A BEWILDERING ENCOUNTER.
When Pavel was in St. Petersburg Anna Nicolayevna had missed him only
occasionally. Now that he was with her his absences were a continuous
torture to her. On the present occasion she sought diversion in a visit
to Princess Chertogoff where she expected to hear something about the
mysterious prisoner. Princess Chertogoff was a lame, impoverished
noblewoman whose daughter was married to the assistant-procureur. In
higher circles she was looked down upon as a social outcast, so that
Anna Nicolayevna's visits to her had a surreptitious character and
something of the charm of forbidden fruit. Pavel's mother was fond of
the stir her appearance produced in houses of this kind. The curious
part of it was that the impecunious princess was one of the very few
persons in the world whose presence irritated her. It seemed as though
this irritation had a peculiar attraction for her.
It was an early hour in the afternoon. She was received in the vestibule
by Helene, the assistant-procureur's wife, with an outburst of kisses
and caresses which had something to do with the young woman's expecting
to become a mother. Rising in the background was the hostess, Lydia
Grigorievna Chertogova (Chertogoff) and her gorgeous crutches. She was
large, dark, and in spite of her made-over gowns, imposingly handsome.
Aware of the fantastic majesty which these crutches gave her stalwart
form, she paraded her defect as she did her beautiful dark eyes. At this
moment it seemed as though the high-polished ebony crutches joined her
in beaming at the sight of the distinguished visitor. Helene, a small
woman of twenty-four, usually compact as a billiard ball, was beginning
to resemble an over-ripe apple.
When the three women found themselves in the drawing room Lydia
Grigorievna lost no time in turning the conversation on the arrested
Nihilist. Her son-in-law had carefully abstained from opening his mouth
on the subject, yet she talked about it authoritatively, with an
implication of reserved knowledge of still graver import, but Helene
gave her away.
"Woldemar would not speak about it," she complained, reverently. "'An
affair of state,' he said. You can't get a single word out of him." She
exulted in the part he was playing as an exterminator of the enemies of
the Czar, and in the air-castles she was building as to the promotion to
which the present case was to pave his way.
"But what do they want, those scamps?" Lydia Grigorievna resumed, in
soft, pampered accents. "Would they have us live without a Czar? I
should have them cut to pieces, the rogues. Is it possible that the
government should be powerless to get rid of them? To think of a handful
of striplings keeping cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror."
"Oh, nobody is really afraid of them," Helene retorted, holding her face
to the breeze which came in through an open window.
"But your husband is not yet a cabinet minister, dear," her mother said
with a smile toward the countess.
"Oh, you're always suspecting me of something or other, _mamman_. I was
not thinking of Woldemar at all."
The charm of her presence, the appealing charm of a pretty young woman
about to become a mother, added itself to the tenderness and mystery of
spring. Lydia Grigorievna addressed another smile to the countess, but
Anna Nicolayevna dropped her glance. The princess went on raging at the
revolutionists. In reality, however, that handful of striplings who
"kept cabinet ministers in a perpetual state of terror" had stirred up a
curiosity in her that sprang from anything but indignation or contempt.
She was hankering for a specimen of their literature, of those
publications the very handling of which was apt to bring death. Her
thirst in this direction was all the keener because she felt sure that
some of the Nihilist papers that had been confiscated at the arrest of
the unknown man were upstairs in her son-in-law's desk.
"A constitution may be all very well in Germany or France," she said.
"This is Russia, not Germany or France or England, thank God. Yet those
wretches will go around stirring up discontent. On my way home from
Moscow last winter I heard a passenger say that if we had less bribery
and more liberty and popular education we would be as good as any nation
in Western Europe. I knew at once he was a Nihilist. You can tell one by
the first word he utters. I confess I was afraid to sit near him. He had
grey side-whiskers, but maybe they were just stuck on. Oh, I should show
them no mercy."
She was all flushed and ill at ease. She received no encouragement. Her
sugared enunciation and the false ring of what she said grated on her
hearer's nerves. Anna Nicolayevna listened in silence. The lame princess
was a sincere woman coated with a layer of insincerity. But the
countess thought her the embodiment of affectation and hated her,
bizarre beauty, enunciation, altered gowns, crutches and all.
