The Secret of the Night
comprehended only one thing, that a man named Priemkof, whom he had
never heard spoken of, as determined as Matiew to destroy the general,
had been entrusted by Koupriane with the guard of the datcha des Iles.
It was necessary to warn Koupriane instantly.
“How is it that you have not done so already, yourself, Monsieur
Gounsovski? Why wait to speak about it to me? It is unimaginable.”
“Pardon, pardon,” said Gounsovski, smiling softly behind his goggles;
“it is not the same thing.”
“No, no, it is not the same thing,” seconded the lady with the black
silk, brilliant jewels and flabby chin. “We speak here to a friend in
the course of dinner-talk, to a friend who is not of the police. We
never denounce anybody.”
“We must tell you. But sit down now,” Gounsovski still insisted,
lighting his cigar. “Be reasonable. They have just tried to poison him,
so they will take time to breathe before they try something else. Then,
too, this poison makes me think they may have given up the idea of
living bombs. Then, after all, what is to be will be.”
“Yes, yes,” approved the ample dame. “The police never have been able
to prevent what was bound to happen. But, speaking of this Priemkof, it
remains between us, eh? Between just us?”
“Yes, we must tell you now,” Gounsovski slipped in softly, “that it will
be much better not to let Koupriane know that you got the information
from me. Because then, you understand, he would not believe you; or,
rather, he would not believe me. That is why we take these precautions
of dining and smoking a cigar. We speak of one thing and another and
you do as you please with what we say. But, to make them useful, it is
absolutely necessary, I repeat, to be silent about their source.” (As
he said that, Gounsovski gave Rouletabille a piercing glance through his
goggles, the first time Rouletabille had seen such a look in his eyes.
He never would have suspected him capable of such fire.) “Priemkof,”
continued Gounsovski in a low voice, using his handkerchief vigorously,
“was employed here in my home and we separated on bad terms, through his
fault, it is necessary to say. Then he got into Koupriane’s confidence
by saying the worst he could of us, my dear little monsieur.”
“But what could he say?--servants’ stories! my dear little monsieur,”
repeated the fat dame, and rolled her great magnificent black eyes
furiously. “Stories that have been treated as they deserved at Court,
certainly. Madame Daquin, the wife of His Majesty’s head-cook, whom
you certainly know, and the nephew of the second Maid of Honor to the
Empress, who stands very well with his aunt, have told us so; servants’
stories that might have ruined us but have not produced any effect on
His Majesty, for whom we would give our lives, Christ knows. Well,
you understand now that if you were to say to Koupriane, ‘Gaspadine
Gounsovski has spoken ill to me of Priemkof,’ he would not care to hear
a word further. Still, Priemkof is in the scheme for the living bombs,
that is all I can tell you; at least, he was before the affair of the
poisoning. That poisoning is certainly very astonishing, between us. It
does not appear to have come from without, whereas the living bombs will
have to come from without. And Priemkof is mixed up in it.”
“Yes, yes,” approved Madame Gounsovski again, “he is committed to it.
There have been stories about him, too. Other people as well as he can
tell tales; it isn’t hard to do. He has got to make some showing now if
he is to keep in with Annouchka’s clique.”
“Koupriane, our dear Koupriane,” interrupted Gounsovski, slightly
troubled at hearing his wife pronounce Annouchka’s name, “Koupriane
ought to be able to understand that this time Priemkof must bring things
off, or he is definitely ruined.”
“Priemkof knows it well enough,” replied Madame as she re-filled the
glasses, “but Koupriane doesn’t know it; that is all we can tell you. Is
it enough? All the rest is mere gossip.”
It certainly was enough for Rouletabille; he had had enough of it! This
idle gossip and these living bombs! These pinchbecks, these
whispering tale-tellers in their bourgeois, countrified setting; these
politico-police combinations whose grotesque side was always uppermost;
while the terrible side, the Siberian aspect, prisons, black holes,
hangings, disappearances, exiles and deaths and martyrdoms remained
so jealously hidden that no one ever spoke of them! All that weight of
horror, between a good cigar and “a little glass of anisette, monsieur,
if you won’t take champagne.” Still, he had to drink before he
left, touch glasses in a health, promise to come again, whenever he
wished--the house was open to him. Rouletabille knew it was open to
anybody--anybody who had a tale to tell, something that would send
some other person to prison or to death and oblivion. No guard at the
entrance to check a visitor--men entered Gounsovski’s house as the house
of a friend, and he was always ready to do you a service, certainly!
He accompanied the reporter to the stairs. Rouletabille was just about
to risk speaking of Annouchka to him, in order to approach the subject
of Natacha, when Gounsovski said suddenly, with a singular smile:
“By the way, do you still believe in Natacha Trebassof?”
“I shall believe in her until my death,” Rouletabille thrust back; “but
I admit to you that at this moment I don’t know where she has gone.”
“Watch the Bay of Lachtka, and come to tell me to-morrow if you will
believe in her always,” replied Gounsovski, confidentially, with a
horrid sort of laugh that made the reporter hurry down the stairs.
And now here was Priemkof to look after! Priemkof after Matiew!
