The Secret of the Night
would have said the little thing was a weeping-willow soaked in ink. The
plate reached Prince Galitch, who futilely searched his pockets.
“Bah!” said he, with a lordly air, “I have no money. But here is my
pocket-book; I will give it to you for a souvenir of me, Katharina.”
Thaddeus and Athanase exclaimed at the generosity of the prince, but
Annouchka said:
“The prince does as he should, for my friends can never sufficiently
repay the hospitality that that little thing gave me in her dirty hut
when I was in hiding, while your famous department was deciding what to
do about me, my dear Gounsovski.”
“Eh,” replied Gounsovski, “I let you know that all you had to do was to
take a fine apartment in the city.”
Annouchka spat on the ground like a teamster, and Gounsovski from yellow
turned green.
“But why did you hide yourself that way, Annouchka?” asked Onoto as she
caressed the beautiful tresses of the singer.
“You know I had been condemned to death, and then pardoned. I had been
able to leave Moscow, and I hadn’t any desire to be re-taken here and
sent to taste the joys of Siberia.”
“But why were you condemned to death?”
“Why, she doesn’t know anything!” exclaimed the others.
“Good Lord, I’m just back from London and Paris--how should I know
anything! But to have been condemned to death! That must have been
amusing.”
“Very amusing,” said Annouchka icily. “And if you have a brother whom
you love, Onoto, think how much more amusing it must be to have him shot
before you.”
“Oh, my love, forgive me!”
“So you may know and not give any pain to your Annouchka in the future,
I will tell you, madame, what happened to our dear friend,” said Prince
Galitch.
“We would do better to drive away such terrible memories,” ventured
Gounsovski, lifting his eyelashes behind his glasses, but he bent his
head as Annouchka sent him a blazing glance.
“Speak, Galitch.”
The Prince did as she said.
“Annouchka had a brother, Vlassof, an engineer on the Kasan line, whom
the Strike Committee had ordered to take out a train as the only means
of escape for the leaders of the revolutionary troops when Trebassof’s
soldiers, aided by the Semenowsky regiment, had become masters of the
city. The last resistance took place at the station. It was necessary
to get started. All the ways were guarded by the military. There were
soldiers everywhere! Vlassof said to his comrades, ‘I will save you;’
and his comrades saw him mount the engine with a woman. That woman
was--well, there she sits. Vlassof’s fireman had been killed the evening
before, on a barricade; it was Annouchka who took his place. They busied
themselves and the train started like a shot. On that curved line,
discovered at once, easy to attack, under a shower of bullets, Vlassof
developed a speed of ninety versts an hour. He ran the indicator up to
the explosion point. The lady over there continued to pile coal into the
furnace. The danger came to be less from the military and more from
an explosion at any moment. In the midst of the balls Vlassof kept his
usual coolness. He sped not only with the firebox open but with the
forced draught. It was a miracle that the engine was not smashed against
the curve of the embankment. But they got past. Not a man was hurt. Only
a woman was wounded. She got a ball in the chest.”
“There!” cried Annouchka.
With a magnificent gesture she flung open her white and heaving chest,
and put her finger on a scar that Gounsovski, whose fat began to melt in
heavy drops of sweat about his temples, dared not look at.
“Fifteen days later,” continued the prince, “Vlassof entered an inn
at Lubetszy. He didn’t know it was full of soldiers. His face never
altered. They searched him. They found a revolver and papers on him.
They knew whom they had to do with. He was a good prize. Vlassof was
taken to Moscow and condemned to be shot. His sister, wounded as she
was, learned of his arrest and joined him. ‘I do not wish,’ she said
to him, ‘to leave you to die alone.’ She also was condemned. Before the
execution the soldiers offered to bandage their eyes, but both refused,
saying they preferred to meet death face to face. The orders were to
shoot all the other condemned revolutionaries first, then Vlassof,
then his sister. It was in vain that Vlassof asked to die last. Their
comrades in execution sank to their knees, bleeding from their death
wounds. Vlassof embraced his sister and walked to the place of death.
There he addressed the soldiers: ‘Now you have to carry out your duty
according to the oath you have taken. Fulfill it honestly as I have
fulfilled mine. Captain, give the order.’ The volley sounded. Vlassof
remained erect, his arms crossed on his breast, safe and sound. Not a
ball had touched him. The soldiers did not wish to fire at him. He had
to summon them again to fulfill their duty, and obey their chief. Then
they fired again, and he fell. He looked at his sister with his eyes
full of horrible suffering. Seeing that he lived, and wishing to appear
charitable, the captain, upon Annouchka’s prayers, approached and cut
short his sufferings by firing a revolver into his ear. Now it was
Annouchka’s turn. She knelt by the body of her brother, kissed his
bloody lips, rose and said, ‘I am ready.’ As the guns were raised, an
officer came running, bearing the pardon of the Tsar. She did not
wish it, and she whom they had not bound when she was to die had to be
restrained when she learned she was to live.”
Prince Galitch, amid the anguished silence of all there, started to
add some words of comment to his sinister recital, but Annouchka
interrupted:
“The story is ended,” said she. “Not a word, Prince. If I asked you
to tell it in all its horror, if I wished you to bring back to us the
atrocious moment of my brother’s death, it is so that monsieur” (her
fingers pointed to Gounsovski) “shall know well, once for all, that if
I have submitted for some hours now to this promiscuous company that has
been imposed upon me, now that I have paid the debt by accepting this
abominable supper, I have nothing more to do with this purveyor of
bagnios and of hangman’s ropes who is here.”
