The White Terror and The Red Part 35

When his sleigh reached the Neva Prospect, he saw the new Czar, surrounded by a cohort of officers in dazzling uniform, pa.s.sing along the thoroughfare. The crowds were greeting him with wild cheers. They cheered their own emotions at sight of the man whose father had come to so tragic a death, and they cheered their own servility to the master of the situation.

These shouts filled Pavel with a mixed sense of defeat and triumph. The gloomier feeling predominated. The world looked as usual. It did not look as if this cheering, servile, stolid mob would ever rise against anything.

That evening placards bearing the name of the Executive Committee appeared on the walls of public buildings. They announced the death of Alexander II. and admonished his successor to adopt a liberal policy.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

THE REVELATION.

Every resident in the capital was being scanned and spied after, and every house-porter was kept peeking and seeking and reporting at the police station of his precinct. The railway stations were teeming with spies and a system was introduced by which every hack-driver was expected to spy on his fare. The effect of it all was that the great majority of St. Petersburg's population was in a state of unspeakable terror. Curiosity, pity and everything else had given way to a nervous feeling of self-preservation. People walked through the streets hastily.

The sight of a policeman was enough to send a twinge of fright into the heart of the most loyal government clerk; everybody was afraid of everybody else. One avoided to utter such words as "Czar," "police,"

"government." As to the Nihilists, one literally dreaded to think of them. People who had never had a liberal thought in their brain were tremulous with distrust of their own souls.

And through all this all-pervading panic Clara was busy posting revolutionary proclamations in the streets, distributing tracts among students and working-people, keeping "business" appointments with her "illegal" friends. Pavel, in his turn, had all he could do to attend to the needs of some of the out-of-town "circles." The revolutionists throughout the country were clamouring for information, for proclamations, for speakers; so that the seventy or eighty men and women who formed the innermost organisation were as feverishly busy in their way as the police and the gendarmes were in theirs.

The authorities were ransacking the capital for Nihilists in general and for the cheesemonger couple in particular, but during the first few hours following the two explosions their eagerness was centered on the man who had thrown the fatal bomb. The search for that man soon proved superfluous, however.

The civilian who was picked up unconscious near where the Czar was stricken down had been taken to a hospital. Late in the evening he had a brief interval of consciousness.

"Who are you?" an officer then asked him.

"I don't know," he answered. He had a relapse from which he never awoke.

The front of his body, particularly the inner side of one arm, was covered with ghastly wounds, from which experts inferred that at the time of the explosion he could not have stood more than three feet from the Czar. This, according to some eye-witnesses of the catastrophe, was the distance between the deceased monarch and the man who threw the second bomb. After two days of searching and sniffing the police discovered the unknown man's lodging, where they found some revolutionary literature and other evidence that pointed to him as the author of the fatal explosion. He had stood so close to the Czar that it was impossible for him to make a target of his victim without making one of himself. His real name still remained unknown.

As to the first bomb-thrower, he proved to be a college student named Rysakoff. In the hands of the gendarme officers and the procureur he broke down and told all he knew; but it appeared that he knew very little. He had been one of a number of volunteers who offered to attack the Emperor under the command of Zachar. When Zachar's arrest became known to the Executive Committee things had begun to be rushed. Sophia Perovskaya, the ex-governor's daughter, had taken his place, and it was decided to make the a.s.sault without delay. Zachar had been arrested on Friday evening. As it was known to Sophia that the Czar would visit the Riding Schools on the next Sunday, the attempt was fixed for that occasion. The Terrorists immediately connected with the plot held their gatherings at a "conspiracy lodgings" kept by a man and woman Rysakoff did not know. There the volunteers met Sophia and one of the inventors of the self-igniting sh.e.l.l (the man with the priestly face whom we saw at the meeting of the Executive Committee at which Clara's wedding was to be celebrated). On Sunday morning (the day of the a.s.sa.s.sination) the volunteers--three college men and an artisan--called at the same gathering place. They found two finished bombs there and soon Sophia arrived with two more. Where the bomb factory was Rysakoff did not know.

Sophia explained that it took a whole night to make the four portable machines and that more than four volunteers could not be accommodated.

She then drew a rough map of the Czar's expected route, with four dots for the posts of the four bomb-throwers. There were two sets of dots on the diagram. In case the Czar failed to include Little Garden Street in his route, the Terrorists were to shift their positions to Catharine Ca.n.a.l and two neighbouring streets.

That afternoon, as Rysakoff stood on his post near Little Garden Street, Sophia pa.s.sed by him, her handkerchief to her nose (the same sort of signal which the same young woman had given a year and a half before to the man who fired the mine which blew up the imperial train near Moscow). That meant that the Czar was not pa.s.sing through Little Garden Street. Accordingly, Rysakoff hastened over to Catherine Ca.n.a.l. There, after he had thrown the bomb and while the Czar was speaking to him, he saw the three other volunteers each on his post.

The second bomb-thrower was known to Rysakoff under the name of "the Kitten." His real name he did not know.

He also gave the police the address of the "conspiracy lodgings," which were located on the sixth floor of a house on Waggon Street, and an hour or two later, at midnight, two days after the killing of the Czar, the procureur, accompanied by gendarmes and police, knocked at one of the doors of that apartment.

"Who is there?" a masculine voice asked from within.

"Police and the procureur."

"What do you want?"

"Open the door at once or we'll break it down."

