The White Terror and The Red Part 4

Alexandre Alexandrovich, then, had done no wrong, and yet he had been banished as "living poison," treated by everybody as a criminal, until he came to believe himself one. Why, of course he was better than Novikoff. Novikoff was a self-seeking, posing wretch, and all the other teachers were cringing and crouching before him; and these insects turned their backs upon Alexandre Alexandrovich! Corruption pa.s.sed for loyalty, and a really good man was persecuted, hunted down like a wild beast, trampled upon. "Trampled upon, trampled upon, trampled upon!"

Pavel whispered audibly, stamping his foot and gnashing his teeth as he did so.

The only gleam of light was the veiled figure of that gymnasium girl.

She alone had had sympathy and courage enough to raise her voice for the poor man. "Why, she is a perfect heroine," he said in his aching heart.

At the gymnasium he felt his loneliness more keenly than ever. Wherever he saw a cl.u.s.ter of boys, he felt sure they were whispering about the gendarmes and the girl who had made the "speech" at the railroad station. His pride was gone. He now saw himself an outcast, shut out of the most important things life contained.

The leader of the "serious-minded" boys in Pavel's cla.s.s was an underfed Jewish youth, with an anaemic chalky face and a cold intelligent look, named Elkin. To Pavel he had always been repugnant. Since Pievakin's departure, however, the aristocratic boy had looked at his cla.s.smates in a new light, and Elkin now even inspired him with respect.

"Who is the girl that made that speech at the station?" he asked simply.

The two had scarcely ever spoken before.

Elkin gave Boulatoff a stare of freezing irony, as who should say: "What do you think of the a.s.surance of this man?" and then, dropping his eyes, he asked:

"What girl?" When he spoke his lips a.s.sumed the form of two obtuse angles, exposing to view a glistening lozenge of white teeth.

"Look here, Elkin, I want to know who that girl is and all about the whole affair, and if you think I ought not to know it because--well, because I am a Boulatoff and my uncle is the governor, I can a.s.sure you that if I had been there I should have acted as she did. What's more, I hate myself for not having been there."

"I don't know what you're talking about," replied Elkin. "As to your hating yourself, that's your own affair."

"Well, however I may feel toward myself, I certainly have nothing but contempt for a man like you," Pasha snapped back, paling. "But if you think you can keep it from me, you're mistaken."

Elkin sized him up with a look full of venom, as he said:

"Pitiful wretch! How are you going to find it out? Through the political spies?"

Pavel turned red. It was with a great effort that he kept himself from striking Elkin. After a pause he said:

"Now, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that you are a knave."

"Besides," said Elkin, as though finishing an interrupted remark, "most of the gymnasium girls who saw Alexandre Alexandrovich off are daughters of poor, humble people, so of what interest would it have been to a man in your position?"

Boulatoff stood still for a few moments, and then said under his breath:

"Well, you're a fool as well as a knave," and turned away.

The heroine of the demonstration was hateful to him now. She and Elkin seemed to stand at the head of the unt.i.tled cla.s.ses all arrayed against him. He retired into himself deeper than ever. He abhorred her because she had done the right thing, and each time his sympathy for Pievakin welled up he hated himself for not having been at the station, and her for having been there. He sought relief in charging Elkin with cowardice. "What did he do there?" he would say to himself. "To think of a lot of fellows running away when they are told they can't say good-bye to their martyred teacher, and a girl being the only one who has courage enough to act properly. And now that she has done it this coward has the face to give himself airs, as if he were ent.i.tled to credit for her courage. If I had been there I should not have run away as Elkin and his crew did."

This placed Elkin and his followers on one side of the line and Pavel and the girl on the other. So what right had that coward of a Jew to place himself between her and him?

Toward spring, some two months after the old teacher's departure, and when the incident was beginning to grow dim in the public mind, the sensation was suddenly revived and greatly intensified by an extraordinary piece of news that came from the town to which Pievakin had been transferred: The Third Section of His Majesty's Own Office--the central political detective bureau of the empire--had taken up the case, with the result that the action of the Department of Public Instruction had been repudiated as dangerously inadequate. The idea of a man like Pievakin partic.i.p.ating in the education of children! Accordingly, the poor old man was now under arrest, condemned to be transported to Viatka, a thinly populated province in the remote north, where he was to live under police surveillance, as a political exile strictly debarred from teaching, even in private families.

Pavel was stunned. He received the news as something elemental. He could find fault with his uncle, but the government at St. Petersburg was a sublime abstract force, bathed in the effulgence of the Czar's personality. It was no more open to condemnation than a thunderstorm or a turbulent sea. But the incident made an ineffaceable impression upon him. It left him with the general feeling that there was something inherently cruel in the world. And the picture of a pretty girl boldly raising her voice for poor Pievakin in the teeth of formidable-looking gendarmes and in the midst of a crowd of panic-stricken men remained imbedded in his fancy as the emblem of brave pity. An importunate sense of jealousy nagged him. He often caught himself dreaming of situations in which he appeared in a role similar to the one she had played at the railroad station.

His perceptions and sensibilities took a novel trend.

One day, for example, as he walked through Theatre Square, he paused to watch an apple-faced ensign, evidently fresh from the military school, lecture a middle-aged sergeant. The youthful officer sat on a bench, swaggeringly leaning back, his new sword gleaming by his side, as he questioned the soldier who stood at attention, the picture of embarra.s.sment and impotent rage. A young woman, probably the sergeant's wife, sweetheart, or daughter, stood aside, looking on wretchedly.

