THE next letter Dorothy received bore Russian stamps, and was dated at
the black-smith’s shop, Bolshoi Prospect, St. Petersburg. After a few
preliminaries, which need not be set down here, Drummond continued:
“The day after Jack arrived in London, there being nothing whatever to
detain him in England, we set off together for St. Petersburg, and are
now domiciled above his blacksmith shop. We are not on the fashionable
side of the river, but our street is wide, and a very short walk brings
us to a bridge which, being crossed, allows us to wander among palaces
if we are so disposed. We have been here only four days, yet a good deal
has already been accomplished. The influence of the Prince has smoothed
my path for me. Yesterday I had an audience with a very important
personage in the Foreign Office, and to-day I have seen an officer of
high rank in the navy. The Prince warns me to mention no names, because
letters, even to a young lady, are sometimes opened before they reach
the person to whom they are addressed. These officials who have been
kind enough to receive me are gentlemen so polished that I feel quite
uncouth in their presence. I am a little shaky in my French, and feared
that my knowledge of that language might not carry me through, but both
of these officials speak English much better than I do, and they seemed
rather pleased I had voluntarily visited St. Petersburg to explain that
no discourtesy was meant in the action I had so unfortunately taken on
the Baltic, and they gave me their warmest assurances they would do
what they could to ease the tension between our respective countries.
It seems that my business here will be finished much sooner than I
expected, and then I am off on the quickest steamer for New York, in
the hope of seeing Niagara Falls. I have met with one disappointment,
however. Jack says he cannot possibly accompany me to the United States.
I have failed to arouse in him the faintest interest about the electric
works at Niagara. He insists that he is on the verge of a most important
discovery, the nature of which he does not confide in me. I think he is
working too hard, for he is looking quite haggard and overdone, but that
is always the way with him. He throws himself heart and soul into any
difficulty that confronts him, and works practically night and day until
he has solved it.
“Yesterday he gave the whole street a fright. I had just returned
from the Foreign Office, and had gone upstairs to my room, when there
occurred an explosion that shook the building from cellar to roof, and
sent the windows of our blacksmith’s shop rattling into the street. Jack
had a most narrow escape, but is unhurt, although that fine beard of
his was badly singed. He has had it shaved off, and now sports merely a
mustache, looking quite like a man from New York. You wouldn’t recognize
him if you met him on Broadway. The carpenters and glaziers are at work
to-day repairing the damage. I told Jack that if this sort of thing kept
on I’d be compelled to patronize another hotel, but he says it won’t
happen again. It seems he was trying to combine two substances by adding
a third, and, as I understood him, the mixing took place with unexpected
suddenness. He has endeavored to explain to me the reaction, as he
calls it, which occurred, but I seem to have no head for chemistry, and
besides, if I am to be blown through the roof some of these days it will
be no consolation to me when I come down upon the pavement outside
to know accurately the different elements which contributed to my
elevation. Jack is very patient in trying to instruct me, but he could
not resist the temptation of making me ashamed by saying that your
friend, Miss Katherine Kempt, would have known at once the full
particulars of the reaction. Indeed, he says, she warned him of the
disaster, by marking a passage in a book she gave him which foreshadowed
this very thing. She must be a most remarkable young woman, and it shows
how stupid I am that I did not in the least appreciate this fact when in
her company.”
The next letter was received a week later. He was getting on swimmingly,
both at the Foreign Office and at the Russian Admiralty. All the
officials he had met were most courteous and anxious to advance his
interests. He wrote about the misapprehensions held in England regarding
Russia, and expressed his resolve to do what he could when he returned
to remove these false impressions.
“Of course,” he went on, “no American or Englishman can support or
justify the repressive measures so often carried out ruthlessly by the
Russian police. Still, even these may be exaggerated, for the police
have to deal with a people very much different from our own. It is
rather curious that at this moment I am in vague trouble concerning the
police. I am sure this place is watched, and I am also almost certain
that my friend Jack is being shadowed. He dresses like a workman; his
grimy blouse would delight the heart of his friend Tolstoi, but he is
known to be a Prince, and I think the authorities imagine he is playing
up to the laboring class, whom they despise. I lay it all to that
unfortunate explosion, which gathered the police about us as if they had
sprung from the ground. There was an official examination, of course,
and Jack explained, apparently to everybody’s satisfaction, exactly how
he came to make the mistake that resulted in the loss of his beard
and his windows. I don’t know exactly how to describe the feeling of
uneasiness which has come over me. At first sight this city did not
strike me as so very much different from New York or London, and
meeting, as I did, so many refined gentlemen in high places, I had come
to think St. Petersburg was after all very much like Paris, or Berlin,
or Rome. But it is different, and the difference makes itself subtly
felt, just as the air in some coast towns of Britain is relaxing, and in
others bracing. In these towns a man doesn’t notice the effect at first,
but later on he begins to feel it, and so it is here in St. Petersburg.
