“I fancy you Americans think better of Russia than we Englishmen do.”
“Perhaps so,” was my reply, as I buried myself once more in the pages of “Punch,” and resumed silence.
Our English friends can not at least complain that they are denied freedom of speech in Russia. On the railroad-trains, in shops, in the hotels, and in the public streets, I have heard them talk as boldly and freely against the Tsar and his system as if they were at home. I have sometimes thought it would be only becoming in them to speak a little lower, or else tone down the severity of their criticisms while experiencing in their own persons the actual toleration of the government they so fiercely denounce.
Before entering Russia, I had stuffed myself—my mind, not pockets—with books, magazine articles, and newspaper letters about the Nihilists. From such sources of information I had learned that the Nihilists represent all classes of Russian society—peasants, priests, soldiers and officers, noblemen, and even the imperial family. It was said that ladies of rank, wealth, and refinement were among the most active propagandists of Nihilism. These reports had taken so strong a hold of me that, on striking Russian soil, I began at once to look about for some signs of the presence of this widely spread and terrible doctrine.
Among our fellow-passengers from Berlin to St. Petersburg was a lady accompanied by her maid. She had a coupé lit for her exclusive use, through the window of which I could see her from the platform of stations where we alighted for refreshments. She always shrank into a corner of her carriage, as if to escape scrutiny. I noticed that her chin was disproportionately large, and that her lips were firmly pressed together. Some one told me that she was of high rank in Russia. Whereupon the whimsical thought possessed me that here, perhaps, was one of those aristocratic female Nihilists of whom I had read so much. The absurdity of the idea did not prevent me from keeping an eye on her.
At the frontier station this lady’s actions were so strange that I watched her with a “fearful joy.” She was profoundly agitated. Her face was pale—even her resolute lips sharing in the ashen hue—and she strode up and down the salle d’attente unceasingly, as if to walk off her nervousness. She had three large, black, strongly bound trunks, marked with Russian initials in white paint. I knew they were her trunks by the anxious glances which she threw at them from time to time. Once, when the porter let the corner of one of them fall heavily to the floor, I observed her start. “Perhaps it contains dynamite,” I said to myself, half-laughingly.
When her turn came for the formalities of the douane, she stepped forward with a boldness which was well assumed. She and her maid assisted the Government officers in unlocking, unstrapping, and unpacking. Her apparent anxiety to have the search made thorough did not deceive me. The men went to the bottom of two of the trunks—either removing the contents or probing them with their long arms, or peering among them with trained eyes and smelling hard for tobacco and spirits all the time. They found nothing contraband. When they proceeded to explore the third trunk, the lady made a strong visible effort to conceal her emotion. “Now for bombs,” I thought, “or Nihilists’ tracts at the very least!”
It was fortunate for her that the custom-house myrmidons had not noticed her feverish anxiety. But they were busy at their work, not over-suspicious, and glad to be through with a midnight job which paid them nothing. So they slighted number three, simply removing and putting back a top layer of clothes. Then they closed the lid, and chalked all the trunks. I could see the mysterious lady heave a sigh of relief, which I could not help sharing with her, though it left unanswered the interesting question, What did she have in that third trunk?
Was it dynamite? Or revolutionary pamphlets and circulars? Or some innocent but dutiable stuff which the lady carried into her country free? I have seen the sex equally agitated on the docks of New York, when the goods which had been hid away were nothing more dangerous than smoking-jackets or meerschaum pipes or uncut velvet. So let us give the fair unknown Russian the benefit of the doubt, and imagine that the extent of her offense, if any, was smuggling in a costly French dinner-dress or articles de Paris dear to the female heart.
Perhaps there never was a more harmless fellow than the mujik who made our beds and blacked our shoes on the Russian sleeping-car which bore us to St. Petersburg. But that man had the high cheek bones, the long, unkempt hair, and the generally wild look which I had once noticed in the portrait of a notorious Nihilist printed in the “Illustrated London News.” I did not then know that these were the characteristic Tartar features, seen all over Russia. On account of his resemblance to that portrait I found myself suspecting the mujik of Nihilistic tendencies. I once came upon him suddenly while he was sitting on a stool in a little recess, at the rear end of the car. He was muttering to himself, and pounding his knee with his brawny fist. How could I help thinking that he was heaping curses on the existing order of things universal, and that that self-inflicted blow of his clinched hand expressed, in a feeble way, his long-pent hatred of all human society? And yet it is possible that the poor man was only cursing his ill-luck in taking a counterfeit ruble for good money.