THE WHITE ONE
She rose and crossed to him; and Ivan and Nicolai slipped out. She was
dressed as he had seen her in this same room a week before--in the
coarse, quilted jacket and head-swathing shawl of a factory girl.
Their hands gripped. He had never known before what the grip of a hand
could be. Nor how glowing a pair of blue eyes.
“I thought you were sick!” he cried.
“Only a pretense,” she smiled.
He drew a breath of relief. “But even though you are well, how did you
manage to come here?”
“The time had come for me to stop being Princess Valenko--so I just
stopped.”
“Ah, I see. You have at length given up all that!”
“No--not yet.”
“Then how did you manage to leave home?--how did you dare?”
They sat down together on the couch, peasant and working-girl. Drexel
now noticed that a lamp was burning, and that without the window was
blackness; plainly he had slept the whole day.
“As soon as you told me last night where Borodin is,” she began, “I
complained to my father about feeling a fever coming on. I urged him to
take me home at once, so that I could have the proper attention in case
the fever developed seriously. I sent for my own doctor; I said I would
have no other. He is a friend--a revolutionist. He found I had a high
fever; he ordered day and night nurses--also revolutionists; he said
that my condition was so serious that no one should be allowed to see
me--not even my father.
“I waited till the way was made clear for me, then in these clothes I
slipped out through the servants’ entrance. Until further notice the
nurses will be keeping night and day watch upon Princess Valenko; they
will order special food for her; the doctor will visit her two or three
times a day, and issue bulletins regarding her condition. And in the
meantime--here I am.”
“Wonderful!” laughed Drexel.
“Now about yourself,” she said. “That is vastly more important.”
Drexel at first tried to give a mere bald outline, but she impatiently
demanded details of all that had happened since she had saved the
day by walking forth to face the captain and the prince. So he told
everything; how he had found Borodin’s whereabouts; how he had been
trapped by the prince, and almost by the captain; of his flight with
the countess and their pursuit; of his escape disguised as a peasant.
And if since yesterday he had passed through dangers, the look with
which she regarded him was payment a thousandfold.
“Forgive me for what I said in this room a week ago,” she besought him.
“Forgive you?” he cried. “Why, it was I----”
“No, no!” she interrupted. “There is a side to you I then no more than
glimpsed. I now see that it is really the larger side--perhaps it is
really the whole man. Since I then said unjust things, I now want to
say that you are generous, strong, resourceful, brave, resolute, true.”
Her look might mean no more than warm and grateful comradeship--and
yet, his heart leaped daringly. “I only hope that what you say is the
truth,” he stammered joyously.
“I do not know how much of a democrat you are--yet,” she continued;
“but you are the type of man we need to help set Russia free. And that
makes me regret that we must lose you.”
“Lose me!”
“Yes. For you must now leave us.”
“Why?”
“Prince Berloff has discovered that you are aiding us. He is after
you--and not only for that, but plainly for some private reason. The
only safe plan for you is to join your uncle’s family; he dare not
touch you then. Never leave them.”
“Never leave them? But I want to help you!”
“Do you not see that he will have you watched? That if you come to us
spies will follow you, and discover us?”
“Yes.” He thought a moment. “I see, then, there is only one way.”
“I thought you would see it.”
“But not the way you mean. Not to go back. But to stay among you. To
live the underground life. Won’t you let me?”
“But the danger!”
“Won’t you let me?” he repeated.
“You mean it?” The blue eyes shone with an even brighter glow into the
gray ones. “You do! Ah--perhaps you will help set Russia free!”
It was on Drexel’s tongue to say it was not Russia--but he remembered
the scene of a week ago in this room, and held back his words.
“Now that you have learned where my brother is, we must begin the next
step, to try to free him,” she went on. “Our Central Committee is ready
to strike at once. We discuss plans to-night. I go from here to The
White One.”
“The White One!” exclaimed Drexel. “You know The White One?”
“Well.”
“I have heard no name more often since I’ve been in Russia. Might I ask
what he is like?”
“Forgive me--I cannot tell even you. Only the Central Committee and a
very few others, persons who have been tested by fire and water, know
who The White One is.”
She paused, then said hesitant: “Possibly, after all, you may see for
yourself. I told about your saving me and your offer to help us, and
The White One was very much interested. By what you have done you have
earned and proved the right to be trusted, and when I tell all--who
knows? At any rate, I was going to ask you to walk there with me.”
