Half an hour later, Drexel, in a cheap, ready-made suit and overcoat, and with a forged passport describing him as a mechanic, walked out of the court with Sonya. He was now truly entering upon the underground life; he was one of those who were being hunted down craftily, ruthlessly by Prince Berloff’s vast secret army; his life might any moment be snuffed out. Yet he felt an intense exhilaration; he felt that he and Sonya would defeat the prince, despite all his cunning, despite his myriads of spies.
A furious wind was raging in from the Gulf of Finland, armed with an icy snow that stabbed the face like tiny daggers. As they bent away against it, her arm through his, he asked her what had occurred when the countess had been returned to Berloff’s house the night before, but she had not seen the countess. They spoke of Captain Nadson, against whom in particular they must ever be on the watch; and Sonya told him of the captain’s own company of gendarmes, known as “Nadson’s Hundred,” who had been recruited for the most merciless work from the lowest and fiercest types of men.
As they came out upon the Palace Bridge they paused, despite the gale, and gazed to where, a few hundred yards up the Neva, stood the mighty fortress-prison of Saints Peter and Paul. They could not see it with their eyes, but they sensed its fear-compelling form: a huge, low, irregular oblong of massive granite walls, moat-surrounded, washed on one side by the Neva’s flood, with cannon scowling blackly forth. This grim pile was the prison that held Borodin, perhaps in some dungeon beneath the water’s level. And it was this grim pile, separated from the Czar’s palace by only the river’s width, in the centre of Russia’s troop-filled capital—it was this that they two, a man and a woman, with a few others proposed to rob of its chief prisoner.
“That is a symbol of all Russia,” she murmured with subdued passion. “Russia is just one great jail; at best the position of the people is merely that of prisoners on parole. The Czar is not a ruler. He is merely head-jailer.”
They traversed the long bridge, went by the Winter Palace, and turned south past the Cathedral of St. Isaac. After walking a quarter of an hour Sonya paused.
“We part here for the present. Go into that little shop across the street, and spend ten minutes in making some purchase. When you come out, look at the windows on the third floor above the door I enter. If the curtains are still down, you are to return. If one is up a few inches, it will mean that The White One desires to see you.”
Drexel watched her enter a door half a block ahead, then he crossed to the shop and bought a package of cheap tea. When he came out he looked up at the windows. Light shone from beneath one of the curtains.
He crossed eagerly, his pulses in a tumult—for in a moment he was to stand face to face with this famous mystery. His mind guessed wildly at what figure he should find. Perhaps some great professor, whose ethics or mathematics were only a mask for this his real activity. Perhaps some noted general from the Czar’s army. Perhaps even some mighty nobleman, hiding his identity beneath this vague and fearsome name.
He climbed the stairs and knocked. Sonya admitted him and led him through a short hallway into a plainly furnished room. Here were three men, and a figure in a wheeled chair. Drexel swept the three men with swift, tense wonder. Two were the men he had seen with Sonya in the house in Three Saints’ Court, the third he saw for the first time. Which of the three was it?
“This is Mr. Drexel,” said Sonya. She took his arm and led him forward. “And this is The White One.”