Part 12

Douniasha looked radiantly happy; she was dressed in pale green, and wore a necklace of bright beads; but Anoushka, in her pink silk finery, looked as white as a ghost, and said no word during the whole evening. And when Dimitri danced with her and kissed her, she seemed no more to notice him than if he had been a phantom.

They danced all night, but never once during all those hours of mirth and gaiety, did Anoushka smile.

Three weeks later preparations were made for the wedding. Vichareff bought provisions; the wedding was to be a magnificent one. The landowner lent his horses, and Anoushka and Douniasha were to be driven to the church in two troikas. Dimitri had a new salmon-pink shirt for the occasion, and in his high boots there was an unusual number of creases; he appeared with pride to show himself to Anoushka, but she took no notice of him. On her wedding day she was paler than ever, and her eyes were red with crying. Dimitri asked her if anything was the matter with her and whether she was not feeling well; but she said that she was perfectly well. So he attributed her strange appearance and ways to the inscrutable habits of womankind, and asked no further questions. But, shortly before the wedding pairs were to leave for the church, Anoushka went to her mother and said that she could not marry Dimitri. Her mother said that she supposed the child had another sweetheart; such was the way of girls. But if she had, it was of no consequence, she said; she would soon forget him. In any case she was to marry Dimitri, and that immediately.

Then Anoushka broke into a passion of weeping, and begged and implored her mother not to let her marry Dimitri; and her mother lost patience, and said she deserved to be beaten; that she never heard such nonsense in her life.

“Now stop that crying,” she ended by saying, “or I will call your father, and he shall put an end to this nonsense!”

Then Anoushka dried her tears and said: “Very well, since it is so, let it be so. But I will never be Dimitri’s wife!”

Then the troikas drove up to the cottage door, their bells jangling and tinkling, and the bridal couples all in their best clothes were driven off at a canter to the church, and the wedding took place. And Anoushka and Douniasha were crowned with gold crowns, and walked round the altar (which was placed in the centre of the church with a tall candle on it) in memory of David dancing round the Ark, according to the rite of the Orthodox Church. After the ceremony was over, they drove home once more and the feasting, which had already lasted one day, began again. The two bridegrooms were taken by their friends through the village, stopping at nearly every cottage to have their healths drunk, and to join in the toasts, while crowds of children followed them, some of them beating small tom-toms and scrambling every fifty yards or so for sugar, which was thrown to them in handfuls by the bridegrooms and their friends.

Towards the evening the bridegrooms were fairly intoxicated, although they could both walk quite straight and speak without difficulty. In Vichareff’s house an uproarious feast ended in general music and dancing, which took place on the green in front of the cottage. In the yard behind the house a special chamber, like a tent, had been made for Anoushka, hung with pieces of striped linen. The dancing company ultimately moved from Vichareff’s house and visited various parts of the village, settling now here and now there, and gaining fresh liveliness and zest at each place where it settled. Anoushka was left alone, and shortly afterwards Dimitri returned. He went into the cottage and saw that it was empty. He then went into the yard and into the tent which had been prepared; and glimmering in the darkness he saw the tall white figure of Anoushka standing up. He called to her, but she did not answer. Being half-intoxicated he could not see clearly, and he was not sure whether it was in reality Anoushka or not that he seemed to see. He called once more, as loudly as he could, and, receiving no answer, he walked up to her and grasped her by the arm, and as he did so her whole body swung backwards and forwards as though it were dancing on air. Then in a moment he grew sober, for he realised that Anoushka had hanged herself, and he went and shouted for the neighbours. The body was cut down, and efforts were made to restore her to life, but she had already been dead about an hour, and there was nothing more to be done.

