THE MYSTERY OF A SHOP.
A tall man with a reddish beard called at one of the police stations of
the capital about a cheese store which he was going to open on Little
Garden Street. He gave his name as Koboseff. When he had gone the
Captain of the station said to one of his roundsmen:
"That fellow doesn't talk like a tradesman. I asked him a few questions,
and his answers were rather too polished for a cheese dealer." And
taking up his pen, he added, with a preoccupied air, "Keep an eye on
him, will you?"
Little Garden Street was part of a route which the Emperor often took on
his way to or from his niece's residence, the Michail Palace, and
received the special attention of the police.
The roundsman spoke to the agent of the house where Koboseff had rented
a basement for his projected shop and dwelling room; whereupon the agent
recalled that cheesemonger's handwriting had struck him as being too
good for a man of his class. Inquiry at the town at which Koboseff's
passport was dated brought the information that a document corresponding
in every detail to the one in question had actually been issued by the
local authorities. Koboseff was thus no invented name, and as the
description in the passport agreed with the appearance of the man who
had rented the basement, the St. Petersburg police saw no ground for
further suspicion.
The cheese shop was opened in the early part of January, Koboseff having
moved in with a fair-complexioned woman whom he introduced as his wife.
Some three or four weeks later the head porter of the house notified the
police that Koboseff had boasted of the flourishing state of his
business, whereas in reality his shop attracted but very scant custom.
At the same time it was pointed out that there was a well-established
and prosperous cheese store close by, that the basement occupied by the
Koboseffs was scarcely the place one would naturally select for the
purpose, and that the rent was strikingly too high for the amount of
business Koboseff could expect to do there. To cap the climax, there was
some lively gossip among the neighbours about Mme. Koboseff, who had
been seen smoking cigarettes--a habit quite unusual for a woman of the
lower classes--and who often stayed out all night.
"Koboseff" was Uric Bogdanovich, Pavel's "Godfather," and "Mme.
Koboseff" was Baska, formerly "housewife" of the dynamite shop and a
year previous to that in charge of a house in the south near which
Zachar and others attempted to blow up an imperial train.
The cheese shop was often visited by Zachar, Purring Cat, the reticent
stalwart man with the Tartarian features, Pavel and other
revolutionists. The police kept close watch on the place, but, according
to all reports, no suspicious persons were ever seen to enter it. Upon
the whole the Koboseffs seemed to be real tradesmen, and as the
information concerning their passport was satisfactory, they were not
disturbed. A slim little man named Kurilloff who had played the part of
errand boy at the cheese shop had been arrested, but his detention had
nothing to do with the Koboseffs, and the police of Little Garden
Street had no idea of the arrest, while the officers who had made it
were unaware of the prisoner's connection with a suspicious shop.
"If I were you I'd make missus behave," the head porter of the house
once said to Koboseff, speaking of his "wife."
"Right you are," the cheesemonger replied. "Only my old woman is a tough
customer to handle, you know. I do tell her she had better mind the
house and ought to be ashamed of herself to smoke cigarettes, but she
doesn't care a rap, not she."
"I would teach her if she was _my_ wife."
The cheesemonger made a gesture of despair, and the porter said to
himself that there was nothing suspicious about him; that he was simply
a fellow without backbone and a fool, qualities which seemed to account
for Koboseff's incompetence as a business man.
* * * * *
"Well, Clanya," Pavel said to Mlle. Yavner, lazily addressing her in the
diminutive of his own coining. "I am afraid I shall have to exile you
for some time."
"Exile me?" she asked absently without lifting her eyes from a heap of
type she was sorting and putting up in packages. She sat across the
table from the sofa upon which he was cuddling himself drowsily as a cat
does before a fireside.
"Yes, that's what I'll have to do--pack you off, put you in a box, nail
you up tight, stick a label on it and ship you somewhere. 'To places not
so very distant,'" he added, mocking the official phrase used in
transporting people to eastern Siberia.
She raised her eyes from her work, her fingers stiff and black with lead
dust. "What are you driving at, Pasha? Anything up? Or is it merely one
of those jokes under which one must write in big letters: 'This is a
joke?'"
"Is _that_ a joke?" he asked, and burst into laughter.
She resumed her work. The type she was sorting was intended for a
revolutionary printing office, having been sent to St. Petersburg by
Masha Safonoff, who had bought it of the foreman of the government's
printing office in Miroslav.
"Oh, to all the diabolical devils with that type of yours, Clanya. Can't
you sit down by a fellow's side for a minute or two?"