Lydia Grigorievna was interrupted by the appearance of the
assistant-procureur himself. He was tall and frail with a long straight
straw-coloured mane and pontifical gestures. His figure made one think
of length in the abstract. As you looked at him he seemed to be
continually growing in height. Helene had fallen in love with him
because he resembled the baron in a play she had seen in Moscow.
"I've just looked in to bid you good afternoon, countess," he said. "I
saw your carriage through the window. But unfortunately--_business
before pleasure_." It was one of two or three English phrases which he
kept for occasions of this character and which he mispronounced with
great self-confidence.
When Anna Nicolayevna got into the street she felt as though she had
emerged from the suffocating atmosphere of some criminal den. In the May
breeze, however, and at sight of the river her spirits rose. She
dismissed her carriage. When she reached the macadamised bank and caught
the smell of the water it was borne in upon her afresh that it was
spring. She had passed this very spot, in a sleigh only a short while
ago, it seemed. Lawns and trees had been covered with snow then; all had
been stiff with the stiffness of death; whereas now all was tenderly
alive with verdure and bloom, and wild-flowers smiled upon her at every
turn. Here it struck her as though spring had just been born; born in
full attire overnight. Flushed and radiant, with her rusty chin in the
air and her flat chest slightly thrown out, spinning her parasol, she
was briskly marching along, a broad streak of water to the right of her,
a row of orchards to the left. The river beamed. From somewhere
underneath she heard the clanking of chains of lumber-horses,
accompanied by the yell of boys. The greased wooden screws of a receding
cable-ferry were squirming in the air like two erect snakes of silver;
the brass buttons of a soldier-passenger burned like a column of flames.
All this and the lilac-laden breeze and Anna Nicolayevna's soul were
part of something vast, swelling with light and joy. But the breath of
spring is not all joy. Nature's season of love is a season of yearning.
One feels like frisking and weeping at once. Spring was with us a year
ago, but the interval seems many years. It is like revisiting one's home
after a long absence: the scenes of childhood are a source of delight
and depression at once. It is like hearing a long forgotten song: the
melody, however gay, has a dismal note in it. Anna Nicolayevna had not
been out many minutes when she began to feel encompassed by an immense
melancholy to which her heart readily responded. There was a vague
longing in the clear blue sky, in the gleaming water, in the patches of
grass on either side of the public promenade, in the distant outlines
across the river, but above all in the overpowering freshness of the
afternoon air. The travail of an unhappy soul seemed to be somewhere
nearby. A look of loneliness came into her eyes. She was burning to see
Pavel, to lay bare her soul to him.
When a passing artisan in top-boots and with glass buttons in his
waistcoat reverently took off his flat cap she returned the salute with
motherly fervour and slackened her pace to a more dignified gait. "I'm
respected and loved by the people," she mentally boasted to Pavel.
Arrived at the bridge, she paused to hand a twenty-copeck piece to a
blind beggar who sat on the ground by the tollman's booth. He apparently
recognised her by the way her gloved hand put the coin in his hand. She
had given him alms as long as she could remember, and usually he made no
more impression on her than the lamp-posts she passed. This time,
however, it came back to her how her mother used to send her out of
their carriage with some money for him. She paused to look at him and to
listen to his song. She recalled him as a man of thirty or forty with
thick flaxen hair. Now he was gray and bald. "Great heavens! how time
does fly!" she exclaimed in her heart, feeling herself an old woman. The
blind man seemed to be absorbed in his song. All blind beggars look
alike and they all seem to be singing the same doleful religious tune,
yet this man, as he sat with his eyes sealed and his head leaned against
the parapet, gave her a novel sensation. He was listening to his own
tones, as if they came from an invisible world, like his own, but one
located somewhere far away.
