Читать книгу The White Terror and The Red - Abraham Cahan - Страница 15

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IT was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy young engineer in Kharkoff—a slender little man with eyelids that looked swollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsy appearance—was filled with Nihilists come to hear “an important man from St. Petersburg.” The governor of the province had recently been killed for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of the local university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made on the life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement was asserting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address by the stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was known here as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.

The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand, but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several more listeners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. He and Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslav gymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerably changed, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin’s face as anæmic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkin had been expelled from the University for signing some sort of petition. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionary business. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, and his days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for more than tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to give lessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man of spotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certain kind of magnetism.

When Elkin discovered who the important revolutionist from St. Petersburg was the blood rushed to his face. It was a most disagreeable surprise. But Pavel greeted him with a cordiality so free from consciousness, and his roaring laughter, as he compared the circumstances of their last quarrel and those that surrounded their present meeting, was so hearty that Elkin’s hostility gave way to a feeling of elation at being so well received by the lion of the evening. He was one of the rank and file of the local “Circles,” and the prominence into which Pavel’s attention brought him at this meeting, in the presence of several of his chums, gave him a sense of promotion and triumph. He wished he could whisper into the ear of everybody present that this important revolutionist who was known to the gathering as Nikolai was Prince Boulatoff.

“I am still in the dark as to the identity 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 lass 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 assailed 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 classmate 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 sex 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 pass. 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 passages 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.