# The Adventures of Miss Gregory/Eva

From McClure's Magazine, Sep 1911. Also included in The Adventures of Miss Gregory, 1911
    Sandorf grinned, and Miss Gregory laughed outright. The peep-show view of their ménage which they disclosed to her was altogether consistent with the childishness of the little wife; she could imagine it diversified with a hundred rather charming little contretemps and difficulties. It was all so innocent and playful, she thought; it would make a good, light touch in her book. Later, when she came to write of it, she remembered her first conclusions, and shuddered.
VII.
EVA
IT was the merest accident that brought Miss Gregory to enter the dark little church that stands close to the harbor of Odessa, and made her a witness of the whispered interview that took place there between two men in the shadow of the stout wooden pillars. She had gone from her hotel to transact business at the post-office, and, that done, had strolled on down the street, in idle contentment with the company of the throng that shared the pavement with her; and, near the foot of the hill that overlooks the harbor, the church—a dingy little temple for dingy people—had invited her with its open door and the gloom of shadows within. So, in the spirit of a sight-seer willing to miss nothing that is to be seen, she had passed in to look about her.
She was in Odessa as the result of one of those whims which make the record of her travels such exacting reading. Her plan had been to sail for England from Constantinople on one of the Papayani boats; but, before the boat sailed, there had come news from across the Black Sea, of fresh fires rekindling the ashes of revolution, and strange hates and heroisms keying up the life of the sad cities to the pitch of tragedy.
"You see," she told the Consul, when she called on him to arrange about her passport, "I can hardly turn my back on it all. It wouldn't be fair to my book."
The gray-haired Consul frowned slightly. In his early days he too had written a book, and his career had suffered by it.
"Everybody writes books nowadays," he said. "Got something better to do, myself."
Miss Gregory had smiled tolerantly at his reply. Her book, she felt, was not of the kind that everybody was qualified to write. There had gone to the framing of it many thousands of miles of travel on salt water and dry earth, much expenditure of humanity and vital force, and not a few breathless moments. A little Russia would round it off neatly, she decided; she had not a moment's doubt that, if things were to happen, they would happen under her steady gray eyes. She had the knack of being by when affairs reached the breaking-point.
So London was telegraphed to for letters of introduction to supplement the broad official passport, and Miss Gregory's friends at home responded generously. After her long sojourn in the East and the South, it was not unpleasant to be again in relation with the current of European life and within reach of the shops; and the introductions made her at home in a wide circle of people of her own class—officials, military folk, and their like. Her handsome gray head and strong pink face had a vogue in local society,—some word or two of her exploits down the Red Sea had trickled through,—and she was mildly lionized. The city was enjoying an interval of tranquility after a threatened mutiny by the crews of the war-ships in the harbor; not a bomb had stayed the traffic for a month; and the pleasant blond folk of the place were glad of a novelty to occupy their leisure.
But, of all the letters of introduction that came to her, the most fruitful was that which had seemed to promise least. Thinking over her resources, Miss Gregory had remembered a certain shy elderly musician to whom she had once or twice sent pupils. It took an effort of mind to recall his name; he dwelt in the background of her memory as a misty, uncertain figure, white-faced, with brindled hair, bent over a 'cello. He was a Russian, certainly; so a telegram went from Constantinople to him also, and in reply came a note addressed to one Anton Sandorf, begging him to put himself at Miss Gregory's service for the writer's sake, who was her debtor for much goodness. And it concluded: "You will not let her involve herself, for she is much loved by her friends." Miss Gregory found that a little mysterious, but it became plain when she made the acquaintance of Anton Sandorf.
She presented the letter, one afternoon, trusting to an istvostchik to find the place. It turned out to be a gaunt tenement dwelling, thrusting itself high over the roofs of a poor quarter, and showing a front like a cliff to a mean street of small shops. The flat to which she was bound was at the head of many stone stairs, and she arrived at the door panting from the ascent. She paused to get her breath before knocking.
The girl that answered her knock and stood in the doorway looking at her was as trim as Miss Gregory herself—a clean-cut, delicate young person who seemed a day or two too old for a school-girl and a day or so too young for a governess. Miss Gregory tried her in her quaint, precise French.
"Monsieur Anton Sandorf lives here?" she inquired.
"Yes," replied the girl. "You wish to see him?"
"If you please," said Miss Gregory, and the girl made way for her to enter the flat.
There was a little hall with a little kitchen at the end of it; Miss Gregory had a glimpse of it before the girl opened another door.
"Enter, Madame," she invited, and called to somebody within: "Anton, one seeks you."