Anna Nicolayevna gave him a ruble and passed on. Followed by the
beggar's benedictions, she made to turn into the street which formed the
continuation of the bridge, when an approaching flour truck brought her
to a halt. Besides several sacks of meal the waggon carried a cheap old
trunk, and seated between the trunk and the driver was--Pavel; Pavel
uncouthly dressed in the garb of an artisan. His rudimentary beard was
covered with dust; his legs, encased in coarse grimy topboots, were
dangling in the air. The visor of his flat cap was pushed down over his
eyes, screening them from the red afternoon sun which sparkled and
glowed in the glass buttons of his vest. It certainly was Pavel. Anna
Nicolayevna was panic-stricken. She dared not utter his name.
The toll paid, the truck moved on. The countess followed her son with
her eyes, until a cab shut him out of view, and then she remained
standing for some time, staring at the cab. "What does it all mean?" she
asked herself with sickening curiosity. Finally her eye went to the
water below. She gazed at its rippling stretches of black and masses of
shattered silver; at a woman slapping a heap of wash with a wash-beater,
at a long raft slowly gliding toward the bridge. "Is he disguised? What
does it all mean? Was it really Pasha?"
Doubt dawned in her mind. In her eagerness to take another look at the
man on the truck she raised her eyes. After waiting for some moments she
saw the waggon with the two men as it appeared and forthwith disappeared
at the other end of the bridge. The thought of the arrested man stunned
her. Was Pavel a Nihilist? The image of her son had assumed a new, a
forbidding expression.
The revolutionists moved about on the verge of martyrdom, and as the
mere acquaintance with one of their number meant destruction, the
imagination painted them as something akin to living shadows, as beings
whose very touch brought silence and darkness. People dared not utter
the word "Nihilist" or "revolutionist" aloud. Anna Nicolayevna belonged
to the privileged few, but at this moment she dreaded so much as to
think of her son by these ghastly names. It now appeared to Anna
Nicolayevna that all through her call at Lydia Grigorievna's she had had
a presentiment of an approaching calamity. She took the first cab that
came along.
"As fast as you can drive," she said.
The moment Anna Nicolayevna got home she inquired whether Pavel was in
his room, and when the porter said that his Highness had not been back
since he had left, in the morning, a fresh gust of terror smote her
heart and brain. She stole into his room. On the table lay a German
pamphlet on Kant and a fresh number of the _Russian Messenger_, the
ultra-conservative magazine published in Moscow. In several places the
leaves were cut. A Nihilist was the last person in the world one would
expect to read this organ of Panslavists. What Anna Nicolayevna did not
know was that the cut pages of the conservative magazine, which Pavel
had received from St. Petersburg the day before, contained a hidden
revolutionary message. Here and there a phrase, word, or a single
letter, was marked, by means of an inkstain, abrasion or what looked
like the idle penciling of a reader, these forming half a dozen
consecutive sentences.
Anna Nicolayevna was perplexed and her perplexity gave her a new thrill
of hope. She was in a quiver of impatience to see her son and have it
all out.
The dinner hour came round and Pavel was not there. She could not eat.
Every little while she paused to listen for a ring of the door bell. She
sent a servant to his room to see if he had not arrived unheard. He had
not.
The other people at table were Kostia, in huge red shoulder-straps which
made his well-fitting uniform look too large for him; Kostia's old
tutor, a powerful looking German with a bashful florid face, and the
countess' own old governess, an aged Frenchwoman with a congealed smile
on her bloodless lips. This restlessness of the countess when Pavel was
slow in coming was no news to them, but this time she seemed to feel
particularly uneasy. Silence hung over them. The Frenchwoman's dried-up
smile turned to a gleam of compassion. The German ate timidly. This
man's services had practically ceased when Kostia entered the cadet
corps, but Anna Nicolayevna retained him in the house for his quiet
piety. She had a feeling that so far as the intelligent classes were
concerned the simple forms of Protestantism were more compatible with
religious sincerity than were the iron-bound formalities of her native
church. So, with her heart thirsting for spiritual interest, she found
intense pleasure in her theological conversations with this well-read,
narrow-minded, honest Lutheran, whose religious convictions she envied.