as only Frenchmen and women can, touching life lightly like a skilled
musician, running nimble fingers over the keys, and striking a chord
half by accident here and there which was sonorous and had a deeper
meaning. He ordered the luncheon, argued with the waiter, and rallied
him on the criminal paucity of his menu.
“Yes,” he said, “let it be beef. I know your mutton. It tastes like the
smell of goat. So give us beef--your railway beef, which has travelled
so far, but not by train. It has come on foot, to be killed and cut up
by a locomotive, to be served by a waiter who has assuredly failed as a
stoker.”
He sat down as he spoke, and rearranged the small table, covered by
a doubtful cloth, through which could be felt the chill of the marble
underneath. Deulin always took the lead in these small matters, and
Cartoner accepted his decision without comment. The Frenchman knew
him so well, it seemed, that he knew his tastes, or suspected his
indifference. While he thus rattled on he glanced sharply from time to
time at his companion, and when the waiter was finally sent away with a
hundred minute instructions, he turned suddenly to Cartoner.
“You are absorbed. What are you thinking about?” he said.
“I was thinking how well you speak Polish. And yet you have only been
here once before,” answered the Englishman, bluntly.
“When I was a young man there were opportunities of learning Polish in
Paris,” said Deulin. “Yes--I learned Polish when I was young----”
He had arranged the table to his satisfaction, had picked up several
objects to examine them and replace them with care on the exact spot
from whence he had taken them, and was now looking round the room with
large, deep-lined eyes which were always tired and never at rest.
“When one is young, one learns so much in a short time, especially if
that time is ill-spent,” he said, airily. “That is why the virtuous
are such poor company; they have no backbone to their past. With the
others--'nous autres'--it is the evil deeds that form a sort of spinal
column to our lives, rigid and strong, upon which to lean in old age
when virtue is almost a necessity.”
Finally he came round in his tour of inspection to the face opposite to
him.
“Do you know,” he said, sharply, “you are devilish absent-minded. It is
a bad habit. It makes the world think that you have something on your
mind. And having nothing on its own mind--or no mind to have anything
on--it hates you for your airs of superiority.”
He took up the bottle of wine which the waiter had set upon the table in
front of him, inspected the label, and filled two glasses. He tasted the
vintage, and made a wry face. Then he raised his shoulders with an air
or reconciliation to the inevitable.
“When I was a young--a very young diplomatist--an old scoundrel in gold
spectacles told me that one of the first rules of the game was to appear
content with that which you cannot alter. We must apply that rule to
this wine. It is our old friend, Chateau la Pompe. It will not hurt you.
It will not loosen your tongue, my friend, you need not fear that.”
He spoke so significantly that Cartoner looked across the table at him.
“What do you mean?”
Deulin laughed and made no answer.
“Do you think that my tongue requires loosening?”
And the Frenchman stroked his mustache as he looked thoughtfully into
the steady, meditating eyes.
“It is not,” he said, “that you assume a reserve which one might think
unfair. It is merely that there are so many things which you do not
think worth saying, or wise to speak of, or necessary to communicate,
that--well--there is nothing left but silence. And silence is sometimes
dangerous. Not as dangerous as speech, I allow--but dangerous,
nevertheless.”
Cartoner looked at him and waited. Across the little table the two
schools went out to meet each other--the old school of diplomacy, all
words; the new, all silence.
“Listen,” said the Frenchman. “I once knew a man into whose care
was given the happiness of a fellow-being. There is a greater
responsibility, by-the-way, than the well-being of a whole nation, even
of one of the two greatest nations in the world. And that is a care
which you and I have had upon our shoulders for a brief hour here and
there. It was the old story; for it was the happiness of a woman. God
knows the man meant well! But he bungled it. Bon Dieu--how he bungled
it! He said too little. Ever since he has talked too much. She was a
Polish woman, by-the-way, and that has left a tenderness, nay, a raw
place, in my heart, which smarts at the sound of a Polish word. For I
was the man.”
“Well,” asked Cartoner, “what do you want to know?”
“Nothing,” answered the other, quick as thought. “I only tell you the
story as a warning. To you especially, who take so much for said
that has not been said. You are strong, and a man. Remember that a
woman--even the strongest--may not be able to bear such a strain as you
can bear.”
