Chapter 2

He had a turgid, sentimental
wife, always weeping and cramming her religious notions down his throat.

Of course someone asked Rouletabille what he thought of Russia, but he
had no more than opened his mouth to reply than Athanase Georgevitch
closed it by interrupting:

“Permettez! Permettez! You others, of the young generation, what do you
know of it? You need to have lived a long time and in all its districts
to appreciate Russia at its true value. Russia, my young sir, is as yet
a closed book to you.”

“Naturally,” Rouletabille answered, smiling.

“Well, well, here’s your health! What I would point out to you first of
all is that it is a good buyer of champagne, eh?”--and he gave a huge
grin. “But the hardest drinker I ever knew was born on the banks of the
Seine. Did you know him, Feodor Feodorovitch? Poor Charles Dufour, who
died two years ago at fete of the officers of the Guard. He wagered at
the end of the banquet that he could drink a glassful of champagne to
the health of each man there. There were sixty when you came to count
them. He commenced the round of the table and the affair went splendidly
up to the fifty-eighth man. But at the fifty-ninth--think of the
misfortune!--the champagne ran out! That poor, that charming, that
excellent Charles took up a glass of vin dore which was in the glass
of this fifty-ninth, wished him long life, drained the glass at one
draught, had just time to murmur, ‘Tokay, 1807,’ and fell back dead! Ah,
he knew the brands, my word! and he proved it to his last breath! Peace
to his ashes! They asked what he died of. I knew he died because of the
inappropriate blend of flavors. There should be discipline in all things
and not promiscuous mixing. One more glass of champagne and he would
have been drinking with us this evening. Your health, Matrena Petrovna.
Champagne, Feodor Feodorovitch! Vive la France, monsieur! Natacha, my
child, you must sing something. Boris will accompany you on the guzla.
Your father will enjoy it.”

All eyes turned toward Natacha as she rose.

Rouletabille was struck by her serene beauty. That was the first
enthralling impression, an impression so strong it astonished him, the
perfect serenity, the supreme calm, the tranquil harmony of her noble
features. Natacha was twenty. Heavy brown hair circled about er forehead
and was looped about her ears, which were half-concealed. Her profile
was clear-cut; her mouth was strong and revealed between red, firm lips
the even pearliness of her teeth. She was of medium height. In walking
she had the free, light step of the highborn maidens who, in primal
times, pressed the flowers as they passed without crushing them. But all
her true grace seemed to be concentrated in her eyes, which were deep
and of a dark blue. The impression she made upon a beholder was very
complex. And it would have been difficult to say whether the calm which
pervaded every manifestation of her beauty was the result of conscious
control or the most perfect ease.

She took down the guzla and handed it to Boris, who struck some
plaintive preliminary chords.

“What shall I sing?” she inquired, raising her father’s hand from the
back of the sofa where he rested and kissing it with filial tenderness.

“Improvise,” said the general. “Improvise in French, for the sake of our
guest.”

“Oh, yes,” cried Boris; “improvise as you did the other evening.”

He immediately struck a minor chord.

Natacha looked fondly at her father as she sang:

“When the moment comes that parts us at the close of day,
when the Angel of Sleep covers you with azure wings;
“Oh, may your eyes rest from so many tears, and your oppressed
heart have calm;
“In each moment that we have together, Father dear, let our
souls feel harmony sweet and mystical;
“And when your thoughts may have flown to other worlds, oh, may
my image, at least, nestle within your sleeping eyes.”

Natacha’s voice was sweet, and the charm of it subtly pervasive. The
words as she uttered them seemed to have all the quality of a prayer and
there were tears in all eyes, excepting those of Michael Korsakoff, the
second orderly, whom Rouletabille appraised as a man with a rough heart
not much open to sentiment.

“Feodor Feodorovitch,” said this officer, when the young girl’s voice
had faded away into the blending with the last note of the guzla,
“Feodor Feodorovitch is a man and a glorious soldier who is able to
sleep in peace, because he has labored for his country and for his
Czar.”

“Yes, yes. Labored well! A glorious soldier!” repeated Athanase
Georgevitch and Ivan Petrovitch. “Well may he sleep peacefully.”

