large force of devoted and trustworthy workers; and the arrests that had
been made just before my arrival had considerably thinned their ranks.
This circumstance, as I have said, changed the nature of my own
relations with the revolutionary organisation. Hitherto my visits to the
town had been short, only to spend my school holidays in fact. Very
young, moreover, I had never belonged to any of the clubs; and my
friendships with their members had been purely personal. Now, however, I
was older, and I had come to stop at X---- for several months. In the
face of the gaps the late arrests had made in the little army of
revolutionists, I felt that I must enlist. I offered my services, and
they were accepted.
Towards the middle of the summer, my uncle and aunt went to Moroznoie, a
little village near the town where their property lay. Leaving St.
Petersburg before the end of the University year, I, a student of
medicine, had been obliged to put off my examinations until the autumn.
These examinations, or rather, my necessity to work and prepare for
them, coupled with the presence of a fine public library at X----, gave
me the pretext I needed to stay behind during the family villegiatura.
After some opposition, and a good deal of talk about the superiority of
country air, my uncle and aunt consented--the more easily, perhaps,
because, after all, I was not to be alone; my Aunt Vera and two servants
were to remain in the town house. Besides, my uncle and his wife were
often coming back for a day or two at a time, and I promised to pass all
my Sundays with them. This arrangement suited me perfectly. My Aunt
Vera, my dead father's sister, was the sweetest and gentlest of women,
an invalid, with an infinite tenderness for Serge and myself, the
orphans of her favourite brother. The servants also, an old nurse and a
gardener, were entirely devoted to my family and to me. I was therefore
free, mistress of the house, of my time, of myself. Divided between my
studies, a few visits paid and received, and my weekly trip to
Moroznoie, my life flowed peacefully, monotonously enough--on the
surface.
[Illustration: "WE ARE BETRAYED!"]
Down deep, alas! it was not the same. Our revolutionary group was being
harried by the police, and their arrests and domiciliary visits were
conducted with so much skill and certainty, we were forced to believe
at last that we were betrayed by a traitor or a spy among our own
numbers. Strictly watched by the police, who kept us "moving on,"
avoided on that account by some of our friends, and knowing perfectly
well that a single false step might bring ruin not only upon ourselves,
but upon many others, we were obliged to be extremely cautious, and not
to meet too often. A few furtive interviews now and again for the
interchange of news, a few sparsely attended rendezvous for the purpose
of keeping the threads of our organisation together, were pretty nearly
all that we thought safe to permit ourselves. This mode of life--so
tranquil to outward appearance, but in reality so full of anxiety for
each and all; a life without a to-morrow, so that when we parted we did
not know whether we should ever meet again, and it became our habit to
say _Adieu_ instead of _Au revoir_--lasted for me about five months.
Melancholy enough, indeed, it had notwithstanding a charm of its own, a
charm that sprang partly, perhaps, from the consciousness of dangers
incurred for a noble object, and from the feeling of grave moral
responsibility that we all had. A few episodes of that time are deeply
fixed in my memory. A meeting we held one evening at twilight in a rich
park near the town, a park that belonged to a high personage at the
Imperial Court, whose son was one of us. There we met and whispered, and
the murmur of the leaves overhead and the deepening shadows of the
nightfall lent an intense colour of poetry to the situation. And then
another meeting, in the poor little lodging of a factory-operative--a
special meeting, called because our suspicions of treason within our own
ranks had centred now upon a certain individual, a student, a college
friend of my cousins, a constant visitor at our house. At this meeting a
plan was adopted to test our suspect, and prove whether or not he was
the guilty man. I, the next time he called, was to put him on a false
scent; I was to tell him that a reunion of Nihilists would be held at a
given place and a given time; and then we would await developments. I
was also to draw him out, if possible, and make him convict himself from
his own mouth. But this I could not do. I put him on the false scent;
but I couldn't draw him out. It is terrible to hold the life of a human
being between your hands, even though that human being be the basest of
cowards and traitors.
Well, at the time and place that I told him of, surely enough, the
police turned up, and naturally they found nobody there. But during the
two following nights twenty fresh arrests took place; and I was one of
those arrested. My cousins' friend, feeling himself discovered and
menaced, had made haste to deliver us into the hands of our enemies!
