I felt very sorry for poor Stepanovna in her trouble. She was a fine type of woman in her way, though her views on things were often crude. But it must be remembered that she was only a peasant. As I was crossing the threshold of the cathedral, something moved me to turn back for a moment, and I saw Stepanovna shuffle up to the altar and fall on her knees. Then I came away.
I was resolved to get the Policeman on the job at once to find out the circumstances of Varia’s case, which I felt sure could not be serious. But I was not destined to make this investigation. I never saw either Varia or Stepanovna again, nor was it possible for me to discover what ultimately became of them. Tossed hither and thither by the caprice of circumstance, I found myself shortly afterwards suddenly placed in a novel and unexpected situation, of which and its results, if the reader have patience to read a little further, he will learn.
CHAPTER VII
FINLAND
Stáraya Derévnya, which means “the Old Village,” is a remote suburb of Petrograd, situated at the mouth of the most northerly branch of the River Neva, overlooking the Gulf of Finland. It is a poor and shabby locality, consisting of second-rate summer villas and a few small timber-yards and logmen’s huts. In winter when the gulf is frozen it is the bleakest of bleak places, swept by winds carrying the snow in the blizzard-like clouds across the dreary desert of ice. You cannot tell then where land ends and seas begins, for the flats, the shores, the marshes, and the sea lie hidden under a common blanket of soft and sand-like snowdrifts. In olden times I loved to don my skis and glide gently from the world into that vast expanse of frozen water, and there, miles out, lie down and listen to the silence.
A few days after I had parted from Stepanovna in the Kazan Cathedral, I sat in one of the smallest and remotest huts of Stáraya Derévnya. It was eleven o’clock of a dark and windless night. Except for the champing of a horse outside, the silence was broken only by the grunting and snoring of a Finnish contrabandist lying at full length on the dirty couch. Once, when the horse neighed, the Finn rose hurriedly with a curse. Lifting the latch cautiously, he stole out and led the animal round to the seaward side of the cottage, where it would be less audible from the road. Having recently smuggled a sleigh-load of butter into the city, he was now returning to Finland—with me.
It was after midnight when we drove out, and, conditions being good, the drive over the sea to a point well along the Finnish coast, a distance of some forty-odd miles, was to take us between four and five hours. The sledge was of the type known as drovny, a wooden one, broad and low, filled with hay. The drovny, used mostly for farm haulage, is my favourite kind of sledge, and nestling comfortably at full length under the hay I thought of long night-drives in the interior in days gone by, when someone used to ride ahead on horseback with a torch to keep away the wolves.
In a moment we were out, flying at breakneck speed across the ice, windswept after recent storms. The half-inch of frozen snow just gave grip to the horse’s hoofs. Twice, suddenly bumping into snow ridges, we capsized completely. When we got going again the runners sang just like a saw-mill. The driver noticed this too, and was alive to the danger of being heard from shore a couple of miles away; but his sturdy pony, exhilarated by the keen frosty air, was hard to restrain.
Some miles out of Petrograd there lies on an island in the Finnish Gulf the famous fortress of Cronstadt, one of the most impregnable in the world. Search-lights from the fortress played from time to time across the belt of ice, separating the fortress from the northern shore. The passage through this narrow belt was the crucial point in our journey. Once past Cronstadt we should be in Finnish waters and safe.
To avoid danger from the searchlights, the Finn drove within a mile of the mainland, the runners hissing and singing like saws. As we entered the narrows a dazzling beam of light swept the horizon from the fortress, catching us momentarily in its track; but we were sufficiently near the shore not to appear as a black speck adrift on the ice.