THE COUNTESS’ DISCOVERY.
AS Pavel mounted the majestic staircase of his mother’s residence he became aware that an abstract facial expression was all his memory retained of Mlle. Yavner’s likeness. He coveted another glance at her much as a man covets to hear again a new song that seems to be singing itself in his mind without his being able to reproduce it.
He found his mother sitting up for him, on the verge of a nervous collapse. She took him to a large, secluded room, the best in the vast house for tête-à-tête purposes. It was filled with mementoes, the trophies of her father’s diplomatic career, with his proud collection of rare 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-born race-horse.
Anna Nicolayevna had planned to lead up to the main question diplomatically, but she was scarcely seated on a huge, venerable couch (which made her look smaller than ever) than she turned pale and blurted out in a whisper:
“Did you cross the bridge this afternoon?”
“No. Why?” He said this with fatigued curiosity and looking her full in the face.
She dropped her glance. “I thought I saw you there.”
“You were mistaken, then, but what makes you look so uneasy? I did not go in that direction at all, but suppose I did. Why, what has happened?”
She cowed before the insistence of his interrogations and beat a retreat.
“I am not uneasy at all. I must have been mistaken, then. It is about Kostia I have been wanting to speak to you. It is quite a serious matter. You see he is too delicate for the military schools. So I was thinking of putting him in the gymnasium, but then many of the boys there are children of undesirable people. One can’t be too careful these days.” She was now speaking according to her carefully considered program, and growing pale once more, she fixed him with a searching glance, as she asked: “You must have heard of the man the gendarmes caught, haven’t you?”
“Oh, you mean the fellow who would not open his mouth,” he said with a smile. “Quite a sensation for a town like this. In St. Petersburg or Moscow they catch them so often it has ceased to be news.”
She went on to speak of the evil of Nihilism, Pavel listening with growing interest, like a man who had given the matter some consideration. Poor Anna Nicolayevna! She was no match for him.
Finally he got up. “Well, I don’t really know,” he said. “It seems to me the trouble lies much deeper than that, mamman. Those fellows, the Nihilists, don’t amount to anything in themselves. If it were not for that everlasting Russian helplessness of ours they could do no more harm than a group of flies. Our factories and successful farms are all run by Germans; we simply can’t take care of the least thing.”
“But what have factories and farms to do with the pranks of demoralised boys?”
He smiled. “But if we were not a helpless, shiftless nation a handful of boys 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 begin with.”
He was tempted to cast circumspection to the winds and to thunder out his real impeachment of existing conditions. This, however, he could not afford; so he felt like a boat that is being rowed across stream with a strong current to tempt her downward. He was sailing in a diagonal direction. Every now and then he would let himself drift along, only presently to take up his oars and strike out for the bank again. He spoke 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 own voice which continued to ring in his ears, as though his words remained suspended in the air.
Anna Nicolayevna—a curled-up little heap capped by an enormous pile of glossy auburn hair, in the corner of a huge couch—followed him intently. Once or twice she nodded approval to a severe attack upon the government, without realising that he was speaking against the Czar. She was at a loss to infer whether he was opposed to the new advisers of the Emperor in the same way in which her brother-in-law and the ultra-conservative Slavophiles were opposed to them or whether he was some kind of liberal. He certainly seemed to tend toward the Slavophiles in his apparent hatred of foreigners.
“They’ll kill him, those murderous youngsters, they are sure to kill him,” he shouted at one point, speaking of the Czar. “And who is to blame? Is such a state of things possible anywhere in Western Europe?”
Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as she shrank deeper into the corner of the couch.
She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Her pity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom and glint of martyrdom on his face—the face of Alexander II. Quite apart from this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasy of thought and feeling—of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. She was in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be a weightier personage than ever. The haze that enveloped him was thickening. Nevertheless his strictures upon Russia’s incapacity left her rankling with a desire to refute them. That national self-conceit which breeds in every child the conviction that his is the greatest country in the world and that its superiority is cheerfully conceded by all other nations, reasserted itself in the countess with resentful emphasis. To be sure, all the skill, ingenuity and taste of the refined world came from abroad, but this did not lessen her contempt for foreigners any more than did the fact that all acrobats and hair-dressers were Germans or Frenchmen. Her childhood had been spent in foreign countries and she knew their languages as well as she did her own; nevertheless her abstraction of a foreigner was a man who spoke broken Russian—a lisping, stammering, cringing imbecile. She revolted to think of Russia as being inferior to wretches of this sort, and when the 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 after all,” she said to herself, in dismay.
She went to bed, but tossed about in an agony of restlessness. When the darkness of her room began to thin and the brighter objects loomed into view, she slipped on a wrapper and seated herself at a window, courting composure in the blossom-scented air that came up from the garden; but all to no purpose. Ever and anon, after a respite of tranquillity she would be seized with a new rush of consternation. Pasha was the man she had seen on the bridge, disguised as an artisan; he was a Nihilist.
