"I am still in the dark as to the ident.i.ty of that girl," said Pavel.

"I shouldn't keep it from you now," the other returned, exposing an exultant lozenge of white teeth. "Next time we meet in Miroslav I shall look her up and introduce you to her. I have not seen her for a long time. She is quite an interesting specimen."

"I should like to meet her very much," Pavel said earnestly. "I have been wanting to know something about her all along. You see, if there were a circle in that blessed out-of-the-way town of ours one might be able to find out things, but if there is I have not seen anybody who knows of its existence. I myself have not been there for two years."

"I was there last summer. There is a small circle there. At least there are several people who get things through me, but that girl I have not seen for a long time."

"Is it possible? Can it be that you have not tried to get her in?

Really, a Miroslav circle without her seems like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark."

"Yes, she is a la.s.s with some grit to her, and with brains too."

"If she is, we ought to get her in. We ought to get her in."

"She was only sixteen when that affair happened."

"Was she? Well, you wouldn't believe it, but my curiosity about that girl has been smouldering ever since. If it were not for her and for poor Pievakin I might not be in the movement now."

"I see. It needed a little girl to make a convert of a great man like you. Well, well. That's interesting," Elkin remarked, with a lozenge-shaped sneer; but he hastened to atone for it by adding, ardently: "You're right. She should be in the circle. I'll make it my business to see her next time I am there. I'll go there on purpose, in fact."

He was always trying to be clever, for the most part with venom in his attempts. Friend or foe, whatever humour was his was habitually coloured by an impulse to sting. "For the sake of a pretty word he would not spare his own father," as a Russian proverb phrases it, and his pretty words or puns were usually tinctured with malice.

He painted the Miroslav girl in the most attractive colours. It gave him a peculiar satisfaction to whet Pavel's curiosity and to be able to say mutely: "Indeed, she is even more interesting than you suppose, yet while you are so crazy to know her, I, who do know her, have not even thought of getting her into my Circle."

When Pavel was making his speech Elkin, whose natural inclination was to disapprove, listened with an air of patronising concurrence. Pavel's oratory was of the unsophisticated, "hammer-and-tongs," fiery type, yet its general effect, especially when he a.s.sailed existing conditions, was one of complaint. In spite of the full-throated buzz of his voice and the ferocious rush of his words, he conveyed the impression of a schoolboy laying his grievance before his mother.

Before he took leave from his former cla.s.smate the two had another talk of the "heroine of the Pievakin demonstration." It was Elkin who brought up the subject, which took them back to the time when, from a Nihilist point of view, he was Pavel's superior. He found him a ready listener.

The student girls of the secret movement, their devotion to the cause, their pluck, the inhuman sufferings which the government inflicted on those of them who fell into its hands,--all this was the aureole of Pavel's ecstasy. His heart had remained spotless, the wild oats he had sown during the first weeks of his stay in the capital notwithstanding.

The word Woman would fill him with tender whisperings of a felicity hallowed by joint sacrifices, of love crowned with martyrdom, and it was part of the soliloquies which the s.e.x would breathe into his soul to tell himself that he owned his conversion to a girl. But these were sentimentalities of which the Spartan traditions of the underground movement had taught him to be ashamed. Moreover, there was really no time for such things.

During the following summer and fall mines were laid in several places under railway tracks over which the Emperor was expected to pa.s.s. The revolutionists missed their aim, but the Czar's narrow escape, coupled with the gigantic scope of the manifold plot, with the skill and the boldness it implied, and with the fact that the digging of these subterranean pa.s.sages had gone on for months without attracting notice, made a profound impression. Such a display of energy and dexterity on the part of natives in a country where one was accustomed to trace every bit of enterprise to some foreign agency, could not but produce a fascinating effect. The gendarmes were apparently no match for the Nihilists.

CHAPTER VII.

"TERRORISM WITHOUT VIOLENCE."

One afternoon, in December of the same year, Pavel sat in a student restaurant, in the capital, eating fried steak and watching the door for a man with whom he had an appointment. He ate without appet.i.te and looked fatigued and overworked. He had been out from an early hour, bustling about on perilous business and dodging spies. It was extremely exhausting and enervating, this prowling about under the perpetual strain of danger. He was liable to be arrested at any moment. It was like living continually under fire.

The restaurant was full of cigarette smoke and noise. Somebody in the rear of Pavel, who evidently had nothing to say, was addressing somebody else in high-flown Russian and with great gusto. His fine resonant voice, of which he was apparently conscious, jarred on Pavel's nerves, interfering with what little relish he had for his meal. He was eyeing the design on the frost-covered door-gla.s.s and lashing himself into a fury over the invisible man's phrase-mongery, when he was accosted by a fair-complexioned young woman:

"Pardon me, but if I am not mistaken you are Prince Boulatoff?"

"That's my name. And with whom have I the pleasure----?"

"Oh, that would really be uninteresting to know. I'll tell you, though, that I belong to Miroslav."

