II
Our daily relations were interrupted at this
period for something like a fortnight. I had to
absent myself unexpectedly from Geneva. On my
return I lost no time in directing my steps up
the Boulevard des Philosophes.
Through the open door of the drawing-room I was
annoyed to hear a visitor holding forth steadily
in an unctuous deep voice.
Mrs. Haldin's armchair by the window stood
empty. On the sofa, Nathalie Haldin raised her
charming grey eyes in a glance of greeting
accompanied by the merest hint of a welcoming
smile. But she made no movement. With her
strong white hands lying inverted in the lap of
her mourning dress she faced a man who presented
to me a robust back covered with black
broadcloth, and well in keeping with the deep
voice. He turned his head sharply over his
shoulder, but only for a moment.
"Ah! your English friend. I know. I know.
That's nothing."
He wore spectacles with smoked glasses, a tall
silk hat stood on the floor by the side of his
chair. Flourishing slightly a big soft hand he
went on with his discourse, precipitating his
delivery a little more.
"I have never changed the faith I held while
wandering in the forests and bogs of Siberia.
It sustained me then--it sustains me now. The
great Powers of Europe are bound to disappear--
and the cause of their collapse will be very
simple. They will exhaust themselves struggling
against their proletariat. In Russia it is
different. In Russia we have no classes to
combat each other, one holding the power of
wealth, and the other mighty with the strength
of numbers. We have only an unclean bureaucracy
in the face of a people as great and as
incorruptible as the ocean. No, we have no
classes. But we have the Russian woman. The
admirable Russian woman! I receive most
remarkable letters signed by women. So elevated
in tone, so courageous, breathing such a noble
ardour of service! The greatest part of our
hopes rests on women. I behold their thirst for
knowledge. It is admirable. Look how they
absorb, how they are making it their own. It is
miraculous. But what is knowledge? . . . I
understand that you have not been studying
anything especially--medicine for instance. No?
That's right. Had I been honoured by being
asked to advise you on the use of your time when
you arrived here I would have been strongly
opposed to such a course. Knowledge in itself
is mere dross."
He had one of those bearded Russian faces
without shape, a mere appearance of flesh and
hair with not a single feature having any sort
of character. His eyes being hidden by the dark
glasses there was an utter absence of all
expression. I knew him by sight. He was a
Russian refugee of mark. All Geneva knew his
burly black-coated figure. At one time all
Europe was aware of the story of his life
written by himself and translated into seven or
more languages. In his youth he had led an
idle, dissolute life. Then a society girl he
was about to marry died suddenly and thereupon
he abandoned the world of fashion, and began to
conspire in a spirit of repentance, and, after
that, his native autocracy took good care that
the usual things should happen to him. He was
imprisoned in fortresses, beaten within an inch
of his life, and condemned to work in mines,
with common criminals. The great success of his
book, however, was the chain.
I do not remember now the details of the weight
and length of the fetters riveted on his limbs
by an "Administrative" order, but it was in the
number of pounds and the thickness of links an
appalling assertion of the divine right of
autocracy. Appalling and futile too, because
this big man managed to carry off that simple
engine of government with him into the woods.
The sensational clink of these fetters is heard
all through the chapters describing his escape--
a subject of wonder to two continents. He had
begun by concealing himself successfully from
his guard in a hole on a river bank. It was the
end of the day; with infinite labour he managed
to free one of his legs. Meantime night fell.
He was going to begin on his other leg when he
was overtaken by a terrible misfortune. He
dropped his file.
All this is precise yet symbolic; and the file
had its pathetic history. It was given to him
unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced
girl. The poor creature had come out to the
mines to join one of his fellow convicts, a
delicate young man, a mechanic and a social
democrat, with broad cheekbones and large
staring eyes. She had worked her way across
half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to
be near him, and, as it seems, with the hope of
helping him to escape. But she arrived too
late. Her lover had died only a week before.
Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the
history of ideas in Russia, the file came into
his hands, and inspired him with an ardent
resolution to regain his liberty. When it
slipped through his fingers it was as if it had
gone straight into the earth. He could by no
manner of means put his hand on it again in the
dark. He groped systematically in the loose
earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was
passing meantime, the precious night on which he
counted to get away into the forests, his only
chance of escape. For a moment he was tempted
by despair to give up; but recalling the quiet,
sad face of the heroic girl, he felt profoundly
ashamed of his weakness. She had selected him
for the gift of liberty and he must show himself
worthy of the favour conferred by her feminine,
indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred
trust. To fail would have been a sort of
treason against the sacredness of self-sacrifice
and womanly love.