[Illustration: "I WAITED A MOMENT TO TAKE BREATH."]
That evening I had come home rather late, and had then sat and chatted
for a long while with aunt Vera, so that it was well towards midnight
before I started to go to bed. Half-way upstairs, I was stopped by a
noise; footsteps and stifled voices, mingled with the clang of spurs and
sabres. I waited a moment, to take breath, which had failed me
suddenly; then I went back downstairs. A violent pull at the bell, an
imperative pull, sounded at the garden gate; and in a moment was
followed by another at the door of the house. It woke the old nurse, and
brought my aunt Vera from her room. Having been a little forewarned by
me of the possibility of such a visit as this, she questioned me with a
frightened glance. I answered "Yes," by a sign of the head, and begged
her under my breath to delay "them" as long as possible before letting
"them" come in. The idea of being able to render me a service, perhaps
the last, gave her strength and courage; and while slowly, very slowly,
she moved towards the door, where the nocturnal visitors were getting
impatient and trying to force the lock, I went into the dining-room. A
moment later I heard her sweet trembling voice assuring Monsieur le
Colonel de Gendarmerie that there was no one in the house; all the
family were at Moroznoie; my uncle had been in town on Monday, but had
left again on Tuesday, and wouldn't return till the end of next week;
and there was no one here but herself, the speaker, and a young lady
visiting her. In this little respite, which I had arranged for myself
without too well knowing why, I remained inert in the room, lighted
feebly by a single candle, and tried to gather my thoughts together:
they were slow enough to respond to my efforts. My first notion was that
of flight, and, automatically, I opened a window. Close at hand, behind
some shrubbery, I perceived the glitter of a gendarme's uniform. There
would surely be others in the garden and in the courtyard; and for the
rest, fly--? How, and whither? I shut the window, and coming back to the
middle of the room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the chimney-glass. I
was very pale. Was I going to be a coward? This question, and that pale
face in the mirror, awoke in me other thoughts, brought back to my
memory other faces: that of my brother, who, a few months before, had
gone so bravely from his home, to which he would never return, to the
prison that he would perhaps never leave; those of friends lately
arrested; those of so many, many noble men and women. Was I going to be
a coward? So the examples set by these others turned my attention from
myself, calmed me, gave me strength. I could hear the voice of Colonel
P----, who, impatient of my aunt's parleying, briefly bade her hold her
tongue, and conduct him to the presence of her niece, Mademoiselle
Sophie. That voice, rude and gross, had the effect of changing the moral
depression which I had felt a moment ago into a sort of intense nervous
excitement; and at the moment when the Colonel, followed by his men,
appeared upon the threshold of the dining-room, honouring me with the
very least respectful of bows, I, instead of saluting him in return, met
him with a gaze as fixed and haughty as his own.
[Illustration: "MET HIM WITH A GAZE AS FIXED AND HAUGHTY AS HIS OWN."]
A minute later the Colonel was installed at the dinner-table, with the
whole household arraigned before him, and everybody forbidden to leave
the room. He asked my aunt Vera for the keys of the house, and the
search began. The gendarmes scattered themselves through all the rooms,
through the garden, the courtyard, the offices, and turned everything
upside down, emptying wardrobes and cupboards, unmaking the beds, moving
the articles of furniture to see that nothing was hidden behind them,
and trying the screws to discover if there were any secret drawers. In
my bedroom, which was of course the object of a very particular
attention, a spy dressed in civilian's costume got up on the tables and
chairs, and tapped on the walls. Another drew the ashes, still hot, from
the stove, and examined them by the light of a lamp, held by a big
gendarme. From time to time these men would come back to the
dining-room, bringing armfuls of books, and school papers belonging to
my cousins, which they would deposit upon the table before Colonel
P----. After looking them over, he would throw them aside with such
manifest ill humour, that I, who by this time had myself completely
under control, couldn't let the occasion pass to condole with him on the
sad nature of his trade. The whole search was a useless and odious
farce, for I knew that there was nothing in the house of the kind they
were looking for. Still I wasn't sorry to let them prolong it, for that
gave me more time to stay there at home, beside my aunt Vera, who,
smaller and feebler and paler than ever, turned her dear eyes, full of
fear and tenderness, upon my face, and kept stroking my hand with her
two trembling ones.
