CHAPTER XVII.
THE COUNTESS' DISCOVERY.
As Pavel mounted the majestic staircase of his mother's residence hebecame aware that an abstract facial expression was all his memoryretained of Mlle. Yavner's likeness. He coveted another glance at hermuch as a man covets to hear again a new song that seems to be singingitself in his mind without his being able to reproduce it.
He found his mother sitting up for him, on the verge of a nervouscollapse. She took him to a large, secluded room, the best in the vasthouse for _tete-a-tete_ purposes. It was filled with mementoes, thetrophies of her father's diplomatic career, with his proud collection ofrare and costly inkstands, and with odds and ends of ancient furniture,each with a proud history as clear-cut as the pedigree of a high-bornrace-horse.
Anna Nicolayevna had planned to lead up to the main questiondiplomatically, but she was scarcely seated on a huge, venerable couch(which made her look smaller than ever) than she turned pale and blurtedout in a whisper:
"Did you cross the bridge this afternoon?"
"No. Why?" He said this with fatigued curiosity and looking her full inthe face.
She dropped her glance. "I thought I saw you there."
"You were mistaken, then, but what makes you look so uneasy? I did notgo in that direction at all, but suppose I did. Why, what has happened?"
She cowed before the insistence of his interrogations and beat aretreat.
"I am not uneasy at all. I must have been mistaken, then. It is aboutKostia I have been wanting to speak to you. It is quite a seriousmatter. You see he is too delicate for the military schools. So I wasthinking of putting him in the gymnasium, but then many of the boysthere are children of undesirable people. One can't be too careful thesedays." She was now speaking according to her carefully consideredprogram, and growing pale once more, she fixed him with a searchingglance, as she asked: "You must have heard of the man the gendarmescaught, haven't you?"
"Oh, you mean the fellow who would not open his mouth," he said with asmile. "Quite a sensation for a town like this. In St. Petersburg orMoscow they catch them so often it has ceased to be news."
She went on to speak of the evil of Nihilism, Pavel listening withgrowing interest, like a man who had given the matter someconsideration. Poor Anna Nicolayevna! She was no match for him.
Finally he got up. "Well, I don't really know," he said. "It seems to methe trouble lies much deeper than that, _mamman_. Those fellows, theNihilists, don't amount to anything in themselves. If it were not forthat everlasting Russian helplessness of ours they could do no more harmthan a group of flies. Our factories and successful farms are all run byGermans; we simply can't take care of the least thing."
"But what have factories and farms to do with the pranks of demoralisedboys?"
He smiled. "But if we were not a helpless, shiftless nation a handful ofboys couldn't frighten us, could they?"
"Very well. Let us suppose you are a minister. What would you do?"
"What would I do? I shouldn't let things come to such a pass, to beginwith."
He was tempted to cast circumspection to the winds and to thunder outhis real impeachment of existing conditions. This, however, he could notafford; so he felt like a boat that is being rowed across stream with astrong current to tempt her downward. He was sailing in a diagonaldirection. Every now and then he would let himself drift along, onlypresently to take up his oars and strike out for the bank again. Hespoke in his loud rapid way. Every now and again he would break off,fall to pacing the floor silently and listening to the sound of his ownvoice which continued to ring in his ears, as though his words remainedsuspended in the air.
Anna Nicolayevna--a curled-up little heap capped by an enormous pile ofglossy auburn hair, in the corner of a huge couch--followed himintently. Once or twice she nodded approval to a severe attack upon thegovernment, without realising that he was speaking against the Czar. Shewas at a loss to infer whether he was opposed to the new advisers of theEmperor in the same way in which her brother-in-law and theultra-conservative Slavophiles were opposed to them or whether he wassome kind of liberal. He certainly seemed to tend toward the Slavophilesin his apparent hatred of foreigners.
"They'll kill him, those murderous youngsters, they are sure to killhim," he shouted at one point, speaking of the Czar. "And who is toblame? Is such a state of things possible anywhere in Western Europe?"
