CHAPTER XV.

A WARNING.

It was one o'clock when the assemblage broke up. They scattered over various sections of the town, Pavel going to his home in the Palace, while Clara, accompanied by Elkin and Orlovsky, set off in the direction of Paradise Town. But whatever the character of the district one was bound for, in their hearts there was the same feeling that they belonged to a higher life than did those who slept behind the closed shutters they were passing. This feeling made them think of their group as a world within a world. Their Circle was a magic one. Somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kieff, Odessa, Siberia, men and women were being slowly tortured, dying on the gallows; a group of brave people still at large--the mysterious Executive Committee--was doing things that thrilled the empire; and they, members of the Miroslav Circle, were the kin of those heroes. As they dispersed through the sleeping town each unconsciously remembered the organisation as so many superior beings dotting a population of human prose.

"He must be quite close to the Centre," Orlovsky said.

The other two made no answer. It struck Clara as sacrilege to talk of Boulatoff, whose fervent face was vivid before her at this minute. Particularly unbearable was the allusion to the prince to her because it was Orlovsky who made it. The stout government clerk was one of the men in love with her, while she often disliked him to abhorrence. She felt a sincere friendship for him, yet sometimes when he spoke she would be tempted to shut her ears and to gnash her teeth as people do when they hear a window pane scratched. This was one of her causeless hatreds with which she was perpetually struggling.

Orlovsky construed their irresponsiveness as a rebuke for his speaking of the revolutionary "centre" in the street; so he started to tell them about his mother. With Clara by his side his tongue would not rest. Not so Elkin, who nursed his love in morose silence. When they heard the whistle of a distant policeman and the answer of a watchman's rattle by way of showing that he had not fallen asleep on his post, Orlovsky raised his voice.

"She is getting more pious every day," he said, as though defying the invisible policeman to find anything seditious in his words.

Clara's mind was on Boulatoff. The strange avowal of the man whom she had never seen before save through the window of a princely carriage tingled through her veins in a medley of new-born exaltations. Boulatoff did seem to be close to the Executive Committee, and the sentiments of that wonderful body, voiced by this high-born young man, the nephew of the governor of Miroslav, had lit stirring images in her consciousness. Pavel stood out amid the other revolutionists of her acquaintance even as the whole Miroslav Circle did in the midst of the rest of her native town.

The interchange of signals between policeman and watchman which now and then sounded through the stillness of the night reminded her of the unknown man the gendarmes had arrested, of the hard glint of chains, of gallows. She wondered whether Elkin or Boulatoff knew anything about that man. She saw herself rapidly marching toward something at once terrible and divine. She was not the only one who followed this course--that was the great point. The kindest and best people in Miroslav, the best and the wisest in the land, and among them children of governors, of noblemen, were consecrated to that same something which was both terrible and luring. Her heart went out to her comrades known and unknown, and as she beheld a sleepy watchman curled up in the recess of his gateway, she exclaimed without words: "I'm going to die for you--for you and all the other poor and oppressed people in the world."

Here and there they passed an illuminated window or an open street door, through which they saw Jewish artisans at work. They saw the bent forms of Jewish tailors, they heard the hammer sounds of Jewish carpenters, tinsmiths, blacksmiths, silversmiths; yet all these made no impression upon her. There were about 50,000 Jews in Miroslav and as many as three-fourths of them were pinched, half-starved mechanics, working fourteen hours a day, and once or twice a week all night, to live on rye bread and oatmeal soup; yet they made no appeal to her sympathies, while the Gentiles who were huddled up in front of the gates she was passing