The White Terror and The Red Part 6

"Isn't there? It was Pani Oginska's son who gave me the first start,"

the other said, blissfully, uttering the name in a lowered voice. "If it had not been for him I should still be immersed in the depths of darkness."

"'Immersed in the depths of darkness!' There is a phrase for you! Why should you use high-flown language like that?"

Parmet smiled, shrugging his shoulders bashfully. "Will you kindly try me on Greek now?" he said.

"One second. That must have been quite a little while ago when Pani Oginska's son taught you, wasn't it?"

Parmet tiptoed over to the open door, closed it, tiptoed back and said: "Not quite two years. If you knew what a man of gold he was! They are slowly killing him, the murderers. And why? What had he done? He could not harm a fly. He is all goodness, an angel like his mother. He was of delicate health when they took him, and now he is melting like a candle. Why, oh why, should men like him have to perish that way?"

"Isn't it rather risky for you to be coming here?" Pavel demanded, looking him over curiously.

Parmet smiled, a queer, outlandish smile, at once nave and knowing, as he replied:

"Risky? No. What does an old-fas.h.i.+oned Jew like myself care about politics? I am supposed to come here on business. Did you know Eugene?"

"Who is Eugene? Pani Oginska's son?"

"Yes. I thought you knew him."

"I wish I had. People like him are the only ones worth knowing. Most of the others are scoundrels, humbugs, cold-blooded egoists; that's what they are."

So talking, they gradually confided to each other the story of their respective conversions and tribulations. Parmet followed the prince's tale first with a look of childlike curiosity and then with an air that betrayed emotion. As he listened he kept rubbing his hand nervously.

When Pavel had concluded, the Jew took to tiptoeing up and down the room, stopped in front of him and said, with great ardour:

"Don't grieve, my dear man. I may be able to help you. I know a friend of Eugene's who could put you in touch with the proper persons."

"Is he in St. Petersburg?"

"No, but that's no matter. He can arrange it. He knows somebody there.

I'll see him as soon as I can, even if I have to travel many miles for it."

Pavel grasped his hand silently.

"Well," the other said. "There was a time when I thought every Christian hard-hearted and cruel. Now I am ashamed of myself for having harboured such ideas in my mind. Every Christian whose acquaintance I happen to make turns out to be an angel rather than a human being."

"Why these compliments?" Pavel snarled. "Most of the Christians I know are knaves. The whole world is made up of knaves for that matter."

When Pani Oginska came home and saw them together, she said:

"I knew I should find you two making love to each other."

A month or two after Pavel's return to St. Petersburg a tall blond young man with typical Great-Russian features looked him up at the university.

"I have received word from the south about you," he said, without introducing himself.

"I am pleased to meet you," Pavel returned gruffly, "but I hope I won't be kept on probation and be subjected to all sorts of humiliations."

"Why, why," the other said, in confusion. "I'll be glad to let you have any kind of literature there is and to introduce you to other comrades.

That's why I have been looking for you. Why should you take it that way?"

Pavel's face broke into a smile. "Dashed if I know why I should.

Something possessed me to put on a harsh front. It was mere parading, I suppose. Don't mind it. What shall I call you?"

"Why--er--oh, call me anything," the other answered, colouring.

"Very well, then. I'll call you Peter; or no, will 'G.o.dfather' do? That is, provided you are really going to be one to me," Pavel said, in a vain struggle to suppress his exultation.

"It'll be all right," his new acquaintance replied with bashful ardour.

"G.o.dfather, then?"

G.o.dfather introduced him to several other "radicals," who gave him underground prints and a list of legitimate books for a course of "serious" reading. He would stay at home a whole week at a time without dressing or going down for his meals, perusing volume after volume, paper after paper. When he did dress and go out it was to get more books or to seek answers to the questions which disturbed his peace. He was in a state of vernal agitation, in a fever of lofty impulses. And so much like a conspirator did he feel by now, that he no longer even thought of opening his mind to his mother. Indeed, the change that had come over him was so complete that she was not likely to understand him if he had.