Cartoner was listening attentively enough. He always listened with
attention to his friend on such rare occasions as he chose to be
serious.
“You know,” went on Deulin, after a pause, during which the waiter had
set before him a battered silver dish from which he removed the cover
with a flourish full of promise--“you know that I would give into
your care unreservedly anything that I possessed, such as a fortune,
or--well--a daughter. I would trust you entirely. But any man may make
a mistake. And if you make a mistake now, I shall never forgive
you--never.”
And his eyes flashed with a sudden fierceness as he looked at his
companion.
“Is there anything I can do for you, my friend?” he asked, curtly.
“You have already promised to do the only thing I would ask you to do in
Warsaw,” replied Cartoner.
Deulin held up one hand in a gesture commanding silence.
“Not another word--they cost you so much, a few words--I understand
perfectly.”
Then with a rapid relapse into his gayer mood he turned to the dish
before him.
“And now let us consider the railway beef. It promises little. But it
cannot be so tough and indigestible as the memory of a mistake--I tell
you that.”
XXX
THE QUIET CITY
The most liberal-minded man in Russia at this time was the Czar. He had
chosen his ministers from among the nobles who were at least tolerant of
advance, if they did not actually advocate it. Much as he hated to make
a change, he had in one or two instances parted with old and trusted
servants--friends of his boyhood--rather than forgo one item of his
policy. In other cases he had appealed to the memory of their long
friendship in order to bring his nobles not to his own way of thinking,
for he could not do that, but to his own plan of action.
“I do not agree with you, but I will serve you,” had answered one of
these, and the Czar, who did not know where to turn to find the man he
needed, accepted such service.
For a throne stands in isolation, and no man may judge another by
looking down upon him, but must needs descend into the crowd, and,
mingling there on a lower level, pick out for himself the honest man or
the clever man--or that rare being, the man who is both.
Kings and emperors may not do this, however. Despots dare not. Alexander
II. acted as any ordinary man acts when he finds himself in a position
to confer favors, to make appointments, to get together, as it were, a
ministry, even if this takes no more dignified a form than a board of
directors. He suspected that the world contained precisely the men he
wanted, if he could only let down a net into it and draw them up. How,
otherwise, could he select them? So he did the usual thing. He looked
round among his relations, and, failing them, the friends of his youth.
For an emperor, popularly supposed to have the whole world to choose
from, has no larger a choice than any bourgeois looking round his own
small world for a satisfactory executor.
Coming to the throne, as he did, in the midst of a losing fight, his
first task was to conclude a humiliating peace. He must needs bow down
to the upstart adventurer of France, who had tricked England into a
useless war in order to steady his own tottering throne.
Alexander II., moreover, came to power with the avowed intention of
liberating the serfs, which intention he carried out, and paid for with
his own life in due time. Russia had been the only country to stand
aloof on the slave question, thus branding herself in two worlds
as still uncivilized. The young Czar knew that such a position was
untenable. “Without the serf the Russian Empire must crumble away,” his
advisers told him. “With the serf she cannot endure,” he answered And
twenty-two millions of men were set free. In this act he stood almost
alone; for hardly a single minister was with him heart and soul, though
many obeyed him loyally enough against their own convictions. Many
honestly thought that this must be the end of the Russian Empire.
It is hard to go against the advice of those near at hand; for their
point of view must always appear to be the same as one's own, while
counsel from afar comes as the word of one who is looking at things from
another stand-point, and may thus be more easily mistaken.
Alexander II., called suddenly to reign over one-tenth part of the human
race, men of different breed and color, of the three great contending
religions and a hundred minor churches, was himself a nervous,
impressionable man, suffering from ill-health, bowed down with the
weight of his great responsibility. His father died in his arms,
broken-hearted, bequeathing him an empire invaded by the armies of five
European nations, hated of all the world, despised of all mankind. Even
to-day there is a sinister sound in the very name of Russian. Men turn
to look twice at one who comes from that stupendous empire. It is said
that an hereditary melancholy broods beneath the weightiest earthly
crown. History tells that none wearing it has ever reached a hale old
age. Soldiers still hearty, still wearing the sword they have carried
through half a dozen campaigns, bow to-day in the Winter Palace before
their sovereign, having taken the oath of allegiance to four successive
Czars.
