PAVEL AT BOYKO'S COURT.
Clara was introduced to Mme. Shubeyko, the warden's sister-in-law, and
to her niece, the gendarme officer's sister. At first communication with
Makar was held by means of notes concealed in cigarettes and carried to
and fro by one of the warders, who received half a ruble per errand; but
Clara was soon installed in the warden's house. Once or twice Pavel
spoke with Makar directly, by means of handkerchief signals based on the
same code as the telegraph language which political prisoners rap out to
each other through their cell walls. These signals Pavel sent from the
top of a hill across the river from Makar's cell window. To allay
suspicion he would wave his handkerchief toward Masha or Clara, who
stood for the purpose on a neighbouring hill, giving the whole
proceeding the appearance of a flirtation. As to Makar, his cell was in
an isolated part of the prison, facing the outer wall. Still, this mode
of communication was exasperatingly slow and attended by some risks
after all, and Pavel had recourse to it only in case of extreme
necessity, although to the prisoner it was a welcome diversion.
One day, when Clara, Masha and Pavel were together, he said to the
gendarme officer's sister, with mystifying gaiety:
"Well, have you discovered the heroine of the Pievakin demonstration?"
He regretted the question before it had left his lips. Clara was
annoyed.
"No, why?" Masha asked, looking from him to her.
"I have the honour to introduce--" he said, colouring. For some reason
Masha did not seem to be agreeably impressed by the announcement, and
Clara did not fail to notice it.
As it was rather inconvenient for the son of Countess Varoff to be seen
at the house of a major of gendarmes, Clara was to report to him at the
residence of her parents. In the depth of the markets and the Jewish
quarter his identity was unlikely to be known. Clara had lived at the
warden's house about a fortnight when Pavel's first visit at the trunk
shop took place. She offered him a rude chair in the small space between
the partition of her bed-room and the window by the wall that was lined
with the worn folios of her father's meagre library. The room was
pervaded by odours of freshly planed wood, putty and rusty tin which the
breath of spring seemed to intensify rather than to abate.
Motl, Hannah's sole employe, was hammering away at his bindings and
courting attention by all sorts of vocal quirks and trills. During the
Days of Awe, the solemn festivals of autumn, he sang in a synagogue
choir; so he never ceased asserting his musical talents. As Clara's
visitor took no heed of his flourishes he proceeded to imitate domestic
animals, church bells, a street organ playing a selection from Il
Trovatore, and a portly captain drilling his men, but all to no purpose.
As the noise he was making was a good cover for their talk, she did not
stop him. At any rate, Motl scarcely understood any Russian.
"I have only seen him at a distance," Clara said, meaning the prisoner.
"But I know that he eats and sleeps well, and looks comfortable."
"He would look comfortable if you tied him up in a sack. Is he still
'dumb'?"
She portrayed the warden's bed-ridden and voiceless wife who suffered
from a disease of the spinal and vocal chords, and the disorder at his
house and in the prison. She had always wondered at the frequent cases
of political gaol-breaking, but if every gaol were conducted as this one
was the number would be much larger, she thought. That vodka was quite
openly sold and bought in every common gaol in the empire was no news to
her, but this was a trifle compared to what she had heard of Rodkevich's
administration. One of his gaolers had told her of imprisoned thieves
whom he would give leave of absence in order that he might confiscate
part of their booty when they came back.
"Yes, I think he is a man who would go into any kind of scheme that
offered money, or--excitement," she said, gravely; and she added with a
smile: "He might even become a man of principle if there were money in
it."
"He won't give 'a political' 'leave of absence,' though, will he?" Pavel
joked. "Still, upon the whole, it looks rather encouraging."
"I think it does."
"Do you?" And his eyes implored her for a more enthusiastic prediction
of success.
"Indeed I do," she answered soberly. "But whether I do or not, we must
go to work and get him out."
"This damsel is certainly not without backbone," he said to himself.
