VIII
Two weeks before the Governor’s death, a linen-covered package was handed in to the Government House—its value declared at three roubles. It proved to be an infernal machine—a bomb intended to explode on being opened. But it was badly made by the unskilled hands of one who had only read of such things—so it missed fire. Yet in the very homemade simplicity of the outfit there was something sinister and terrifying, as if blind Death had stretched forth his hand and was fumbling clumsily about in the dark.
The police sounded the alarm, and Maria Petrovna insisted upon her husband’s wiring to St. Petersburg that very day, to ask for sick leave. She herself drove first to the tailor’s, and then wrote her son a long letter full of horrors—all in French. …
A strange and radical change had come over the Governor. In place of the man they used to know appeared an entirely new figure. No one knew precisely when the change came about, and in the main he seemed the same; but upon his face had dawned such an expression of righteousness it seemed a new countenance. He smiled where formerly he would have been grave, and frowned where he had been wont to smile; he was bored and indifferent where he used to be attentive and animated. He was horribly candid in the expression of his feelings. When he chose, he was silent; left the room when he felt inclined, and turned his back when people bored him.
Those who had counted for years on his liking and friendship, who knew all his thoughts and moods, felt themselves suddenly neglected—quite shoved aside—and could no longer understand his feelings and fancies. All the bows and smiles and cordial greetings had suddenly disappeared—the little ceremonious form of politeness: “If you will be so good, my dear fellow!”—“I am vastly obliged to you, my dear sir!”—which had seemed like second nature to him, he dropped completely; and people were taken aback at the remarkable, even alarming originality of his new manner. So animals, accustomed to looking on a man’s apparel as the person himself, might be taken aback at the sight of a naked figure.
He had simply ceased to be polite—and directly the bond was broken which had held him throughout many years to his wife, his children, his associates—as though it had only been made of smiles and compliments, and had vanished together with the ceremonious kissing of the hand. He did not judge them, he did not hate them; found nothing new or repulsive in them—they simply fell out of his soul; as decayed teeth crumble in the mouth … as the hair falls out … as a dead skin is sloughed off—painlessly, quietly, without an effort. When the veil of custom and politeness fell from him, he stood there forsaken and aloof; yet he did not even feel it—as though loneliness had been his natural state throughout his long, eventful life.
He forgot his morning greetings, he forgot to say good night; and when his wife held out her hand, or his daughter Cissy lifted her smooth forehead to his lips, he was not quite sure what to do with the hand or the forehead. When guests came to luncheon—the Vice-Governor and his wife, or Kosloff—he did not rise, or bow, or smile, but went hastily on with his meal—and when he had finished he did not ask to be excused, but simply rose and left the room.
“Where are you going, Pievna? Please stay with us, we are so lonely. They’ll bring the coffee soon.” He answered calmly: “No! I’d rather go to my study. I don’t want any coffee,” and the rudeness of the answer was lost in its candour and simplicity.
He cared nothing about Cissy’s new clothes, did not greet the guests of the house, let her Excellency invent excuses for his absence, had nothing to do with society, and refused to accept statements without an explanation of motives. Twice a week he received petitioners, and listened to each attentively, with an interest that seemed even a trifle rude, as he inspected the petitioner from head to foot. “Are you convinced that it will be better so?” he asked, after he had listened patiently; and when the astonished man had given an affirmative answer he promised immediately to grant his request. In these days he never considered the possibility of overstepping the limits of his powers, or else he had an exaggerated impression of them; at all events, he often decided matters which were quite out of his province. The new Governor, in consequence, had many difficulties with the entanglements that resulted—all the more so as some of the questions were of the most complex and illegal character.
In order to dispel her husband’s gloom, Maria Petrovna often came to his study, felt of his forehead to see if he were feverish, and began to talk about their trip. But he held her off with blunt directness. “Yes, very well, run along now! I would rather be alone. You have your own room, and I don’t bother you there.”
“Ah, how you have changed, Pievna!”
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he said, in his gruffest tones, leaning his back up against the cold stove. “Do go and make that pug of yours shut up. You can’t hear a thing in the whole house for his barking!”
Of all his former habits, card-playing was the only one which he still enjoyed. Twice a week he had his whist, and he played for small stakes with keen and evident pleasure. He was a thoughtful, clever player, and if his partner revoked he called him down in proper shape. “What are you thinking of, my dear sir! I led diamonds!” flashed out his cool, clear voice—hard and cutting as the diamond itself … and Maria Petrovna, in the next room, hearing her husband’s voice, would smile her tired smile and shake her head sadly. Her yellow cheeks hung flabby as a pointer’s; the powder stood out on her face, and her heavy, bulging, brownish lids rose and fell like iron shutters in a shop window. At this moment it seemed to her, as it did to all the others, utterly impossible that a person who could play cards like that could be assassinated.
