“The prince does as he should, for my friends can never sufficiently repay the hospitality that that little thing gave me in her dirty hut when I was in hiding, while your famous department was deciding what to do about me, my dear Gounsovski.”
“Eh,” replied Gounsovski, “I let you know that all you had to do was to take a fine apartment in the city.”
Annouchka spat on the ground like a teamster, and Gounsovski from yellow turned green.
“But why did you hide yourself that way, Annouchka?” asked Onoto as she caressed the beautiful tresses of the singer.
“You know I had been condemned to death, and then pardoned. I had been able to leave Moscow, and I hadn’t any desire to be re-taken here and sent to taste the joys of Siberia.”
“But why were you condemned to death?”
“Why, she doesn’t know anything!” exclaimed the others.
“Good Lord, I’m just back from London and Paris — how should I know anything! But to have been condemned to death! That must have been amusing.”
“Very amusing,” said Annouchka icily. “And if you have a brother whom you love, Onoto, think how much more amusing it must be to have him shot before you.”
“Oh, my love, forgive me!”
“So you may know and not give any pain to your Annouchka in the future, I will tell you, madame, what happened to our dear friend,” said Prince Galitch.
“We would do better to drive away such terrible memories,” ventured Gounsovski, lifting his eyelashes behind his glasses, but he bent his head as Annouchka sent him a blazing glance.
“Speak, Galitch.”
The Prince did as she said.
“Annouchka had a brother, Vlassof, an engineer on the Kasan line, whom the Strike Committee had ordered to take out a train as the only means of escape for the leaders of the revolutionary troops when Trebassof’s soldiers, aided by the Semenowsky regiment, had become masters of the city. The last resistance took place at the station. It was necessary to get started. All the ways were guarded by the military. There were soldiers everywhere! Vlassof said to his comrades, ‘I will save you;’ and his comrades saw him mount the engine with a woman. That woman was — well, there she sits. Vlassof’s fireman had been killed the evening before, on a barricade; it was Annouchka who took his place. They busied themselves and the train started like a shot. On that curved line, discovered at once, easy to attack, under a shower of bullets, Vlassof developed a speed of ninety versts an hour. He ran the indicator up to the explosion point. The lady over there continued to pile coal into the furnace. The danger came to be less from the military and more from an explosion at any moment. In the midst of the balls Vlassof kept his usual coolness. He sped not only with the firebox open but with the forced draught. It was a miracle that the engine was not smashed against the curve of the embankment. But they got past. Not a man was hurt. Only a woman was wounded. She got a ball in the chest.”
“There!” cried Annouchka.
With a magnificent gesture she flung open her white and heaving chest, and put her finger on a scar that Gounsovski, whose fat began to melt in heavy drops of sweat about his temples, dared not look at.
“Fifteen days later,” continued the prince, “Vlassof entered an inn at Lubetszy. He didn’t know it was full of soldiers. His face never altered. They searched him. They found a revolver and papers on him. They knew whom they had to do with. He was a good prize. Vlassof was taken to Moscow and condemned to be shot. His sister, wounded as she was, learned of his arrest and joined him. ‘I do not wish,’ she said to him, ‘to leave you to die alone.’ She also was condemned. Before the execution the soldiers offered to bandage their eyes, but both refused, saying they preferred to meet death face to face. The orders were to shoot all the other condemned revolutionaries first, then Vlassof, then his sister. It was in vain that Vlassof asked to die last. Their comrades in execution sank to their knees, bleeding from their death wounds. Vlassof embraced his sister and walked to the place of death. There he addressed the soldiers: ‘Now you have to carry out your duty according to the oath you have taken. Fulfill it honestly as I have fulfilled mine. Captain, give the order.’ The volley sounded. Vlassof remained erect, his arms crossed on his breast, safe and sound. Not a ball had touched him. The soldiers did not wish to fire at him. He had to summon them again to fulfill their duty, and obey their chief. Then they fired again, and he fell. He looked at his sister with his eyes full of horrible suffering. Seeing that he lived, and wishing to appear charitable, the captain, upon Annouchka’s prayers, approached and cut short his sufferings by firing a revolver into his ear. Now it was Annouchka’s turn. She knelt by the body of her brother, kissed his bloody lips, rose and said, ‘I am ready.’ As the guns were raised, an officer came running, bearing the pardon of the Tsar. She did not wish it, and she whom they had not bound when she was to die had to be restrained when she learned she was to live.”