The room occupied the whole side of the flat, with three windows upon the street, for the Russian believes in elbow room. Miss Gregory passed from the dark hall to its full light, and thought for a moment that the girl had made a mistake and shown her into an empty room. But an exclamation and a disturbance among some rugs upon a couch made her aware that she was not alone.
"Who is it?" demanded a voice, and there came into view a thin hatchet face with wild hair above it, staring at her over the edge of a rug as from a bed. It darkened as it dwelt upon her, and made some remark in emphatic Russian.
"I have a letter of introduction," explained Miss Gregory, in French still, and gave the name of the writer of the letter. "But I fear I am disturbing you."
"It's not that," said Anton Sandorf, preparing to rise. "It is Eva—she makes a spectacle of me. But Madame will pardon."
He showed himself as a small man, grotesquely hunchbacked, with a tiny body below his deformity and a large, drooping head above. He gave her a chair, and stood to one side to read the letter she produced for him.
While he read, Miss Gregory had an opportunity to look about her. The great room was very bare, but a grand piano at one end of it and a large writing-table heaped with a wild confusion of papers gave it the atmosphere of occupation which fills a room more potently than any amplitude of furniture. The walls, too, were well covered, mostly with little canvases unframed and sketches held in place by drawing-pins. Among them a few colored cartoons from German papers were conspicuous, and opposite Miss Gregory, on the plaster of the wall itself, some one had drawn in charcoal, and with a certain dashing skill, the flat profile of some immensely fat man with huge shoulders blotting out the neck.
Anton Sandorf read the letter to an end, seemed to consider for a moment, and then turned to Miss Gregory with a smile that lit up the hollows of his brooding face.
"Then," he said, in her own language, "it appears you are English?"
"Certainly," said Miss Gregory.
He laughed. "I thought you were German," he said. "You speak French just like a German. But you shall be very welcome here. An' now I will call the little beast Eva, an' there shall be a revenge. She shows people in to me without warning; I have no chance to be polite. She is English, too."
"The—the young lady who came to the door?" inquired Miss Gregory.
"Yes," said Anton Sandorf; "the little Eva."
He pulled open the door and shouted, and the girl made her appearance in the full light of the three windows. She was charmingly, delicately young, Miss Gregory perceived; she had the very primness and fragility of some spring flower.
"Eva," said Sandorf, in French, "you can arrange to receive a pupil for lessons in English?"
"But certainly," said the girl promptly. Nevertheless, she cast a glance of vague trepidation in the direction of Miss Gregory's strong dignity.
"Madame is the friend of our friend Constantin," said Sandorf, and passed her the letter. "Read what he says."
The girl read, while Sandorf watched her with delighted malice. Miss Gregory looked on smiling at the small comedy.
"But," said Eva, "he says you are English?"
Sandorf burst into ecstatic laughter. "Voyons!" he cried. "The little Eva's first pupil—and Eva can teach her nothing. I must tell Andreitch that."
Eva smiled reluctantly, and tossed the letter back to him.
"You see," she said to Miss Gregory, with a touch of awkwardness, "Constantin sends you to us because he thinks we shall amuse you. But we're not always such idiots; it's only Anton's foolishness."
Anton Sandorf combined a smile at Miss Gregory and a grimace at the girl in one extraordinary contortion of his long, mobile face.
"At any rate," he said, "we are most glad to see you; you must believe that. And, if Eva can manage it, we will give you tea."
The pair of them, the strange, deformed man and the pretty, prim girl, made a business of giving her a welcome. They were like a couple of brilliant children about her, sparring perfunctorily and half affectionately at each other, and treating her with a sort of gentle freedom that did not lack charm. The name of Andreitch was mentioned once or twice, and when at last the samovar and the tea-glasses made their appearance, Miss Gregory demanded information.
"But tell me," she asked, "who is Andreitch?"
Anton Sandorf shot out a great, flat hand toward the girl.
"Andreitch?" he said. "He is the—what you call—master of the house. And that is Madame Andreitch."
"Eh? You are married?" inquired Miss Gregory, in surprise. The girl was really so little more than a child. She answered the question with a promptness that was half defiant.
"Oh, yes," she said. "I—I hope you will see my husband. He will be in soon."
"That will be very nice." Miss Gregory, for some reason, was a little touched. It occurred to her that here, after all her adventures, she had come upon the real adventurer. This neat, reserved child, stamped with the seal of secure English middle-class life, had married her man and linked herself to his life in the harsh, barbarous outskirts of Europe, and exchanged the play fellows of her home for this gaunt cripple with the bitter, wry mouth, and eyes of a faithful dog.
"As for me," Sandorf was saying, "I am the lodger. I suffer many inconveniences, but I am patient. It is a hard life for me."
