The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  A SECOND COURTSHIP.

  The Czar was still in Livadia with his bride, abandoning himself to hissecond youth with a passion that was tinged with the pathos of imminenttragedy, when Count Loris-Melikoff telegraphed to him a plea for thelives of two revolutionists who had been sentenced to death, one ofthese being Alexandre, the man in whose lodgings the gendarmes had founda diagram of the Imperial dining hall. The distinguished Armenian wascontemplating reforms which he expected to leave no room for terrorism,and it was for the sake of these measures as well as of the Emperorhimself, that he was averse to having the bitterness of therevolutionists quickened by new executions. If they only let the Czarlive until those projects had been carried out, he thought, theirconspiracies would lose all reason of existence; at any rate, thesurreptitious support which they received from men of high socialposition would be withdrawn.

  But his despatch was followed by one from the Czarowitz, who, echoingthe views of the anti-Melikoff party at court, urged his father not toshow signs of weakness, and the sentence was allowed to stand.

  * * * * *

  At about nine o'clock in the morning of a cold autumn day, a fortnightafter the meeting of the Executive Committee which Clara attended,Pavel stood on a chair nailing a clothes rack to the wall. The room wasClara's. It was on the fifth floor of a house near a corner, withwindows commanding the two intersecting streets, where her windowsignals could be seen at a considerable distance. She rented itfurnished, with samovar service, but the curtains and some bits ofbric-a-brac had been bought by Pavel who took more interest in thesethings and was handier about the house than she. He himself lived in thehouse of a distant relative, an elderly widow, who took great pride inhim and had no doubt that he led the life of the average young man ofhis class, that is to say, he spent his nights and his mamma's rubles onan endless crop of wild oats. To Clara's landlady he was known as abrother of hers. On the present occasion he had found his fiancee out,but a mark on the door had told him that she would soon be back.Presently she came in. She wore a tall fur cap and her cheeks gleamed,exhaling the freshness of girlish health and of the cold weather of thestreet, but she looked grave. Pavel threw away his hammer and pounceddown upon her with open arms. She repulsed him gently.

  "Stop," she whispered, drearily, unbuttoning her cloak and drawing anewspaper from its inner pocket. "There is terrible news this morning."

  The execution of Alexandre and the other revolutionist had taken placethe day before, and the newspapers were allowed to print a very briefaccount of it--how they bade each other good-bye on the scaffold andhow, when Alexandre saw the death-shroud on his friend, his eyes filledwith tears. The two condemned men had been great chums for severalyears, Alexandre having once wrested the other from a convoy. Now theydied together.

  As Pavel read the account of the double execution, standing by thewindow, a flush of overpowering despair shot into his chest and diffuseditself through his legs.

  "They have choked them after all," he gasped out.

  Clara, who sat at a table watching him, dropped her head on her foldedarms, in a paroxysm of quick, bitter sobbing.

  The few details in the newspaper report gave vividness to the grewsomescene. The two executed men had been among Pavel's most intimatefriends. The image of Alexandre, his arms pinioned, looking on withtears while a white shroud was being slipped over his fellow-prisoner,was tearing at his heart with cruel insistence.

  "Oh, it's terrible, Clarochka!" he moaned, dropping by her side,nestling to her, and bursting into tears in her bosom. Then, getting up,he took to walking back and forth, vehemently. "They have choked them,the blood-drinkers," he muttered. "They have done it after all." He fellsilent, pacing the floor in despair, and then burst out once again:"They have choked them, the vampires."

  "But war is war," she said, for something to say to him, her own facedistorted with her struggle against a flow of tears.

  "Oh, I don't know. All I do know is that they have been murdered, thatthey are no more." A minute or two later he turned upon her with a lookfull of ghastly malice. "War did you say? The government can't haveenough of it, can it? Well, it shall have all the war it wants. Theparty has only shown it the blossoms; the berries are still to come."

  The world seemed to be divided into those who had known the two executedmen personally and those who had not. For the moment there seemed to belittle in common between him and Clara. She strained him to a seat byher 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 bespared," he said. "I was ashamed to say so, but I did. But no! theychoked them. They choked them. Idiots that they are. They imagine theycan hang every honest man in the country."

  "Loris-Melikoff is even worse than the Czar. His liberalism is nothingbut hypocrisy. There can no longer be any question about it."

