PAVEL'S FIRST STEP.
When Pavel arrived in St. Petersburg, in the last days of July, his
recent tribulations seemed a thing of the faded past. The capital was a
fascinating setting for the great university which he was soon to enter
and in which he was bent upon drinking deep of the deepest mysteries of
wisdom. His "certificate of maturity"--his gymnasium diploma--was a
solemn proclamation of his passage from boyhood to manhood--a change
which seemed to assert itself in everything he did. He ate maturely,
talked maturely, walked maturely. He felt like a girl on the eve of her
wedding day.
He had not been in the big city for six years, and so marked was the
distinction between it and the southern town from which he hailed, that
to his "mature" eyes it seemed as if they were seeing it for the first
time. The multitude of large lusty men, heavily bearded and wearing
blouses of flaming red; the pink buildings; the melodious hucksters; the
cherry-peddlars, with their boards piled with the succulent fruit on
their shoulders; the pitchy odor of the overheated streets; the soft,
sibilant affectations in the speech of the lower classes; the bustling
little ferry-boats on the Neva--all this, sanctified by the presence of
the university buildings across the gay river, made his heart throb with
a feeling as though Miroslav were a foreign town and he were treading
the soil of real Russia at last.
He matriculated at the Section of Philology and History, St. Petersburg.
Before starting on his studies, however, he went off on a savage debauch
with some aristocratic young relatives. The debauch lasted a fortnight,
and cost his mother a small fortune. When he came to the university at
last, weary of himself and his relatives, he settled down to a winter of
hard work. But the life at the university disturbed his peace of mind.
He found the students divided into "crammers," "parquette-scrapers" and
"radicals." The last named seemed to be in the majority--a bustling,
whispering, preoccupied crowd with an effect of being the masters of the
situation. There was a vast difference between Elkin and his followers
and these people. Pavel knew that the university was the hotbed of the
secret movement, of which he was now tempted to know something. There
was no telling who of his present classmates might prove a candidate for
the gallows. The wide-awake, whispering, mysterious world about him
reminded him of the Miroslav girl and of his rebuff upon trying to
discover who she was. When he made an attempt to break through the magic
circle in which that world was enclosed his well-cared-for appearance
and high-born manner went against him. A feeling of isolation weighed on
his soul that was much harder to bear than his ostracism at the
gymnasium had been. Harder to bear, because the students who kept away
from him here struck him as his superiors, and because he had a humble
feeling as though it were natural that they should hold aloof from him.
And the image of that Miroslav girl seemed to float over these
whispering young men, at once luring and repulsing him. He often went
about with a lump in his throat.
One day he met a girl named Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a former
governor of the Province of St. Petersburg and the granddaughter of a
celebrated cabinet minister. She was a strong-featured, boyish-looking
little creature, with grave blue eyes beneath a very high forehead. He
had known her when he was a child. There was something in her general
appearance now and in the few words she said to him which left a
peculiar impression on Pavel. As he thought of her later it dawned upon
him that she might belong to the same world as those preoccupied,
whispering fellow-students of his. He looked her up the same day.
"I should like to get something to read, Sophia Lvovna," he said,
colouring. "Some of the proscribed things, I mean." Then he added, with
an embarrassed frown, "Something tells me you could get it for me. If I
am mistaken, you will have to excuse me."
The governor's daughter fixed her blue eyes on him as she said, simply:
"All right. I'll get you something."
She lent him a volume of the "underground" magazine _Forward!_ and some
other prints. The tales of valour and martyrdom which he found in these
publications, added to the editorials they contained calling upon the
nobility to pay the debt they owed to the peasantry by sacrificing
themselves for their welfare, literally intoxicated him.
"Dear Mother and Comrade," he wrote in a letter home, "I have come to
the conclusion that the so-called nobility to which I belong has never
done anything useful. For centuries and centuries and centuries we have
been living at the expense of those good, honest, overworked people, the
peasantry. It is enough to drive one to suicide. Yes, mamma darling, we
are a race of drones and robbers. The ignorant, unkempt moujiks that we
treat like beasts are in reality angels compared to us. There is
something in them--in their traditions and in the inherent purity of
their souls--which should inspire us with reverence. Yet they are
literally starved and three-fourths of their toil goes to maintain the
army and the titled classes."
Further down in the same letter he said: "Every great writer in the
history of our literature has been in prison or exiled. Our noblest
thinker and critic, Chernyshevsky, is languishing in Siberia. Why? Why?
My hair stands erect when I think of these things."
When it came to posting the letter, it dawned upon him that such
sentiments were not to be trusted to the mails, and, feeling himself a
conspirator, he committed the epistle to the flames.