Half in, half out of Europe, Alexander II. awoke with his own hand the
great nation still wrapped in the sleep of the Middle Ages, only to
find that he had stirred a slumbering power whose movements were soon
to prove beyond control. He poured out education like water upon the
surface of a vast field full of hidden seed, which must inevitably
spring up wheat or tares--a bountiful harvest of good or a terrific
growth of evil. He made reading and writing compulsory to the whole of
his people. With a stroke of the pen he threw aside the last prop to
despotic rule. Yet he hoped to continue Czar of All the Russias. This
tall, pale, gentle, determined man was a man of courage. When the time
came he faced the consequence of his own temerity with an unflinching
eye.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, the very moment after he had been
saved almost by a miracle from assassination. For he knew that he was
giving more than was wise. It is said that he was puzzled and thoughtful
after each attempt upon his life.
The war with Turkey was the first sign that Russia was awakening--that
the soldiers knew how to read and write. It was the first time in
history that the nation forced a Czar to declare war, and Servia was
full of Russian volunteers fighting for Christian Slavs before the
Emperor realized that he must fight--and fight alone, for no nation in
Europe would help him. He had taught Russia to read; had raised the veil
of ignorance that hung between his people and the rest of civilization.
They had read of the Bulgarian atrocities, and there was no holding
them.
To rule autocratically what was then the vastest empire in the world was
in itself more than one brain could compass. But in addition to his
own internal troubles, Alexander II. was surrounded by European
difficulties. England, his steady, deadly enemy, despite a declaration
of neutrality, was secretly helping Turkey. Austria, as usual, the
dog waiting on the threshold, was ready to side with the winner--for a
consideration. No wonder this man was always weary. It is said that all
through his reign he received and despatched telegrams at any hour of
the night.
No wonder that his heart was hardened towards Poland. The most
liberal-minded Czar had his mean point, as every man must have. There
are many great and good men who will write a check readily enough and
look twice at a penny. There are many who will give generously with one
hand while grasping with the other that which is really the property of
their neighbor. Alexander's mean point was Poland.
On the occasion of his first imperial visit to Warsaw he said, in the
cold, calm voice which was so hated and feared: “Gentlemen, let us
have no more dreams.” Eleven years later he reminded an influential
deputation of Polish nobles of the unforgiven and unforgotten words,
commending the caution to their attention again. He paid frequent visits
to Warsaw on one excuse or another. This dreamer would have no dreaming
in his dominion. This mean man must ever be looking at his hoard.
The chief interest in the study of a human life lies around the
inexplicable. If we were quite consistent we should be entirely dull. No
one knows why this liberal autocrat was mean to Poland.
From Warsaw, the city which has been commanded to stand still, Cartoner
travelled across the plains of endless snow towards the north. He found
as he progressed a hundred signs of the awakening. The very faces of
the people had changed since he last looked upon them only a few
years earlier. These people were now a nation, conscious of their own
strength. They had fought in a great and victorious war, not because
they had been commanded to fight, but because they wanted to. They had
followed with understanding the diplomatic warfare that succeeded the
signing of the treaty of San Stefano. They had won and lost. They were
men, and no longer driven beasts.
It was evening when Cartoner arrived at St. Petersburg. The long
northern twilight had begun, and the last glow of the western sky was
reflected on the golden dome of St. Isaac's, while the arrowy spire of
the Admiralty shot up into a cloudless sky.
The Warsaw Railway Station is in a quiet part of the town, and the
streets through which Cartoner drove in his hired sleigh were almost
deserted. It was the hour of the promenade in the Summer Garden, or the
drive in the Newski Prospect, so that all the leisured class were in
another quarter of the town. St. Petersburg is, moreover, the most
spacious capital in the world, where there is more room than the
inhabitants can occupy, where the houses are too large and the streets
too wide. The Catherine Canal was, of course, frozen, and its broken
surface had a dirty, ill-kept air, while the snow was spotted with
rubbish and refuse, and trodden down into numberless paths and
crossings. Cartoner looked at it indifferently. It had no history yet.
