A HUNTED MONARCH.
The ministers were reporting to the Czar who had recently returned from
Livadia. They were admitted one at a time. As they sat chatting under
breath in the blue waiting room, with the white reflection of the snow
that was falling outside, upon their faces, these elderly men, whose
names were associated in millions of minds with the notion of infinite
dignity and power, looked like a group of anxious petitioners in the
vestibule of some official.
An exception was made for Count Loris-Melikoff, who was with the Czar
during the audiences of all his colleagues. The Supreme Executive
Commission over which he had presided had been abolished some four
months before. Nominally he was now simply in charge of the Department
of the Interior, but in reality he continued to play the part of
premier, a position he partly owed to Princess Dolgoruki, the Czar's
young wife, who set great store by his liberal policy. She was said to
be a woman of a rather progressive turn of mind, but whether she was or
not, her fate hung on the life of her imperial husband and every measure
that was calculated to pacify the Nihilists found a ready advocate in
her. Indeed, she and the Count were united by a community of personal
interests; for he had as many enemies at court as she, and his position
depended upon the life of Alexander II. as much as hers.
The Czar was receiving the ministers in a chamber of moderate size,
finished in sombre colours, with engaged columns of malachite,
book-cases of ebony and silver, with carvings representing scenes from
Russian history, and a large writing table to match. Statues of bronze
and ivory stood between the book-cases and a striking life-size
watercolour of Nicholas I. hung on the wall to the right of the Czar's
chair. The falling snow outside was like a great impenetrable veil
without beginning or end, descending from some unknown source and
disappearing into some equally mysterious region. The room, whose high
walls, dismally imposing, were supposed to hold the destinies of a
hundred millions of human beings, was filled with lustreless wintry
light. The Emperor, tall, erect, broad-shouldered, the image of easy
dignity, but pale and with a touch of weariness in his large oval face,
wore the undress uniform of a general of infantry. He was sixty-two and
he was beginning to look it. He listened to the ministers with
constrained attention. He showed exaggerated interest in the affairs of
their respective departments, but they could see that his heart was not
in their talk, and with unuttered maledictions for the upstart
vice-Emperor, they made short work of their errands. They knew that the
Interior Department was the only one that commanded the Czar's interest
in those days.
At last the Emperor and his chief adviser were left alone. Both were
silent. Loris-Melikoff was as strikingly oriental of feature as
Alexander II. was European. Notwithstanding his splendid military career
and uniform he had the appearance of a sharp-witted scientist rather
than of a warrior. His swarthy complexion, shrewd oriental eyes and
huge energetic oriental nose, flanked by greyer and longer side-whiskers
than the Czar's, made him look like a representative of some foreign
power.
There was pathos in both. Alexander II. had that passion for life which
comes to an old man upon marrying a pretty young woman. Yet foreigners
who saw him during this period said that he looked like a hunted man. As
to Count Melikoff, his advance had been so rapid, he was surrounded by
so many enemies at court, and the changes by which he was trying to save
the Czar's life and his own power, were beset by so many obstacles, that
he could not help feeling like the peasant of the story who was made
king for one day.
Naturally talkative and genially expansive, the Czar's manner toward
people who were admitted to his intimacy was one of amiable informality.
The chief pathos of his fate sprang from the discrepancy between the
Czar and the man in him, between a vindictive ruthlessness born of a
blind sense of his autocratic honour and an affectionate, emotional
nature with less grit than pride. Had he been a common mortal he would
have made far more friends than enemies.
Count Loris-Melikoff had become accustomed to feel at home in his
presence. At this minute, however, as the Czar was watching the snow
flakes, with an air of idle curiosity, the Armenian had an overbearing
sense of the distance between them. He knew that the Czar was anxious to
talk about the revolutionists and that he hated to do so. His heart
contracted with common human pity, yet in the silence that divided them
it came over him that the man in front of him was the Czar, and a
feeling of awe seized him like the one he used to experience at sight of
the Emperor long before he was raised to his present position. This
feeling passed, however, the moment the Czar began to speak.
"Well?" he said, with sudden directness. "Anything new about that
Michailoff fellow?" Alexandre Michailoff was the real name of the
Janitor.
"Nothing new so far, your Majesty," Loris-Melikoff answered
obsequiously, yet with something like triumph, as if the powerlessness
of the police were only too natural and substantiated his views on the
general state of things. "He is one of their chief ringleaders."
"And this has been known all along," the Emperor remarked with sad
irony. "Such a thing would be inconceivable in any other capital in
Europe."
