Ten minutes before train-time a brilliantly dressed woman swept by us. I looked up and I own I was badly startled. I recognized her as one of the women secret police of St. Petersburg. Only the day before she had sat at the very next table to me in the Hôtel de France in St. Petersburg. Now, thirty hours later, she was in Moscow. By shifting our positions several times we made out with almost equal surety that she, too, was shadowing us. But Sasha, knowing that his nerves and my own were badly strained at that time, was loath to be frightened out of his course. Two bells sounded and we started for the train. At the gate where tickets are examined Sasha looked back and saw the man whom we had been warned against immediately behind me; just beyond the gate stood the woman whose face I knew so well. She seemed to be waiting for some one. Four weeks later I learned quite accidentally that this very woman had been on my trail more or less continuously for several months.
Sasha and I both took in the situation at a glance and Sasha whispered to me: “I don’t want to die to-morrow! This job, at any rate, must be finished first.”
We boarded the train, passed through the cars, dropped off the other side into the yard, and got into a side street behind the station. Once more the police net closed empty.
The next day Sasha made his way to St. Petersburg via Vilna. Two weeks later he participated in a terrorist coup near Kieff, then fled to Warsaw and the Polish frontier. He paid some money to a Jew whom he knew of, who smuggled him into Austria one night. Three months later, when I was in Paris, I called on Sasha and Nastasia where they were living on a top floor of a house on a street leading off the Boulevard Saint Michel opposite to the Luxembourg Gardens. They were both working hard at chemistry, agriculture, history, and philosophy, looking forward to the time when they could reënter their own country to participate in the final overthrow of the autocracy and then serve as teachers of the people through the long, serious period of the reconstruction.
CHAPTER XX
WITH THE RUSSIAN WORKMAN
Yusofka for a week-end—An exciting journey—A late welcome—Guarded slumber—The story of Yusofka—The Black Country of Russia—Time of small consequence to Russian workmen—Russian holidays numerous—The working-day—Cost of living not low—Coal mines—The Artel—Morality—The drink question—Through a Russian coal mine—The Russian engineer an obstacle to progress—Child-labor laws good—Conditions compared with Scotland and Pennsylvania—Comparative wage scale—Standards of living—Departure from Yusofka.
R. MEDHURST, the charming and companionable British consul for southeast Russia, urged my visiting Yusofka in the government of Yekaterinoslaff.
“Come down for a week-end,” he urged. “You will see the deepest mines and the biggest mills in the country. You will find conditions favorable for visiting the workmen in their homes as well as watching them at work. And, besides, you will see a British colony in Russia that I am prouder of than anything else in this whole country.”
We were then in Rostov-on-Don. Yusofka is difficult to reach from any point, but Mr. Medhurst wired Mr. Arthur Hughes, who was in command of the “works” at Yusofka that we were leaving Rostov early that evening, and would reach a certain junction at 1 A.M. From this junction to Yusofka the railroad is owned by the New Russia Company, and a special train would have to be sent to meet us.