“Oh, yes,” said the other, growing more and more melancholy. “So a man suffers. He is his own tormentor; he himself makes the wheel on which, like his own executioner, he binds himself.”
“It is not necessary, monsieur; it is not necessary,” counseled the reporter.
“Listen,” implored Boris in a voice that showed tears were not far away. “You are still a child, but still you can see things. Do you believe Natacha loves me?”
“I am sure of it, Monsieur Boris; I am sure of it.”
“I am sure of it, too. But I don’t know what to think now. She has let me go, without trying to detain me, without a word of hope.”
“And where are you going like that?”
“I am returning to the Orel country, where I first saw her.”
“That is good, very good, Monsieur Boris. At least there you are sure to see her again. She goes there every year with her parents for a few weeks. It is a detail you haven’t overlooked, doubtless.”
“Certainly I haven’t. I will tell you that that prospect decided my place of retreat.”
“See!”
“God gives me nothing, but He opens His treasures, and each takes what he can.”
“Yes, yes; and Mademoiselle Natacha, does she know it is to Orel you have decided to retire?”
“I have no reason for concealing it from her, Monsieur Rouletabille.”
“So far so good. You needn’t feel so desolate, my dear Monsieur Boris. All is not lost. I will say even that I see a future for you full of hope.”
“Ah, if you are able to say that truthfully, I am happy indeed to have met you. I will never forget this rope you have flung me when all the waters seemed closing over my head. ‘What do you advise, then?”
“I advise you to go to Orel, monsieur, and as quickly as possible.”
“Very well. You must have reasons for saying that. I obey you, monsieur, and go.”
As Boris started towards the entrance-arch, Rouletabille slipped into the laboratory. Old Alexis was bent over his retorts. A wretched lamp barely lighted his obscure work. He turned at the noise the reporter made.
“Ah!-you, lad!”
“‘Well?”
“Oh, nothing so quick. Still, I have already analyzed the two napkins, you know.”
“Yes? The stains? Tell me, for the love of God!”
“Well, my boy, it is arsenate of soda again.”
Rouletabille, stricken to the heart, uttered a low cry and everything seemed to dance around him. Pere Alexis in the midst of all the strange laboratory instruments seemed Satan himself, and he repulsed the kindly arms stretched forth to sustain him; in the gloom, where danced here and there the little blue flames from the crucibles, lively as flickering tongues, he believed he saw Michael Nikolaievitch’s ghost come to cry, “The arsenate of soda continues, and I am dead.” He fell against the door, which swung open, and he rolled as far as the counter, and struck his face against it. The shock, that might well have been fatal, brought him out of his intense nightmare and made him instantly himself again. He rose, jumped over the heap of boots and fol-de-rols, and leaped to the court. There Boris grabbed him by his coat. Rouletabille turned, furious:
“What do you want? You haven’t started for the Orel yet?”
“Monsieur, I am going, but I will be very grateful if you will take these things yourself to - to Natacha.” He showed him, still with despairing mien, the two ikons from Mount Athos, and Rouletabille took them from him, thrust them in his pocket, and hurried on, crying, “I understand.”
Outside, Rouletabille tried to get hold of himself, to recover his coolness a little. Was it possible that he had made a mortal error? Alas, alas, how could he doubt it now! The arsenate of soda continued. He made, a superhuman effort to ward off the horror of that, even momentarily - the death of innocent Michael Nikolaievitch - and to think of nothing except the immediate consequences, which must be carefully considered if he wished to avoid some new catastrophe. Ah, the assassin was not discouraged. And that time, what a piece of work he had tried! What a hecatomb if he had succeeded! The general, Matrena Petrovna, Natacha and Rouletabille himself (who almost regretted, so far as he was concerned, that it had not succeeded) - and Koupriane! Koupriane, who should have been there for luncheon. What a bag for the Nihilists! That was it, that was it. Rouletabille understood now why they had not hesitated to poison everybody at once: Koupriane was among them.
Michael Nikolaievitch would have been avenged!
The attempt had failed this time, but what might they not expect now! From the moment he believed Michael Nikolaievitch no longer guilty, as he had imagined, Rouletabille fell into a bottomless abyss.
Where should he go? After a few moments he made the circuit of the Rotunda, which serves as the market for this quarter and is the finest ornament of Aptiekarski-Pereoulok. He made the circuit without knowing it, without stopping for anything, without seeing or understanding anything. As a broken-winded horse makes its way in the treadmill, so he walked around with the thought that he also was lost in a treadmill that led him nowhere. Rouletabille was no longer Rouletabille.
XIII
THE LIVING BOMBS
At random - because now he could only act at random - he returned to the datcha. Great disorder reigned there. The guard had been doubled. The general’s friends, summoned by Trebassof, surrounded the two poisoned sufferers and filled the house with their bustling devotion and their protestations of affection. However, an insignificant doctor from the common quarter of the Vasili-Ostrow, brought by the police, reassured everybody. The police had not found the general’s household physician at home, but promised the immediate arrival of two specialists, whom they had found instead. In the meantime they had picked up on the way this little doctor, who was gay and talkative as a magpie. He had enough to do looking after Matrena Petrovna, who had been so sick that her husband, Feodor Feodorovitch, still trembled, “for the first time in his life,” as the excellent Ivan Petrovitch said.
The reporter was astonished at not finding Natacha either in Matrena’s apartment or Feodor’s. He asked Matrena where her step-daughter was. Matrena turned a frightened face toward him. When they were alone, she said:
“We do not know where she is. Almost as soon as you left she disappeared, and no one has seen her since. The general has asked for her several times. I have had to tell him Koupriane took her with him to learn the details from her of what happened.”
