“I am not likely to forget anything you say at this our last parting.”
Her hand fell into mine.
“It’s difficult to believe that it must be good-bye with us.”
She returned my pressure and our hands separated.
“Yes. I am leaving here to-morrow. My eyes are open at last and my hands
are free now. As for the rest--which of us can fail to hear the stifled
cry of our great distress? It may be nothing to the world.”
“The world is more conscious of your discordant voices,” I said. “It is
the way of the world.”
“Yes.” She bowed her head in assent, and hesitated for a moment. “I must
own to you that I shall never give up looking forward to the day when
all discord shall be silenced. Try to imagine its dawn! The tempest of
blows and of execrations is over; all is still; the new sun is rising,
and the weary men united at last, taking count in their conscience of
the ended contest, feel saddened by their victory, because so many ideas
have perished for the triumph of one, so many beliefs have abandoned
them without support. They feel alone on the earth and gather close
together. Yes, there must be many bitter hours! But at last the anguish
of hearts shall be extinguished in love.”
And on this last word of her wisdom, a word so sweet, so bitter, so
cruel sometimes, I said good-bye to Natalia Haldin. It is hard to think
I shall never look any more into the trustful eyes of that girl--wedded
to an invincible belief in the advent of loving concord springing like
a heavenly flower from the soil of men’s earth, soaked in blood, torn by
struggles, watered with tears.
It must be understood that at that time I didn’t know anything of Mr.
Razumov’s confession to the assembled revolutionists. Natalia Haldin
might have guessed what was the “one thing more” which remained for him
to do; but this my western eyes had failed to see.
Tekla, the ex-lady companion of Madame de S--, haunted his bedside at
the hospital. We met once or twice at the door of that establishment,
but on these occasions she was not communicative. She gave me news of
Mr. Razumov as concisely as possible. He was making a slow recovery, but
would remain a hopeless cripple all his life. Personally, I never went
near him: I never saw him again, after the awful evening when I stood
by, a watchful but ignored spectator of his scene with Miss Haldin. He
was in due course discharged from the hospital, and his “relative”--so I
was told--had carried him off somewhere.
My information was completed nearly two years later. The opportunity,
certainly, was not of my seeking; it was quite accidentally that I met a
much-trusted woman revolutionist at the house of a distinguished Russian
gentleman of liberal convictions, who came to live in Geneva for a time.
He was a quite different sort of celebrity from Peter Ivanovitch--a
dark-haired man with kind eyes, high-shouldered, courteous, and with
something hushed and circumspect in his manner. He approached
me, choosing the moment when there was no one near, followed by a
grey-haired, alert lady in a crimson blouse.
“Our Sophia Antonovna wishes to be made known to you,” he addressed me,
in his guarded voice. “And so I leave you two to have a talk together.”
“I would never have intruded myself upon your notice,” the grey-haired
lady began at once, “if I had not been charged with a message for you.”
It was a message of a few friendly words from Natalia Haldin. Sophia
Antonovna had just returned from a secret excursion into Russia, and
had seen Miss Haldin. She lived in a town “in the centre,” sharing her
compassionate labours between the horrors of overcrowded jails, and the
heartrending misery of bereaved homes. She did not spare herself in good
service, Sophia Antonovna assured me.
“She has a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable
body,” the woman revolutionist summed it all up, with a touch of
enthusiasm.
A conversation thus engaged was not likely to drop from want of interest
on my side. We went to sit apart in a corner where no one interrupted
us. In the course of our talk about Miss Haldin, Sophia Antonovna
remarked suddenly--
“I suppose you remember seeing me before? That evening when Natalia came
to ask Peter Ivanovitch for the address of a certain Razumov, that young
man who...”
“I remember perfectly,” I said. When Sophia Antonovna learned that I had
in my possession that young man’s journal given me by Miss Haldin she
became intensely interested. She did not conceal her curiosity to see
the document.
I offered to show it to her, and she at once volunteered to call on me
next day for that purpose.
She turned over the pages greedily for an hour or more, and then handed
me the book with a faint sigh. While moving about Russia, she had seen
Razumov too. He lived, not “in the centre,” but “in the south.” She
described to me a little two-roomed wooden house, in the suburb of some
very small town, hiding within the high plank-fence of a yard overgrown
with nettles. He was crippled, ill, getting weaker every day, and Tekla
the Samaritan tended him unweariedly with the pure joy of unselfish
devotion. There was nothing in that task to become disillusioned about.
I did not hide from Sophia Antonovna my surprise that she should have
visited Mr. Razumov. I did not even understand the motive. But she
informed me that she was not the only one.
“Some of _us_ always go to see him when passing through. He is
intelligent. He has ideas.... He talks well, too.”
Presently I heard for the first time of Razumov’s public confession in
Laspara’s house. Sophia Antonovna gave me a detailed relation of what
had occurred there. Razumov himself had told her all about it, most
minutely.