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THE WHITE TERROR AND THE RED

THE WHITE TERROR
AND
THE RED

A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

BY

A. CAHAN

Author of “Yekl” and “The Imported Bridegroom.”

CONTENTS.

THE WHITE TERROR AND THE RED.

CHAPTER I.

AN AFFRONT TO HIS CZAR.

ALEXANDER II. passed part of the summer of 1874 in a German health-resort taking the mineral waters. When not in the castle in which he was staying with his train he affected the life of an ordinary citizen. He did so as much from necessity as from choice. Czar or subject, the same water must be drunk at the same spot and hour by all who seek its cure. Nor can any distinction be made in the matter of the walk which the patient is to take after draining his two or three gobletsful.

The promenade at a watering place is a great parade-ground for the display of plumage, the gayest and costliest gowns being reserved for the procession that follows the taking of the remedy; but while the race is under way and everybody is striving to throw everybody else into the shade, the fact of their being there pierces each dress as with “X” rays, showing their flesh to be of the same fragile clay.

So the Czar accepted the levelling effect of the place good-naturedly and sought diversion in the unsustained rôle of a common mortal. Unsustained, because he carried his gigantic, beautiful form with a graceful self-importance and a martial erectness that betrayed his incognito even in the open country stretches to which he would stroll off in search of mild adventure and flirtation.

It was a late afternoon in the valley. The river glittered crimson. The hills on the other side of the summer town were capped by a sultry haze. Donkeys used in ascending these hills were trotting about impishly or standing in stupid row awaiting custom. The sun blazed down upon a parade of a hundred countries, including a jet black prince from Africa, a rajah, a Chinaman in dazzling silks, a wealthy Galician Jew in atlas, and a pasha with German features.

The Czar, his immense figure encased in a light frock coat of excellent fit, was sauntering along apparently unaccompanied except by his terrier and cane. When saluted he would raise his straw hat and nod his enormous well-shaped head with a cordiality that bordered on good-fellowship. He seemed to relish this exchange of courtesies with people who were not his subjects in this little republic of physical malady. It was as though he felt apart from his autocratic self without feeling out of that pampering atmosphere of deference and attention which was his second nature; and he gave an effect of inhaling his freedom as one does the first whiffs of spring air.

As to his fellow patients, they either discovered something majestic in the very dog that followed him, or were struck by the knuckles of his ungloved hands, for example, as if it were remarkable that they should be the same sort of knuckles as their own. He was strikingly well-built and strikingly handsome. He wore thick close-cropped side whiskers of the kind that is rarely becoming, but his face they became very well indeed, adding majesty to a cast of large, clear-cut features. It was the most monarchical face of its time, and yet it was anything but a strong face. His imposing side whiskers and moustache left bare a full sensuous mouth and a plump weak chin; his blueish eyes gave forth suggestions of melancholy and anguish. Interest in him was whetted by stories of his passion for Princess Dolgoruki, lady in waiting to the Czarina; so the women at the watering place tried to decipher the tale of his liaison in those sad amative eyes of his.

Two refined looking, middle-aged women attracted attention by the bizarre simplicity with which one of them was attired and coiffured. She was extremely pale and made one think of an insane asylum or a convent. She was grey, while her companion had auburn hair and was shorter and flabbier of figure. They were conversing in French, but it was not their native tongue. The one with the grey hair was Pani Oginska, a Polish woman; the other a Russian countess named Anna Nicolayevna Varova (Varoff). They had first met, in this watering place, less than a fortnight ago, when a chat, in the course of which they warmed to each other, led to the discovery that their estates lay in neighbouring provinces in Little Russia. They were preceded by a slender youth of eighteen in a broad-brimmed straw hat and a clean-shaven elderly little man in one of soft grey felt. These were Prince Pavel Alexeyevich Boulatoff, a son of the countess by a former marriage, and Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin, his private tutor, as well as one of his instructors at the gymnasium[A] of his native town. Pavel’s straw hat was too sedate for his childish face and was pushed down so low that a delicately sculptured chin and mouth and the turned up tip of a rudely hewn Russian nose was all one could see under its vast expanse of yellow brim. The old man knew no German and this was his first trip abroad, so his high-born pupil, who had an advantage over him in both these respects, was explaining things to him, with an air at once patronising and respectful. Presently Pavel interrupted himself.

“The Czar!” he whispered, in a flutter. “The Czar!” he repeated over his shoulder, addressing himself to his mother.

Pievakin raised his glance, paling as he did so, but was so overawed by the sight that he forthwith dropped his eyes, a sickly expression on his lips.

When the men came face to face with their monarch they made way and snatched off their hats as if they were on fire. Countess Varoff, Pavel’s mother, curtseyed deeply, her flaccid insignificant little body retreating toward the side of the promenade and then sinking to the ground; while the Polish woman proceeded on her way stiffly without so much as a nod of her head. The Czar returned the greeting of the Russian woman gallantly and disappeared in the rear of them.

The group walked on in nervous silence, the two women now in the lead. When they reached a deserted spot the youth suddenly flushed a violent red, and, thrusting out his finely chiselled chin at his mother, he said, in quick pugnacious full-toned accents as out of keeping with his boyish figure as his hat:

“Mother, you are not going to keep up acquaintance with a person who has offered an insult to our Czar.”

“Paul! What has come over you?” the countess stammered out, colouring abjectly as she paused.

“I mean just what I say, mother.”

The elderly little man by his side looked on sheepishly, the cold sweat standing in beads on his forehead.

“Don’t mind this wild boy, I beg of you,” Anna Nicolayevna said to the Polish woman. “Don’t pay the least attention to him. He imagines himself a full grown man, but he is merely a silly boy and he gives me no end of trouble. Don’t take it ill, ma chère.” She rattled it off in a great flurry of embarrassment, straining the boy back tenderly, while she was condemning him.

“I don’t take it ill at all,” Pani Oginska answered tremulously. “He’s perfectly right. Your acquaintance has been a great pleasure to me, countess, but I can see that my company at this place would be very inconvenient to you. Adieu!”

She walked off toward a row of new cottages, and Anna Nicolayevna, the countess, stood gazing after her like one petrified.

“You are a savage, Pasha,” she whispered, in Russian.

“Why am I? I have done what is right, and you feel it as well as I do,” he returned hotly, in his sedate, compact, combative voice, looking from her to his teacher. When he was excited he sputtered out his sentences in volleys, growling at his listener and seemingly about to flounce off. This was the way he spoke now. “Why am I a savage? Can you afford to associate with a woman who will behave in this impudent, in this rebellious manner toward the Czar? Can you, now?”

“That’s neither here nor there,” she said, with irritation, as they resumed their walk. “She is a very unhappy creature. All that she holds dear has been taken from her. Her husband was hanged during the Polish rebellion and now her son, a college student, has been torn from her and is dying in prison of consumption. If you were not so heartless you would have some pity on her.”

“Her husband was hanged and her son is in prison and you wish to associate with her! Do you really? What do you think of it, Alexandre Alexandrovich?”

“A very painful incident,” Pievakin murmured, wretchedly.

“As if I were eager for her company,” she returned, timidly. “As if one could help the chance acquaintances that fall into one’s way while travelling. Besides, she is no rebel. Indeed, she is one of the most charming women I ever met, and to hear her story is enough to break a heart of stone. You have no sympathy, Pasha.”

“She is no rebel! Why, if she did in Russia what she did here a minute ago she would be hustled off to Siberia in short order, and it would serve her right, too. And because I don’t want my mother to go with such a person I have no sympathy.”

“Pardon me, Anna Nicolayevna,” Pievakin interposed, with embarrassed ardour, “but if I were you I should keep out of her way. She is an unfortunate woman, but, God bless her,—Pasha is right, I think.”

