THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE
Sonya had taken her stand beside the wheeled chair, her hand lightly
upon The White One’s shoulder. As Drexel gazed upon the two women, side
by side, and gathered the significance of the pair, a tremor of awe ran
through all his being. Sisters in purpose, these two generations: one
who had given all, one ready to give all. Sisters in purpose--yet what
a contrast! Sonya, fresh, young, lithely erect; the other pale, old,
shrivelled, twisted by a despot’s vengeful torture.
The White One bent upon him all-reading eyes, deep-set in purple
hollows; and Drexel had the feeling that to her his soul was large
print. After a moment she held out to him a withered hand. Though weak,
its grasp was firm.
“We owe you much, Mr. Drexel,” she said, in a firm, resonant voice. “We
are grateful; but as yet we can pay you in thanks alone.”
“That should be enough,” he managed to say. “Yet I should also like
something else.”
“And that?”
“If I have helped, then to be allowed to help you further.”
“So Sonya has told me.” Again those eyes peered from their purple
hollows into his soul. “Pardon me if I seem to speak discourteously,
but you do not care much for the principles for which we are
struggling.”
“I do not know what my principles are,” he said frankly. “I used
to have opinions, definite ones--a week ago. But now they are all
unsettled and I seem to be awhirl with new ones. But this I do know: I
am with you in this fight, and with you with all my heart!”
The White One slowly nodded, “Yes, I know we can trust you, and I know
you are too useful a person to be refused. You have shown both.”
She looked at the three men. “I say yes. What do you say?”
“Yes,” they responded.
She again gave Drexel her withered hand. “Then you shall help us,” said
she.
Whereupon Sonya and the three men clasped hands with him. He now
learned the two men he had before seen were Dr. Razoff, a distinguished
physician, and Pestel, a leader of the working-people. The third was
an official in the Ministry of the Interior, which he had entered
five years before for the purpose of gaining advance knowledge of the
Government’s proposed action against the revolutionists. His name was
Sabatoff, and as one of his functions was to secure and hold for use
Government blanks of all kinds, together with counterfeits of the
seals necessary to make them authoritative, he was known as “The Keeper
of the Seals.”
The Central Committee met here under the very eyes of the police, but
the police suspected nothing. They knew this old woman well enough
under her true name of Madame Nikitin, for her long history was written
down in their records; but she was to them a negligible person whose
harm was long since spent--little more than a corpse awaiting a delayed
sepulture. They knew that Dr. Razoff called frequently, but he was
her attending physician. They knew of Sabatoff’s visits, but he was
her man of affairs. Pestel they knew only as an irregular servant who
came in to do the rough work in her apartment. They never guessed that
this little coterie, seemingly summoned hither by routine business
relations, were the people that the police of all Russia was exerting
its every wile to discover and make prisoners.
They all drew about The White One and began to discuss what should be
their plan to free Borodin from the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul.
“First we shall hear what Sonya has to propose,” said The White One.
“Since we have chosen her as leader in this affair, and since Borodin
is her brother, she has given more thought to a plan than any of us.”
They all looked at Sonya and waited. “I have a plan--yes,” she said.
“But it is one I dislike, one I would suggest only as a last resort.
Let us first discuss other possibilities.”
“How about your father?” suggested Sabatoff. “As military governor he
has absolute authority over political prisoners. He loves you, I know;
but how about his son? If he were told who Borodin is, would he do
anything?”
She slowly shook her head. “It would be useless to appeal to father in
his behalf.”
“Then strategy is our only course,” Sabatoff declared. “We must get
some of our comrades introduced into the Fortress as guards, and
through them manage his escape.”
“There is a bare chance that might succeed if we had time for it,”
returned Sonya. “But it would take months. In the meantime the police
may any day discover Borodin is Borski, and discovery will be followed
by immediate execution. Whatever we do we must do at once.”
“If we could only take the Fortress by force--blow it up--wipe it off
the earth!” growled Pestel.
All echoed that grim wish. But how achieve it? Force might do for
weaker prisons they all agreed, but what force less than an uprisen
nation could subdue Peter and Paul? A Paris mob overthrew the Bastille,
yes--but the Bastille was a house of cards compared to that granite
citadel beside the Neva.
“We will do that some day--never fear!” said The White One. “But at
present we must have some other plan. What is yours, Sonya?”
