The Secret of the Night
forget such an action, and that she loved me more than if I were truly
her mother. It was all in vain that during the days following we sought
to understand how the infernal machine had been placed in the bouquet
of wild flowers. Only the general’s friends that you saw this evening,
Natacha and I had entered the general’s chamber during the day or in
the evening. No servant, no chamber-maid, had been on that floor. In
the day-time as well as all night long that entire floor is closed and I
have the keys. The door of the servants’ staircase which opens onto that
floor, directly into the general’s chamber, is always locked and barred
on the inside with iron. Natacha and I do the chamber work. There is no
way of taking greater precautions. Three police agents watched over
us night and day. The night of the bouquet two had spent their time
watching around the house, and the third lay on the sofa in the veranda.
Then, too, we found all the doors and windows of the villa shut tight.
In such circumstances you can judge whether my anguish was not deeper
than any I had known hitherto. Because to whom, henceforth, could we
trust ourselves? what and whom could we believe? what and whom could we
watch? From that day, no other person but Natacha and me have the right
to go to the first floor. The general’s chamber was forbidden to his
friends. Anyway, the general improved, and soon had the pleasure of
receiving them himself at his table. I carry the general down and take
him to his room again on my back. I do not wish anyone to help. I am
strong enough for that. I feel that I could carry him to the end of the
world if that would save him. Instead of three police, we had ten; five
outside, five inside. The days went well enough, but the nights were
frightful, because the shadows of the police that I encountered always
made me fear that I was face to face with the Nihilists. One night I
almost strangled one with my hand. It was after that incident that we
arranged with Koupriane that the agents who watched at night, inside,
should stay placed in the veranda, after having, at the end of the
evening, made complete examination of everything. They were not to leave
the veranda unless they heard a suspicious noise or I called to them.
And it was after that arrangement that the incident of the floor
happened, that has puzzled so both Koupriane and me.”
“Pardon, madame,” interrupted Rouletabille, “but the agents, during the
examination of everything, never went to the bedroom floor?”
“No, my child, there is only myself and Natacha, I repeat, who, since
the bouquet, go there.”
“Well, madame, it is necessary to take me there at once.”
“At once!”
“Yes, into the general’s chamber.”
“But he is sleeping, my child. Let me tell you exactly how the affair
of the floor happened, and you will know as much of it as I and as
Koupriane.”
“To the general’s chamber at once.”
She took both his hands and pressed them nervously. “Little friend!
Little friend! One hears there sometimes things which are the secret of
the night! You understand me?”
“To the general’s chamber, at once, madame.”
Abruptly she decided to take him there, agitated, upset as she was by
ideas and sentiments which held her without respite between the wildest
inquietude and the most imprudent audacity.
IV. “THE YOUTH OF MOSCOW IS DEAD”
Rouletabille let himself be led by Matrena through the night, but he
stumbled and his awkward hands struck against various things. The ascent
to the first floor was accomplished in profound silence. Nothing broke
it except that restless moaning which had so affected the young man just
before.
The tepid warmth, the perfume of a woman’s boudoir, then, beyond,
through two doors opening upon the dressing-room which lay between
Matrena’s chamber and Feodor’s, the dim luster of a night-lamp showed
the bed where was stretched the sleeping tyrant of Moscow. Ah, he was
frightening to see, with the play of faint yellow light and diffused
shadows upon him. Such heavy-arched eyebrows, such an aspect of pain and
menace, the massive jaw of a savage come from the plains of Tartary to
be the Scourge of God, the stiff, thick, spreading beard. This was a
form akin to the gallery of old nobles at Kasan, and young Rouletabille
imagined him as none other than Ivan the Terrible himself. Thus appeared
as he slept the excellent Feodor Feodorovitch, the easy, spoiled father
of the family table, the friend of the advocate celebrated for his feats
with knife and fork and of the bantering timber-merchant and amiable
bear-hunter, the joyous Thaddeus and Athanase; Feodor, the faithful
spouse of Matrena Petrovna and the adored papa of Natacha, a brave
man who was so unfortunate as to have nights of cruel sleeplessness or
dreams more frightful still.
At that moment a hoarse sigh heaved his huge chest in an uneven
rhythm, and Rouletabille, leaning in the doorway of the dressing-room,
watched--but it was no longer the general that he watched, it was
something else, lower down, beside the wall, near the door, and it was
that which set him tiptoeing so lightly across the floor that it gave
no sound. There was no slightest sound in the chamber, except the heavy
breathing lifting the rough chest. Behind Rouletabille Matrena raised
her arms, as though she wished to hold him back, because she did not
know where he was going. What was he doing? Why did he stoop thus beside
the door and why did he press his thumb all along the floor at the
doorway? He rose again and returned. He passed again before the bed,
where rumbled now, like the bellows of a forge, the respiration of the
sleeper. Matrena grasped Rouletabille by the hand. And she had already
hurried him into the dressing-room when a moan stopped them.
“The youth of Moscow is dead!”