Great numbers of workmen pass down our street. They all seem to know who
the Prince is, and the first days we were here, they saluted him with a
deference which I supposed was due to his rank, in spite of the greasy
clothes he wore. Since the explosion an indefinable change has come over
these workmen. They salute the Prince still when we meet them on the
street, but there is in their attitude a certain sly sympathy, if I
may so term it; a bond of camaraderie which is implied in their manner
rather than expressed. Jack says this is all fancy on my part, but I
don’t think it is. These men imagine that Prince Ivan Lermontoff, who
lives among them and dresses like them, is concocting some explosive
which may yet rid them of the tyrants who make their lives so unsafe.
All this would not matter, but what does matter is the chemical
reaction, as I believe Jack would term it, which has taken place among
the authorities. The authorities undoubtedly have their spies among
the working-men, and know well what they are thinking about and talking
about. I do not believe they were satisfied with the explanations Jack
gave regarding the disaster. I have tried to impress upon Jack that
he must be more careful in walking about the town, and I have tried
to persuade him, after work, to dress like the gentleman he is, but he
laughs at my fears, and assures me that I have gone from one extreme to
the other in my opinion of St. Petersburg. First I thought it was like
all other capitals; now I have swung too far in the other direction. He
says the police of St. Petersburg would not dare arrest him, but I’m
not so sure of that. A number of things occur to me, as usual, too late.
Russia, with her perfect secret service system, must know that Prince
Lermontoff has been serving in the British Navy. They know he returned
to St. Petersburg, avoids all his old friends, and is brought to their
notice by an inexplicable explosion, and they must be well aware, also,
that he is in the company of the man who fired the shell at the rock in
the Baltic, and that he himself served on the offending cruiser.
“As to my own affairs, I must say they are progressing slowly but
satisfactorily; nevertheless, if Jack would leave St. Petersburg,
and come with me to London or New York, where he could carry on his
experiments quite as well, or even better than here, I should depart at
once, even if I jeopardized my own prospects.”
The next letter, some time later, began:
“Your two charming notes to me arrived here together. It is very kind of
you to write to a poor exile and cheer him in his banishment. I should
like to see that dell where you have swung your hammock. Beware of
Hendrick Hudson’s men, so delightfully written of by Washington Irving.
If they offer you anything to drink, don’t you take it. Think how
disastrous it would be to all your friends if you went to sleep in that
hammock for twenty years. It’s the Catskills I want to see now rather
than Niagara Falls. Your second letter containing the note from Captain
Kempt to Jack was at once delivered to him. What on earth has the genial
Captain written to effect such a transformation in my friend? He came to
me that evening clothed in his right mind; in evening rig-out, with his
decorations upon it, commanded me to get into my dinner togs, took me
in a carriage across the river to the best restaurant St. Petersburg
affords, and there we had a champagne dinner in which he drank to
America and all things American. Whether it was the enthusiasm produced
by Captain Kempt’s communication, or the effect of the champagne, I do
not know, but he has reconsidered his determination not to return to the
United States, and very soon we set out together for the west.
“I shall be glad to get out of this place. We were followed to the
restaurant, I am certain, and I am equally certain that at the next
table two police spies were seated, and these two shadowed us in a cab
until we reached our blacksmith’s shop. It is a humiliating confession
to make, but somehow the atmosphere of this place has got on my nerves,
and I shall be glad to turn my back on it. Jack pooh-poohs the idea that
he is in any danger. Even the Governor of St. Petersburg, he says, dare
not lay a finger on him, and as for the Chief of Police, he pours scorn
on that powerful official. He scouts the idea that he is being watched,
and all-in-all is quite humorous at my expense, saying that my state of
mind is more fitting for a schoolgirl than for a stalwart man over six
feet in height. One consolation is that Jack now has become as keen for
America as I am. I expect that the interview arranged for me to-morrow
with a great government official will settle my own business finally one
way or another. A while ago I was confident of success, but the repeated
delays have made me less optimistic now, although the gentle courtesy of
those in high places remains undiminished.
“Dear Miss Amhurst, I cannot afford to fall lower in your estimation
than perhaps I deserve, so I must say that this fear which has overcome
me is all on account of my friend, and not on my own behalf at all. I
am perfectly safe in Russia, being a British subject. My cold and formal
Cousin Thaxted is a member of the British Embassy here, and my cold and
formal uncle is a Cabinet Minister in England, facts which must be well
known to these spy-informed people of St. Petersburg; so I am immune.
The worst they could do would be to order me out of the country, but
even that is unthinkable. If any one attempted to interfere with me, I
have only to act the hero of the penny novelette, draw myself up to my
full height, which, as you know, is not that of a pigmy, fold my
arms across my manly chest, cry, ‘Ha, ha!’ and sing ‘Rule Britannia,’
whereupon the villains would wilt and withdraw. But Jack has no
such security. He is a Russian subject, and, prince or commoner, the
authorities here could do what they liked with him. I always think of
things when it is too late to act. I wish I had urged Jack ashore at
Bar Harbor, and induced him to take the oath of allegiance to the United
States. I spoke to him about that coming home in the carriage, and to my
amazement he said he wished he had thought of it himself at the time we
were over there.
“But enough of this. I daresay he is in no real danger after all.
Nevertheless, I shall induce him to pack to-morrow, and we will make
for London together, so my next letter will bear a British stamp, and I
assure you the air of England will taste good to one benighted Britisher
whose name is Alan Drummond.”