The White Terror and The Red Part 49

Here he had a much better look at her. She certainly was familiar to him, but he was still unable to locate her, and before he knew his own mind he let her pa.s.s. It was not until the train had pulled out, and its rear lights were rapidly sinking into the vast gloom of the night, that it dawned upon him that she looked like the girl he used to spy upon in St. Petersburg. Blue spectacles as a means of concealing one's ident.i.ty are quite a commonplace article, so he called himself names for not having thought of it in time and hastened to telegraph to the gendarmes at the next station to arrest the young woman, giving a description of Clara's disguise and general appearance.

Some three quarters of an hour later an answer came from the next station that the train had been detained for a careful search, but that no such woman could be found on it.

While that search was in progress Clara, her disguise removed, entered the "conspiracy house," where Olga had been waiting for her, in case she should have found it inconvenient to board the train.

"There you are!" Olga said, in despair, as she beheld her friend's smiling face in the doorway. "What has happened?"

"It's a fizzle, that's all. But it might have been worse than that.

There is a St. Petersburg fellow at the station. He knows me."

"Did he see you?" Olga demanded breathlessly.

"I should say he did," Clara replied with another smile. "Well, I thought it was all up. Gracious! didn't my feet grow weak under me. But my star has not gone back on me yet, it seems. I got into one of the cars just as the third bell was heard. I was sure he was close behind me, but, when I turned around, looking for a seat, I saw he was not there. He must have gone to another car for the moment, or something.

Anyhow, I tried to get out again. I thought I had nothing to lose, and--here I am. But look here, Olya[E], are you sure there is n.o.body outside?"

[E] Diminutive of Olga.

"I think I am," Olga answered firmly. "Why?"

"I thought I saw a queer looking individual as I turned into this street. I must have been mistaken. Still, I confess, the presence of that fellow in this town is anything but a pleasant surprise to me. I don't like it at all. I wonder why we have not heard from Masha about him."

The reason they had not heard from her was simply this, that the invasion of the St. Petersburg detectives had had such an overbearing effect on everybody in the local gendarmerie that her brother had become unusually reticent on the affairs of his office even at home.

Two or three hours had pa.s.sed, when Clara and Olga heard an ominous confusion of footsteps in the vestibule. The next moment the room was crowded with men, some in uniforms, others in citizens' clothes. One of the St. Petersburg officers rushed to a window where a blue medicine bottle--Clara's "window signal"--stood on the sill, to prevent either of the two Nihilist girls from removing it by way of warning to their friends.

"You here!" the tall, baronial-looking procureur, Princess Chertogoff's son-in-law, said to Olga, in amazement. He bowed to her most chivalrously, but she turned away from him with a contemptuous gesture.

"And may I ask for _your_ name, Miss," a gendarme officer accosted Clara.

"I decline to answer," she returned, simply. Her eyes were on a pistol which she saw in the hand of one of the gendarmes.

"You live in Miroslav, don't you?"

Instead of answering this question she sprang at the man who held the pistol, seized it from him and began firing at the wall. This was her subst.i.tute for a removal of the safety signal from the window.

The weapon was instantly knocked out of her hand by a blow with the flat of a gleaming sword, and she was forced into a seat, two men holding her tightly by the arms, while a third was tying a handkerchief around her bleeding hand.

"I merely wanted to alarm the neighbourhood," she said calmly. "But, of course, you people will turn it into a case of armed resistance."

When Orlovsky learned of Clara's and Olga's arrest, one of his first thoughts was about notifying Pavel, of whose relations toward Clara he had by this time been informed. It appeared that the only man he knew who had "underground" connections in the two capitals and was in a position to communicate with Boulatoff was the former leader of the Miroslav Circle, Elkin. This, however, did not stop Orlovsky. To Elkin he went and explained the situation to him.

"Elkin, darling, you know you are a soul of a fellow," he implored him.

"Pavel is either in St. Petersburg or in Moscow, and you are the only man who could get at him."

Elkin stood, thinking glumly, at the window for a few minutes, and then said:

"Very well, I am going."

He started on the same day, accompanied by a spy. That evening Orlovsky, the judge and several other members of the Miroslav Circle, were arrested at Orlovsky's house, and a few days later news came from Moscow that Pavel and Elkin had been taken in a cafe, while Makar had fallen into a "trap" at the house of an old friend of Elkin's, who had been seized several hours before.

CHAPTER XLIII.

A MESSAGE THROUGH THE WALL.

Months had pa.s.sed. Spring was three or four weeks old, but cell No. -- on the first floor of the Trubetzkoy Bastion, Fortress of Peter and Paul, had not yet tasted its caressing breath. It was a rather s.p.a.cious, high-ceiled vault, but being quite close to the stone fence outside, it was practically without the range of suns.h.i.+ne and breeze. Its window, which was high overhead, at the top of a sloping stretch of sill, sent down twilight at noonday and left it in the grip of night two or three hours after. The chill, damp air was laden with a stifling odour of must. The lower part of the walls was covered with a thick layer of mould which looked like a broad band of heavy tapestry of a dark-greenish hue.

The solitary inmate of this pit was walking back and forth diagonally, from corner to corner. He wore a loose, shapeless cloak of coa.r.s.e but flimsy material, which he was continually wrapping about his slim, emaciated figure. He was s.h.i.+vering. As he walked to and fro, his head was for the most part thrown back, his eyes raised to the window, whose sloping sill he could have scarcely touched with the tips of his fingers. Now and then he paused and turned toward one of the walls, as though listening for some sounds, and then, with an air of nerveless disappointment, he would resume his walk.

