Darkness began to fall and the endless day gradually drew towards evening.
A gendarme rode up to the house and announced to the magistrate in a military manner: “We have him. He was about four hours from the estate.
We found him in a pasture. He was running around a hay-stack like a madman.”
The expression on the magistrate’s face changed. His round eyes lit up behind the glasses. He wet his lips with his tongue and took on the look of a cat that has just spied a mouse.
“When will he be here?” he asked.
“In about an hour.”
“Have him sent in to me at once.”
“At your service, your honour.”
The magistrate smiled amiably at me. “Now you will soon see me at work, Germinia Viktorovna.”
He walked through all the rooms to choose the one best suited to his
“work.”
“The Baron’s study will be best.” He arranged the table lamp. “I shall sit here, and we’ll put the fellow over there in the light.”
The posse returned; chained between two gendarmes was a pale frightened little man who seemed anything but a murderer. The gendarmes had found no weapons on him. The magistrate did not give him time to draw a breath. The prisoner was taken immediately into the study and seated on a stool directly in the brilliant light of the desk lamp. The magistrate leaned back in his arm-chair. Nothing was to be seen of his entire face except the lenses of his spectacles, which reflected the light from the lamp.
Then the hearing began.
At first the prisoner protested his innocence; he had indeed heard the shot; but he had been on the scene by accident. The murderer had met him and forced him to go with him. Yes, he knew who the murderer was, but he did not dare tell his name.
Questions rained on him like hail-stones. Every statement he made was dissected, torn to pieces, twisted this way and that. A plump, threatening finger shot out o£ the shadow. The magistrate’s voice was sharp as a knife and cold as ice. From time to time he asked in an almost friendly tone: “Ah, so that was how it happened, eh? I see – ee – ee.”
Then suddenly his round head seemed to roll out of the dark like a ball
straight towards the accused man, the spectacles flashed, and the dreadful cold voice drawled: “You are lying.”
Somewhere behind the drawn curtains silence and peace lay over the fields, somewhere people fought honourably with the same weapons, but here one man was boring a screw into the brain of another, boring deeper and deeper and smiling as he did it.
The prisoner became entangled in contradictions; he began to stammer;
sweat ran down his face; his hands trembled. Once he pleaded: “Water.”
I got up at once, but a gesture from the judge kept me back. “Not now, Germinia Viktorovna. Later, after he has confessed, he may have anything he likes.”
My hands were trembling too, and there was perspiration on my forehead. Vainly I tried to tell myself: “The man is a nasty murderer. He shot some one who had been one of his friends; he doesn’t deserve better.”
Yet I wanted to hurl myself at that perfectly functioning machine, the examining magistrate, and force it to shut up.
After a two-hour hearing the little Estonian peasant confessed to a murder – which, as it afterwards turned out, he had not committed. He could no longer stand the torture. If that judge had questioned me in the same way I would also have confessed to the murder.
At last the prisoner was allowed to eat and drink. Then he was put in the cart and taken by the gendarmes to O.
The investigating magistrate was a well-bred gentleman. As we left the study he asked with an amiable smile: “May I brush up a little before dinner, Germinia Viktorovna? This kind of work is pretty exhausting.”
As the police cart with the prisoner in it was being driven out of the yard, the magistrate, combed, washed, and smelling of Russian eau de Cologne, sat down to table with a good appetite and spoke enthusiastically about St.
Petersburg.
Traitors
The eerie atmosphere surrounding the tenant’s hut since the murder had not yet begun to wear off when there was a murder in St. Petersburg that sent shock waves through the whole country.
It was early autumn. We were having dinner at the estate of the Czar’s
Grand Master of the Horse. The master of the manor himself was in St.
Petersburg, but his American wife and two pretty daughters were spending the summer on the estate.
Dinners in the autumn were always jollier than at other times; the harvest, including the potatoes, was in, the hunting season was approaching, and the estate owners were contented and good-humoured. During this particular dinner the lady of the house was called to the telephone – a telegram from St. Petersburg.