[Illustration: "A LAMP HELD BY A BIG GENDARME."]
The search was nearly over, when a gendarme came in from the stable with
a great parcel of books, done up in green cloth, which he laid before
the Colonel. Opened, the parcel proved to contain not books only, but
_forbidden_ books--books by Herbert Spencer, by Mr. Ruskin, by Monsieur
Renan! I was astonished at seeing them, and my first thought was that
they belonged to my brother, who might have forgotten them there in the
stable, or to my cousins, who, without being revolutionists, were
interested in forbidden literature just because it was forbidden. So
when the Colonel, having finished his inspection of them, asked me whom
they belonged to, I answered quietly, "To me." My aunt Vera, to whom I
had always promised never to bring "forbidden" things into the house,
looked at me sadly, reproachfully. Ah! my dear aunt, I lied in saying
they were mine; but in my situation a few forbidden books couldn't
matter much; whereas for the others, for my innocent cousins--who knows
what serious trouble they might have got them into?
The Colonel demanded, "Where do these books come from?"
"From the people who had them last."
"Their names?"
"What, Colonel! You, the chief of the secret police of X----, you don't
know!"
This answer kindled a light of anger in his little Chinese eyes. For my
part, I had spoken very slowly, looking steadily at him, and smiling as
if it were a jest; but it wasn't exactly a jest. While the Colonel had
been questioning me, I had reflected. It was impossible that my cousins
should have had books of this sort in their possession without speaking
to me about them; and it was most unlikely that they could have belonged
to Serge, who, always very careful, made it a strict rule never to bring
anything of a compromising nature to our uncle's house. But I had often
heard that the political police, to create evidence against people whom
they strongly suspected, but who were too prudent for their taste, and
also to make their arrests appear less arbitrary in the eyes of the
public, had a pleasant habit of bringing "forbidden" things with them to
the houses where they made their perquisitions, for the sake of
supplying what they might not be able to find. Was this what had
happened now? Had I been caught in such a trap?
That was what I asked the Colonel in the form of a little jest.
Did he understand? He answered with a piece of advice: that I should be
less gay. For the rest, he was in a hurry; he looked at his watch;
announced that all was over, and that I was under arrest; and called for
witnesses to sign the _proces-verbal_. Our gardener ran out to find
somebody. He came back with two people who had been attracted to our
house by the lights and the noise. One was a cabman, the other was Dr.
A----, a neighbour who had recently come to live at X----, and whom we
knew only by sight. These men stared at me with surprise and curiosity.
I scarcely saw them. The words "Under arrest" had completely upset my
Aunt Vera, who, till then so calm, was now crying bitterly, covering me
with kisses, and repeating, "My child! My child!" The old nurse also was
crying, sobbing, and muttering to herself. Just when I feel that I
myself am about to give way, and cry too--that which I am anxious, most
anxious, not to do--she, the old nurse, throws herself at the Colonel's
feet, and begs grace for me, telling him that I am too young, too frail,
to go to prison, that I have been coughing these many days, that I may
die there! This makes the Colonel smile. For me, I tell the old nurse to
get up. I scold her. Stupefied, trembling, she sinks to the floor in a
corner of the room, and weeps for me as the Russian peasants weep for
their dead, mingling with her sobs memories of our common past, praises
of my good qualities, and so forth. All this, uttered in a low
sing-song, is like a sort of funeral dirge.
[Illustration: "THROWS HERSELF AT THE COLONEL'S FEET."]
I hear it still at the moment when the Colonel shuts me into a cab, with
two gendarmes facing me, and another on the box beside the driver, to
whom the order is given, "The fortress!"
Sophie Wassilieff.
(_To be continued._)
PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET.
BY SCOTT RANKIN.
BRET HARTE.
"'When a man is interviewed he, consciously or unconsciously, prepares
himself for it and isn't at all natural. Suppose, for instance, you
found your man in a railway car, and entered casually into conversation
with him. Then you would probably get his real thoughts--the man as he
is. But, of course, when a man is asked questions, and sees the answers
taken down in shorthand, it is a very different thing.'"--Bret Harte.
MY SERVANT JOHN.
BY ARCHIBALD FORBES.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERIC VILLIERS.
