An hour or more later, while she and Rodkevich were absorbed in a game of cards in the parlour and a solitary star shone out of the semi-obscurity of a colorless sky, Makar, clean-shaven and clad as a woman, with a blue handkerchief round his face, advanced toward the gate. Clara stood in the doorway of the warden’s office, watching the scene. “Double Chin,” the gateman, was still on duty, and as the disguised prisoner approached him the impersonation struck her as absurdly defective. Another second and all would be lost with a crash. Her heart stood still. She shut her eyes with a sick feeling, but the next instant she sprang forward, bonnetless, addressing Makar by Mme. Shubeyko’s name.
“You must not forget to let us know, dear,” she said aloud, placing herself between him and the gateman and shutting the disguised man from view. “A swollen gum is a dangerous thing to neglect, you know. Yes, figs and milk. I’ll see you down the road, dear.”
The heavy key groaned in the lock, the ponderous gate swung open and Makar and Clara walked out into the twilight of the street—he with a rush of joy, she in a turmoil of triumph and despair. It seemed as if he had never vividly hoped to see liberty, and now, suddenly, he had found himself breathing the very breath of it; while she who, a minute ago, could have walked freely through the streets, was now the quarry of that terrible force called government.
As soon as they reached the ditch, a short distance from the prison building, Makar pulled off his feminine attire, threw it under the little foot-bridge, and put on a government official’s cap. Masha, the gendarme officer’s sister, was to await him round the corner; her house was within easy reach from here, and Makar was to be taken there to change his disguise and then to be driven to the Palace; but it had all come about much sooner than they had expected, and she had not yet arrived.
“Never mind. Hire a cab to Cucumber Market,” Clara said. “There you can cross some streets in the opposite direction and then take another cab direct for Theatre Square. A very short walk will bring you to the Palace. Don’t forget the names: First Cucumber Market and then Theatre Square,” she repeated, coolly.
He nodded with a reassuring smile, shook her hand warmly, and they parted.
Double Chin was soon to be relieved. Had he left his post before the guards missed Makar, the connection existing between Mme. Shubeyko’s toothache and Makar’s escape would never have been discovered, and Clara would have come out uncompromised. But Clara was too slow in returning, and the fat gateman was an impressionable, suspicious man, so he presently made inquiry. He found that Mme. Shubeyko was still in the warden’s parlour, nursing her cheek with one hand and holding her cards with the other.
In the commotion that followed the discovery Rodkevich wept hysterically and beat the gateman, while Mme. Shubeyko went about invoking imprecations upon the sly prisoner for stealing her new spring cloak, bonnet and parasol.
Meanwhile Clara stood at a point of vantage, watching developments. Had Double Chin left the building at the usual hour, without the prison betraying any signs of disquiet, she would have returned to her room in the warden’s house at once, and thus saved her legal existence. Otherwise she would have been forced to escape and join the army of the “ne-legalny” (illegal), of political outlaws like the majority of Pavel’s intimate friends in St. Petersburg. About twenty minutes had elapsed from the time she had parted from Makar, when she saw human figures burst from the prison-gate, accompanied by the violent trill of a police whistle. Her heart sank at the sound. From this minute on Miroslav would be forbidden ground to her. A ne-legalny is something neither dead nor alive, the everlasting prey of gendarmes, policemen, spies—of the Czar himself, it seemed; a “cut-off slice;” an outcast without the right of being either an outcast or a member of the community, a creature without name, home or identity. She was appallingly forbidding to herself. But then in the underground world ne-legalny is a title of indescribable distinction, and at this moment Clara seemed to feel in her own person the sanctity which she had been wont to associate with the word.