The White Terror and The Red Part 8

"No. Quite an amusing sort of a damsel. Seething and steaming for all the world like a samovar. You should have seen her calflike ecstasy when I handed her something to read. I was afraid she was going to have a fit."

Makar trotted silently on, continually curling himself in his wretched grey cloak and striking one foot against the other, to knock the caked drab-coloured snow off his boots. Pavel wore a new furred coat.

"She may be useful though," Pavel resumed, after a pause. "That is, provided she is all she seems to be. Her brother is a gendarme major.

What do you think of that?"

"Is he?" Makar asked, looking up at his companion in beatific surprise.

"Yes, and she says he's a good fellow, too. Of course, she's quite a full-fledged ninny herself, and ought to be taken with a carload of salt, but she referred to some facts with which I happen to be familiar." While he was describing the girl's aunt, a pa.s.sing soldier saluted Makar, mistaking him for an army officer. Makar, however, was too absorbed in his companion's talk to be aware of what was going on about him. Pavel shrieked with laughter. "He must be a pretty raw sort of recruit to take _you_ for a warrior," he said. When he had finished his sketch of the woman who was longing to set somebody free, the medical student paused in the middle of the sidewalk.

"Why, she's a G.o.dsend, then," he said.

"Moderate your pa.s.sions, Mr. Army Officer," Pavel said languidly, mocking his old gymnasium director. "If she does not turn out to be a spy we'll see what we can do with her. She strikes me rather favourably, though."

"Why, you oughtn't to neglect her, Pasha. If I were you I would lose no time in making her brother's acquaintance. Think of the possibilities of it!"

"Bridle your exuberance, young man. Her brother lives many miles from here. He is on the hunt for sedition in the most provincial of provinces. Want to make a Terrorist of him? Go ahead. He lives in Miroslav. There."

"In Miroslav!" Makar echoed, with pride in the capital of his native province.

Presently they entered a courtyard and took to climbing a steep stony staircase. Strong, inviting odours of cabbage soup and cooked meat greeted them at several of the landings. Makar's lodging was on the sixth floor. He had moved in only a few days ago and the chief object of Pavel's visit was to make a mental note of its location.

The first thing Makar did as he got into the room was to put a pitcher on one of his two windows. The windows commanded a little side street, and the pitcher was Makar's safety signal. When he had lit his lamp a sofa, freshly covered with green oil-cloth, proved to be the best piece of furniture in the room, the smell of the oil-cloth mingling with the stale odours of tobacco smoke with which the very walls seemed to be saturated.

"Ugh, what a room!" Pavel said, sniffing. They talked of a revolutionist who had recently been arrested and to whom they referred as "Alexandre."

Special importance was attached by the authorities to the capture of this man, because among the things found at his lodgings was a diagram of the Winter Palace with a pencil mark on the imperial dining hall. As the prisoner was a conspicuous member of the Terrorists' Executive Committee, the natural inference was that another bold plot was under way, one which had something to do with the Czar's dining room, but which had apparently been frustrated by the discovery of the diagram.

The palace guard was strongly re-enforced and every precaution was taken to insure the monarch's safety. Now, the Terrorists had their man in the very heart of the enemy's camp, and the result of the search of Alexandre's lodgings was no secret to them. This revolutionist, whose gloomy face was out of keeping with his carefully pomaded hair, kid gloves, silk hat, showy clothes and carefully trimmed whiskers a la Alexander II., was known to Makar as "the Dandy." Less than a year before he had obtained a position in the double capacity of spy and clerk, at the Third Section of his Majesty's Own Office, and so liked was he by his superiors that he had soon been made private secretary to the head of the secret service, every doc.u.ment of importance pa.s.sing through his hands. Since then he had been communicating to the Executive Committee, now a list of new suspects, now the details of a contemplated arrest, now a copy of some secret circular to the gendarme offices of the empire.

While they were thus conversing of Alexandre and the Dandy, Pavel stretched himself full length on the sofa and dozed off. When he opened his eyes, about two hours later, he found Parmet tiptoeing awkwardly up and down the room, his shadow a gigantic crab on the wall. Pavel broke into a boisterous peal of laughter.

"Here is a figure for you! All that is needed is an artist to set to work and paint it."

