PAVEL AT BOYKO’S COURT.
CLARA was introduced to Mme. Shubeyko, the warden’s sister-in-law, and to her niece, the gendarme officer’s sister. At first communication with Makar was held by means of notes concealed in cigarettes and carried to and fro by one of the warders, who received half a ruble per errand; but Clara was soon installed in the warden’s house. Once or twice Pavel spoke with Makar directly, by means of handkerchief signals based on the same code as the telegraph language which political prisoners rap out to each other through their cell walls. These signals Pavel sent from the top of a hill across the river from Makar’s cell window. To allay suspicion he would wave his handkerchief toward Masha or Clara, who stood for the purpose on a neighbouring hill, giving the whole proceeding the appearance of a flirtation. As to Makar, his cell was in an isolated part of the prison, facing the outer wall. Still, this mode of communication was exasperatingly slow and attended by some risks after all, and Pavel had recourse to it only in case of extreme necessity, although to the prisoner it was a welcome diversion.
One day, when Clara, Masha and Pavel were together, he said to the gendarme officer’s sister, with mystifying gaiety:
“Well, have you discovered the heroine of the Pievakin demonstration?” He regretted the question before it had left his lips. Clara was annoyed.
“No, why?” Masha asked, looking from him to her.
“I have the honour to introduce—” he said, colouring. For some reason Masha did not seem to be agreeably impressed by the announcement, and Clara did not fail to notice it.
As it was rather inconvenient for the son of Countess Varoff to be seen at the house of a major of gendarmes, Clara was to report to him at the residence of her parents. In the depth of the markets and the Jewish quarter his identity was unlikely to be known. Clara had lived at the warden’s house about a fortnight when Pavel’s first visit at the trunk shop took place. She offered him a rude chair in the small space between the partition of her bed-room and the window by the wall that was lined with the worn folios of her father’s meagre library. The room was pervaded by odours of freshly planed wood, putty and rusty tin which the breath of spring seemed to intensify rather than to abate.
Motl, Hannah’s sole employe, was hammering away at his bindings and courting attention by all sorts of vocal quirks and trills. During the Days of Awe, the solemn festivals of autumn, he sang in a synagogue choir; so he never ceased asserting his musical talents. As Clara’s visitor took no heed of his flourishes he proceeded to imitate domestic animals, church bells, a street organ playing a selection from Il Trovatore, and a portly captain drilling his men, but all to no purpose. As the noise he was making was a good cover for their talk, she did not stop him. At any rate, Motl scarcely understood any Russian.
“I have only seen him at a distance,” Clara said, meaning the prisoner. “But I know that he eats and sleeps well, and looks comfortable.”
“He would look comfortable if you tied him up in a sack. Is he still ‘dumb’?”
She portrayed the warden’s bed-ridden and voiceless wife who suffered from a disease of the spinal and vocal chords, and the disorder at his house and in the prison. She had always wondered at the frequent cases of political gaol-breaking, but if every gaol were conducted as this one was the number would be much larger, she thought. That vodka was quite openly sold and bought in every common gaol in the empire was no news to her, but this was a trifle compared to what she had heard of Rodkevich’s administration. One of his gaolers had told her of imprisoned thieves whom he would give leave of absence in order that he might confiscate part of their booty when they came back.
“Yes, I think he is a man who would go into any kind of scheme that offered money, or—excitement,” she said, gravely; and she added with a smile: “He might even become a man of principle if there were money in it.”
“He won’t give ‘a political’ ‘leave of absence,’ though, will he?” Pavel joked. “Still, upon the whole, it looks rather encouraging.”
“I think it does.”
“Do you?” And his eyes implored her for a more enthusiastic prediction of success.
“Indeed I do,” she answered soberly. “But whether I do or not, we must go to work and get him out.”
“This damsel is certainly not without backbone,” he said to himself.
He had familiarised himself with the details in the case of almost every revolutionist who had escaped or attempted to escape from prison. Some of these had made their way through an underground passage; others had passed the gateman in the disguise of a soldier or policeman; still others had been wrenched from their convoy, while being taken to the gendarme office or a photograph gallery. Prince Kropotkin had simply made a desperate break for liberty while the gates of the prison hospital in which he was confined stood open, a cab outside bearing him off to a place of safety. Another political prisoner regained his freedom by knocking down a sentinel with brass knuckles, while still another, who was awaiting death in Odessa, would have made his escape by means of planks laid from his cell window to the top of the prison fence, had not these planks proved to be too flimsy. In one place an imprisoned army officer slipped away under cover of a flirtation in which a girl prisoner had engaged the warden. A revolutionist named Myshkin had tried to liberate Chernishevsky, the celebrated critic, by appearing at the place of his banishment, in far-away Siberia, in the guise of a gendarme officer with an order for the distinguished exile, and a similar scheme had been tried on the warden of a prison in European Russia. Both these attempts had failed, but then in the case in hand there was the hope of Rodkevich, the warden, acting as a willing victim. Pavel said he would impersonate one of the gendarmes.
“Some of the gaolers may know you,” Mlle. Yavner objected.
“That’s quite unlikely, I was away so long. Besides, the thing would have to be done in the evening anyhow. I must be on hand. It will be necessary.”
“You might be recognised after all,” she insisted, shyly.
