THE COUNTESS' DISCOVERY.
As Pavel mounted the majestic staircase of his mother's residence he
became aware that an abstract facial expression was all his memory
retained of Mlle. Yavner's likeness. He coveted another glance at her
much as a man covets to hear again a new song that seems to be singing
itself in his mind without his being able to reproduce it.
He found his mother sitting up for him, on the verge of a nervous
collapse. She took him to a large, secluded room, the best in the vast
house for _tete-a-tete_ purposes. It was filled with mementoes, the
trophies of her father's diplomatic career, with his proud collection of
rare and costly inkstands, and with odds and ends of ancient furniture,
each with a proud history as clear-cut as the pedigree of a high-born
race-horse.
Anna Nicolayevna had planned to lead up to the main question
diplomatically, but she was scarcely seated on a huge, venerable couch
(which made her look smaller than ever) than she turned pale and blurted
out in a whisper:
"Did you cross the bridge this afternoon?"
"No. Why?" He said this with fatigued curiosity and looking her full in
the face.
She dropped her glance. "I thought I saw you there."
"You were mistaken, then, but what makes you look so uneasy? I did not
go in that direction at all, but suppose I did. Why, what has happened?"
She cowed before the insistence of his interrogations and beat a
retreat.
"I am not uneasy at all. I must have been mistaken, then. It is about
Kostia I have been wanting to speak to you. It is quite a serious
matter. You see he is too delicate for the military schools. So I was
thinking of putting him in the gymnasium, but then many of the boys
there are children of undesirable people. One can't be too careful these
days." She was now speaking according to her carefully considered
program, and growing pale once more, she fixed him with a searching
glance, as she asked: "You must have heard of the man the gendarmes
caught, haven't you?"
"Oh, you mean the fellow who would not open his mouth," he said with a
smile. "Quite a sensation for a town like this. In St. Petersburg or
Moscow they catch them so often it has ceased to be news."
She went on to speak of the evil of Nihilism, Pavel listening with
growing interest, like a man who had given the matter some
consideration. Poor Anna Nicolayevna! She was no match for him.
Finally he got up. "Well, I don't really know," he said. "It seems to me
the trouble lies much deeper than that, _mamman_. Those fellows, the
Nihilists, don't amount to anything in themselves. If it were not for
that everlasting Russian helplessness of ours they could do no more harm
than a group of flies. Our factories and successful farms are all run by
Germans; we simply can't take care of the least thing."
"But what have factories and farms to do with the pranks of demoralised
boys?"
He smiled. "But if we were not a helpless, shiftless nation a handful of
boys couldn't frighten us, could they?"
"Very well. Let us suppose you are a minister. What would you do?"
"What would I do? I shouldn't let things come to such a pass, to begin
with."
He was tempted to cast circumspection to the winds and to thunder out
his real impeachment of existing conditions. This, however, he could not
afford; so he felt like a boat that is being rowed across stream with a
strong current to tempt her downward. He was sailing in a diagonal
direction. Every now and then he would let himself drift along, only
presently to take up his oars and strike out for the bank again. He
spoke in his loud rapid way. Every now and again he would break off,
fall to pacing the floor silently and listening to the sound of his own
voice which continued to ring in his ears, as though his words remained
suspended in the air.
Anna Nicolayevna--a curled-up little heap capped by an enormous pile of
glossy auburn hair, in the corner of a huge couch--followed him
intently. Once or twice she nodded approval to a severe attack upon the
government, without realising that he was speaking against the Czar. She
was at a loss to infer whether he was opposed to the new advisers of the
Emperor in the same way in which her brother-in-law and the
ultra-conservative Slavophiles were opposed to them or whether he was
some kind of liberal. He certainly seemed to tend toward the Slavophiles
in his apparent hatred of foreigners.
"They'll kill him, those murderous youngsters, they are sure to kill
him," he shouted at one point, speaking of the Czar. "And who is to
blame? Is such a state of things possible anywhere in Western Europe?"
