officer in an infantry regiment and had once been a man of considerable
means, but he had lost all his money quite suddenly playing cards. He
had been fond of adventure, and had even taken part in foreign wars in
Cuba, in Greece, and in China. Then he married. He did this as he had
done everything else, suddenly and impulsively. He married the daughter
of a landowner whom he met in a provincial town, and he married her
after three days’ acquaintance. His wife was good-looking and prided
herself on her European culture; she spoke French and English. They
had two children. It was after his marriage that he had lost his
money, and shortly before the war. When the war broke out he went to
Manchuria. He was wounded at the battle of Mukden and promoted to be
a captain; he also received two orders. After Mukden he was invalided
home and some influential person who had met him in the Far East
obtained for him a place in the police at Moscow, for which he received
good pay. He was what is called in Russian a “Pristav”; that is to
say, the police officer of a town district. His wife considered that
this position was an inferior one; she was humiliated by it. She also
considered her husband to be beneath her in social rank (which was in
reality absurd) and she constantly reminded him of the fact. Alexander
Petrovitch was quick-witted, good-natured, impulsive, but hopelessly
incapable of any prolonged effort or any sort of concentration or
fixity of purpose. His mind continually went off at a tangent, and as a
Russian proverb says, “there was no Tsar in his head.”
When the Manifesto of the 17th of October had been published he had
greeted it with enthusiasm, and had taken part in the processions
which had filled the streets that day, and the crowds that sang the
“Marseillaise” and “God Save the Emperor,” alternately, and displayed
together the red and the National flag. But now he was discouraged. His
innate scepticism and his pessimism which every now and then gave way
to fitful outbursts of enthusiasm, had once more got the upper hand,
and he muttered as he walked home through the snowy streets on that
grey evening: “What a beastly state of things! What a beastly state of
things!”
When he got home he saw at a glance that his wife was not in the best
of tempers.
“Late as usual!” she said. “The soup’s been standing twenty minutes and
it’s quite cold.”
“I’m very sorry,” he said; “I was kept at the Governor’s.” He sat down
to the table on which there were a few sardines in a broken saucer,
a little stale pickled caviare which had got hard and slightly grey,
and some slices of sausage no longer fresh. He gulped down three small
glasses of vodka.
“What about Ermolov?” asked his wife.
“He has been arrested,” said Alexander Petrovitch. “He will be
examined by the doctors.”
“What nonsense!” said his wife, “why should he be examined? Why should
he be arrested? I think he ought to be rewarded. They don’t care who
they kill; they shoot policemen round the corner; they profit by the
red cross uniform to kill the police; they were shooting from some of
the churches to-day.”
Ermolov was a high police official who had walked into a doctor’s house
the day before and had shot him with a pistol for no reason at all.
Alexander Petrovitch shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the Government’s
fault,” he said. “There is no order and no law anywhere. Protection
is everything. What does it matter what the Revolutionaries do? That
has nothing to do with the question. If an officer breaks the law he
ought to be punished. He won’t be punished because he’s got protection.
Besides which, Ermolov is not a normal man: he is mad, quite mad.”
“What I say is,” said his wife, “that men who pretend to be doctors and
use the protection of the red cross badges to shoot innocent policemen
in the streets, ought to be shot in the street at sight.”
“The whole thing is absurd!” said Alexander Petrovitch.
“What did I tell you?” said his wife; “I told you so from the very
first when the Manifesto was published. I said that nothing would come
of it, and that it was a mistake. What do we want with a Constitution
in Russia? It is all the Jews--all this chaos is the work of the Jews.
And look what is happening now. One cannot even go out into the streets
for fear of being shot. They killed the Schwetzar (the hall porter)
next door this morning; he had been sent on a message.”
“If people would stay at home and mind their own business,” said
Alexander Petrovitch, “they would be quite safe. All day long I have
been pestered by people who want to pass here and want to pass there;
and they know quite well they can’t. And it’s no good telling them
‘Don’t go there, it’s dangerous; don’t go there, you’ll be shot,’
because the moment you tell them that, they make a point of going there
at once. I’m sick of always saying the same thing. If they go out in
the streets they must expect to be killed.”
“These students and these Jews,” said his wife, “come and shoot you
round the corner. I always said this would be the end of it. I always
said no good would come of it. It is disgraceful!”
Alexander Petrovitch settled down to his dinner, and, putting a napkin
under his chin, began to eat the soup, but it was cold and he had no
appetite.
