THE INN OF THE SILVER BIRCH
A winter night, frosty and still. The northern stars, set in a sky of
steely blue, twinkled over a plain of frozen snow—a plain so vast that
its visible border touched the horizon. In all the wide landscape no
town, no hamlet, not even a solitary dwelling was to be seen; the view,
a monotonous blank, relieved here and there by clumps of dark firs, the
darker by contrast with the surrounding white.
Lofty posts, painted with alternate bands of black and white, and
situated a verst distant from one another, indicated the ordinary line
of route over the wintry waste, and along this route a hooded sledge was
moving with all the speed that three gallant mares could supply, the
bells upon the duga, or wooden arch, ringing out musically over the crisp
snow.
Two persons occupied this sledge, one, the _yamchik_ or driver, Izak by
name, an active little Russian, who sat partly upon the shaft, in order
when necessary to steady the vehicle by thrusting out a leg upon the
snow; the other, Wilfrid Courtenay, who, voluminous in fur wrappings,
sat, or rather reclined at the rear under cover of the hood.
It was over Russian ground that the car was speeding, its goal being St.
Petersburg, distant now about one hundred miles.
Wilfrid had met with considerable difficulty in entering the Czar’s
dominions. Twenty days had he been detained at the frontier-town of
Kowno for no reason whatever as far as he could see, save the caprice of
petty officials, whose insolence and greed had so galled the spirit of
the Englishman that several times he was on the point of turning back.
However, he thought better of it, and when at last leave _was_ granted
him to go forward, forward he went. Having learned by experience that
travelling in one’s own equipage is more convenient, and, in the end more
economical, than the ordinary method of posting, Wilfrid had purchased at
Kowno a covered car, together with three steeds to draw it, accepting at
the same time the proffered services of a yamchik, who boasted that he
knew every verst of the way from Kowno to St. Petersburg.
And here he was speeding along at the rate of twelve miles an hour. The
keen cold air, combined with the rapid swaying of the car, caused him to
fall into a semi-slumber, from which he was roused by the voice of Izak.
“If the little father will condescend to look, he will see the village of
Gora,” he cried, pointing with his whip to a light shining far off like a
star.
Welcome news to the cold and hungry Wilfrid. Gora should be his
stopping-place for the night.
Fifteen minutes more and they reached the silent, sleeping village,
which, like most of its kind in Russia, consisted merely of a line of
wooden cabins on each side of the post-road with a row of trees in front.
At one end of the village stood its only house of entertainment, the Inn
of the Silver Birch—an inn very different externally from the generality
of its class. As a matter of fact, it had originally been the seat of a
rich boyar, the lord of the village and of the surrounding land. It was a
large and handsome structure of timber, pillared and balconied, and with
much carving about its eaves and gables. On three sides grew lofty birch
trees with silvery bark; the fourth side lay open to the gaze of the
travellers.
“This is the twentieth inn I’ve seen painted red,” remarked Wilfrid.
“’Tis the will of the Czar,” answered the yamchik. “Some weeks ago he
gave a ball, and to it came a lady wearing a red dress. ‘What a pretty
colour!’ said Paul. And lo! at once a law that all post-houses and
bridges shall be painted red. Great is the word of the Czar! He wills,
and—pouf! ’tis done.”
“A pity he doesn’t will a spell of warm weather, then,” growled Wilfrid,
as he set his half-frozen feet upon the hard ground.
As was the village, so was the inn, still and silent as the tomb.
Wilfrid’s summons, however, soon brought to the door the landlord, a
somewhat melancholy-looking man. He was accompanied by a tall and pretty
girl of about eighteen, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his
daughter.
Though wrapped in sheepskins they shivered as the keen, icy air from
without, chilling the warmer air within, produced an instant fall of
sleet, a phenomenon which, familiar enough to the four, was witnessed
without surprise.
Now as the girl caught sight of Wilfrid there came into her eyes a
sudden light. It was not the light of recognition, for she could never
previously have seen Wilfrid, but it was a look that seemed to say she
had been expecting him, and was glad he had come. Such at least was the
impression that Wilfrid derived from her odd manner.
Turning from her to the landlord Wilfrid requested accommodation for the
night, but at this the landlord put on a lugubrious look of refusal,
explaining that it was neither for lack of room nor of victuals that he
was compelled to turn the little father away, but the fact was the whole
inn had been hired for the night by a small party, now fast asleep,
whose grandeur was such that they had insisted that no other traveller
should be received, lest the noise, however light, which must necessarily
accompany his presence, should disturb their slumbers.
“Did they look under their pillow for a rose-leaf?” asked Wilfrid.