"Don't you believe him!" cried the girl. "Last night he was working—at the piano, you know—till four o'clock, when Pavel, my husband, went in and stopped him. He always talks like this when anyone comes."
Sandorf grinned, and Miss Gregory laughed outright. The peep-show view of their ménage which they disclosed to her was altogether consistent with the childishness of the little wife; she could imagine it diversified with a hundred rather charming little contretemps and difficulties, small domestic adventures of inexperienced housewifery. It was all so innocent and playful, she thought; it would make a good, light touch in her book. Later, when she came to write of it, she remembered her first conclusions, and shuddered.
Soon the husband came in and joined them, a dark, thin young man with a sensitive, enthusiastic face. It was evident that the young couple had not been long married, for they were even yet a little shy of each other under the eyes of strangers. It was only in moments of unconsciousness that their eyes traveled together and met, to fall asunder again in sharp constraint. But Andreitch was not less cordial than the others in his welcome of Miss Gregory. Indeed. if there was one quality more than another that made her hosts remarkable, it was the gentleness and kindliness which was common to all three of them, a sort of simplicity that made Miss Gregory wonder and feel abashed at her own capacity for harshness.
"You will come again?" Andreitch asked, when it came time for her to take her leave. "You will surely come? It will be so pleasant for us."
"Miss Gregory will come to see me, then," asserted Anton Sandorf. "It is upon me she has called. It is so, Madame?"
"At any rate, I will come," Miss Gregory promised.
Anton Sandorf came down the stairs with her to call a droschky and give the driver the direction of her hotel. As the turning of the stairs hid the door of the flat from them, he lifted his thin, deep-lined face with a sidelong smile.
"Eh bien?" he asked. "Have we bored you Madame?"
"No," said Miss Gregory. "Why?"
"Perhaps our dear Constantin, whose letter you brought, told you of us? Or of me? Surely he told you something?"
They were at an angle of the stairs, where the only light came from the deep well between the iron banisters. Sandorf came to a stop as he spoke, and Miss Gregory paused likewise.
"I'm afraid not," she answered. "Should he have told me something?"
He inspected her grave, handsome face for a space of seconds before he replied.
"That's what I wonder," he said. "We are glad to see you—very glad and very happy. But it is not like our dear Constantin, there in London, to send you to us simply—well, as he might tell a tourist to visit a gallery. Because we do some strange things."
The very sweetness of courtesy was in all his tone and his manner—it was not possible to be affronted; but Miss Gregory was a little puzzled.
"I should be sorry if I thought I were taking advantage of your friendship for Monsieur Constantin," she answered. "Still, I'm hardly a tourist, you know. I'm traveling, and I'm writing a book, and——"
"A book!" exclaimed, Sandorf. "Ah, c'est une autre affaire. I comprehend. Madame, shall I apologize? But I was sure our dear Constantin would not send us a tourist."
"No apology necessary," Miss Gregory assured him. "That's quite all right."
Sandorf bowed. "A book," he repeated. "But that is charming. We are all artists together, then. Besides Madame, there is Eva, the little Eva, with a voice like a friendly little bird; and me, I am a composer; and Andreitch abuses a violin so that it would make you ill. We will make music for you some evening—not?"
"I should be delighted," answered Miss Gregory, a little thrilled at this swift, unquestioning recognition of her literary quality. "But, I wish you would tell me something about yourselves. You know—you're rather unexpected."
"So?" Sandorf laughed. His whimsical cripple's face could express a very personal charm. "Is it Eva?" he asked. "She is wonderful, is she not? A little Englishwoman who will always be a little Englishwoman—remote, a prig, a fanatic for the conventions, but strong and faithful for ever. Wonderful! She was a nursery governess to two stupid babies, when Andreitch found her and took her into his hands; and now she teaches us all to wipe our boots on the mat and not to drop cigarette ash upon our knees. And by degrees we improve; we become gentlemen."
"I see," said Miss Gregory.
"We can show you nothing more marvelous,"' said Sandorf. "But, still—you would like to meet some of our—our comrades?"
He hesitated on the last word, and Miss Gregory put it down to a momentary hitch in his English.
"I should like it very much," she assured him. "Very much indeed."
"For instance," he suggested, "there is Orloff."
"Orloff," repeated Miss Gregory. "You don't mean the Orloff? The Anarchist, you know?"