The next day Dimitri’s father and Vichareff held a consultation; Vichareff even said that he considered his bargain cancelled, and Dimitri’s father, after a great deal of argument, refused to admit that this was so. Ultimately Vichareff’s cunning mind found a way out of the matter. “Why should not Dimitri,” he said, “marry Natasha my third daughter? It is true she is only fifteen, but she is a good strong girl, and will make him a good wife. And then,” he added, “we can have the wedding at once, so that the food shall not be wasted, and we shall thus be spared the burden and expense of two weddings.”

So this was arranged, and the priest was informed of it. But the priest declined to celebrate the wedding, and said that such a proceeding was unchristian and inhuman; they must be married, he said, after a decent interval of time had elapsed.

Vichareff and Dimitri’s father were forced to comply, for public opinion in the village was entirely on the side of the priest; but the wedding food, so far from being wasted, did double service all the same, for it served to satisfy the guests who thronged to Anoushka’s funeral; so that in these days in the village there was both dirge in marriage and mirth in funeral.

THE GOVERNOR’S NIECE

Irina Andreevna T---- was a fair-haired, blue-eyed girl aged twenty-two. She went to lectures at the St. Petersburg University in the daytime; in the evening she went to balls and parties. Irina was an orphan, but she lived with an aunt of hers in a large house in St. Petersburg, where on Thursday evenings there was always a considerable gathering of girls and young men, officers chiefly.

When the war broke out in 1904, Irina spent all the days at the hospital, learning to tend the sick and the wounded, and making bandages and clothes for the soldiers at the war. In 1905, when peace was declared, and followed by tumultuous events, she was deeply infected by the atmosphere of excitement which prevailed everywhere, the wild hopes and the great expectations. She went to public meetings and attended private discussions--the private discussions of small groups of students, men and women, which took place in private houses. All the people who attended these informal meetings belonged, as far as their political opinions were concerned, to the Extreme Left. Some of them called themselves Social Democrats, others Social Revolutionaries. Irina’s special friend belonged to the extremer shade of the latter party. Irina’s nature was enthusiastic; she hated compromise. She wanted all or nothing. Violent means such as terrorism or assassination seemed to her of no account where the cause was great and the end noble.

As the months went on, she became more and more closely bound to the more ardent spirits among the Social Revolutionaries, and they regarded her as one of their most inspiring leaders. But she continued during all this time to live the ordinary life of the St. Petersburg society, to talk and dance with the young officers at evening parties, and go to the opera, and to take part in sledging and ski-ing parties. Neither her relations nor any of her ordinary acquaintances suspected the intensity of the inner life that was going on within her. They knew she was interested in politics, but so was everybody else. Her friends chaffed her for being what they called “red”; but then a great many people were red.

In February 1906, her uncle, General Steinberg, a brother of her deceased father, was appointed to the Governorship of O., a large manufacturing city. It was just at this time that she joined the branch of the Social Revolutionaries which called themselves Maximalists, and whose business it was to remove by violence the persons whom they considered to be obstacles in the way of their cause. These people, when they had decided that some one should be removed, drew lots among themselves as to who should accomplish the deed of destruction.

It so happened that, in February 1906, the Executive Committee of the Maximalists condemned General Steinberg to death for suppressing certain riots in the town of O., during which affray a certain number of workmen had been killed and wounded. Lots were drawn as to who should kill General Steinberg--and the lot fell to Irina, his niece. She received the decision with calm, and made preparations for leaving St. Petersburg. She told her aunt she was going to Moscow to stay with some intimate friends of the family: from Moscow it is but a short distance to O. Her relations saw her off at the station, also a young man in the regiment of the Chevalier-Gardes, who was particularly devoted to her. She seemed in excellent spirits.

When she arrived at Moscow she went straight to O., and stayed at the hotel, from whence she wrote a letter to her uncle saying that she was on her way to the estate of her St. Petersburg relations, which was a night’s journey from O. Everything was made easy for her, for the next morning she received a letter from him asking her to come to luncheon at half-past twelve.

The next morning at the appointed time she started off in a sledge to the Governor’s house, wrapped in a fur _shuba_, and in her muff was concealed a small dynamite bomb capable of enormous destruction.

