“What is your name?” he addressed himself to Zachar, with the exaltation of a man come upon a precious find. He knew but too well how anxious the government was to capture him, but he had come here to arrest My Lord without the remotest idea of finding this revolutionary giant in the place.
“Krasnoff,” Zachar answered with dignity, in his deep-chested voice.
“I beg your pardon,” the officer returned, with a twinkle in his eye. “I once had the pleasure of arresting you. Your name is Andrey Ivanovitch Jeliaboff.”
“Oh, in that case I am pleased to meet you,” the prisoner said with playful chivalry.
Jeliaboff’s arrest made a joyous stir not only in the gendarmerie, but also at court. Apart from the attempt to blow up an imperial train in the south, in which he had played the leading part, he had been described to the authorities as the most gifted and effective agitator in the movement.
The police at Little Garden Street were unaware of all this, but the conduct of the two men who had visited the cheese shop that afternoon seemed decidedly suspicious and lent a glare of colour to the irrelevancies that seemed to enfold the place.
The next morning Pavel called on the Koboseffs. As he entered the cheese store he saw that the adjoining room was crowded with police officers. In his first shock he was only conscious of the gleam of uniforms, of Urie’s and somebody else’s voice and of his own sick despair. But the sick feeling ebbed away, leaving him in a state of desperate, pugnacious tranquillity, his mind on the revolver in his pocket.
“Hello there!” he shouted, with the self-satisfied disrespect of a man of the better classes addressing one of the lower, and at this he surveyed the store with an air of contempt, as much as to say: “What a den I did strike!”
“Wife,” he heard Urie’s voice, “there is a gentleman in the shop.”
Baska, who had been calmly emptying a barrel of cheese into some boxes, wiped her hands upon her apron and stepped behind the counter.