He gave a short laugh--the laugh of a man who had tried something and failed. Something that was not commerce, for his voice and speech had a ring of other things.
“Can you put me up?” asked Cartoner. “Only for a few days, perhaps.”
“As long as you stay in Petersburg you stay in these rooms,” replied the other, gravely.
Cartoner nodded his thanks and sat down. Their attitude towards each other had the repose which is only existent in a friendship that has lasted since childhood.
“Gad!” exclaimed the other, “we are in a queer way. I went to the opera the other evening. He showed his face in the imperial box and the house was empty in half an hour. He always drives alone in his sleigh now, so that only one royal life may go at a time. They'll get him--they'll get him! And he knows it.”
“They are worse than fools,” answered the other. “The man is down, and they strike him. His asthma is worse. He has half a dozen complaints. His policy has failed. It was the finest policy ever tried in Russia. He is the finest Czar they have ever had. He gave them trial by jury; he abolished corporal punishment. Fools! they are the scum of this earth, Cartoner!”
“I know,” replied Cartoner, in his gentle way, “students who cannot learn--workmen who will not work--women whom no one will marry.”
“Yes, the sons and daughters of the serfs that he emancipated. It makes one sick to talk of them. Let me hear about yourself.”
“Well,” answered Cartoner, “I have had nothing to eat since breakfast.”
“That is all you have to tell me about yourself?”
It was on every gossip's tongue in St. Petersburg that Jeliaboff had been arrested.
“It is the beginning of the end,” men said. “They will now catch the others. The new reign of terror is over.”
But Jeliaboff himself--a dangerous man (one of the Terrorists), the chief of the plot to blow up the imperial train at the Alexandroff Station--said that it was not so. This also, the mere bravado of an arrested criminal, was bandied from mouth to mouth.
For two years the most extraordinary agitation of modern days had held Russian society within its grip. All the world seemed to whisper. Men walking in the streets turned to glance over their shoulders at the approach of a step, at the sound of a sleigh-bell. The women were in the secret, too; and when the women touch politics they are politics no longer. For there should be no real emotion in politics; only the stimulated emotion of the platform.