FOR LOVE OF A WOMAN
I had discovered at a glance that the spy was not a Russian; and that
being the case he was presumably engaged in his present occupation for
pay only, and I believed that I could turn what seemed to be a
catastrophe into a decided advantage. Experience had taught me long ago
that the Russian nihilist is a fanatic who possesses distorted ideas of
patriotism upon which he builds a theory of government, and that
nothing short of death can turn him from his purpose. But with the
foreigners who ally themselves with the fortunes of the
nihilists--Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, etc.--it is different. They
are always open to argument--for pay--although they are hardly to be
relied upon even then, for they will sell out to another with the same
celerity with which they formerly disposed of themselves to you.
"You are a Frenchman, are you not?" I asked this man, as soon as we
were alone together.
"Yes," he replied, reluctantly.
"Do you know what is in store for you now?"
"Siberia, or death; one is as bad as the other. I'm only sorry that I
did not have a chance to use my knife before you struck me; that's
all."
"I have not a doubt of it. And yet you may escape both, Siberia and
death, if you are reasonable."
"How? I'll be reasonable fast enough if you can prove that to me."
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes; as well as I do French, and Russian, and German, and half a dozen
other languages."
"Then you heard and understood everything that passed between the
prince and me?"
"Certainly. I might have pretended that I did not, if I had thought to
do so. Still it would have made no difference, any way."
"Not much, that's a fact. Why did you hide in this room?"
"To hear what you said. To get what information I could. I certainly
did not do it for the fun of the thing."
"Well, my man, I will make a bargain with you. If you will tell me all
that I want to know and answer truthfully every question I ask, I will
engage that you shall neither go to Siberia nor to your death. You will
go to prison, and I will keep you there long enough to find out if your
information is correct. If it is, I will set you free as soon as I can
afford to do so; if it is not, then Siberia, and the worst that there
is in that delightful country, too. What do you say?"
"How long will you keep me in prison?"
"A month--six months--a year--as long as I deem it necessary. I shall
want you near me where I can talk to you frequently, whenever the fancy
takes me."
"I'll see you damned first."
"Very well. I'm sorry for you. A few months in a comfortable prison,
with the best of food, books to read, paper and pens at your disposal,
permission to communicate with your friends as often as you please so
long as I see your letters before they are sent away, ought to be
preferable to ending your life in the mines of frozen Siberia; but the
choice is yours."
"It is."
"Then why don't you accept my offer?"
"Because I don't believe you. You will get all that you want out of me,
and then I will travel East any way."
"That is a chance that you will have to take." I arose and walked
across the room to give him an opportunity to think it over. "You look
to me like one who has seen better days," I said, when I returned. "You
evidently came from a very good family; you are an educated man, and
you are young. In all probability you joined the nihilists without
really meaning to do so, and having later been selected for this work
here, on account of your ability, you were afraid to refuse it. Suppose
that I should keep you imprisoned a year, or even two, what is that to
the fate that awaits you if you refuse to do as I ask, or to that which
you would have met, if you had refused to obey the men who commanded
you to come here? Answer me."
"A joke."
"Precisely. Now, here is another question. If I should let you go free
after you betray those men to me, what would your life be worth the
moment you got upon the street, even if I provided you with passports
out of the country?"
"Nothing."
"They would find you, wouldn't they?"
"To a certainty."
"And kill you?"
"As surely as you stand there."
"On the other hand, if I send you to a prison here in St. Petersburg,
as I have proposed, you will be thought by them to be dead, or in
Siberia, which is about the same thing. In the mean time you can write
to any one whom you wish to have know that you are still alive; you can
receive replies under an assumed name, and----"
"Enough, sir. I accept. You guessed rightly when you said that I am not
a nihilist at heart. I am one because I love a woman who is one. That
will suffice for the present. Later, I may tell you more about it. I am
disposed to make another condition concerning her but I see that it
would be useless; and perhaps you will grant me a favor if I ask it,
when you discover that I have not deceived you in what I shall tell
you."
"You may be quite sure of it, if it is a reasonable one. Now tell me
your name."
