The Secret of the Night
first-floor was open above their heads, so that they could hear any
noise from there. They could not be surprised from any side, and they
held every door in view. They were talking softly and tranquilly,
looking straight before them. They appeared young. One had a pleasant
face, pale but smiling, with rather long, curly hair; the other was more
angular, with haughty bearing and grave face, an eagle nose and glasses.
Both wore long black coats buttoned over their calm chests.
Koupriane and the reporter, followed by Ermolai, advanced with the
greatest precaution across the lawn. Screened by the wooden steps
leading to the veranda and by the vine-clad balustrade, they got near
enough to hear them. Koupriane gave eager ear to the words of these two
young men, who might have been so rich in the many years of life that
naturally belonged to them, and who were about to die so horrible a
death in destroying all about them. They spoke of what time it was, of
the softness of the night and the beauty of the sky; they spoke of the
shadows under the birch-trees, of the gulf shining in the late evening’s
fading golden light, of the river’s freshness and the sweetness of
springtime in the North. That is what they talked about. Koupriane
murmured, “The assassins!”
Now it was necessary to decide on action, and that necessity was
horrible. A false movement, an awkwardness, and the “doctors” would be
warned, and everything lost. They must have the bombs under their coats;
there were certainly at least two “living bombs.” Their chests, as
they breathed, must heave to and fro and their hearts beat against an
impending explosion.
Above on the bedroom floor, they heard the rapid arranging of the room,
steps on the floor and a confusion of voices; shadows passed across the
window-space. Koupriane rapidly interrogated Ermolai and learned that
all the general’s friends were there. The two doctors had arrived only
a couple of minutes before the Prefect of Police and the reporter.
The little doctor of Vassili-Ostrow had already gone, saying there was
nothing more for him to do when two such celebrated specialists had
arrived. However, in spite of their celebrity, no one had ever heard the
names they gave. Koupriane believed the little doctor was an accomplice.
The most necessary thing was to warn those in the room above. There was
immediate danger that someone would come downstairs to find the doctors
and take them to the general, or that the general would come down
himself to meet them. Evidently that was what they were waiting for.
They wished to die in his arms, to make sure that this time he did not
escape them! Koupriane directed Ermolai to go into the veranda and speak
in a commonplace way to them at the threshold of the drawing-room door,
saying that he would go upstairs and see if he might now escort them
to Madame Trebassof’s room. Once in the room above, he could warn the
others not to do anything but wait for Koupriane; then Ermolai was to
come down and say to the men, “In just a moment, if you please.”
Ermolai crept back as far as the lodge, and then came quite normally up
the path, letting the gravel crunch under his countrified footsteps.
He was an intelligent man, and grasped with extraordinary coolness the
importance of the plan of campaign. Easily and naturally he mounted the
veranda steps, paused at the threshold of the drawing-room, made the
remark he had been told to make, and went upstairs. Koupriane and
Rouletabille now watched the bedroom windows. The flitting shadows there
suddenly became motionless. All moving about ceased; no more steps were
heard, nothing. And that sudden silence made the two “doctors” raise
their faces toward the ceiling. Then they exchanged an aroused glance.
This change in the manner of things above was dangerous. Koupriane
muttered, “The idiots!” It was such a blow for those upstairs to learn
they walked over a mine ready to explode that it evidently had paralyzed
their limbs. Happily Ermolai came down almost immediately and said to
the “doctors” in his very best domestic manner:
“Just a second, messieurs, if you please.”
He did it still with utter naturalness. And he returned to the ledge
before he rejoined Koupriane and Rouletabille by way of the lawn.
Rouletabille, entirely cool, quite master of himself, as calm now as
Koupriane was nervous, said to the Prefect of Police:
“We must act now, and quickly. They are commencing to be suspicious.
Have you a plan?”
“Here is all I can see,” said Koupriane. “Have the general come down by
the narrow servants’ stairway, and slip out of the house from the window
of Natacha’s sitting-room, with the aid of a twisted sheet. Matrena
Petrovna will come to speak to them during this time; that will keep
them patient until the general is out of danger. As soon as Matrena has
withdrawn into the garden, I will call my men, who will shoot them from
a distance.”
“And the house itself? And the general’s friends?”
“Let them try to get away, too, by the servants’ stairway and jump from
the window after the general. We must try something. Say that I have
them at the muzzle of my revolver.”
“Your plan won’t work,” said Rouletabille, “unless the door of Natacha’s
sitting-room that opens on the drawing-room is closed.”
“It is. I can see from here.”
“And unless the door of the little passage-way before that staircase
that opens into the drawing-room is closed also, and you cannot see it
from here.”
“That door is open,” said Ermolai.
Koupriane swore. But he recovered himself promptly.
“Madame Trebassof will close the door when she speaks to them.”
“It’s impracticable,” said the reporter. “That will arouse their
suspicions more than ever. Leave it to me; I have a plan.”
“What?”
“I have time to execute it, but not to tell you about it. They have
already waited too long. I shall have to go upstairs, though. Ermolai
will need to go with me, as with a friend of the family.”