He had familiarised himself with the details in the case of almost every
revolutionist who had escaped or attempted to escape from prison. Some
of these had made their way through an underground passage; others had
passed the gateman in the disguise of a soldier or policeman; still
others had been wrenched from their convoy, while being taken to the
gendarme office or a photograph gallery. Prince Kropotkin had simply
made a desperate break for liberty while the gates of the prison
hospital in which he was confined stood open, a cab outside bearing him
off to a place of safety. Another political prisoner regained his
freedom by knocking down a sentinel with brass knuckles, while still
another, who was awaiting death in Odessa, would have made his escape by
means of planks laid from his cell window to the top of the prison
fence, had not these planks proved to be too flimsy. In one place an
imprisoned army officer slipped away under cover of a flirtation in
which a girl prisoner had engaged the warden. A revolutionist named
Myshkin had tried to liberate Chernishevsky, the celebrated critic, by
appearing at the place of his banishment, in far-away Siberia, in the
guise of a gendarme officer with an order for the distinguished exile,
and a similar scheme had been tried on the warden of a prison in
European Russia. Both these attempts had failed, but then in the case in
hand there was the hope of Rodkevich, the warden, acting as a willing
victim. Pavel said he would impersonate one of the gendarmes.
"Some of the gaolers may know you," Mlle. Yavner objected.
"That's quite unlikely, I was away so long. Besides, the thing would
have to be done in the evening anyhow. I must be on hand. It will be
necessary."
"You might be recognised after all," she insisted, shyly.
Another project was to have a rope thrown over the prison fence, in a
secluded corner of the yard. This was to be done at a signal from
within, while Makar was out for exercise, in the charge of a bribed
guard. The guard was to raise an alarm when it was too late, telling how
his prisoner knocked him down and was hoisted out of sight. Or Makar
might be smuggled out in a barrel on some provision waggon, the
prescribed examination of the vehicle being performed by a friendly
gaoler. Whatever plan they took up, Pavel insisted on playing the
leading part in it. He was for taking Makar away in a closed carriage,
if need be under cover of pistol shots. Clara urged that in the event
the equipage had to wait for some time, its presence about the prison
was sure to arouse dangerous curiosity. Altogether she was in favour of
a quiet and simple proceeding. Safonoff's house was within easy distance
from the prison, so if Masha could undertake to keep her brother away
from home, Clara would prefer to have Makar walk quietly to that place,
as a first resort, thence to be taken, thoroughly disguised, to the
"conspiracy house" of the Circle. But Pavel picked the proposition to
pieces.
Since her initiation into the warden's house Clara had been in a
peculiarly elevated state of mind, her whole attention being absorbed in
her mission in which she took great pride. This uplifted mood of hers
she strove to suppress, and the clear-headed, matter-of-fact way in
which she faced the grave dangers of her task animated Pavel with a
feeling of intimate comradeship as well as admiration.
As they now sat in the cleanest and brightest corner of the trunk shop
he was vaguely sensible of a change in her appearance. Then he noticed
that instead of the dark woolen dress she had worn at the time of their
previous meetings she had on a fresh blouse of a light-coloured fabric.
To be seen in a new colour is in itself becoming to a woman, but this
blouse of Clara's was evidently a tribute to spring. Her face seemed to
be suffused with the freshness of the month.
While they sat talking, her mother came in, an elderly Jewess, tall and
stately, with a shrewd, careworn look, her hair carefully hidden beneath
a strip of black satin.
"Is that you, Tamara?" she asked without taking notice of the stranger.
She said something to Motl, made for the door, but suddenly returned,
addressing herself to her daughter again. She wanted to know something
about the law of chattel-mortgages, but neither Clara nor her visitor
could furnish her the desired information.
"Always at those books of theirs, yet when it comes to the point they
don't know anything," she said, with a smile, as she bustled out of the
room.
"Are these Talmud books?" Pavel asked, pointing at Rabbi Rachmiel's
library.
"Yes," Clara nodded with an implied smile in her voice.