There are in his book whole pages of self-
analysis whence emerges like a white figure from
a dark confused sea the conviction of woman's
spiritual superiority--his new faith confessed
since in several volumes. His first tribute to
it, the great act of his conversion, was his
extraordinary existence in the endless forests
of the Okhotsk Province, with the loose end of
the chain wound about his waist. A strip torn
off his convict shirt secured the end firmly.
Other strips fastened it at intervals up his
left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent
the slack links from getting hooked in the
bushes. He became very fierce. He developed an
unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and
hunted existence. He learned to creep into
villages without betraying his presence by
anything more than an occasional faint jingle.
He broke into outhouses with an axe he managed
to purloin in a wood-cutters' camp. In the
deserted tracts of country he lived on wild
berries and hunted for honey. His clothing
dropped off him gradually. His naked tawny
figure glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with
a cloud of mosquitoes and flies hovering about
the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through
whole districts. His temper grew savage as the
days went by, and he was glad to discover that
that there was so much of a brute in him. He
had nothing else to put his trust in. For it
was as though there had been two human beings
indissolubly joined in that enterprise. The
civilized man, the enthusiast of advanced
humanitarian ideals thirsting for the triumph of
spiritual love and political liberty; and the
stealthy, primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in
the preservation of his freedom from day to day,
like a tracked wild beast.
The wild beast was making its way instinctively
eastward to the Pacific coast, and the civilised
humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
watched the proceedings with awe. Through all
these weeks he could never make up his mind to
appeal to human compassion. In the wary
primeval savage this shyness might have been
natural, but the other too, the civilized
creature, the thinker, the escaping "political"
had developed an absurd form of morbid
pessimism, a form of temporary insanity,
originating perhaps in the physical worry and
discomfort of the chain. These links, he
fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind.
It was a repugnant and suggestive load. Nobody
could feel any pity at the disgusting sight of a
man escaping with a broken chain. His
imagination became affected by his fetters in a
precise, matter-of-fact manner. It seemed to
him impossible that people could resist the
temptation of fastening the loose end to a
staple in the wall while they went for the
nearest police official. Crouching in holes or
hidden in thickets, he had tried to read the
faces of unsuspecting free settlers working in
the clearings or passing along the paths within
a foot or two of his eyes. His feeling was that
no man on earth could be trusted with the
temptation of the chain.
One day, however, he chanced to come upon a
solitary woman. It was on an open slope of
rough grass outside the forest. She sat on the
bank of a narrow stream; she had a red
handkerchief on her head and a small basket was
lying on the ground near her hand. At a little
distance could be seen a cluster of log cabins,
with a water-mill over a dammed pool shaded by
birch trees and looking bright as glass in the
twilight. He approached her silently, his
hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel
in his hand; there were leaves and bits of twig
in his tangled hair, in his matted beard;
bunches of rags he had wound round the links
fluttered from his waist. A faint clink of his
fetters made the woman turn her head. Too
terrified by this savage apparition to jump up
or even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted
to faint. . . . Expecting nothing less than to
be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes
with her hands to avoid the sight of the
descending axe. When at last she found courage
to look again, she saw the shaggy wild man
sitting on the bank six feet away from her. His
thin, sinewy arms hugged his naked legs; the
long beard covered the knees on which he rested
his chin; all these clasped, folded limbs, the
bare shoulders, the wild head with red staring
eyes, shook and trembled violently while the
bestial creature was making efforts to speak.
It was six weeks since he had heard the sound of
his own voice. It seemed as though he had lost
the faculty of speech. He had become a dumb and
despairing brute, till the woman's sudden,
unexpected cry of profound pity, the insight of
her feminine compassion discovering the complex
misery of the man under the terrifying aspect of
the monster, restored him to the ranks of
humanity. This point of view is presented in
his book, with a very effective eloquence. She
ended, he says, by shedding tears over him,
sacred, redeeming tears, while he also wept with
joy in the manner of a converted sinner.
Directing him to hide in the bushes and wait
patiently (a police patrol was expected in the
Settlement) she went away towards the houses,
promising to return at night.
As if providentially appointed to be the newly
wedded wife of the village blacksmith, the woman
persuaded her husband to come out with her,
bringing some tools of his trade, a hammer, a
chisel, a small anvil. . . . "My fetters"--the
book says--" were struck off on the banks of the
stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an
athletic, taciturn young man of the people,
kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a
liberating genius stood by with clasped hands."
Obviously a symbolic couple. At the same time
they furnished his regained humanity with some
decent clothing, and put heart into the new man
by the information that the seacoast of the
Pacific was only a very few miles away. It
could be seen, in fact, from the top of the next
ridge. . . .
The rest of his escape does not lend itself to
mystic treatment and symbolic interpretation.