The streets were silent beneath their cloak of snow. All St. Petersburg
is silent for nearly half the year, and is the quietest city in the
world, excepting Venice.
The sleigh sped across the Nicholas Bridge to the Vasili Island. The
river showed no signs of spring yet. The usual pathways across it were
still in use. The Vasili Ostrov is less busy than that greater part of
the city which lies across the river. Behind the academy of Arts, and
leading out of the Bolshoi Prospect, are a number of parallel streets
where quiet people live--lawyers and merchants, professors at the
university or at one or other of the numerous schools and colleges
facing the river and looking across it towards the English Quay.
It was to one of these streets that Cartoner had told his driver to
proceed, and the man had some difficulty in finding the number. It was a
house like any other in the street--like any other in any other street.
For St. Petersburg is a monstrous town, showing a flat face to the
world, exhibiting to the sky a flat expanse of roof broken here and
there by some startling inequality, the dagger-like spire of St. Peter
and St. Paul, the great roof of the Kasan Cathedral, the dome of St.
Isaac's--the largest cathedral in the world.
When the sleigh at length drew up with a shrill clang of bells the
door-keeper came from beneath the great porch without enthusiasm. His
was a quiet house, and he did not care for strangers, especially at this
time, when every man looked askance at a new-comer and the police gave
the dvorniks no peace. He seemed to recognize Cartoner, however, for he
raised his hand to his peaked cap when he answered that the gentleman
asked for was within.
“On the second floor. You will remember the door,” he said, over his
shoulder, as Cartoner, having paid the driver, hurried towards the
house, leaving the dvornik to bring the luggage.
Cartoner's summons at the door on the second floor was answered by
a clumsy Russian maid-servant, who smiled a broad, good-natured
recognition when she saw him, and, turning without a word, led the
way along a narrow passage. The smell of tobacco smoke and a certain
bareness of wall and floor suggested a bachelor's home. The maid opened
the door of a room and stood aside for Cartoner to pass in.
Seated near an open wood-fire was a man with grizzled hair and a short,
brown beard, which had the look of concealing a determined chin. He
was in the act of filling a wooden pipe from a jar on the table, and he
stood up, pipe in hand, to greet the new-comer.
“Ah!” he said. “I was wondering if you would come, or if you had got
other work to do.”
“No, I am at the same work. And you?”
“As you see,” replied the bearded man, dragging forward a chair with his
foot and seating himself again before the fire. “I am here still, where
you left me”--he paused to make a brief calculation--“five years ago. I
stayed here all through the war--all through the Berlin Congress, when
it was not good to be an Englishman in Petersburg. But I stayed. Tallow!
It does not sound heroic, but the world must have its tallow. And there
is a simplicity about commerce, you know.”
He gave a short laugh--the laugh of a man who had tried something and
failed. Something that was not commerce, for his voice and speech had a
ring of other things.
“Can you put me up?” asked Cartoner. “Only for a few days, perhaps.”
“As long as you stay in Petersburg you stay in these rooms,” replied the
other, gravely.
Cartoner nodded his thanks and sat down. Their attitude towards each
other had the repose which is only existent in a friendship that has
lasted since childhood.
“Well?” he inquired.
“Gad!” exclaimed the other, “we are in a queer way. I went to the opera
the other evening. He showed his face in the imperial box and the house
was empty in half an hour. He always drives alone in his sleigh now, so
that only one royal life may go at a time. They'll get him--they'll get
him! And he knows it.”
“Fools!” said Cartoner.
“They are worse than fools,” answered the other. “The man is down, and
they strike him. His asthma is worse. He has half a dozen complaints.
His policy has failed. It was the finest policy ever tried in Russia.
He is the finest Czar they have ever had. He gave them trial by jury; he
abolished corporal punishment. Fools! they are the scum of this earth,
Cartoner!”
“I know,” replied Cartoner, in his gentle way, “students who cannot
learn--workmen who will not work--women whom no one will marry.”
“Yes, the sons and daughters of the serfs that he emancipated. It makes
one sick to talk of them. Let me hear about yourself.”
“Well,” answered Cartoner, “I have had nothing to eat since breakfast.”