He was touched by the spirit of that peasant worship--the religion of
the "penitent nobility"--which was the spirit of the best unproscribed
literature of the day as well as of the "underground" movement.
Turgeneff owed the origin of his fame to the peasant portraits of his
_Notes of a Huntsman_. Nekrasoff, the leading poet of the period, and a
score of other writers were perpetually glorifying the peasant, going
into ecstasies over him, bewailing him. The peasant they drew was a
creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but shed over him was the golden
halo of idealism. The central doctrine of the movement was a theory that
the survival of the communistic element in the Russian village, was
destined to become the basis of the country's economic and political
salvation; that Russia would leap into an ideal social arrangement
without having to pass through capitalism; that her semi-barbaric
peasant, kindly and innocent as a dove and the martyr of centuries,
carried in his person the future glory, moral as well as material, of
his unhappy country. As to the living peasant, he had no more knowledge
of this adoration of himself (nor capacity to grasp the meaning of the
movement, if an attempt had been made to explain it to him) than a
squirrel has of the presence of a "q" in the spelling of its name.
* * * * *
Sophia disappeared from St. Petersburg, and Pavel found himself cut off
from the "underground" world once more. The prints she had left him only
served to excite his craving for others of the same character. The
preoccupied, mysterious air of the "radicals" at the university
tantalised him. He was in a veritable fever of envy, resentment,
intellectual and spiritual thirst. He subscribed liberally to the
various revolutionary funds that were continually being raised under the
guise of charity, and otherwise tried to manifest his sympathy with the
movement, all to no purpose. His contributions were accepted, but his
advances were repulsed. One day he approached a student whom he had once
given ten rubles "for a needy family"--a thin fellow with a very long
neck and the face of a chicken.
"I should like to get something to read," he said, trying to copy the
tone of familiar simplicity which he had used with Sophia. "I have read
one number of _Forward!_ and another thing or two, but that's all I have
been able to get."
"Pardon me," the chicken-face answered, colouring, "I really don't know
what you mean. Can't you get those books in the book-stores or in the
public library?"
Pavel was left with an acute pang of self-pity. He felt like a pampered
child undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of strangers. His mother and
all his relatives thought so much of him, while these fellows, who
would deem it a privilege to talk to any of them, were treating him as
a nobody and a spy. The tears came to his eyes. But presently he
clenched his fists and said to himself, "I _will_ be admitted to their
set."
In his fidget he happened to think of Pani Oginska. As the scene at the
German watering-place came back to him, he was seized with a desire to
efface the affront he had offered her. "How can I rest until I have seen
her and asked her pardon?" he said to himself. "If I were a real man and
not a mere phrase-monger I should start out on the journey at once. But,
of course, I won't do anything of the kind, and writing of such things
is impossible. I _am_ a phrase-maker. That's all I am."
But he soliloquized himself into the reflection that Pani Oginska was
likely to know some of her imprisoned son's friends, if, indeed, she was
not in the "underground" world herself, and the very next morning found
him in a railway car, bound for the south.
* * * * *
Pani Oginska's estate was near the boundary line between the province to
which it belonged and the one whose capital was Miroslav, a considerable
distance from a railway station. Pavel covered that distance in a
post-sleigh drawn by a troika. His way lay in the steppe region. It was
a very cold forenoon in mid-winter. The horses' manes were covered with
frost; the postilion was bundled up so heavily that he looked like an
old woman. The sun shone out of a blue, unconcerned sky upon a waste of
eery whiteness. There were ridges of drifts and there were black patches
of bare ground, but the general perspective unfolded an unbroken plane
of snow, a level expanse stretching on either side of the smooth road,
seemingly endless and bottomless, destitute of any trace of life save
for an occasional inn by the roadside or the snow-bound hovel and
outhouses of a shepherd in the distance--a domain of silence and numb
monotony. That this desert of frozen sterility would four or five months
later, be transformed into a world of grass and birds seemed as
inconceivable as the sudden disappearance of the ocean.
The last few versts were an eternity. Pavel's heart leaped with a
foretaste of the exciting interview.
"Lively, my man," he pressed the postilion. "Can't your horses get a
move on them?"
The postilion nodded his muffled head and set up a fierce yelp, for all
the world like a wolf giving chase; whereupon the animals, apparently
scared to death, broke into a desperate gallop, the scud flying, the
sleigh dashing along like an electric car in open country, its bell
ringing frostily.