“Where are the children?” he said.
“They’ve had their dinner,” said his wife. “Kolia and Peter are reading
in the next room.”
Alexander Petrovitch called his children, and two little boys came
into the room. Kolia, a fair-haired, pasty-faced boy with large grey
eyes, was aged nine, and Peter, a fat, dark-haired little creature in a
sailor’s suit was aged seven. Peter climbed on to his father’s knee and
his father asked him what he had been doing.
“We’ve been making bombs with the snow,” said Peter; “and playing at
the Revolution. Kolia was a policeman and I was a Social Democrat, and
I made a bomb and threw it at him and killed him.”
“How dare you play such games?” said their mother--“that’s all your
fault,” she added to her husband; “it’s you who have put such ideas
into their heads. Heaven knows when children begin to get such ideas; I
think the end of the world is come. Look at our schools: the children
can’t read; the universities are all in the hands of the Jews. The
girls at school have all gone quite mad. Nothing but hysteria,
hysteria, hysteria! It’s a disgrace. Don’t let me ever hear of your
playing such games again,” she said to the children.
The children, used to perpetual scolding, said nothing. Alexander
Petrovitch laughed.
“At least, I hope,” said his wife, “that the result of all this, and
of your having to do all this extra work, will be that you will get
promotion.”
“I doubt it,” said Alexander Petrovitch. “I have got no protection, and
protection is everything. I have finished my dinner. I want some tea.”
His wife called Sasha, the maid, and told her to bring the samovar,
and then scolded her violently because it was not ready. She then made
a further scene about the way in which the lemon was cut. Finally the
samovar was brought, Alexander Petrovitch was given his tea and began
smoking cigarette after cigarette in gloomy silence. His wife sat at
the head of the table and said nothing. The children played in the
corner with some wooden soldiers, and every now and then a dull boom
was heard outside, and once or twice the window shook and rattled.
“Guns!” said Alexander Petrovitch. “They are firing in the Tverskaia, I
suppose.”
At that moment the bell rang.
“I think,” said Alexander Petrovitch’s wife, “that it must be Ivan
Ivanovitch; he said he would come round this evening if he could.”
“I shall have to go presently,” said Alexander Petrovitch; “I’ve got to
go back to the office.”
Then the door was opened, and seven or eight people walked into the
room. They were young schoolboys and students between the ages of
sixteen and eighteen, and there were two girls with them.
Alexander Petrovitch and his wife were surprised at this influx of
guests, and the children stood up in the corner and stared.
“Whom have I the honour to address and what can I do for you?” said
Alexander Petrovitch.
A young student with long black hair, a seedy overcoat, and a worn fur
cap appeared to be the spokesman of the group, and, taking off his cap,
said: “We are the representatives of the flying column of the Social
Revolutionaries. We have come to carry out our orders.”
Alexander Petrovitch’s wife stood up and turned pale. The schoolboys
and the students surrounded Alexander Petrovitch and, linking their
arms in his, forced him out of the room. He turned round and looked at
his wife and the children. “I thought as much!” he said. Then he was
pushed out of the room and down the staircase.
All this happened in a moment. His wife stood still as though
transfixed, and could not move or utter.
Two or three minutes passed in breathless silence, and Peter began to
cry. They had left the door open. The banging of the street door was
heard, and then two or three shots rang out.
Sasha, the maid, came rushing into the room, screaming with all her
might--
“They have killed Alexander Petrovitch in the yard!”
THE AMORPHISTS
I was staying not long ago in a small town in the centre of Russia
which I will call T----. It was a small, sleepy town, through which
an indolent river wended its way. The houses were low, one-storeyed,
built of wood and painted white, adorned with old-fashioned delicate
stucco, delicate pilasters and wooden verandahs; and many of them
had gardens and trellis-work arbours. The place breathed a spirit of
the dying eighteenth century. One seemed to be in a kind of Russian
“Cranford.” The shops and market-places, the hotel with its stiff
early Victorian furniture--mahogany, stuffed with faded red rep--the
squatting churches, the slow moving, leisurely inhabitants, all seemed
to belong to a remoter time than ours. Here, I thought, in any case,
the Revolution cannot have penetrated; to seek for politics here would
be like looking for bombs in the Garden of Proserpine. But when I was
waiting for my dinner in the dining-room of the hotel, when the great
mechanical barrel-organ had played a tune by Donizetti out of _Lucrezia
Borgia_ for the tenth time, I was disillusioned by the innkeeper, a
fat, smiling man, with a huge beard, high boots, and a loose, white
untucked shirt, with a red corded waistband round it.