It was the sleeper speaking. The mouth which had given the stringent
orders moaned. And the lamentation was still a menace. In the haunted
sleep thrust upon that man by the inadequate narcotic the words Feodor
Feodorovitch spoke were words of mourning and pity. This perfect fiend
of a soldier, whom neither bullets nor bombs could intimidate, had a way
of saying words which transformed their meaning as they came from his
terrible mouth. The listeners could not but feel absorbed in the tones
of the brutal victor.
Matrena Petrovna and Rouletabille had leant their two shadows, blended
one into the other, against the open doorway just beyond the gleam of
the night-lamp, and they heard with horror:
“The youth of Moscow is dead! They have cleared away the corpses. There
is nothing but ruin left. The Kremlin itself has shut its gates--that it
may not see. The youth of Moscow is dead!”
Feodor Feodorovitch’s fist shook above his bed; it seemed that he was
about to strike, to kill again, and Rouletabille felt Matrena trembling
against him, while he trembled as well before the fearful vision of the
killer in the Red Week!
Feodor heaved an immense sigh and his breast descended under the
bed-clothes, the fist relaxed and fell, the great head lay over on its
ear. There was silence. Had he repose at last? No, no. He sighed, he
choked anew, he tossed on his couch like the damned in torment, and
the words written by his daughter--by his daughter--blazed in his eyes,
which now were wide open--words written on the wall, that he read on the
wall, written in blood.
“The youth of Moscow is dead! They had gone so young into the
fields and into the mines,
And they had not found a single corner of the Russian land where
there were not moanings.
Now the youth of Moscow is dead and no more moanings are heard,
Because those for whom all youth died do not dare even to moan
any more.
But--what? The voice of Feodor lost its threatening tone. His breath
came as from a weeping child. And it was with sobs in his throat that he
said the last verse, the verse written by his daughter in the album, in
red letters:
“The last barricade had standing there the girl of eighteen
winters, the virgin of Moscow, flower of the snow.
Who gave her kisses to the workmen struck by the bullets
from the soldiers of the Czar;
“She aroused the admiration of the very soldiers who, weeping,
killed her:
“What killing! All the houses shuttered, the windows with heavy
eyelids of plank in order not to see!--
“And the Kremlin itself has closed its gates--that it may
not see.
“The youth of Moscow is dead!”
“Feodor! Feodor!”
She had caught him in her arms, holding him fast, comforting him while
still he raved, “The youth of Moscow is dead,” and appeared to thrust
away with insensate gestures a crowd of phantoms. She crushed him to
her breast, she put her hands over his mouth to make him stop, but he,
saying, “Do you hear? Do you hear? What do they say? They say nothing,
now. What a tangle of bodies under the sleigh, Matrena! Look at those
frozen legs of those poor girls we pass, sticking out in all directions,
like logs, from under their icy, blooded skirts. Look, Matrena!”
And then came further delirium uttered in Russian, which was all the
more terrible to Rouletabille because he could not comprehend it.
Then, suddenly, Feodor became silent and thrust away Matrena Petrovna.
“It is that abominable narcotic,” he said with an immense sigh. “I’ll
drink no more of it. I do not wish to drink it.”
With one hand he pointed to a large glass on the table beside him, still
half full of a soporific mixture with which he moistened his lips each
time he woke; with the other hand he wiped the perspiration from his
face. Matrena Petrovna stayed trembling near him, suddenly overpowered
by the idea that he might discover there was someone there behind the
door, who had seen and heard the sleep of General Trebassof! Ah, if he
learned that, everything was over. She might say her prayers; she should
die.
But Rouletabille was careful to give no sign. He barely breathed. What
a nightmare! He understood now the emotion of the general’s friends when
Natacha had sung in her low, sweet voice, “Good-night. May your eyes
have rest from tears and calm re-enter your heart oppressed.” The
friends had certainly been made aware, by Matrena’s anxious talking, of
the general’s insomnia, and they could not repress their tears as they
listened to the poetic wish of charming Natacha. “All the same,” thought
Rouletabille, “no one could imagine what I have just seen. They are not
dead for everyone in the world, the youths of Moscow, and every night I
know now a chamber where in the glow of the night-lamp they rise--they
rise--they rise!” and the young man frankly, naively regretted to have
intruded where he was; to have penetrated, however unintentionally, into
an affair which, after all, concerned only the many dead and the one
living. Why had he come to put himself between the dead and the living?
It might be said to him: “The living has done his whole heroic duty,”
but the dead, what else was it that they had done?
Ah, Rouletabille cursed his curiosity, for--he saw it now--it was the
desire to approach the mystery revealed by Koupriane and to penetrate
once more, through all the besetting dangers, an astounding and perhaps
monstrous enigma, that had brought him to the threshold of the datcha
des Iles, which had placed him in the trembling hands of Matrena
Petrovna in promising her his help. He had shown pity, certainly, pity
for the delirious distress of that heroic woman. But there had been more
curiosity than pity in his motives. And now he must pay, because it was
too late now to withdraw, to say casually, “I wash my hands of it.” He
had sent away the police and he alone remained between the general
and the vengeance of the dead! He might desert, perhaps! That one idea