Prince Galitch, amid the anguished silence of all there, started to add some words of comment to his sinister recital, but Annouchka interrupted:
“The story is ended,” said she. “Not a word, Prince. If I asked you to tell it in all its horror, if I wished you to bring back to us the atrocious moment of my brother’s death, it is so that monsieur” (her fingers pointed to Gounsovski) “shall know well, once for all, that if I have submitted for some hours now to this promiscuous company that has been imposed upon me, now that I have paid the debt by accepting this abominable supper, I have nothing more to do with this purveyor of bagnios and of hangman’s ropes who is here.”
“She is mad,” he muttered. “She is mad. What has come over her? What has happened? Only to-day she was so, so amiable.”
And he stuttered, desolately, with an embarrassed laugh:
“Ah, the women, the women! Now what have I done to her?”
“What have you done to me, wretch? Where are Belachof, Bartowsky and Strassof? And Pierre Slutch? All the comrades who swore with me to revenge my brother? Where are they? On what gallows did you have them hung? What mine have you buried them in? And still you follow your slavish task. And my friends, my other friends, the poor comrades of my artist life, the inoffensive young men who have not committed any other crime than to come to see me too often when I was lively, and who believed they could talk freely in my dressing-room — where are they? Why have they left me, one by one? Why have they disappeared? It is you, wretch, who watched them, who spied on them, making me, I haven’t any doubt, your horrible accomplice, mixing me up in your beastly work, you dog! You knew what they call me. You have known it for a long time, and you may well laugh over it. But I, I never knew until this evening; I never learned until this evening all I owe to you. ‘Stool pigeon! Stool pigeon!’ I! Horror! Ah, you dog, you dog! Your mother, when you were brought into the world, your mother...” Here she hurled at him the most offensive insult that a Russian can offer a man of that race.
She trembled and sobbed with rage, spat in fury, and stood up ready to go, wrapped in her mantle like a great red flag. She was the statue of hate and vengeance. She was horrible and terrible. She was beautiful. At the final supreme insult, Gounsovski started and rose to his feet as though he had received an actual blow in the face. He did not look at Annouchka, but fixed his eyes on Prince Galitch. His finger pointed him out:
“There is the man,” he hissed, “who has told you all these fine things.”
“Yes, it is I,” said the Prince, tranquilly.
“Caracho!” barked Gounsovski, instantaneously regaining his coolness.
“Ah, yes, but you’ll not touch him,” clamored the spirited girl of the Black Land; “you are not strong enough for that.”
“I know that monsieur has many friends at court,” agreed the chief of the Secret Service with an ominous calm. “I don’t wish ill to monsieur. You speak, madame, of the way some of your friends have had to be sacrificed. I hope that some day you will be better informed, and that you will understand I saved all of them I cou
ld.”
“Let us go,” muttered Annouchka. “I shall spit in his face.”
“Yes, all I could,” replied the other, with his habitual gesture of hanging on to his glasses. “And I shall continue to do so. I promise you not to say anything more disagreeable to the prince than as regards his little friend the Bohemian Katharina, whom he has treated so generously just now, doubtless because Boris Mourazoff pays her too little for the errands she runs each morning to the villa of Krestowsky Ostrow.”
At these words the Prince and Annouchka both changed countenance. Their anger rose. Annouchka turned her head as though to arrange the folds of her cloak. Galitch contented himself with shrugging his shoulders impatiently and murmuring:
“Still some other abomination that you are concocting, monsieur, and that we don’t know how to reply to.”
