“That is all you have to tell me about yourself?”
“That is all.”
XXXI
THE PAYMENT
It was on every gossip's tongue in St. Petersburg that Jeliaboff had been arrested.
“It is the beginning of the end,” men said. “They will now catch the others. The new reign of terror is over.”
But Jeliaboff himself—a dangerous man (one of the Terrorists), the chief of the plot to blow up the imperial train at the Alexandroff Station—said that it was not so. This also, the mere bravado of an arrested criminal, was bandied from mouth to mouth.
For two years the most extraordinary agitation of modern days had held Russian society within its grip. All the world seemed to whisper. Men walking in the streets turned to glance over their shoulders at the approach of a step, at the sound of a sleigh-bell. The women were in the secret, too; and when the women touch politics they are politics no longer. For there should be no real emotion in politics; only the stimulated emotion of the platform.
For two years the Czar had been slowly and surely ostracized by a persecution which was as cruel as it was unreasoning.