“I should say I was,” the boy said, triumphantly. “She wouldn’t dare do such a thing in Russia, would she? But then in Russia a woman of that sort would have no chance to do anything of the kind. Oh, I do hate the Germans for exposing the Czar to these insults. It is simply terrible, terrible. Couldn’t they arrange it so that he should not have to rub shoulders with every Tom, Dick and Harry and be exposed to every sort of affront? And yet when I say so I am a savage and have no heart.” He gnashed his teeth and burst into tears.

“Hush, dear, I didn’t mean it. Don’t be excited, now.”

“But you did mean it; you know you did.”

“Sh, calm down, Pasha,” the old man besought him, and Pavel’s features softened.

Alexandre Alexandrovich was the only teacher at the high school of whom Pavel was fond. He was an old-fashioned little man, with cravats of a former generation and with features and movements which conveyed the impression that he was forever making ready to bow. His cackling good humour when the recitations were correct and fluent, his distressed air when they were not; his mixed timidity and quick temper—these things are recalled with fond smiles in Miroslav. He was attached to both his subjects and when put on his mettle by the attention of his class he really knew how to put life into the dullest lesson. On such occasions his timid manner would disappear, and he would draw himself up, and go strutting back and forth with long, defiant steps and hurling out his sentences like a domineering rooster. It was only when a lesson of this sort was suddenly disturbed by some sally from a scapegrace of a pupil that Pievakin would fly into a passion and then he would take to jumping about, tearing at his own hair, and groaning as though with physical pain.

Pavel was perhaps the most ardent friend Alexandre Alexandrovich had in all Miroslav. The young prince was in a singular position at the gymnasium. Somehow things were always done in a way to make one remember that he was Prince Boulatoff and a nephew of the governor of the province of which Miroslav was the capital. He was the only boy who usually came to school in a carriage and it seemed as though the imposing vehicle had the effect of isolating him from the other boys. As to his teachers, they took a peculiar tone with him—one of ill-concealed reverence which would betray itself with all the more emphasis when they tried to take him to task. The upshot was that most of the other pupils, including the only other prince in the class (who was also the wildest boy in it) kept out of Pavel’s way, while those who did not treated him with a servility that was even more offensive to him than the aloofness of the rest. He had made several attempts to get on terms of good fellowship with two or three of the boys he liked, but his own effort to laugh and frolic with them had jarred on him like a false note. He had finally settled down to a manner of haughty reticence, keeping an observant eye on his classmates and finding a peculiar pleasure in these silent observations.

The only two teachers who did not indulge him were Pievakin and the teacher of mathematics, a cheerful hunchback with a pale distended face lit by a pair of comical blue eyes, whom the boys had dubbed “truncated cone.” The teacher of mathematics made Pavel feel his exceptional position by treating him with special harshness. As to Pievakin, who had begun by addressing the aristocratic youth with an embarrassed air, he had gradually adopted toward him a manner of fatherly superiority that developed in the boy’s heart a filial attachment for the old pedagogue. In order to increase his income Pavel had made him his private tutor, although he stood high in his class and needed no such assistance, and this summer, when the old man complained of rheumatism, he had caused his mother to invite him to the German resort.

When they reached their hotel the countess unburdened herself to her son’s tutor of certain memories which interested her now far more than did her unexpected rupture with the Polish woman. She described a court ball at St. Petersburg at which the present Czar, then still Czarowitz, conversed for five minutes with her. She treated the gymnasium teacher partly as she would her priest, partly as if he were her butler, and now, in her burst of reminiscence, she overhauled her past to him with the whole-hearted, childlike abandon which is characteristic of her race and which put the humble old teacher ill at ease. “He told me to take good care of my ‘pretty eyes and golden eyebrows,’” she said. “And yet it was for these very eyebrows that Pavel’s father disliked me.”

She had been the pet daughter of a wealthy nobleman, high in the service of the ministry for foreign affairs, but Pavel’s father, and her living husband, from whom she was now practically separated, had almost convinced her that to be disliked was her just share in life. Her parents and sisters were dead. She had a little boy by her second marriage, but she was still in love with the shadow of her first husband, and the son he had left her was the one passion of her life. Having spent her youth in the two foreign countries to which her father’s diplomatic career took the family, she deprecated, in a dim unformulated way, many of the things that surrounded her in her native land. She was unable to reconcile her luminous image of the Emperor with the mediæval cruelties that were being perpetrated by his order. She was at a loss to understand how such a gentle-hearted man could send to the gallows or to the living graves of Siberia people like the Polish patriots. The compulsory religion of the Orthodox Russian Church, too, with its iron-clad organisation and grotesque uniforms, impressed her as a kind of spiritual gendarmerie. Yet she accepted it all as part of that panorama of things which whispered the magic word, “Russia.” And now the sight of the Czar had rekindled memories of her better days and stirred in her a submissive sense of her cheerless fate.

Pavel was meanwhile putting the case of the Polish woman to Onufri, one of the two servants who accompanied them in their present travels—a retired hussar with a formidable moustache in front of a pinched hollow-cheeked face.

“Her highness, your mother, is good as an angel, sir,” was Onufri’s verdict.

“And you are stupid as a cork,” Pavel snarled. His sense of the desecration to which the person of his Czar was being subjected by mingling with people like the widow of a hanged rebel rankled in his heart. He worked himself up to a state of mind in which the very similarity in physical appearance between the untitled people with whom the Czar and born aristocrats like himself and his mother were compelled to mingle at a place like this resort struck him as an impertinence on the part of the untitled people.

Later when he lay between two German featherbeds and Onufri brought him his book and a candle he asked him to take a seat by his bedside.

“Why are you such a deuced fool, Onufri?”

“If I am it is God’s business, not mine, nor your highness’.”

“Look here, Onufri. How would you like to have all common people black like those darkies?”

The servant spat out in horror and made the sign of the cross.

“For shame, sir. What harm have the common people done you that you should wish them a horrid thing like that? And where does your highness get these cruel thoughts? Surely not from your mother. For shame, sir.”

“Idiot that you are, it’s mere fancy, just for fun. There ought to be some difference between noble people and common. There is in some countries, you know.” He told him about castes, the slave trade in America and passed to the days of chivalry, his favourite topic, until the retired hussar’s head sank and a mighty snore rang out of his bushy moustache. Pavel flew into a passion.

“Ass!” he shouted, getting half out of bed and shaking him fiercely. “Why don’t I fall asleep when you tell me stories?”

Onufri started and fell to rubbing one eye, while with his other eye he looked about him, as though he had slept a week. The stories he often told young Boulatoff mostly related to the days of serfdom, which had been abolished when Pavel was a boy of five. Onufri’s mother had been flogged to death in the presence of her master, Pavel’s grandfather, and the former hussar would tell the story with a solemnity that reflected his veneration for the “good old times” rather than grief over the fate of his mother.

That night Pavel dreamed of a pond full of calves that were splashing about and laughing in the water. He carried them all home and on his way there they were transformed into one pair, and the two calves walked about and talked just like Onufri and the transformation was no transformation at all, the calves being real calves and negroes at the same time. When he awoke, in the morning, and it came over him that the dream had had something to do with Onufri, he was seized with a feeling of self-disgust. He thought of the Polish woman and his treatment of her, and this, too, appeared in a new light to him.

Two or three hours later, when the countess returned from her morning walk Pavel, dressed to go out, grave and mysterious, solemnly handed her a sealed note from himself.

“Don’t open it until I have left,” he said. “I am going out for a stroll.”