"You do not care about my true name, I suppose?"
"I want the one by which you are known among the nihilists."
"Jean Morét."
"And here, in the palace?"
"The same."
"I shall send you to your prison now. I cannot promise what it will be
for to-night. To-morrow I will see you and will keep my word in every
respect. In the mean time I want you to think over all that you have to
say to me so that we may lose as little time as possible when we meet
again."
I left him then and went to the door. Outside, waiting in the corridor
was the prince, and in a few words I explained to him what had taken
place during his absence at the same time apologizing for having sent
him from the room. Then I asked that the captain of the palace guard be
sent for, and in a few moments Jean Morét was placed in his care. After
that the prince and I smoked another cigarette together and then parted
for the night.
"Mr. Derrington," he said, as he was about to take his leave, "I am
more than ever convinced that you are the right man in the right place.
Tell me how you discovered the presence of that spy. I had no idea that
he was there, and thought that we were entirely alone."
"I knew he was there the moment we entered the room," I replied. "It is
my habit to glance at everything in sight whenever I enter an
apartment, and I do it now without realizing that I do so, if you can
understand the seeming paradox. When we passed the threshold I saw
instantly that one of the curtains did not hang properly, so I seated
myself in a position from which I could keep it in view. Twice I saw
that it moved; a very little to be sure, but enough to satisfy me that
somebody was concealed behind it That is the reason why I rather forced
the conversation in English. The rest you know. I am convinced that the
man we captured is the victim of circumstances, and I think I can make
him very valuable."
"Well," acknowledged the prince, "there might have been a man behind
every one of the curtains and I would not have thought to suspect it.
This service alone, Mr. Derrington, is worth all the pay you will draw
from Russia."
"Yes," I replied, "for I believe that the spy will confess to me that
he was sent there with orders to murder the czar."
"My God! And even now there may be others of the same sort in the
palace."
"No; I hardly think that. The nihilists would not be likely to send
more than one at a time on such a dangerous errand."
Morét confessed to me the following day, and I speedily was convinced
that my suppositions concerning him were correct. He had not had the
brutal courage to carry out his orders; and already he had received
several warnings from his compatriots that if another week passed
without his accomplishment of the design, his own life would pay the
forfeit. He was in that room awaiting my arrival when he heard me
approaching with the prince, and had concealed himself behind the
curtain without any definite purpose other than to hear all that he
could.
It is hardly necessary, and there is not space, for me to go into the
details of my subsequent talks with Morét. Suffice it to say that the
information I gleaned in that way, proved of inestimable value to my
work. From it I learned the names of all the leading nihilists of St.
Petersburg and Moscow, their meeting places, their passwords, and
several of their ciphers. Concerning their plans for the future, beyond
those in which he was personally engaged, Morét knew almost nothing;
but he did put me in the way of finding out nearly all that I wished to
know. Nor is it necessary that I should describe my subsequent
interviews with the emperor. My plans were adopted almost without a
correction--and most of those I suggested myself--so that by the time I
had been an inmate of the palace for a week, the reorganization of the
Fraternity of Silence was well under way, and ere a month had passed it
was an established fact.
There was one point upon which Morét stubbornly refused to talk, and
that was concerning the woman who had led him into the difficulty, and
who, he confessed, was the brains and the real head of the society. I
questioned him very closely and so decided in my own mind that she was
prominent at the capital; but at the last he positively refused to
answer any further questions concerning her, saying that he would
rather go to Siberia and have done with it at once, than to betray her.
I desisted, therefore, believing that ultimately he would denounce her
to me without knowing that he had done so, and events proved that I was
right although they also demonstrated that it would have been much
better for all concerned had he trusted me implicitly in the beginning.
Thus, at the end of a month succeeding the night of my ride from the
hotel to the palace with the prince, I was prepared to commence work in
earnest; but it must not be supposed that I had been idle, personally,
during that time.
