The White Terror and The Red Part 30

The world seemed to be divided into those who had known the two executed men personally and those who had not. For the moment there seemed to be little in common between him and Clara. She strained him to a seat by her side on the sofa again, clasping one of his hands in both of hers, and kissed him on the cheek, wetting his temple with her tears.

"Do you know, dearest, I really had a lurking hope they would be spared," he said. "I was ashamed to say so, but I did. But no! they choked them. They choked them. Idiots that they are. They imagine they can hang every honest man in the country."

"Loris-Melikoff is even worse than the Czar. His liberalism is nothing but hypocrisy. There can no longer be any question about it."

"He is a rogue of the deepest dye. He is a bungling hypocrite, an abominable liar and a mangy coward, that's what he is. But to the devil with him! This is not the point. Oh, nothing is the point. Nothing except that they have been murdered."

He went to see some of the revolutionists with whom he had shared the intimacy of the dead men.

Left alone, Clara began to pace the floor slowly. Not having known either Alexandre or the man who had died with him, she was exempt from that acute agony of grief which was her lover's; but there was the image of two men in death-shrouds, a stirring image of martyrdom, before her vision. Pity, the hunger of revenge and a loftier feeling--the thirst of self-sacrifice to the cause of liberty--swelled her heart. Back and forth she walked, slowly, solemnly, her hands gently clasped behind her, her soul in a state of excitement that was coupled with a peculiar state of physical tranquillity, her mind apparently seeing things with a perspicacity the like of which it had never enjoyed before. Her future, her duties, her relation to the rest of the world, her whole life--all was wonderfully clear to her, and in spite of her anguish over the death of the two men she felt singularly happy. It seemed to be a matter of course that her party would now undertake some new plot, one exceeding in boldness and magnitude all its predecessors. Many lives would have to be staked. She would offer hers. Matrimony was out of the question at a time like this. She conjured that image of the insane woman clasping a rag to her bosom in support of her position. She longed to be near Pavel again. In her mind she embraced him tenderly, argued with him, opened her soul to him. It was all so clear. Her mind was so firmly made up.

She fondly hoped she would make Pavel see it all in the same light.

The explanation took place the next time he called on her, a few days later.

"Oh, we shall all have to offer our lives," he replied. "But for G.o.d's sake love me, Clanya. It will drive me crazy if you don't."

"But I do, I do. I love you with every fibre of my being, Pasha. What has put it in your head to doubt it?"

"Oh, I don't know. All I do know is that as long as my life is mine I cannot exist without you. I am frightfully lonely and that stands in the way of my work. Dash it, I feel just as I did last summer before I took courage to tell you that I was insanely in love with you."

She drew him to her, with a smile at once of happiness and amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Poor boy! It's enough to break one's heart. Poor little dear!" she joked affectionately.

"I knew you would be making fun of me," he said, yearning upon her.

"Love me, Clanya, do love me, with all your heart. I cannot live apart from you, I cannot, upon my word I cannot," he concluded piteously, like a child.

"Do you imagine it's easy for me to be away from you?" she retorted earnestly. "I can't be a single hour without you without missing you, without feverishly waiting to see you again. As if you did not know it!

But what can we do? Is this the only sacrifice we are ready to make?"

A fortnight had pa.s.sed. Unknown to her lover, Clara had spoken to the Janitor, intimating her readiness to offer her life, and asking for one of the most dangerous a.s.signments the Governing Board could give her.

She was waiting for an answer, when the startling news spread among the revolutionists that the Janitor was in the hands of the enemy and that the capture of that maniac of caution had been the result of a most insane piece of recklessness.

His arrest was one of the heaviest losses the party had yet sustained.

At the same time the government found a new source of uneasiness in it.

