A MESSAGE THROUGH THE WALL.
MONTHS had passed. Spring was three or four weeks old, but cell No. — on the first floor of the Trubetzkoy Bastion, Fortress of Peter and Paul, had not yet tasted its caressing breath. It was a rather spacious, high-ceiled vault, but being quite close to the stone fence outside, it was practically without the range of sunshine and breeze. Its window, which was high overhead, at the top of a sloping stretch of sill, sent down twilight at noonday and left it in the grip of night two or three hours after. The chill, damp air was laden with a stifling odour of must. The lower part of the walls was covered with a thick layer of mould which looked like a broad band of heavy tapestry of a dark-greenish hue.
The solitary inmate of this pit was walking back and forth diagonally, from corner to corner. He wore a loose, shapeless cloak of coarse but flimsy material, which he was continually wrapping about his slim, emaciated figure. He was shivering. As he walked to and fro, his head was for the most part thrown back, his eyes raised to the window, whose sloping sill he could have scarcely touched with the tips of his fingers. Now and then he paused and turned toward one of the walls, as though listening for some sounds, and then, with an air of nerveless disappointment, he would resume his walk.
It was Pavel.
The spy who accompanied Elkin from Miroslav to Moscow had shadowed him in the ancient city until he saw him with Prince Boulatoff and then with Makar and a university student, in whose room the four revolutionists were arrested, shortly after, in the course of a heated debate between Makar and Elkin on the riots and the question of emigration to America.
During the first few weeks of Pavel’s stay in the fortress the guards, who had been converted to revolutionary sympathies by a celebrated political prisoner named Nechayeff, had carried communications not only from prisoner to prisoner, but also from them to the revolutionists at large; so that the Will of the People was at one time partly edited from this fortress, and a bold plot was even planned by Nechayeff to have the Czar locked up in a cell while he visited its cathedral. But these relations between the guards and the revolutionists, which lasted about a year, had finally been disclosed, and since then Pavel and the inmates of the other cells had been treated with brutal stringency.
Pavel’s trial was not likely to take place for another year or two, but his fate was clear to him: death, probably commuted to life-imprisonment, which actually amounted to slow death in a spacious grave like this vault, or in the mines of Siberia, was the usual doom of men charged with “crimes” like his. His future yawned before him in the form of a black, boundless cavern charged with dull, gnawing pain, like the pain that was choking him at this moment. The worst part of his torture was his solitude. The most inhuman physical suffering seemed easier to bear than this speechless, endless, excruciatingly monotonous solitude of his. “Oath-men” as the sworn-in attendants of the prison were called (under-sized, comical looking fellows, most of them) came into his cell three or four times a day—with food, or to put things to rights hastily—but neither they nor the gendarmes who invariably accompanied them ever answered his questions. One morning, in an excess of self-commiseration and resentment at their stolid taciturnity, he had spat in the face of a gendarme. He had done so, at the peril of being flogged, in the hope of hearing him curse, at least; but the gendarme merely wiped his bewhiskered face and went on watching the “oath-man” silently.
Whenever Pavel was taken out for his 15-minute walk in a secluded little yard, which was once in two days, the sentinels he met would turn their backs on him, lest he should see more faces than was absolutely necessary. The warden and the prison doctor were the only human beings whose voices he could hear, and these were brutally laconic and brutally rude or ironical with him. To be taken to the prison office for an examination by the procureur was the one diversion which the near future held out to him; but then his near future might be a matter of weeks and might be a matter of months.
Back and forth he walked, at a spiritless, even pace, as monotonous as his days of gloom and misery, as that dull pain which was ceaselessly choking his throat and gnawing at his heart. At one moment he paused and felt his gums with his fingers. Were they swollen? Was he developing scurvy? Or was it mere imagination? He also passed his hand over his cheeks, and it seemed to him that they were sunken a little more than they had been the day before. But the great subject of his thoughts to-day was his mother, and tantalising, heart-crushing thoughts they were. Where was she? How was she? Was she alive at all? He pictured her committing suicide because of his doom, and the cruel vision persisted. And if she was not dead, her life was little better than death. He tried to think of something else, but no, the appealing, reproachful image of his mother, of his poor dear mother who had scarcely had a day of happiness since she married, would not leave his mind. As a matter of fact, his efforts to think of something else were scarcely sincere. He would not shake that image out of his brain if he could. It was tearing his heart to pieces, yet he would rather stand all these tortures than shut his mother out of his thoughts. To talk to somebody was the only thing that could have saved him from the terrible pang that was harrowing him at this moment; but the chimes of the cathedral, which played the quarter-hours as well as the hours, and the crash of iron bolts at the opening of cells at meal-time were the only sounds that he could expect to hear to-day. His heart was writhing within him. Something was clutching at his brain. He seemed to feel himself going mad. He was tempted to cry at the top of his voice; to cry like a wild beast; but, of course, he was not going to give such satisfaction to the enemy.
