The dim opening of the gate loomed as a sickly quadrangular hole exhaling nightmare and ruin. Turning sharply back, however, might have attracted notice; so Clara entered the first gate on her way, four or five houses this side of her destination, and when she reappeared a minute or two later, she took the opposite direction. As she turned the next corner she found herself abreast of a man she had noticed in the streets before. He was fixed in her mind by his height and carriage. Extremely tall and narrow-shouldered, he walked like a man with a sore neck, swinging one of his long arms to and fro as he moved stiffly along. The look he gave her made a very unpleasant impression on her. He let her gain on him a little and then she heard his soft rubber-shod footsteps behind her.
It is a terrible experience, this sense of being dogged as you walk along. It is tantalising enough when your desire to take a look at the man at your heels is only a matter of curiosity which for some reason or other you cannot gratify. Imagine, then, the mental condition of an “illegal” shadowed by a spy or by a man he suspects of being one. He tingles with a desire to quicken pace, yet he must walk on with the same even, calm step; every minute or two he is seized with an impulse to turn on the fellow behind him, yet he must not show the least sign of consciousness as to his existence. It is the highest form of torture, yet it was the daily experience of every active man or woman of the secret organisation; for if the political detectives were spying upon pedestrians right and left, the revolutionists, on their part, were apt to be suspicious with equal promiscuity. Small wonder that some of them, upon being arrested, hailed their prison cell as a welcome place of rest, as a relief from the enervating strain of liberty under the harrowing conditions of underground life. As a matter of fact this wholesale shadowing seldom results in the arrest of a revolutionist. Thousands of innocent people were snuffed to one Nihilist, and the Nihilists profited by the triviality of suspicion. Most arrests were the result of accident.
At the corner of the next large thoroughfare she paused and looked up the street for a tram-car. While doing so Clara glanced around her. The tall man had disappeared. A tram-car came along shortly and she was about to board it when she heard Sonia’s voice once more.
“You’re being shadowed. Follow me.”
Sonia entered a crowded sausage shop, and led the way to the far end of it in the rear of an impatient throng. Pending her turn to be waited on, she took off her broad-brimmed hat, asking Clara to hold it for her, while she adjusted her hair.
“Put it on, and let me have your fur cap,” she gestured.
The homely broad-brimmed hat transformed Clara’s appearance considerably. It made her look shorter and her face seemed larger and older.
“I saw a tall fellow turn you over to one with a ruddy mug. The red man is waiting for you outside now, but I don’t think he had a good look at your face. There is a back door over there.”
Clara regained the street through the yard, and sure enough, a man with a florid face was leisurely smoking a cigarette at the gate post. He only gave her a superficial glance and went on watching the street door of the shop. She took a public sleigh, ordered the driver to take her to the Liteyny Bridge, changed her destination in the middle of the journey, and soon after she got off she took another sleigh for quite another section of the city. In short, she was “circling,” and when she thought her trail completely “swept away,” she went home on foot.