Through the two long weeks before his death, he simply waited. Doubtless he had other feelings beside—thoughts of the daily routine, his surroundings, his past; the stale, old thoughts of a man whose body and mind are long since fossilised. Probably he thought of the workmen and that sad, awful day—but all these reflections were vague and superficial, and vanished as they came—like the light wind’s ripple on the river—and again as before, the still, dark waters of his fathomless soul stood calm in silent waiting. It was as though politeness and habit only had united him to his mental processes, and when ceremony and custom vanished his ideas fled too. He was as isolated in his brain as he was in his family.
As usual he rose at seven, had his cold shower, drank his milk, and at eight o’clock took his accustomed stroll. Each time he crossed the threshold of his palace he felt that he should never return—that the two hours’ walk would prolong itself into an eternal wandering through the unknown. … With his red-lined General’s cloak; tall, broad-shouldered, his grey head high with soldierly bearing; he marched through the city for two long hours like a stately ghost—past wooden houses dark with mould, past countless gates and empty squares, past shops whose clerks, shivering in the brisk morning air, bowed slavishly. Whether the pale October sun shone out, or the fine cold rain trickled down, unfailingly he rose and followed his orbit—a sad, majestic wanderer of the town, seeking death at the head of his column. Forward he marched through mire and puddle, the scarlet lining of his overcoat reflected in the mud; forward through the streets, not noticing policemen’s salutes nor horses—and a bird’s-eye view of his daily Road of Suspense would have shown an extraordinary tracery of short, straight lines, crossing and recrossing in a hopeless tangle. He seldom glanced to right or left, and never looked behind; yet scarcely even saw what was before him, so sunk was he in the depths of his dark forebodings. He rarely acknowledged greetings, and many a startled eye encountered his passing glance—direct, unseeing, and yet so penetrating.
Long after he was dead and buried, and the new Governor, a smiling young man surrounded by Cossack guards, drove rapidly through the city in his equipage of state, many recalled these last two long weeks of his pilgrimage—the grey-haired ghost in the General’s uniform marching through the mire with upright carriage, the scarlet lining of his cloak glancing in the puddles; and followed by the hoary old law: “A life for a life!”
The crush and the jostling curiosity of the main streets wearied him, and he preferred to lose himself in the silent, squalid alleys, with their tiny three-room cottages, their broken fences, and slippery wooden sidewalks. Throughout these days he had but one desire—to go the length and breadth of Kawatnaja lane. But he could not bring himself to gratify this wish: it seemed too horrible, too painful, more painful than death itself. And a thrill of wonder came over him as he thought of that earlier September he had driven down the lane quite fearlessly, and had even wished that he might meet some one of the people, to speak to them in passing.
But one spot he never neglected. This was the street that led to the seminary, where each morning, just at nine, it swarmed with little schoolgirls. Forgetting his usual haste, he strode along here like some good-natured, whimsical old General, out for his morning walk. He nodded to them as they came: the big girls first, stately, tall and dignified; then the little ones, with their short brown skirts and their huge knapsacks; and they shyly answered his greeting. His nearsighted eyes could not distinguish their faces. Large and small, in groups they came, and they seemed to him like a cluster of rosy petals. As the last one passed he smiled his quiet, ironical smile, a sly twinkle in his eye meanwhile, and then at the next corner he was transformed again into the silent, stately ghost, seeking death at the head of his column.
At first two spies, at their chief’s secret command, trailed him at a distance; but he did not observe them, as he never looked back. For some days they conscientiously followed his devious paths, but soon tired of it—it seemed so foolish to run after a man who was hanging about the most dangerous spots in such an idiotic way. So they stopped now and again at some friendly shop to gossip with a policeman, dropped in at an alehouse, and often lost sight of their charge for hours at a time.
“It’s all the same—there’s nothing to do anyway!” said one of them apologetically. He had the smug, shaven face of a priest, and seemed a prosy old fool. He was gulping down a hot pâté, and although he had not quite swallowed the first he was already reaching for the second. “When a man’s in his dotage and runs into the trap himself, what are you going to do with him … will you kindly tell me?”
“Oh, it’s only for form’s sake,” said the barkeeper.
“And how about the Pike?” asked the second spy, a gloomy man who had seen better days, but was given to drink, and had been caught cheating at cards. Growling like a dog over his bone, he devoured everything in sight, drinking vodka steadily meanwhile; and though he was never drunk, yet he never stopped drinking.
“What about the Pike? He knows well enough that we aren’t angels from heaven!”
