He reclined between two cossacks, with a gendarme officer facing him and supporting his legs. This is the way he returned home. Pedestrians met him with gestures of horrified perplexity and acute commiseration now.
The crowd at one corner of Catharine Canal was a babel of excitement and violence. In their mad rush for the man who threw the second bomb, the bystanders were accusing each other, grabbing at each other, quarrelling, fighting. As Nihilists were for the most part people of education, every man who looked college-bred was in danger of his life. Among those who were beaten to a pulp in this wild mêlée were two political spies who had the appearance of university students. A shout went up that the thrower of the fatal bomb had vaulted over the fence of the Michaïl gardens nearby, and then the mob broke down part of that fence, and ruined the gardens in a wild but vain search for the Terrorist. People were seized and hustled off to the station houses by the hundred.
The heir apparent, a fair-complexioned Hercules, was on his way to the Winter Palace surrounded by a strong escort of mounted men. It was the first time he had appeared in the streets so accompanied. The cluster of horsemen and sleighs that had left the palace three hours before never returned; this one was coming in its place; but the effect of grim detachment, of fierce challenge was the same.
An hour had elapsed. The flag over the Winter Palace which denotes Imperial presence was put at half-mast. Church bells were tolling the death of Alexander II. and the accession of Alexander III.
The new Czar was by his father’s bedside. He was even more powerfully built than he, but he lacked his grace and the light of his intelligent eyes—a physical giant with a look of obtuse honesty on a fair, bearded round face. An English diplomatist who understood him well has said that “he had a mind not only commonplace, but incapable of receiving new ideas.” When he saw his father breathe his last, he exclaimed: “This is what we have come to!”—a celebrated ejaculation which an archbishop uttered at the funeral of Peter the Great in 1725. This was his first utterance as Emperor of Russia. Its puerile lack of originality was characteristic of the man.
Princess Dolgoruki fainted, and she had no sooner been brought to than the packing of her trunks was ordered by the sons of her dead husband.
The palace was surrounded by a strong cordon of cossacks. Palace Square was thronged, the neighbouring streets were tremulous with subdued excitement. Some people were sincerely overcome with grief and horror; others were struggling to conceal their exultation. There were such as wept and cursed the Nihilists by way of displaying their own loyalty, and there were such as burst into tears from the sheer solemnity and nervousness of the moment. But the great predominating feeling that pervaded these crowds, eclipsing every other sentiment or thought, was curiosity. “What is going to happen next?”—this was the question that was uppermost in the minds of these people in their present fever of excitement. Had a republic been proclaimed with the Executive Committee of the Nihilists as a provisional government, they would have sworn their allegiance to the bomb-throwers as readily as they did, on the morrow, to the son of the assassinated Emperor. Had the Terrorists succeeded, the same bearded bishops who blessed and sounded the praises of the new Czar would have blessed and sounded the praises of those who had killed his father.
Pavel was in a suburb of the capital, when he first heard the melancholy tolling of the church bells.