“That is all you have to tell me about yourself?”
“That is all.”
XXXI
THE PAYMENT
It was on every gossip's tongue in St. Petersburg that Jeliaboff had
been arrested.
“It is the beginning of the end,” men said. “They will now catch the
others. The new reign of terror is over.”
But Jeliaboff himself--a dangerous man (one of the Terrorists), the
chief of the plot to blow up the imperial train at the Alexandroff
Station--said that it was not so. This also, the mere bravado of an
arrested criminal, was bandied from mouth to mouth.
For two years the most extraordinary agitation of modern days had held
Russian society within its grip. All the world seemed to whisper. Men
walking in the streets turned to glance over their shoulders at the
approach of a step, at the sound of a sleigh-bell. The women were in
the secret, too; and when the women touch politics they are politics
no longer. For there should be no real emotion in politics; only the
stimulated emotion of the platform.
For two years the Czar had been slowly and surely ostracized by a
persecution which was as cruel as it was unreasoning.
In former days the curious, and the many who loved to look on royalty,
had studied his habits and hours to the end that they might gain a
glimpse of him or perhaps a bow from the courteous Emperor. Now his
habits and his daily life were watched for quite another purpose. If
it was known that he would pass through a certain street, he was now
allowed a monopoly of that thoroughfare. None passed nearer to the
Winter Palace than he could help. If the Czar was seen to approach, men
hurried in the opposite direction; women called their children to them.
He was a leper among his own people.
“Do not go to the opera to-morrow,” one lady would say to another. “I
have heard that the Czar is to be there.”
“Do not pass through the Little Sadovaia,” men said to one another; “the
street is mined. Do not let your wife linger in the Newski Prospect; it
is honeycombed by mines.”
The Czar withdrew himself, as a man must who perceives that others
shrink from him; as the leper who sees even the pitiful draw aside his
cloak. But some ceremonies he would not relinquish; and to some duties
he remained faithful, calmly facing the risk, which he fully recognized.
He went to the usual Sunday review on the 12th of March, as all the
world knows. It was a brilliant, winter morning. The sun shone from a
cloudless sky upon streets and houses buried still beneath their winter
covering of snow. The houses always look too large for their inmates,
the streets too wide for those that walk them. St. Petersburg was
planned on too large a scale by the man who did everything largely,
and made his window looking out upon Europe a bigger window than the
coldness of his home would allow.
The review passed off successfully. The Czar, men said, was in good
spirits. He had that morning signed a decree which was now in the hands
of Loris Melikoff, and would to-morrow be given to the world, proving
even to the most sceptical for the hundredth time that he had at heart
the advance of Russia--the greater liberty of his people.
Instead of returning direct to the Winter Palace, the Czar paid his
usual visit to his cousin, the Grand Duchess Catherine. He quitted her
palace at two o'clock in his own carriage, accompanied by half a dozen
Cossacks. His officers followed in two sleighs. It was never known which
way he would take. He himself gave the order to the coachman. He knew
the streets as thoroughly as the driver himself; for he had always
walked in them unattended, unheeded, and unknown--had always mixed with
his subjects. This was no French monarch living in an earthly heaven
above his people. He knew--always had known--what men said to each other
in the streets.
He gave the order to go to the Winter Palace by way of the Catherine
Canal, which was not the direct way. Had he passed down the Newski
Prospect half of that great street would have been blown to the skies.
The road running by the side of the Catherine Canal was in 1881 a quiet
enough thoroughfare, with large houses staring blankly across the frozen
canal. The canal itself was none too clean a sight, for the snow was old
and soiled and strewed with refuse. In some places there were gardens
between the road and the waterways, but most of its length was bounded
by a low wall and a railing.
The road itself was almost deserted. The side streets of St. Petersburg
are quieter than the smaller thoroughfares of any other city in the
world. A confectioner's boy was alone on the pavement, hurrying along
and whistling as he went on his Sunday errand of delivery. He hardly
glanced at the carriage that sped past him. Perhaps he saw a man looking
over the low wall at the approach of the cavalcade. Perhaps he saw the
bomb thrown and heard the deafening report. Though none can say what he
heard or saw at that minute, for he was dead the next.