In fact I was never so busy in all my life as during those four weeks
of preparation for the stupendous task I had set myself; and you will
understand that there were countless things to do, unnumbered details
to arrange, and a thousand and one ramifications of the work to be
planned and plotted and thoroughly comprehended, not alone by myself,
but by the men I would gather around me to work under my direction.
The organization of a secret service bureau, no matter how general may
be its duties, is at least a monumental task; but the organization of
such a bureau as this one whose very existence must remain a secret
from all the world, presented difficulties not to be met with or
contended against under any other circumstances.
It was necessary that I should become the chief over an army of men,
and it was equally imperative that not one person among the rank and
file of that army should know of my existence, as it was related to
them. With the chiefs of departments and sections, it was necessary
that I should have intercourse and interviews, but I had already made
my mental selection of persons to fill those positions, when I arrived
in St. Petersburg, and the organization of the several departments was
to be left in their hands.
I was determined that there should be no phase of Russian life which
could hide itself away from the skill of my investigating forces; from
palace to hovel, from the highest official in the Russian diplomatic
service and in the army to the meanest servant or laborer, my sources
of knowledge must extend, and every detail of it all must necessarily
be so complete as to render it not only exact, but absolutely under my
personal control and direction, without however in any way creating the
suspicion that I was personally interested. Presently you will
understand more perfectly how this all came about, and in quite a
natural way it would seem, for always things accomplished seem easy
enough to the casual observer; and you who read are only observers
after all. You are receiving a bit of unwritten history which closely
concerned the Russian empire and without which the assassination of
Alexander would undoubtedly have happened many years before it did, for
I give to myself the credit of having extended the days of that really
great but much misunderstood Moscovite gentleman.
At the time of my appearance in St. Petersburg the forces of nihilism
had assumed proportions greater than they had ever attained before or
will ever attain to again, thanks to my activities. The palace itself
was a hotbed of conspiracy; the rank and file of the army was so
disaffected that the officers never knew whom they could depend upon or
whom they might trust; a secret pressure of the thumb, indeterminate in
its character but nevertheless significant, was likely to be received
from any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, and
a princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as any
ordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself was
merely a tentative question which might be translated by the words:
"Are you a nihilist?" and you might understand it and reply to it by a
returning pressure of acquiescence, or ignore it utterly, as you
pleased. The pressure itself was so slight, was carelessly given and
might so readily be attributed to a careless motion of the hand that it
could not betray the person who made it; nor could the answering
pressure do so.
I had not been long at the palace before I discovered that many of the
high officials who had ready and constant access there had become
inoculated with the nihilistic bacilli and although I had no doubt that
many of them were at heart loyal to the emperor, I already knew better
than they did the immensity of the obligation they had undertaken in
swearing allegiance to an association of persons dominated by fanatics
and by actual criminals whose trade was murder and whose chiefest
pleasures and relaxation was the study of how best to bring about
entire social upheaval.
The confession of Morét enabled me to read every sign however slight
that was made by these persons and the four weeks of my domicile in the
apartment of the palace that had been assigned to me served me as
nothing else could have done in this respect.
You have already been told that this was by no means my first
experience in St. Petersburg and with nihilism; but I must confess that
extensive as my information had been and was I had never for a moment
contemplated the vast resources of this revolutionary order, its
unlimited ramifications and its boundless possibilities for evil. To
discover as I speedily did that princes of the blood, that ladies high
in place, that generals in the army and lesser officers under them were
among the ranks of the nihilists, was an astounding fact which I had
not contemplated and which I was ill prepared to receive so soon after
my arrival. It extended the requirements of my operation; it increased
ten fold, nay a hundred fold, my obligations to the czar in whose
service I was now sworn.
It seems difficult to imagine a beautiful woman as being at the head
and front of such an organization which discusses murder and which
arranges for wholesale assassination with the same equanimity of
conscience that a hunting party at an English country estate would
arrange for the slaughter of rabbits and pheasants.
But I was destined soon to discover that even this could be true. I was
destined soon to be brought in contact with a beautiful woman who was
not only high in place and a favorite with the czar himself, but who
was veritably a leader in the plots against him.