“I am ready,” said Drexel springing up.
“In those clothes?”
Drexel for the first moment since waking thought of what he wore, and
of him who waited for the garments.
“What shall I do?” he cried. And he told her of leaving the peasant at
the station twelve hours before.
“Believe me,” she returned, “he is patiently sitting there, his left
leg over his right leg, his wrong-side-out cap on his left knee. Ivan
will take the clothes to him. The outfit Ivan bought for you is on the
table. I will wait for you in the next room.”
Half an hour later, Drexel, in a cheap, ready-made suit and overcoat,
and with a forged passport describing him as a mechanic, walked out of
the court with Sonya. He was now truly entering upon the underground
life; he was one of those who were being hunted down craftily,
ruthlessly by Prince Berloff’s vast secret army; his life might any
moment be snuffed out. Yet he felt an intense exhilaration; he felt
that he and Sonya would defeat the prince, despite all his cunning,
despite his myriads of spies.
A furious wind was raging in from the Gulf of Finland, armed with an
icy snow that stabbed the face like tiny daggers. As they bent away
against it, her arm through his, he asked her what had occurred when
the countess had been returned to Berloff’s house the night before, but
she had not seen the countess. They spoke of Captain Nadson, against
whom in particular they must ever be on the watch; and Sonya told him
of the captain’s own company of gendarmes, known as “Nadson’s Hundred,”
who had been recruited for the most merciless work from the lowest and
fiercest types of men.
As they came out upon the Palace Bridge they paused, despite the gale,
and gazed to where, a few hundred yards up the Neva, stood the mighty
fortress-prison of Saints Peter and Paul. They could not see it with
their eyes, but they sensed its fear-compelling form: a huge, low,
irregular oblong of massive granite walls, moat-surrounded, washed on
one side by the Neva’s flood, with cannon scowling blackly forth. This
grim pile was the prison that held Borodin, perhaps in some dungeon
beneath the water’s level. And it was this grim pile, separated from
the Czar’s palace by only the river’s width, in the centre of Russia’s
troop-filled capital--it was this that they two, a man and a woman,
with a few others proposed to rob of its chief prisoner.
“That is a symbol of all Russia,” she murmured with subdued passion.
“Russia is just one great jail; at best the position of the people is
merely that of prisoners on parole. The Czar is not a ruler. He is
merely head-jailer.”
They traversed the long bridge, went by the Winter Palace, and turned
south past the Cathedral of St. Isaac. After walking a quarter of an
hour Sonya paused.
“We part here for the present. Go into that little shop across the
street, and spend ten minutes in making some purchase. When you come
out, look at the windows on the third floor above the door I enter.
If the curtains are still down, you are to return. If one is up a few
inches, it will mean that The White One desires to see you.”
Drexel watched her enter a door half a block ahead, then he crossed to
the shop and bought a package of cheap tea. When he came out he looked
up at the windows. Light shone from beneath one of the curtains.
He crossed eagerly, his pulses in a tumult--for in a moment he was to
stand face to face with this famous mystery. His mind guessed wildly at
what figure he should find. Perhaps some great professor, whose ethics
or mathematics were only a mask for this his real activity. Perhaps
some noted general from the Czar’s army. Perhaps even some mighty
nobleman, hiding his identity beneath this vague and fearsome name.
He climbed the stairs and knocked. Sonya admitted him and led him
through a short hallway into a plainly furnished room. Here were three
men, and a figure in a wheeled chair. Drexel swept the three men with
swift, tense wonder. Two were the men he had seen with Sonya in the
house in Three Saints’ Court, the third he saw for the first time.
Which of the three was it?
“This is Mr. Drexel,” said Sonya. She took his arm and led him forward.
“And this is The White One.”
It was to the wheeled chair that she led him. Drexel looked at the
chair and stood amazed. For The White One, the leader feared and hated
by the Government, the master mind, the very heart of the revolution,
was a woman!
Aye, and an invalid at that! Her hands were twisted, her body bent,
and he had no guess of what infirmities lay hid beneath the rug that
warmed her lower body. But disease had stayed its withering hands at
her shoulders. Such a head it had never been his fortune to look upon
before: a pale, deep-wrinkled face, powerful, patient, austere, mighty
with purpose, yet in it a tremendous, lofty love; and crowning her
head, and falling unconfined upon her shoulders, a mass of soft short
hair as white as the virgin snow.
The White One--well named indeed!