Goa is a forlorn and decayed settlement on the west coast of Hindustan,
the last remaining relic of the once wide dominions of the Portuguese in
India. Its inhabitants are of the Roman Catholic faith, ever since in
the 16th century St. Francis Xavier, the colleague of Loyola in the
foundation of the Society of Jesus, baptised the Goanese in a mass. Its
once splendid capital is now a miasmatic wreck, its cathedrals and
churches are ruined and roofless, and only a few black nuns remain to
keep alight the sacred fire before a crumbling altar. Of all European
nations the Portuguese have intermingled most freely with the dusky
races over which they held dominion, with the curious result that the
offspring of the cross is darker in hue than the original coloured
population. To-day, the adult males of Goa, such of them as have any
enterprise, emigrate into less dull and dead regions of India, and are
found everywhere as cooks, ship-stewards, messengers, and in similar
menial capacities. They all call themselves Portuguese, and own
high-sounding Portuguese surnames. Domingo de Gonsalvez de Soto will
cook your curry, and Pedro de Guiterraz is content to act as dry nurse
to your wife's babies. The vice of those dusky noblemen is their
addiction to drink.
[Illustration: "JOHN."]
The better sort of these self-expatriated Goanese are eager to serve as
travelling servants, and when you have the luck to chance on a
reasonably sober fellow, no better servant can be found anywhere. Being
a Christian, he has no caste, and has no religious scruples preventing
him from wiping your razor after you have shaved, or from eating his
dinner after your shadow has happened to fall across the table. In
Bombay there is a regular club or society of these Goanese travelling
servants, and when the transient wayfarer lands in that city from the
Peninsular and Oriental mail boat, one of the first things he is advised
to do is to send round to the "Goa Club" and desire the secretary to
send him a travelling servant. The result is a lottery. The man arrives,
mostly a good-looking fellow, tall and slight, of very dark olive
complexion, with smooth glossy hair, large soft eyes, and well-cut
features. He produces a packet of chafed and dingy testimonials of
character from previous employers, all full of commendation, and not one
of which is worth the paper it is written on, because the good-natured
previous employer was too soft of heart to speak his mind on paper. If
by chance a stern and ruthless person has characterised Bartolomeo de
Braganza as drunken, lazy, and dishonest, Bartolomeo, who has learnt to
read English, promptly destroys the "chit," and the stern man's object
is thus frustrated. But you must take the Goa man as he comes, for it is
a law of the society that its members are offered in strict succession
as available, and that no picking and choosing is to be allowed. When
with the Prince of Wales during his tour in India, the man who fell to
me, good, steady, honest Francis, was simply a dusky jewel. My comrade,
Mr. Henty, the well-known author of so many boys' books, rather crowed
over me because Domingo, his man, seemed more spry and smart than did my
Francis. But Francis had often to attend on Henty as well as myself,
when Domingo the quick-witted was lying blind drunk at the back of the
tent, and once and again I have seen Henty carrying down on his back to
the departing train the unconscious servant on whom at the beginning he
had congratulated himself.
[Illustration: "THE OLD AMEER."]
In the summer of 1876, Shere Ali, the old Ameer of Afghanistan, took it
into his head to pick a quarrel with the Viceroy of British India. Lord
Lytton was always spoiling for a fight himself, and thus there was every
prospect of a lively little war. If war should occur, it was my duty to
be in the thick of it, and I reached Bombay well in time to see the
opening of the campaign. Knowing the ropes, within an hour of landing I
sent to the "Goa Club" for a servant, begging that, if possible, I might
have worthy Francis, who had fully satisfied me during the tour of the
Prince. Francis was not available, and there was sent me a tall,
prepossessing-looking young man, who presented himself as "John Assissis
de Compostella de Crucis," but was quite content to answer to the name
of "John."
John seemed a capable man, but was occasionally muzzy. After visiting
Simla, the headquarters of the Viceroy, I started for the frontier,
where the army was mustering. On the way down I spent a couple of days
at Umballa, to buy kit and saddlery. The train by which I was going to
travel up-country was due at Umballa about midnight. I instructed John
to have everything at the depot in good time, and went to dine at the
mess of the Carbineers. In due time I reached the station, accompanied
by several officers of that fine regiment. The train was at the
platform; my belongings I found in a chaotic heap, crowned by John fast
asleep, who, when awakened, proved to be extremely drunk. I could not
dispense with the man; I had to cure him. There was but one chance of
doing this. I gave him then and there a severe beating. A fatigue party
of Carbineers pitched my kit into the baggage car, and threw John in
after it. Next day he was sore, but penitent. There was no need to send
him to Dwight, even if that establishment had been in the Punjaub
instead of in Illinois. John was redeemed without resorting to the
chloride of gold cure, and in his case at least, I was quite as
successful a practitioner as any Dr. Keeley could have been. John de
Compostella, &c., was a dead sober man during my subsequent experience
of him, at least till close on the time we parted.