It seemed to the young man that he had to contend against all the
revolutionaries not only, but all the Russian police as well--and
Gounsovski himself, and Koupriane! Everybody, everybody! But most
urgent was Priemkof and his living bombs. What a strange and almost
incomprehensible and harassing adventure this was between Nihilism and
the Russian police. Koupriane and Gounsovski both employed a man they
knew to be a revolutionary and the friend of revolutionaries. Nihilism,
on its side, considered this man of the police force as one of its
own agents. In his turn, this man, in order to maintain his perilous
equilibrium, had to do work for both the police and the revolutionaries,
and accept whatever either gave him to do as it came, because it
was necessary he should give them assurances of his fidelity. Only
imbeciles, like Gapone, let themselves be hanged or ended by being
executed, like Azef, because of their awkward slips. But a Priemkof,
playing both branches of the police, had a good chance of living a long
time, and a Gounsovski would die tranquilly in his bed with all the
solaces of religion.
However, the young hearts hot with sincerity, sheathed with dynamite,
are mysteriously moved in the atrocious darkness of Holy Russia, and
they do not know where they will be sent, and it is all one to them,
because all they ask is to die in a mad spiritual delirium of hate
and love--living bombs!*
* In the trial after the revolt at Cronstadt two young women
were charged with wearing bombs as false bosoms.
At the corner of Aptiekarski-Pereoulok Rouletabille came in the way
of Koupriane, who was leaving for Pere Alexis’s place and, seeing the
reporter, stopped his carriage and called that he was going immediately
to the datcha.
“You have seen Pere Alexis?”
“Yes,” said Koupriane. “And this time I have it on you. What I told you,
what I foresaw, has happened. But have you any news of the sufferers?
Apropos, rather a curious thing has happened. I met Kister on the Nevsky
just now.”
“The physician?”
“Yes, one of Trebassof’s physicians whom I had sent an inspector to his
house to fetch to the datcha, as well as his usual associate, Doctor
Litchkof. Well, neither Litchkof nor he had been summoned. They
didn’t know anything had happened at the datcha. They had not seen my
inspector. I hope he has met some other doctor on the way and, in view
of the urgency, has taken him to the datcha.”
“That is what has happened,” replied Rouletabille, who had turned very
pale. “Still, it is strange these gentlemen had not been notified,
because at the datcha the Trebassofs were told that the general’s usual
doctors were not at home and so the police had summoned two others who
would arrive at once.”
Koupriane jumped up in the carriage.
“But Kister and Litchkof had not left their houses. Kister, who had just
met Litchkof, said so. What does this mean?”
“Can you tell me,” asked Rouletabille, ready now for the thunder-clap
that his question invited, “the name of the inspector you ordered to
bring them?”
“Priemkof, a man with my entire confidence.”
Koupriane’s carriage rushed toward the Isles. Late evening had come.
Alone on the deserted route the horses seemed headed for the stars; the
carriage behind seemed no drag upon them. The coachman bent above them,
arms out, as though he would spring into the ether. Ah, the beautiful
night, the lovely, peaceful night beside the Neva, marred by the wild
gallop of these maddened horses!
“Priemkof! Priemkof! One of Gounsovski’s men! I should have suspected
him,” railed Koupriane after Rouletabille’s explanations. “But now,
shall we arrive in time?”
They stood up in the carriage, urging the coachman, exciting the horses:
“Scan! Scan! Faster, douriak!” Could they arrive before the “living
bombs”? Could they hear them before they arrived? Ah, there was
Eliaguine!
They rushed from the one bank to the other as though there were no
bridges in their insensate course. And their ears were strained for the
explosion, for the abomination now to come, preparing slyly in the night
so hypocritically soft under the cold glance of the stars. Suddenly,
“Stop, stop!” Rouletabille cried to the coachman.
“Are you mad!” shouted Koupriane.
“We are mad if we arrive like madmen. That would make the catastrophe
sure. There is still a chance. If we wish not to lose it, then we must
arrive easily and calmly, like friends who know the general is out of
danger.”
“Our only chance is to arrive before the bogus doctors. Either they
aren’t there, or it already is all over. Priemkof must have been
surprised at the affair of the poisoning, but he has seized the
opportunity; fortunately he couldn’t find his accomplices immediately.”
“Here is the datcha, anyway. In the name of heaven, tell your driver to
stop the horses here. If the ‘doctors’ are already there it is we who
shall have killed the general.”
“You are right.”
Koupriane moderated his excitement and that of his driver and horses,
and the carriage stopped noiselessly, not far from the datcha. Ermolai
came toward them.
“Priemkof?” faltered Koupriane.
“He has gone again, Excellency.”
“How--gone again?”
“Yes, but he has brought the doctors.”
Koupriane crushed Rouletabille’s wrist. The doctors were there!
“Madame Trebassof is better,” continued Ermolai, who understood nothing
of their emotion. “The general is going to meet them and take them to
his wife himself.”
“Where are they?”
“They are waiting in the drawing-room.”
“Oh, Excellency, keep cool, keep cool, and all is not lost,” implored
the reporter.
Rouletabille and Koupriane slipped carefully into the garden. Ermolai
followed them.
“There?” inquired Koupriane.
“There,” Ermolai replied.
From the corner where they were, and looking through the veranda, they
could see the “doctors” as they waited.
They were seated in chairs side by side, in a corner of the drawing-room
from where they could see every-thing in the room and a part of the
garden, which they faced, and could hear everything. A window of the