While they were raining blows on the door, a succession of pistol shots was heard within. Another door flew open, at the end of the corridor, and a woman made her appearance.

"We surrender," she said. "Pray send for a doctor. Look out, don't pa.s.s through this door. There are explosives there."

Inside they found the fresh corpse of a man lying in a pool of blood. It was the gay poet; and the woman was Hessia Helfman, the dark little Jewess with the frizzled hair who was married to Purring Cat. It was she and the man now lying dead from his own pistol shots who had been in charge of this "conspiracy lodgings." Among the things found in the apartment were the two bombs which had been brought back from the scene of the a.s.sa.s.sination; the rough map made by Sophia on the morning before the attack and a large quant.i.ty of revolutionary literature.

The former "conspiracy lodgings" were now a police trap, and on the very next morning it caught a big burly man whom Rysakoff identified as Timothy Michailoff, the one mechanic among the four men who had been armed with bombs on the fatal morning. Michailoff's memorandum book furnished the police some important addresses, but the great surprise of that eventful week did not come until the following day, March 17th, and when it did it was anything but a source of self-congratulation to the authorities.

About ten o'clock in the morning of that day the porters of the house on Little Garden Street where the Koboseffs kept their shop reported to the roundsman that the cheese dealer and his wife had not been home since the previous evening, and that their shop was still closed. The roundsman, who, like every member of the St. Petersburg police during those days, was overworked and badly in need of rest, made no reply. An hour later the porter accosted him again:

"The shop is still closed. Customers have been around and there is n.o.body in."

"Oh, I have no time to bother about it."

"But I think I saw something in that store, some strange looking tools,"

pleaded the porter.

"The devil you did," the roundsman said, as much with irritation as with amazement.

The statement was reported to the captain, who communicated it to his superiors, until finally an order was obtained to raid the shop. A search was made, more thorough than the first, and with quite different results. The lounge in the living room upon which General Mrovinsky had sat while speaking to Koboseff was found to contain a heap of earth, and when the planks under the window of the middle room were removed--the very ones which General Mrovinsky had made a feeble attempt to detach in the presence of Koboseff and the police--a large yawning hole presented itself to view. When this part of the wall had been torn down, the aperture proved to be the mouth of a subterranean pa.s.sage enclosed in wood. Seven feet from the shop began a charge of a hundred pounds of dynamite with an electric battery near by and wires running along the gallery back to the middle room. Everything was in complete readiness.

All that was necessary to explode the mine was to connect the wires.

As was learned subsequently, this mine had been the leading feature of the plot, the bombs having been added in case the Czar left Little Garden Street out of his route or the mine failed of its deadly purpose for some other reason. Of the existence of such a mine Rysakoff had not the remotest idea until he heard of it at the trial.

On the Friday afternoon immediately preceding the arrest of Jeliaboff (Zachar) the porter of the house where he and Sophia were registered as brother and sister met them at the gate as they were leaving the house together; and later, at 9 o'clock in the evening, he saw Sophia return alone. The next morning, after Jeliaboff had spent his first night in prison, the police, in their effort to discover his residence, ordered every porter in the city to ascertain who of his tenants had been absent from home that night. When the porter rang Sophia's bell that morning there was no response. He reported it at the police station where he was told to try again. At 2 o'clock he saw Sophia.

"I have received some blanks from the police," he said. "Every tenant must state his occupation and place of business."

"My brother is working now," Sophia answered. "When he comes home I'll tell him about it."

Two hours later she went out again, and in order to avoid pa.s.sing the porter at the gate, she gained the street through a little dry goods shop that had a rear door into that yard, buying something for a pretext. She came back, by way of the same dry goods shop, at 9 o'clock in the evening and that was the last that was ever seen of her in that neighbourhood. The next morning the porter reported the disappearance of the couple.

When the police searched the deserted apartment they found a number of revolutionary publications, several tin boxes like those which formed the sh.e.l.ls of the two exploding machines seized at the "conspiracy house" kept by Hessia and the "gay poet," and several cheeses bearing the same trade-mark as those in Koboseff's shop.

Meanwhile Jeliaboff had heard the solemn tolling of the bells in his prison cell. In the excitement of the hour a gendarme on duty in the prison corridor answered his questions through the peep-hole, in violation of regulations. Jeliaboff at once sent word to the procureur, a.s.suming responsibility for the entire plot, as an agent of the Executive Committee.

Sophia knew through a certain high official all that transpired between Jeliaboff and the procureur. She knew that the authorities were turning the capital inside out in their search for the woman who had lived with Jeliaboff as his sister and for the Koboseff couple, yet in spite of all the pressure the Nihilists brought to bear on her, persuading her to seek temporary retirement, she, like Urie and Baska, remained in the heart of St. Petersburg, in the very thick of her party's activity.

Clara saw her at a meeting during that week.

"You need rest, Sonia. You look tired."

"Do I?" Sophia answered with a smile. "So do you. Everybody does these days."

Her smile was on her lips only. Her blue eyes were inscrutably grave, but Clara saw a blend of lofty exaltation and corroding anguish in them.

She knew how dear Jeliaboff was to her. She had been craving to speak to her of him, of Hessia and of the "gay poet," who had committed suicide at the time of Hessia's arrest; but at this moment it was Sophia herself who filled her mind.

"Sonia!" Clara said, huskily.

"What is it, child?" the other asked, kindly.