The White Terror and The Red Part 32

"We'll discuss it later on, Clanya. I'm too tired now. My brain won't work. Let us play school," he pleaded fawningly, in burlesque Russian, mimicking the accent of the Czech who taught Latin at the Miroslav gymnasium.

"Stop that, pray."

He made a sorry effort to obey her, and finally she yielded, with a smile and a Jewish shrug. He played a gymnasium teacher and she a pupil.

He made her conjugate his name as she would a verb; made puns on Clanya, which is an unfinished Russian word meaning to bow, to greet, to convey one's regards; mocked and laughed at her enunciation till his eyes watered. Gradually he drifted into an impersonation of old Pievakin and flew into a pa.s.sion because her hearty laughter marred the illusion of the performance.

"You do need rest, poor thing," she said, looking at his haggard, worn face.

"Well, another few weeks and we shall be able to get all the rest we want, if not in a cell, or in a quieter place still, in some foreign resort, perhaps. I really feel confident we are going to win this time."

"It's about time the party did."

"It will this time, you may be sure of it. And then--by George, the very sky will feel hot. Everything seems ready for a general uprising. All that is needed is the signal. I can see the barricades going up in the streets." He gnashed his teeth and shook her by the shoulders exultantly. "Yes, ma'am. And then, Clanya, why, then we won't have to go abroad for our vacation. One will be able to breathe in Russia then.

Won't we give ourselves a spree, eh? But whether here or abroad, I must take you for a rest somewhere. Will you marry your love-lorn Pashka then? I dare you to say no."

"But I don't want to say no," she answered radiantly.

They went to dinner together and then they parted. As they shook hands he peered into her face with a rush of tenderness, as though trying to inhale as deep an impression of her as possible in case either of them was arrested before they met again. And, indeed, there was quite an eventful day in store for her.

One of the persons she was to see later in the afternoon was a man with a Greek name. As she approached the house in which he had his lodgings, she recognised in the gas-lit distance the high forehead and the boyish face of Sophia, the ex-Governor's daughter. Sophia, or Sonia, as she was fondly called, was bearing down upon her at a brisk, preoccupied walk.

As she swept past Clara, without greeting her, she whispered:

"A trap."

The lodging of the man with the queer name had been raided, then, and was now held by officers in the hope of ensnaring some of his friends.

Clara had been at the place several times and she was afraid that the porter of the house, in case he stood at his post in the gateway at this minute, might recognise her.

The dim opening of the gate loomed as a sickly quadrangular hole exhaling nightmare and ruin. Turning sharply back, however, might have attracted notice; so Clara entered the first gate on her way, four or five houses this side of her destination, and when she reappeared a minute or two later, she took the opposite direction. As she turned the next corner she found herself abreast of a man she had noticed in the streets before. He was fixed in her mind by his height and carriage.

Extremely tall and narrow-shouldered, he walked like a man with a sore neck, swinging one of his long arms to and fro as he moved stiffly along. The look he gave her made a very unpleasant impression on her. He let her gain on him a little and then she heard his soft rubber-shod footsteps behind her.

It is a terrible experience, this sense of being dogged as you walk along. It is tantalising enough when your desire to take a look at the man at your heels is only a matter of curiosity which for some reason or other you cannot gratify. Imagine, then, the mental condition of an "illegal" shadowed by a spy or by a man he suspects of being one. He tingles with a desire to quicken pace, yet he must walk on with the same even, calm step; every minute or two he is seized with an impulse to turn on the fellow behind him, yet he must not show the least sign of consciousness as to his existence. It is the highest form of torture, yet it was the daily experience of every active man or woman of the secret organisation; for if the political detectives were spying upon pedestrians right and left, the revolutionists, on their part, were apt to be suspicious with equal promiscuity. Small wonder that some of them, upon being arrested, hailed their prison cell as a welcome place of rest, as a relief from the enervating strain of liberty under the harrowing conditions of underground life. As a matter of fact this wholesale shadowing seldom results in the arrest of a revolutionist.