He ended by finding his way to the West by the
Suez Canal route in the usual manner. Reaching
the shores of South Europe he sat down to write
his autobiography--the great literary success of
its year. This book was followed by other books
written with the declared purpose of elevating
humanity. In these works he preached generally
the cult of the woman. For his own part he
practised it under the rites of special devotion
to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame
de S---, a lady of advanced views, no longer
very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife
of a now dead and forgotten diplomat. Her loud
pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern
thought and of modern sentiment, she sheltered
(like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the
republican territory of Geneva. Driving through
the streets in her big landau she exhibited to
the indifference of the natives and the stares
of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure
of hieratic stiffness, with a pair of big
gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short
veil of black lace, which, coming down no
further than her vividly red lips, resembled a
mask. Usually the "heroic fugitive" (this name
was bestowed upon him in a review of the English
edition of his book)--the " heroic fugitive "
accompanied her, sitting, portentously bearded
and darkly bespectacled, not by her side, but
opposite her, with his back to the horses.
Thus, facing each other, with no one else in the
roomy carriage, their airings suggested a
conscious public manifestation. Or it may have
been unconscious. Russian simplicity often
marches innocently on the edge of cynicism for
some lofty purpose. But it is a vain enterprise
for sophisticated Europe to try and understand
these doings. Considering the air of gravity
extending even to the physiognomy of the
coachman and the action of the showy horses,
this quaint display might have possessed a
mystic significance, but to the corrupt
frivolity of a Western mind, like my own, it
seemed hardly decent.
However, it is not becoming for an obscure
teacher of languages to criticize a "heroic
fugitive" of worldwide celebrity. I was aware
from hearsay that he was an industrious busy-
body, hunting up his compatriots in hotels, in
private lodgings, and--I was told--conferring
upon them the honour of his notice in public
gardens when a suitable opening presented
itself. I was under the impression that after a
visit or two, several months before, he had
given up the ladies Haldin--no doubt
reluctantly, for there could be no question of
his being a determined person. It was perhaps
to be expected that he should reappear again on
this terrible occasion, as a Russian and a
revolutionist, to say the right thing, to strike
the true, perhaps a comforting, note. But I did
not like to see him sitting there. I trust that
an unbecoming jealousy of my privileged position
had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to a
special standing for my silent friendship.
Removed by the difference of age and nationality
as if into the sphere of another existence, I
produced, even upon myself, the effect of a dumb
helpless ghost, of an anxious immaterial thing
that could only hover about without the power to
protect or guide by as much as a whisper. Since
Miss Haldin with her sure instinct had refrained
from introducing me to the burly celebrity, I
would have retired quietly and returned later
on, had I not met a peculiar expression in her
eyes which I interpreted as a request to stay,
with the view, perhaps, of shortening an
unwelcome visit.
He picked up his hat, but only to deposit it on
his knees.
"We shall meet again, Natalia Victorovna. To-
day I have called only to mark those feelings
towards your honoured mother and yourself, the
nature of which you cannot doubt. I needed no
urging, but Eleanor--Madame de S--- herself has
in a way sent me. She extends to you the hand
of feminine fellowship. There is positively in
all the range of human sentiments no joy and no
sorrow that woman cannot understand, elevate,
and spiritualize by her interpretation. That
young man newly arrived from St. Petersburg, I
have mentioned to you, is already under the
charm."
At this point Miss Haldin got up abruptly. I
was glad. He did not evidently expect anything
so decisive and, at first, throwing his head
back, he tilted up his dark glasses with bland
curiosity. At last, recollecting himself, he
stood up hastily, seizing his hat off his knees
with great adroitness.
"How is it, Natalia Victorovna, that you have
kept aloof so long, from what after all is--let
disparaging tongues say what they like--a unique
centre of intellectual freedom and of effort to
shape a high conception of our future? In the
case of your honoured mother I understand in a
measure. At her age new ideas--new faces are
not perhaps. . . . But you! Was it mistrust--
or indifference? You must come out of your
reserve. We Russians have no right to be
reserved with each other. In our circumstances
it is almost a crime against humanity. The
luxury of private grief is not for us. Nowadays
the devil is not combated by prayers and
fasting. And what is fasting after all but
starvation. You must not starve yourself,
Natalia Victorovna. Strength is what we want.
Spiritual strength, I mean. As to the other
kind, what could withstand us Russians if we
only put it forth? Sin is different in our day,
and the way of salvation for pure souls is
different too. It is no longer to be found in
monasteries but in the world, in the. . . ."
The deep sound seemed to rise from under the
floor, and one felt steeped in it to the lips.
Miss Haldin's interruption resembled the effort
of a drowning person to keep above water. She
struck in with an accent of impatience--
"But, Peter Ivanovitch, I don't mean to retire
into a monastery. Who would look for salvation
there?"
"I spoke figuratively," he boomed.