“Natacha sang like an angel,” said Boris, the first orderly, in a
tremulous voice.

“Like an angel, Boris Nikolaievitch. But why did she speak of his heart
oppressed? I don’t see that General Trebassof has a heart oppressed, for
my part.” Michael Korsakoff spoke roughly as he drained his glass.

“No, that’s so, isn’t it?” agreed the others.

“A young girl may wish her father a pleasant sleep, surely!” said
Matrena Petrovna, with a certain good sense. “Natacha has affected us
all, has she not, Feodor?”

“Yes, she made me weep,” declared the general. “But let us have
champagne to cheer us up. Our young friend here will think we are
chicken-hearted.”

“Never think that,” said Rouletabille. “Mademoiselle has touched me
deeply as well. She is an artist, really a great artist. And a poet.”

“He is from Paris; he knows,” said the others.

And all drank.

Then they talked about music, with great display of knowledge concerning
things operatic. First one, then another went to the piano and ran
through some motif that the rest hummed a little first, then shouted in
a rousing chorus. Then they drank more, amid a perfect fracas of talk
and laughter. Ivan Petrovitch and Athanase Georgevitch walked across and
kissed the general. Rouletabille saw all around him great children who
amused themselves with unbelievable naivete and who drank in a fashion
more unbelievable still. Matrena Petrovna smoked cigarettes of yellow
tobacco incessantly, rising almost continually to make a hurried
round of the rooms, and after having prompted the servants to greater
watchfulness, sat and looked long at Rouletabille, who did not stir, but
caught every word, every gesture of each one there. Finally, sighing,
she sat down by Feodor and asked how his leg felt. Michael and Natacha,
in a corner, were deep in conversation, and Boris watched them with
obvious impatience, still strumming the guzla. But the thing that struck
Rouletabille’s youthful imagination beyond all else was the mild face of
the general. He had not imagined the terrible Trebassof with so paternal
and sympathetic an expression. The Paris papers had printed redoubtable
pictures of him, more or less authentic, but the arts of photography and
engraving had cut vigorous, rough features of an official--who knew no
pity. Such pictures were in perfect accord with the idea one naturally
had of the dominating figure of the government at Moscow, the man who,
during eight days--the Red Week--had made so many corpses of students
and workmen that the halls of the University and the factories had
opened their doors since in vain. The dead would have had to arise for
those places to be peopled! Days of terrible battle where in one quarter
or another of the city there was naught but massacre or burnings, until
Matrena Petrovna and her step-daughter, Natacha (all the papers told of
it), had fallen on their knees before the general and begged terms for
the last of the revolutionaries, at bay in the Presnia quarter, and had
been refused by him. “War is war,” had been his answer, with irrefutable
logic. “How can you ask mercy for these men who never give it?” Be it
said for the young men of the barricades that they never surrendered,
and equally be it said for Trebassof that he necessarily shot them.
“If I had only myself to consider,” the general had said to a Paris
journalist, “I could have been gentle as a lamb with these unfortunates,
and so I should not now myself be condemned to death. After all, I fail
to see what they reproach me with. I have served my master as a brave
and loyal subject, no more, and, after the fighting, I have let others
ferret out the children that had hidden under their mothers’ skirts.
Everybody talks of the repression of Moscow, but let us speak, my
friend, of the Commune. There was a piece of work I would not have
done, to massacre within a court an unresisting crowd of men, women and
children. I am a rough and faithful soldier of His Majesty, but I am
not a monster, and I have the feelings of a husband and father, my dear
monsieur. Tell your readers that, if you care to, and do not surmise
further about whether I appear to regret being condemned to death.”

Certainly what stupefied Rouletabille now was this staunch figure of
the condemned man who appeared so tranquilly to enjoy his life. When the
general was not furthering the gayety of his friends he was talking with
his wife and daughter, who adored him and continually fondled him, and
he seemed perfectly happy. With his enormous grizzly mustache, his ruddy
color, his keen, piercing eyes, he looked the typical spoiled father.