“I’ll go too.”
“That would give the whole show away, if they saw you, the Prefect of
Police.”
“Why, no. If they see me--and they know I ought to be there--as soon
as I show myself to them they will conclude I don’t know anything about
it.”
“You are wrong.”
“It is my duty. I should be near the general to defend him until the
last.”
Rouletabille shrugged his shoulders before this dangerous heroism, but
he did not stop to argue. He knew that his plan must succeed at once,
or in five minutes at the latest there would be only ruins, the dead and
the dying in the datcha des Iles.
Still he remained astonishingly calm. In principle he had admitted that
he was going to die. The only hope of being saved which remained to them
rested entirely upon their keeping perfectly cool and upon the patience
of the living bombs. Would they still have three minutes’ patience?
Ermolai went ahead of Koupriane and Rouletabille. At the moment they
reached the foot of the veranda steps the servant said loudly, repeating
his lesson:
“Oh, the general is waiting for you, Excellency. He told me to have you
come to him at once. He is entirely well and Madame Trebassof also.”
When they were in the veranda, he added:
“She is to see also, at once, these gentlemen, who will be able to tell
her there is no more danger.”
And all three passed while Koupriane and Rouletabille vaguely saluted
the two conspirators in the drawing-room. It was a decisive moment.
Recognizing Koupriane, the two Nihilists might well believe themselves
discovered, as the reporter had said, and precipitate the catastrophe.
However, Ermolai, Koupriane and Rouletabille climbed the stairs to the
bedroom like automatons, not daring to look behind them, and expecting
the end each instant. But neither stirred. Ermolai went down again, by
Rouletabille’s order, normally, naturally, tranquilly. They went into
Matrena Petrovna’s chamber. Everybody was there. It was a gathering of
ghosts.
Here was what had happened above. That the “doctors” still remained
below, that they had not been received instantly, in brief, that the
catastrophe had been delayed up to now was due to Matrena Petrovna,
whose watchful love, like a watch-dog, was always ready to scent danger.
These two “doctors” whose names she did not know, who arrived so late,
and the precipitate departure of the little doctor of Vassili-Ostrow
aroused her watchfulness. Before allowing them to come upstairs to the
general she resolved to have a look at them herself downstairs. She
arose from her bed for that; and now her presentiment was justified.
When she saw Ermolai, sober and mysterious, enter with Koupriane’s
message, she knew instinctively, before he spoke, that there were bombs
in the house. When Ermolai did speak it was a blow for everybody. At
first she, Matrena Perovna, had been a frightened, foolish figure in
the big flowered dressing-gown belonging to Feodor that she had wrapped
about her in her haste. When Ermolai left, the general, who knew she
only trembled for him, tried to reassure her, and, in the midst of
the frightened silence of all of them, said a few words recalling
the failure of all the previous attempts. But she shook her head and
trembled, shaking with fear for him, in agony at the thought that she
could do nothing there above those living bombs but wait for them to
burst. As to the friends, already their limbs were ruined, absolutely
ruined, in very truth. For a moment they were quite incapable of moving.
The jolly Councilor of Empire, Ivan Petrovitch, had no longer a lively
tale to tell, and the abominable prospect of “this horrible mix-up”
right at hand rendered him much less gay than in his best hours at
Cubat’s place. And poor Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff was whiter than the
snow that covers old Lithuania’s fields when the winter’s chase is on.
Athanase Georgevitch himself was not brilliant, and his sanguine face
had quite changed, as though he had difficulty in digesting his last
masterpiece with knife and fork. But, in justice to them, that was
the first instantaneous effect. No one could learn like that, all of
a sudden, that they were about to die in an indiscriminate slaughter
without the heart being stopped for a little. Ermolai’s words had turned
these amiable loafers into waxen statues, but, little by little, their
hearts commenced to beat again and each suggested some way of preventing
the disaster--all of them sufficiently incoherent--while Matrena
Petrovna invoked the Virgin and at the same time helped Feodor
Feodorovitch adjust his sword and buckle his belt; for the general
wished to die in uniform.
Athanase Georgevitch, his eyes sticking out of his head and his body
bent as though he feared the Nihlists just below him might perceive his
tall form--through the floor, no doubt--proposed that they should throw
themselves out of the window, even at the cost of broken legs. The
saddened Councilor of Empire declared that project simply idiotic, for
as they fell they would be absolutely at the disposal of the Nihilists,
who would be attracted by the noise and would make a handful of dust of
them with a single gesture through the window. Thaddeus Tchitchnikoff,
who couldn’t think of anything at all, blamed Koupriane and the rest of
the police for not having devised something. Why hadn’t they already got
rid of these Nihilists? After the frightened silence they had kept at
first, now they all spoke at once, in low voices, hoarse and rapid, with
shortened breath, making wild movements of the arms and head, and walked
here and there in the chamber quite without motive, but very softly on
tiptoe, going to the windows, returning, listening at the doors, peering
through the key-holes, exchanging absurd suggestions, full of the
wildest imaginings. “If we should... if... if,”--everybody speaking and