“She is not with Koupriane,” said Rouletabille.
“Where is she? This disappearance is more than strange at the moment we were dying, when her father - O God! Leave me, my child; I am stifling; I am stifling.”
Rouletabille called the temporary doctor and withdrew from the chamber. He had come with the idea of inspecting the house room by room, corner by corner, to make sure whether or not any possibility of entrance existed that he had not noticed before, an entrance would-be poisoners were continuing to use. But now a new fact confronted him and overshadowed everything: the disappearance of Natacha. How he lamented his ignorance of the Russian language - and not one of Koupriane’s men knew French. He might draw something out of Ermolai.
Ermolai said he had seen Natacha just outside the gate for a moment, looking up and down the road. Then he had been called to the general, and so knew nothing further.
That was all the reporter could gather from the gestures rather than the words of the old servant.
An additional difficulty now was that twilight drew on, and it was impossible for the reporter to discern Natacha’s footprints. Was it true that the young girl had fled at such a moment, immediately after the poisoning, before she knew whether her father and mother were entirely out of danger? If Natacha were innocent, as Rouletabille still wished to believe, such an attitude was simply incomprehensible. And the girl could not but be aware she would increase Koupriane’s suspicions. The reporter had a vital reason for seeing her immediately, a vital reason for all concerned, above all in this
moment when the Nihilists were culminating their plans, a vital reason for her and for him, equally menaced with death, to talk with her and to renew the propositions he had made a few minutes before the poisoning and which she had not wished to hear him talk about, in fearful pity for him or in defiance of him. Where was Natacha? He thought maybe she was trying to rejoin Annouchka, and there were reasons for that, both if she were innocent and if she were guilty. But where was Annouchka? Who could say! Gounsovski perhaps. Rouletabille jumped into an isvo, returning from the Point empty, and gave Gounsovski’s address. He deigned then to recall that he had been invited that same day to dine with the Gounsovskis. They would no longer be expecting him. He blamed himself.
They received him, but they had long since finished dinner.
Monsieur and Madame Gounsovski were playing a game of draughts under the lamp. Rouletabille as he entered the drawing-room recognized the shining, fattish bald head of the terrible man. Gounsovski came to him, bowing, obsequious, his fat hands held out. He was presented to Madame Gounsovski, who was besprinkled with jewels over her black silk gown. She had a muddy skin and magnificent eyes. She also was tentatively effusive. “We waited for you, monsieur,” she said, smirking timidly, with the careful charm of a woman a little along in years who relies still on infantine graces. As the recreant young man offered his apologies, “Oh, we know you are much occupied, Monsieur Rouletabille. My husband said that to me only a moment ago. But he knew you would come finally. In the end one always accepts my husband’s invitation.” She said this with a fat smile of importance.
Rouletabille turned cold at this last phrase. He felt actual fear in the presence of these two figures, so actrociously commonplace, in their horrible, decent little drawing-room.
Madame continued:
“But you have had rather a bad dinner already, through that dreadful affair at General Trebassof’s. Come into the dining-room.” “Ah, so someone has told you?” said Rouletabille. “No, no, thanks; I don’t need anything more. You know what has happened?”
“If you had come to dinner, perhaps nothing would have happened at all, you know,” said Gounsovski tranquilly, seating himself again on the cushions and considering his game of draughts through his glasses. “Anyway, congratulations to Koupriane for being away from there through his fear.”
For Gounsovski there was only Koupriane! The life or death of Trebassof did not occupy his mind. Only the acts and movements of the Prefect of Police had power to move him. He ordered a waiting-maid who glided into the apartment without making more noise than a shadow to bring a small stand loaded with zakouskis and bottles of champagne close to the game-table, and he moved one of his pawns, saying, “You will permit me? This move is mine. I don’t wish to lose it.”
Rouletabille ventured to lay his hand on the oily, hairy fist which extended from a dubious cuff.
“What is this you tell me? How could you have foreseen it?”
“It was easy to foresee everything,” replied Gounsovski, offering cigars, “to foresee everything from the moment Matiew’s place was filled by Priemkof.”
“Well?” questioned Rouletabille, recalling with some inquietude the sight of the whipping in the guards’ chapel.
“Well, this Priemkof, between ourselves,” (and he bent close to the reporter’s ear) “is no better, as a police-guard for Koupriane than Matiew himself. Very dangerous. So when I learned that he took Matiew’s place at the datcha des Iles, I thought there was sure to be some unfortunate happening. But it was no affair of mine, was it? Koupriane would have been able to say to me, ‘Mind your own business.’ I had gone far enough in warning him of the ‘living bombs.’ They had been denounced to us by the same agency that enabled us to seize the two living bombs (women, if you please!) who were going to the military tribunal at Cronstadt after the rebellion in the fleet. Let him recall that. That ought to make him reflect. I am a brave man. I know he speaks ill of me; but I don’t wish him any harm. The interests of the Empire before all else between us! I wouldn’t talk to you as I do if I didn’t know the Tsar honors you with his favor. Then I invited you to dinner. As one dines one talks. But you did not come. And, while you were dining down there and while Priemkof was on guard at the datcha, that annoying affair Madame Gounsovski has spoken about happened.”
Rouletabille had not sat down, in spite of Madame Gounsovski’s insistences. He took the box of cigars brusquely out of the hand of the Chief of the Secret Service, who had continued tendering them, for this detail of hospitality only annoyed his mood, which had been dark enough for hours and was now deepened by what the other had just said. He 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 Koupri
ane,” 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 comhinations 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 tomorrow if you will believe in her always,” replied Gounsovski, confidentially, with a horrid sort of laugh that made the reporter hurry down the stairs.
Gaston Leroux Page 22