After which he bowed to the supper-party, took Annouchka’s arm and had her move before him. Gounsovski bowed, almost bent in two. When he rose he saw before him the three astounded and horrified figures of Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff, Ivan Petrovitch and Athanase Georgevitch.
“Messieurs,” he said to them, in a colorless voice which seemed not to belong to him, “the time has come for us to part. I need not say that we have supped as friends and that, if you wish it to be so, we can forget everything that has been said here.”
The three others, frightened, at once protested their discretion. He added, roughly this time, “Service of the Tsar,” and the three stammered, “God save the Tsar!” After which he saw them to the door. When the door had closed after them, he said, “My little Annouchka, you mustn’t reckon without me.” He hurried toward the sofa, where Rouletabille was lying forgotten, and gave him a tap on the shoulder.
“Come, get up. Don’t act as though you were asleep. Not an instant to lose. They are going to carry through the Trebassof affair this evening.”
Rouletabille was already on his legs.
“Oh, monsieur,” said he, “I didn’t want you to tell me that. Thanks all the same, and good evening.”
He went out.
Gounsovski rang. A servant appeared.
“Tell them they may now open all the rooms on this corridor; I’ll not hold them any longer.” Thus had Gounsovski kept himself protected.
Left alone, the head of the Secret Service wiped his brow and drank a great glass of iced water which he emptied at a draught. Then he said:
“Koupriane will have his work cut out for him this evening; I wish him good luck. As to them, whatever happens, I wash my hands of them.”
And he rubbed his hands.
X. A DRAMA IN THE NIGHT
AT THE DOOR of the Krestowsky Rouletabille, who was in a hurry for a conveyance, jumped into an open carriage where la belle Onoto was already seated. The dancer caught him on her knees.
“To Eliaguine, fast as you can,” cried the reporter for all explanation.
“Scan! Scan! (Quickly, quickly)” repeated Onoto.
She was accompanied by a vague sort of person to whom neither of them paid the least attention.
“What a supper! You waked up at last, did you?” quizzed the actress. But Rouletabille, standing up behind the enormous coachman, urged the horses and directed the route of the carriage. They bolted along through the night at a dizzy pace. At the corner of a bridge he ordered the horses stopped, thanked his companions and disappeared.
“What a country! What a country! Caramba!” said the Spanish artist.
The carriage waited a few minutes, then turned back toward the city.
Rouletabille got down the embankment and slowly, taking infinite precautions not to reveal his presence by making the least noise, made his way to where the river is widest. Seen through the blackness of the night the blacker mass of the Trebassof villa loomed like an enormous blot, he stopped. Then he glided like a snake through the reeds, the grass, the ferns. He was at the back of the villa, near the river, not far from the little path where he had discovered the passage of the assassin, thanks to the broken cobwebs. At that moment the moon rose and the birch-trees, which just before had been like great black staffs, now became white tapers which seemed to brighten that sinister solitude.
The reporter wished to profit at once by the sudden luminance to learn if his movements had been noticed and if the approaches to the villa on that side were guarded. He picked up a small pebble and threw it some distance from him along the path. At the unexpected noise three or four shadowy heads were outlined suddenly in the white light of the moon, but disappeared at once, lost again in the dark tufts of grass.
He had gained his information.
The reporter’s acute ear caught a gliding in his direction, a slight swish of twigs; then all at once a shadow grew by his side and he felt the cold of a revolver barrel on his temple. He said “Koupriane,” and at once a hand seized his and pressed it.
The night had become black again. He murmured: “How is it you are here in person?”
The Prefect of Police whispered in his ear:
“I have been informed that something will happen to-night. Natacha went to Krestowsky and exchanged some words with Annouchka there. Prince Galitch is involved, and it is an affair of State.”
“Natacha has returned?” inquired Rouletabille.
“Yes, a long time ago. She ought to be in bed. In any case she is pretending to be abed. The light from her chamber, in the window over the garden, has been put out.”
“Have you warned Matrena Petrovna?”
“Yes, I have let her know that she must keep on the sharp look-out to-night.”