Anna Nicolayevna's eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as sheshrank deeper into the corner of the couch.
* * * * *
She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Herpity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom andglint of martyrdom on his face--the face of Alexander II. Quite apartfrom this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasyof thought and feeling--of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. Shewas in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be aweightier personage than ever. The haze that enveloped him wasthickening. Nevertheless his strictures upon Russia's incapacity lefther rankling with a desire to refute them. That national self-conceitwhich breeds in every child the conviction that his is the greatestcountry in the world and that its superiority is cheerfully conceded byall other nations, reasserted itself in the countess with resentfulemphasis. To be sure, all the skill, ingenuity and taste of the refinedworld came from abroad, but this did not lessen her contempt forforeigners any more than did the fact that all acrobats andhair-dressers were Germans or Frenchmen. Her childhood had been spent inforeign countries and she knew their languages as well as she did herown; nevertheless her abstraction of a foreigner was a man who spokebroken Russian--a lisping, stammering, cringing imbecile. She revoltedto think of Russia as being inferior to wretches of this sort, and whenthe bridge incident swept back upon her in all the clearness of fact,her blood ran chill again. "He is the man I saw in the waggon afterall," she said to herself, in dismay.
She went to bed, but tossed about in an agony of restlessness. When thedarkness of her room began to thin and the brighter objects loomed intoview, she slipped on a wrapper and seated herself at a window, courtingcomposure in the blossom-scented air that came up from the garden; butall to no purpose. Ever and anon, after a respite of tranquillity shewould be seized with a new rush of consternation. Pasha was the man shehad seen on the bridge, disguised as an artisan; he was a Nihilist.
* * * * *
While Anna Nicolayevna was thus harrowed with doubt, Pavel was pacinghis room, his heart on the point of bursting with a desire to see hismother again and to make a clean breast of it. The notion of her beingoutwitted and made sport of touched him with pity. Come what might, hispoor noble-hearted mother must be kept in the dark no longer. She wouldappreciate his feelings. He would plead with her, with tears in his eyeshe would implore her to open her eyes to the appalling inhumanity of theprevailing adjustment of things. And as he visioned himself making thisplea to her, his own sense of the barbarity of the existing regime sethis blood simmering in him, and quickened his desire to lay it allbefore his mother.
Presently somebody rapped on his door. It was Anna Nicolayevna.
"I must speak to you, Pasha; I can't get any sleep," she said.
They went into a newly-built summer house. The jumble of colour andredolence was invaded with light that asserted its presence like a greatliving spirit. The orchard seemed to be worlds away from itself.
As a precaution, they spoke in French.
"Pasha, you are the man I saw on the bridge," she said. "You are aNihilist."
"Sh-h, don't be agitated, mother dear, I beg of you," he replied withtender emphasis. "I am going to tell you all. Only first composeyourself, mamma darling, and hear me out. Yes, I'm what you call aNihilist, but I am not the man you saw."
"You a Nihilist, Pasha!" she whispered, staring at him, as though agreat physical change had suddenly come over him. "Anyhow, you havenothing to do with the man they have arrested?"
He shook his head and she felt relieved. His avowal of being a Nihilistwas so startling a confession to make, that she believed all he said. Hewas a Nihilist, then--a Nihilist in the abstract; something shocking, nodoubt, but remote, indefinite, vague. The concrete Nihilism contained inthe picture of a man disguised as a laborer and having some thing to dowith the fellow under arrest--that would have been quite another matter.He told her the story of his conversion in simple, heart-felt eloquence;he pictured the reign of police terror, the slow massacre ofschool-children in the political dungeons, the brutal fleecing andmaltreatment of a starving peasantry.