At that time there had come again into the light of Russian revolutionary politics a veteran of the country's unrest, a human mole, living commonly below the social surface and emerging to the light only to let loose forces of violence and disorder. The name of Orloff had had sinister prominence since the early days of Nihilism; it had been spoken doubtfully in those years when the Tsar Alexander II dodged his death by mine and pistol and bomb, and more certainly of later years in Italy and London. The man had been trapped by the authorities more than once. He had escaped from Siberia, and it was said his evasion had been winked at in return for disclosures he had made. To mention him was to invoke the bloodstained past of Russia.
"Not Orloff the Anarchist?" said Miss Gregory.
"That's the man," said Sandorf. "He isn't an Anarchist, though. But perhaps you don't understand the difference. Still, your book. You would like to meet him?"
"I should like it, of all things," replied Miss Gregory. "This is really wonderful luck. He comes to your flat, then?"
"Sometimes," said Sandorf. "It is easily arranged. He is a gentle creature, and Eva is very fond of him. She keeps slippers for him to put on, because he always gets his feet wet."
Miss Gregory stared. "Good Lord!" she said. "That little thing! I hope—I do hope—she won't get into any trouble through knowing this man."
"I hope not, too," replied Sandorf, and made a motion to resume the descent of the stairs.
He put Miss Gregory into her droschky and gave the name of her hotel to the cabman.
"Our dear Constantin shall be satisfied that we have treated you well," were his last words, as the istvostchik woke his skinny beast and started off.
"Our dear Constantin," said Miss Gregory to herself, looking back at the distorted figure standing by the curb, "is evidently a man with a past."
Such had been the commencement of an intercourse that ripened, as it grew, into strong interest and some liking on both sides. It was a compliment to the Andreitch couple and to Anton Sandorf—if they had only known how to esteem it—that Miss Gregory, the figure of the moment in Odessa, withdrew herself so willingly from elaborate hospitalities to spend afternoons and evenings in the curious disorder of their flat. By degrees their function in the world became apparent to her. She met, in the big room where Sandorf's piano was, earnest persons of both sexes, always young, whose presence enlightened her. She had heard of old, and now remembered, accounts of that curious altruism which infects the young men and women of Russia like a delayed measles of the mind. It makes them not only sympathizers with, but partakers of, the lot of the people; it sends young aristocrats to hunt their ideals in factories and slums. To Andreitch's flat in one evening came a dock-laborer who had discovered Christianity, and a wan, consumptive princess who spoke in a flat, weary voice of dynamite as a panacea for social wrongs.
"I can understand," wrote Miss Gregory in her diary, at this period, "that talking of massacres may relieve one's feelings. There are times when thinking of it relieves mine. I don't object to Eva playing with fire; but I do object to her playing with a police-court charge."
And then, one evening, when all was· going forward in its usual manner, there appeared Orloff.
The room was full when he came. Sandorf had played them his latest composition, sitting bunched up at the keyboard of the big piano with an unwonted vagueness of countenance, and talk had resumed with a double force when his music ceased. He came round from the piano and sat upon the couch beside Miss Gregory.
"You are tired?" she asked him, for he seemed limp and spent.
"Not tired," he answered. "Only I spend much of myself when I play. Then this seems grotesque—that people should waste themselves so, when there is art for them to love."
The door had opened, but Miss Gregory was not looking at it.
"I think so, too," she was saying, when Sandorf put his hand on her arm, all his lassitude suddenly gone.
"See," he said. "There he is—Orloff."
"Orloff." The young people were flocking about the man who had entered, and Miss Gregory stood up to see him. He came through them slowly, like some vast and ponderous vessel shouldering through flotsam, and she had a view of the man whose great, fat-laden face was sketched in charcoal on the wall. He was huge to the point of unwieldiness, an immense, clumsy carcass of a man, ballooning along on shapeless short legs. The terrible wire-puller of innumerable revolutions, the author of murders and outrages past counting, breathed heavily and smiled with a fatuous amiability about him as he made his ungainly way to the chair that Andreitch thrust forward for him.
"So that is the great Orloff," said Miss Gregory. "The public should be armed with harpoons."
"Here is Eva with the slippers," remarked Sandorf.
Miss Gregory found the spectacle disagreeable. There was a sort of indecency in the sight of the trim English girl at the fat man's feet, aiding him to rid himself of his patched boots. He patted her blond head benignly, and spoke in Russian to those around him. ("His very voice is fat," was Miss Gregory's comment subsequently.) At his touch Eva looked up, smiling; she had the attitude of a docile and loving daughter.
Presently Sandorf presented Miss Gregory to the great man. He did not rise to take her hand, but contented himself with looking up blindly and emitting a kind of rich chuckle from the recesses of his being. His great, shapeless hand enveloped hers flabbily.
"Engleesh?" he said. "Ah, ver' good—ver' good. Engleesh lady—ver' good."