While Anna Nicolayevna was thus harrowed with doubt, Pavel was pacing his room, his heart on the point of bursting with a desire to see his mother again and to make a clean breast of it. The notion of her being outwitted and made sport of touched him with pity. Come what might, his poor noble-hearted mother must be kept in the dark no longer. She would appreciate his feelings. He would plead with her, with tears in his eyes he would implore her to open her eyes to the appalling inhumanity of the prevailing adjustment of things. And as he visioned himself making this plea to her, his own sense of the barbarity of the existing regime set his blood simmering in him, and quickened his desire to lay it all before 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 and redolence was invaded with light that asserted its presence like a great living 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 a Nihilist.”
“Sh-h, don’t be agitated, mother dear, I beg of you,” he replied with tender emphasis. “I am going to tell you all. Only first compose yourself, mamma darling, and hear me out. Yes, I’m what you call a Nihilist, but I am not the man you saw.”
“You a Nihilist, Pasha!” she whispered, staring at him, as though a great physical change had suddenly come over him. “Anyhow, you have nothing to do with the man they have arrested?”
He shook his head and she felt relieved. His avowal of being a Nihilist was so startling a confession to make, that she believed all he said. He was a Nihilist, then—a Nihilist in the abstract; something shocking, no doubt, but remote, indefinite, vague. The concrete Nihilism contained in the picture of a man disguised as a laborer and having some thing to do with 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 of school-children in the political dungeons, the brutal fleecing and maltreatment of a starving peasantry.
“I found myself in a new world, mother,” he said. “It was a world in which the children of refined, well-bred families fervently believed that he who did not work for the good of the common people was not a man of 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. For centuries we have been living on the fat of the earth, luxuriating in the toil, misery and ignorance of the peasants. It is to their drudgery and squalor that we owe our material and mental well-being. We ought to feel ashamed for living at the expense of these degraded, literally starving creatures; yet we go on living off their wretchedness and even pride ourselves upon doing so. Let us repay our debt to them by working for their real emancipation. We have grown fat on serfdom, so we must give our blood to undo it, to bring about the reign of liberty. This is the sum and substance of our creed, mother. This is the faith that has taken 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 as he did at the present moment.
A host of sparrows burst into song and activity, all together, as though at the stroke of a conductor’s baton; and at this it seemed as if the flood of perfume had taken a spurt and the sunlight had begun to smile and speak. He went on in the same strain, and she listened as she would to a magic tale that had no bearing upon the personality of her son. His voice, sharp and irascible as it often sounded, was yet melodious in its undercurrent tone of filial devotion. The vital point, indeed, was that at last he was uncovering his soul to her. She was not shocked by what she heard. Rather, she was proud of his readiness to sacrifice himself for an ideal, and what is more, she felt that his world lured her heart also.
“But the Emperor is a noble soul, Pasha,” she said. “He has emancipated the serfs. If there ever was a friend of the common people the present Czar is one.”
Her objections found him ready. He had gone over these questions hundreds of times before, and he gave her the benefit of all his former discussions and reading. At times he would borrow a point or two from Zachar’s speeches. Touching upon the emancipation of the serfs, he contended that Alexander II. had been forced to the measure by the disastrous results of the Crimean War; and that the peasants, having been defrauded of their land, were now worse off than ever.
“Oh, mother,” he suddenly exclaimed, “whenever you think of the abolition of serfdom think also of the row of gallows he had erected about that very time for noble-minded Polish patriots. Do you remember Mme. 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 Slavonic races of the Balkans,” Pavel asked her why the Czar had not first thought of his own oppressed Russians, and whether it was not hypocrisy to send one’s slaves to die for somebody else’s freedom. The Emperor had secured a constitution for Bulgaria, had he? Why, then, was he hanging those who were striving for one in his own land? A war of emancipation indeed! It was the old Romanoff greed for territory, for conquest, for bloodshed.
He literally bore her down by a gush of arguments, facts, images. Now and again he would pause, sit looking at the grass in grim silence, and then, burst into another torrent of oratory. It was said of Zachar that a single speech of his was enough to make a convert of the most hopeless conservative. Pavel was far from possessing any such powers of pleading eloquence, when his audience was made up of strangers, but he certainly scored a similar victory by the appeal which he was now addressing to his mother.
He went to order coffee. When he returned, reveille was sounding in the barracks.
“There you have it!” he said. “Do you know what that sound means? It means that the youngest, the best forces of the country are turned into weapons of human butchery.”
The brass notes continued, somewhat cracked at times, but loud and vibrant with imperious solemnity.
“It means, too, that people are forced to keep themselves in chains at the 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 after pamphlet with tremulous absorption. The little pile before her included scientific treatises, poetry and articles of a polemical nature, and she read it all; but she was chiefly interested in the hair-breadth escapes, pluck and martyrdom of the revolutionists. The effect this reading had on her was something like the thrilling experience she had gone through many 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 her tired eyes one forenoon.