The Green Book; Or, Freedom Under the Snow: A Novel

by Mór Jókai

"Did you observe with what devotion the Czarina kissed the crucifix? Did you not know what was her petition?"

"I neither know, nor did I remark anything."

It was late before the church service had ended. The congregation quickly dispersed and hastened home. The streets were deserted. On the first day of Lent every family man makes a point of supping at home. And as among the poorer classes in St. Petersburg only about every seventh man is blessed with a wife, others join together and get some female of their own class in life to prepare the Lenten soup for them. This is seen on every table, rich and poor, whether in hardware vessel or delicate china tureen. Even upon the Czar's table it may not be absent; the imperial cook prepares it according to time-honored formula.

This soup every head of the family is expected to partake of in his own home. Time was when even in the Winter Palace the custom was observed. Time was! The table was laid for two covers only; no guests were invited. The many dishes, all prepared with oil and honey, were served for the two alone. Then came a day when the imperial wife awaited her husband in vain at the Lenten meal. He came not. And yet she waited and waited; the supper waited also. Some untoward circumstance had come between them. First the meats grew cold, then their hearts. Yet all the same, year after year, the wife had two covers laid on the first evening in Lent, and waited on and on, until the dishes grew cold, and still she did not touch them. She was waiting for him. Hours would pass, the imperial wife sitting lonely, waiting, listening for the slightest sound, wondering whether it were not her husband's footstep outside the tapestried door which connected the corridor of their apartments—that door, at the opening of which her heart had formerly overflowed with earthly bliss. Alas! now the lock had long grown stiff and rusty. Suddenly the clock began to strike—a mechanical clock which Araktseieff had had made in Paris. The piece it plays is the National Anthem; it plays it but once in the twenty-four hours—at one o'clock in the morning—the hour at which Czar Paul had been murdered by his generals and nobles in his bedchamber.

The son of the murdered man, who had ascended the throne over his father's dead body, had, at the turn of the year, listened for many an anniversary to the solemn strain, kneeling low, bedewing his prie dieu with his tears; and one being there was who fully shared the sorrow of his heart. With every fibre that heart of his vibrated to the sad notes, a truer timepiece than the clock: it attuned its note to the triumphant strains of victory, as to the undertone of sadness when it reproached him that his father's corpse had been his stepping-stone to the throne, threatening that his body, likewise, should be the stepping-stone to his successor. This was the great trouble of his life; the ever-present torture of his soul. To no one had he confided it save to his wife. No one had ever comforted him in the hours of his agonized wrestling with that burden of grief save his wife. Now that is all over. The soul-destroying blue eyes, in whose depths he had sought a new heaven, gave him for heaven the cold, blue ether eternally separating earth from heaven for him. The Czar of all the Russias has no one in whom he can trust. The mightiest of the mighty has no place where he may sleep in peace. The most forlorn pilgrim of the desert is not so utterly alone as is he.

When the last notes of the hymn has died away, and the husband, so long waited for, has not returned, the wife, rising, fetches a portrait of him painted upon ivory, and places it upon the table by the place he should have occupied. It is the portrait of a proud, heroic man, with smiling lip and unclouded brow—such as he was as a bridegroom. She gazes at it long, so long that her eyes are suffused with tears. Nothing is left to her of him but this portrait. He whom it represents has long ceased to smile.

Two sledges, already horsed, are drawn up before the colonnade of the Winter Palace. One is harnessed with six horses, the other with three. Both are closed carriages with drawn blinds. The coachman and footmen belonging to the six-in-hand wear the livery of the Czar; those of the three-horsed sledge that of the Grand Duke. But, on getting into them, the Czar takes the Grand Duke's sledge, the Grand Duke that of the Czar; and as they pass out of the gates, with jingling of bells, the one sledge turns to the right, the other to the left. The six-horsed sledge is followed by an escort of the guards; where it halts, there halts the escort. The three-horsed sledge skims along the road unattended. It is known that the Grand Duke drives home direct; he is a domesticated man. But of the Czar none knows whither he will take his way in the course of the long night; and nowadays it behooves one to be careful; an escort has become a necessity!

Araktseieff had had a sharp tussle that very morning with Chulkin, Chief of Police, and the governor of the city, Miloradovics. There were three sets of police on active duty—military, civil, and secret police. And instead of playing into each other's hands, their sole study seemed to be for each to set the other's regulations at naught. Araktseieff was furious at Chulkin because Chevalier Galban had been set upon and robbed the previous night, not only of his money, but of his papers—papers, among which were many important state secrets. To which Chulkin had retorted that the soldiers on patrol had been the thieves. Hereupon Araktseieff's wrath was turned upon Miloradovics, and he demanded that the officer in command, who had had the inspection on the night past, be sternly reprimanded for lack of supervision. To which the governor returned that the said officer in command was no other than young Araktseieff, his hopeful son. Hereupon Araktseieff waxed still more wroth; but with whom? He fully believed that his son had been Chevalier Galban's plunderer, well knowing him to be capable of the act.

He made no further official inquiry into the matter, merely adding that in future the Household Regiment of Hussars, under his own immediate command, were to accompany the Czar, at a distance, whenever he left the palace. No reliance, evidently, was to be placed on either infantry or police.

Araktseieff possessed a sure instinct which warned him of conspiracies against the Czar, even when he failed to obtain any certain clew. His was the sole and ever-watchful eye that guarded the person of the Czar. He gathered upon his head the detestation of a whole nation in order to protect the head of the one man in whom his entire individuality was merged.