"That's what I think of an American passport," the overseer replied, looking us over with incredible impudence as he walked away.
The rest of Russian officialdom must regard American rights in much the same way, since it is four months now that we have been detained.
I went to the headquarters of the secret police the other day with Mr. Douglas. It is located in the opposite end of the town, down a quiet side street—an unobtrusive, one-storied brown house that gives the impression of trying to hide itself from people's notice. It is reached by a narrow, stone-flagged path, crowded in between two houses which block its view from the street. There are four windows in a row on the front façade, all with the curtains drawn. These four blind windows add to the secretive appearance. Over the front steps the yellowing leaves of a lime tree rustled in the wind and detached themselves one by one.
We rang the bell. While we waited, I was conscious of being watched, and, glancing up quickly, I saw the curtain at one of the windows fall back into place. The door opened a crack, and a white face with a long, thin nose, and horn-rimmed spectacles with smoky glass to hide the eyes, peered out at us furtively. Mr. Douglas handed the spy his card and the door was shut softly in our faces.
In about three minutes the door was opened again, and a gendarme in uniform ushered us into a long room thick with stale tobacco-smoke. He gave me a chair, and while we waited I looked about at the walls with the brightly colored portraits of the Czar and the Czarina and the royal family, and the ikon in one corner. "Give up all hope all ye who enter here."
The room was silent except for the scratch of pens on paper. The secret-service spies sat at long tables, writing laboriously, and smoking. They all wore civilian clothes, and I recognized most of them. I had passed them on the street or sat beside them in restaurants, and three had come with the chief to arrest us. I wondered what they were writing. Some one was being betrayed or ruined. That was how they lived. I looked for the mark of their calling on them, but at first they appeared an ordinary crowd, pale, with a thick, unhealthy pallor, as though from an indoor life. Their suits were poor enough,—worn threadbare,—and their fingernails were dirty. Furtively they glanced up at me and examined me curiously, and then gave quick, frightened looks on either side to see if their comrades had observed their interest in me. What a mediocre, shabby crowd, with their low foreheads and dead-white skin and dirty linen, and, yes, the stamp on them that made them infamous! It was as though their profession affected them the way that living in a close, dark room would, stupefying and making them bestial.
And then the chief came in, accompanied by two spies with black portfolios under their arms. When he saw us, he grew white with anger. He looked like a German, spurred and booted, with square head and jaw and steel-like eyes and compressed, cruel lips. He was the only well-dressed one in the crowd, but his livery was the same as theirs. He was their superior, that was all, and how I loathed him!
"He's angry because we were brought in here," Douglas whispered under his breath.
The chief turned his back on us.