The reporter studied all these widely-different types and made his
observations while pretending to a ravenous appetite, which served,
moreover, to fix him in the good graces of his hosts of the datcha des
Iles. But, in reality, he passed the food to an enormous bull-dog
under the table, in whose good graces he was also thus firmly planting
himself. As Trebassof had prayed his companions to let his young friend
satisfy his ravening hunger in peace, they did not concern themselves to
entertain him. Then, too, the music served to distract attention from
him, and at a moment somewhat later, when Matrena Petrovna turned to
speak to the young man, she was frightened at not seeing him. Where had
he gone? She went out into the veranda and looked. She did not dare to
call. She walked into the grand-salon and saw the reporter just as he
came out of the sitting-room.

“Where were you?” she inquired.

“The sitting-room is certainly charming, and decorated exquisitely,”
complimented Rouletabille. “It seems almost a boudoir.”

“It does serve as a boudoir for my step-daughter, whose bedroom opens
directly from it; you see the door there. It is simply for the present
that the luncheon table is set there, because for some time the police
have pre-empted the veranda.”

“Is your dog a watch-dog, madame?” asked Rouletabille, caressing the
beast, which had followed him.

“Khor is faithful and had guarded us well hitherto.”

“He sleeps now, then?”

“Yes. Koupriane has him shut in the lodge to keep him from barking
nights. Koupriane fears that if he is out he will devour one of the
police who watch in the garden at night. I wanted him to sleep in the
house, or by his master’s door, or even at the foot of the bed, but
Koupriane said, ‘No, no; no dog. Don’t rely on the dog. Nothing is more
dangerous than to rely on the dog. ‘Since then he has kept Khor locked
up at night. But I do not understand Koupriane’s idea.”

“Monsieur Koupriane is right,” said the reporter. “Dogs are useful only
against strangers.”

“Oh,” gasped the poor woman, dropping her eyes. “Koupriane certainly
knows his business; he thinks of everything.”

“Come,” she added rapidly, as though to hide her disquiet, “do not
go out like that without letting me know. They want you in the
dining-room.”

“I must have you tell me right now about this attempt.”

“In the dining-room, in the dining-room. In spite of myself,” she said
in a low voice, “it is stronger than I am. I am not able to leave the
general by himself while he is on the ground-floor.”

She drew Rouletabille into the dining-room, where the gentlemen were now
telling odd stories of street robberies amid loud laughter. Natacha was
still talking with Michael Korsakoff; Boris, whose eyes never quitted
them, was as pale as the wax on his guzla, which he rattled violently
from time to time. Matrena made Rouletabille sit in a corner of the
sofa, near her, and, counting on her fingers like a careful housewife
who does not wish to overlook anything in her domestic calculations, she
said:

“There have been three attempts; the first two in Moscow. The first
happened very simply. The general knew he had been condemned to
death. They had delivered to him at the palace in the afternoon the
revoluntionary poster which proclaimed his intended fate to the whole
city and country. So Feodor, who was just about to ride into the city,
dismissed his escort. He ordered horses put to a sleigh. I trembled and
asked what he was going to do. He said he was going to drive quietly
through all parts of the city, in order to show the Muscovites that a
governor appointed according to law by the Little Father and who had in
his conscience only the sense that he had done his full duty was not to
be intimidated. It was nearly four o’clock, toward the end of a winter
day that had been clear and bright, but very cold. I wrapped myself
in my furs and took my seat beside him, and he said, ‘This is fine,
Matrena; this will have a great effect on these imbeciles.’ So we
started. At first we drove along the Naberjnaia. The sleigh glided like
the wind. The general hit the driver a heavy blow in the back, crying,
‘Slower, fool; they will think we are afraid,’ and so the horses
were almost walking when, passing behind the Church of Protection and
intercession, we reached the Place Rouge. Until then the few passers-by
had looked at us, and as they recognized him, hurried along to keep
him in view. At the Place Rouge there was only a little knot of women
kneeling before the Virgin. As soon as these women saw us and recognized
the equipage of the Governor, they dispersed like a flock of crows, with
frightened cries. Feodor laughed so hard that as we passed under
the vault of the Virgin his laugh seemed to shake the stones. I felt
reassured, monsieur. Our promenade continued without any remarkable
incident. The city was almost deserted. Everything lay prostrated under
the awful blow of that battle in the street. Feodor said, ‘Ah, they give
me a wide berth; they do not know how much I love them,” and all through
that promenade he said many more charming and delicate things to me.

