When she referred to the late war “in behalf of the oppressed Slavonic races of the Balkans,” Pavel asked her why the Czar had not first thought of his own oppressed Russians, and whether it was not hypocrisy to send one’s slaves to die for somebody else’s freedom. The Emperor had secured a constitution for Bulgaria, had he? Why, then, was he hanging those who were striving for one in his own land? A war of emancipation indeed! It was the old Romanoff greed for territory, for conquest, for bloodshed.
He literally bore her down by a gush of arguments, facts, images. Now and again he would pause, sit looking at the grass in grim silence, and then, burst into another torrent of oratory. It was said of Zachar that a single speech of his was enough to make a convert of the most hopeless conservative. Pavel was far from possessing any such powers of pleading eloquence, when his audience was made up of strangers, but he certainly scored a similar victory by the appeal which he was now addressing to his mother.
He went to order coffee. When he returned, reveille was sounding in the barracks.
“There you have it!” he said. “Do you know what that sound means? It means that the youngest, the best forces of the country are turned into weapons of human butchery.”
The brass notes continued, somewhat cracked at times, but loud and vibrant with imperious solemnity.
“It means, too, that people are forced to keep themselves in chains at the point of their own bayonets,” he added.
The next few days were spent by the countess in reading “underground” literature. She was devouring paper after paper and pamphlet after pamphlet with tremulous absorption. The little pile before her included scientific treatises, poetry and articles of a polemical nature, and she read it all; but she was chiefly interested in the hair-breadth escapes, pluck and martyrdom of the revolutionists. The effect this reading had on her was something like the thrilling experience she had gone through many years ago when she was engrossed in the Lives of Saints.
“It makes one feel twenty years younger,” she said to Pavel, bashfully, as she laid down a revolutionary print and took the glasses off her tired eyes one forenoon.