Well, at the time and place that I told him of, surely enough, the police turned up, and naturally they found nobody there. But during the two following nights twenty fresh arrests took place; and I was one of those arrested. My cousins’ friend, feeling himself discovered and menaced, had made haste to deliver us into the hands of our enemies!
“I WAITED A MOMENT TO TAKE BREATH.”
That evening I had come home rather late, and had then sat and chatted for a long while with aunt Vera, so that it was well towards midnight before I started to go to bed. Half-way upstairs, I was stopped by a noise; footsteps and stifled voices, mingled with the clang of spurs and sabres. I waited a moment, to take breath, which had failed me suddenly; then I went back downstairs. A violent pull at the bell, an imperative pull, sounded at the garden gate; and in a moment was followed by another at the door of the house. It woke the old nurse, and brought my aunt Vera from her room. Having been a little forewarned by me of the possibility of such a visit as this, she questioned me with a frightened glance. I answered “Yes,” by a sign of the head, and begged her under my breath to delay “them” as long as possible before letting “them” come in. The idea of being able to render me a service, perhaps the last, gave her strength and courage; and while slowly, very slowly, she moved towards the door, where the nocturnal visitors were getting impatient and trying to force the lock, I went into the dining-room. A moment later I heard her sweet trembling voice assuring Monsieur le Colonel de Gendarmerie that there was no one in the house; all the family were at Moroznoië; my uncle had been in town on Monday, but had left again on Tuesday, and wouldn’t return till the end of next week; and there was no one here but herself, the speaker, and a young lady visiting her. In this little respite, which I had arranged for myself without too well knowing why, I remained inert in the room, lighted feebly by a single candle, and tried to gather my thoughts together: they were slow enough to respond to my efforts. My first notion was that of flight, and, automatically, I opened a window. Close at hand, behind some shrubbery, I perceived the glitter of a gendarme’s uniform. There would surely be others in the garden and in the courtyard; and for the rest, fly—? How, and whither? I shut the window, and coming back to the middle of the room, I caught a glimpse of myself in the chimney-glass. I was very pale. Was I going to be a coward? This question, and that pale face in the mirror, awoke in me other thoughts, brought back to my memory other faces: that of my brother, who, a few months before, had gone so bravely from his home, to which he would never return, to the prison that he would perhaps never leave; those of friends lately arrested; those of so many, many noble men and women. Was I going to be a coward? So the examples set by these others turned my attention from myself, calmed me, gave me strength. I could hear the voice of Colonel P——, who, impatient of my aunt’s parleying, briefly bade her hold her tongue, and conduct him to the presence of her niece, Mademoiselle Sophie. That voice, rude and gross, had the effect of changing the moral depression which I had felt a moment ago into a sort of intense nervous excitement; and at the moment when the Colonel, followed by his men, appeared upon the threshold of the dining-room, honouring me with the very least respectful of bows, I, instead of saluting him in return, met him with a gaze as fixed and haughty as his own.
“MET HIM WITH A GAZE AS FIXED AND HAUGHTY AS HIS OWN.”
A minute later the Colonel was installed at the dinner-table, with the whole household arraigned before him, and everybody forbidden to leave the room. He asked my aunt Vera for the keys of the house, and the search began. The gendarmes scattered themselves through all the rooms, through the garden, the courtyard, the offices, and turned everything upside down, emptying wardrobes and cupboards, unmaking the beds, moving the articles of furniture to see that nothing was hidden behind them, and trying the screws to discover if there were any secret drawers. In my bedroom, which was of course the object of a very particular attention, a spy dressed in civilian’s costume got up on the tables and chairs, and tapped on the walls. Another drew the ashes, still hot, from the stove, and examined them by the light of a lamp, held by a big gendarme. From time to time these men would come back to the dining-room, bringing armfuls of books, and school papers belonging to my cousins, which they would deposit upon the table before Colonel P——. After looking them over, he would throw them aside with such manifest ill humour, that I, who by this time had myself completely under control, couldn’t let the occasion pass to condole with him on the sad nature of his trade. The whole search was a useless and odious farce, for I knew that there was nothing in the house of the kind they were looking for. Still I wasn’t sorry to let them prolong it, for that gave me more time to stay there at home, beside my aunt Vera, who, smaller and feebler and paler than ever, turned her dear eyes, full of fear and tenderness, upon my face, and kept stroking my hand with her two trembling ones.
“A LAMP HELD BY A BIG GENDARME.”
The search was nearly over, when a gendarme came in from the stable with a great parcel of books, done up in green cloth, which he laid before the Colonel. Opened, the parcel proved to contain not books only, but forbidden books—books by Herbert Spencer, by Mr. Ruskin, by Monsieur Renan! I was astonished at seeing them, and my first thought was that they belonged to my brother, who might have forgotten them there in the stable, or to my cousins, who, without being revolutionists, were interested in forbidden literature just because it was forbidden. So when the Colonel, having finished his inspection of them, asked me whom they belonged to, I answered quietly, “To me.” My aunt Vera, to whom I had always promised never to bring “forbidden” things into the house, looked at me sadly, reproachfully. Ah! my dear aunt, I lied in saying they were mine; but in my situation a few forbidden books couldn’t matter much; whereas for the others, for my innocent cousins—who knows what serious trouble they might have got them into?