“She is mad,” he muttered. “She is mad. What has come over her? What has
happened? Only to-day she was so, so amiable.”
And he stuttered, desolately, with an embarrassed laugh:
“Ah, the women, the women! Now what have I done to her?”
“What have you done to me, wretch? Where are Belachof, Bartowsky and
Strassof? And Pierre Slutch? All the comrades who swore with me to
revenge my brother? Where are they? On what gallows did you have them
hung? What mine have you buried them in? And still you follow your
slavish task. And my friends, my other friends, the poor comrades of my
artist life, the inoffensive young men who have not committed any
other crime than to come to see me too often when I was lively, and who
believed they could talk freely in my dressing-room--where are they?
Why have they left me, one by one? Why have they disappeared? It is you,
wretch, who watched them, who spied on them, making me, I haven’t any
doubt, your horrible accomplice, mixing me up in your beastly work, you
dog! You knew what they call me. You have known it for a long time, and
you may well laugh over it. But I, I never knew until this evening; I
never learned until this evening all I owe to you. ‘Stool pigeon! Stool
pigeon!’ I! Horror! Ah, you dog, you dog! Your mother, when you were
brought into the world, your mother...” Here she hurled at him the most
offensive insult that a Russian can offer a man of that race.
She trembled and sobbed with rage, spat in fury, and stood up ready to
go, wrapped in her mantle like a great red flag. She was the statue of
hate and vengeance. She was horrible and terrible. She was beautiful.
At the final supreme insult, Gounsovski started and rose to his feet as
though he had received an actual blow in the face. He did not look at
Annouchka, but fixed his eyes on Prince Galitch. His finger pointed him
out:
“There is the man,” he hissed, “who has told you all these fine things.”
“Yes, it is I,” said the Prince, tranquilly.
“Caracho!” barked Gounsovski, instantaneously regaining his coolness.
“Ah, yes, but you’ll not touch him,” clamored the spirited girl of the
Black Land; “you are not strong enough for that.”
“I know that monsieur has many friends at court,” agreed the chief of
the Secret Service with an ominous calm. “I don’t wish ill to monsieur.
You speak, madame, of the way some of your friends have had to be
sacrificed. I hope that some day you will be better informed, and that
you will understand I saved all of them I could.”
“Let us go,” muttered Annouchka. “I shall spit in his face.”
“Yes, all I could,” replied the other, with his habitual gesture of
hanging on to his glasses. “And I shall continue to do so. I promise you
not to say anything more disagreeable to the prince than as regards his
little friend the Bohemian Katharina, whom he has treated so generously
just now, doubtless because Boris Mourazoff pays her too little for the
errands she runs each morning to the villa of Krestowsky Ostrow.”
At these words the Prince and Annouchka both changed countenance. Their
anger rose. Annouchka turned her head as though to arrange the folds
of her cloak. Galitch contented himself with shrugging his shoulders
impatiently and murmuring:
“Still some other abomination that you are concocting, monsieur, and
that we don’t know how to reply to.”
After which he bowed to the supper-party, took Annouchka’s arm and had
her move before him. Gounsovski bowed, almost bent in two. When he rose
he saw before him the three astounded and horrified figures of Thaddeus
Tchitchnikoff, Ivan Petrovitch and Athanase Georgevitch.
“Messieurs,” he said to them, in a colorless voice which seemed not to
belong to him, “the time has come for us to part. I need not say that we
have supped as friends and that, if you wish it to be so, we can forget
everything that has been said here.”
The three others, frightened, at once protested their discretion.
He added, roughly this time, “Service of the Tsar,” and the three
stammered, “God save the Tsar!” After which he saw them to the door.
When the door had closed after them, he said, “My little Annouchka,
you mustn’t reckon without me.” He hurried toward the sofa, where
Rouletabille was lying forgotten, and gave him a tap on the shoulder.
“Come, get up. Don’t act as though you were asleep. Not an instant
to lose. They are going to carry through the Trebassof affair this
evening.”
Rouletabille was already on his legs.
“Oh, monsieur,” said he, “I didn’t want you to tell me that. Thanks all
the same, and good evening.”
He went out.
Gounsovski rang. A servant appeared.
“Tell them they may now open all the rooms on this corridor; I’ll not
hold them any longer.” Thus had Gounsovski kept himself protected.
Left alone, the head of the Secret Service wiped his brow and drank a
great glass of iced water which he emptied at a draught. Then he said:
“Koupriane will have his work cut out for him this evening; I wish him
good luck. As to them, whatever happens, I wash my hands of them.”
And he rubbed his hands.
X. A DRAMA IN THE NIGHT
At the door of the Krestowsky Rouletabille, who was in a hurry for
a conveyance, jumped into an open carriage where la belle Onoto was
already seated. The dancer caught him on her knees.
“To Eliaguine, fast as you can,” cried the reporter for all explanation.
“Scan! Scan! (Quickly, quickly)” repeated Onoto.
She was accompanied by a vague sort of person to whom neither of them
paid the least attention.
“What a supper! You waked up at last, did you?” quizzed the actress. But