A large quant.i.ty of dynamite and some other things confiscated at his lodgings pointed to a vigorous renewal of terroristic activity. Another plot on the life of the Emperor seemed to be hatching in the capital, yet all efforts of the police and the gendarmes in this connection were futile. Indeed, the circ.u.mstances of the Janitor's arrest only furnished new proof of the inept.i.tude and s.h.i.+ftlessness of those whose business it was to ferret out Nihilism.

A few days before the Janitor was taken the police received word about two portraits which had been left for reproduction at a well-known photograph gallery and in which the photographer had recognised the two Nihilists who had recently been hanged. Instead of a detective being detailed, however, to lie in wait for the unknown man, the proprietor of the gallery was simply ordered to notify the police when he came for his pictures. The unknown man was the Janitor. When he called for the photographs, an awkward attempt was made to detain him which aroused his suspicion. He pleaded haste and made for the door. When a porter barred his way he scared him off by thrusting his hand into an empty pistol-pocket. A similar order for photographs of the two executed Terrorists had been given by him to another well-known photographer next door to the former place, and it was when he called there, a day or two after his narrow escape at the adjoining gallery, that he was seized by detectives.

When his landlady heard that her "star" lodger, the punctilious government official and retired army officer, was neither an official nor a retired officer, but a leading Nihilist, she fainted. The gendarmes had been hunting for him since he broke away from his captors on his way to prison one evening more than two years before. They had heard that it was he who subsequently organised the railroad plot near Moscow; also that he had been connected with the a.s.sa.s.sination of the chief of gendarmes and with the shooting at the Czar in front of the Winter Palace. Yet he had freely moved about the streets of St.

Petersburg these two years, the busiest agitator and conspirator in the city, until, in a moment of morbid foolhardiness, he practically surrendered himself to the police.

When Clara heard of his arrest, she clapped her hands together, Yiddish fas.h.i.+on. "If the Janitor has been arrested as a result of carelessness,"

she exclaimed, "then everyone of us ought to hold himself in readiness to be taken at any moment."

She repeated the remark the next time she saw Pavel, adding:

"The idea of being a married woman under such conditions!"

"Oh, that's an _idee fixe_ of yours," he said, testily.

She gave him a look and dropped her eyes, resentfully.

The peace-offering came from him.

"Whew, what a cloud!" he said, pointing at her glum face. "Won't there be a single rift in it? Not a wee bit of a one for a single ray to come through?"

She smiled, heartily.

CHAPTER XXIX.

A HUNTED MONARCH.

The ministers were reporting to the Czar who had recently returned from Livadia. They were admitted one at a time. As they sat chatting under breath in the blue waiting room, with the white reflection of the snow that was falling outside, upon their faces, these elderly men, whose names were a.s.sociated in millions of minds with the notion of infinite dignity and power, looked like a group of anxious pet.i.tioners in the vestibule of some official.

An exception was made for Count Loris-Melikoff, who was with the Czar during the audiences of all his colleagues. The Supreme Executive Commission over which he had presided had been abolished some four months before. Nominally he was now simply in charge of the Department of the Interior, but in reality he continued to play the part of premier, a position he partly owed to Princess Dolgoruki, the Czar's young wife, who set great store by his liberal policy. She was said to be a woman of a rather progressive turn of mind, but whether she was or not, her fate hung on the life of her imperial husband and every measure that was calculated to pacify the Nihilists found a ready advocate in her. Indeed, she and the Count were united by a community of personal interests; for he had as many enemies at court as she, and his position depended upon the life of Alexander II. as much as hers.