He gazed at the sloping window-sill. For the thousandth time a desire took hold of him to mount it and take a look through the glass; and for the thousandth time he cast a hopeless glance at his bed, at the table, the chair, the wash-stand: they were all nailed to the floor, a large earthen water-cup and a salt-cellar made of lead being the only movable things in his room.
Four months ago there had been a prisoner in the adjoining cell with whom he carried on long conversations by rapping out his words on the wall, but one day their talk had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence, after which that man had been removed. The cell had long remained empty, as could be inferred from the fact that Pavel never heard its door opened at meal-time. Since a week ago it had been tenanted again, but all his attempts at conversation with his new neighbour had so far been futile. His taps on the wall had been left unanswered.
Suddenly, as he was now pacing his floor, his heart melting with homesickness and anguish at the thought of his mother, he heard a rapid succession of fine, dry sounds on the right wall. He started, and, breathless and flushed with excitement, he listened. “Who are you?” the mould-grown wall demanded.
Pavel cast a look at the peephole in the heavy door, and seeing no eye in it, he took a turn or two up and down the room and stopped hard by the wall, upon which he rapped out his reply:
“Boulatoff. Who are you?”
“The Emperor of all Africa,” came the answer.
“What?” Pavel asked in perplexity. “You have not finished your sentence, what were you saying?”
“Begone!” the wall returned. “How dare you doubt my title? I am the Emperor of all Africa. How dare you speak to me? Away with you!”
Pavel’s heart sank. It was apparently some political prisoner who had gone insane in a damp, cold, isolated cell.
“Dear friend, dear comrade!” he implored. “Can’t you try and remember your name?”
“Begone, or I’ll order your arrest, mean slave that you are!” This was followed by some incoherencies. Pavel went away from the wall with tears in his eyes.
In the afternoon of the third day he was striding to and fro, in excellent spirits. He had been in this mood since he opened his eyes that morning. Nothing but the most encouraging moments in the history of his connection with the movement would come to his mind to-day. He felt as though he and all his revolutionary friends were looking at each other, and conversing mentally, all as cheerful and happy as he was now. Everything pointed toward the speedy triumph of their cause. He beheld barricades in the streets of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa; he saw the red flag waving; he heard the Marseillaise. He recalled Makar’s vision of the time when victorious revolutionists would break into the fortress of Peter and Paul and take its prisoners out to celebrate the advent of liberty with the people. He thought of Clara, and his heart went out to her and to their interrupted honeymoon; he imagined her on his arm marching with others, he did not know whither, and whispering words of love and exultation to her, and once more his heart leaped with joy. He recalled jokes, comical situations. He felt like bursting into a roar of merriment, when there came a shower of taps on the wall.
“Who are you?”
“Boulatoff,” Pavel answered, with sadness in his heart. He expected other absurdities from his insane neighbour. “And you?”
“Bieliayeff. I am not well. But I feel much better to-day. My lucid interval, perhaps. I remember everything.”
Pavel had met him two years before. They talked of themselves, of their mutual friends, of the last news that had reached Bieliayeff through his other wall. It appeared that Bieliayeff’s neighbour on that side of his cell was Elkin.
Pavel received the information with a thrill of pleasure. He was going to ask Bieliayeff to convey a message to his fellow townsman; but at this he had an instinctive feeling that there was an eye at the peephole and he dropped his hand to his side, pretending to be absorbed in thought.
They resumed their conversation a quarter of an hour later.
“Tell Elkin I love him; he is dear to me,” Pavel tapped out. “I feel guilty and miserable. If it were not for me he would be in America now. Besides, I have been unjust to him. This oppresses me more than anything else.”
These communications through the wall are the most precious things life has to offer in living graves like those of the fortress of Peter and Paul. The inmate of such a grave will listen to the messages of his neighbours with the most strenuous attention, with every faculty in his possession, with every fibre of his being; and he will convey every word of a long message as if reading it from a written memorandum.
After a lapse of five or ten minutes Bieliayeff came back with Elkin’s answer.
“He says he loves you,” the tap-tap said, “and that it is he who ought to apologise. It was he who was unjust. As to his American scheme, he is happy to be here. It is sweet to be suffering for liberty, he says.”
Makar was at the other end of the same corridor, and a message from him reached Pavel by way of a dozen walls.
“Hello, old boy!” it said. “At last I have completed the revolutionary programme I have been so long engaged upon. It’s a dandy! It is not the same I spoke to you about in Moscow. It covers every point beautifully. It would save the party from every mistake it has ever made or is liable to make.”
One day Pavel learned that Clara had arrived in the fortress, after a long confinement and no end of examinations in Miroslav. She was in another part of the building and communicating with her was impossible. Pavel scarcely ever thought of anything else. Could it be true that she was in the building and he would not even have a chance to see her? He was fidgeting and writhing like a bird in a cage.
At last, on a morning, the wall brought him a message from her. It had come through walls, floors and ceilings.
“Clanya sends her love,” it ran, “and tells him to keep away from the damp walls as much as possible.”
“Tell Clanya I think of her day and night,” he rapped back.
Then a footstep sounded at his door, and with a heart swelling with emotion he threw himself upon his bed and buried his face in his hands.
THE END.