The Samovar Girl

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

“Can I have my meals served in the room?” asked Peter. The youth yawned.

“Yes. If you pay extra. Ring this bell three times for the samovar girl,” and he pointed to a button in the wall near the door, and the youth departed, as if afraid that he would be asked to do something.

There was an electric drop lamp on a writing table, and running water in a little sink against the wall behind the screen. There was a tall wardrobe set against a second door which evidently led to another room.

It was hard for Peter to realize that Chita could be so modern. And the room, poor as it was, seemed like a palace to Peter. His mind had been readjusted to the things he had known as a boy by his visit to Rimsky. Peter Petrovitch Gorekin would have thought himself a king to have a room like this one in which Peter Gordon was to live.

But there was no Peter Gordon now. Peter Gorekin was back in Chita. The scene which opened to him from the windows had been for twenty years in the back of his brain. The little hut, the post-house, the Sofistkaya! He found it hard to believe that he had ever been away from Chita at all.

He sat down by the window. The mild heat from the radiator had thawed away most of the frost in the panes and he looked out over the city. Things that had been but memories were now real, truly existing before his eyes in spite of his years of trying to blur their images out of his mind.

The old superstitions of peasants and exiles which he had learned in his father’s hut as a boy returned to his mind—tales of werewolves who took the shapes of men for diabolical purposes. Was there not something in it all? Was not he himself something like a werewolf? Was he not a Russian in an American coat? Michael Kirsakoff would never suspect an American officer of being the son of a dead exile. Nor would Kirsakoff suspect an American officer of being the same poor boy who had been thrown into prison for a whim—now come for vengeance.

The mysticism inherent in his race, the queer inarticulate yearnings and the dissatisfactions of the Slavic soul, came to the surface in Peter’s consciousness. But now he had knowledge of things, and power, and the means of carrying out his own ends. He would play the game carefully to an end in Chita, and then go on to Irkutsk without any one’s suspecting that the American officer had killed Kirsakoff.

He began to think of his return to Chita as a holy mission. Affairs had turned out well for him from the first. He had managed to get to Siberia instead of going to France. He had managed to get himself ordered to Irkutsk, and had slipped away from his Russian orderly with no one the wiser that Peter Gordon was really a Russian. And there was every evidence that Kirsakoff was still alive and that he was still in Chita. The reticence of Rimsky in discussing Kirsakoff was proof enough to Peter that the former Governor might be found somewhere in the Valley of Despair.

He took off his tunic and rang for a samovar. A slattern of a girl, dirty and unkempt, came trembling to the door to ask what was wanted. She was not more than fifteen—round-cheeked, with scared blue eyes, and brown hair down her back. She was wearing men’s cast-off old shoes. Peter looked at her with pity.