The all-powerful tyrant did not know that at that very time I had come to a point at which the Baltic provinces and life itself had just about done with me. I was ill a lot of the time, could no longer ride or swim or take long walks, spent half the day lying on a chaise-longue, and had ample time to think about things.
The thoughts that went through my mind were not particularly happy ones. I knew very well that my whole life was a betrayal of the cause in which I believed — in which, in fact, I believed more strongly the more I observed the injustice and oppression all around me. As a decent, self-respecting human being, I had to go away, begin a new life, work, serve the movement. But I was so tired that I longed only for rest, and I was afraid of the difficulties and the cares of an independent life, for which I felt I was quite unprepared.
My mother came on a visit and said: “I really don’t see how you can live in such primitive, inelegant surroundings.” But when I compared my existence and my surroundings with those of our workers I was ashamed and could not understand how it was possible for me to act so much against my conscience.
My little friend Linda had gone to St. Petersburg; everyone I came in contact with had different convictions from mine. What could I hope to achieve all alone against all of them?
Somewhere far away, there was a larger world where people were fighting for justice, but here I lay in the garden under the tall pines, reading, knitting warm clothes for the workers’ children, and thinking as the sun went down behind the mournful silver willows: the end of another useless day. Will there ever be anything but useless days in my life?
My poor husband was pleased that I had become “quiet and gentle”;
but he could not understand why my buoyant good spirits had so completely disappeared. Still, a gentle, boring wife was better than a merry, loud-mouthed one.
What I remember of these last two summers is above all the great silence. The little flower garden that I had laid out on the model of an old Italian convent garden was filled with the scent of roses; through the silver leaves of the willows the vast wheat fields were visible, bathed
in a golden glow; the house gleamed white in the sunlight; and the dogs lay in the shade near my deckchair snapping lazily at the flies.
Never before had I loved the house, the garden, the whole wonderfully beautiful estate as I did now that I was telling myself: I have to give it up, I can’t allow myself to live off the labour of others any longer. But my cowardice was always finding a way out, a reason to delay: I was ill, I was tired, I would be incapable of doing anything constructive. Not yet.
Just a few more months, another year of ease and security.
A murder
As summer drew to a close, a great anxiety came over the entire countryside. All sorts of strange things had been happening. One peasant’s barn was burned down, another found his cows dead in the meadow one morning. “Revolutionary” activities were clearly not involved, because the big landlords were unscathed; the mysterious evil had not touched them. Those affected were certain peasants who had a
“bad reputation,” and who were said to have belonged, years ago, to a band of house burglars.
One beautiful summer night there was loud knocking at the heavy house door, which was locked. My husband opened it, and on the steps stood a woman weeping, the wife of a tenant who lived about ten minutes away from us: “My husband has been murdered! A half an hour ago. Some one knocked at the door, and when he went to open it he was shot in the head with a bullet. It killed him at once.”
Murder, a murder in the still of the summer night, and only a short distance from us. My husband took his revolver.
“Telephone at once to Vladimir Stepanovitch, and have him send the gendarmes. And telephone to Fellin for the police bloodhound. Have the groom saddle the horses at once and get the peasants out to help with the man-hunt. Are you afraid?”
“No.”
“Then go down to the river. He might have tried to escape that way.
Is your revolver loaded?”
“Yes.”
“If you catch sight of the fellow down there, try to hit him in the leg.
Don’t aim too high. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
Standing at my post by the river was not exactly reassuring. In the bright moonlight the bushes cast strange shadows which moved like living beings, and the branches cracked and creaked. I drew Jacko, the setter, close to me. We stood there motionless. Let the man please not come this way. He is a murderer, that’s true, but to shoot at a human being! And anyway, I’m such a bad shot, I’m bound to hit him in the stomach instead of the leg.
At last one of the foremen, armed with a shot-gun, took over from me. The entire farm was awake now; figures rose up everywhere out of the shadows. The men were furious, totally intent on capturing the murderer, while the women moaned, frightened to death. The last to show up was the fat uriadnik who came over from the next farm. Half asleep, he declared that it was a mean trick to commit a murder in the middle of the night and frighten people out of their sleep. My husband distributed guns to the men and sent them out in different directions.
Then the horrific gave way to the prosaic.
“Have the cook make coffee and butter some bread so that the peasants can have something to eat. And put some schnapps on ice for the captain of the gendarmerie.”
Gradually silence again settled over the farm. Down in the little hut, which was visible from the upper stories of the house, lay a dead man, and somewhere not very far from us, the murderer was trying to get away. The moon leered mockingly, and in the east the sky was beginning to be coloured pink.
Clip, clop — the sound of hoofs on the highway. Strange hard knockings like the approach of a threatening fate. The pack in the kennels began to howl. A command shouted in Russian, and the gendarmes came to a halt in front of the house.
The captain declared that he could do nothing until the police dog arrived, and sat down to eat his breakfast in comfort. In the yard the horses champed at the bit, and the young workgirls joked around with the gendarmes until the big bell sounded the call to work.
A loud murmur of voices, the sound of heavy steps; the peasants are coming. I looked out of the window; it is a scene from the Peasant War. That is how “Poor Konrad”114 might have marched his men out.
At their head an old white-haired peasant with a scythe in his hand;
following him, peasants armed with ancient flint-locks, axes and flails,
sickles, and heavy oak clubs. Faces twisted in anger, raised, threatening fists: “We’ll tear the fellow to bits.”
Breakfast calmed them slightly, but they would not wait for the police dog. They divided up into four troops and marched off again.
At last the police captain had his fill of coffee and bread and butter;
he began to drink schnapps and eat herring. Then the sound of rolling wheels; the Doberman arrived in a little peasant cart, escorted on both sides by mounted gendarmes, like a prisoner.
The other gendarmes came out; the dog was led away ahead of them all to the hut of the murdered man. (As in a detective story, the murderer had dropped his leather belt in front of the hut.)
The dog sniffed about for a while, then picked up the scent. He raced like mad across a great swampy meadow and plunged into the pine wood that lay along the highway. The gendarmes, my husband, and some armed men from the estate followed him.
It was as though a a pack of hounds had been set loose on the trail of a hare. Somewhere a human being was trying to get away, creeping low behind bushes, anxiously avoiding every open space, wading across brooks to wipe out his tracks. Behind him the dog, the gendarmes, the furious peasants — a man hunt.
About noontime a peasant from the neighbourhood rode up and asked to speak to me alone.
“I have just received a threatening letter. Probably from the murderer.
He is threatening to set fire to my farm. Phone the police in O. for me, and tell them to send me two gendarmes.”
“You can phone yourself.”
“No chance. He also threatens to shoot me or anyone else who informs the police. You phone.”
I gathered that the peasant would rather have me be shot than himself, and so I phoned.
In the afternoon the Russian examining magistrate arrived, an innocent-looking, still quite young man with a round face and round eyes behind spectacles. There was nothing about him that corresponded in the least to my idea of an examining magistrate; he chatted away innocently and amiably and drank unbelievable quantities of tea.
Slowly the peasants came home; they had not found the murderer.