He had not the gift of tongues, and transmitted a heavy compliment through Sandorf. Miss Gregory received it stonily.
"You are disappointed—not?" asked Sandorf, when the audience was over and they had made way for the others who pressed about Orloff. "He is not what you looked for?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Miss Gregory. "I rather expected he'd be beastly, and he is."
The hunchback smiled at her. "And yet," he said, "there are few here to-night, and none that I can think of, who wouldn't die for him. So perhaps 'beastly' is not the word."
"Die for him!" Miss Gregory repeated the phrase scornfully. "For some principle, perhaps, or some feather-headed idea. But not for him."
Sandorf only smiled.
"Would you?" asked Miss Gregory suddenly.
"I?" he answered her simply. "Yes, of course," he said. "Some day perhaps I shall. I am quite ready."
Miss Gregory looked at him steadily. He did not cease to smile under her examination, but there was a disconcerting earnestness about him none the less.
"You see," he said, "Orloff—he has seen and done so much. A great deal depends on him. He is worth a hundred of me."
"My dear boy," said Miss Gregory, "I wouldn't sell your little finger for a thousand Orloffs."
Sandorf laughed. "A woman to perceive a man's value," he said. "I kiss your hands, Miss Gregory."
"Don't dare," said Miss Gregory.
She went away soon after that, bearing with her the memory of Orloff like a bad taste in the mouth. The sight of Eva at his feet, of Andreitch leaning over the back of his chair, of all the young men and girls gathered about him, attentive and admiring, filled her with disgust. It was not only that she felt no sympathy for gentlemen whose trade is with fulminate of mercury put up in small parcels for every-day use, but all that was clean and eupeptic in her composition revolted at the lumbering, plethoric flesh of the man. The evil impression she carried away with her was even strong enough to restrain her from visiting the flat as frequently as of old; and on the day when the open door of the humble little church, yawning dark below a spherical dome of crude sky-blue, dotted with yellow stars, invited her to enter, she had not seen Sandorf and his friends for nearly a week.
The church had little to offer her besides its shadows and its dust. She strolled idly to the rails of the altar, and made a perfunctory examination of the candle-stands and the icons, and then she would have gone again to the street and its agreeable, busy variety. But, as she turned, she saw a man enter and slip at once into the side aisle between the thick pillars, and something of haste and precaution in his movements attracted her attention. Miss Gregory had an instinct for those trifles that are the germ of history. She paused on her way to the door, and found herself a retreat, among the pillars at the other side of the church, where she could wait enveloped by shadows and spy upon anything that was due to happen.
She had not long to wait. She saw the hidden man glancing forth, keeping an eye upon the door by which he had entered, and once he drew out his watch and consulted it.
"Ah," reflected Miss Gregory. "It's an appointment, then. If it's a woman, I'll go."
Next instant she frowned in sudden perplexity. Through the door of the church, waddling clumsily, and making comical and tragic efforts to move furtively and with discretion, came a great bulk which she recognized as Orloff. It was not a figure about which any mistake was possible. Peering around her pillar, she even had a view of his big, flat face, with a staircase of chins creased over his collar, as he too vanished into the side aisle where the first man waited.
"Now, that's funny," said Miss Gregory.
The two were hidden from her. From time to time she could hear the faint noise of whispering, in which no words were distinguishable. The rest was but the stillness and mustiness of the church and the muffled sounds of the street. In later years, when she recalled that scene, there returned always the stale odor of candles guttering at a stand of icons, and the feeling of ancient grime on all she touched.
She stood perhaps a quarter of an hour, thinking and doubting; and then, upon an impulse, walked forth from her hiding-place and crossed the church without concealment. "It's a public place," she told herself. The two men heard her coming, and, when she approached within sight of them, they presented the appearance of inhuman detachment and offhandedness which is usual to people whose privacy is surprised. Orloff was leaning against a pillar, with his hands clasped over the circumference of his stomach, his face torpid and benign. His companion stood a couple of paces from him, ill at ease and impatient; and Miss Gregory, passing serenely between them, took occasion to examine him. A man in civilian clothes that fitted him ill, she saw; a narrow, intolerant face; a way of standing with the shoulders braced back that would have rendered any disguise futile to so shrewd and experienced an eye as Miss Gregory's. The whole person of the man bespoke the promoted policeman; the official cloth itself could hardly have distinguished him more clearly.
"Ah, M'sieur Orloff," said Miss Gregory coolly. "Vous voilà?"
The huge man blinked at her placidly, immovable, portentous.
"Engleesh lady?" he said in his thick voice. "Yais; ver' good."