The Czar was receiving the ministers in a chamber of moderate size, finished in sombre colours, with engaged columns of malachite, book-cases of ebony and silver, with carvings representing scenes from Russian history, and a large writing table to match. Statues of bronze and ivory stood between the book-cases and a striking life-size watercolour of Nicholas I. hung on the wall to the right of the Czar's chair. The falling snow outside was like a great impenetrable veil without beginning or end, descending from some unknown source and disappearing into some equally mysterious region. The room, whose high walls, dismally imposing, were supposed to hold the destinies of a hundred millions of human beings, was filled with l.u.s.treless wintry light. The Emperor, tall, erect, broad-shouldered, the image of easy dignity, but pale and with a touch of weariness in his large oval face, wore the undress uniform of a general of infantry. He was sixty-two and he was beginning to look it. He listened to the ministers with constrained attention. He showed exaggerated interest in the affairs of their respective departments, but they could see that his heart was not in their talk, and with unuttered maledictions for the upstart vice-Emperor, they made short work of their errands. They knew that the Interior Department was the only one that commanded the Czar's interest in those days.

At last the Emperor and his chief adviser were left alone. Both were silent. Loris-Melikoff was as strikingly oriental of feature as Alexander II. was European. Notwithstanding his splendid military career and uniform he had the appearance of a sharp-witted scientist rather than of a warrior. His swarthy complexion, shrewd oriental eyes and huge energetic oriental nose, flanked by greyer and longer side-whiskers than the Czar's, made him look like a representative of some foreign power.

There was pathos in both. Alexander II. had that pa.s.sion for life which comes to an old man upon marrying a pretty young woman. Yet foreigners who saw him during this period said that he looked like a hunted man. As to Count Melikoff, his advance had been so rapid, he was surrounded by so many enemies at court, and the changes by which he was trying to save the Czar's life and his own power, were beset by so many obstacles, that he could not help feeling like the peasant of the story who was made king for one day.

Naturally talkative and genially expansive, the Czar's manner toward people who were admitted to his intimacy was one of amiable informality.

The chief pathos of his fate sprang from the discrepancy between the Czar and the man in him, between a vindictive ruthlessness born of a blind sense of his autocratic honour and an affectionate, emotional nature with less grit than pride. Had he been a common mortal he would have made far more friends than enemies.

Count Loris-Melikoff had become accustomed to feel at home in his presence. At this minute, however, as the Czar was watching the snow flakes, with an air of idle curiosity, the Armenian had an overbearing sense of the distance between them. He knew that the Czar was anxious to talk about the revolutionists and that he hated to do so. His heart contracted with common human pity, yet in the silence that divided them it came over him that the man in front of him was the Czar, and a feeling of awe seized him like the one he used to experience at sight of the Emperor long before he was raised to his present position. This feeling pa.s.sed, however, the moment the Czar began to speak.

"Well?" he said, with sudden directness. "Anything new about that Michailoff fellow?" Alexandre Michailoff was the real name of the Janitor.

"Nothing new so far, your Majesty," Loris-Melikoff answered obsequiously, yet with something like triumph, as if the powerlessness of the police were only too natural and substantiated his views on the general state of things. "He is one of their chief ringleaders."

"And this has been known all along," the Emperor remarked with sad irony. "Such a thing would be inconceivable in any other capital in Europe."

"Quite so. But I feel that in other countries, the capture of miscreants like ours would be due less to the efficiency of the police than to the cordial cooperation of the public. The trouble is that our police is thrown on its own resources, Sire. It is practically fighting those wretches single-handed."

The Czar had a fit of coughing, the result of asthma. When it had subsided, he said with an air of suffering:

"Well, that's your theory. But then their public is not ours. The average Russian is not wide-awake enough to cooperate with the authorities." He had in mind his own address at Moscow in which he had appealed to the community at large for this very a.s.sistance in ferreting out sedition. The Will of the People had come into existence since then.

"Still, if our public were drawn into active cooperation with the Government, if it became habituated to a sense of the monarch's confidence in itself, it seems reasonable to suppose that the indolence of the community would then disappear. No people is capable of greater loyalty to the throne than your Majesty's. All that is needed is to lend to this devotion tangibility. This and this alone would enable your Majesty to cure the evil. What the body politic needs is judicious internal treatment. Surgical operations have proven futile. These are my sincerest convictions, your Majesty."