"Are you awake? Look here, Pasha. Your gendarme's sister and her aunt are haunting my mind."

"Why, why, have you fallen in love with both of them at once?" Pavel asked as he jumped to his feet and shot his arms toward the ceiling. He looked refreshed and full of animal spirits.

"Stop joking, Pasha, pray," Makar said in his purring, mellifluous voice. "It irritates me. It's a serious matter I want to speak to you about, and here you are bent upon fun." Pavel's story of the gendarme officer's sister had stirred in him visions of a mighty system of counter-espionage. He had a definite scheme to propose.

Pavel found it difficult to work himself out of his playful mood until Makar fell silent and took to pacing the floor resentfully. When he had desisted, with a final guffaw over Makar's forlorn air, the medical student, warming up to fresh enthusiasm, said:

"Well, to let that prison stand idle would be criminal negligence. That girl's aunt must be given a chance."

"What's that?" Pavel said, relapsing into horseplay. "Do you want somebody nabbed on purpose to give a bored lady something to excite her nerves?" He finished the interrogation rather limply. It flashed upon him that what Makar was really aiming at was that some revolutionist should volunteer to be arrested on a denunciation from the Dandy or some other member of the party with a view to strengthening its position in the Third Section.

Makar went on to plead for an organised effort to get into the various gendarme offices.

"It is a terrible struggle we are in, Pasha. Our best men fall before they have time to turn round. If we had more revolutionists on the other side, Alexandre might be a free man now."

"Well, and sooner or later you and I will be where he is now and be plunged into the sleep of the righteous, and there won't even be a goat to graze at our graves. Let the dead bury the dead, Makashka. We want the living for the firing line. We can't afford to let fresh blood turn sour in a damp cell, if we can help it."

"But this is 'the firing line'," Makar returned with beseeching, almost with tearful emphasis. "If you only gave me a chance to explain myself.

What I want is to have confusion carried into every branch of the government; I want the Czar to be surrounded by a masquerade of enemies, so that his henchmen will suspect each other of being either agents of the Third Section or revolutionists. Do you see the point? I want the Czar to be surrounded by a babel of mistrust and espionage. I want him to be dazed, staggered until he succ.u.mbs to this nightmare of suspicion and hastens to convoke a popular a.s.sembly, as Louis XVI. was forced to do; I want the inhabitants of our tear-drenched country to be treated like human beings without delay. My scheme practically amounts to a system or terrorism without violence, and I insist that one good man in the enemy's camp is of more value than the death of ten spies." His low, velvety voice rang clear, tremulous with pleading fervour; his face gleamed with an intellectual relish in his formula of the plan. As he spoke, he was twisting his mighty fist, opening and closing it again, Talmud-fashion, in unison with the rhythm of his sentences.

e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns like "visionary!" "phrase-maker!" were on the tip of Pavel's tongue, but he had not the heart to utter them. Aerial as the scheme was, Makar's plea had cast a certain spell over him. It was like listening to a beautiful piece of mythology.

"Let us form a special force of men ready to go to prison, to be destroyed, if need be," Makar went on. "The loss of one man would mean, in each case, the saving of twenty. Think how many important comrades a single leak in the Third Section has saved us. It's a matter of plain arithmetic."

"Of plain insanity," Pavel finally broke in.

"Don't get excited, Pasha, pray. Can't you let me finish? If I am wrong you'll have plenty of time to prove it."

His purring Talmudic voice and the smell of the fresh oil-cloth were unbearable to Pavel now.

"It's like this," Makar resumed. "In the first place [he bent down his little finger] every honest man is sure to be arrested some day, and what difference does it make whether the end comes a few months sooner or a few months later? In the second place [he bent down the next finger] there must be some more people like that girl's aunt. It is quite possible that most of those who would be arrested on this plan would get out, and that itself would be a good thing, for it would add to the prestige of the party. Everything that reveals the weakness of the government on the one hand, and the cleverness and daring of our people on the other, is good for the cause. Every success scored by the 'Will of the People' is a step in the direction of that for which men like yourself are staking their lives, Pasha. Don't interrupt me, pray.

I'll go a step further. I am of the opinion that under certain conditions, where an escape is a.s.sured, it wouldn't be a bad idea to let one's self be arrested just in order to add another name to the list of political gaol-breakers, that is to say, to the list of the government's fiascos. Every little counts. Every straw increases that weight which will finally break the back of Russia's despot."