All again turned their eyes upon Sonya. “It is very simple. To buy the
coöperation of a prison official.”
“Who?”
“The very highest--the governor of Peter and Paul. I have heard that
Governor Delwig has fallen into disfavour and is soon to be displaced,
and is very bitter about it.” She looked at Sabatoff. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” was the answer.
“You know him?”
“I have met him officially.”
“Do you think he could be bought?”
“Where is the Russian official who cannot--if the price is right!”
They all agreed that Sonya’s suggestion was the best and safest
plan. Who should deal with the governor of the Fortress was the next
question. The three men all volunteered for the delicate and dangerous
task, but Sonya insisted that the mission be given her; of them all she
was the one most concerned, the one who would put most soul into it;
and at length she had her way.
But where should she arrange to see the governor? If she were to
appoint a rendezvous in any cafe, or private house, or street, or
even church, he might fear some plot and remain away; or if he came,
he would contrive that they should be under the surveillance of a
secret guard, and it would be in his power to seize her at any moment.
Moreover, even if he were agreeable to her proposal, they might be
observed by some of the city’s omnipresent spies and fatal suspicion be
aroused.
Any plan she could devise that would succeed in gaining her an audience
with him required that she should put herself in his power. Hence, what
seemed the boldest course was in reality the safest course, and also
was the simplest. On some pretense of business she would call upon the
governor in the Fortress. If he accepted her proposal, she had taken
the course least likely to rouse outside suspicion. If he rejected it,
then, to be sure, she was caught in that vast prison trap, but no more
securely caught than if seized in street or cafe by the governor’s
surveillant guard.
During all this talk The White One leaned back and spoke but little,
though she weighed every suggestion. As she had said, Sonya was the
leader in this affair, and it was no part of her generalship to
reassume an authority that had been vested in a deputy.
So much of the plan settled upon, nothing more could be done till
Delwig had been sounded. Sonya and Drexel rose to depart, leaving The
White One and the three men to discuss other matters.
Once more the old woman stretched out to him her wasted hand.
“Good-night, Mr. Drexel. Do not despair because we have given you
nothing to do. Before we are through you may have more than you desire!”
He followed Sonya down into the street, and still he saw that withered
and blanched old figure in the chair. All the time that he had sat
watching her, he had wondered who she was and what had been her
history; and now as he and Sonya, holding to each other, went careening
through the frenzied wind, he asked her. The White One, said Sonya, was
the daughter of a scientist famous during the third quarter of the last
century, and herself had been a learned and skilled physician. She had
become fired with the inspiration for freedom that crept into Russia
in the sixties, while she was in the first flush of young womanhood,
and ever since had given heart and mind to the cause of liberty.
Thirty-five years she had spent in prison or Siberian exile. Her last
sentence had been to fifteen years of hard labour in the Siberian
mines. Here toil, exposure, the bitter cold, the prison food, the vile
living conditions, a flogging she had been given, had at length broken
her once strong body. Two years before she had been sent back on a
stretcher as a “safe” and negligible person--sent back to die. But her
thirty-five years of harsh captivity that had shattered her body, had
only strengthened her spirit. She had returned to the struggle of right
against might with even greater devotion and intensity.
But she had to be careful, so very careful! Her life hung but by a
thread. Besides her paralysis, which bound her prisoner to chair and
bed, she had heart trouble, and Dr. Razoff had said that any unusual
exertion, any high excitement, would be her end.
By the time Sonya had concluded they were back again in Three Saints’
Court. As they entered the outer of the upstairs rooms a man rose from
the table where he had been reading by the light of a single candle. It
was Freeman, the terrorist.
“I was told some of you would be back, so I waited,” he said. “I have
an idea----”
He recognized Drexel and broke off in surprise. “Why it was to talk
about you that I came here! To plan for bringing you here in a day or
two, as I had promised. This is better than I had expected! How does it
happen you are here?”
Drexel remembered that Freeman was not one of the few in the secret of
Sonya’s identity--so he dared not reveal the part she had played.
“I learned a secret from Prince Berloff’s papers,” he answered easily.
“I had to flee; you had told me of this place; I came here.”
“It must have been a valuable discovery.” His eyes suddenly flashed.
“Not the whereabouts of Borodin?” he said.
Drexel glanced at Sonya. He had gained the information for her; it was
for her to decide with whom it should be shared.