"Can you read them?"
"Oh, no," she answered, smiling.
He told her that Makar was a deep Talmudic scholar and talked of the
Jewish religion, but she offered him no encouragement. She was brimful
of questions herself. Her inquiries were concerned with the future
destinies of the human race. With all her practical common sense, she
had a notion that the era of undimmed equality and universal love would
dawn almost immediately after the overthrow of Russian tyranny. This, as
she had been taught by revolutionary publications, was to come as the
logical continuation of Russia's village communes, once the development
of this survival of prehistoric communism received free scope. What she
wanted was a clear and detailed account of life in Future Society.
Her questions and his answers had the character of a theoretical
discussion. Gradually, however, he mounted to a more animated tone,
portraying the future with quiet fervour. She listened gravely, her eyes
full upon his, and this absorbed look spurred him on. But presently her
mother came in again, this time with a peasant customer, and they went
out to continue their talk in the open air. There were plenty of
deserted lanes and bits of open country a short distance off. There was
a vague gentle understanding between them that it was the golden
idealism of their talk which had set them yearning for the unhidden sky
and the aromatic breezes of spring. This upheld their lofty mood while
they silently trudged through the outskirts of the market place. They
could not as yet continue their interrupted conversation, and to speak
of something else would have seemed profanation. At last they emerged on
a lonely square, formed by an orchard, some houses and barns and the
ruin of an old barrack. The air was excellent and there was nobody to
overhear them. Nevertheless when Pavel was about to resume he felt that
he was not in the mood for it. Nor did she urge him on with any further
questions.
From the old barracks they passed into a dusty side lane and thence into
a country road which led to a suburb and ran parallel to the railway
tracks.
The sun was burning by fits and starts, as it were. In those spots where
masses of lilacs and fruit blossoms gave way to a broader outlook, the
road was so flooded with light that Clara had to shield her eyes with
her hand. Now and again a clump of trees in the distance would fall
apart to show the snow-crested top of a distant hill and the blueish
haze of the horizon-line.
Their immediate surroundings were a scrawny, frowzy landscape. The lawns
in front of the huts they passed, the homes of washerwomen, were
overspread with drying linen.
"Delightful, isn't it?" Pavel said, inhaling a long draught of the rich,
animating air and glancing down a ravine choked with nettle. The remark
was merely a spoken sigh of joy. She made no reply.
They were both hungry, and presently they began to feel tired as well.
Yet neither of them was disposed to halt or to break silence except by
an occasional word or two that meant nothing.
At last he said:
"You must be quite fatigued. It's cruel of me."
"I am, but it isn't cruel of you," she answered, stopping short, and
drawing a deep, smiling breath.
He ran into a washerwoman's hovel, startling a brood of ducklings on his
way, and soon came back with the information that milk was to be had in
a trackman's hut beyond a sparse grove to the right.
A few minutes later they sat at a rude table in a miniature garden
between the shining steel rails of the track and a red-painted cabin. It
was the fourth track-house from the Miroslav railroad station and was
generally known as the Fourth Hut. Besides milk and eggs and coarse rye
bread they found sour soup. They ate heartily, but an echo of their
exalted dream was still on them. To Pavel this feeling was embodied in
an atmosphere of femininity that pervaded his consciousness at this
moment. He was sensible of sitting in front of a pretty, healthy girl
full of modest courage and undemonstrative inspiration. The lingering
solemnity of his mood seemed to have something to do with the shimmering
little hairs which the breeze was stirring on Clara's neck, as she bent
over her earthen bowl, with the warm colouring of her ear, with the
elastic firmness of her cheek, with the airiness of her blouse.
A desire stirred in him to speak once more of the part she had
unconsciously played in his conversion, and at this he felt that if he
told her the story he would find a peculiar pleasure in exaggerating the
importance of the effect which her "speech" had produced on his mind.
But it came over him that Makar was still behind the prison gate and
that this was not the time to enjoy oneself.