“What you said yesterday about my being hard-hearted and incapable of sympathy,” the letter read, “left a deep impression on me. I thought of it almost the first thing this morning as I opened my eyes, and it kept me thinking all the morning. I looked deep into my soul, I overhauled my whole ego. I turned it inside out, and—well, I must say I have come to the conclusion that what you said was not devoid of foundation. Not that I am prepared to imagine ourselves as having anything to do with a woman whose family is a family of rebels and who has the audacity to pass our emperor without bowing; but she is a human being, too, and her sufferings should have aroused some commiseration in me. I envy you, mother. Compared to you I really am a hard-hearted, unfeeling brute, and it makes me very, very unhappy to think of it. My heart is so full at this moment that I am at a loss to give expression to what I feel, but you will understand me, darling little mother mine. I do not want to be hard and cruel, and I want you to help me.

“Your struggling son,

“Pavel.”

When Anna Nicolayevna laid down the letter her large meek grey eyes first grew red and then filled with tears. She sat with her long slim arms loosely folded on a davenport, weeping and smiling at once. There was much charm in her smile, but, barring it and her mass of fine auburn hair, she was certainly not good looking. She was small, ungainly, flat-chested, with a large thin-lipped mouth and, in spite of her beautiful gowns, with a general effect of rustiness.

When Pavel and his mother met at dinner he felt so embarrassed he could not bring himself to look her in the face.

CHAPTER II.

THE WHITE TERROR.

MIROSLAV was trisected longitudinally by a clear, cheerful river and by Kasimir Street, its principal thoroughfare, which contained most of its public buildings and best shops. The middle one of the three sections thus formed was the home of the higher nobility and the official class; the district across the bridge from here was inhabited by Christian burghers and workmen, with here and there a clay hovel, the home of a peasant family, gleaming white in the distant outskirts; while the hilly quarter beyond Kasimir Street was the seat of Jewish industry and Jewish poverty, part of this neighbourhood being occupied by the market places and “the Paradise,” as the slums of the town were called ironically. The governor’s house, which faced Governor’s Prospect—a small square with a fountain in the centre—and Anna Nicolayevna’s were the two most imposing buildings in Miroslav.

The countess’ residence was the only structure in town that had a colonnaded front. The common people called it the Palace and the section of Kasimir Street it faced the Pillars. The sidewalk opposite was the favourite promenade of the younger generation, and every afternoon, in auspicious weather, it glittered with the uniforms of army officers and gymnasium boys. The Palace was built by her grandfather in the closing days of the previous century. It abutted on a long narrow lane formed on one side by Anna Nicolayevna’s garden and leading to Theatre Square, where stood the playhouse and the Nobles’ Club. When the white rigidity of these buildings was relieved by the grass of its lawns and the foliage of its trees the spot was the joy of the town.

During the winter of the year following the countess’ sojourn at the German watering place, Miroslav was stirred by a sensation, the central figure of which was Pavel’s tutor, the instructor of geography and history in the local gymnasium, Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin. Pavel was then in the graduating class.

Besides being connected with the male gymnasium Pievakin taught at the female high school of Miroslav. The town was fond of him and he was fond of the town and upon the whole he was contented. One of the things that galled him was the fact that his superior, the newly appointed director of the school, was his inferior both in years and in civil rank. Pievakin was a “councillor of state,” while Novikoff, the head of the male gymnasium, was only a “collegiate assessor.” Novikoff was a painstaking, narrow-minded functionary, superciliously proud of his office and slavishly loyal to the letter of the law. He was a slender, dark-complexioned man of forty, but he tried to look much older and heavier. He copied the Czar’s side-whiskers, walked like a corpulent grandee, perpetually pulling at his waistcoat as though he were burdened by a voluminous paunch, and interlarded his speech with aphorisms from the Latin Grammar.

One day as the director strutted ponderously along one of the two corridors, the word “parliament” fell on his ear. It was Pievakin’s voice. The old man was explaining something to his class with great ardour. Novikoff paused, his lordly walk congealing into the picture of dignified attention. The next minute, however, his grandeur melted away. His face expressed unfeigned horror. Pievakin was drawing an effusive parallel between absolute monarchies and limited. This was distinctly in violation of the Circular of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment enjoining teachers of geography, in cases of this kind, to adhere strictly to the bare terminology of the approved text-book without venturing into anything like an elucidation. Not that Pievakin was betraying any partiality for limited monarchies. Indeed, to him the distinction between the two forms of government was neither of more nor of less interest than the difference between a steppe and a prairie or a simoon and a hurricane. It appealed to him because it was geography, and in his ecstasy over the lesson all thought of the Ministry and its Circulars had escaped his mind.

That afternoon he was summoned to the director’s office on the floor below.

Novikoff was at his large, flat-topped desk, studiously absorbed in some papers. He silently motioned the teacher of geography to a seat, and went on with his feigned work. After a lapse of some minutes he straightened up, played a few scales upon the brass buttons of his uniform, and said:

“It pains me to have to say it, Alexandre Alexandrovich, but these are queer times and the passions of youth should be moderated, held in check, suppressed, not aroused. The imagination of one’s pupils is not to be trifled with, Alexandre Alexandrovich.”

He paused mournfully. The little old man, who had not the least idea what he was driving at, waited in consternation. The room was overheated, and the pause had an overpowering effect on him. He felt on the verge of fainting.

“The point is,” Novikoff resumed, with a sudden spurt in his voice, “that in your class work you sometimes suffer yourself to say things that cannot but be regarded as dangerous. Dangerous particularly in view of the evil influences at work among the young of our generation; in view of the very sad fact that college students will disguise themselves as peasants——”

“What do you mean, sir?” Pievakin burst out, reddening violently. “How dare you liken me to those fellows? I was serving the Czar while you were still a whippersnapper. I’m a councillor of state, sir. How dare you make these insinuations?”

“I expected as much,” Novikoff answered, nervously polishing his buttons. “Defying one’s superior is of a piece with the views you’re trying to instill into the minds of your scholars.”

“What is of a piece with what? Speak out, sir,” Pievakin shrieked.

“Bridle your temper, sir. I can’t allow that.”

“Then tell me what it’s all about,” the teacher of history and geography said in a queer, half-beseeching, half-threatening voice.

“Well, this morning you were expatiating upon the blessings of a constitutional government. Yes, sir. There are no spies to eavesdrop on one in this building, but it seems you never speak so loud nor with so much gusto as when you get to the subject of constitutions and parliaments and things of that kind.”

“It isn’t true. I merely said a word or two on the various forms of government. It’s practically all in Smirnoff’s Geography.”

“‘Practically’! It’s against the law. I am very sorry, but it becomes my duty to report it to the curator.”

Here Pievakin, losing control of himself, shouted “Spy!” and “Scoundrel!” and darted out of the room.

This happened at a time when the “peasantist” movement, the peaceful, unresisting stage in the history of what is commonly known as Nihilism, was at its height. The educated young generation was in an ecstasy of altruism. It was the period of “going to the people,” when hundreds of well-bred men and women, children of the nobility, would don peasant garb and go to share the life of the tillers of the soil, teaching them to read, talking to them of universal love, liberty and equality. The government punished this “going to the people” with Asiatic severity. Russia has no capital punishment for the slaying of common mortals, the average penalty for murder being about ten years of penal servitude in Siberia; and this penalty the courts were often ordered to impose on absolutely peaceable missionaries, on university students who practically did the same kind of work as that pursued by the “university settlements” in English-speaking countries. There were about one thousand of these propagandists in the political prisons of the empire, and their number was growing. They were kept in solitary confinement in cold, damp cells. Scores of them went insane or died of consumption, scurvy or suicide before their cases came up for trial.