"I found myself in a new world, mother," he said. "It was a world inwhich the children of refined, well-bred families fervently believedthat he who did not work for the good of the common people was not a manof real honour. Indeed, of what use has the nobility been to the world?They are a lot of idlers, _mamman_, a lot of good-for-nothings. Forcenturies we have been living on the fat of the earth, luxuriating inthe toil, misery and ignorance of the peasants. It is to their drudgeryand squalor that we owe our material and mental well-being. We ought tofeel ashamed for living at the expense of these degraded, literallystarving creatures; yet we go on living off their wretchedness and evenpride ourselves upon doing so. Let us repay our debt to them by workingfor their real emancipation. We have grown fat on serfdom, so we mustgive our blood to undo it, to bring about the reign of liberty. This isthe sum and substance of our creed, mother. This is the faith that hastaken hold of me. It is my religion and will be as long as I live."
In his entire experience as a revolutionary speaker he had never felt ashe did at the present moment.
A host of sparrows burst into song and activity, all together, as thoughat the stroke of a conductor's baton; and at this it seemed as if theflood of perfume had taken a spurt and the sunlight had begun to smileand speak. He went on in the same strain, and she listened as she wouldto a magic tale that had no bearing upon the personality of her son. Hisvoice, sharp and irascible as it often sounded, was yet melodious in itsundercurrent tone of filial devotion. The vital point, indeed, was thatat last he was uncovering his soul to her. She was not shocked by whatshe heard. Rather, she was proud of his readiness to sacrifice himselffor an ideal, and what is more, she felt that his world lured her heartalso.
"But the Emperor is a noble soul, Pasha," she said. "He has emancipatedthe serfs. If there ever was a friend of the common people the presentCzar is one."
Her objections found him ready. He had gone over these questionshundreds of times before, and he gave her the benefit of all his formerdiscussions and reading. At times he would borrow a point or two fromZachar's speeches. Touching upon the emancipation of the serfs, hecontended that Alexander II. had been forced to the measure by thedisastrous results of the Crimean War; and that the peasants, havingbeen defrauded of their land, were now worse off than ever.
"Oh, mother," he suddenly exclaimed, "whenever you think of theabolition of serfdom think also of the row of gallows he had erectedabout that very time for noble-minded Polish patriots. Do you rememberMme. Oginska, that unfortunate Polish woman we met at the health-resort?Gallows, gallows, nothing but gallows in his reign."
When she referred to the late war "in behalf of the oppressed Slavonicraces of the Balkans," Pavel asked her why the Czar had not firstthought of his own oppressed Russians, and whether it was not hypocrisyto send one's slaves to die for somebody else's freedom. The Emperor hadsecured a constitution for Bulgaria, had he? Why, then, was he hangingthose who were striving for one in his own land? A war of emancipationindeed! It was the old Romanoff greed for territory, for conquest, forbloodshed.
He literally bore her down by a gush of arguments, facts, images. Nowand again he would pause, sit looking at the grass in grim silence, andthen, burst into another torrent of oratory. It was said of Zachar thata single speech of his was enough to make a convert of the most hopelessconservative. Pavel was far from possessing any such powers of pleadingeloquence, when his audience was made up of strangers, but he certainlyscored a similar victory by the appeal which he was now addressing tohis mother.
He went to order coffee. When he returned, reveille was sounding in thebarracks.
"There you have it!" he said. "Do you know what that sound means? Itmeans that the youngest, the best forces of the country are turned intoweapons of human butchery."
The brass notes continued, somewhat cracked at times, but loud andvibrant with imperious solemnity.
"It means, too, that people are forced to keep themselves in chains atthe point of their own bayonets," he added.
* * * * *
The next few days were spent by the countess in reading "underground"literature. She was devouring paper after paper and pamphlet afterpamphlet with tremulous absorption. The little pile before her includedscientific treatises, poetry and articles of a polemical nature, and sheread it all; but she was chiefly interested in the hair-breadth escapes,pluck and martyrdom of the revolutionists. The effect this reading hadon her was something like the thrilling experience she had gone throughmany years ago when she was engrossed in the Lives of Saints.
"It makes one feel twenty years younger," she said to Pavel, bashfully,as she laid down a revolutionary print and took the glasses off hertired eyes one forenoon.
The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia Page 18