He reluctantly invited her to a gla.s.s of tea, which she accepted, saying: "It may look as if I were forcing myself upon your acquaintance, prince, but I really could not help it. Whatever comes from Miroslav is irresistible to me." And talking rapidly in effervescent, choking sentences, she told him that her name was Maria Andreevna Safonova (Safonoff), that she was a student at the Bestusheff Women's College and that her brother was a major of gendarmes.

Pavel had heard of there being a daughter or a sister of a Miroslav gendarme officer at the Bestusheff College; also that she made a favourable impression on her cla.s.smates; but he had been too busy to give the information more than pa.s.sing notice.

"Is your brother in Miroslav?" he asked.

"Yes, and I can a.s.sure you he is a gentleman, even if he is in the gendarme service. Some day, I hope, he'll give it up. He is really too good to be in the business."

Pavel ascribed her ebullition to the nature of the subject, but he soon found that she was in the same state of excitement when a railroad ticket was the topic. She looked twenty-three but she had the cheeks and eyes of a chubby infant, while her arms and figure had the lank, immature effect of a girl of thirteen.

While they sat talking, a dark man in the military uniform of the Medico-Surgical Academy entered the cafe. It was Parmet, the man Pavel was waiting for. Finding him engaged, the newcomer pa.s.sed his table without greeting him, took a seat in a remote corner and buried himself in a book.

Mlle. Safonoff did all the talking. She had not sat at Boulatoff's table half an hour nor said much about Miroslav before she had poured out some of her most intimate thoughts to him.

"If you think it a pleasure to be the sister of a gendarme officer you are mistaken," she said. "It is not agreeable to be treated by everybody as though you had been put at the college to spy upon the girls, is it?

My brother is a better man than the brothers and fathers and grandfathers of all the other student-girls put together, I a.s.sure you, prince. But then, of course, you may think I'm trying to spy on you, too."

"No, I don't," said Boulatoff with a laugh, p.r.i.c.king up his ears.

"Don't you, really?" And her eyes bubbled.

"Of course, I don't."

"Oh, if you knew how good he is, my brother. Do you remember the time when poor Pievakin left Miroslav? I know you do. You were in the eighth cla.s.s then. Well, I may as well tell you, prince"--she lowered her voice--"had it not been for my brother there would have been no end of arrests at the railroad station. He simply told his men not to make a fuss. You see, I can confide in you without hesitation, for who would suspect a Boulatoff of--pardon the word--spying? But I, why, I am the sister of a gendarme officer, so it is quite natural to suppose, and so forth and so on, don't you know."

"Do you know the girl who made that speech?"

"There you are," she said dolefully. "I happened to be at the other end of the room just then. When I tried to find out who she was everybody was mum. Fancy, my best girl-friend said to me: 'If I were you, Masha, I shouldn't want to know her name if I could. Suppose you utter it in sleep and your brother overhears you.' The idiots! They didn't know it was my brother who saved that girl from being arrested. And, by the way, if she had been arrested by some of his men, it would not have been hard for her to escape. I know I am saying more than I should, but I really can't help it. You have no idea how I feel about these things. And now, at the sight of you, prince--a man from Miroslav--I seem to be going to pieces altogether. Well, I don't mean, though, that my brother would have let her escape. But then I have an aunt, who is related to the warden of the Miroslav prison by marriage, so she can arrange things there. Oh, she's the greatest revolutionist you ever saw. Of course, I don't know whether you sympathise with these things, prince, but I'll tell you frankly, _I_ do. It was that aunt of mine who talked it into me. She is simply crazy to do something. She is sorry there are no political prisoners in Miroslav. If there were she would get them out.

She's just itching for a chance to do something of that sort. And yet she never met a revolutionist in her life, nor saw a sc.r.a.p of underground paper."

To question the ingenuousness of this gush seemed to be the rankest absurdity. The Russian spies of the period were poor actors. Pavel was seized by a desire to show her that he, at least, did not suspect her of spying, and quite forgetting to restrain the "idiotic breadth" of his Russian nature for which he was often rebuked by a certain member of the revolutionary Executive Committee who was forever berating his comrades for their insufficient caution, he slipped a crisp copy of the _Will of the People_ into her hand.

"Put it into your m.u.f.f," he said.

The colour surged into her chubby face. Her whole figure seemed tense with sudden excitement, as though the fine glossy paper in her hand were charged with electricity.

"How shall I thank you?" she gasped.

Pavel saw a moist glitter in her eyes, and as he got up, his slender erect little frame, too, seemed charged with electricity. When she had gone he asked himself whether it had not all been acting, after all. He cursed himself for his imprudence, but he said: "Oh, well, what must be will be," and as usual the phrase acted like an effectual incantation on his frame of mind.

Parmet had been dubbed Bismarck, because he bore considerable resemblance to Gambetta. Another nickname, one which he had invented himself, on a similar theory of contrasts, was Makar. Makar was as typically Slavic as his face was Semitic. His military uniform, which he had to wear because his Academy was under the auspices of the War Department, ill became him. Instead of concealing the rabbinical expression of his face, it emphasised it. When they came out of the restaurant, a man, shouldering a stick, was running along the snow-covered pavement, lighting the street-lamps, as though in dread of being forestalled by somebody.

"Guess who that girl is," Pavel said.

"Have I heard of her?"