Pievakin’s house was searched by gendarmes, but no “underground” literature was discovered there. He was not arrested, but spies shadowed his movements and about a month after the domiciliary visit he was officially notified by the curator’s office that he was to be transferred to the four-year “progymnasium” of a small town a considerable distance off. This implied that his work was to be restricted to boys of fourteen and less in a town out of the way of “dangerous tendencies.” He grew thin and haggard and a certain look of fright never left his eye. The other instructors at the gymnasium, all except one, and many of his private acquaintance plainly shunned him. He had become one of those people with whom one could not come in contact without attracting the undesirable attention of the police. One of those who were not afraid to be seen in his company was the “truncated cone.” “My crooked back is the only one that does not bend,” the deformed man would joke. The tacit philosophy of his attitude toward the world seemed to be something like this: “You people won’t consider me one of you. I am only a hunchback, something like an elf, and you will take many an unwelcome truth from me which you would resent in one like yourselves. So let us proceed on this understanding.”

When Boulatoff heard that his favourite teacher was to be exiled to a small town “to render him harmless,” he was shocked. Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin was the last man in the world he would have suspected to be guilty of seditious agitation. His only idol at school was thus shattered. Pievakin had not the courage to visit the countess’ house now, and Pavel, on his part, held aloof from him. The old man was hateful to him, not only as a rebel, but also as an impostor and a hypocrite. He felt duped. His blood rankled with disgust and resentment. At the same time the situation did not seem quite clear to him. Something puzzled him, although he could not have put his finger on it.

CHAPTER III.

PIEVAKIN PLEADS GUILTY.

A LESSON in Latin was in progress. The teacher was a blond Czech. Pavel looked at him intently, trying to follow the exercises, but he only became the more aware of the foreigner’s struggles with Russian and made the discovery that his clumsy carriage, as he walked up and down the room, was suggestive of a peasant woman trying to catch a chicken. His thoughts passed to Pievakin and almost at the same instant a question flashed into his brain: If Pievakin was unreliable politically, why, then, was he getting off so easily? How was it that instead of being cut off from the living world, instead of being thrown into a dungeon to waste and perish, as was done with all fellows of that sort, he was merely transferred to another school?

The bell sounded. The Czech put his big flat record-book under his arm and left the room. Most of the pupils went out soon after. The two long corridors were bubbling with boys in blue, a-glitter with nickel-plated buttons and silver galloon, some laughing over their experience with the lesson just disposed of, others eagerly reviewing the one soon to be recited. Pievakin passed along. The pupils bowed to him with curious sympathetic looks, and he returned their salutes with an air of mixed timidity and gratitude. Presently the teacher of mathematics emerged from one of the glass doors, his deformity bulging through the blue broadcloth of his uniform.

“Alexandre Alexandrovich!” he shouted demonstratively, and catching up with him he threw his arm around his waist.

Pavel, who had been watching the scene, was about to return to his class-room so as to avoid bowing to Pievakin, when, by a sudden impulse, he saluted the two teachers, and advancing to meet them, with that peculiar air of politeness which reminded his classmates of his equipage and the colonnade in front of his mother’s mansion, he accosted the instructor of history and geography, turning pale as he did so:

“May I speak to you, Alexandre Alexandrovich?” When the mathematician had withdrawn, he inquired in a tone of pain and concern: “What has happened, Alexandre Alexandrovich?”

“Oh, I’m in trouble, prince,” the old man faltered. He had never addressed the youth by his title before, and there was a note of abject supplication in his voice, as if the boy could help him. His face had a pinched, cowed look.

“But, Alexandre Alexandrovich, it’s a terrible thing they are accusing you of. You’ve been so dear to me, Alexandre Alexandrovich. I want to know all. I cannot rest, Alexandre Alexandrovich.”

“The story is easily told. A misfortune has befallen me. While touching upon the constitutional form of government, I was somewhat carried away. That I don’t deny. I know it was wrong of me, but I assure you, prince, I meant no harm.”

It sounded as though he were a pleading pupil and the boy before him his teacher.

Pavel was touched and perplexed.

“But that’s in the text-book, Alexandre Alexandrovich.”

“To be sure it is. Only the text-book merely uses the term without explaining it, while I, absent-mindedly, proceeded to do so, which is against the rules, and, as ill luck would have it, I warmed up a bit. When I was first asked about it I was not aware of having done any wrong. I was so shocked, in fact, I lost my temper. That was the worst of it. I am a ruined man, prince. Thirty-six years have I served the Czar and there is not a blemish on my record.”

“But why should you call yourself a ruined man, Alexandre Alexandrovich,” Pavel said impetuously. “I don’t see why it should be too late to straighten it all out. I’m going to see my uncle. Or, better still, my mother will see him. We can’t let it go that way. We should all be a lot of scoundrels if we did. I’m going to tell him so.”

“Do it, prince, if you can,” the old man said with shamefaced eagerness. “I shall never forget it.”

When Pavel came home he found his mother’s sleigh in front of the main entrance, her coachman in dazzling attire, waiting with pompous stolidity. When the liveried porter threw the door open to him and he entered the vestibule he saw coming down the immense staircase his mother and his five-year-old half-brother, Kostia, dressed for their afternoon drive, Anna Nicolayevna in her furs and the little fellow in the costume of a Caucasian horseman, which became his grave little face charmingly. Following at some distance, with a smile of admiration, half servile, half sincere, on her fresh German face, was Kostia’s governess. She was not dressed for a drive. She was merely going to see her charge off.

“Mother, I am afraid I shall have to detain you,” Pavel said, solemnly. “I wish to speak to you about Alexandre Alexandrovich.”

“Won’t it keep?” she asked, with a facetious gesture.

“Don’t make fun of it, mother,” he reproached her. “It’s a serious matter. My head is in a whirl.”

Kostia was burning to show himself in public in his new Circassian cap and when he saw his mother yield he screwed up his face for a cry, but he forthwith straightened it out again. He scarcely ever cried in Pavel’s presence for fear of being called “damsel” by him—an appellation he dreaded more than being locked up alone in the schoolroom.

They went into Anna Nicolayevna’s favorite sitting-room, a square chamber furnished and decorated in tan, in no particular style, but with an eye to the combined suggestions of old-time solidity and latter-day elegance. It was the embodiment of rest and silence, an effect to which two life-sized bronze statues—a Diana and a Venus de Medici—and the drowsy ticking of an ancient clock contributed not a little. It was known as the English room because its former furnishings had been modelled after London standards.

Pavel painted Pievakin as a penitent, broken spirit till Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red.

“Still, maybe he does hold dangerous views?” she asked.

“Dangerous nothing! It’s all nonsense. He’s more loyal than Novikoff anyhow, for Novikoff is a soulless, attitudinising nincompoop, while he is the kindliest, most conscientious, most soulful man in the world.”

“Unfortunately all this has nothing to do with loyalty,” she said, sadly. “This is a very queer world, Pasha. It’s just like those wretches who would do away with czars to be warm-hearted and good to everybody. They don’t believe there ought to be rich and poor, either. When you come across a man of this sort keep away from him, Pasha.”

“But what has that got to do with Pievakin?” he shouted. “The very sight of a Nihilist would be enough to frighten him out of his wits. I want you to tell it all to uncle, mamman. Give him no peace until he promises you to write to the curator about the poor old man.”

The governor of Miroslav was a Boulatoff, being a cousin of Pavel’s deceased father; but he was also related to the young man by marriage to his mother’s sister, who had died less than a year ago. Anna Nicolayevna promised to see her brother-in-law the next morning, but Pavel would not wait. He pleaded, he charged her with heartlessness, tapping the thick rug with his foot and shaking all over as he spoke, until she agreed to go at once.

While she was gone Pavel and Kostia went into the ball room and played “hunter and partridge,” a game of the gymnasium boys’ inventing. They had not been many minutes at it before Pavel had forgotten all about the errand on which he had despatched his mother and the vast ball room echoed with his voluminous laughter. His great pleasure was to tease Kostia until the little boy’s mouth would begin to twitch, and then to shake his finger at him and say: “Better not cry, Kostia, or you know what I am going to call you.” Whereupon Kostia would make a desperate effort to look nonchalantly grave and Pavel would burst into a new roar of merriment.

