The White Terror and The Red Part 5

He was touched by the spirit of that peasant worship--the religion of the "penitent n.o.bility"--which was the spirit of the best unproscribed literature of the day as well as of the "underground" movement.

Turgeneff owed the origin of his fame to the peasant portraits of his _Notes of a Huntsman_. Nekrasoff, the leading poet of the period, and a score of other writers were perpetually glorifying the peasant, going into ecstasies over him, bewailing him. The peasant they drew was a creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but shed over him was the golden halo of idealism. The central doctrine of the movement was a theory that the survival of the communistic element in the Russian village, was destined to become the basis of the country's economic and political salvation; that Russia would leap into an ideal social arrangement without having to pa.s.s through capitalism; that her semi-barbaric peasant, kindly and innocent as a dove and the martyr of centuries, carried in his person the future glory, moral as well as material, of his unhappy country. As to the living peasant, he had no more knowledge of this adoration of himself (nor capacity to grasp the meaning of the movement, if an attempt had been made to explain it to him) than a squirrel has of the presence of a "q" in the spelling of its name.

Sophia disappeared from St. Petersburg, and Pavel found himself cut off from the "underground" world once more. The prints she had left him only served to excite his craving for others of the same character. The preoccupied, mysterious air of the "radicals" at the university tantalised him. He was in a veritable fever of envy, resentment, intellectual and spiritual thirst. He subscribed liberally to the various revolutionary funds that were continually being raised under the guise of charity, and otherwise tried to manifest his sympathy with the movement, all to no purpose. His contributions were accepted, but his advances were repulsed. One day he approached a student whom he had once given ten rubles "for a needy family"--a thin fellow with a very long neck and the face of a chicken.

"I should like to get something to read," he said, trying to copy the tone of familiar simplicity which he had used with Sophia. "I have read one number of _Forward!_ and another thing or two, but that's all I have been able to get."

"Pardon me," the chicken-face answered, colouring, "I really don't know what you mean. Can't you get those books in the book-stores or in the public library?"

Pavel was left with an acute pang of self-pity. He felt like a pampered child undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of strangers. His mother and all his relatives thought so much of him, while these fellows, who would deem it a privilege to talk to any of them, were treating him as a n.o.body and a spy. The tears came to his eyes. But presently he clenched his fists and said to himself, "I _will_ be admitted to their set."

In his fidget he happened to think of Pani Oginska. As the scene at the German watering-place came back to him, he was seized with a desire to efface the affront he had offered her. "How can I rest until I have seen her and asked her pardon?" he said to himself. "If I were a real man and not a mere phrase-monger I should start out on the journey at once. But, of course, I won't do anything of the kind, and writing of such things is impossible. I _am_ a phrase-maker. That's all I am."

But he soliloquized himself into the reflection that Pani Oginska was likely to know some of her imprisoned son's friends, if, indeed, she was not in the "underground" world herself, and the very next morning found him in a railway car, bound for the south.

Pani Oginska's estate was near the boundary line between the province to which it belonged and the one whose capital was Miroslav, a considerable distance from a railway station. Pavel covered that distance in a post-sleigh drawn by a troika. His way lay in the steppe region. It was a very cold forenoon in mid-winter. The horses' manes were covered with frost; the postilion was bundled up so heavily that he looked like an old woman. The sun shone out of a blue, unconcerned sky upon a waste of eery whiteness. There were ridges of drifts and there were black patches of bare ground, but the general perspective unfolded an unbroken plane of snow, a level expanse stretching on either side of the smooth road, seemingly endless and bottomless, dest.i.tute of any trace of life save for an occasional inn by the roadside or the snow-bound hovel and outhouses of a shepherd in the distance--a domain of silence and numb monotony. That this desert of frozen sterility would four or five months later, be transformed into a world of gra.s.s and birds seemed as inconceivable as the sudden disappearance of the ocean.

The last few versts were an eternity. Pavel's heart leaped with a foretaste of the exciting interview.

"Lively, my man," he pressed the postilion. "Can't your horses get a move on them?"

The postilion nodded his m.u.f.fled head and set up a fierce yelp, for all the world like a wolf giving chase; whereupon the animals, apparently scared to death, broke into a desperate gallop, the scud flying, the sleigh dashing along like an electric car in open country, its bell ringing frostily.

"That's better," Pavel shouted with a thrill of physical pleasure and speaking with difficulty for the breakneck speed that seemed to fling the breath out of his lungs. "That's better, my man. You shall get a good tip. But where have you learned the trick?"

The postilion gave a m.u.f.fled grunt of appreciation and went on howling with all his might.

They pa.s.sed through a small village. The chimneys of some of the white clay hovels on either side of the road poured out clouds of sweetish, nauseating smoke. Wood being scarce in these parts, the peasantry made fuel of manure.

At last the sleigh swung into the great front yard of Pani Oginska's manor house. It was greeted by the curious eyes of half a dozen servants. Pavel entered a warm vestibule with a painted floor, where he found waiting to meet him Pani Oginska and an aged man with hair as white as the snow without. He bowed politely and asked, in French, with nervous timidity:

"Do you remember me, Madame Oginska?"

She screwed up her eyes as she scanned his flushed, frozen face.

"Prince Boulatoff!" she said in a perplexed whisper.

"I have come all the way from St. Petersburg to beg your pardon, Madame Oginska," he fired out. "I acted like a brute on that occasion. I was an idiotic boy. Forgive me."

"Have you actually come all the way from St. Petersburg, to tell me that?" she asked with a hearty peal of laughter. She introduced him to the white-haired man, her father, who first made a bow full of old-fashioned dignity and then gave Pavel's cold hand a doddering grasp.