"Quite so. But I feel that in other countries, the capture of miscreants
like ours would be due less to the efficiency of the police than to the
cordial cooperation of the public. The trouble is that our police is
thrown on its own resources, Sire. It is practically fighting those
wretches single-handed."
The Czar had a fit of coughing, the result of asthma. When it had
subsided, he said with an air of suffering:
"Well, that's your theory. But then their public is not ours. The
average Russian is not wide-awake enough to cooperate with the
authorities." He had in mind his own address at Moscow in which he had
appealed to the community at large for this very assistance in ferreting
out sedition. The Will of the People had come into existence since then.
"Still, if our public were drawn into active cooperation with the
Government, if it became habituated to a sense of the monarch's
confidence in itself, it seems reasonable to suppose that the indolence
of the community would then disappear. No people is capable of greater
loyalty to the throne than your Majesty's. All that is needed is to
lend to this devotion tangibility. This and this alone would enable your
Majesty to cure the evil. What the body politic needs is judicious
internal treatment. Surgical operations have proven futile. These are my
sincerest convictions, your Majesty."
"I know they are," the Czar answered musingly.
"And the great point is, that with the intelligent classes actively
interested in the preservation of law and order, criminal societies of
any sort would find themselves without any ground to stand upon."
The Czar had another cough, and then he said, flushing:
"There is a simpler way to leave them without ground to stand upon,
surgical operations or no surgical operations. Call it what you will.
There is no sense in pampering them, Melikoff. Why, in western Europe
they execute common murderers. As to a gang of assassins like that,
death would be regarded a mild punishment." He lighted a cigarette, but
forthwith extinguished it and went on with emphasis: "We handle them
with kid gloves, Melikoff. That's why they take chances."
He spoke with subdued anger, citing the republican uprising led by
aristocratic army officers in 1825, which his father (the man whose
portrait was on the right wall) quelled by means of field guns.
Loris-Melikoff demurred to the comparison, tactfully hinting that there
would be no betrayal of weakness in inviting the public to participate
in the extermination of crime by showing it signs of increased imperial
confidence, and the Czar softened again. He felt that the Armenian knew
how to save him and he willingly submitted to his and Princess
Dolgoruki's influence. But Fate was bent on tragedy.
Alexander II. lacked anything but courage. Still, this continuous
living under fire had gradually unnerved him. The soldier on the
battlefield finds moral support in the presence of thousands of
comrades, all facing the same fate as he; whereas he was like a lone man
on top of a dynamite pile. And if his perils were shared by those about
him, this only added the agonising consciousness that his person carried
the shadow of destruction with it, endangering the life of every living
being that came near him. He knew, for example, that when he was at the
theatre candles were kept ready, in case the lights were blown out by an
explosion; that many people stayed away from the playhouse on such
occasions for fear of being destroyed along with their sovereign. His
pride would not let him feel low-spirited. He very often forced himself
to disdain caution, to act with reckless courage. Nevertheless he had a
dreary, jaded look. The notion that he, the most powerful of men, the
image of grandeur and human omnipotence, should tremble at every sound,
wounded his common human pride acutely. The consequence was that this
mightiest monarch in the world, the gigantic man of sixty-two, every bit
of him an Emperor, was at heart a terror-stricken infant mutely
imploring for help. He continued to appear in the streets of the
capital, accompanied by his usual escort and to return the salutes of
passers-by with his usual air of majestic ease. Now and then he went to
the theatre, and occasionally even beyond the scenes for a flirtation
with the actresses. But the public knew that besides his large uniformed
escort, his carriage was watched by hordes of detectives in citizen's
clothes, and that every inch of the ground which he was to traverse was
all but turned inside out for possible signs of danger. And those who
were admitted to his presence knew that underneath his grand,
free-and-easy bearing was a sick heart and a crushed spirit. That the
enemy was an unknown quantity was one of the sources of his growing
disquiet. The organised movement might be very large and it might be
ridiculously small, but with a latent half-Nihilist in the heart of
every subject. He was beginning to realise at last that he knew his
people scarcely better than he did the French or the English. He was
anxious to make peace with that invisible enemy of his, provided it did
not look as if he did.
He was willing to be deceived, and Loris-Melikoff was about to help him
deceive himself. But destiny was against them both. He was an honest
man, Loris-Melikoff, serious-minded, public-spirited, one of the few
able statesmen Russia ever had; but his path was strewn with thorns.