Anna Nicolayevna came back converted to a rigorous point of view, and although her son had no difficulty in convincing her once again that Pievakin deserved mercy, he made up his mind to see his uncle himself, and he did so the very next morning.

Governor Boulatoff was a massive, worn, blinking old satrap, shrewd, tight-fisted, and, what was quite unusual for a man of his class, with an eye to business. His nose was extremely broad and fleshy, his hair was elaborately dressed, and altogether he looked like a successful old comedian. Bribe-giving was as universal in Miroslav as tipping was in its leading café. One could not turn round without showing “gratitude.” The wheels of government would not move in the desired direction unless they were greased, the price of this “grease” or “gratitude” varying all the way from a ten-copeck piece to ten or fifteen thousand rubles. Governor Boulatoff, who had come to Miroslav a ruined man, was now the largest land-owner in the province. Whenever he was in need of ready cash he would galvanize into a new lease of life some defunct piece of anti-Jewish legislation. This was known among the other officials as “pressing the spring”—the spring of the Jewish pocketbook, that is, the invariable effect of the proceeding being the appearance of a delegation with a snug piece of Jewish “gratitude.” He was continually sneering at the powers behind the throne, and mildly striving for recognition; yet so comfortable did he feel in this city of gardens, card-playing and “gratitude,” from which “the Czar was too far off and God too high up,” that he was in mortal fear lest the promotion which he coveted should come in the form of a transfer to a more important province.

Pavel found him in his imposing “den.” The old potentate was in his morning gown, freshly bathed, shaved and coiffured and smelling of pomade and cigarette smoke.

“Well, my little statesman,” he greeted him in French. “What brings you so early this morning? Aren’t you going to school at all?” He called him statesman because of his ambition to follow in the footsteps of his diplomatic grandfather.

“I shall stay away from the first three lessons,” Pavel answered. “I cannot rest, uncle. I want to speak to you about that unfortunate man.”

The governor was very fond of Pavel, but he persisted in treating him as a boy, and the only serious talk young Boulatoff got out of him regarding Pievakin was an exhortation to give “men of that sort a wide berth.”

“But, uncle——”

“Don’t argue,” the governor interrupted him, blinking as he spoke. “This is not the kind of thing for a boy of your station to get mixed up in.”

“Oh, it’s enough to drive one crazy. The poor man is sincerely repentant, uncle. He’ll never do it again, uncle.”

“I see you’re quite excited over it. Just the kind of effect fellows of that stamp will have on the mind of a boy. This is just where the danger comes in. Don’t forget your name, Pasha. Come, throw it all out of your clever little head. There’s a good boy.”

“Uncle darling, he’ll never do it again. Let him stay where he is.”

“You’re a foolish boy. Whether he’ll do it again or no, his very presence in this town would be a source of danger. Whoever sets his eyes on him will say to himself: ‘Here is the man who once talked of the way people live under a constitution.’ So you see he’ll be a reminder of unlawful ideas. We have no use for fellows of this sort. They are like living poison. Do you see the point? Let your teacher thank his stars the case was not put in the hands of the gendarmes entirely, or he would be sent to a colder place.”

All this the governor said in the playful manner of one conversing with a child and, by way of clinching the matter, he explained that he had nothing to do with the case and that it was under the jurisdiction of the “curator of educational district.”

Pavel was in despair and his being treated as a boy threw him into a rage, but he held himself in check for Pievakin’s sake.

“Oh, the curator will do anything you ask of him, uncle,” he said in a tone of entreaty and resentment at once.

“You don’t want your uncle to write letters begging for a fellow who was foolish enough to get mixed up in such an affair as that, do you? I used to think you really cared for your uncle.”

Pavel contracted his forehead and put out his chin sullenly.

CHAPTER IV.

THE “DEMONSTRATION.”

AT the hour of Pievakin’s departure the Miroslav railway station was crowded with gymnasium pupils of both sexes, but Pavel was not among them. He had not been informed that such a gathering was in contemplation at all.

Alexandre Alexandrovich, a satchel slung across his breast, wan and haggard, but flushed with excitement, was bustling about in a listless, mechanical way. He was accompanied by his large family and the teacher of mathematics. A number of gendarmes, stalwart, bewhiskered, elaborately formidable, were pacing up and down the large waiting room. The gendarmerie is the political police of the Czar. It forms a special military organisation quite distinct from the police proper. A detail of such gendarmes, proportionate to the importance of the place, is to be found in every railroad station of the country. On this occasion, however, the presence of the gendarmes seemed to have some special bearing upon the nature of the scene. They were all big strapping fellows. Their jingling spurs, red epaulets and icy silence belonged to the same category of things as the terrible political prisons of Kharkoff and St. Petersburg; as the clinking of convict-chains, as the frozen wastes of Siberia.

All at once most of the bespurred men disappeared. After an absence of two or three minutes they came back, considerably re-enforced.

“All gymnasium pupils, ladies and gentlemen, will please leave the station,” they called out.

About one-half of the throng struck out for the doors as if the place were on fire. Some fifteen or twenty pupils stood still, frowning upon the guardians of the Czar’s safety, in timid defiance. The rest, a crowd of about two hundred, made a lunge in the direction of the corner where Alexandre Alexandrovich and his family were pottering about some light baggage, when three lusty gendarmes planted themselves in front of the little old man.

“Go home, ladies and gentlemen, go home!” Pievakin besought his friends, waving his hands and stamping his feet desperately.

“Have we no right to say good-bye to our own teacher?” one boy ventured.

“Not allowed!” a gendarme answered, sternly. “Get out, get out!”

The crowd surged back; but at this point a young feminine voice, sonorous with indignation and distress, rose above the din of the scramble:

“Good heavens! Can it be that we shall leave without saying good-bye to our dear teacher? All they say of him is a lie, a malicious lie. They’re a lot of knaves, and he is the best man in the world. Let them arrest us if they will, let them kill us. It would be a shame if we went away like traitors to our dear teacher.”

The rest was lost in a hubbub of shouts and shrieks. In their effort to get at the speaker, who was shielded by the other pupils, the gendarmes were beating young women with their sheathed swords or pulling them by the hair. With the exception of a few who had skulked out through back doors, the young people now all stood their ground, ready to fight.

“Arrest us all!” they yelled. “We all say the same thing.”

“Yes, Alexandre Alexandrovich is the best man in the world. There!”

“A better man than Novikoff!”

“Novikoff is a hypocrite and a rogue!”

In the commotion the gendarmes lost sight of the girl they were about to arrest. She could not have left the room, but then it was not easy to tell her from any of the other girls. The gendarmes had seen her at a distance, and all they could say was that she was blonde. In their eagerness to pick her out, they were rudely scanning every young woman in the waiting-room. Had she been arrested it would have gone hard with her. As good luck would have it, however, Major Safonoff, the officer in command of the railroad gendarmes, was the brother of one of the girls present. He was a plump, good-natured bachelor, and his devotion to his sister, who had been under his care since she was a year old, was a source of jests and anecdotes. When it occurred to him that the conflict, which was beginning to look like a serious affair, was likely to cause trouble to his sister, he hastened to make light of it.

“Go home, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, in a remonstrative amicable voice, taking the matter in his own hands.

His friendly tone and his smiling fat face, added to the tacit understanding that the girl who had made the speech was not to be persecuted, acted as a balm; but the flattering notion that the gendarmes had surrendered kindled new fighting blood.

“Your men have hit ladies. They’ve no right to hit anybody. They’re a lot of brutes. All we wanted was to say good-bye to Alexandre Alexandrovich.”

“But that’s impossible, so what’s the use getting excited, gentlemen? Better go home.”

The pupils obeyed, in a leisurely way, as though leaving of their own accord.