But this classical allusion was lost upon the landlord. It grieved him,
he continued, to refuse a traveller at so late an hour of the night,
but what could he do? He had given his word. There was another inn some
twenty _versts_ farther on; would not his Excellency——?
No, his Excellency wouldn’t, especially when he noticed on the face of
the pretty girl a look of disappointment, evidently occasioned by her
father’s words.
“Your name?” asked Wilfrid, addressing the landlord.
“Boris, son of Peter.”
“Good Boris, your guests’ command applies only to noisy and drunken
roysterers, not to a gentleman so orderly and quiet as myself. Lead
on—I’ll not disturb their slumbers.”
Boris hesitated, but a whisper from the girl seemed to decide him.
“His Excellency may enter,” said he.
The girl’s eyes danced; she could not have looked more glad had she
herself, and not Wilfrid, been the traveller. While Boris conducted
the yamchik with the car and horses across a courtyard to the stables,
Wilfrid followed the girl—whose name she told him was Nadia—to a
large room on the ground floor, a room not warmed by the ugly-looking
closed-up stove, the usual accompaniment of a Russian room, but by a
fire of pine-logs blazing upon the stone hearth, the ruddy glow forming
a cheerful contrast to the snowy prospect without, which could be dimly
discerned through the panes of the double lattice.
In one corner of the apartment hung a small painting of the Madonna,
before which a taper was burning.
Wilfrid was passing this negligently by when Nadia gave a little scream.
“Ah! you are a heretic!” she cried. “Come, you must bow before the
picture—so.” She showed him how to do it, and, to please her, Wilfrid
bowed. “Now you make the sign of the cross, with your fingers bent thus.”
Wilfrid imitated her action. “That’s right. Now you are a member of the
True Church.”
She smiled so prettily that Wilfrid could not help smiling too.
Throwing a huge bearskin over the back and seat of a chair, Nadia drew it
to the fire, and bidding her guest be seated, she began to bustle about,
saying that all the servants were asleep and that it would be a pity to
awaken them, so she herself would prepare his supper.
As Wilfrid seated himself, the innkeeper entered from the kitchen, where
he had left the yamchik, who, when his meal was over, would curl himself
up and sleep, peasant-fashion, upon the stove.
“Your Excellency has travelled far to-day?” asked Boris. His manner was
in striking contrast with Nadia’s free and lively style. He stood in
humble fashion, as if not liking, even in his own house, to sit down in
the presence of his guest; but, invited by Wilfrid to a seat near the
fire, he sat down, mentally contrasting the Englishman’s affability with
the hauteur of the Russian grandees sleeping above.
“You have come far to-day?” he repeated.
“From,” replied Wilfrid, as he set to work with knife and fork, “from a
place called—let me think—Via—Via—”
“Viaznika?” interjected Nadia.
“Ah! that’s the name—Viaznika.”
“You set off late in the day?” pursued the innkeeper.
“About noon.”
Boris looked as if Wilfrid had made a very puzzling statement.
“Your horses seem fleet enough,” he murmured.
“Have you any reason to doubt their fleetness?” smiled Wilfrid.
“Why, see here, gospodin. It is now midnight, and since you say you set
off at noon, you have taken twelve hours to come thirty-six versts.”
Reckon a verst at about two-thirds of the English mile, and it will thus
be seen that Wilfrid had been travelling at the magnificent rate of about
two miles an hour! But how could this be when the horses had been kept
going at a fair trot the whole of the time? Nadia sat silent, her eyes
fixed upon the ground. Odd, but Wilfrid somehow derived the impression
that the talk had taken a turn distasteful to her. Why should this be?
“Have you mistaken the distance between Viaznika and here?” said Wilfrid
to the innkeeper.
Now whatever faults English travellers may have to find with Russia and
her ways, all will bear witness to the excellence of her posting-maps.
One of these, placed before Wilfrid, quickly convinced him that Boris
was right. The distance by the post-road between Viaznika and Gora was
a little more than twenty-four miles. The three-horse car had occupied
twelve hours over a journey that a pedestrian could have performed
in half the time. It was clear that the yamchik had not followed the
ordinary route; in fact, Wilfrid had known thus much at the time, for
on pretext of taking a short cut, Izak had frequently deviated, now to
the right and now to the left. Wilfrid’s suspicions being thus aroused
he began to study the map, and found that the preceding day’s journey
could have been accomplished in a considerably less space of time than
that actually taken by the yamchik. That worthy’s conduct was certainly
puzzling. His motive could hardly be a pecuniary one since Wilfrid, alive
to the disadvantages of paying by the day, had by mutual arrangement
fixed upon a definite sum for the whole journey, so that manifestly
it was to Izak’s interest not to retard, but to accelerate, Wilfrid’s
progress.