Anna Nicolayevna's eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as she
shrank deeper into the corner of the couch.
* * * * *
She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Her
pity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom and
glint of martyrdom on his face--the face of Alexander II. Quite apart
from this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasy
of thought and feeling--of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. She
was in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be a
weightier personage than ever. The haze that enveloped him was
thickening. Nevertheless his strictures upon Russia's incapacity left
her rankling with a desire to refute them. That national self-conceit
which breeds in every child the conviction that his is the greatest
country in the world and that its superiority is cheerfully conceded by
all other nations, reasserted itself in the countess with resentful
emphasis. To be sure, all the skill, ingenuity and taste of the refined
world came from abroad, but this did not lessen her contempt for
foreigners any more than did the fact that all acrobats and
hair-dressers were Germans or Frenchmen. Her childhood had been spent in
foreign countries and she knew their languages as well as she did her
own; nevertheless her abstraction of a foreigner was a man who spoke
broken Russian--a lisping, stammering, cringing imbecile. She revolted
to think of Russia as being inferior to wretches of this sort, and when
the bridge incident swept back upon her in all the clearness of fact,
her blood ran chill again. "He is the man I saw in the waggon after
all," she said to herself, in dismay.
She went to bed, but tossed about in an agony of restlessness. When the
darkness of her room began to thin and the brighter objects loomed into
view, she slipped on a wrapper and seated herself at a window, courting
composure in the blossom-scented air that came up from the garden; but
all to no purpose. Ever and anon, after a respite of tranquillity she
would be seized with a new rush of consternation. Pasha was the man she
had seen on the bridge, disguised as an artisan; he was a Nihilist.
* * * * *
While Anna Nicolayevna was thus harrowed with doubt, Pavel was pacing
his room, his heart on the point of bursting with a desire to see his
mother again and to make a clean breast of it. The notion of her being
outwitted and made sport of touched him with pity. Come what might, his
poor noble-hearted mother must be kept in the dark no longer. She would
appreciate his feelings. He would plead with her, with tears in his eyes
he would implore her to open her eyes to the appalling inhumanity of the
prevailing adjustment of things. And as he visioned himself making this
plea to her, his own sense of the barbarity of the existing regime set
his blood simmering in him, and quickened his desire to lay it all
before his mother.
Presently somebody rapped on his door. It was Anna Nicolayevna.
"I must speak to you, Pasha; I can't get any sleep," she said.
They went into a newly-built summer house. The jumble of colour and
redolence was invaded with light that asserted its presence like a great
living spirit. The orchard seemed to be worlds away from itself.
As a precaution, they spoke in French.
"Pasha, you are the man I saw on the bridge," she said. "You are a
Nihilist."
"Sh-h, don't be agitated, mother dear, I beg of you," he replied with
tender emphasis. "I am going to tell you all. Only first compose
yourself, mamma darling, and hear me out. Yes, I'm what you call a
Nihilist, but I am not the man you saw."
"You a Nihilist, Pasha!" she whispered, staring at him, as though a
great physical change had suddenly come over him. "Anyhow, you have
nothing to do with the man they have arrested?"
He shook his head and she felt relieved. His avowal of being a Nihilist
was so startling a confession to make, that she believed all he said. He
was a Nihilist, then--a Nihilist in the abstract; something shocking, no
doubt, but remote, indefinite, vague. The concrete Nihilism contained in
the picture of a man disguised as a laborer and having some thing to do
with the fellow under arrest--that would have been quite another matter.
He told her the story of his conversion in simple, heart-felt eloquence;
he pictured the reign of police terror, the slow massacre of
school-children in the political dungeons, the brutal fleecing and
maltreatment of a starving peasantry.
"I found myself in a new world, mother," he said. "It was a world in
which the children of refined, well-bred families fervently believed
that he who did not work for the good of the common people was not a man
of real honour. Indeed, of what use has the nobility been to the world?
