Promptly at seven o’clock, in accordance with Trant’s directions, young
Winton Edwards and his father entered the pawnshop and started
negotiations for a loan. Almost immediately after they arrived there,
Trant joined them, still carrying in his hand his instrument case. The
boy and his father closed their negotiations and went out with Trant
into the street. They saw then, to their surprise, that the psychologist
was not alone. Two men were awaiting them, each of whom carried a case
like Trant’s. The elder of the two, a man between fifty and sixty years
old, met young Edwards’ stare with a benignant glance of his pale blue
eyes through an immense pair of gold spectacles. The other was young,
pale, broad-browed, with an intelligent face, and his gaze was fixed in
a look of dreamy contemplation. They were dressed as mechanics, but
their general appearance was not that of workmen.
The door of Meyan’s lodging house was opened to them by the landlady.
She led the way to the second floor, but paused to show a room to Trant.
“That is Meyan’s room,” Trant explained. “We will wait for him over
here.” He followed the woman into a small and stuffy bedroom on the
other side of the hall. “We had better not speak while we are waiting
and--we had better wait in the dark.”
In the strange, stuffy, darkened little room the five sat in silence.
Footsteps passed often in the street outside, and twice some one went
through the hall. A half hour they waited thus. Then a heavier footstep
warned them of Meyan’s coming. A minute later, the front door opened
again and admitted--as Trant felt from the effect of the first tone which
reached the man waiting at his side--Eva Silber. After several minutes
Trant turned up the light and motioned to the two strangers who had come
with him. They immediately rose and left the room.
“I am going to submit you both to a very trying ordeal,” Trant said to
his clients, in a tone so low it could not reach the hallway, “and it
will require great self-control on your part. Within five, or I hope at
most ten, minutes I am going to show you into Meyan’s room, where you
will find, among other persons, Meyan himself and Miss Silber. I want
you to promise that neither of you will attempt to question or to speak
to Miss Silber until I give you leave. Otherwise I cannot allow you to
go in there, and I have my own reasons for wanting you to be present.”
“If it is essential, Mr. Trant--” the elder Edwards said.
Trant looked at the young man, who nodded.
“Thank you,” said the psychologist; and he went out and closed the door
upon them.
Fully a quarter of an hour had passed, in spite of Trant’s promise to
summon them in ten minutes, before the psychologist again opened the
door and ushered them into the room they already knew as Meyan’s.
The long table in the center of the room had been cleared, and behind it
three men sat in a row. Two of these were the strangers who had come
with Trant, and the cases they had carried, together with the one Trant
himself had brought, stood open under the table. The man who sat between
these two was Meyan. Near the table stood Miss Silber.
At sight of her, Winton Edwards made one swift step forward before he
recollected the promise he had made, and checked himself. Eva Silber had
grown pale as death. She stood now with small hands clenched tight
against her breast, staring into the face of the young American she
loved. Trant closed the door and locked it.
“We can begin now, I think,” he said.
He stooped at once over the instrument cases and brought out from them
three folding screens, about eighteen inches square when extended, which
he set on the table--one in front of each of the three men. At the bottom
of each screen was a circular hole just large enough for a man’s arm to
go through; and at Trant’s command the men put their arms through them.
Stooping again swiftly over the instrument cases, Trant took out three
sphygmographs.
He rapidly adjusted these on the arms of the three men, and set in
motion the revolving drums, against which the pencil points traced their
wavy lines on smoked paper. His clients, leaning forward in their
interest, could then understand the purpose of the screens, which were
designed to hide the pitilessly exact records from the three men.
For several minutes Trant allowed the instruments to run quietly, until
the men had recovered from the nervousness caused by the beginning of
the test.
“I am going to ask Miss Silber to tell you now, as briefly as she can,”
he said, after a pause, “the circumstances of her father’s connection
with the Russian revolution which brought him to the state you have
seen, and the reasons why she has left you to go with this man to
Russia.”
“To Russia?” broke from Winton Edwards.
“To Russia, yes!” The girl’s pale cheeks glowed. “You have seen my
father, what he is, what they have made of him, and you did not know he
was a Russian? You have seen him as he is! Let me tell you--you, who wear
proudly the badge of your revolution fought in seven short years by your
great-grandfathers--what my father was!
“Before I was born--it was in the year 1887--my father was a student in
Moscow. He had married my mother the year before. The czar, finding that
even the teachings he had been advised to permit made people dangerous,
closed the universities. Father and his fellow students protested. They
were imprisoned; and they kept my father, who had led the protest, so
long that I was three years old before he saw his home again!
“But suffering and prison could not frighten him! In Zurich, before he
went to Moscow, he had been trained for a doctor. And seeing how
powerless the protest of the students had been, he determined to go
among the people. So he made himself a medical missionary to the
poorest, the most oppressed, the most miserable; and wherever he was
called to carry a cure for disease, he carried, too, a word of hope, of
courage, of protest, a cry for freedom!
“Late one night, in a terrible snowstorm,” she went on, “just twenty
years ago, a peasant brought to our door a note, unsigned for the sake
of safety, it seemed, telling father that an escaped political prisoner
was dying of exposure and starvation in a hut on a deserted farm ten
miles from the town. My father hurried to his horse and set out, with
food and fagots, and by morning, through the cold and deep snow, he
reached the place.