"Well, then, I am speaking figuratively too.
But sorrow is sorrow and pain is pain in the old
way. They make their demands upon people. One
has got to face them the best way one can. I
know that the blow which has fallen upon us so
unexpectedly is only an episode in the fate of a
people. You may rest assured that I don't
forget that. But just now I have to think of my
mother. How can you expect me to leave her to
herself. . . ?"
"That is putting it in a very crude way," he
protested in his great effortless voice.
Miss Haldin did not wait for the vibration to
die out.
"And run about visiting amongst a lot of strange
people. The idea is distasteful for me; and I
do not know what else you may mean?"
He towered before her, enormous, deferential,
cropped as close as a convict and this big
pinkish poll evoked for me the vision of a wild
head with matted locks peering through parted
bushes, glimpses of naked, tawny limbs slinking
behind the masses of sodden foliage under a
cloud of flies and mosquitoes. It was an
involuntary tribute to the vigour of his
writing. Nobody could doubt that he had
wandered in Siberian forests, naked and girt
with a chain. The black broadcloth coat
invested his person with a character of austere
decency--something recalling a missionary.
"Do you know what I want, Natalia Victorovna?"
he uttered solemnly. "I want you to be a
fanatic."
"A fanatic?"
"Yes. Faith alone won't do."
His voice dropped to a still lower tone. He
raised for a moment one thick arm; the other
remained hanging down against his thigh, with
the fragile silk hat at the end.
"I shall tell you now something which I entreat
you to ponder over carefully. Listen, we need a
force that would move heaven and earth--nothing
less."
The profound, subterranean note of this "nothing
less" made one shudder, almost, like the deep
muttering of wind in the pipes of an organ.
"And are we to find that force in the salon of
Madame de S---? Excuse me, Peter Ivanovitch, if
I permit myself to doubt it. Is not that lady a
woman of the great world, an aristocrat?"
"Prejudice!" he cried. "You astonish me. And
suppose she was all that! She is also a woman
of flesh and blood. There is always something
to weigh down the spiritual side in all of us.
But to make of it a reproach is what I did not
expect from you. No! I did not expect that.
One would think you have listened to some
malevolent scandal."
"I have heard no gossip, I assure you. In our
province how could we? But the world speaks of
her. What can there be in common in a lady of
that sort and an obscure country girl like me?"
"She is a perpetual manifestation of a noble and
peerless spirit," he broke in. "Her charm--no,
I shall not speak of her charm. But, of course,
everybody who approaches her falls under the
spell. . . . Contradictions vanish, trouble
falls away from one. . . . Unless I am mistaken-
-but I never make a mistake in spiritual matters-
-you are troubled in your soul, Natalia
Victorovna."
Miss Haldin's clear eyes looked straight at his
soft enormous face; I received the impression
that behind these dark spectacles of his he
could be as impudent as he chose.
"Only the other evening walking back to town
from Chateau Borel with our latest interesting
arrival from Petersburg, I could notice the
powerful soothing influence--I may say
reconciling influence. . . . There he was, all
these kilometres along the shores of the lake,
silent, like a man who has been shown the way of
peace. I could feel the leaven working in his
soul, you understand. For one thing he listened
to me patiently. I myself was inspired that
evening by the firm and exquisite genius of
Eleanor--Madame de S---, you know. It was a
full moon and I could observe his face. I
cannot be deceived. . . ."
Miss Haldin, looking down, seemed to hesitate.
"Well! I will think of what you said, Peter
Ivanovitch. I shall try to call as soon as I
can leave mother for an hour or two safely."
Coldly as these words were said I was amazed at
the concession. He snatched her right hand with
such fervour that I thought he was going to
press it to his lips or his breast. But he only
held it by the finger-tips in his great paw and
shook it a little up and down while he delivered
his last volley of words.
"That's right. That's right. I haven't
obtained your full confidence as yet, Natalia
Victorovna, but that will come. All in good
time. The sister of Viktor Haldin cannot be
without importance. . . . It's simply
impossible. And no woman can remain sitting on
the steps. Flowers, tears, applause--that has
had its time; it's a mediaeval conception. The
arena, the arena itself is the place for women!"
He relinquished her hand with a flourish, as if
giving it to her for a gift, and remained still,
his head bowed in dignified submission before
her femininity.
"The arena! . . . You must descend into the
arena, Natalia."
He made one step backwards, inclined his
enormous body, and was gone swiftly. The door
fell to behind him. But immediately the
powerful resonance of his voice was heard
addressing in the ante-room the middle-aged
servant woman who was letting him out. Whether
he exhorted her too to descend into the arena I
cannot tell. The thing sounded like a lecture,
and the slight crash of the outer door cut it
short suddenly.