To drive her to despair seemed to be the only result he could expect of such a confession. The secret movement appealed to him as a host of saints. He longed to be one of them, to be martyred with them. It was clear to him that some day he would die for the Russian people; die a slow, a terrible death; and this slow, terrible death impressed him as the highest pinnacle of happiness.

When his mother came to see him, a year later, she thought he was in love.

He was in the thick of the movement by that time. He was learning shoemaking with a view to settling in a village. He would earn his livelihood in the sweat of his brow, and he would carry the light of his lofty ideas into the hovels of the suffering peasantry. But his plans in this direction were never realized. The period of "going to the people"

soon came to an end.

The mothlike self-immolation of university students continued, but the spirit of unresisting martyrdom could not last. Violence was bound to result from it.

The next year saw the celebrated "trial of 193," mostly college men and college women. They were charged with political propaganda, and the bold stand they took thrilled the country. The actual number tried was, indeed, much less than 193, for of those who had been kept in prison in connection with that case as many as seventy had perished in their cold, damp cells while waiting to be arraigned. Of those who were tried many were acquitted, but instead of regaining their liberty a large number of these were transported to Siberia "by administrative order." Moreover, hundreds of people were slowly killed in the dungeons or exiled to Siberia without any process of law whatsoever. School children were buried in these consumption breeding cells; whole families were ruined because one of their members was accused of reading a socialist pamphlet. Student girls were subjected to indignities by dissolute officials--all "by administrative order."

The Russian penal code imposes the same penalty for disfiguring the eyes of an imperial portrait as it does for blinding a live subject of the Czar. But political suspects were tortured without regard even to this code.

It gradually dawned upon the propagandists that instead of being decimated in a fruitless attempt to get at the common people they should first devote themselves to an effort in the direction of free speech. By a series of bold attacks it was expected to extort the desired reforms from the government. Nothing was lawless, so it was argued, when directed, in self-defence, against the representatives of a system that was the embodiment of bloodthirsty lawlessness.

Thus peaceful missionaries became Terrorists. The government inaugurated a system of promiscuous executions; the once unresisting propagandists retaliated by a.s.sa.s.sination after a.s.sa.s.sination. Socialists were hanged for disseminating their ideas or for resisting arrest; high officials were stabbed or shot down for the bloodthirsty cruelty with which they fought the movement; and finally a series of plots was inaugurated aiming at the life of the emperor himself.

The White Terror of the throne was met by the Red Terror of the Revolution.

CHAPTER VI.

A MEETING ON NEW TERMS.

It was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy young engineer in Kharkoff--a slender little man with eyelids that looked swollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsy appearance--was filled with Nihilists come to hear "an important man from St. Petersburg." The governor of the province had recently been killed for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of the local university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made on the life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement was a.s.serting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address by the stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was known here as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.

The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand, but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several more listeners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. He and Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslav gymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerably changed, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin's face as anaemic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkin had been expelled from the University for signing some sort of pet.i.tion. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionary business. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, and his days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for more than tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to give lessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man of spotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certain kind of magnetism.

When Elkin discovered who the important revolutionist from St.

Petersburg was the blood rushed to his face. It was a most disagreeable surprise. But Pavel greeted him with a cordiality so free from consciousness, and his roaring laughter, as he compared the circ.u.mstances of their last quarrel and those that surrounded their present meeting, was so hearty that Elkin's hostility gave way to a feeling of elation at being so well received by the lion of the evening.

He was one of the rank and file of the local "Circles," and the prominence into which Pavel's attention brought him at this meeting, in the presence of several of his chums, gave him a sense of promotion and triumph. He wished he could whisper into the ear of everybody present that this important revolutionist who was known to the gathering as Nikolai was Prince Boulatoff.