[Illustration: "EXTREMELY DRUNK."]
And, once cured of fuddling, he turned out a most worthy and efficient
fellow. He lacked the dash of Andreas, but he was as true as steel. In
the attack on Ali Musjid, in the throat of the Khyber Pass, the native
groom, who was leading my horse behind me, became demoralised by the
rather heavy fire of big cannon balls from the fort, and skulked to the
rear with the horse. John had no call to come under fire, since the
groom was specially paid for doing so; but abusing the latter for a
coward in the expressive vernacular of India, he laid hold of the reins,
and was up right at my back just as the close musketry fighting began.
He took his chances through it manfully, had my pack pony up within half
an hour after the fighting was over, and before the darkness fell had
cooked a capital little dinner for myself and a comrade, whose
commissariat had gone astray. Next morning the fort was found evacuated.
I determined to ride back down the pass to the field telegraph post at
its mouth. The General wrote in my notebook a telegram announcing the
good news to the Commander-in-Chief; and poor Cavagnari, the political
officer, who was afterwards massacred at Cabul, wrote another message to
the same effect to the Viceroy. I expected to have to walk some distance
to our bivouac of the night; but lo! as I turned to go, there was John
with my horse, close up.
[Illustration: "JUST AS THE CLOSE MUSKETRY FIGHTING BEGAN."]
In one of the hill expeditions, the advanced section of the force I
accompanied had to penetrate a narrow and gloomy pass which was beset on
either side by swarms of Afghans, who slated us severely with their
long-range jezails. With this leading detachment there somehow was no
surgeon, and as men were going down and something had to be done, it
devolved upon me, as having some experience in this kind of work in
previous campaigns, to undertake a spell of amateur surgery. John
behaved magnificently as my assistant. With his light touch and long
lissom hands, the fellow seemed to have a natural instinct for
successful bandaging. I was glad that we could do no more than bandage,
and that we had no instruments, else I believe that John would not have
hesitated to undertake a capital operation. As for the Afghan bullets,
he did not shrink as they splashed on the stones around him; he did not
treat them with disdain; he simply ignored them. The soldiers swore that
he ought to have the war medal for the good and plucky work he was
doing; and a Major protested that if his full titles, which John always
gave in full when his name was asked, had not been so confoundedly long,
he would have asked the General to mention the Goa man in despatches.
[Illustration: "THERE WAS JOHN WITH MY HORSE."]
John liked war, but he was not fond of the rapid changes of temperature
up on the "roof of the world" in Afghanistan. During one twenty-four
hours at Jellalabad, we had one man killed by a sunstroke, and another
frozen to death on sentry duty in the night. On Christmas morning, when
I rose at sunrise, the thermometer was far below freezing point; the
water in the brass basin in my tent was frozen solid, and I was glad to
wrap myself in furs. At noon the thermometer was over a hundred in the
shade, and we were all so hot as to wish with Sydney Smith that we could
take off our flesh and sit in our bones. John was delighted when, as
there seemed no immediate prospect of further hostilities in
Afghanistan, I departed therefrom to pay a visit to King Thebaw, of
Burmah, who has since been disestablished. When in his capital of
Mandalay, there came to me a telegram from England informing me of the
massacre by the Zulus of a thousand British soldiers at Isandlwana, in
South Africa, and instructing me to hurry thither with all possible
speed. John had none of the Hindoo dislike to cross the "dark water,"
and he accompanied me to Aden, where we made connection with a potty
little steamer, which called into every paltry and fever-smelling
Portuguese port all along the east coast of Africa, and at length
dropped us at Durban, the seaport of the British colony of Natal, in
South Africa, and the base of the warlike operations against the Zulus.
[Illustration: "POOR CAVAGNARI."]