“He acts like a horse in a fire … take him out of his stall and he rears and plunges. He’d sooner burn up than leave the stable,” said the barkeeper.
“No, he knows we aren’t angels,” repeated the first, with a sigh. And in fact they had very little in common with angels—these two poor devils—and it was quite beyond their feeble power to arrest the course of events!
… Home again over the familiar threshold, even then the Governor felt no thrill of relief, nor any surety of one more day of life. He took things as they came, and forgot the sense of his past wanderings in the awakening dread of what the day would yet bring forth. And the empty, idle days passed by with frightful haste—yet time stood still; as if the mechanism that turned up each new day had been jarred and, instead of the following one, the same old day came round again. Even the calendar on his desk that he used to turn—usually at night, as though he were calling up the advancing day—even this stood pointing to that long-past date, and when occasionally he looked at that back number, his breast heaved, he knew not why, and a feeling of sickness came to him as he turned his eyes away.
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed angrily. Nowadays when he was alone he often broke into short ejaculations, indefinite and disconnected. He was especially apt to say “Nonsense!” or “Disgusting!”
He did not fear death in the least, and viewed it quite impersonally. They would shoot at him; he would fall. … And then would come the funeral with the bands, and his Orders carried behind the coffin, etc. He’d go bravely forward to meet it. He did not even think of a life beyond the grave; for him it all ended here. And he ate with his usual appetite and slept soundlessly and dreamlessly.
Yet once in the night—and it was three days before his end—he must have had a heavy dream; for he awoke with the sound of his own hoarse, muffled groans. And as he recognised this strange, dull voice of his, and his eyes encountered the darkness, he felt the shudder and weakness of death. He huddled the clothes up over his head, drew up his bony knees, knotted himself into a bundle in the bed and, reviewing his whole past life, from infancy to age, he began to sob bitterly and softly; and whispered to the damp, white, silent pillow: “Have pity on me! Help me someone, whoever it is! Have mercy! О—о—о!”
But no one was there to pity him; and soon he was conscious through his tears of his great shaken frame in its strange, cramped attitude, and his rough, hoarse voice, and he mastered himself and lay still. And long he lay there silent, in the same tense pose, staring up wide-eyed into the dark. … And in the morning he started out again in his military cloak. For two days more its scarlet lining was reflected in the puddles by the wayside, and the tall, stately ghost stalked through the streets, seeking his grave at the head of his column.
The affair came about very simply and quickly—like a picture in a biograph.
At the crossing of two streets was a dingy hay-market, open on Fridays; and here a hesitating voice arrested the Governor.
“Your Excellency!”
“Yes?”
He stood still and faced about.
From behind a lonely hedge across the street two men came hastily striding through the mud: one in high boots, the other in gaiters without overshoes, his trousers rolled up. These wet feet must make him very cold, for his face is greenish pale, and his thick blond hair stands out very stiffly from his head. … In his left hand he holds a folded paper, and the right is thrust deep into his pocket.
And directly all is clear; the victim knew that death had come, and they knew that he had seen it.
“If you please,” said the man, and a convulsive tremor passed over his face.
“A petition? … What is it about?” the Governor asked superfluously too, but strangely impelled to play the scene out. Yet he did not reach for the petition. The fellow still held out his left hand with the bit of paper that would have deceived no one, and without handing it to the Governor he fumbled with his right hand for the revolver; knitting his brows in his endeavour to free it from the lining of his pocket.
The Governor cast one quick glance about. The squalid marketplace, the mud littered with straw, the lonely hedge—Ah! But it was too late. He gave one short, deep, gasping sigh, and straightened up … without terror, and quite without defiance. Yet still there lay somewhere—perhaps in the deep-set wrinkles about his heavy nose—a quiet, almost imperceptible pleading for mercy—just a trace of remorse. But he himself was unconscious of this, and neither of the men observed it.
His death came in three quick shots, sounding together in rapid succession like a single loud report. Three minutes later a policeman hurried up, followed by the Secret Service men, and then the people, as though they had all been hanging about the neighbourhood, behind the corner, awaiting the end.
… And the corpse was covered over. …
Some ten minutes later the ambulance drove slowly through the streets with its red cross—and throughout the city questions and answers flew like stones:
“Is he dead?” “On the spot!” “Who was it—did they arrest him?” “No; they got away. No one knows who it was. There were three men.”
And all day long they spoke only of the assassination, some with censure, some with joyful approbation. But through all their talk, whatever its character, one felt the shiver of a mighty terror. Something powerful and annihilating swept like a cyclone over their daily lives; and from behind their dreary counters, their samovars, their beds and wheaten cakes, peered forth through the dimness of the commonplace the threatening figures of that hoary old Law of Revenge.
… And the little schoolgirl wept! …