She came back pale and extremely upset: “Stolypin* has been assassinated!”
For a moment a deep silence fell upon the table. People looked at each other; their faces pale and strained. No one uttered a word, but everyone had the same thought: “The first sign. It’s breaking out again!”
Then one of the old estate owners laughed loudly. The sound of his voice had a strange ring as it broke the complete silence.
“We will defend ourselves as we did the first time!” he cried out resolutely.
“We will soon bring the herd to order!”
I glanced at the men sitting around the table – yes, they will defend themselves, they will fight to the last, they are not afraid, they are almost glad to engage their enemy. They are men who have somehow been transported from the time of the robber barons to our present age, fighting is their element. And they will fight well because they have an unshakable belief in their cause, and because there are no “traitors” among them.
In the first revolution there had been two “traitors,” two elderly sisters who had always sympathized with the workers on the land. When the revolution broke out they raised the red flag over their castle and supplied the revolutionaries with guns. The Baltic barons seized the castle in “self-defence,” and the two women were brought to the nearest village. Here, on the village square, in front of everybody, their clothes were torn off and they were whipped with riding whips on their bare behinds. These were
“social equals”; one can imagine how the other prisoners fared, those who were not social equals.
While the others at the table were again beginning to engage in conversation, I kept thinking of the two “traitresses.” They had been typical Baltic women, modest and prudish. For as long as they did not know what was going to happen to them they had kept their courage up; but then they had broken down and, weeping, implored their captors: “Shoot us, but do not inflict this shame on us!”
My husband who was sitting across from me, gave me a long, searching glance; he knew on which side I would stand if it “broke out again.”
After dinner the men divided up into small groups. They spoke of
“arming,” “self-defence,” “headquarters” and of how at the first sign of insurrection the women and children would be sent abroad, so that they, the men, “could have a free hand.”
But the assassination of the minister was only a flash of summer lightning. The land became quiet once more, and routine existence again took its course.
*
The following autumn the doctor ordered me to Davos. For months I had been running a fever and coughing. The climate was now too much for me.
I wept desperately when I bade farewell to the familiar house and all the dogs; I knew that I should never see them again, I knew that fate had at last come to my aid by tearing me away from my life of comfort and security.
The first step had been taken for me; if I did not go on now it would be sheer cowardice.
Manoeuvers
As the train approached the Russian border, lots of soldiers were to be seen, nothing but soldiers, on foot, on horseback, with artillery. Uniforms everywhere. It created an uncanny feeling in the autumn peacefulness, caused a tightness around the heart. My God, what are all those soldiers doing so close to the border? The country is at peace after all. Can the rumour that the Czar has decided to avert the imminent danger of a new revolution by starting a war be true?
The sun sank beneath the horizon, the fields were bathed in red, blood seemed to be streaming over them, and in the distance – the soldiers. Was it war? “
“Manoeuvers” said a fellow traveller reassuringly, and in Berlin, when I ran across a friend, who was the German Empress’s head chamberlain, and asked: “For God’s sake, tell me the truth, will there be a war?”, he too laughed reassuringly: “Of course not. Don’t get all worked up. Germany doesn’t want war. And Russia knows very well that she can’t get the better of us.”
He spent his entire life at court, he certainly had to know. But for months
I was pursued by that vision of Russian uniforms near the frontier.
When the Austrian crown prince was assassinated I saw these uniforms again, and the sunset and the plain with the blood streaming over it, the blood of innocent men who, on both sides, did not know what they were dying for.
When the war broke out, I was still in Davos. It was not difficult for me to be “unpatriotic.” I knew the various peoples engaged in the war too well – there was hardly one of them of which I did not have some blood in my veins – to give any one of them preference over the others. All I could see was poor devils being driven pointlessly and uselessly to death; I also saw the one thing that is capable of putting an end to imperialist wars.