Her uncle greeted her with the utmost simplicity and affection. He was a short, grey-haired man between fifty and sixty, with a thick grey moustache and kind blue eyes. He was a widower and had no children. He took her into his sitting-room.

“My dear little Irina,” he said, kissing her on both cheeks, “it is years since I’ve seen you; I should not have recognised you, you’ve grown into such a lovely grown-up creature. It is lucky that I have been appointed here, just on your way to X. (the country estate of Irina’s relations), but why did you go to the hotel? Another time you must stay here. And mind, I expect to see you often now; you must stop here every time you go to X. There is always plenty of room in this old barrack of a house. But come, we will go and have something to eat.” And he took her into the dining-room. “We shall be quite alone,” he said. “It is better, isn’t it? When you were a little girl, when we were all at X. together, you used to love pancakes; you never could have enough; so I’ve had some made to-day. And my cook understands how to make them properly.”

Irina blurted out a few confused phrases. Her uncle could not get over the fact that she was grown up; that she was a tall and pretty girl. He took her to the window to observe her properly, and he kept on making exclamations of admiration and surprise. Then he led her to the sideboard, and chose out for her titbits among the hot and cold _zakouski_ (hors-d’oeuvre) that were there.

“It does one good,” he said, “to see a face like yours in this detestable hole. I can’t tell you what a life it is. One never has a moment’s peace, and nobody is satisfied. There are fifteen or sixteen different parties in the town, all quarrelling. I have to settle everything. There are Revolutionaries, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries, Maximalists, Minimalists, merchants, students, Jews, anti-Jews, Reactionaries, the Alliance of the Russian People--all fighting against each other, and all appealing to me to settle their difficulties; and if one does manage to keep things smooth, what thanks does one get from the Government? Absolutely none. The other day all the Reactionaries, the Alliance of the Russian People, and so forth, met together and sang the National Hymn and collected a crowd of hooligans, and went to set fire to the school. I had to go down and make a speech to them, and it was with the greatest difficulty I got them away.

“Then the other day there was a man called Savin, who was arrested for making revolutionary propaganda among the troops. He sent and appealed to me to be allowed to go and see his son, who, he said, was dying of scarlet fever. I gave him permission, and it turned out that the son had not got scarlet fever at all; that the whole thing was a pretext; and he took advantage of the occasion to shoot a policeman and to get away. The result of this is that the Reactionaries here say I am a Revolutionary, and, of course, the Revolutionaries say I’m a satrap and a brutal oppressor, and all the rest of it. But it doesn’t matter what one does, it is impossible to satisfy any one. And every day I receive threatening letters from both sides: letters from people telling me I am a traitor to my country, that I am sold to the Jews and in league with England and all the Continental finance; and others saying that I am an executioner, and the enemy of freedom and of light. However, why should I bore you with all these stories? Let’s talk of more cheerful things.”

They sat down at the table.

“Here are the pancakes,” he said. “The country is turned upside down, but we have to go on eating pancakes just the same, don’t we? The best thing is not to think at all in times like this.”

Irina looked at him and smiled; she found it difficult to speak. But he did not give her much opportunity, for he went on gaily, talking first about one thing, then about another--of the coming elections, of the plays that were being acted in St. Petersburg and Moscow, of the modern literature and its hysterical tendencies; and he told many amusing anecdotes illustrating the strange anomalies and the curious ideas that were rife in the present condition of things.

When they had finished eating, he said: “Now, you must come into my own sitting-room, where no one is allowed to disturb me, and I will have at least a half-hour of human intercourse before I go back to my convict’s existence; because, you know, my dear, a Governor’s life is worse than a convict’s. At least, a convict does not have to make up his mind twenty hundred times a day about questions which cannot be solved at all.”

He led her into his sitting-room, which was as simply furnished as possible: it contained a large writing-table and a low divan; the carpets had holes in them; there was a gramophone and a small piano.