"That's better," Pavel shouted with a thrill of physical pleasure and
speaking with difficulty for the breakneck speed that seemed to fling
the breath out of his lungs. "That's better, my man. You shall get a
good tip. But where have you learned the trick?"
The postilion gave a muffled grunt of appreciation and went on howling
with all his might.
They passed through a small village. The chimneys of some of the white
clay hovels on either side of the road poured out clouds of sweetish,
nauseating smoke. Wood being scarce in these parts, the peasantry made
fuel of manure.
At last the sleigh swung into the great front yard of Pani Oginska's
manor house. It was greeted by the curious eyes of half a dozen
servants. Pavel entered a warm vestibule with a painted floor, where he
found waiting to meet him Pani Oginska and an aged man with hair as
white as the snow without. He bowed politely and asked, in French, with
nervous timidity:
"Do you remember me, Madame Oginska?"
She screwed up her eyes as she scanned his flushed, frozen face.
"Prince Boulatoff!" she said in a perplexed whisper.
"I have come all the way from St. Petersburg to beg your pardon, Madame
Oginska," he fired out. "I acted like a brute on that occasion. I was an
idiotic boy. Forgive me."
"Have you actually come all the way from St. Petersburg, to tell me
that?" she asked with a hearty peal of laughter. She introduced him to
the white-haired man, her father, who first made a bow full of
old-fashioned dignity and then gave Pavel's cold hand a doddering grasp.
"So you have really come for that express purpose?" Pani Oginska
resumed, while a servant was relieving the newcomer of his fur-lined
coat, fur cap, heavy gloves, muffler and storm shoes. "A case of
compunction, I suppose?"
Her father followed them as far as the open door of a vast, plainly
furnished parlour, and after looming on the threshold for a minute or
two, in an attitude of pained dignity, he bowed himself away. Pani
Oginska gently pressed the young man into a huge, rusty easy-chair, she
herself remaining in a standing posture, her mind apparently divided
between hospitality and an important errand upon which she seemed to
have been bent when he arrived. She wore a furred jacket, her head in a
grey shawl and her feet in heavy top-boots--a costume jarringly out of
accord with her pale, delicate, nunnish face. She made quite a new
impression on the young prince.
"I was blind then," he began, when they were left alone. "My eyes were
closed."
"Oh, you needn't go into detail," she rejoined with an amused look. "I
think I can guess how it has come about. You have caught the contagion,
haven't you?"
"Why call it 'contagion?' It's the truth; it's justice. If I hadn't been
such a silly boy when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, I should
certainly not have acted the way I did."
"A boy? And what are you now, pray? An old man with the weight of
experience on your shoulders?" she asked with motherly gaiety. "Well,
we'll talk it over later on, or, indeed, we'll find better things to
talk about; and meanwhile I want you to excuse me, prince, and make
yourself comfortable without me. You are hungry, of course?"
"Not at all. I had luncheon at the station."
"Well, you shall have some refreshments at any rate, and by and by I
shall be back. I am a rather busy woman, you see. I have to be my own
manager, and there are a thousand and one things to look after, and the
snow is rather deep"--pointing at her heavy boots. "Well, here are some
books and magazines. _Au revoir._" She made for the door, but faced
about again. "By the way, prince, does your mother know of this crazy
trip of yours?"
"I confess she does not," he answered, feeling helplessly like a boy.
"Why?"
"Why! Because she is the best woman in the world, and because it's too
bad you did anything so foolish without letting her know at least. By
the way, this is anything but a desirable place for a young man to
visit. Since my son got into trouble the police have tried to keep an
eye on us; but then the police are so stupid. Still, I am sorry you
didn't first consult your mother. If you boys would only let yourselves
be guided by your mothers you would be spared many a trouble."
"Is that the prime object of life--to guard against harm to oneself?"
Pavel protested.
She fixed him with a look of amusement, and then remarked sadly: "You
_have_ caught the contagion, poor thing. I'll write your mother about
it. Let her put a stop to it if it isn't too late."
He took fire. "I don't know what you are hinting at, Madame Oginska," he
said. Asking her to introduce him to Nihilists seemed out of the
question.
"I am hinting at those 'circles,' prince. You probably belong to one of
them; that's what I am hinting at. Don't you, now?"
"I don't belong to any circles. Nor do I know what you mean, madame."
"Well, well. You have come to ask me not to be offended with you, and
now it seems to be my turn to ask you not to be angry with me. Don't be
uneasy, prince. I shan't write to your mother. Indeed, she couldn't
afford to be in correspondence with me at all. However, if you really
aren't yet mixed up in those dreadful things"--there was a dubious
twinkle in her eye--"you had better keep out of them in the future, too.
