“I suppose,” he said to me, “you are mixed up in the affair of Ogaryóv and the other young men who were lately arrested.” I admitted it.
“I’ve heard about it casually,” he went on; “a queer business! I can’t understand it at all.”
“Well, I’ve been in prison a fortnight because of it, and not only do I not understand it, but I know nothing about it.”
“That’s right!” said the man, looking at me attentively. “Continue to know nothing about it! Excuse me, if I give you a piece of advice. You are young, and your blood is still hot, and you want to be talking; but it’s a mistake. Just you remember that you know nothing about it. Nothing else can save you.”
I looked at him in surprise; but his expression did not suggest anything base. He guessed my thoughts and said with a smile:
“I was a student at Moscow University myself twelve years ago.”
A clerk of some kind now came in. The fat man, who was evidently his superior, gave him some directions and then left the room, after pressing a finger to his lips with a friendly nod to me. I never met him again and don’t know now who he was; but experience proved to me that his advice was well meant.
§4
My next visitor was a police-officer, not Colonel Miller this time. He summoned me to a large, rather fine room where five men were sitting at a table, all wearing military uniform except one who was old and decrepit. They were smoking cigars and carrying on a lively conversation, lying back in their chairs with their jackets unbuttoned. The Chief Commissioner, Tsinski, was in the chair.
When I came in, he turned to a figure sitting modestly in a corner of the room and said, “May I trouble Your Reverence?” Then I made out that the figure in the corner was an old priest with a white beard and a mottled face. The old man was drowsy and wanted to go home; he was thinking of something else and yawning with his hand before his face. In a slow and rather sing-song voice he began to admonish me: he said it was sinful to conceal the truth from persons appointed by the Tsar, and useless, because the ear of God hears the unspoken word; he did not fail to quote the inevitable texts—that all power is from God, and that we must render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Finally, he bade me kiss the Holy Gospel and the True Cross in confirmation of a vow (which however I did not take and he did not ask) to reveal the whole truth frankly and openly.