“That gramophone,” he said, “is my one consolation. When I am tired I turn it on and listen to gipsy songs and to Caruso.” He hummed a tune from an Italian opera. “It’s a beautiful gramophone; you must hear it,” and he fixed a Caruso record on it which sang a song from _Cavalleria Rusticana_. When this was over he talked on for about twenty minutes, of the memories of his youth, of his travels, and many trifling episodes concerning their common relations and acquaintances. Presently he looked at his watch. “My time is really up,” he said, “and now I want to talk to you seriously. You know, Irina, I am alone in the world, and you have got no parents either; so that in a kind of way I look upon myself as your father, and I want you to treat me like a father. I want you to come here whenever you like and to confide in me if ever you have anything that troubles you in any way. And I will always be ready to do anything I can for you; because, you know, little Irina, I am very, very fond of you. And now, I’m afraid my time is up, and I must go back to my work.”

He kissed her on both cheeks, and made the sign of the cross on her face. “God bless you,” he said.

Irina left the house, and the General rang for his aide-de-camp and settled down to his work.

Ten minutes later a loud explosion was heard in the street where the hotel was situated at which Irina had stopped. She had thrown her bomb, but the street was empty at the time, and she had killed no one save herself.

A POLICE OFFICER

It was the fourth day of the armed rising in Moscow. Early in the morning some of the shops had opened, especially the tobacconists, and there had been a certain amount of movement in the streets; but later on, towards noon, a stillness had again descended on the city. From the centre of the town came the noise of artillery, and in the side streets one heard a ceaseless clicking of firing, though one could not tell whence it came or where it was going on.

At half-past six in the evening, when Alexander Petrovitch Pavlov, a police officer, went home to dinner, all the city seemed empty, quiet and deserted, yet at the same time full of an intermittent, unwonted noise. He went down the Square from the Governor’s house where he had had business, past the Hotel Dresden, and stopped to say a few words to the policeman there on duty. The policeman, in reply to some question he had vaguely asked (for Alexander Petrovitch was tired, sick of the whole business and discouraged by what seemed to him to be a tissue of absurdities), said: “They are fools, little fools--nothing will come of it.” He did not pay much attention to this; he was thinking how absurd the whole matter was, and what a nuisance these abnormal upheavings were when they were prolonged.

Alexander Petrovitch was a man about forty years of age. He had been an officer in an infantry regiment and had once been a man of considerable means, but he had lost all his money quite suddenly playing cards. He had been fond of adventure, and had even taken part in foreign wars in Cuba, in Greece, and in China. Then he married. He did this as he had done everything else, suddenly and impulsively. He married the daughter of a landowner whom he met in a provincial town, and he married her after three days’ acquaintance. His wife was good-looking and prided herself on her European culture; she spoke French and English. They had two children. It was after his marriage that he had lost his money, and shortly before the war. When the war broke out he went to Manchuria. He was wounded at the battle of Mukden and promoted to be a captain; he also received two orders. After Mukden he was invalided home and some influential person who had met him in the Far East obtained for him a place in the police at Moscow, for which he received good pay. He was what is called in Russian a “Pristav”; that is to say, the police officer of a town district. His wife considered that this position was an inferior one; she was humiliated by it. She also considered her husband to be beneath her in social rank (which was in reality absurd) and she constantly reminded him of the fact. Alexander Petrovitch was quick-witted, good-natured, impulsive, but hopelessly incapable of any prolonged effort or any sort of concentration or fixity of purpose. His mind continually went off at a tangent, and as a Russian proverb says, “there was no Tsar in his head.”

When the Manifesto of the 17th of October had been published he had greeted it with enthusiasm, and had taken part in the processions which had filled the streets that day, and the crowds that sang the “Marseillaise” and “God Save the Emperor,” alternately, and displayed together the red and the National flag. But now he was discouraged. His innate scepticism and his pessimism which every now and then gave way to fitful outbursts of enthusiasm, had once more got the upper hand, and he muttered as he walked home through the snowy streets on that grey evening: “What a beastly state of things! What a beastly state of things!”