Think of your charming mother and take care of yourself, prince. Well, I
have got to go. It's barbaric of me to leave you, but I'll soon be back.
Here are some books and magazines. Or wait, I have another occupation
for you. I want you to meet the best Jew in the world. I want you to
examine him in 'Gentile lore,' as his people would put it. They would
kill me, his people, if they knew he came to read my 'Gentile books.'"
"He is a brainy fellow," she went on, leading the way through a
labyrinth of rooms and corridors, "chockful of that Talmud of theirs,
don't you know. Now that he is married they are trying to make a
business man of him, but he prefers worldly wisdom and that sort of
thing. I let him use my library, the only place he has for his 'unholy'
studies, in fact. He is supposed to come on business here. He lives in a
small town a mile from here."
She was speaking in Russian now, a language she had perfect command of,
but which she spoke with a strong Polish accent, making it sound to
Pavel as though she was declaiming poetry. Twelve years ago, before she
inherited this estate, and when she still lived in Poland, her
birthplace, she could scarcely speak it at all.
She took him into a room whose walls were lined with books, mostly old
and worn, and whose two windows looked out upon a frozen pond in front
of a snow-covered clump of trees.
"Monsieur Parmet, Prince Boulatoff," she said, as a man sprang to his
feet with the air of one startled from mental absorption. He was of
strong, ungainly build, with the peculiar stamp of rabbinical
scholarship on a plump, dark-bearded face. "See how much he knows,
prince. He thinks he can take the examination for a certificate of
maturity and enter the university. But then he thinks he knows
everything." With this she left them to themselves.
Pavel was in a whirl of embarrassment and annoyance, but the abashed
smile of the other mollified him. "What I need more than anything else
is to be examined in Latin and Greek," Parmet said. "I haven't had my
exercises looked over for a long time, and it may be all wrong for all I
know." His Russian had a Yiddish accent. He spoke in low, purring tones
that seemed to soften the heavy outline of his figure. He was a
lumbering mass of physical strength, one of those bearlike giants whom
village people will describe as bending horseshoes like so many blades
of grass or driving nails into a wall with their bare knuckles for a
hammer. His dark-brown eyes shone meekly.
"Have you learned it all by yourself?" Pavel asked.
"Not altogether."
Pavel began with an air of lofty reluctance, but he was soon carried
away by the niceties of the ancient syntax, and his stiffness melted
into didactic animation. As to Parmet, his plump, dark face was an image
of religious ecstasy. Pavel warmed to him. His Talmudic gestures and
intonation amused him.
"There's no trouble about your Latin," he said, familiarly; "no trouble
whatever."
"Isn't there? It was Pani Oginska's son who gave me the first start,"
the other said, blissfully, uttering the name in a lowered voice. "If it
had not been for him I should still be immersed in the depths of
darkness."
"'Immersed in the depths of darkness!' There is a phrase for you! Why
should you use high-flown language like that?"
Parmet smiled, shrugging his shoulders bashfully. "Will you kindly try
me on Greek now?" he said.
"One second. That must have been quite a little while ago when Pani
Oginska's son taught you, wasn't it?"
Parmet tiptoed over to the open door, closed it, tiptoed back and said:
"Not quite two years. If you knew what a man of gold he was! They are
slowly killing him, the murderers. And why? What had he done? He could
not harm a fly. He is all goodness, an angel like his mother. He was of
delicate health when they took him, and now he is melting like a
candle. Why, oh why, should men like him have to perish that way?"
"Isn't it rather risky for you to be coming here?" Pavel demanded,
looking him over curiously.
Parmet smiled, a queer, outlandish smile, at once naive and knowing, as
he replied:
"Risky? No. What does an old-fashioned Jew like myself care about
politics? I am supposed to come here on business. Did you know Eugene?"
"Who is Eugene? Pani Oginska's son?"
"Yes. I thought you knew him."
"I wish I had. People like him are the only ones worth knowing. Most of
the others are scoundrels, humbugs, cold-blooded egoists; that's what
they are."
So talking, they gradually confided to each other the story of their
respective conversions and tribulations. Parmet followed the prince's
tale first with a look of childlike curiosity and then with an air that
betrayed emotion. As he listened he kept rubbing his hand nervously.
When Pavel had concluded, the Jew took to tiptoeing up and down the
room, stopped in front of him and said, with great ardour:
"Don't grieve, my dear man. I may be able to help you. I know a friend
of Eugene's who could put you in touch with the proper persons."
"Is he in St. Petersburg?"
"No, but that's no matter. He can arrange it. He knows somebody there.