She got up, washed her hands and complied with his wish. As she played
with his hand she noticed the trace of blisters on his palm. Her face
darkened; but she asked no questions. After a little she demanded: "What
did you mean by 'exiling' me?"
"Oh dash it all, Clanya. It's something serious. I'll tell it to you
some other time. I'm too lazy to be serious." He would have preferred to
be sprawling like this with her hands in his; luxuriating in the gleam
of her intelligent blue eyes and in the feminine atmosphere of her
person; but his excuse that it was "too serious" only sharpened her
determination to know what it was without delay.
"What is it, Pasha?"
"There you are," he said peevishly. "One can't have a minute's rest from
business, not a minute's rest."
"Why did you hasten to speak of 'exiling' me, then?" she retorted
tartly. "Why didn't you keep it to yourself until you were again in a
mood for 'business'?"
He had not kept it to himself simply because it was not easy for him to
keep anything from her. He was more apt to fly into a temper with her
than she with him, but in their mutual relations she was the stronger
vessel of the two and, in an imperceptible, unformulated way, he was
considerably under her thumb. When he heard or saw something new,
received some new impression, his first impulse was to share it with
her. If an opinion was formed in his mind he wondered, sometimes
timidly, whether she would concur with it. Timidly, because in many
instances, when he came bubbling over with enthusiasm over some scheme
of his own, she had cruelly dampened his fervour by merely extricating
the vital point of his argument from a surrounding tangle of roseate
phraseology. His great intellectual feast was to be in her room,
discussing theories, books, people with her. These discussions, which
sometimes lasted for hours, often called forth a snappish, bitter tone
on both sides, but they were at once an expression and a fostering
agency of that spiritual unity which was one of the chief sources of
their happiness in one another.
"Well, there is very little to tell about," he said at last. "Something
is under way, and it has been decided to notify all illegals not in it
to vacate St. Petersburg until it's all over."
The lines of her fresh-tinted face hardened into an expression of
extreme gravity and her fingers grew limp in his grasp. She withdrew
them.
"Look at her!" he squeaked in a burst of merriment.
"There is nothing to look at. I am not going." She dropped her glance.
She divined that his blisters had something to do with the digging of a
mine in which he took part.
"Is it all settled?"
"Oh, Pasha! Your jesting is so out of place," she returned sullenly. "I
am not going."
"But the air is getting hot in St. Petersburg. Whew! The police are
suspicious, of course; they won't leave a stone unturned."
He took hold of her tender girlish hand, but she withdrew it again, with
a gesture of impatience.
"There will be something to do for you too later on," he comforted her,
guiltily. "It's going to be a big thing, the biggest of all. You'll come
back in a month or so."
She made no answer.
The two intersecting streets outside reeked and creaked and glittered
with the crispness of a typical St. Petersburg frost. It was about ten
in the morning, in the early part of January. The little parlour was
delightfully warm, with a dim consciousness of sleigh-furs, hack drivers
in absurd winter caps, pedestrians huddling themselves and wriggling and
grunting for an effeminating background to one's sense of shelter. The
even heat of the white glazed oven seemed to be gleaming and stirring
over the surface of the tiles like something animate, giving them an
effect of creamy mellowness that went to one's heart together with the
delicious warmth they radiated. Ever and anon a sleigh bell would tinkle
past and sink into Pavel's mood. There was a rhythm to the warm
stillness of the room. But Clara's silence tormented him.
"We'll discuss it later on, Clanya. I'm too tired now. My brain won't
work. Let us play school," he pleaded fawningly, in burlesque Russian,
mimicking the accent of the Czech who taught Latin at the Miroslav
gymnasium.
"Stop that, pray."
He made a sorry effort to obey her, and finally she yielded, with a
smile and a Jewish shrug. He played a gymnasium teacher and she a pupil.
He made her conjugate his name as she would a verb; made puns on
Clanya, which is an unfinished Russian word meaning to bow, to greet, to
convey one's regards; mocked and laughed at her enunciation till his
eyes watered. Gradually he drifted into an impersonation of old Pievakin
and flew into a passion because her hearty laughter marred the illusion
of the performance.
"You do need rest, poor thing," she said, looking at his haggard, worn
face.
"Well, another few weeks and we shall be able to get all the rest we
want, if not in a cell, or in a quieter place still, in some foreign
resort, perhaps. I really feel confident we are going to win this time."
"It's about time the party did."