“As we were talking pleasantly under our furs we came to la Place
Koudrinsky, la rue Koudrinsky, to be exact. It was just four o’clock,
and a light mist had commenced to mix with the sifting snow, and the
houses to right and left were visible only as masses of shadow. We
glided over the snow like a boat along the river in foggy calm. Then,
suddenly, we heard piercing cries and saw shadows of soldiers rushing
around, with movements that looked larger than human through the mist;
their short whips looked enormous as they knocked some other shadows
that we saw down like logs. The general stopped the sleigh and got out
to see what was going on. I got out with him. They were soldiers of the
famous Semenowsky regiment, who had two prisoners, a young man and a
child. The child was being beaten on the nape of the neck. It writhed
on the ground and cried in torment. It couldn’t have been more than nine
years old. The other, the young man, held himself up and marched
along without a single cry as the thongs fell brutally upon him. I was
appalled. I did not give my husband time to open his mouth before I
called to the subaltern who commanded the detachment, ‘You should be
ashamed to strike a child and a Christian like that, which cannot defend
itself.’ The general told him the same thing. Then the subaltern told
us that the little child had just killed a lieutenant in the street by
firing a revolver, which he showed us, and it was the biggest one I
ever have seen, and must have been as heavy for that infant to lift as a
small cannon. It was unbelievable.

“‘And the other,’ demanded the general; ‘what has he done?’

“‘He is a dangerous student,’ replied the subaltern, ‘who has delivered
himself up as a prisoner because he promised the landlord of the house
where he lives that he would do it to keep the house from being battered
down with cannon.’

“‘But that is right of him. Why do you beat him?’

“‘Because he has told us he is a dangerous student.’

“‘That is no reason,’ Feodor told him. ‘He will be shot if he deserves
it, and the child also, but I forbid you to beat him. You have not been
furnished with these whips in order to beat isolated prisoners, but to
charge the crowd when it does not obey the governor’s orders. In such a
case you are ordered “Charge,” and you know what to do. You understand?’
Feodor said roughly. ‘I am General Trebassof, your governor.’

“Feodor was thoroughly human in saying this. Ah, well, he was badly
compensed for it, very badly, I tell you. The student was truly
dangerous, because he had no sooner heard my husband say, ‘I am General
Trebassof, your governor,’ than he cried, ‘Ah, is it you, Trebassoff’
and drew a revolver from no one knows where and fired straight at
the general, almost against his breast. But the general was not hit,
happily, nor I either, who was by him and had thrown myself onto the
student to disarm him and then was tossed about at the feet of the
soldiers in the battle they waged around the student while the revolver
was going off. Three soldiers were killed. You can understand that the
others were furious. They raised me with many excuses and, all together,
set to kicking the student in the loins and striking at him as he lay on
the ground. The subaltern struck his face a blow that might have blinded
him. Feodor hit the officer in the head with his fist and called,
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ The officer fell under the blow and
Feodor himself carried him to the sleigh and laid him with the dead
men. Then he took charge of the soldiers and led them to the barracks.
I followed, as a sort of after-guard. We returned to the palace an hour
later. It was quite dark by then, and almost at the entrance to the
palace we were shot at by a group of revolutionaries who passed swiftly
in two sleighs and disappeared in the darkness so fast that they could
not be overtaken. I had a ball in my toque. The general had not been
touched this time either, but our furs were ruined by the blood of the
dead soldiers which they had forgotten to clean out of the sleigh. That
was the first attempt, which meant little enough, after all, because it
was fighting in the open. It was some days later that they commenced to
try assassination.”

At this moment Ermolai brought in four bottles of champagne and Thaddeus
struck lightly on the piano.