I'll see him as soon as I can, even if I have to travel many miles for
it."
Pavel grasped his hand silently.
"Well," the other said. "There was a time when I thought every Christian
hard-hearted and cruel. Now I am ashamed of myself for having harboured
such ideas in my mind. Every Christian whose acquaintance I happen to
make turns out to be an angel rather than a human being."
"Why these compliments?" Pavel snarled. "Most of the Christians I know
are knaves. The whole world is made up of knaves for that matter."
When Pani Oginska came home and saw them together, she said:
"I knew I should find you two making love to each other."
* * * * *
A month or two after Pavel's return to St. Petersburg a tall blond young
man with typical Great-Russian features looked him up at the university.
"I have received word from the south about you," he said, without
introducing himself.
"I am pleased to meet you," Pavel returned gruffly, "but I hope I won't
be kept on probation and be subjected to all sorts of humiliations."
"Why, why," the other said, in confusion. "I'll be glad to let you have
any kind of literature there is and to introduce you to other comrades.
That's why I have been looking for you. Why should you take it that
way?"
Pavel's face broke into a smile. "Dashed if I know why I should.
Something possessed me to put on a harsh front. It was mere parading, I
suppose. Don't mind it. What shall I call you?"
"Why--er--oh, call me anything," the other answered, colouring.
"Very well, then. I'll call you Peter; or no, will 'godfather' do? That
is, provided you are really going to be one to me," Pavel said, in a
vain struggle to suppress his exultation.
"It'll be all right," his new acquaintance replied with bashful ardour.
"Godfather, then?"
Godfather introduced him to several other "radicals," who gave him
underground prints and a list of legitimate books for a course of
"serious" reading. He would stay at home a whole week at a time without
dressing or going down for his meals, perusing volume after volume,
paper after paper. When he did dress and go out it was to get more books
or to seek answers to the questions which disturbed his peace. He was in
a state of vernal agitation, in a fever of lofty impulses. And so much
like a conspirator did he feel by now, that he no longer even thought of
opening his mind to his mother. Indeed, the change that had come over
him was so complete that she was not likely to understand him if he had.
To drive her to despair seemed to be the only result he could expect of
such a confession. The secret movement appealed to him as a host of
saints. He longed to be one of them, to be martyred with them. It was
clear to him that some day he would die for the Russian people; die a
slow, a terrible death; and this slow, terrible death impressed him as
the highest pinnacle of happiness.
When his mother came to see him, a year later, she thought he was in
love.
He was in the thick of the movement by that time. He was learning
shoemaking with a view to settling in a village. He would earn his
livelihood in the sweat of his brow, and he would carry the light of his
lofty ideas into the hovels of the suffering peasantry. But his plans in
this direction were never realized. The period of "going to the people"
soon came to an end.
The mothlike self-immolation of university students continued, but the
spirit of unresisting martyrdom could not last. Violence was bound to
result from it.
The next year saw the celebrated "trial of 193," mostly college men and
college women. They were charged with political propaganda, and the bold
stand they took thrilled the country. The actual number tried was,
indeed, much less than 193, for of those who had been kept in prison in
connection with that case as many as seventy had perished in their cold,
damp cells while waiting to be arraigned. Of those who were tried many
were acquitted, but instead of regaining their liberty a large number of
these were transported to Siberia "by administrative order." Moreover,
hundreds of people were slowly killed in the dungeons or exiled to
Siberia without any process of law whatsoever. School children were
buried in these consumption breeding cells; whole families were ruined
because one of their members was accused of reading a socialist
pamphlet. Student girls were subjected to indignities by dissolute
officials--all "by administrative order."
The Russian penal code imposes the same penalty for disfiguring the eyes
of an imperial portrait as it does for blinding a live subject of the
Czar. But political suspects were tortured without regard even to this
code.
It gradually dawned upon the propagandists that instead of being
decimated in a fruitless attempt to get at the common people they should
first devote themselves to an effort in the direction of free speech. By
a series of bold attacks it was expected to extort the desired reforms
from the government. Nothing was lawless, so it was argued, when
directed, in self-defence, against the representatives of a system that
was the embodiment of bloodthirsty lawlessness.
Thus peaceful missionaries became Terrorists. The government inaugurated
a system of promiscuous executions; the once unresisting propagandists
retaliated by assassination after assassination. Socialists were hanged
for disseminating their ideas or for resisting arrest; high officials
were stabbed or shot down for the bloodthirsty cruelty with which they
fought the movement; and finally a series of plots was inaugurated
aiming at the life of the emperor himself.
The White Terror of the throne was met by the Red Terror of the
Revolution.