He said something in Russian to his companion, who lifted his hat to Miss Gregory and answered in the same tongue. The situation was short-circuited, as it were, by the fact that they could not speak to each other. Orloff did not move; he merely smiled sleepily, and the other man waited. There was no more to do.
"Well," said Miss Gregory, "this is rather a bore, isn't it?" She smiled politely on the pair of them. "I'll leave you to your business, then, eh?"
The man whom she recognized as a policeman lifted his hat again as she went, and, pausing at the door, she turned and saw that he was looking after her. His head stuck out between the pillars as from a window; he looked more like a policeman than ever.
She lost no time in finding a droschky, and, in spite of some difficulty in making the driver understand her, she lost little time in getting to the home of the Andreitch pair. Sandorf, however, was out, and this disconcerted her, for she had prepared herself to reveal the matter to him. It was another thing to speak of it to Eva and her husband.
It was Andreitch who opened the door and let her in.
"Ah, Miss Gregory," he said, and seemed to hesitate an instant. "Come in, come in," he invited. "Eva is here, and you will forgive us if we are a little busy, will you not?"
"Yes," said Miss Gregory. "I wouldn't disturb you, but if Monsieur Sandorf is not here I must tell you something I came to tell him."
"Certainly," smiled Andreitch, and let her pass before him into the large room.
The comfortable disorder that was native to the room was increased now by a couple of trunks, between which knelt Eva, on a floor littered with papers. The little stove was piled with the black ash of other papers which had been burned; and, as Miss Gregory entered, the girl was drawing papers from the trunk, one by one, tearing some and putting others aside for burning.
"You've heard, then?" cried Miss Gregory.
Both Andreitch and his wife looked at her with startled eyes.
"Heard—what?" demanded Andreitch.
"You must have heard," said Miss Gregory, "or why are you burning papers?"
Eva and her husband glanced at each other. Miss Gregory was feeling a certain agitation, but she could not fail to notice the fellowship and understanding of the glance by which each consulted the other.
"We burn our papers from time to time," Andreitch said. "They accumulate and get lost, and some of them might get us into trouble."
"Then burn the lot," cried Miss Gregory forcibly. "Burn the lot at once! What do you think I've just seen? I came to tell Sandorf at once. There's treachery going on."
Andreitch interrupted her in his gentle voice. "But sit down," he urged. "You are upset. You mustn't stand."
Miss Gregory impatiently took the chair he offered. Their caution, their tranquility, struck her as wooden, and she was conscious of an irritable wish to startle them. She leaned forward in her chair, while Eva knelt between the trunks and watched her face with serious eyes, and Andreitch stood beside her, frowning thoughtfully. She told them of what she had seen in the little church, of the furtive interview between the two men, of the unmistakable quality of the policeman. She made her points strongly, for their stillness put her on her mettle.
"So, now, you see what is going on," she concluded.
The husband and wife looked at each other again, and a smile passed between them.
"Dear Miss Gregory," said Andreitch then, "it was very kind of you to come and tell us. We know how good you are. But as to Orloff—you are mistaken."
"I saw him, I tell you," cried Miss Gregory. "And I know a policeman when I see one."
"I'm sure you do," agreed Andreitch soothingly. "But you are still mistaken. It isn't treachery. We know all about it. It was the little Peter Church, was it not? Yes; we know all about that."
Miss Gregory stared at them. What they knew she did not ask. They had not seen, as she had, the circumstances of the interview, its dark, cautious character. She rose impetuously.
"It was Anton Sandorf I came to see," she said. "He has glimmerings of reason. I'll come again this evening and talk to him."
"Not this evening," said Andreitch. "Not this evening, please. Anton won't be here this evening."
"To-morrow, then," said Miss Gregory. "I don't suppose twelve hours matters. But I've warned you, and I've one other thing to say."
"Yes?"
Miss Gregory pointed to Eva, who had begun her work among the papers again. At her gesture the girl stopped, startled, like a child convicted of sin.
"You know your own business," said Miss Gregory. "But you've no right to lead a child like that into danger. She's not a Russian, either; she's English. So, if you've any sense of your responsibility, you'll let me take her back with me to my hotel till this affair—whatever it is—is blown over. She'll be safe with me, and I don't think she's safe with you, by any means."
Andreitch smiled. "I don't think so, either," he said softly. "Take her, by all means, Miss Gregory."
Kneeling on the floor, Eva laughed.
"He's joking, Miss Gregory," she said. "He knows I won't go. But thank you ever so much, all the same."
"Well," said Miss Gregory, "we can talk of it again. To-morrow I will come to see Monsieur Sandorf."