Thousands of innocent people were snuffed to one Nihilist, and the Nihilists profited by the triviality of suspicion. Most arrests were the result of accident.

At the corner of the next large thoroughfare she paused and looked up the street for a tram-car. While doing so Clara glanced around her. The tall man had disappeared. A tram-car came along shortly and she was about to board it when she heard Sonia's voice once more.

"You're being shadowed. Follow me."

Sonia entered a crowded sausage shop, and led the way to the far end of it in the rear of an impatient throng. Pending her turn to be waited on, she took off her broad-brimmed hat, asking Clara to hold it for her, while she adjusted her hair.

"Put it on, and let me have your fur cap," she gestured.

The homely broad-brimmed hat transformed Clara's appearance considerably. It made her look shorter and her face seemed larger and older.

"I saw a tall fellow turn you over to one with a ruddy mug. The red man is waiting for you outside now, but I don't think he had a good look at your face. There is a back door over there."

Clara regained the street through the yard, and sure enough, a man with a florid face was leisurely smoking a cigarette at the gate post. He only gave her a superficial glance and went on watching the street door of the shop. She took a public sleigh, ordered the driver to take her to the Liteyny Bridge, changed her destination in the middle of the journey, and soon after she got off she took another sleigh for quite another section of the city. In short, she was "circling," and when she thought her trail completely "swept away," she went home on foot.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

A REa.s.sURING SEARCH.

The capture of the man with the Greek name proved disastrous to the Executive Committee. It was the first link in a chain of most important arrests. The trap set at his house caught the very tall man with the Tartarian features; this led to the arrest of Purring Cat, and the residence of Purring Cat, in its turn, ensnared a pretentiously dressed man, in whom the superior gendarme officers were amazed to find their own trusted secretary, the man whom Makar knew as "the Dandy." Makar's arrest at Miroslav had tended to strengthen the Dandy's position somewhat, but now that he was in the hands of the enemy himself, it seemed as if the medical student's sweeping system of "counter-espionage" had burst like a bubble. Makar was in despair. He spoke of new plans, of new sacrifices, until Zachar silenced him.

"All in due time, my dear romanticist," he said to him. "A month or two later I shall be delighted to be entertained with the fruit of your rich fancy; not now, my boy."

The four arrests were a severe blow to the undertaking of which Zachar had been placed in charge. He was overworked, dejected, yet thrilling with nervous activity. But his own days were numbered. An air of impending doom hung over the Czar and his "internal enemies" alike.

Good fortune seemed to attend the state police. While the gendarmes of the capital were celebrating their unexpected haul an intellectual looking man was locked up in a frontier town as a "vagrant," that is, as a man without a pa.s.sport, who subsequently proved to be one of the active Terrorists the detectives had long been looking for. He was the "grave bard," one of the twin poets of the party. Shortly after his arrest the Russian government received word from the police of the German capital that a prominent Russian Nihilist known among his friends as "My Lord," a sobriquet due to his elegance of personal appearance and address, had spent some time in Berlin and was now on his way to St.

Petersburg. A German detective followed the man to the frontier and then, shadowed by Russian spies, he was tracked to a house on the Neva Prospect, the leading street of St. Petersburg. There it was decided to arrest him Friday, March 23.

A little after 4 o'clock of that day Zachar and the ex-Governor's daughter left their home, where they were registered as brother and sister, and took a sleigh, alighting in front of the Public Library, in the very heart of the city. Instead of entering the library, however, which the sleigh-driver thought to be their destination, they parted, continuing their several journeys on foot.

It was an extremely cold afternoon. The beards of pedestrians and sleigh-drivers and the manes of horses were glued with frost; their breath came in short painful puffs. It was getting dark. The sky was a spotless, almost a warm blue. To look at it you would have wondered where this sharp, all-benumbing cold came from. There was an air of insincerity about the crimson clearness of the afternoon light.