“That’s a mistake. I shouldn’t have told her anything. She will take such extra precautions that the others will be instantly warned.”
“I have told her she should not go to the ground-floor at all this night, and that she must not leave the general’s chamber.”
“That is perfect, if she will obey you.”
“You see I have profited by all your information. I have followed your instructions. The road from the Krestowsky is under surveillance.”
“Perhaps too much. How are you planning?”
“We will let them enter. I don’t know whom I have to deal with. I want to strike a sure blow. I shall take him in the act. No more doubt after this, you trust me.”
“Adieu.”
“Where are you going?”
“To bed. I have paid my debt to my host. I have the right to some repose now. Good luck!”
But Koupriane had seized his hand.
“Listen.”
With a little attention they detected a light stroke on the water. If a boat was moving at this time for this bank of the Neva and wished to remain hidden, the right moment had certainly been chosen. A great black cloud covered the moon; the wind was light. The boat would have time to get from one bank to the other without being discovered. Rouletabille waited no longer. On all-fours he ran like a beast, rapidly and silently, and rose behind the wall of the villa, where he made a turn, reached the gate, aroused the dvornicks and demanded Ermolai, who opened the gate for him.
“The Barinia?” he said.
Ermolai pointed his finger to the bedroom floor.
“Caracho!”
Rouletabille was already across the garden and had hoisted himself by his fingers to the window of Natacha’s chamber, where he listened. He plainly heard Natacha walking about in the dark chamber. He fell back lightly onto his feet, mounted the veranda steps and opened the door, then closed it so lightly that Ermolai, who watched him from outside not two feet away, did not hear the slightest grinding of the hinges. Inside the villa Rouletabille advanced on tiptoe. He found the door of the drawing-room open. The door of the sitting-room had not been closed, or else had been reopened. He turned in his tracks, felt in the dark for a chair and sat down, with his hand on his revolver in his pocket, waiting for the events that would not delay long now. Above he heard distinctly from time to time the movements of Matrena Petrovna. And this would evidently give a sense of security t
o those who needed to have the ground-floor free this night. Rouletabille imagined that the doors of the rooms on the ground-floor had been left open so that it would be easier for those who would be below to hear what was happening upstairs. And perhaps he was not wrong.
Suddenly there was a vertical bar of pale light from the sitting-room that overlooked the Neva. He deduced two things: first, that the window was already slightly open, then that the moon was out from the clouds again. The bar of light died almost instantly, but Rouletabille’s eyes, now used to the obscurity, still distinguished the open line of the window. There the shade was less deep. Suddenly he felt the blood pound at his temples, for the line of the open window grew larger, increased, and the shadow of a man gradually rose on the balcony. Rouletabille drew his revolver.
The man stood up immediately behind one of the shutters and struck a light blow on the glass. Placed as he was now he could be seen no more. His shadow mixed with the shadow of the shutter. At the noise on the glass Natacha’s door had opened cautiously, and she entered the sitting-room. On tiptoe she went quickly to the window and opened it. The man entered. The little light that by now was commencing to dawn was enough to show Rouletabille that Natacha still wore the toilette in which he had seen her that same evening at Krestowsky. As for the man, he tried in vain to identify him; he was only a dark mass wrapped in a mantle. He leaned over and kissed Natacha’s hand. She said only one word: “Scan!” (Quickly).
But she had no more than said it before, under a vigorous attack, the shutters and the two halves of the window were thrown wide, and silent shadows jumped rapidly onto the balcony and sprang into the villa. Natacha uttered a shrill cry in which Rouletabille believed still he heard more of despair than terror, and the shadows threw themselves on the man; but he, at the first alarm, had thrown himself upon the carpet and had slipped from them between their legs. He regained the balcony and jumped from it as the others turned toward him. At least, it was so that Rouletabille believed he saw the mysterious struggle go in the half-light, amid most impressive silence, after that frightened cry of Natacha’s. The whole affair had lasted only a few seconds, and the man was still hanging over the balcony, when from the bottom of the hall a new person sprang. It was Matrena Petrovna.
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 71
