A SECOND COURTSHIP.
The Czar was still in Livadia with his bride, abandoning himself to his
second youth with a passion that was tinged with the pathos of imminent
tragedy, when Count Loris-Melikoff telegraphed to him a plea for the
lives of two revolutionists who had been sentenced to death, one of
these being Alexandre, the man in whose lodgings the gendarmes had found
a diagram of the Imperial dining hall. The distinguished Armenian was
contemplating reforms which he expected to leave no room for terrorism,
and it was for the sake of these measures as well as of the Emperor
himself, that he was averse to having the bitterness of the
revolutionists quickened by new executions. If they only let the Czar
live until those projects had been carried out, he thought, their
conspiracies would lose all reason of existence; at any rate, the
surreptitious support which they received from men of high social
position would be withdrawn.
But his despatch was followed by one from the Czarowitz, who, echoing
the views of the anti-Melikoff party at court, urged his father not to
show signs of weakness, and the sentence was allowed to stand.
* * * * *
At about nine o'clock in the morning of a cold autumn day, a fortnight
after the meeting of the Executive Committee which Clara attended,
Pavel stood on a chair nailing a clothes rack to the wall. The room was
Clara's. It was on the fifth floor of a house near a corner, with
windows commanding the two intersecting streets, where her window
signals could be seen at a considerable distance. She rented it
furnished, with samovar service, but the curtains and some bits of
bric-a-brac had been bought by Pavel who took more interest in these
things and was handier about the house than she. He himself lived in the
house of a distant relative, an elderly widow, who took great pride in
him and had no doubt that he led the life of the average young man of
his class, that is to say, he spent his nights and his mamma's rubles on
an endless crop of wild oats. To Clara's landlady he was known as a
brother of hers. On the present occasion he had found his fiancee out,
but a mark on the door had told him that she would soon be back.
Presently she came in. She wore a tall fur cap and her cheeks gleamed,
exhaling the freshness of girlish health and of the cold weather of the
street, but she looked grave. Pavel threw away his hammer and pounced
down upon her with open arms. She repulsed him gently.
"Stop," she whispered, drearily, unbuttoning her cloak and drawing a
newspaper from its inner pocket. "There is terrible news this morning."
The execution of Alexandre and the other revolutionist had taken place
the day before, and the newspapers were allowed to print a very brief
account of it--how they bade each other good-bye on the scaffold and
how, when Alexandre saw the death-shroud on his friend, his eyes filled
with tears. The two condemned men had been great chums for several
years, Alexandre having once wrested the other from a convoy. Now they
died together.
As Pavel read the account of the double execution, standing by the
window, a flush of overpowering despair shot into his chest and diffused
itself through his legs.
"They have choked them after all," he gasped out.
Clara, who sat at a table watching him, dropped her head on her folded
arms, in a paroxysm of quick, bitter sobbing.
The few details in the newspaper report gave vividness to the grewsome
scene. The two executed men had been among Pavel's most intimate
friends. The image of Alexandre, his arms pinioned, looking on with
tears while a white shroud was being slipped over his fellow-prisoner,
was tearing at his heart with cruel insistence.
"Oh, it's terrible, Clarochka!" he moaned, dropping by her side,
nestling to her, and bursting into tears in her bosom. Then, getting up,
he took to walking back and forth, vehemently. "They have choked them,
the blood-drinkers," he muttered. "They have done it after all." He fell
silent, pacing the floor in despair, and then burst out once again:
"They have choked them, the vampires."
"But war is war," she said, for something to say to him, her own face
distorted with her struggle against a flow of tears.
"Oh, I don't know. All I do know is that they have been murdered, that
they are no more." A minute or two later he turned upon her with a look
full of ghastly malice. "War did you say? The government can't have
enough of it, can it? Well, it shall have all the war it wants. The
party has only shown it the blossoms; the berries are still to come."
The world seemed to be divided into those who had known the two executed
men personally and those who had not. For the moment there seemed to be
little in common between him and Clara. She strained him to a seat by
her side on the sofa again, clasping one of his hands in both of hers,
and kissed him on the cheek, wetting his temple with her tears.
"Do you know, dearest, I really had a lurking hope they would be
spared," he said. "I was ashamed to say so, but I did. But no! they
choked them. They choked them. Idiots that they are. They imagine they
can hang every honest man in the country."
"Loris-Melikoff is even worse than the Czar. His liberalism is nothing
but hypocrisy. There can no longer be any question about it."
"He is a rogue of the deepest dye. He is a bungling hypocrite, an
abominable liar and a mangy coward, that's what he is. But to the devil
with him! This is not the point. Oh, nothing is the point. Nothing
except that they have been murdered."
He went to see some of the revolutionists with whom he had shared the
intimacy of the dead men.