Zachar wore a tall cap of Persian lamb, flattened at the top, and a tight-fitting fur coat. He walked briskly, his chest thrown out, his full pointed beard h.o.a.ry with frost, his cheeks red with the biting cold.

Presently he found himself shadowed by a man in civilian clothes whom he knew to be a gendarme in disguise. It was evident, however, that the spy was following him merely as a suspicious person without having any idea what sort of man his quarry was, and Zachar, with whom a hunt of this kind was a daily occurrence, had no difficulty in "thrashing his trail."

He was bound for the cheese shop on Little Garden Street. This was within a short walk from the Public Library, yet on this occasion it took him an hour's "circling" to reach the place.

About ten minutes after Zachar entered the cheesemonger's bas.e.m.e.nt, the head porter of the house met two police officers round the corner. One of them was the captain of the precinct and the other, one of his roundsmen. The Czar was expected to pa.s.s through this street in two days, so one could not be too watchful over a suspicious place like this.

"There is somebody down there now," the head porter said to the captain, with servile eagerness. "A big fellow with a long pointed beard. I have seen him go down several times before. He looks like a business man, but before he started to go down he stopped to look round."

This stopping to look round was, according to a printed police circular, one of the symptoms of Nihilism, so the roundsman was ordered to watch until the suspicious man should re-emerge from the cheese shop.

When the captain had gone the roundsman brushed out his icicled moustache with his finger nails, and said with an air of authority:

"Well, you take your post at the gate and I'll just go and change my uniform for citizen's clothes in case it's necessary to see where that fellow is going. Keep a sharp lookout on that cursed bas.e.m.e.nt until I get back, will you?"

When he returned, in citizen's clothes, he found that the suspicious man had left the store and that the head porter had set out after him, leaving his a.s.sistant in his place.

"There is another man down there now," the a.s.sistant porter whispered.

Presently the new visitor came out of the bas.e.m.e.nt. As he mounted the few steps and then crossed over, through the snow, to a sleigh standing near by, he kept mopping his face with a handkerchief, thus preventing the two spies from getting a look at his features. Seeing that he boarded a hackney-sleigh, the roundsman did the same, ordering the driver to follow along as closely as possible, but at this he lost time in persuading the hackman that he was a policeman in disguise. The two sleighs were flying through the snow as fast as their horses could run.

The policeman was far in the rear. For some ten minutes his eyes were riveted to the suspicious man. Presently, however, the vehicle he was shadowing turned a corner, and by the time he reached that point it was gone. All sorts of sleighs, their bells jingling, were gliding along in every direction, but the one he wanted was not among them.

The head porter, who had started after the first man, in the absence of the roundsman, had met with a similar defeat. After awhile the hackman who had driven the second suspicious man returned to his stand. In answer to inquiry he told how his fare had twice changed his destination, finally alighted on a street corner, and turned into a narrow alley.

Meanwhile Zachar had called on My Lord. It was about seven o'clock. The two revolutionists sat chatting in a cheerful gas-lit room, when the host was called out into the corridor. As he was long in coming back, Zachar went to the door, prepared for the worst. He found the corridor full of gendarmes and police. It was evident that they had fought shy of raiding My Lord's apartments for fear of violence, and had been patiently waiting until his visitor should come out of his own accord.

Several of the gendarmes made a dash at Zachar, seizing him by both arms. One of these was the spy from whom he had "circled" away near the Public Library, soon after he had taken leave from the ex-Governor's daughter three hours ago. Zachar's presence here was a surprise to this gendarme, but the full importance of the man was still unknown to him.

The officer in command, however, knew who his prisoner was.

"What is your name?" he addressed himself to Zachar, with the exaltation of a man come upon a precious find. He knew but too well how anxious the government was to capture him, but he had come here to arrest My Lord without the remotest idea of finding this revolutionary giant in the place.

"Krasnoff," Zachar answered with dignity, in his deep-chested voice.