“Quickly, madame, the second attempt,” said Rouletabille, who was
aking hasty notes on his cuff, never ceasing, meanwhile, to watch the
convivial group and listening with both ears wide open to Matrena.

“The second happened still in Moscow. We had had a jolly dinner because
we thought that at last the good old days were back and good citizens
could live in peace; and Boris had tried out the guzla singing songs of
the Orel country to please me; he is so fine and sympathetic. Natacha
had gone somewhere or other. The sleigh was waiting at the door and we
went out and got in. Almost instantly there was a fearful noise, and we
were thrown out into the snow, both the general and me. There remained
no trace of sleigh or coachman; the two horses were disemboweled, two
magnificent piebald horses, my dear young monsieur, that the general
was so attached to. As to Feodor, he had that serious wound in his right
leg; the calf was shattered. I simply had my shoulder a little wrenched,
practically nothing. The bomb had been placed under the seat of the
unhappy coachman, whose hat alone we found, in a pool of blood. From
that attack the general lay two months in bed. In the second month they
arrested two servants who were caught one night on the landing leading
to the upper floor, where they had no business, and after that I sent
at once for our old domestics in Orel to come and serve us. It
was discovered that these detected servants were in touch with
the revolutionaries, so they were hanged. The Emperor appointed a
provisional governor, and now that the general was better we decided
on a convalescence for him in the midi of France. We took train for
St. Petersburg, but the journey started high fever in my husband and
reopened the wound in his calf. The doctors ordered absolute rest and so
we settled here in the datcha des Iles. Since then, not a day has passed
without the general receiving an anonymous letter telling him that
nothing can save him from the revenge of the revolutionaries. He is
brave and only smiles over them, but for me, I know well that so long as
we are in Russia we have not a moment’s security. So I watch him every
minute and let no one approach him except his intimate friends and us
of the family. I have brought an old gniagnia who watched me grow up,
Ermolai, and the Orel servants. In the meantime, two months later, the
third attempt suddenly occurred. It is certainly of them all the most
frightening, because it is so mysterious, a mystery that has not yet,
alas, been solved.”

But Athanase Georgevitch had told a “good story” which raised so much
hubbub that nothing else could be heard. Feodor Feodorovitch was so
amused that he had tears in his eyes. Rouletabille said to himself
as Matrena talked, “I never have seen men so gay, and yet they know
perfectly they are apt to be blown up all together any moment.”

General Trebassof, who had steadily watched Rouletabille, who, for that
matter, had been kept in eye by everyone there, said:

“Eh, eh, monsieur le journaliste, you find us very gay?”

“I find you very brave,” said Rouletabille quietly.

“How is that?” said Feodor Feodorovitch, smiling.

“You must pardon me for thinking of the things that you seem to have
forgotten entirely.”

He indicated the general’s wounded leg.

“The chances of war! the chances of war!” said the general. “A leg here,
an arm there. But, as you see, I am still here. They will end by growing
tired and leaving me in peace. Your health, my friend!”

“Your health, general!”

“You understand,” continued Feodor Feodorovitch, “there is no occasion
to excite ourselves. It is our business to defend the empire at the
peril of our lives. We find that quite natural, and there is no occasion
to think of it. I have had terrors enough in other directions, not to
speak of the terrors of love, that are more ferocious than you can
yet imagine. Look at what they did to my poor friend the Chief of the
Surete, Boichlikoff. He was commendable certainly. There was a brave
man. Of an evening, when his work was over, he always left the bureau of
the prefecture and went to join his wife and children in their apartment
in the ruelle des Loups. Not a soldier! No guard! The others had every
chance. One evening a score of revolutionaries, after having driven away
the terrorized servants, mounted to his apartments. He was dining with
his family. They knocked and he opened the door. He saw who they were,
and tried to speak. They gave him no time. Before his wife and children,
mad with terror and on their knees before the revolutionaries, they read
him his death-sentence. A fine end that to a dinner!”