  "He is a rogue of the deepest dye. He is a bungling hypocrite, anabominable liar and a mangy coward, that's what he is. But to the devilwith him! This is not the point. Oh, nothing is the point. Nothingexcept that they have been murdered."

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

  Left alone, Clara began to pace the floor slowly. Not having knowneither Alexandre or the man who had died with him, she was exempt fromthat acute agony of grief which was her lover's; but there was the imageof two men in death-shrouds, a stirring image of martyrdom, before hervision. Pity, the hunger of revenge and a loftier feeling--the thirst ofself-sacrifice to the cause of liberty--swelled her heart. Back andforth she walked, slowly, solemnly, her hands gently clasped behind her,her soul in a state of excitement that was coupled with a peculiar stateof physical tranquillity, her mind apparently seeing things with aperspicacity the like of which it had never enjoyed before. Her future,her duties, her relation to the rest of the world, her whole life--allwas wonderfully clear to her, and in spite of her anguish over the deathof the two men she felt singularly happy. It seemed to be a matter ofcourse that her party would now undertake some new plot, one exceedingin boldness and magnitude all its predecessors. Many lives would have tobe staked. She would offer hers. Matrimony was out of the question at atime like this. She conjured that image of the insane woman clasping arag to her bosom in support of her position. She longed to be near Pavelagain. In her mind she embraced him tenderly, argued with him, openedher 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 dayslater.

  "Oh, we shall all have to offer our lives," he replied. "But for God'ssake 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. Whathas 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 Icannot exist without you. I am frightfully lonely and that stands in theway of my work. Dash it, I feel just as I did last summer before I tookcourage to tell you that I was insanely in love with you."

  She drew him to her, with a smile at once of happiness and amusement.

  "Poor boy! It's enough to break one's heart. Poor little dear!" shejoked 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 apartfrom 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 retortedearnestly. "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 passed. Unknown to her lover, Clara had spoken to
theJanitor, intimating her readiness to offer her life, and asking for oneof the most dangerous assignments the Governing Board could give her.She was waiting for an answer, when the startling news spread among therevolutionists that the Janitor was in the hands of the enemy and thatthe capture of that maniac of caution had been the result of a mostinsane 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 quantity of dynamite and some other things confiscated at hislodgings pointed to a vigorous renewal of terroristic activity. Anotherplot 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 werefutile. Indeed, the circumstances of the Janitor's arrest only furnishednew proof of the ineptitude and shiftlessness of those whose business itwas to ferret out Nihilism.

  A few days before the Janitor was taken the police received word abouttwo portraits which had been left for reproduction at a well-knownphotograph gallery and in which the photographer had recognised the twoNihilists who had recently been hanged. Instead of a detective beingdetailed, however, to lie in wait for the unknown man, the proprietor ofthe gallery was simply ordered to notify the police when he came for hispictures. The unknown man was the Janitor. When he called for thephotographs, an awkward attempt was made to detain him which aroused hissuspicion. He pleaded haste and made for the door. When a porter barredhis way he scared him off by thrusting his hand into an emptypistol-pocket. A similar order for photographs of the two executedTerrorists had been given by him to another well-known photographer nextdoor to the former place, and it was when he called there, a day or twoafter his narrow escape at the adjoining gallery, that he was seized bydetectives.

  When his landlady heard that her "star" lodger, the punctiliousgovernment official and retired army officer, was neither an officialnor a retired officer, but a leading Nihilist, she fainted. Thegendarmes had been hunting for him since he broke away from his captorson his way to prison one evening more than two years before. They hadheard that it was he who subsequently organised the railroad plot nearMoscow; also that he had been connected with the assassination of thechief of gendarmes and with the shooting at the Czar in front of theWinter Palace. Yet he had freely moved about the streets of St.Petersburg these two years, the busiest agitator and conspirator in thecity, until, in a moment of morbid foolhardiness, he practicallysurrendered himself to the police.

  When Clara heard of his arrest, she clapped her hands together, Yiddishfashion. "If the Janitor has been arrested as a result of carelessness,"she exclaimed, "then everyone of us ought to hold himself in readinessto 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 therebe a single rift in it? Not a wee bit of a one for a single ray to comethrough?"

  She smiled, heartily.