During the following few weeks this “victory” over the gendarmes was the great topic of discussion. The personality of the girl who “started the demonstration” was emblazoned with the halo of heroism. The curious part of it was that only a minority of those who had participated in the scene had any idea who she was. When the crowd at the railroad station had dispersed, the handful that knew her whispered her name to some of those who did not, so that the number of pupils in the secret was by now comparatively large, but it was a “revolutionary” secret, so it was guarded most zealously against unreliable pupils as well as against the authorities.

One of the page-proofs of the Miroslav Messenger that were sent to the censor at midnight contained the following paragraph:

“Alexandre Alexandrovich Pievakin, for many years instructor of History and Geography at our male gymnasium, left for his new place of service yesterday afternoon. A large number of gymnasium pupils were at the railway station.”

The entire paragraph was stricken out, so that the Messenger next morning contained not the remotest reference to the departure of the old teacher.

When Pasha heard what had happened at the railway station his heart sank.

“I must speak to you, mother,” he gasped out, bursting into her room, after school time. When her companion, a dried-up little Frenchwoman with a thriving streak of black moustache, had withdrawn, he said: “Mother, I am a miserable egoist and a scoundrel.” He told her the story of Pievakin’s departure. His dear old teacher was in trouble, the victim of a cruel injustice, yet he, Pasha, had not even thought of going to see him off. Everybody had been there except him. But what tantalised him more than anything else was the fact that a girl was the only person who had taken a brave noble stand in the old man’s behalf. This hurt his knightly sense of honour cruelly. He should have been on the scene and done exactly what that girl had done.

“I’m an egoist and a coward, mamman. I hate myself. Oh, I do hate myself!”

Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red. She had an impulse to fold him in her arms and to offer to take him to Pievakin’s new place so that he might protest his sympathy and affection for the old man, but her instinct told her that this would be improper. Oh, there were so many things that made a strong appeal to one’s better feelings which were considered improper. So she emitted a sigh of resignation and said nothing.

Pavel was pacing the floor so vehemently that he came near running into and knocking down the life-sized Diana. He walked with rapid heavy steps until his brain grew dizzy and his despair was dulled as from the effect of drink. Suddenly the situation rushed back upon him.

“I tell you what, mother, he’s too good for them,” he said, stopping in front of her. “He is better than uncle, anyhow.”

“Hush, you mustn’t say that.”

“The devil I mustn’t. It’s true.”

“You are impossible, Pasha. Can’t you calm down?”

“I’ll tell you calmly, then: uncle is a bribe-taker and a heartless egoist. There.”

“Dear me,” she said, in consternation.

“But you know he is, mother. And do you call that loyalty to the Czar? Pievakin is pure as an infant. If the Czar knew the real character of both, he would know that the poor man could give uncle points in loyalty.”

A few days after this conversation the governor dined at “The Palace,” as Countess Varoff’s residence was known among the common people of Miroslav. Pavel refused to leave his room. When Anna Nicolayevna pleaded his uncle’s affection for him, he said:

“His affection be hanged. Who wants the affection of a bribe-taker who will let an honest man perish? Look here, mother, you have no business to tell him I have a headache. I want him to know the truth. Tell him it’s men like himself, bribe-takers, cowards, who spread sedition, not men like Pievakin. ‘Living poison,’d! Tell him he is a lump of living poison himself. Oh, I hate him, I do hate him.”

His brain was working feverishly. The image of Pievakin with three gendarmes between him and a crowd of pupils haunted him. Why could he not be pardoned? Was there no mercy in this world? His sense of the cruelty of the thing and of his own helplessness seized him as with a violent clutch again and again.

Once, as he was reviewing the situation for the thousandth time, a voice in him exclaimed: “Pardoned? What was Pievakin to be pardoned for? What had he done? Why should it be wrong to dwell on the vital features of parliamentary government? Such governments existed, didn’t they? And if they did, then why should one be forbidden to explain their essence?” For the first time did his attention fix itself on this point, and questions came crowding upon him. Where was the sense of having such terms as “limited monarchy” in the text-book at all, if the pupils were not to be told what this meant? Above all, why should the government be afraid of such explanations? There seemed to be something cowardly, sneaking, about all this which jarred on Pavel’s sense of the knightly magnificence of the Czar and left him with a bad taste in the mouth, as the phrase is.

Alexandre Alexandrovich, then, had done no wrong, and yet he had been banished as “living poison,” treated by everybody as a criminal, until he came to believe himself one. Why, of course he was better than Novikoff. Novikoff was a self-seeking, posing wretch, and all the other teachers were cringing and crouching before him; and these insects turned their backs upon Alexandre Alexandrovich! Corruption passed for loyalty, and a really good man was persecuted, hunted down like a wild beast, trampled upon. “Trampled upon, trampled upon, trampled upon!” Pavel whispered audibly, stamping his foot and gnashing his teeth as he did so.

The only gleam of light was the veiled figure of that gymnasium girl. She alone had had sympathy and courage enough to raise her voice for the poor man. “Why, she is a perfect heroine,” he said in his aching heart.

At the gymnasium he felt his loneliness more keenly than ever. Wherever he saw a cluster of boys, he felt sure they were whispering about the gendarmes and the girl who had made the “speech” at the railroad station. His pride was gone. He now saw himself an outcast, shut out of the most important things life contained.

The leader of the “serious-minded” boys in Pavel’s class was an underfed Jewish youth, with an anæmic chalky face and a cold intelligent look, named Elkin. To Pavel he had always been repugnant. Since Pievakin’s departure, however, the aristocratic boy had looked at his classmates in a new light, and Elkin now even inspired him with respect.

“Who is the girl that made that speech at the station?” he asked simply. The two had scarcely ever spoken before.

Elkin gave Boulatoff a stare of freezing irony, as who should say: “What do you think of the assurance of this man?” and then, dropping his eyes, he asked:

“What girl?” When he spoke his lips assumed the form of two obtuse angles, exposing to view a glistening lozenge of white teeth.

“Look here, Elkin, I want to know who that girl is and all about the whole affair, and if you think I ought not to know it because—well, because I am a Boulatoff and my uncle is the governor, I can assure you that if I had been there I should have acted as she did. What’s more, I hate myself for not having been there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied Elkin. “As to your hating yourself, that’s your own affair.”

“Well, however I may feel toward myself, I certainly have nothing but contempt for a man like you,” Pasha snapped back, paling. “But if you think you can keep it from me, you’re mistaken.”

Elkin sized him up with a look full of venom, as he said:

“Pitiful wretch! How are you going to find it out? Through the political spies?”

Pavel turned red. It was with a great effort that he kept himself from striking Elkin. After a pause he said:

“Now, I can tell you from the bottom of my heart that you are a knave.”

“Besides,” said Elkin, as though finishing an interrupted remark, “most of the gymnasium girls who saw Alexandre Alexandrovich off are daughters of poor, humble people, so of what interest would it have been to a man in your position?”

Boulatoff stood still for a few moments, and then said under his breath:

“Well, you’re a fool as well as a knave,” and turned away.

The heroine of the demonstration was hateful to him now. She and Elkin seemed to stand at the head of the untitled classes all arrayed against him. He retired into himself deeper than ever. He abhorred her because she had done the right thing, and each time his sympathy for Pievakin welled up he hated himself for not having been at the station, and her for having been there. He sought relief in charging Elkin with cowardice. “What did he do there?” he would say to himself. “To think of a lot of fellows running away when they are told they can’t say good-bye to their martyred teacher, and a girl being the only one who has courage enough to act properly. And now that she has done it this coward has the face to give himself airs, as if he were entitled to credit for her courage. If I had been there I should not have run away as Elkin and his crew did.”

This placed Elkin and his followers on one side of the line and Pavel and the girl on the other. So what right had that coward of a Jew to place himself between her and him?

