A fortnight had passed. Unknown to her lover, Clara had spoken to the Janitor, intimating her readiness to offer her life, and asking for one of the most dangerous assignments the Governing Board could give her. She was waiting for an answer, when the startling news spread among the revolutionists that the Janitor was in the hands of the enemy and that the capture of that maniac of caution had been the result of a most insane piece of recklessness.
His arrest was one of the heaviest losses the party had yet sustained. At the same time the government found a new source of uneasiness in it. A large quantity of dynamite and some other things confiscated at his lodgings pointed to a vigorous renewal of terroristic activity. Another plot on the life of the Emperor seemed to be hatching in the capital, yet all efforts of the police and the gendarmes in this connection were futile. Indeed, the circumstances of the Janitor’s arrest only furnished new proof of the ineptitude and shiftlessness of those whose business it was to ferret out Nihilism.
A few days before the Janitor was taken the police received word about two portraits which had been left for reproduction at a well-known photograph gallery and in which the photographer had recognised the two Nihilists who had recently been hanged. Instead of a detective being detailed, however, to lie in wait for the unknown man, the proprietor of the gallery was simply ordered to notify the police when he came for his pictures. The unknown man was the Janitor. When he called for the photographs, an awkward attempt was made to detain him which aroused his suspicion. He pleaded haste and made for the door. When a porter barred his way he scared him off by thrusting his hand into an empty pistol-pocket. A similar order for photographs of the two executed Terrorists had been given by him to another well-known photographer next door to the former place, and it was when he called there, a day or two after his narrow escape at the adjoining gallery, that he was seized by detectives.
When his landlady heard that her “star” lodger, the punctilious government official and retired army officer, was neither an official nor a retired officer, but a leading Nihilist, she fainted. The gendarmes had been hunting for him since he broke away from his captors on his way to prison one evening more than two years before. They had heard that it was he who subsequently organised the railroad plot near Moscow; also that he had been connected with the assassination of the chief of gendarmes and with the shooting at the Czar in front of the Winter Palace. Yet he had freely moved about the streets of St. Petersburg these two years, the busiest agitator and conspirator in the city, until, in a moment of morbid foolhardiness, he practically surrendered himself to the police.
When Clara heard of his arrest, she clapped her hands together, Yiddish fashion. “If the Janitor has been arrested as a result of carelessness,” she exclaimed, “then everyone of us ought to hold himself in readiness to be taken at any moment.”
She repeated the remark the next time she saw Pavel, adding:
“The idea of being a married woman under such conditions!”
“Oh, that’s an idée fixe of yours,” he said, testily.
She gave him a look and dropped her eyes, resentfully.
The peace-offering came from him.