“Why, she’s a godsend, then,” he said.
“Moderate your passions, Mr. Army Officer,” Pavel said languidly, mocking his old gymnasium director. “If she does not turn out to be a spy we’ll see what we can do with her. She strikes me rather favourably, though.”
“Why, you oughtn’t to neglect her, Pasha. If I were you I would lose no time in making her brother’s acquaintance. Think of the possibilities of it!”
“Bridle your exuberance, young man. Her brother lives many miles from here. He is on the hunt for sedition in the most provincial of provinces. Want to make a Terrorist of him? Go ahead. He lives in Miroslav. There.”
“In Miroslav!” Makar echoed, with pride in the capital of his native province.
Presently they entered a courtyard and took to climbing a steep stony staircase. Strong, inviting odours of cabbage soup and cooked meat greeted them at several of the landings. Makar’s lodging was on the sixth floor. He had moved in only a few days ago and the chief object of Pavel’s visit was to make a mental note of its location.
The first thing Makar did as he got into the room was to put a pitcher on one of his two windows. The windows commanded a little side street, and the pitcher was Makar’s safety signal. When he had lit his lamp a sofa, freshly covered with green oil-cloth, proved to be the best piece of furniture in the room, the smell of the oil-cloth mingling with the stale odours of tobacco smoke with which the very walls seemed to be saturated.
“Ugh, what a room!” Pavel said, sniffing. They talked of a revolutionist who had recently been arrested and to whom they referred as “Alexandre.” Special importance was attached by the authorities to the capture of this man, because among the things found at his lodgings was a diagram of the Winter Palace with a pencil mark on the imperial dining hall. As the prisoner was a conspicuous member of the Terrorists’ Executive Committee, the natural inference was that another bold plot was under way, one which had something to do with the Czar’s dining room, but which had apparently been frustrated by the discovery of the diagram. The palace guard was strongly re-enforced and every precaution was taken to insure the monarch’s safety. Now, the Terrorists had their man in the very heart of the enemy’s camp, and the result of the search of Alexandre’s lodgings was no secret to them. This revolutionist, whose gloomy face was out of keeping with his carefully pomaded hair, kid gloves, silk hat, showy clothes and carefully trimmed whiskers à la Alexander II., was known to Makar as “the Dandy.” Less than a year before he had obtained a position in the double capacity of spy and clerk, at the Third Section of his Majesty’s Own Office, and so liked was he by his superiors that he had soon been made private secretary to the head of the secret service, every document of importance passing through his hands. Since then he had been communicating to the Executive Committee, now a list of new suspects, now the details of a contemplated arrest, now a copy of some secret circular to the gendarme offices of the empire.
While they were thus conversing of Alexandre and the Dandy, Pavel stretched himself full length on the sofa and dozed off. When he opened his eyes, about two hours later, he found Parmet tiptoeing awkwardly up and down the room, his shadow a gigantic crab on the wall. Pavel broke into a boisterous peal of laughter.
“Here is a figure for you! All that is needed is an artist to set to work and paint it.”
“Are you awake? Look here, Pasha. Your gendarme’s sister and her aunt are haunting my mind.”
“Why, why, have you fallen in love with both of them at once?” Pavel asked as he jumped to his feet and shot his arms toward the ceiling. He looked refreshed and full of animal spirits.
“Stop joking, Pasha, pray,” Makar said in his purring, mellifluous voice. “It irritates me. It’s a serious matter I want to speak to you about, and here you are bent upon fun.” Pavel’s story of the gendarme officer’s sister had stirred in him visions of a mighty system of counter-espionage. He had a definite scheme to propose.
Pavel found it difficult to work himself out of his playful mood until Makar fell silent and took to pacing the floor resentfully. When he had desisted, with a final guffaw over Makar’s forlorn air, the medical student, warming up to fresh enthusiasm, said:
“Well, to let that prison stand idle would be criminal negligence. That girl’s aunt must be given a chance.”
“What’s that?” Pavel said, relapsing into horseplay. “Do you want somebody nabbed on purpose to give a bored lady something to excite her nerves?” He finished the interrogation rather limply. It flashed upon him that what Makar was really aiming at was that some revolutionist should volunteer to be arrested on a denunciation from the Dandy or some other member of the party with a view to strengthening its position in the Third Section.
Makar went on to plead for an organised effort to get into the various gendarme offices.
“It is a terrible struggle we are in, Pasha. Our best men fall before they have time to turn round. If we had more revolutionists on the other side, Alexandre might be a free man now.”
“Well, and sooner or later you and I will be where he is now and be plunged into the sleep of the righteous, and there won’t even be a goat to graze at our graves. Let the dead bury the dead, Makashka. We want the living for the firing line. We can’t afford to let fresh blood turn sour in a damp cell, if we can help it.”
“But this is ‘the firing line’,” Makar returned with beseeching, almost with tearful emphasis. “If you only gave me a chance to explain myself. What I want is to have confusion carried into every branch of the government; I want the Czar to be surrounded by a masquerade of enemies, so that his henchmen will suspect each other of being either agents of the Third Section or revolutionists. Do you see the point? I want the Czar to be surrounded by a babel of mistrust and espionage. I want him to be dazed, staggered until he succumbs to this nightmare of suspicion and hastens to convoke a popular assembly, as Louis XVI. was forced to do; I want the inhabitants of our tear-drenched country to be treated like human beings without delay. My scheme practically amounts to a system or terrorism without violence, and I insist that one good man in the enemy’s camp is of more value than the death of ten spies.” His low, velvety voice rang clear, tremulous with pleading fervour; his face gleamed with an intellectual relish in his formula of the plan. As he spoke, he was twisting his mighty fist, opening and closing it again, Talmud-fashion, in unison with the rhythm of his sentences.
Ejaculations like “visionary!” “phrase-maker!” were on the tip of Pavel’s tongue, but he had not the heart to utter them. Aerial as the scheme was, Makar’s plea had cast a certain spell over him. It was like listening to a beautiful piece of mythology.
“Let us form a special force of men ready to go to prison, to be destroyed, if need be,” Makar went on. “The loss of one man would mean, in each case, the saving of twenty. Think how many important comrades a single leak in the Third Section has saved us. It’s a matter of plain arithmetic.”
“Of plain insanity,” Pavel finally broke in.
“Don’t get excited, Pasha, pray. Can’t you let me finish? If I am wrong you’ll have plenty of time to prove it.”
His purring Talmudic voice and the smell of the fresh oil-cloth were unbearable to Pavel now.
“It’s like this,” Makar resumed. “In the first place [he bent down his little finger] every honest man is sure to be arrested some day, and what difference does it make whether the end comes a few months sooner or a few months later? In the second place