“He’s a trump, after all. If they haven’t caught him so far I don’t see why he should be caught now. He may come in at any moment. But where can he be?”
The next morning, at about ten o’clock, when the countess heard the doorbell she declared, with intense agitation, that something told her it was the governor, and so it was. Clara went into her room.
“Don’t leave me for a moment, Pasha,” Anna Nicolayevna entreated her son. “I am afraid to face him alone. I should be sure to put my foot in it, if I did.”
“Just leave uncle to me,” said Pavel.
The old man looked wan and haggard, and was blinking harder than ever. He began by joking Pasha on the rarity of his visits at the gubernatorial mansion, but the young man cut him short.
“By the way, uncle, is it true that that fellow, the Nihilist, has escaped?” he asked.
“How did it reach you so soon?” the governor asked. “The town must be full of it.”
“I heard it from a cab-driver last night. It’s awful. But how did he get out? Say what you will, they are a clever set, those Nihilists.”
“Clever nothing! Our gendarmes are the most stupid lot on God’s earth. That’s where the trouble comes in. There was a governess at the warden’s house. It was she who seems to have managed the whole affair. Of course, the warden is a scoundrel, but what does he know of these things? It’s for the gendarme office to scent a bird of that variety, but then the gendarme office is made up of rogues and blockheads. To clip one’s wings, that’s all they are good for. Wherever one turns, he bumps his head against the ‘independent power’ of the gendarmerie. It’s a government within a government, that’s what it is. Else one would be able to show St. Petersburg that Miroslav was not the kind of place for Nihilists and all sorts of ragamuffins to play the mischief with. Those swaggering gendarmes go around poking their noses everywhere, smelling nothing but their own grand epaulets, and yet they are beyond the control of civil authorities. The consequence is that when something happens somebody else is held responsible, because the prisons, forsooth, are under the Department of the Interior! To set an example of idleness and stupidity is all they seem to be needed for, the gendarmes; that’s all, that’s all.”
Pavel agreed with him.