It was Pavel.

The spy who accompanied Elkin from Miroslav to Moscow had shadowed him in the ancient city until he saw him with Prince Boulatoff and then with Makar and a university student, in whose room the four revolutionists were arrested, shortly after, in the course of a heated debate between Makar and Elkin on the riots and the question of emigration to America.

During the first few weeks of Pavel's stay in the fortress the guards, who had been converted to revolutionary sympathies by a celebrated political prisoner named Nechayeff, had carried communications not only from prisoner to prisoner, but also from them to the revolutionists at large; so that the _Will of the People_ was at one time partly edited from this fortress, and a bold plot was even planned by Nechayeff to have the Czar locked up in a cell while he visited its cathedral. But these relations between the guards and the revolutionists, which lasted about a year, had finally been disclosed, and since then Pavel and the inmates of the other cells had been treated with brutal stringency.

Pavel's trial was not likely to take place for another year or two, but his fate was clear to him: death, probably commuted to life-imprisonment, which actually amounted to slow death in a s.p.a.cious grave like this vault, or in the mines of Siberia, was the usual doom of men charged with "crimes" like his. His future yawned before him in the form of a black, boundless cavern charged with dull, gnawing pain, like the pain that was choking him at this moment. The worst part of his torture was his solitude. The most inhuman physical suffering seemed easier to bear than this speechless, endless, excruciatingly monotonous solitude of his. "Oath-men" as the sworn-in attendants of the prison were called (under-sized, comical looking fellows, most of them) came into his cell three or four times a day--with food, or to put things to rights hastily--but neither they nor the gendarmes who invariably accompanied them ever answered his questions. One morning, in an excess of self-commiseration and resentment at their stolid taciturnity, he had spat in the face of a gendarme. He had done so, at the peril of being flogged, in the hope of hearing him curse, at least; but the gendarme merely wiped his bewhiskered face and went on watching the "oath-man"

silently.

Whenever Pavel was taken out for his 15-minute walk in a secluded little yard, which was once in two days, the sentinels he met would turn their backs on him, lest he should see more faces than was absolutely necessary. The warden and the prison doctor were the only human beings whose voices he could hear, and these were brutally laconic and brutally rude or ironical with him. To be taken to the prison office for an examination by the procureur was the one diversion which the near future held out to him; but then his near future might be a matter of weeks and might be a matter of months.

Back and forth he walked, at a spiritless, even pace, as monotonous as his days of gloom and misery, as that dull pain which was ceaselessly choking his throat and gnawing at his heart. At one moment he paused and felt his gums with his fingers. Were they swollen? Was he developing scurvy? Or was it mere imagination? He also pa.s.sed his hand over his cheeks, and it seemed to him that they were sunken a little more than they had been the day before. But the great subject of his thoughts to-day was his mother, and tantalising, heart-crus.h.i.+ng thoughts they were. Where was she? How was she? Was she alive at all? He pictured her committing suicide because of his doom, and the cruel vision persisted.

And if she was not dead, her life was little better than death. He tried to think of something else, but no, the appealing, reproachful image of his mother, of his poor dear mother who had scarcely had a day of happiness since she married, would not leave his mind. As a matter of fact, his efforts to think of something else were scarcely sincere. He would not shake that image out of his brain if he could. It was tearing his heart to pieces, yet he would rather stand all these tortures than shut his mother out of his thoughts. To talk to somebody was the only thing that could have saved him from the terrible pang that was harrowing him at this moment; but the chimes of the cathedral, which played the quarter-hours as well as the hours, and the crash of iron bolts at the opening of cells at meal-time were the only sounds that he could expect to hear to-day. His heart was writhing within him.

Something was clutching at his brain. He seemed to feel himself going mad. He was tempted to cry at the top of his voice; to cry like a wild beast; but, of course, he was not going to give such satisfaction to the enemy.

He gazed at the sloping window-sill. For the thousandth time a desire took hold of him to mount it and take a look through the gla.s.s; and for the thousandth time he cast a hopeless glance at his bed, at the table, the chair, the wash-stand: they were all nailed to the floor, a large earthen water-cup and a salt-cellar made of lead being the only movable things in his room.

Four months ago there had been a prisoner in the adjoining cell with whom he carried on long conversations by rapping out his words on the wall, but one day their talk had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence, after which that man had been removed. The cell had long remained empty, as could be inferred from the fact that Pavel never heard its door opened at meal-time. Since a week ago it had been tenanted again, but all his attempts at conversation with his new neighbour had so far been futile. His taps on the wall had been left unanswered.

Suddenly, as he was now pacing his floor, his heart melting with homesickness and anguish at the thought of his mother, he heard a rapid succession of fine, dry sounds on the right wall. He started, and, breathless and flushed with excitement, he listened. "Who are you?" the mould-grown wall demanded.

Pavel cast a look at the peephole in the heavy door, and seeing no eye in it, he took a turn or two up and down the room and stopped hard by the wall, upon which he rapped out his reply:

"Boulatoff. Who are you?"

"The Emperor of all Africa," came the answer.

"What?" Pavel asked in perplexity. "You have not finished your sentence, what were you saying?"

"Begone!" the wall returned. "How dare you doubt my t.i.tle? I am the Emperor of all Africa. How dare you speak to me? Away with you!"