When he got home he saw at a glance that his wife was not in the best of tempers.

“Late as usual!” she said. “The soup’s been standing twenty minutes and it’s quite cold.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said; “I was kept at the Governor’s.” He sat down to the table on which there were a few sardines in a broken saucer, a little stale pickled caviare which had got hard and slightly grey, and some slices of sausage no longer fresh. He gulped down three small glasses of vodka.

“What about Ermolov?” asked his wife.

“He has been arrested,” said Alexander Petrovitch. “He will be examined by the doctors.”

“What nonsense!” said his wife, “why should he be examined? Why should he be arrested? I think he ought to be rewarded. They don’t care who they kill; they shoot policemen round the corner; they profit by the red cross uniform to kill the police; they were shooting from some of the churches to-day.”

Ermolov was a high police official who had walked into a doctor’s house the day before and had shot him with a pistol for no reason at all.

Alexander Petrovitch shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the Government’s fault,” he said. “There is no order and no law anywhere. Protection is everything. What does it matter what the Revolutionaries do? That has nothing to do with the question. If an officer breaks the law he ought to be punished. He won’t be punished because he’s got protection. Besides which, Ermolov is not a normal man: he is mad, quite mad.”

“What I say is,” said his wife, “that men who pretend to be doctors and use the protection of the red cross badges to shoot innocent policemen in the streets, ought to be shot in the street at sight.”

“The whole thing is absurd!” said Alexander Petrovitch.

“What did I tell you?” said his wife; “I told you so from the very first when the Manifesto was published. I said that nothing would come of it, and that it was a mistake. What do we want with a Constitution in Russia? It is all the Jews--all this chaos is the work of the Jews. And look what is happening now. One cannot even go out into the streets for fear of being shot. They killed the Schwetzar (the hall porter) next door this morning; he had been sent on a message.”

“If people would stay at home and mind their own business,” said Alexander Petrovitch, “they would be quite safe. All day long I have been pestered by people who want to pass here and want to pass there; and they know quite well they can’t. And it’s no good telling them ‘Don’t go there, it’s dangerous; don’t go there, you’ll be shot,’ because the moment you tell them that, they make a point of going there at once. I’m sick of always saying the same thing. If they go out in the streets they must expect to be killed.”

“These students and these Jews,” said his wife, “come and shoot you round the corner. I always said this would be the end of it. I always said no good would come of it. It is disgraceful!”

Alexander Petrovitch settled down to his dinner, and, putting a napkin under his chin, began to eat the soup, but it was cold and he had no appetite.

“Where are the children?” he said.

“They’ve had their dinner,” said his wife. “Kolia and Peter are reading in the next room.”

Alexander Petrovitch called his children, and two little boys came into the room. Kolia, a fair-haired, pasty-faced boy with large grey eyes, was aged nine, and Peter, a fat, dark-haired little creature in a sailor’s suit was aged seven. Peter climbed on to his father’s knee and his father asked him what he had been doing.

“We’ve been making bombs with the snow,” said Peter; “and playing at the Revolution. Kolia was a policeman and I was a Social Democrat, and I made a bomb and threw it at him and killed him.”

“How dare you play such games?” said their mother--“that’s all your fault,” she added to her husband; “it’s you who have put such ideas into their heads. Heaven knows when children begin to get such ideas; I think the end of the world is come. Look at our schools: the children can’t read; the universities are all in the hands of the Jews. The girls at school have all gone quite mad. Nothing but hysteria, hysteria, hysteria! It’s a disgrace. Don’t let me ever hear of your playing such games again,” she said to the children.

The children, used to perpetual scolding, said nothing. Alexander Petrovitch laughed.