Makar longed to see Sophia, the daughter of the former governor of St. Petersburg. She had taken an active part in one of the most daring rescues and was celebrated for the ingenuity and motherly devotion with which she gave herself to the “Red Cross” work of the party, supplying political prisoners with provisions and keeping them in secret communication with their relatives. It was the story of this young noblewoman’s life which afterwards inspired Turgeneff’s prose poem, The Threshold. Makar thought she might take an active interest in his scheme, but she was overwhelmed with other work and inaccessible.
CHAPTER IX.
A DAY UNDERGROUND.
ABOUT a week had elapsed, when Pavel read in his morning paper of the hanging of three revolutionists in Odessa: two Gentiles and a Jew. He had never met these men, but he knew that two of them had not been implicated in anything more violent than the diffusion of socialist ideas. Also that the parents of the one who belonged to the Jewish race were under arrest, condemned to be exiled to Siberia for no other crime than their having given birth to an enemy of the existing régime.
Pavel moved about his room with a sob of helpless fury in his throat. He found feverish satisfaction in the thought that he had some chemicals in his overcoat which he was to carry to the dynamite shop of the Terrorists. The explosives to be made from it were intended for a new attempt upon the life of the Emperor. Not being directly connected with the contemplated attack, neither he nor the dynamite makers of the organisation had any clear idea about the plot, which was in the hands of a special sub-committee, Alexandre’s place having been taken by another man; but he did know that preparations were under way in the Winter Palace.
The dynamite shop was kept by a woman with a deep-chested, almost masculine voice, and a man with a squeaky feminine one. They were registered as man and wife. She was the daughter of a priest, but she looked like a woman of the people and dressed like one—a thick-set extremely blonde young woman with coarse yet pleasing features. Her revolutionary name was Baska. Her fictitious husband, who was one of the chemists of the party, was addressed by the revolutionists as Grisha. He had a scholarly face, yet the two had no difficulty in passing among the neighbours for a tradesman or shop clerk and his wife. For the greater reality of the impersonation and as a special precaution against curiosity they made friends with the porter of the house and his wife and with the police roundsman of the neighbourhood, often inviting them to a glass of vodka. The porter of St. Petersburg, like his brother of Paris under the empire, is a political detective “ex-officio.” The two spies and the police officer were thus turned into unconscious witnesses of the young couple’s political innocence, for in the first place they had many an opportunity to convince themselves that their dwelling was free from anything suspicious and, in the second, people who drank vodka and went, moreover, on sprees with the house porter, certainly did not look like Nihilists.
“Good morning, Pavel,” Baska greeted him vivaciously, as she gave his hand a hearty squeeze, while her other hand held a smoking cigarette. “Just in time! I hate to eat my breakfast all alone. Grisha has another bad headache, poor fellow. But I see you, too, have a long face. Where did you get it?”
Pavel smiled lugubriously as he handed her the package. He had not the heart to disturb her good spirits, and she went on chirping and laughing.