Toward spring, some two months after the old teacher’s departure, and when the incident was beginning to grow dim in the public mind, the sensation was suddenly revived and greatly intensified by an extraordinary piece of news that came from the town to which Pievakin had been transferred: The Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Office—the central political detective bureau of the empire—had taken up the case, with the result that the action of the Department of Public Instruction had been repudiated as dangerously inadequate. The idea of a man like Pievakin participating in the education of children! Accordingly, the poor old man was now under arrest, condemned to be transported to Viatka, a thinly populated province in the remote north, where he was to live under police surveillance, as a political exile strictly debarred from teaching, even in private families.

Pavel was stunned. He received the news as something elemental. He could find fault with his uncle, but the government at St. Petersburg was a sublime abstract force, bathed in the effulgence of the Czar’s personality. It was no more open to condemnation than a thunderstorm or a turbulent sea. But the incident made an ineffaceable impression upon him. It left him with the general feeling that there was something inherently cruel in the world. And the picture of a pretty girl boldly raising her voice for poor Pievakin in the teeth of formidable-looking gendarmes and in the midst of a crowd of panic-stricken men remained imbedded in his fancy as the emblem of brave pity. An importunate sense of jealousy nagged him. He often caught himself dreaming of situations in which he appeared in a rôle similar to the one she had played at the railroad station.

His perceptions and sensibilities took a novel trend.

One day, for example, as he walked through Theatre Square, he paused to watch an apple-faced ensign, evidently fresh from the military school, lecture a middle-aged sergeant. The youthful officer sat on a bench, swaggeringly leaning back, his new sword gleaming by his side, as he questioned the soldier who stood at attention, the picture of embarrassment and impotent rage. A young woman, probably the sergeant’s wife, sweetheart, or daughter, stood aside, looking on wretchedly. Seated on a bench directly across the walk were two pretty gymnasium girls. It was clear that the whole scene had been gotten up for their sake, that the ensign had stopped the poor fellow, who was old enough to be his father, and was now putting him through this ordeal for the sole purpose of flaunting his authority before them. When the sergeant had been allowed to go his way, but before he was out of hearing, Pavel walked up to the ensign and said aloud:

“I wish to tell you, sir, that you tormented that poor man merely to show off.”

“Bravo!” said the two gymnasium girls, clapping their hands with all their might; “bravo!”

The ensign sprang to his feet, his apple-cheeks red as fire. “What do you mean by interfering with an officer—in the performance of his duty?” he faltered. He apparently knew that the young man before him was a nephew of the governor.

“Nonsense! You were not performing any duties. You were parading. That’s what you were doing.”

The two girls burst into a ringing laugh, whereupon the ensign stalked off, mumbling something about having the gymnasium boy arrested.

“Mother,” he said, when he came home. “The world is divided into tormentors and victims.”

Anna Nicolayevna gave a laugh that made her rusty face interesting. “And what are you—a tormentor or a victim?” she asked. “At any rate you had better throw these thoughts out of your mind. They lead to no good, Pasha.”

CHAPTER V.

PAVEL’S FIRST STEP.

WHEN Pavel arrived in St. Petersburg, in the last days of July, his recent tribulations seemed a thing of the faded past. The capital was a fascinating setting for the great university which he was soon to enter and in which he was bent upon drinking deep of the deepest mysteries of wisdom. His “certificate of maturity”—his gymnasium diploma—was a solemn proclamation of his passage from boyhood to manhood—a change which seemed to assert itself in everything he did. He ate maturely, talked maturely, walked maturely. He felt like a girl on the eve of her wedding day.

He had not been in the big city for six years, and so marked was the distinction between it and the southern town from which he hailed, that to his “mature” eyes it seemed as if they were seeing it for the first time. The multitude of large lusty men, heavily bearded and wearing blouses of flaming red; the pink buildings; the melodious hucksters; the cherry-peddlars, with their boards piled with the succulent fruit on their shoulders; the pitchy odor of the overheated streets; the soft, sibilant affectations in the speech of the lower classes; the bustling little ferry-boats on the Neva—all this, sanctified by the presence of the university buildings across the gay river, made his heart throb with a feeling as though Miroslav were a foreign town and he were treading the soil of real Russia at last.

He matriculated at the Section of Philology and History, St. Petersburg. Before starting on his studies, however, he went off on a savage debauch with some aristocratic young relatives. The debauch lasted a fortnight, and cost his mother a small fortune. When he came to the university at last, weary of himself and his relatives, he settled down to a winter of hard work. But the life at the university disturbed his peace of mind. He found the students divided into “crammers,” “parquette-scrapers” and “radicals.” The last named seemed to be in the majority—a bustling, whispering, preoccupied crowd with an effect of being the masters of the situation. There was a vast difference between Elkin and his followers and these people. Pavel knew that the university was the hotbed of the secret movement, of which he was now tempted to know something. There was no telling who of his present classmates might prove a candidate for the gallows. The wide-awake, whispering, mysterious world about him reminded him of the Miroslav girl and of his rebuff upon trying to discover who she was. When he made an attempt to break through the magic circle in which that world was enclosed his well-cared-for appearance and high-born manner went against him. A feeling of isolation weighed on his soul that was much harder to bear than his ostracism at the gymnasium had been. Harder to bear, because the students who kept away from him here struck him as his superiors, and because he had a humble feeling as though it were natural that they should hold aloof from him. And the image of that Miroslav girl seemed to float over these whispering young men, at once luring and repulsing him. He often went about with a lump in his throat.

One day he met a girl named Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of a former governor of the Province of St. Petersburg and the granddaughter of a celebrated cabinet minister. She was a strong-featured, boyish-looking little creature, with grave blue eyes beneath a very high forehead. He had known her when he was a child. There was something in her general appearance now and in the few words she said to him which left a peculiar impression on Pavel. As he thought of her later it dawned upon him that she might belong to the same world as those preoccupied, whispering fellow-students of his. He looked her up the same day.

“I should like to get something to read, Sophia Lvovna,” he said, colouring. “Some of the proscribed things, I mean.” Then he added, with an embarrassed frown, “Something tells me you could get it for me. If I am mistaken, you will have to excuse me.”

The governor’s daughter fixed her blue eyes on him as she said, simply:

“All right. I’ll get you something.”

She lent him a volume of the “underground” magazine Forward! and some other prints. The tales of valour and martyrdom which he found in these publications, added to the editorials they contained calling upon the nobility to pay the debt they owed to the peasantry by sacrificing themselves for their welfare, literally intoxicated him.

“Dear Mother and Comrade,” he wrote in a letter home, “I have come to the conclusion that the so-called nobility to which I belong has never done anything useful. For centuries and centuries and centuries we have been living at the expense of those good, honest, overworked people, the peasantry. It is enough to drive one to suicide. Yes, mamma darling, we are a race of drones and robbers. The ignorant, unkempt moujiks that we treat like beasts are in reality angels compared to us. There is something in them—in their traditions and in the inherent purity of their souls—which should inspire us with reverence. Yet they are literally starved and three-fourths of their toil goes to maintain the army and the titled classes.”

Further down in the same letter he said: “Every great writer in the history of our literature has been in prison or exiled. Our noblest thinker and critic, Chernyshevsky, is languishing in Siberia. Why? Why? My hair stands erect when I think of these things.”

When it came to posting the letter, it dawned upon him that such sentiments were not to be trusted to the mails, and, feeling himself a conspirator, he committed the epistle to the flames.