“Where did you pick up the man?” asked Boris.
“At Kowno. He came to me of his own accord, saying that as he had heard
I was about to make the journey to St. Petersburg would I accept his
services? According to his own account he has performed the journey from
Kowno to St Petersburg more than a hundred times during the past ten
years.”
“His face is strange to me. He has never stopped at the Silver Birch.”
“Nay, father,” interposed Nadia. “I remember him on two or three
occasions.”
She caught Wilfrid’s eye as she spoke, and coloured. Wilfrid wondered why.
“Let’s have the fellow in here, and we’ll question him,” said he.
“He’ll be asleep by this time,” said Nadia gently. “’Twill be a pity to
disturb him.”
Thus advised, Wilfrid put off his cross-examination of the yamchik till
the morning, and the conversation flowed into other channels.
“Are you a _vitch_ or an _off_?” asked Nadia, suddenly.
“I am not quite sure that I understand.”
“Why, look you, my father being the son of one Peter, is Boris Petroff.
Now if he were a boyar he would be Boris Petrovitch.”
“I see. Well, I suppose I must put myself down among the _vitches_, for I
am a nobleman in my own country.”
Nadia’s face fell when she heard this. In a voice that seemed to savour
of resentment, she asked:—
“How many souls have you?”
“We in England are limited to one. Is it different in Russia?”
“One!” echoed Nadia. “Some of our great boyars have ten thousand souls.”
“They must take an unconscionable time in dying! And how many has Nadia?”
“None,” replied the girl with a flash of her eyes as if detecting some
hidden insult in the question. “We are souls ourselves, my father and I.”
“It is the fashion of our boyars,” explained Boris, “to call their serfs
‘souls.’”
“A good name,” added Nadia in a bitter tone, “for they have us, body as
well as soul.”
“And there are twenty million like us,” said Boris.
It came upon Wilfrid as a painful shock to learn that this dignified
innkeeper and his pretty daughter were serfs. That serfage existed in
Russia was, of course, no news to him, but it had existed as something
remote, and therefore as shadowy as the helotry of ancient Sparta. It
was a very different thing to be brought vividly face to face with the
system, to know that Boris, head man of the village, the lessee of a
government post-house, and therefore himself a master of servants and the
owner of many roubles, was of no account in the eye of the law. He and
Nadia could be summoned back at any time to their lord’s estate, clothed
in peasant attire, put to degrading tasks, and, like domestic animals,
could be whipped or sold at the pleasure of their owner.
No wonder, with such fears as these always present to their mind, that
Boris should wear an habitual look of melancholy, and that Nadia’s
flashes of liveliness should alternate with moods of gloom!
Now if Wilfrid had been some blockhead of a Russian boyar he would have
disdained all further conversation with the innkeeper and his daughter,
but being an English gentleman it never occurred to him that he was
losing caste by conversing with a serf, and so he continued to talk on,
and under his sympathetic words Nadia seemed to brighten again.
“Do you know,” she remarked, looking up with a half-smile, “that you have
been talking treason? You have used the word ‘free’ several times. It’s a
prohibited word.”
“Prohibited?”
“I do not jest, gospodin. The Czar Paul would regulate the language of
his people, so he has issued a ukase forbidding the utterance of certain
words. Among such come ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’”
“The devil!” muttered Wilfrid.
“You may say that. That’s not a prohibited word.”
“’Twere well, Nadia, to give me a list of these forbidden vocables.”
“I don’t know them all. However, you mustn’t use the word ‘revolution.’”
Wilfrid began now to understand why the officials of Kowno had
confiscated from his small travelling library a book bearing the title of
“The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies.” Evidently it was regarded as a
dangerous political work!
“Anything more?”
“Well, ‘snub’ is forbidden.”
“Heavens! what treason lurks in that simple word?”
“It will be taken as a reflection on the Czar, whose nose has a skyward
tendency.”
“Anything more?”
“Beware of the word ‘bald.’”
“Ah!”
“Because if the Czar were to swear by the hair of his head the oath would
not be binding. Do you know he once had a soldier knouted to death for
speaking of him as the ‘baldhead?’”
To the truth of Nadia’s remarks history can bear witness. The last of
them was not very encouraging to Wilfrid, for if the Czar could put a
man to death far an offence so slight, he would surely do the like with
one who had defeated his envoy at Berlin. And Wilfrid’s coming to St
Petersburg would quickly become known to Baranoff’s underlings, since
it was required of every stranger that he should report himself at the
Police Bureau. Was it likely, then, that Count Baranoff would neglect
the opportunity of exposing him to the vengeance of the Czar? But though
Wilfrid began to realize more vividly than before the dangerous character
of his enterprise, he was still resolute to go on with it, trusting that
as he had emerged triumphantly from previous perils, so, too, he would
from this.
