Clara, who sat at a table watching him, dropped her head on her folded arms, in a paroxysm of quick, bitter sobbing.
The few details in the newspaper report gave vividness to the grewsome scene. The two executed men had been among Pavel’s most intimate friends. The image of Alexandre, his arms pinioned, looking on with tears while a white shroud was being slipped over his fellow-prisoner, was tearing at his heart with cruel insistence.
“Oh, it’s terrible, Clarochka!” he moaned, dropping by her side, nestling to her, and bursting into tears in her bosom. Then, getting up, he took to walking back and forth, vehemently. “They have choked them, the blood-drinkers,” he muttered. “They have done it after all.” He fell silent, pacing the floor in despair, and then burst out once again: “They have choked them, the vampires.”
“But war is war,” she said, for something to say to him, her own face distorted with her struggle against a flow of tears.
“Oh, I don’t know. All I do know is that they have been murdered, that they are no more.” A minute or two later he turned upon her with a look full of ghastly malice. “War did you say? The government can’t have enough of it, can it? Well, it shall have all the war it wants. The party has only shown it the blossoms; the berries are still to come.”
The world seemed to be divided into those who had known the two executed men personally and those who had not. For the moment there seemed to be little in common between him and Clara. She strained him to a seat by her side on the sofa again, clasping one of his hands in both of hers, and kissed him on the cheek, wetting his temple with her tears.
“Do you know, dearest, I really had a lurking hope they would be spared,” he said. “I was ashamed to say so, but I did. But no! they choked them. They choked them. Idiots that they are. They imagine they can hang every honest man in the country.”
“Loris-Melikoff is even worse than the Czar. His liberalism is nothing but hypocrisy. There can no longer be any question about it.”
“He is a rogue of the deepest dye. He is a bungling hypocrite, an abominable liar and a mangy coward, that’s what he is. But to the devil with him! This is not the point. Oh, nothing is the point. Nothing except that they have been murdered.”
He went to see some of the revolutionists with whom he had shared the intimacy of the dead men.