"So you have really come for that express purpose?" Pani Oginska resumed, while a servant was relieving the newcomer of his fur-lined coat, fur cap, heavy gloves, m.u.f.fler and storm shoes. "A case of compunction, I suppose?"

Her father followed them as far as the open door of a vast, plainly furnished parlour, and after looming on the threshold for a minute or two, in an att.i.tude of pained dignity, he bowed himself away. Pani Oginska gently pressed the young man into a huge, rusty easy-chair, she herself remaining in a standing posture, her mind apparently divided between hospitality and an important errand upon which she seemed to have been bent when he arrived. She wore a furred jacket, her head in a grey shawl and her feet in heavy top-boots--a costume jarringly out of accord with her pale, delicate, nunnish face. She made quite a new impression on the young prince.

"I was blind then," he began, when they were left alone. "My eyes were closed."

"Oh, you needn't go into detail," she rejoined with an amused look. "I think I can guess how it has come about. You have caught the contagion, haven't you?"

"Why call it 'contagion?' It's the truth; it's justice. If I hadn't been such a silly boy when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, I should certainly not have acted the way I did."

"A boy? And what are you now, pray? An old man with the weight of experience on your shoulders?" she asked with motherly gaiety. "Well, we'll talk it over later on, or, indeed, we'll find better things to talk about; and meanwhile I want you to excuse me, prince, and make yourself comfortable without me. You are hungry, of course?"

"Not at all. I had luncheon at the station."

"Well, you shall have some refreshments at any rate, and by and by I shall be back. I am a rather busy woman, you see. I have to be my own manager, and there are a thousand and one things to look after, and the snow is rather deep"--pointing at her heavy boots. "Well, here are some books and magazines. _Au revoir._" She made for the door, but faced about again. "By the way, prince, does your mother know of this crazy trip of yours?"

"I confess she does not," he answered, feeling helplessly like a boy.

"Why?"

"Why! Because she is the best woman in the world, and because it's too bad you did anything so foolish without letting her know at least. By the way, this is anything but a desirable place for a young man to visit. Since my son got into trouble the police have tried to keep an eye on us; but then the police are so stupid. Still, I am sorry you didn't first consult your mother. If you boys would only let yourselves be guided by your mothers you would be spared many a trouble."

"Is that the prime object of life--to guard against harm to oneself?"

Pavel protested.

She fixed him with a look of amus.e.m.e.nt, and then remarked sadly: "You _have_ caught the contagion, poor thing. I'll write your mother about it. Let her put a stop to it if it isn't too late."

He took fire. "I don't know what you are hinting at, Madame Oginska," he said. Asking her to introduce him to Nihilists seemed out of the question.

"I am hinting at those 'circles,' prince. You probably belong to one of them; that's what I am hinting at. Don't you, now?"

"I don't belong to any circles. Nor do I know what you mean, madame."

"Well, well. You have come to ask me not to be offended with you, and now it seems to be my turn to ask you not to be angry with me. Don't be uneasy, prince. I shan't write to your mother. Indeed, she couldn't afford to be in correspondence with me at all. However, if you really aren't yet mixed up in those dreadful things"--there was a dubious twinkle in her eye--"you had better keep out of them in the future, too.

Think of your charming mother and take care of yourself, prince. Well, I have got to go. It's barbaric of me to leave you, but I'll soon be back.

Here are some books and magazines. Or wait, I have another occupation for you. I want you to meet the best Jew in the world. I want you to examine him in 'Gentile lore,' as his people would put it. They would kill me, his people, if they knew he came to read my 'Gentile books.'"

"He is a brainy fellow," she went on, leading the way through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, "chockful of that Talmud of theirs, don't you know. Now that he is married they are trying to make a business man of him, but he prefers worldly wisdom and that sort of thing. I let him use my library, the only place he has for his 'unholy'

studies, in fact. He is supposed to come on business here. He lives in a small town a mile from here."

She was speaking in Russian now, a language she had perfect command of, but which she spoke with a strong Polish accent, making it sound to Pavel as though she was declaiming poetry. Twelve years ago, before she inherited this estate, and when she still lived in Poland, her birthplace, she could scarcely speak it at all.

She took him into a room whose walls were lined with books, mostly old and worn, and whose two windows looked out upon a frozen pond in front of a snow-covered clump of trees.

"Monsieur Parmet, Prince Boulatoff," she said, as a man sprang to his feet with the air of one startled from mental absorption. He was of strong, ungainly build, with the peculiar stamp of rabbinical scholarship on a plump, dark-bearded face. "See how much he knows, prince. He thinks he can take the examination for a certificate of maturity and enter the university. But then he thinks he knows everything." With this she left them to themselves.

Pavel was in a whirl of embarra.s.sment and annoyance, but the abashed smile of the other mollified him. "What I need more than anything else is to be examined in Latin and Greek," Parmet said. "I haven't had my exercises looked over for a long time, and it may be all wrong for all I know." His Russian had a Yiddish accent. He spoke in low, purring tones that seemed to soften the heavy outline of his figure. He was a lumbering ma.s.s of physical strength, one of those bearlike giants whom village people will describe as bending horseshoes like so many blades of gra.s.s or driving nails into a wall with their bare knuckles for a hammer. His dark-brown eyes shone meekly.

"Have you learned it all by yourself?" Pavel asked.

"Not altogether."

Pavel began with an air of lofty reluctance, but he was soon carried away by the niceties of the ancient syntax, and his stiffness melted into didactic animation. As to Parmet, his plump, dark face was an image of religious ecstasy. Pavel warmed to him. His Talmudic gestures and intonation amused him.

"There's no trouble about your Latin," he said, familiarly; "no trouble whatever."