“There he found a man apparently freezing to death, and fed and warmed
him,” said the girl; “and when the fellow was able to tell his pitiful
tale, father boldly encouraged him, told him of the organization of
protest he was forming, and asked him to join. Little by little father
told him all he had done and all his plans. At nightfall father said
farewell and turned to the door, where he found himself facing a spy,
who held a pistol at his head. In the fight that followed, father was
able only to wound the other upon the chest with the blunt knife they
had used to cut their food, before the spy called a second confederate
down from the loft, and father was overcome.
“On the information of these police spies, without trial of any
sort--father’s friends could discover only that the name of his betrayer
was Valerian Urth--father was sentenced to solitary confinement in an
underground cell for life. And my mother--because she sent food and
fagots to a supposed convict--was exiled to Siberia! Ten years ago, her
sister, who took me, received word that she died on the convict island
of Sakhalin; but my father”--she gasped for breath--“lived, at least!”
She stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Trant, who had stooped to
watch his records more closely when the name of the police spy was
mentioned, still kept his gaze steadfastly upon his instruments.
Suddenly he motioned to the girl to complete her narrative.
“Some years ago.” she said, “when I was eighteen, I left my mother’s
sister and went back to my father’s friends, such of them as were still
free,” she continued. “Many who had worked with him for the organization
had been caught or betrayed. But others and more had come in their
places; and they had work for me. I might move about with less suspicion
than a man. So I helped prepare for the strikes which at last so
terrified the czar that on the thirtieth of October he issued his
manifesto to free those in prison. I had helped to free my father with
the rest. I took him to Hungary and left him with friends while I came
here. Now, do you not understand why I am going back?” She turned in
pitiful appeal to young Edwards. “It is because there is work again in
Russia for me to do.”
She checked herself again and turned to Trant to see if he would force
her still to proceed. But he was facing intently, as if fascinated, the
strange hammering man and his two stranger companions; yet he was not
watching their faces or their figures at all. His eyes followed the
little pencil points which, before each of the three, continually traced
their lines of record. Then he took quickly from his pocket a folded
paper, yellow with age, worn, creased, and pierced with pin marks. In
the sight of all he unfolded it swiftly upon the table before the three,
refolded it, and put it back into his pocket. And though at sight of it
no face changed among the three, even Trant’s clients could see how one
line now suddenly grew flat, with low elevations, irregular and far
apart, as the pencil point seemed almost to stop its motion over the
smoked paper of the man in the middle, Meyan.
“That is all,” said Trant, in a tone of assured triumph, as he
unstrapped the sphygmographs from their wrists. “You can speak now, Mr.
Edwards.”
“Eva!” cried Winton Edwards, in wild appeal. “You are not married to
this man?”
“Married? No!” the girl exclaimed in horror. “Until last Thursday, when
he came to the office, I never saw him. But he has come to call me for
the cause which must be to me higher and holier than love. I must leave
my love for the cause of Russia. I must go and nurse our soldiers on the
battlefield. I have been promised a full pardon if I will do so.”
Meyan now, with a heavy slouch of his muscular body, left his two
companions at the table and moved up beside the girl. “Have any more of
you anything to say to her before she goes back with me to Russia?”
“To her? No,” Trant replied. “But to you--and to these gentlemen”--he
motioned to the two who had sat at the table with Meyan--“I have to
announce the result of my test, for which they are waiting. This elder
gentleman is Ivan Munikov, who was forced to leave Russia eight years
ago because his pamphlet on ‘Inalienable Rights’ had incurred the
displeasure of the police. This younger man is Dmitri Vasili, who was
exiled to Siberia for political offenses at thirteen years of age, but
escaped to America. They both are members of the Russian revolutionary
organization in Chicago.”
“But the test--the test!” cried Vasili. “The test”--the psychologist
turned sternly to face Meyan--“has shown as conclusively and irrefutably
as I could hope that this man is not the revolutionist he claims to be,
but is, as we suspected might be the case, an agent of the Russian
secret police. And not only that! It has shown just as truly, though
this fact was at first wholly unsuspected by me, that he--this agent of
police who would have betrayed the daughter now and taken her back to
Russia to be punished for her share in the previous agitation--is the
same agent who, twenty years ago, betrayed the father, Herman Silber,
into imprisonment! True name from false I do not know; but this man, who
calls himself Meyan now, called himself then Valerian Urth!”
“Valerian Urth!” Eva Silber cried, staggering back into Winton Edwards’
arms.
But Meyan made a disdainful gesture with his huge, fat hands. “Bah! You
would try to prove such things by your foolish test?”
“Then you will not refuse, of course,” Trant demanded sternly, “to show
us if there is a knife scar on your chest?”
Even as Meyan would have repeated his denial, Vasili and Munikov leaped
from the rear of the room and tore his shirt from his breast. The
psychologist rubbed and beat the skin, and the blood rose to the
surface, revealing the thin line of an almost invisible and time-effaced
scar.
“Our case is proved, I think!” The psychologist turned from the two who
stared with hate at the cringing spy, and again faced his clients.
He unlocked the door, and handed the key to Munikov; then, picking up
his instrument cases and record sheets, with Miss Silber and his clients
he left the room and entered the landlady’s sitting room.