It had been one of the best moments of her life—yes, certainly—but it did not seem to her that she had done anything remarkable. It had been so absurd to send a man to dwell amidst eternal snows and semi-eternal darkness because he had written a clever novel in which the wiseacres of the third section had seen fit to discover revolutionary doctrines, that when the wife and mother of Boganof, knowing her influence at Court, and having chance of access to her through her steward, threw themselves at her feet one day, and besought her compassion and assistance, she had been surprised into promising her aid, from that generosity and sympathy with courage which always lived beneath the artificiality and indifference of her habits and temper. No doubt they had succeeded because they had come upon her in a bon moment; no doubt they might have found her in moods in which they might as well have appealed to the Japanese bronzes in her vestibule; but, having been touched and surprised into a promise, she had kept it through much difficulty and with an energy which bore down all opposition.
‘She looks as frail as a reed, but she has the force of a lance,’ the autocrat to whom she appealed, and who was at the onset utterly opposed to her petition, had thought as he had answered her coldly that Boganof was a dangerous writer.
‘So were all the Encyclopædists; but the great Catherine was not afraid of them; will you, the Father of your people, refuse to one of those the protection which she was proud to grant to Frenchmen?’ she had said to the Emperor, with many another persuasive and audacious argument, to which he had listened with a smile because the lovely mouth of the Princess Napraxine had spoken them.
‘It was a very noble thing to do,’ repeated Melville.
‘Oh, no,’ she also repeated; ‘it amused me. It frightened everybody else. The Tzar was at Livadia unusually late; there was first to go to him from here; when I reached Livadia, he was everything that was kind to me personally, but I found him terribly angered against the poor novelist, and all his courtiers were of course ready to swear that Boganof was Satan; poor innocent Boganof, with his tender heart always aching over the sorrows of the poor, and the mysteries of animal suffering! I told the Emperor that Boganof was, on the contrary, a type of all that was best in the Russian people; of that obedience, of that faith, of that fortitude, which the Russian possesses in a stronger degree than any other of the races of man. Where will you find as you find in Russia the heroic silence under torture, the unwavering adherence to a lost cause, the power of dying mute for sake of an idea, the uncomplaining surrender of youth, of beauty, of all enjoyment, often of rank and riches, to a mere impersonal duty? They are all sacrificed to dreams, it is true; but they are heroic dreams which have a greatness that looks fine in them, beside the vulgar greeds, and the vulgar content of ordinary life. I said something to that effect to the Tzar. “You fill your mines and prisons, sir, with these people,” I said to him. “Greece would have raised altars to them. They are the brothers of Harmodius; they are the sisters of Læna.” I suppose it is wonderful that he did not send me to the prisons; I dare say, if I had been an ugly woman he would have done; he was, on the contrary, very indulgent, and, though he was hard to move at first, he ended with the utmost leniency.
‘I was really quite in earnest at the time,’ she continued, now, with a little wondering astonishment at such remembrances of herself. ‘ I urged on the Tzar the truth that, when the intellect of a nation is suppressed and persecuted, the nation “dies from the top,” like Swift. I think I convinced him for the moment, but then there were so many other people always at his ear to persuade him that universal convulsion was only to be avoided by corking all the inkbottles, and putting all the writers and readers down the mines. Prince Napraxine, by the way, was in a terrible state when he heard of it all. He was away in Paris at the time, and you may imagine that I did not telegraph to ask his consent. Indeed, he first learnt what I had done from the Russian correspondent of Figaro, and took the whole story for one of Figaro’s impudent fictions. He went to the bureau in a towering rage, and, I think, broke a Malacca cane over a sub-editor. Then he telegraphed to me, and found it was all true enough; he might more wisely have telegraphed first, for the sub-editor brought an action for assault against him, and he had a vast deal of money to pay. He abhors the very name of Boganof. Last New Year’s day I had all Boganof’s novels in the Russian text, bound in vellum, as a present from him; I thought he would have had an apoplectic fit.’
Her pretty, chill laughter completed the sentence.
‘My honesty, however, compels me to confess,’ she continued, ‘that for an unheroic boulevardier and a strongly conservative tchin like my husband, the position was a trying one. He abhors literature, liberal doctrines, and newspaper publicity; and the story of my journey for and with Boganof met him in every journal, in every club, in every city of Europe. The publicity annoyed me myself very much. I think the way in which journalists seize on everything and exaggerate it to their own purposes will, in time, prevent any action, a little out of the common, ever taking place at all. People will shut themselves up in their own shells like oysters. I should have left Boganof to the governor of Tobolsk, who was so anxious to keep him, if I had ever foreseen the annoyance which the Press was destined to cause me about him. When I met the Tzar afterwards he said, “Well, Princess, are you still convinced now that the ink-bottle contains the most harmless and holy of fluids?” and I answered him that I granted it might contain a good deal of gas and a good deal of gall, yet still I thought it wiser not to cork it.’
‘Princess,’ said Melville, with a little hesitation, ‘one cannot but regret that a person capable of such fine sympathy and such noble effort as yourself should pass nearly the whole of her time in sedulously endeavouring to persuade the world that she has no heart and herself that she has no soul. Why do you do it?’
She gave a little contemptuous gesture. ‘I do not believe I have either,’ she said. ‘ When I was a tiny child, my father said to me, “Douchka, you will have no dower, but you will have plenty of wit, two big eyes, and a white skin.” The possession of these three things has always been the only fact I have ever been sure of, really! Do not begin to talk theologically; you are delightful as a man of the world, but as a priest you would bore me infinitely. One thinks out all that sort of thing for oneself: ostensibly, I am of the Greek Church; actually, I am of Victor Hugo’s creed, which has never been able to find a key to the mystery of the universe, “Quelle loi a donné la bête effarée à l’homme cruel?” The horse strains and shivers under the whip, the brutal drunkard kicks him in his empty stomach: God looks on, if He exist at all, in entire indifference throughout tens of thousands of ages. You say the patient animal has no soul, and that the sodden drunkard has one. I do not admire your religion, which enables you placidly to accept such an absurdity, and such an injustice, as a Divine creation. Do not say that poets do no good; they do more than priests, my dear friend. I had been reading that poem of Hugo’s, the Melancholia, at the moment when Boganof’s wife and mother brought their petition to me. It had made me in a mood for pity. You know that is the utmost a woman ever has of any goodness—a mere mood. It is why we are so dangerous in revolutions: we slay one minute, and weep the next, and dance the next, and are sincere enough in it all. If they had come to me when I had been annoyed about anything, or when I had had a toilette I disliked, or a visit that had wearied me, I should have said “No,” and left Boganof in Siberia. It was the merest chance, the merest whim—all due to the Melancholia.’