"Do you really mean what you say, Makar? Do you actually want to be arrested?" Pavel asked.

"Not at all. All I want is that another good man should gain the confidence of the Third Section and that another political prisoner should escape."

"And what if all Mlle. Safonoff says turns out to be as idiotic a dream as all this tommyrot of yours?"

"'If one is afraid of wolves one had better keep out of the woods.' You, yourself, have taken much greater chances than that, Pasha. If I am arrested with papers and the worst comes to the worst they won't hang me."

"I see you take it seriously after all. Well, if you think I'll let you do anything of the kind you are a fool."

"You can't prevent me from doing what I consider to be right. Nor do I want anybody else to send the denunciation which is to result in my arrest. I'll send it myself. All I want is that somebody should claim credit for it afterward, when I am in prison--on that very day, if possible. The search and arrest will be ordered from St. Petersburg, and then some of our men will say at the Third Section that the anonymous letter was his, adding some details about me. Details can be worked out later. Where there is a will there is a way. At any rate, I don't expect anybody but myself to bear the moral responsibility for my arrest."

He talked on in the same strain until Pavel sprang to his feet, flushed with rage. "It's all posing--that's all there's to it!" he shouted. "On the surface it means that you are willing to sacrifice yourself without even attracting attention, but in reality this subtle modesty of yours is only the most elaborate piece of parading that was ever conceived.

It's love of applause all the way through, and you are willing to stake your life on it. That's all there is about it."

Makar grew yellow in the face and sweat broke out on his forehead. "In that case, there's no use talking, of course," he said in a very low voice. "If I am a humbug I am a humbug."

"And if you are a fool, you are a fool," Pavel rejoined, with a conciliatory growl.

"You need not back out, Pasha. Maybe you are right," Makar rejoined.

"Who is absolutely free from vanity? Human nature is such a complex mechanism. One may be governed by love of approbation and, perhaps, also, by a certain adventuresome pa.s.sion for the danger of the thing.

The great question is whether there is something besides this. No, it is not all posing, Pasha. There are moments when I ask myself why I should not live as most people do, but I only have to realise all that is going on around us; the savage tyranny, the writhing millions, the hunger, the bottomless darkness, the unuttered groans,--I only have to think of this and of the dear comrades I have known who have been strangled on the gallows or are wasting away in the casemates; I need only picture all this, I say, to feel that even if there be an alloy of selfishness in my revolutionary interests, yet, in the main, it is this sense of the Great Wrong which keeps me from nursing my own safety. Do you know that the dangling corpses of our comrades are never absent from my mind? I am not without a heart, Pasha."

"n.o.body says you are, only you are a confounded dreamer, Makashka,"

Pavel answered. "We have no time for dreams and poetry. Our struggle is one of hard, terrible prose."

"You are even more of a dreamer than I, Pasha," Makar retorted, blissfully.

When Makar resumed speaking the last echo of resentment was gone from his voice. "After all, one gets more than one gives. When I think of the moments of joy the movement affords me, of the ties of friendship with so many good people--the cream of the generation, the salt of the earth, the best children Russia ever gave birth to--when I think of the glorious atmosphere that surrounds me, of the divine ecstasy with which I view the future; when I recall all this I feel that I get a sort of happiness which no Rothschild could buy. To be kept in solitary confinement is anything but a pleasure, to be sure, but is there nothing to sweeten one's life there? And how about the thought that over yonder, outside, there are people who are going on with the struggle and who think of you sometimes? Sooner or later the government will yield. And then, oh then somebody--some comrade of ours--will throw the cell-door open, and I'll join in the celebration of our triumph. Really, Pasha, I am strong as a bull, and a few years of confinement would not kill me.

While some of our people may die by the hand of the hangman, my life would be spared. Did you ever stop to think of the time when the cells of Siberia and of Peter and Paul are thrown open and one says to the immured comrades, 'Out with you, brothers! You're free! The nation is free!' Come, another year or two and this will be realised."

"You had better save your sentimentalities for novices," Pavel said.

"And, by the way, your eloquence is certainly of more use than your dreaming in a dungeon would be."