Seated on a bench directly across the walk were two pretty gymnasium girls. It was clear that the whole scene had been gotten up for their sake, that the ensign had stopped the poor fellow, who was old enough to be his father, and was now putting him through this ordeal for the sole purpose of flaunting his authority before them. When the sergeant had been allowed to go his way, but before he was out of hearing, Pavel walked up to the ensign and said aloud:

"I wish to tell you, sir, that you tormented that poor man merely to show off."

"Bravo!" said the two gymnasium girls, clapping their hands with all their might; "bravo!"

The ensign sprang to his feet, his apple-cheeks red as fire. "What do you mean by interfering with an officer--in the performance of his duty?" he faltered. He apparently knew that the young man before him was a nephew of the governor.

"Nonsense! You were not performing any duties. You were parading. That's what you were doing."

The two girls burst into a ringing laugh, whereupon the ensign stalked off, mumbling something about having the gymnasium boy arrested.

"Mother," he said, when he came home. "The world is divided into tormentors and victims."

Anna Nicolayevna gave a laugh that made her rusty face interesting. "And what are you--a tormentor or a victim?" she asked. "At any rate you had better throw these thoughts out of your mind. They lead to no good, Pasha."

CHAPTER V.

PAVEL'S FIRST STEP.

When Pavel arrived in St. Petersburg, in the last days of July, his recent tribulations seemed a thing of the faded past. The capital was a fascinating setting for the great university which he was soon to enter and in which he was bent upon drinking deep of the deepest mysteries of wisdom. His "certificate of maturity"--his gymnasium diploma--was a solemn proclamation of his pa.s.sage from boyhood to manhood--a change which seemed to a.s.sert itself in everything he did. He ate maturely, talked maturely, walked maturely. He felt like a girl on the eve of her wedding day.

He had not been in the big city for six years, and so marked was the distinction between it and the southern town from which he hailed, that to his "mature" eyes it seemed as if they were seeing it for the first time. The mult.i.tude of large l.u.s.ty men, heavily bearded and wearing blouses of flaming red; the pink buildings; the melodious hucksters; the cherry-peddlars, with their boards piled with the succulent fruit on their shoulders; the pitchy odor of the overheated streets; the soft, sibilant affectations in the speech of the lower cla.s.ses; the bustling little ferry-boats on the Neva--all this, sanctified by the presence of the university buildings across the gay river, made his heart throb with a feeling as though Miroslav were a foreign town and he were treading the soil of real Russia at last.

He matriculated at the Section of Philology and History, St. Petersburg.

Before starting on his studies, however, he went off on a savage debauch with some aristocratic young relatives. The debauch lasted a fortnight, and cost his mother a small fortune. When he came to the university at last, weary of himself and his relatives, he settled down to a winter of hard work. But the life at the university disturbed his peace of mind.

He found the students divided into "crammers," "parquette-sc.r.a.pers" and "radicals." The last named seemed to be in the majority--a bustling, whispering, preoccupied crowd with an effect of being the masters of the situation. There was a vast difference between Elkin and his followers and these people. Pavel knew that the university was the hotbed of the secret movement, of which he was now tempted to know something. There was no telling who of his present cla.s.smates might prove a candidate for the gallows. The wide-awake, whispering, mysterious world about him reminded him of the Miroslav girl and of his rebuff upon trying to discover who she was. When he made an attempt to break through the magic circle in which that world was enclosed his well-cared-for appearance and high-born manner went against him. A feeling of isolation weighed on his soul that was much harder to bear than his ostracism at the gymnasium had been. Harder to bear, because the students who kept away from him here struck him as his superiors, and because he had a humble feeling as though it were natural that they should hold aloof from him.

And the image of that Miroslav girl seemed to float over these whispering young men, at once luring and repulsing him. He often went about with a lump in his throat.

One day he met a girl named Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a former governor of the Province of St. Petersburg and the granddaughter of a celebrated cabinet minister. She was a strong-featured, boyish-looking little creature, with grave blue eyes beneath a very high forehead. He had known her when he was a child. There was something in her general appearance now and in the few words she said to him which left a peculiar impression on Pavel. As he thought of her later it dawned upon him that she might belong to the same world as those preoccupied, whispering fellow-students of his. He looked her up the same day.

"I should like to get something to read, Sophia Lvovna," he said, colouring. "Some of the proscribed things, I mean." Then he added, with an embarra.s.sed frown, "Something tells me you could get it for me. If I am mistaken, you will have to excuse me."

The governor's daughter fixed her blue eyes on him as she said, simply:

"All right. I'll get you something."

She lent him a volume of the "underground" magazine _Forward!_ and some other prints. The tales of valour and martyrdom which he found in these publications, added to the editorials they contained calling upon the n.o.bility to pay the debt they owed to the peasantry by sacrificing themselves for their welfare, literally intoxicated him.

"Dear Mother and Comrade," he wrote in a letter home, "I have come to the conclusion that the so-called n.o.bility to which I belong has never done anything useful. For centuries and centuries and centuries we have been living at the expense of those good, honest, overworked people, the peasantry. It is enough to drive one to suicide. Yes, mamma darling, we are a race of drones and robbers. The ignorant, unkempt moujiks that we treat like beasts are in reality angels compared to us. There is something in them--in their traditions and in the inherent purity of their souls--which should inspire us with reverence. Yet they are literally starved and three-fourths of their toil goes to maintain the army and the t.i.tled cla.s.ses."

Further down in the same letter he said: "Every great writer in the history of our literature has been in prison or exiled. Our n.o.blest thinker and critic, Chernyshevsky, is languishing in Siberia. Why? Why?

My hair stands erect when I think of these things."

When it came to posting the letter, it dawned upon him that such sentiments were not to be trusted to the mails, and, feeling himself a conspirator, he committed the epistle to the flames.