“Here,” I said to him, “you have in any case the advantage of being
free from revolutionary turmoil.”
“How so?” he asked, in a slightly injured tone, which was due
to the fact, not that I had suspected his native city of being
anti-revolutionary, but of being void of teeming events.
“We, too, have our disorders, very serious disorders,” he said, with
pride. “The day before yesterday there were terrible occurrences.”
“Really,” I answered, with great interest, “what were they?”
“Is it possible that you have not heard,” he asked, “Why, everybody
knows that the day before yesterday the Amorphists made an attempt.”
I confessed that I had not heard of it, because I had been very busy,
and I pressed him to relate to me the proceedings of the Amorphists,
adding that I was not quite sure who the Amorphists were.
“Everybody knows,” said my host, “that the Amorphists are the
extreme left wing of the Free Law Party. They are to the left of all
left parties, which run thus: Social Revolutionaries, Maximalists,
Anarchists, Amorphists.”
“But what are the Free Law Party?” I asked.
“The Free Law Party,” he answered, “are those people who wish the law
to be free.”
“How free?” I asked.
“Free Law,” he answered, “is like free trade. In some countries there
is free trade. We wish for free law; everybody to be free to make
whatever laws he likes, and everybody else to be free to obey them.”
“And to disobey them?” I asked.
“Yes, of course, and to disobey them. Well, I will tell you what
happened. The Amorphists--that is to say the left wing of the Free Law
Party--were getting discontented at the inactivity of the rest of their
party”----
“What are Amorphists?” I interrupted.
“It is a secret,” he answered, “but I will tell you this; nobody can
be an Amorphist who recognises any law or rule, and nobody can be
an Amorphist who is more than seventeen years of age. They have no
President, for every Amorphist is a President. Their watchword is,
‘Death to the Bourgeoisie; away with the intellectuals; down with the
students; to hell with the Jews; Life, Liberty, Anarchy; Death.’ They
wear a sign nobody can recognise unless he is initiated, and whoever
betrays it is condemned to be drowned on dry land, like a Catholic
Freemason.”
“What are those?” I asked.
“Freemasons,” he replied--he had now become used, and consequently
indulgent to my ignorance--“are those people who drink each other’s
healths in water. Well, as I was saying, the Amorphists who constituted
the left wing of the Free Law Party were discontented with the apathy
of the rest of their colleagues, and they decided that this state of
things could not last any longer, and that they must make themselves
felt; so they decided to kill Michael Ivanovitch.”
“Who,” I asked, “is Michael Ivanovitch?”
The innkeeper’s astonishment knew no bounds. My not having heard of
the Amorphists, of free law, or freemasons, he quite understood,
but Michael Ivanovitch! That was too much. Everybody knew Michael
Ivanovitch. “He is the assistant of the Police Inspector,” he said,
with an air of patient pity. “They settled to kill him. Lots were
drawn, and Vasili, Paul, and Trafim were chosen to kill him--Vasili
the floor-cleaner, Paul the stone-mason, and Trafim the stove-maker.”
(He now gave explanations unasked, as one does to small children.) “So
Vasili, Paul, and Trafim went off to buy a bomb at the Apothecary’s
opposite--he is cunning in the making of bombs. They bought a bomb, and
they then went to make the attempt. Vasili and Paul were chosen to act,
Trafim was to keep guard. It was he who told the story afterwards. They
went and sat on a seat in the big street here (it was quite deserted
at this hour), along which they knew Michael Ivanovitch would pass at
five minutes to six, since he passed that way every night on his way
to dinner. But Heaven knows why! Michael Ivanovitch was late; it was
cold, dark, and drizzly, a fine rain was falling, and on Paul, Vasili,
and Trafim, as they waited, a great tediousness descended. At last Paul
asked Vasili if he had ever been to the Circus. Vasili said he had
never been to the Circus. Paul said Vasili knew nothing of anything,
and that he for his part had been to the Circus often, and that it was
a fine sight. There was a maiden, beautiful as the day, glittering
with spangles, who stood on a horse, and leapt through a paper hoop,
and alighted once more on the horse. Then there was a Chinaman, a real
Chinaman with a big pigtail, who spun a pail of water on his finger.