She would have gone then, but, to her surprise, both stayed her to bid her an elaborate farewell. Andreitch kissed her hand, and Eva her face, and both stood at the door, the girl within the man's arm, and called adieux and smiled after her till the bend in the stair interposed.
"One would imagine," thought Miss Gregory, "that they were never going to see me again."
Miss Gregory was before all things a woman of the world, equipped with self-possession against emotional surprises. She placed a meager value on caresses as a means of intercourse; but somehow the tenderness of that farewell in the flat stuck in her mind like a splinter. She dined out that evening, and took nourishment with a naval officer who had been blown tip in the Petropavlosk at one elbow, and a girl-faced, dandified Secretary of the administration at the other. They talked of the relative merits of vingt and bridge as occupations for mature minds; and even this did not avail to wipe her memory clear of its troublesome impression that danger threatened the gentle, kindly lives in the flat and that the girl's good-by kiss has been a portent.
It stayed with her through the night, that vague apprehension of evil; so that when, toward noon, she drove to the flat again, and found that the night had swept its occupants away, she was scarcely astonished. A policeman at the foot of the stairs, others on the way up, made things clear to her, and she was not allowed to enter the flat. A curt, unyielding officer was brought out to confirm the prohibition. Miss Gregory insisted on his taking her card, and her name had its effect. He remained curt, but yielded. And she looked again on the sitting-room, now strange and tragic to her eyes as three deft men worked through on a search for hidden things. They had already pulled Sandorf's piano to pieces; the wreck of it was like a slaughter. But they could tell her nothing save that there had been a raid and a dozen dangerous creatures had been trapped.
Three women, the police officer had said, were among the captures. Miss Gregory thought of Eva, and felt a little sick. The farewell had been final, after all.
Quite final, it seemed. In the days that followed, Miss Gregory came to think with some awe of the vastness and power of the machine that had drawn those poor children in. At the back of it, supplemented by a military tribunal of indefinite functions, worked the dread processes of the "administrative order," in virtue of which a man or any number of men may be made to vanish as if they had never existed, and nobody can be called to account for it. She tried to see the unfortunates in prison, to write to them, to learn something of their fate—all to no purpose. A smiling civility met her on all hands. Everybody was disposed to help her, but nobody could. High up in the scheme of things, somebody had let loose a force which blotted Eva, Andreitch, and the rest from the light of the sun, and left only the memory of them to those who could preserve it.
It took time to conquer Miss Gregory's faith that something could be done in the affair—a matter of weeks. But at last she was baffled. She had done all that was possible, and there was no more left to do. She might not have persisted so long but for her steadfast belief that any human transaction will in the end round itself off and explain itself to the truly patient observer. This one seemed to be the exception; and she prepared for her departure from Odessa, and its ugliness and its cruelty, in discouragement and weariness of heart.
The afternoon before her departure saw her sitting on a bench in a square that takes the back-wash of a busy street's traffic. She had lost her taste for the big salons and the people she met there, and was content to see the last of the city in solitude. She was thinking rather ruefully of the passage by steamboat the length of the Mediterranean which she had sacrificed to her whim to learn the taste of Russia, when some one passing behind her touched her on the shoulder. She turned spiritedly to repel the boarders, and uttered a little cry at the sight of the lean, hollow-cheeked face of the hunchback Sandorf.
"You!" she cried. "And I thought all of you were dead."
She broke off short. She had not noticed, in the moment's shock of surprise, that there was another man with him, a hugely corpulent man who waited a few paces off.
"Ah, Miss Gregory," said Sandorf, "we are all that are left."
But Miss Gregory had no eyes for the fever of his countenance and the depths of sorrow in his voice. She was staring at Orloff grimly.
"That man," she said, with a rasp in her voice, "betrayed them! He murdered them—Eva and the others. Did you know that? He sold them to the police. I saw him do it! Why are you in his company?"
Anton Sandorf shrugged one misshapen shoulder, with a weary little smile. The weeks since she had last seen him had left marks upon him. A cripple before, he was a wreck now, thin and feeble and wasted.
"I was told," he said. "I came home that night just in time to be captured with the others, and they were telling me when the police came how you had called to warn us. You wouldn't believe then that you were mistaken. Poor Orloff is not a traitor."
"Not a traitor!" repeated Miss Gregory scornfully. "What is he, then? A martyr?"
"Something of the kind," said Anton Sandorf. "But let us all sit down and I will tell you, if you like. It will make a strange matter for your book."
"I don't like sitting down with that man," said Miss Gregory. "Still, as you say, there's the book."