As he listened Rouletabille paled and he kept his eyes on the door as
if he expected to see it open of itself, giving access to ferocious
Nihilists of whom one, with a paper in his hand, would read the sentence
of death to Feodor Feodorovitch. Rouletabille’s stomach was not yet
seasoned to such stories. He almost regretted, momentarily, having
taken the terrible responsibility of dismissing the police. After what
Koupriane had confided to him of things that had happened in this house,
he had not hesitated to risk everything on that audacious decision, but
all the same, all the same--these stories of Nihilists who appear at the
end of a meal, death-sentence in hand, they haunted him, they upset him.
Certainly it had been a piece of foolhardiness to dismiss the police!

“Well,” he asked, conquering his misgivings and resuming, as always, his
confidence in himself, “then, what did they do then, after reading the
sentence?”

“The Chief of the Surete knew he had no time to spare. He did not ask
for it. The revolutionaries ordered him to bid his family farewell.
He raised his wife, his children, clasped them, bade them be of good
courage, then said he was ready. They took him into the street. They
stood him against a wall. His wife and children watched from a window.
A volley sounded. They descended to secure the body, pierced with
twenty-five bullets.”

“That was exactly the number of wounds that were made on the body of
little Jacques Zloriksky,” came in the even tones of Natacha.

“Oh, you, you always find an excuse,” grumbled the general. “Poor
Boichlikoff did his duty, as I did mine.

“Yes, papa, you acted like a soldier. That is what the revolutionaries
ought not to forget. But have no fears for us, papa; because if they
kill you we will all die with you.”

“And gayly too,” declared Athanase Georgevitch.

“They should come this evening. We are in form!”

Upon which Athanase filled the glasses again.

“None the less, permit me to say,” ventured the timber-merchant,
Thaddeus Tchnitchnikof, timidly, “permit me to say that this Boichlikoff
was very imprudent.”

“Yes, indeed, very gravely imprudent,” agreed Rouletabille. “When a man
has had twenty-five good bullets shot into the body of a child, he ought
certainly to keep his home well guarded if he wishes to dine in peace.”

He stammered a little toward the end of this, because it occurred to him
that it was a little inconsistent to express such opinions, seeing what
he had done with the guard over the general.

“Ah,” cried Athanase Georgevitch, in a stage-struck voice, “Ah, it was
not imprudence! It was contempt of death! Yes, it was contempt of death
that killed him! Even as the contempt of death keeps us, at this moment,
in perfect health. To you, ladies and gentlemen! Do you know anything
lovelier, grander, in the world than contempt of death? Gaze on Feodor
Feodorovitch and answer me. Superb! My word, superb! To you all! The
revolutionaries who are not of the police are of the same mind regarding
our heroes. They may curse the tchinownicks who execute the terrible
orders given them by those higher up, but those who are not of the
police (there are some, I believe)--these surely recognize that men like
the Chief of the Surete our dead friend, are brave.”

“Certainly,” endorsed the general. “Counting all things, they need more
heroism for a promenade in a salon than a soldier on a battle-field.”

“I have met some of these men,” continued Athanase in exalted vein. “I
have found in all their homes the same--imprudence, as our young French
friend calls it. A few days after the assassination of the Chief of
Police in Moscow I was received by his successor in the same place where
the assassination had occurred. He did not take the slightest precaution
with me, whom he did not know at all, nor with men of the middle class
who came to present their petitions, in spite of the fact that it was
under precisely identical conditions that his predecessor had been
slain. Before I left I looked over to where on the floor there had so
recently occurred such agony. They had placed a rug there and on the rug
a table, and on that table there was a book. Guess what book. ‘Women’s
Stockings,’ by Willy! And--and then--Your health, Matrena Petrovna.
What’s the odds!”

“You yourselves, my friends,” declared the general, “prove your great
courage by coming to share the hours that remain of my life with me.”

“Not at all, not at all! It is war.”

“Yes, it is war.”

“Oh, there’s no occasion to pat us on the shoulder, Athanase,” insisted
Thaddeus modestly. “What risk do we run? We are well guarded.”

“We are protected by the finger of God,” declared Athanase, “because the
police--well, I haven’t any confidence in the police.”

Michael Korsakoff, who had been for a turn in the garden, entered during
the remark.