There was also a clown who threw a great golden ball into the air and
caught it on his nose as easily as a trout catches a fly. ‘Yes,’ said
Vasili, ‘I know how that is done; I can do it myself. You throw the
ball up like this,’ and he made a gesture. ‘Fool!’ said Paul, ‘thou
knowest nothing at all. May the soul of thy mother be vexed! He does
it like this,’ and suiting the action to the word he lightly threw
the bomb which he was holding in his left hand into the air. The bomb
exploded, Paul was blown to bits, and Vasili was left a mangled heap.
“Trafim, who was only wounded, was very angry, and after taking from
the mangled corpse of Vasili a Browning pistol, saying, ‘It is no use
wasting twenty-four roubles,’ he went straight to the Apothecary who
had sold him the bomb. ‘Scoundrel,’ he said, ‘what sort of goods do you
sell? And you even dared to boast. Melinite! Melinite! Here is Melinite
for you! It goes off before it is meant to. You do not know how to make
a simple bomb. Cheat! Rascal!’
“‘Who says I don’t know how to make bombs?’ said the Apothecary,
wounded in his professional pride.
“‘I say so,’ said Trafim. ‘The bomb you sold us yesterday went off of
its own accord. It was worth nothing at all. May the soul of thy mother
be annoyed, you yellow-eyed Arcadia!’”
“What is an Arcadia?” I asked.
“An Arcadia is the same as a Cholera,” he answered.
“‘You say I am a yellow-eyed Arcadia,’ he continued, ‘and you are a
yellow-eyed Arcadia yourself. You say I cannot make bombs! Look at
this!’ and he produced a bomb from a drawer, and banged it down on the
counter. The bomb went off, the shop was wrecked, the assistant of the
Apothecary was killed; Trafim was blown through the window and wounded;
but the Apothecary, who came off with a scratch, smiled triumphantly
amidst the wreckage, and said, ‘Who says I do not know how to make
bombs? Yellow-eyed Arcadia, indeed!’
“Now a large crowd had gathered outside, attracted by the noise; a
policeman came, and every one said something must be done. ‘Send for
the Chief of the Police,’ they cried. But the policeman began to
cry and said he was a family man; and at last Peter Alexandrovitch,
merchant, went and fetched the Chief of Police. The Chief of Police
said he could not act without orders, and went to the Prefect. The
Prefect telephoned for orders to the Governor, who telephoned back that
the Apothecary’s house must be searched, and any bombs and weapons
found there must be taken instantly to the Police Station. The Chief
of Police came back with the news, and told the policeman to search
the Apothecary’s house, for only the shop had been damaged. But the
policeman said, ‘For the sake of Heaven, have mercy on a family man.’
The Chief of Police appealed to the crowd for a patriotic volunteer,
but the crowd began at once to melt away.
“‘It is not our business,’ at last he said, ‘it is the
Electrotechnician’s business; send for the Electrotechnician.’ No
sooner said than done. People rushed to fetch the Electrotechnician.
He soon arrived, and was told what to do. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘These
bombs are Melinite; give me five hundred roubles, and I will bring
them out.’ The police said, ‘We have no such sum.’ Nevertheless, in an
hour’s time the money was found, and by evening a basketful of bombs
was carefully carried by the terrified policemen to the Police Station.
Here the bombs were left, and yesterday the Governor drove to the
Police Station with an engineer, who examined the bombs; he found that
all the explosive had been taken out, and that they were filled with
cotton wool.”
“Who did that?” I asked.
“Why, the Electrotechnician, of course,” said the innkeeper. “Do you
not know he is the Honorary Vice-President of Amorphists?”
“And was he arrested?” I asked.
“Heaven be with him, no,” said the innkeeper. “He was thanked by the
Governor in person.”
SHERLOCK HOLMES IN RUSSIA
THE STORY OF A SKAT SCORING BOOK
(With apologies to Sir A. Conan Doyle)
It was in November 1907 that I went to Moscow to meet Sherlock Holmes,
who was returning via Kiachta by the Trans-Siberian Railway from
Afghanistan, where rumour said he was connected with certain not
altogether official negotiations between the British Government and the
Ameer of Afghanistan. During his return journey, Holmes, indefatigable
as usual, had enabled the Russian police to lay hands at Irkutsk on the
ringleaders of a daring revolutionary band who were plotting to kidnap
the Emperor of Russia. So much I had gathered from a laconic post card
dated Ufa, in which he also requested me to meet him at Moscow on the
20th of November. When, however, I arrived at Moscow, I found the
following telegram awaiting me:--
“Take night train town O----; government Z----; meet you station;
prospect excellent sport; bring furs.”