Another project was to have a rope thrown over the prison fence, in a secluded corner of the yard. This was to be done at a signal from within, while Makar was out for exercise, in the charge of a bribed guard. The guard was to raise an alarm when it was too late, telling how his prisoner knocked him down and was hoisted out of sight. Or Makar might be smuggled out in a barrel on some provision waggon, the prescribed examination of the vehicle being performed by a friendly gaoler. Whatever plan they took up, Pavel insisted on playing the leading part in it. He was for taking Makar away in a closed carriage, if need be under cover of pistol shots. Clara urged that in the event the equipage had to wait for some time, its presence about the prison was sure to arouse dangerous curiosity. Altogether she was in favour of a quiet and simple proceeding. Safonoff’s house was within easy distance from the prison, so if Masha could undertake to keep her brother away from home, Clara would prefer to have Makar walk quietly to that place, as a first resort, thence to be taken, thoroughly disguised, to the “conspiracy house” of the Circle. But Pavel picked the proposition to pieces.
Since her initiation into the warden’s house Clara had been in a peculiarly elevated state of mind, her whole attention being absorbed in her mission in which she took great pride. This uplifted mood of hers she strove to suppress, and the clear-headed, matter-of-fact way in which she faced the grave dangers of her task animated Pavel with a feeling of intimate comradeship as well as admiration.
As they now sat in the cleanest and brightest corner of the trunk shop he was vaguely sensible of a change in her appearance. Then he noticed that instead of the dark woolen dress she had worn at the time of their previous meetings she had on a fresh blouse of a light-coloured fabric. To be seen in a new colour is in itself becoming to a woman, but this blouse of Clara’s was evidently a tribute to spring. Her face seemed to be suffused with the freshness of the month.
While they sat talking, her mother came in, an elderly Jewess, tall and stately, with a shrewd, careworn look, her hair carefully hidden beneath a strip of black satin.
“Is that you, Tamara?” she asked without taking notice of the stranger. She said something to Motl, made for the door, but suddenly returned, addressing herself to her daughter again. She wanted to know something about the law of chattel-mortgages, but neither Clara nor her visitor could furnish her the desired information.
“Always at those books of theirs, yet when it comes to the point they don’t know anything,” she said, with a smile, as she bustled out of the room.
“Are these Talmud books?” Pavel asked, pointing at Rabbi Rachmiel’s library.
“Yes,” Clara nodded with an implied smile in her voice.
“Can you read them?”
“Oh, no,” she answered, smiling.
He told her that Makar was a deep Talmudic scholar and talked of the Jewish religion, but she offered him no encouragement. She was brimful of questions herself. Her inquiries were concerned with the future destinies of the human race. With all her practical common sense, she had a notion that the era of undimmed equality and universal love would dawn almost immediately after the overthrow of Russian tyranny. This, as she had been taught by revolutionary publications, was to come as the logical continuation of Russia’s village communes, once the development of this survival of prehistoric communism received free scope. What she wanted was a clear and detailed account of life in Future Society.
Her questions and his answers had the character of a theoretical discussion. Gradually, however, he mounted to a more animated tone, portraying the future with quiet fervour. She listened gravely, her eyes full upon his, and this absorbed look spurred him on. But presently her mother came in again, this time with a peasant customer, and they went out to continue their talk in the open air. There were plenty of deserted lanes and bits of open country a short distance off. There was a vague gentle understanding between them that it was the golden idealism of their talk which had set them yearning for the unhidden sky and the aromatic breezes of spring. This upheld their lofty mood while they silently trudged through the outskirts of the market place. They could not as yet continue their interrupted conversation, and to speak of something else would have seemed profanation. At last they emerged on a lonely square, formed by an orchard, some houses and barns and the ruin of an old barrack. The air was excellent and there was nobody to overhear them. Nevertheless when Pavel was about to resume he felt that he was not in the mood for it. Nor did she urge him on with any further questions.
From the old barracks they passed into a dusty side lane and thence into a country road which led to a suburb and ran parallel to the railway tracks.
The sun was burning by fits and starts, as it were. In those spots where masses of lilacs and fruit blossoms gave way to a broader outlook, the road was so flooded with light that Clara had to shield her eyes with her hand. Now and again a clump of trees in the distance would fall apart to show the snow-crested top of a distant hill and the blueish haze of the horizon-line.
Their immediate surroundings were a scrawny, frowzy landscape. The lawns in front of the huts they passed, the homes of washerwomen, were overspread with drying linen.
“Delightful, isn’t it?” Pavel said, inhaling a long draught of the rich, animating air and glancing down a ravine choked with nettle. The remark was merely a spoken sigh of joy. She made no reply.
They were both hungry, and presently they began to feel tired as well. Yet neither of them was disposed to halt or to break silence except by an occasional word or two that meant nothing.
At last he said:
“You must be quite fatigued. It’s cruel of me.”
“I am, but it isn’t cruel of you,” she answered, stopping short, and drawing a deep, smiling breath.
He ran into a washerwoman’s hovel, startling a brood of ducklings on his way, and soon came back with the information that milk was to be had in a trackman’s hut beyond a sparse grove to the right.
A few minutes later they sat at a rude table in a miniature garden between the shining steel rails of the track and a red-painted cabin. It was the fourth track-house from the Miroslav railroad station and was generally known as the Fourth Hut. Besides milk and eggs and coarse rye bread they found sour soup. They ate heartily, but an echo of their exalted dream was still on them. To Pavel this feeling was embodied in an atmosphere of femininity that pervaded his consciousness at this moment. He was sensible of sitting in front of a pretty, healthy girl full of modest courage and undemonstrative inspiration. The lingering solemnity of his mood seemed to have something to do with the shimmering little hairs which the breeze was stirring on Clara’s neck, as she bent over her earthen bowl, with the warm colouring of her ear, with the elastic firmness of her cheek, with the airiness of her blouse.
A desire stirred in him to speak once more of the part she had unconsciously played in his conversion, and at this he felt that if he told her the story he would find a peculiar pleasure in exaggerating the importance of the effect which her “speech” had produced on his mind. But it came over him that Makar was still behind the prison gate and that this was not the time to enjoy oneself.