A passer-by would hardly have turned his head to look at them as they sat on the bench, two men and a woman in conservation. Sandorf placed himself between the others. At his left, Orloff clasped his shapeless hands on his stomach and seemed to doze.
"Tell me first," asked Miss Gregory, "are any of them dead?"
But Sandorf shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "There were nine of us in the flat when the police came, and they put us together into a van and drove us to the prison. There was time there for our adieux, and then we were shut up separately and saw each other no more. Even when they took me before the court, none of the others were present, and I could hear nothing of them. They let me go, you see; Orloff vouched for me. They have not let any of the others go."
"Ah," said Miss Gregory, drawing in her breath. "Orloff didn't vouch for them."
Anton Sandorf sighed. "That was the arrangement," he said. "I will tell you all about it. You see, we had formed a little—er—society; we called it the League of Youth. There are many societies nowadays. People are tired of the shame and injustice of this country, and they join themselves into societies to argue about it. It is because arguing does not help that Andreitch formed our League, and our affair was mainly to help those who are risking their lives to make matters better. You understand?"
"You helped Nihilists, eh? Well, go on."
"At first," Sandorf continued, "we didn't do much. We did not know how to work, and we wasted time and money. It was Eva that suggested we should find some old hand of the revolution to put us in the right way—little Eva. She loved us all, even me. And so—and so at last we found a man whose name was spoken before we were born, a man who has seen the beginning and end of many revolts, the greatest of all the veterans of this war of ours. It was Orloff."
Miss Gregory glanced across him. The veteran was breathing hard, with swollen lids lowered over his small eyes.
"It was Orloff," repeated Sandorf. "We could not have found a better man. He is at the heart of things, a man holding the string of many movements in his hands. The very police are baffled by him; they no longer know for certain on which side he is—for them or against them. Just now they are sure he is for them; they pay him a salary. Soon they will be wiser. Well, he took our League, and in a week we were in relations with some others, here in this city; who had a great and dangerous work in hand. We had our part in it, under his guidance. He furnished us with inspiration, with energy, with cunning. All was going well, and in another month things would have been ready for the—er—the demonstration. And then suddenly we became aware that the police were watching us.
"It doesn't matter how we learned it; the fact was certain. It was a very terrible danger. It meant that not only might we be seized, to disappear in Siberia or in graves,—as Eva and Andreitch have disappeared,—but the fine work we had done might go for nothing. That was a thing we could not bear to think of. It was Eva that saw the way out. She proposed it to us one evening, standing beside Orloff's chair with her little hand upon his shoulder, while he listened to her as if he would go into a fit. 'We are just flies on the wheel,' she told us, 'we boys and girls. But this is the wheel'—and she patted him on the shoulder. 'Our wheels must not be broken: she said—she spoke such pretty Russian; it made tears come in my eyes. 'So the easy way out of this trouble is for Father Orloff, here, to go to the police and denounce us all."
"Good Lord!" ejaculated Miss Gregory. "What a—what an appalling thing! And the man agreed, of course?"
Sandorf's look made it apparent that he was being very patient with her.
"You will write it all wrong in your book if you do not put that idea away from you," he warned her. "He agreed—yes. We all agreed, and at last we brought him to agree, too. But it was a horrible time. He sat in his arm-chair with his face behind his hands, crying out loud like a baby, and the tears ran between his fingers. It was laughable and frightful to see—he was so fat, and in such torment."
He made a gesture with his thin hands as if he would brush the memory from him, and for some seconds he sat staring at the ground between his feet. The torpid bulk of Orloff did not stir.
"So that was it," said Miss Gregory, drawing a deep breath. A hundred trifles recurred to her mind that bore out the tale. "So that was really it."
Sandorf nodded. "Yes," he said. "But watch for a month or two. The wheel is not broken, you see. Eva saved it, and not for nothing. Watch and you will see."
Miss Gregory shook her head. "Ah," she said. "But Eva—Eva."
Sandorf gave her a slow look and rose. He touched Orloff and roused him, and the veteran Nihilist heaved to his feet. Outwardly he was yet placid, benign, a soul smothered under a mass of blubber. Miss Gregory gaped at him in a kind of horror, dimly apprehending the dynamic spirit that wrought in that unsightly envelop. His dull eye rested on her peaceably.
"Engleesh lady," he articulated. "Ver' good—ver' good."
"Watch," said Sandorf again. "Eva—I know. But watch."
He touched Orloff again on the arm and they departed together. From her seat Miss Gregory watched the strange pair, the writhen hunchback and the elephantine minister of dynamite, pass from the Square into the throng of the street.
"I will watch," said Miss Gregory, as they disappeared. "But I ought to inform the police."
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1926, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 97 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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