To any one acquainted with Sherlock Holmes’ methods and habits this
seemed to signify that his ever-restless brain was once more on the
scent of some thrilling mystery or some baffling crime. After spending
the day at Moscow, I took the night train, as directed, and I arrived
the next morning at O----. I found my friend awaiting me at the
station, muffled in a thick shouba, and smoking a pipe of more than
usually strong tobacco.
“I hope you have brought a warm coat, Watson,” was his greeting; “we
have got a thirty-mile drive before us;” and giving orders to a porter
to carry my bag, in Russian, which he spoke fluently, he led the way
through the station to where a sledge drawn by three horses, harnessed
abreast, awaited us.
“Jump in,” he said, “we have no time to lose. We are driving,” he
continued, as we made ourselves comfortable in the straw and wrapped
ourselves up with a thick fur rug, “to the property of Prince B----,
whose acquaintance I made in Transbaikalia, and who invited me to stay
with him for a few days’ wolf shooting. The Prince is expecting you.”
During the first half-hour of the drive Holmes discoursed learnedly on
old violins and Elzevir editions, interrupting his discourse to point
out from time to time the effects of light on the snowy plain, or to
make some pregnant comment on the manners and customs of the villagers
whom we passed. Then, when we had driven for about half an hour, he
said, “You will now oblige me, Watson, by not talking to me until
we arrive at our destination. I am engaged in following a train of
speculation which requires all my attention.”
Knowing my friend’s habits I showed neither surprise nor annoyance, and
it was not long before I fell into a deep sleep.
When I awoke we had reached the property of Prince B----. Prince
B----’s home was situated at a stone’s-throw from a long straggling
village composed of log-built huts, and now mantled in a thick covering
of snow.
The houses, for there were two, were situated in the midst of a garden
plentifully wooded with pine trees and Siberian firs. The houses
were separate, although close to each other; both of them were
two-storeyed, the first, at which the horses pulled up, being built of
wood painted red, the second, and farther one, of white bricks.
“You have already been here two or three days?” I ventured to ask, as
we drove through the garden gate.
“Watson, you are incorrigible,” replied Holmes. “Had you observed the
name of the station whence my message was despatched you would have
known that I myself arrived this morning from the town of A----, which
a glance at the map would have shown you is a twelve hours’ journey
from O----. This is the first time I have the pleasure of enjoying the
Prince’s hospitality, and when the Prince invited me he begged me, if
possible, to persuade you to accompany me. I am glad you have come, for
who knows but that I may need your assistance before long.”
I could not help thinking that the reproach was in this case scarcely
justified, since, being entirely ignorant of the Russian language, I
could not be expected to decipher the name of a telegraph station, but
I merely replied: “You have at present no immediate problem on hand?”
“Watson,” said Holmes, as we reached the front door, “every fresh human
being we meet is a possible problem.”
We were met and warmly welcomed by the Prince, and after we had been
shown to our rooms, which were in the further stone house, we were
conducted to the drawing-room in the wooden house, where the Prince
and his family awaited us. The Prince was a middle-aged man with
silver-grey hair and mild grey eyes; he wore a grey undress military
tunic, and Holmes remarked, as we washed our hands upstairs, that he
supposed I had already noticed the Prince was a general adjutant of the
Emperor’s suite; that he had served in Turkestan before he had been in
the Far East; that he was at present suffering from a slight toothache;
and that he had been on two big game expeditions in Africa. I confessed
that all this had escaped me, and Holmes said that he hadn’t time to
detail to me the links of the chain, but if I would glance at the
Prince’s uniform, the spots on his forehead, the iodoform stain on
his upper lip, and the antelope horns in the front hall, with their
respective dates, perhaps all would be clear to me. The Prince’s family
consisted of his wife, his eldest son, and his daughter. The Princess
was a dark, thin, young-looking woman, with large grey eyes, and the
son, Prince Alexander, a tall, dark young man of about twenty-three,
dressed in an ordinary tweed shooting suit; the daughter, Princess
Barbara, was a girl of nineteen, very fair, with blue eyes. The whole
family talked English with the greatest fluency.
As soon as the Prince had presented us to his family, he led us into
the dining-room, where lunch awaited us.
“You have been having a busy morning practising the flute,” said Holmes
to Prince Alexander. “I hope we may have the pleasure of playing some
duets together. I have brought my violin with me.”