He sought to turn the conversation from politics by making inquiries as
to the other guests in the house.
The innkeeper, with a shake of his head, gave it as his opinion that
there was something mysterious about them, since one and all had declined
to disclose their names, a statement that did but serve to stimulate
Wilfrid’s curiosity.
“To-day about noon,” said Boris, proceeding to tell all he knew, “there
drove up to the inn door a troika containing four persons, two equerries
attired in blue and silver livery, and two women, who——”
“Who,” interposed Nadia, “from their dress might have been taken for
grand-duchesses, but who proved in the end to be only ladies’ maids.”
“The four had been sent on to prepare for the coming of their mistress,
a boyarine, so they said, of the highest rank. They wished to engage the
whole inn for the night. They insisted that the time of their lady’s
sleep must be free from the slightest noise, to ensure which they
stipulated that I must exclude all other visitors, and to this I agreed,
as they promised to pay well. They then went the round of the inn,
selecting such rooms as they deemed suitable.”
“And the airs and graces of the maids!” said Nadia. “They strutted about
with their noses held high. Nothing was good enough for them.”
“They selected the Tapestried Chamber as the bedroom of their lady,”
continued Boris.
“Yes, and grumbled because there was no room communicating directly with
it. They wished to be near their lady, and actually wanted us to connect
the Tapestried Chamber with the adjoining room by there and then cutting
a doorway through the wall.”
“And when I refused,” pursued Boris, “on the ground that I could not
make any alteration in government property without the consent of the
government, I thought they would never cease laughing, though for my part
I could see nothing to laugh at. In the evening about seven of the clock
the boyarine and her party arrived.”
“And how sweet and gracious she was!” commented Nadia. “Different
altogether from her retinue. Do you mind that ugly haughty man in
uniform, with the long spurs and the fierce moustaches. He’s a
fire-eater, if you like! He spent an hour after dinner in fencing
with another officer, as lordly as himself. One of the maids so far
condescended to me as to say that he practised this sword-play every day
in order to be able to kill a certain Englishman.”
“He must take care that the Englishman doesn’t kill him,” smiled
Wilfrid.—“They have all gone to bed, I suppose?”
“All,” replied Boris. “The boyarine in the Tapestried Chamber; in the
room on her right the two maids, in that on the left the—the——”
“The Ugly One,” interjected Nadia.
“And the rest here and there in different rooms.”
“And they are staying for the night only?” asked Wilfrid.
“For the night only. They set off at ten in the morning for St
Petersburg.”
“You didn’t hear the boyarine’s name?”
“We didn’t hear the names of any of them. They wish to remain unknown.
‘The name,’ said the officer with the spurs, who seems to be the
boyarine’s right-hand man, ‘the name by which we choose to be known is
Pay-well. Ask questions and it shall be Pay-not.’”
“It is the fashion,” remarked Nadia, “with some of our noble ladies to
spend a week or two of religious seclusion in some convent. From a few
words let fall by one of the party I believe the boyarine is returning
from some such a visit.”
“It may be,” responded Wilfrid. “Is she young or old?”
“Not much past twenty,” replied Nadia.
“And her appearance?”
“Her appearance!” repeated Nadia with enthusiastic warmth. “Her
appearance! Ah! gospodin, how can one describe what is indescribable? I
am told that there lives a German duchess so beautiful that once, when
passing through a certain village of Italy, the simple-minded peasants
knelt, believing her to be the Madonna. I think our boyarine must be that
duchess, so sweet and beautiful is she.”
“Dark or fair?”
“As fair as the day, with golden hair and blue eyes.”
“Then she resembles you.”
Nadia gave a scornful little laugh.
“My eyes are light blue; hers are of a lovely, dark azure and shine like
stars. At a distance our hair may seem alike, but look closer. Mine is
straw-coloured tow; hers woven sunbeams and as soft as silk. But the way
she arranges it! She must be very much afraid of the Czar.”
“Why so?”
“Her _coiffure_ shows it.”
“What! has that old autocrat been dictating in what way ladies shall wear
their hair?”
“That is so, gospodin.” And here Nadia, twisting her long hair into a
number of thick plaits, disposed them in ludicrous fashion around her
head, saying with a smile, “This is Paul’s ideal _coiffure_, and this is
how ladies must appear at Court. But we, who do not go to Court, may wear
it as we please.” And with that she let her hair fall around her like a
shower of golden threads, and pushing some aside, looked smilingly at
Wilfrid.