Left alone, Clara began to pace the floor slowly. Not having known
either Alexandre or the man who had died with him, she was exempt from
that acute agony of grief which was her lover's; but there was the image
of two men in death-shrouds, a stirring image of martyrdom, before her
vision. Pity, the hunger of revenge and a loftier feeling--the thirst of
self-sacrifice to the cause of liberty--swelled her heart. Back and
forth she walked, slowly, solemnly, her hands gently clasped behind her,
her soul in a state of excitement that was coupled with a peculiar state
of physical tranquillity, her mind apparently seeing things with a
perspicacity the like of which it had never enjoyed before. Her future,
her duties, her relation to the rest of the world, her whole life--all
was wonderfully clear to her, and in spite of her anguish over the death
of the two men she felt singularly happy. It seemed to be a matter of
course that her party would now undertake some new plot, one exceeding
in boldness and magnitude all its predecessors. Many lives would have to
be staked. She would offer hers. Matrimony was out of the question at a
time like this. She conjured that image of the insane woman clasping a
rag to her bosom in support of her position. She longed to be near Pavel
again. In her mind she embraced him tenderly, argued with him, opened
her soul to him. It was all so clear. Her mind was so firmly made up.
She fondly hoped she would make Pavel see it all in the same light.
The explanation took place the next time he called on her, a few days
later.
"Oh, we shall all have to offer our lives," he replied. "But for God's
sake love me, Clanya. It will drive me crazy if you don't."
"But I do, I do. I love you with every fibre of my being, Pasha. What
has put it in your head to doubt it?"
"Oh, I don't know. All I do know is that as long as my life is mine I
cannot exist without you. I am frightfully lonely and that stands in the
way of my work. Dash it, I feel just as I did last summer before I took
courage to tell you that I was insanely in love with you."
She drew him to her, with a smile at once of happiness and amusement.
"Poor boy! It's enough to break one's heart. Poor little dear!" she
joked affectionately.
"I knew you would be making fun of me," he said, yearning upon her.
"Love me, Clanya, do love me, with all your heart. I cannot live apart
from you, I cannot, upon my word I cannot," he concluded piteously,
like a child.
"Do you imagine it's easy for me to be away from you?" she retorted
earnestly. "I can't be a single hour without you without missing you,
without feverishly waiting to see you again. As if you did not know it!
But what can we do? Is this the only sacrifice we are ready to make?"
* * * * *
A fortnight had passed. Unknown to her lover, Clara had spoken to the
Janitor, intimating her readiness to offer her life, and asking for one
of the most dangerous assignments the Governing Board could give her.
She was waiting for an answer, when the startling news spread among the
revolutionists that the Janitor was in the hands of the enemy and that
the capture of that maniac of caution had been the result of a most
insane piece of recklessness.
His arrest was one of the heaviest losses the party had yet sustained.
At the same time the government found a new source of uneasiness in it.
A large quantity of dynamite and some other things confiscated at his
lodgings pointed to a vigorous renewal of terroristic activity. Another
plot on the life of the Emperor seemed to be hatching in the capital,
yet all efforts of the police and the gendarmes in this connection were
futile. Indeed, the circumstances of the Janitor's arrest only furnished
new proof of the ineptitude and shiftlessness of those whose business it
was to ferret out Nihilism.
A few days before the Janitor was taken the police received word about
two portraits which had been left for reproduction at a well-known
photograph gallery and in which the photographer had recognised the two
Nihilists who had recently been hanged. Instead of a detective being
detailed, however, to lie in wait for the unknown man, the proprietor of
the gallery was simply ordered to notify the police when he came for his
pictures. The unknown man was the Janitor. When he called for the
photographs, an awkward attempt was made to detain him which aroused his
suspicion. He pleaded haste and made for the door. When a porter barred
his way he scared him off by thrusting his hand into an empty
pistol-pocket. A similar order for photographs of the two executed
Terrorists had been given by him to another well-known photographer next
door to the former place, and it was when he called there, a day or two
after his narrow escape at the adjoining gallery, that he was seized by
detectives.
When his landlady heard that her "star" lodger, the punctilious
government official and retired army officer, was neither an official
nor a retired officer, but a leading Nihilist, she fainted. The
gendarmes had been hunting for him since he broke away from his captors
on his way to prison one evening more than two years before. They had
heard that it was he who subsequently organised the railroad plot near
Moscow; also that he had been connected with the assassination of the
chief of gendarmes and with the shooting at the Czar in front of the
Winter Palace. Yet he had freely moved about the streets of St.
Petersburg these two years, the busiest agitator and conspirator in the
city, until, in a moment of morbid foolhardiness, he practically
surrendered himself to the police.
When Clara heard of his arrest, she clapped her hands together, Yiddish
fashion. "If the Janitor has been arrested as a result of carelessness,"
she exclaimed, "then everyone of us ought to hold himself in readiness
to be taken at any moment."
She repeated the remark the next time she saw Pavel, adding:
"The idea of being a married woman under such conditions!"
"Oh, that's an _idee fixe_ of yours," he said, testily.
She gave him a look and dropped her eyes, resentfully.
The peace-offering came from him.
"Whew, what a cloud!" he said, pointing at her glum face. "Won't there
be a single rift in it? Not a wee bit of a one for a single ray to come
through?"
She smiled, heartily.