They are a lot of idlers, _mamman_, a lot of good-for-nothings. For
centuries we have been living on the fat of the earth, luxuriating in
the toil, misery and ignorance of the peasants. It is to their drudgery
and squalor that we owe our material and mental well-being. We ought to
feel ashamed for living at the expense of these degraded, literally
starving creatures; yet we go on living off their wretchedness and even
pride ourselves upon doing so. Let us repay our debt to them by working
for their real emancipation. We have grown fat on serfdom, so we must
give our blood to undo it, to bring about the reign of liberty. This is
the sum and substance of our creed, mother. This is the faith that has
taken hold of me. It is my religion and will be as long as I live."
In his entire experience as a revolutionary speaker he had never felt as
he did at the present moment.
A host of sparrows burst into song and activity, all together, as though
at the stroke of a conductor's baton; and at this it seemed as if the
flood of perfume had taken a spurt and the sunlight had begun to smile
and speak. He went on in the same strain, and she listened as she would
to a magic tale that had no bearing upon the personality of her son. His
voice, sharp and irascible as it often sounded, was yet melodious in its
undercurrent tone of filial devotion. The vital point, indeed, was that
at last he was uncovering his soul to her. She was not shocked by what
she heard. Rather, she was proud of his readiness to sacrifice himself
for an ideal, and what is more, she felt that his world lured her heart
also.
"But the Emperor is a noble soul, Pasha," she said. "He has emancipated
the serfs. If there ever was a friend of the common people the present
Czar is one."
Her objections found him ready. He had gone over these questions
hundreds of times before, and he gave her the benefit of all his former
discussions and reading. At times he would borrow a point or two from
Zachar's speeches. Touching upon the emancipation of the serfs, he
contended that Alexander II. had been forced to the measure by the
disastrous results of the Crimean War; and that the peasants, having
been defrauded of their land, were now worse off than ever.
"Oh, mother," he suddenly exclaimed, "whenever you think of the
abolition of serfdom think also of the row of gallows he had erected
about that very time for noble-minded Polish patriots. Do you remember
Mme. Oginska, that unfortunate Polish woman we met at the health-resort?
Gallows, gallows, nothing but gallows in his reign."
When she referred to the late war "in behalf of the oppressed Slavonic
races of the Balkans," Pavel asked her why the Czar had not first
thought of his own oppressed Russians, and whether it was not hypocrisy
to send one's slaves to die for somebody else's freedom. The Emperor had
secured a constitution for Bulgaria, had he? Why, then, was he hanging
those who were striving for one in his own land? A war of emancipation
indeed! It was the old Romanoff greed for territory, for conquest, for
bloodshed.
He literally bore her down by a gush of arguments, facts, images. Now
and again he would pause, sit looking at the grass in grim silence, and
then, burst into another torrent of oratory. It was said of Zachar that
a single speech of his was enough to make a convert of the most hopeless
conservative. Pavel was far from possessing any such powers of pleading
eloquence, when his audience was made up of strangers, but he certainly
scored a similar victory by the appeal which he was now addressing to
his mother.
He went to order coffee. When he returned, reveille was sounding in the
barracks.
"There you have it!" he said. "Do you know what that sound means? It
means that the youngest, the best forces of the country are turned into
weapons of human butchery."
The brass notes continued, somewhat cracked at times, but loud and
vibrant with imperious solemnity.
"It means, too, that people are forced to keep themselves in chains at
the point of their own bayonets," he added.
* * * * *
The next few days were spent by the countess in reading "underground"
literature. She was devouring paper after paper and pamphlet after
pamphlet with tremulous absorption. The little pile before her included
scientific treatises, poetry and articles of a polemical nature, and she
read it all; but she was chiefly interested in the hair-breadth escapes,
pluck and martyrdom of the revolutionists. The effect this reading had
on her was something like the thrilling experience she had gone through
many years ago when she was engrossed in the Lives of Saints.
"It makes one feel twenty years younger," she said to Pavel, bashfully,
as she laid down a revolutionary print and took the glasses off her
tired eyes one forenoon.