and other revolutionists. The police kept close watch on the place, but, according to all reports, no suspicious persons were ever seen to enter it. Upon the whole the Koboseffs seemed to be real tradesmen, and as the information concerning their pa.s.sport was satisfactory, they were not disturbed. A slim little man named Kurilloff who had played the part of errand boy at the cheese shop had been arrested, but his detention had nothing to do with the Koboseffs, and the police of Little Garden Street had no idea of the arrest, while the officers who had made it were unaware of the prisoner's connection with a suspicious shop.

"If I were you I'd make missus behave," the head porter of the house once said to Koboseff, speaking of his "wife."

"Right you are," the cheesemonger replied. "Only my old woman is a tough customer to handle, you know. I do tell her she had better mind the house and ought to be ashamed of herself to smoke cigarettes, but she doesn't care a rap, not she."

"I would teach her if she was _my_ wife."

The cheesemonger made a gesture of despair, and the porter said to himself that there was nothing suspicious about him; that he was simply a fellow without backbone and a fool, qualities which seemed to account for Koboseff's incompetence as a business man.

"Well, Clanya," Pavel said to Mlle. Yavner, lazily addressing her in the diminutive of his own coining. "I am afraid I shall have to exile you for some time."

"Exile me?" she asked absently without lifting her eyes from a heap of type she was sorting and putting up in packages. She sat across the table from the sofa upon which he was cuddling himself drowsily as a cat does before a fireside.

"Yes, that's what I'll have to do--pack you off, put you in a box, nail you up tight, stick a label on it and ship you somewhere. 'To places not so very distant,'" he added, mocking the official phrase used in transporting people to eastern Siberia.

She raised her eyes from her work, her fingers stiff and black with lead dust. "What are you driving at, Pasha? Anything up? Or is it merely one of those jokes under which one must write in big letters: 'This is a joke?'"

"Is _that_ a joke?" he asked, and burst into laughter.

She resumed her work. The type she was sorting was intended for a revolutionary printing office, having been sent to St. Petersburg by Masha Safonoff, who had bought it of the foreman of the government's printing office in Miroslav.

"Oh, to all the diabolical devils with that type of yours, Clanya. Can't you sit down by a fellow's side for a minute or two?"

She got up, washed her hands and complied with his wish. As she played with his hand she noticed the trace of blisters on his palm. Her face darkened; but she asked no questions. After a little she demanded: "What did you mean by 'exiling' me?"

"Oh dash it all, Clanya. It's something serious. I'll tell it to you some other time. I'm too lazy to be serious." He would have preferred to be sprawling like this with her hands in his; luxuriating in the gleam of her intelligent blue eyes and in the feminine atmosphere of her person; but his excuse that it was "too serious" only sharpened her determination to know what it was without delay.

"What is it, Pasha?"

"There you are," he said peevishly. "One can't have a minute's rest from business, not a minute's rest."

"Why did you hasten to speak of 'exiling' me, then?" she retorted tartly. "Why didn't you keep it to yourself until you were again in a mood for 'business'?"

He had not kept it to himself simply because it was not easy for him to keep anything from her. He was more apt to fly into a temper with her than she with him, but in their mutual relations she was the stronger vessel of the two and, in an imperceptible, unformulated way, he was considerably under her thumb. When he heard or saw something new, received some new impression, his first impulse was to share it with her. If an opinion was formed in his mind he wondered, sometimes timidly, whether she would concur with it. Timidly, because in many instances, when he came bubbling over with enthusiasm over some scheme of his own, she had cruelly dampened his fervour by merely extricating the vital point of his argument from a surrounding tangle of roseate phraseology. His great intellectual feast was to be in her room, discussing theories, books, people with her. These discussions, which sometimes lasted for hours, often called forth a snappish, bitter tone on both sides, but they were at once an expression and a fostering agency of that spiritual unity which was one of the chief sources of their happiness in one another.

"Well, there is very little to tell about," he said at last. "Something is under way, and it has been decided to notify all illegals not in it to vacate St. Petersburg until it's all over."

The lines of her fresh-tinted face hardened into an expression of extreme gravity and her fingers grew limp in his grasp. She withdrew them.

"Look at her!" he squeaked in a burst of merriment.

"There is nothing to look at. I am not going." She dropped her glance.

She divined that his blisters had something to do with the digging of a mine in which he took part.

"Is it all settled?"

"Oh, Pasha! Your jesting is so out of place," she returned sullenly. "I am not going."

"But the air is getting hot in St. Petersburg. Whew! The police are suspicious, of course; they won't leave a stone unturned."

He took hold of her tender girlish hand, but she withdrew it again, with a gesture of impatience.

"There will be something to do for you too later on," he comforted her, guiltily. "It's going to be a big thing, the biggest of all. You'll come back in a month or so."

She made no answer.

The two intersecting streets outside reeked and creaked and glittered with the crispness of a typical St. Petersburg frost. It was about ten in the morning, in the early part of January. The little parlour was delightfully warm, with a dim consciousness of sleigh-furs, hack drivers in absurd winter caps, pedestrians huddling themselves and wriggling and grunting for an effeminating background to one's sense of shelter. The even heat of the white glazed oven seemed to be gleaming and stirring over the surface of the tiles like something animate, giving them an effect of creamy mellowness that went to one's heart together with the delicious warmth they radiated. Ever and anon a sleigh bell would tinkle past and sink into Pavel's mood. There was a rhythm to the warm stillness of the room. But Clara's silence tormented him.