The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia by Abraham Cahan
CHAPTER VI.
A MEETING ON NEW TERMS.
It was an evening in the spring, 1879. The parlour of a wealthy youngengineer in Kharkoff--a slender little man with eyelids that lookedswollen and a mouth that was usually half-open, giving him a drowsyappearance--was filled with Nihilists come to hear "an important manfrom St. Petersburg." The governor of the province had recently beenkilled for the maltreatment of political prisoners and students of thelocal university, while a month later a bold attempt had been made onthe life of the Czar at the capital. The new phase of the movement wasasserting itself with greater and greater emphasis, and the address bythe stranger, who was no other than Pavel Boulatoff, though he was knownhere as Nikolai, was awaited with thrills of impatience.
The room was fairly crowded and the speaker of the evening was on hand,but the managers of the gathering were waiting for several morelisteners. When two of these arrived, one of them proved to be Elkin. Heand Pavel had not met since their graduation from the Miroslavgymnasium. Both wore scant growths of beard and both looked considerablychanged, though Pavel was still slim and boyish of figure and Elkin'sface as anaemic and chalk-coloured as it had been four years ago. Elkinhad been expelled from the University for signing some sort ofpetition. Since then he had nominally been engaged in revolutionarybusiness. In reality he spent his nights in gossip and tea-drinking, andhis days in sleep. Too proud to sponge on his Nihilist friends for morethan tea and bread and an occasional cutlet, and too lazy to givelessons, he was growing ever thinner and lazier. He was a man ofspotless honesty, overflowing with venom, yet endowed with a certainkind of magnetism.
When Elkin discovered who the important revolutionist from St.Petersburg was the blood rushed to his face. It was a most disagreeablesurprise. But Pavel greeted him with a cordiality so free fromconsciousness, and his roaring laughter, as he compared thecircumstances of their last quarrel and those that surrounded theirpresent meeting, was so hearty that Elkin's hostility gave way to afeeling of elation at being so well received by the lion of the evening.He was one of the rank and file of the local "Circles," and theprominence into which Pavel's attention brought him at this meeting, inthe presence of several of his chums, gave him a sense of promotion andtriumph. He wished he could whisper into the ear of everybody presentthat this important revolutionist who was known to the gathering asNikolai was Prince Boulatoff.
"I am still in the dark as to the identity of that girl," said Pavel.
"I shouldn't keep it from you now," the other returned, exposing anexultant lozenge of white teeth. "Next time we meet in Miroslav I shalllook her up and introduce you to her. I have not seen her for a longtime. She is quite an interesting specimen."
"I should like to meet her very much," Pavel said earnestly. "I havebeen wanting to know something about her all along. You see, if therewere a circle in that blessed out-of-the-way town of ours one might beable to find out things, but if there is I have not seen anybody whoknows of its existence. I myself have not been there for two years."
"I was there last summer. There is a small circle there. At least thereare several people who get things through me, but that girl I have notseen for a long time."
"Is it possible? Can it be that you have not tried to get her in?Really, a Miroslav circle without her seems like Hamlet without thePrince of Denmark."
"Yes, she is a lass with some grit to her, and with brains too."
"If she is, we ought to get her in. We ought to get her in."
"She was only sixteen when that affair happened."
"Was she? Well, you wouldn't believe it, but my curiosity about thatgirl has been smouldering ever since. If it were not for her and forpoor Pievakin I might not be in the movement now."
"I see. It needed a little girl to make a convert of a great man likeyou. Well, well. That's interesting," Elkin remarked, with alozenge-shaped sneer; but he hastened to atone for it by adding,ardently: "You're right. She should be in the circle. I'll make it mybusiness to see her next time I am there. I'll go there on purpose, infact."
He was always trying to be clever, for the most part with venom in hisattempts. Friend or foe, whatever humour was his was habitually colouredby an impulse to sting. "For the sake of a pretty word he would notspare his own father," as a Russian proverb phrases it, and his prettywords or puns were usually tinctured with malice.
He painted the Miroslav girl in the most attractive colours. It gavehim a peculiar satisfaction to whet Pavel's curiosity and to be able tosay mutely: "Indeed, she is even more interesting than you suppose, yetwhile you are so crazy to know her, I, who do know her, have not eventhought of getting her into my Circle."
When Pavel was making his speech Elkin, whose natural inclination was todisapprove, listened with an air of patronising concurrence. Pavel'soratory was of the unsophisticated, "hammer-and-tongs," fiery type, yetits general effect, especially when he assailed existing conditions, wasone of complaint. In spite of the full-throated buzz of his voice andthe ferocious rush of his words, he conveyed the impression of aschoolboy laying his grievance before his mother.
Before he took leave from his former classmate the two had another talkof the "heroine of the Pievakin demonstration." It was Elkin who broughtup the subject, which took them back to the time when, from a Nihilistpoint of view, he was Pavel's superior. He found him a ready listener.The student girls of the secret movement, their devotion to the cause,their pluck, the inhuman sufferings which the government inflicted onthose of them who fell into its hands,--all this was the aureole ofPavel's ecstasy. His heart had remained spotless, the wild oats he hadsown during the first weeks of his stay in the capital notwithstanding.The word Woman would fill him with tender whisperings of a felicityhallowed by joint sacrifices, of love crowned with martyrdom, and it waspart of the soliloquies which the sex would breathe into his soul totell himself that he owned his conversion to a girl. But these weresentimentalities of which the Spartan traditions of the undergroundmovement had taught him to be ashamed. Moreover, there was really notime for such things.
During the following summer and fall mines were laid in several placesunder railway tracks over which the Emperor was expected to pass. Therevolutionists missed their aim, but the Czar's narrow escape, coupledwith the gigantic scope of the manifold plot, with the skill and theboldness it implied, and with the fact that the digging of thesesubterranean passages had gone on for months without attracting notice,made a profound impression. Such a display of energy and dexterity onthe part of natives in a country where one was accustomed to trace everybit of enterprise to some foreign agency, could not but produce afascinating effect. The gendarmes were apparently no match for theNihilists.