Two or three hours had passed, when Clara and Olga heard an ominous confusion of footsteps in the vestibule. The next moment the room was crowded with men, some in uniforms, others in citizens’ clothes. One of the St. Petersburg officers rushed to a window where a blue medicine bottle—Clara’s “window signal”—stood on the sill, to prevent either of the two Nihilist girls from removing it by way of warning to their friends.
“You here!” the tall, baronial-looking procureur, Princess Chertogoff’s son-in-law, said to Olga, in amazement. He bowed to her most chivalrously, but she turned away from him with a contemptuous gesture.
“And may I ask for your name, Miss,” a gendarme officer accosted Clara.
“I decline to answer,” she returned, simply. Her eyes were on a pistol which she saw in the hand of one of the gendarmes.
“You live in Miroslav, don’t you?”
Instead of answering this question she sprang at the man who held the pistol, seized it from him and began firing at the wall. This was her substitute for a removal of the safety signal from the window.
The weapon was instantly knocked out of her hand by a blow with the flat of a gleaming sword, and she was forced into a seat, two men holding her tightly by the arms, while a third was tying a handkerchief around her bleeding hand.
“I merely wanted to alarm the neighbourhood,” she said calmly. “But, of course, you people will turn it into a case of armed resistance.”