A MEETING ON NEW TERMS.
It was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy young
engineer in Kharkoff--a slender little man with eyelids that looked
swollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsy
appearance--was filled with Nihilists come to hear "an important man
from St. Petersburg." The governor of the province had recently been
killed for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of the
local university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made on
the life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement was
asserting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address by
the stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was known
here as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.
The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand,
but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several more
listeners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. He
and Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslav
gymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerably
changed, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin's
face as anaemic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkin
had been expelled from the University for signing some sort of
petition. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionary
business. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, and
his days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for more
than tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to give
lessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man of
spotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certain
kind of magnetism.
When Elkin discovered who the important revolutionist from St.
Petersburg was the blood rushed to his face. It was a most disagreeable
surprise. But Pavel greeted him with a cordiality so free from
consciousness, and his roaring laughter, as he compared the
circumstances of their last quarrel and those that surrounded their
present meeting, was so hearty that Elkin's hostility gave way to a
feeling of elation at being so well received by the lion of the evening.
He was one of the rank and file of the local "Circles," and the
prominence into which Pavel's attention brought him at this meeting, in
the presence of several of his chums, gave him a sense of promotion and
triumph. He wished he could whisper into the ear of everybody present
that this important revolutionist who was known to the gathering as
Nikolai was Prince Boulatoff.
"I am still in the dark as to the identity of that girl," said Pavel.
"I shouldn't keep it from you now," the other returned, exposing an
exultant lozenge of white teeth. "Next time we meet in Miroslav I shall
look her up and introduce you to her. I have not seen her for a long
time. She is quite an interesting specimen."
"I should like to meet her very much," Pavel said earnestly. "I have
been wanting to know something about her all along. You see, if there
were a circle in that blessed out-of-the-way town of ours one might be
able to find out things, but if there is I have not seen anybody who
knows of its existence. I myself have not been there for two years."
"I was there last summer. There is a small circle there. At least there
are several people who get things through me, but that girl I have not
seen for a long time."
"Is it possible? Can it be that you have not tried to get her in?
Really, a Miroslav circle without her seems like Hamlet without the
Prince of Denmark."
"Yes, she is a lass with some grit to her, and with brains too."
"If she is, we ought to get her in. We ought to get her in."
"She was only sixteen when that affair happened."
"Was she? Well, you wouldn't believe it, but my curiosity about that
girl has been smouldering ever since. If it were not for her and for
poor Pievakin I might not be in the movement now."
"I see. It needed a little girl to make a convert of a great man like
you. Well, well. That's interesting," Elkin remarked, with a
lozenge-shaped sneer; but he hastened to atone for it by adding,
ardently: "You're right. She should be in the circle. I'll make it my
business to see her next time I am there. I'll go there on purpose, in
fact."
He was always trying to be clever, for the most part with venom in his
attempts. Friend or foe, whatever humour was his was habitually coloured
by an impulse to sting. "For the sake of a pretty word he would not
spare his own father," as a Russian proverb phrases it, and his pretty
words or puns were usually tinctured with malice.
He painted the Miroslav girl in the most attractive colours. It gave
him a peculiar satisfaction to whet Pavel's curiosity and to be able to
say mutely: "Indeed, she is even more interesting than you suppose, yet
while you are so crazy to know her, I, who do know her, have not even
thought of getting her into my Circle."
When Pavel was making his speech Elkin, whose natural inclination was to
disapprove, listened with an air of patronising concurrence. Pavel's
oratory was of the unsophisticated, "hammer-and-tongs," fiery type, yet
its general effect, especially when he assailed existing conditions, was
one of complaint. In spite of the full-throated buzz of his voice and
the ferocious rush of his words, he conveyed the impression of a
schoolboy laying his grievance before his mother.
Before he took leave from his former classmate the two had another talk
of the "heroine of the Pievakin demonstration." It was Elkin who brought
up the subject, which took them back to the time when, from a Nihilist
point of view, he was Pavel's superior. He found him a ready listener.
The student girls of the secret movement, their devotion to the cause,
their pluck, the inhuman sufferings which the government inflicted on
those of them who fell into its hands,--all this was the aureole of
Pavel's ecstasy. His heart had remained spotless, the wild oats he had
sown during the first weeks of his stay in the capital notwithstanding.
The word Woman would fill him with tender whisperings of a felicity
hallowed by joint sacrifices, of love crowned with martyrdom, and it was
part of the soliloquies which the sex would breathe into his soul to
tell himself that he owned his conversion to a girl. But these were
sentimentalities of which the Spartan traditions of the underground
movement had taught him to be ashamed. Moreover, there was really no
time for such things.
During the following summer and fall mines were laid in several places
under railway tracks over which the Emperor was expected to pass. The
revolutionists missed their aim, but the Czar's narrow escape, coupled
with the gigantic scope of the manifold plot, with the skill and the
boldness it implied, and with the fact that the digging of these
subterranean passages had gone on for months without attracting notice,
made a profound impression. Such a display of energy and dexterity on
the part of natives in a country where one was accustomed to trace every
bit of enterprise to some foreign agency, could not but produce a
fascinating effect. The gendarmes were apparently no match for the
Nihilists.