“You are right,” said she.
Freeman seized Drexel’s hand. “Splendid! Splendid! This is doing even
more than I proposed to you!”
His lean face glowed with a sinister light, and he suggested, as
one detail of their plan, that Prince Berloff be “executed” and
the “execution” be left to him; but Sonya opposed that sanguinary
course. Whereupon he volunteered several suggestions bearing upon
their immediate plan of freeing Borodin; and although Drexel felt an
inward shrinking, he had to acknowledge that Freeman was an adviser of
wonderful shrewdness, of endless expedient, of intimate acquaintance
with the conditions with which their plan must deal. Drexel would have
preferred to work with an ally of less fearsome temperament, but that
he was an ally of supreme efficiency there was no denying.
“You seemed to have some hesitation about Mr. Freeman at that
conference in this room a week ago,” remarked Drexel, when the
terrorist had gone.
“It is a peculiarity of our hunted underground life that we hardly
know whom to trust,” was Sonya’s reply. “We are always suspecting one
another. And for the moment we were not certain about him. He is too
ruthless, he may be over-bold, but we can hardly doubt his sincerity.
You remember the scene between him and Prince Berloff in the Hotel
Europe.”
“I was present,” said Drexel.
“His course there was rash--but it proved that, whatever his faults, he
is sincere, and it brushed away whatever suspicions may have risen in
our minds.”
Presently Sonya withdrew to the lower floor, where she had a room in
the quarters of the housekeeper and his wife, and Drexel went to bed
in the adjoining room. The next day Sonya was for going straight to
the governor, but she took the precaution to call up the Fortress by
telephone to learn whether he was in. He was at the Ministry of the
Interior for the day, she was told, and had left word that he could
not be seen till the morrow. This postponement of action was a heavy
disappointment to her but there was nothing for it but to wait.
Toward the end of the afternoon Sonya went out with the housekeeper’s
wife, and Drexel was left to his thoughts. It was not long before the
countess came into his mind. Even though it had been for the best, he
felt a sharp, accusing shame over his desertion of her, and he wondered
what had befallen her after he had leaped from the sleigh two nights
before.
It occurred to him that perhaps he could gain some hint of her fate by
applying to one of her servants, and he went out to a public telephone
and called up her apartment house. To his surprise the voice that
answered was the countess’s. In reply to his questions she said that if
he would come to her she would tell him all.
She was awaiting him in her drawing-room, pale and rather worn, but
no less richly handsome than usual. She had, however, nothing of her
rallying good humour, her air of confident, luxurious grace. She
told him that she had fallen into the hands of Captain Nadson and
the Cossacks and had been taken by the captain privately before
Prince Berloff. The prince had been most harsh with her, but to save
his guests the unpleasantness of being involved in a scandal, he
had decided to keep the matter secret for the present. They had all
returned to St. Petersburg that day, except the prince; and she, though
apparently free, was under what amounted to domiciliary arrest.
What had happened was of course a little otherwise. When taken before
Prince Berloff, she had told the story of her failure, and how she had
struggled to prevent Drexel’s escape, and had been corroborated by
the captain and by the bruised arms which she exhibited. The prince,
bitterly disappointed as he was, had to attribute the failure to
Drexel’s quickness of brain and body.
Drexel told her in turn how he had got back to St. Petersburg.
“I know you have not returned to your hotel, for I called it up,” said
she. “Where have you gone?”
Her pallor deepened as he answered her.
“And so you are in the midst of a revolutionary plot!” she breathed.
“But how did you know of that house?”
Once more he was forced to give her an evasive reply. “Mr. Freeman told
me of it.”
She gazed at him for several moments, and appalling fear grew upon her.
He was going right forward with this plot she had lured him into--this
plot against his life!
Suddenly she stretched out a jewelled hand and caught his arm.
“Please--please do not go back to that house!” she cried.
He stared at her. “Why?”
“Please do not. I beg of you.”
“But why?” he asked. “Only two days ago you urged me into this plan.”
“I did not then realize the danger!”
“I did. And I realize it now.”
But not all the danger, she wanted to cry out. But to warn him of the
whole of his danger would be to reveal to him the truth about herself.
“And I am quite ready to face it,” he assured her. “I shall see this
affair through to the end.”
She turned ghastly white. If she spoke, he would spurn her, despise
her. If she did not----
But she dared not speak.