"It will this time, you may be sure of it. And then--by George, the very
sky will feel hot. Everything seems ready for a general uprising. All
that is needed is the signal. I can see the barricades going up in the
streets." He gnashed his teeth and shook her by the shoulders
exultantly. "Yes, ma'am. And then, Clanya, why, then we won't have to go
abroad for our vacation. One will be able to breathe in Russia then.
Won't we give ourselves a spree, eh? But whether here or abroad, I must
take you for a rest somewhere. Will you marry your love-lorn Pashka
then? I dare you to say no."
"But I don't want to say no," she answered radiantly.
They went to dinner together and then they parted. As they shook hands
he peered into her face with a rush of tenderness, as though trying to
inhale as deep an impression of her as possible in case either of them
was arrested before they met again. And, indeed, there was quite an
eventful day in store for her.
One of the persons she was to see later in the afternoon was a man with
a Greek name. As she approached the house in which he had his lodgings,
she recognised in the gas-lit distance the high forehead and the boyish
face of Sophia, the ex-Governor's daughter. Sophia, or Sonia, as she was
fondly called, was bearing down upon her at a brisk, preoccupied walk.
As she swept past Clara, without greeting her, she whispered:
"A trap."
The lodging of the man with the queer name had been raided, then, and
was now held by officers in the hope of ensnaring some of his friends.
Clara had been at the place several times and she was afraid that the
porter of the house, in case he stood at his post in the gateway at this
minute, might recognise her.
The dim opening of the gate loomed as a sickly quadrangular hole
exhaling nightmare and ruin. Turning sharply back, however, might have
attracted notice; so Clara entered the first gate on her way, four or
five houses this side of her destination, and when she reappeared a
minute or two later, she took the opposite direction. As she turned the
next corner she found herself abreast of a man she had noticed in the
streets before. He was fixed in her mind by his height and carriage.
Extremely tall and narrow-shouldered, he walked like a man with a sore
neck, swinging one of his long arms to and fro as he moved stiffly
along. The look he gave her made a very unpleasant impression on her. He
let her gain on him a little and then she heard his soft rubber-shod
footsteps behind her.
It is a terrible experience, this sense of being dogged as you walk
along. It is tantalising enough when your desire to take a look at the
man at your heels is only a matter of curiosity which for some reason or
other you cannot gratify. Imagine, then, the mental condition of an
"illegal" shadowed by a spy or by a man he suspects of being one. He
tingles with a desire to quicken pace, yet he must walk on with the same
even, calm step; every minute or two he is seized with an impulse to
turn on the fellow behind him, yet he must not show the least sign of
consciousness as to his existence. It is the highest form of torture,
yet it was the daily experience of every active man or woman of the
secret organisation; for if the political detectives were spying upon
pedestrians right and left, the revolutionists, on their part, were apt
to be suspicious with equal promiscuity. Small wonder that some of them,
upon being arrested, hailed their prison cell as a welcome place of
rest, as a relief from the enervating strain of liberty under the
harrowing conditions of underground life. As a matter of fact this
wholesale shadowing seldom results in the arrest of a revolutionist.
Thousands of innocent people were snuffed to one Nihilist, and the
Nihilists profited by the triviality of suspicion. Most arrests were the
result of accident.
At the corner of the next large thoroughfare she paused and looked up
the street for a tram-car. While doing so Clara glanced around her. The
tall man had disappeared. A tram-car came along shortly and she was
about to board it when she heard Sonia's voice once more.
"You're being shadowed. Follow me."
Sonia entered a crowded sausage shop, and led the way to the far end of
it in the rear of an impatient throng. Pending her turn to be waited on,
she took off her broad-brimmed hat, asking Clara to hold it for her,
while she adjusted her hair.
"Put it on, and let me have your fur cap," she gestured.
The homely broad-brimmed hat transformed Clara's appearance
considerably. It made her look shorter and her face seemed larger and
older.
"I saw a tall fellow turn you over to one with a ruddy mug. The red man
is waiting for you outside now, but I don't think he had a good look at
your face. There is a back door over there."
Clara regained the street through the yard, and sure enough, a man with
a florid face was leisurely smoking a cigarette at the gate post. He
only gave her a superficial glance and went on watching the street door
of the shop. She took a public sleigh, ordered the driver to take her to
the Liteyny Bridge, changed her destination in the middle of the
journey, and soon after she got off she took another sleigh for quite
another section of the city. In short, she was "circling," and when she
thought her trail completely "swept away," she went home on foot.