He was touched by the spirit of that peasant worship—the religion of the “penitent nobility”—which was the spirit of the best unproscribed literature of the day as well as of the “underground” movement. Turgeneff owed the origin of his fame to the peasant portraits of his Notes of a Huntsman. Nekrasoff, the leading poet of the period, and a score of other writers were perpetually glorifying the peasant, going into ecstasies over him, bewailing him. The peasant they drew was a creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but shed over him was the golden halo of idealism. The central doctrine of the movement was a theory that the survival of the communistic element in the Russian village, was destined to become the basis of the country’s economic and political salvation; that Russia would leap into an ideal social arrangement without having to pass through capitalism; that her semi-barbaric peasant, kindly and innocent as a dove and the martyr of centuries, carried in his person the future glory, moral as well as material, of his unhappy country. As to the living peasant, he had no more knowledge of this adoration of himself (nor capacity to grasp the meaning of the movement, if an attempt had been made to explain it to him) than a squirrel has of the presence of a “q” in the spelling of its name.

Sophia disappeared from St. Petersburg, and Pavel found himself cut off from the “underground” world once more. The prints she had left him only served to excite his craving for others of the same character. The preoccupied, mysterious air of the “radicals” at the university tantalised him. He was in a veritable fever of envy, resentment, intellectual and spiritual thirst. He subscribed liberally to the various revolutionary funds that were continually being raised under the guise of charity, and otherwise tried to manifest his sympathy with the movement, all to no purpose. His contributions were accepted, but his advances were repulsed. One day he approached a student whom he had once given ten rubles “for a needy family”—a thin fellow with a very long neck and the face of a chicken.

“I should like to get something to read,” he said, trying to copy the tone of familiar simplicity which he had used with Sophia. “I have read one number of Forward! and another thing or two, but that’s all I have been able to get.”

“Pardon me,” the chicken-face answered, colouring, “I really don’t know what you mean. Can’t you get those books in the book-stores or in the public library?”

Pavel was left with an acute pang of self-pity. He felt like a pampered child undergoing ill-treatment at the hands of strangers. His mother and all his relatives thought so much of him, while these fellows, who would deem it a privilege to talk to any of them, were treating him as a nobody and a spy. The tears came to his eyes. But presently he clenched his fists and said to himself, “I will be admitted to their set.”

In his fidget he happened to think of Pani Oginska. As the scene at the German watering-place came back to him, he was seized with a desire to efface the affront he had offered her. “How can I rest until I have seen her and asked her pardon?” he said to himself. “If I were a real man and not a mere phrase-monger I should start out on the journey at once. But, of course, I won’t do anything of the kind, and writing of such things is impossible. I am a phrase-maker. That’s all I am.”

But he soliloquized himself into the reflection that Pani Oginska was likely to know some of her imprisoned son’s friends, if, indeed, she was not in the “underground” world herself, and the very next morning found him in a railway car, bound for the south.

Pani Oginska’s estate was near the boundary line between the province to which it belonged and the one whose capital was Miroslav, a considerable distance from a railway station. Pavel covered that distance in a post-sleigh drawn by a troika. His way lay in the steppe region. It was a very cold forenoon in mid-winter. The horses’ manes were covered with frost; the postilion was bundled up so heavily that he looked like an old woman. The sun shone out of a blue, unconcerned sky upon a waste of eery whiteness. There were ridges of drifts and there were black patches of bare ground, but the general perspective unfolded an unbroken plane of snow, a level expanse stretching on either side of the smooth road, seemingly endless and bottomless, destitute of any trace of life save for an occasional inn by the roadside or the snow-bound hovel and outhouses of a shepherd in the distance—a domain of silence and numb monotony. That this desert of frozen sterility would four or five months later, be transformed into a world of grass and birds seemed as inconceivable as the sudden disappearance of the ocean.

The last few versts were an eternity. Pavel’s heart leaped with a foretaste of the exciting interview.

“Lively, my man,” he pressed the postilion. “Can’t your horses get a move on them?”

The postilion nodded his muffled head and set up a fierce yelp, for all the world like a wolf giving chase; whereupon the animals, apparently scared to death, broke into a desperate gallop, the scud flying, the sleigh dashing along like an electric car in open country, its bell ringing frostily.

“That’s better,” Pavel shouted with a thrill of physical pleasure and speaking with difficulty for the breakneck speed that seemed to fling the breath out of his lungs. “That’s better, my man. You shall get a good tip. But where have you learned the trick?”

The postilion gave a muffled grunt of appreciation and went on howling with all his might.

They passed through a small village. The chimneys of some of the white clay hovels on either side of the road poured out clouds of sweetish, nauseating smoke. Wood being scarce in these parts, the peasantry made fuel of manure.

At last the sleigh swung into the great front yard of Pani Oginska’s manor house. It was greeted by the curious eyes of half a dozen servants. Pavel entered a warm vestibule with a painted floor, where he found waiting to meet him Pani Oginska and an aged man with hair as white as the snow without. He bowed politely and asked, in French, with nervous timidity:

“Do you remember me, Madame Oginska?”

She screwed up her eyes as she scanned his flushed, frozen face.

“Prince Boulatoff!” she said in a perplexed whisper.

“I have come all the way from St. Petersburg to beg your pardon, Madame Oginska,” he fired out. “I acted like a brute on that occasion. I was an idiotic boy. Forgive me.”

“Have you actually come all the way from St. Petersburg, to tell me that?” she asked with a hearty peal of laughter. She introduced him to the white-haired man, her father, who first made a bow full of old-fashioned dignity and then gave Pavel’s cold hand a doddering grasp.

“So you have really come for that express purpose?” Pani Oginska resumed, while a servant was relieving the newcomer of his fur-lined coat, fur cap, heavy gloves, muffler and storm shoes. “A case of compunction, I suppose?”

Her father followed them as far as the open door of a vast, plainly furnished parlour, and after looming on the threshold for a minute or two, in an attitude of pained dignity, he bowed himself away. Pani Oginska gently pressed the young man into a huge, rusty easy-chair, she herself remaining in a standing posture, her mind apparently divided between hospitality and an important errand upon which she seemed to have been bent when he arrived. She wore a furred jacket, her head in a grey shawl and her feet in heavy top-boots—a costume jarringly out of accord with her pale, delicate, nunnish face. She made quite a new impression on the young prince.

“I was blind then,” he began, when they were left alone. “My eyes were closed.”

“Oh, you needn’t go into detail,” she rejoined with an amused look. “I think I can guess how it has come about. You have caught the contagion, haven’t you?”

“Why call it ‘contagion?’ It’s the truth; it’s justice. If I hadn’t been such a silly boy when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, I should certainly not have acted the way I did.”

“A boy? And what are you now, pray? An old man with the weight of experience on your shoulders?” she asked with motherly gaiety. “Well, we’ll talk it over later on, or, indeed, we’ll find better things to talk about; and meanwhile I want you to excuse me, prince, and make yourself comfortable without me. You are hungry, of course?”

“Not at all. I had luncheon at the station.”

“Well, you shall have some refreshments at any rate, and by and by I shall be back. I am a rather busy woman, you see. I have to be my own manager, and there are a thousand and one things to look after, and the snow is rather deep”—pointing at her heavy boots. “Well, here are some books and magazines. Au revoir.” She made for the door, but faced about again. “By the way, prince, does your mother know of this crazy trip of yours?”

“I confess she does not,” he answered, feeling helplessly like a boy. “Why?”

“Why! Because she is the best woman in the world, and because it’s too bad you did anything so foolish without letting her know at least. By the way, this is anything but a desirable place for a young man to visit. Since my son got into trouble the police have tried to keep an eye on us; but then the police are so stupid. Still, I am sorry you didn’t first consult your mother. If you boys would only let yourselves be guided by your mothers you would be spared many a trouble.”

“Is that the prime object of life—to guard against harm to oneself?” Pavel protested.

She fixed him with a look of amusement, and then remarked sadly: “You have caught the contagion, poor thing. I’ll write your mother about it. Let her put a stop to it if it isn’t too late.”