FullReads

Baburin rushed after the young man. I pressed Musa’s hand warmly, and withdrew, with presentiments of evil in my heart.

‘Come to-morrow,’ she whispered anxiously.

‘I certainly will come,’ I answered.

* * * * *

I was still in bed next morning, when my man handed me a letter from Musa.

‘Dear Piotr Petrovitch!’ she wrote: ‘Paramon Semyonitch has been this night arrested by the police and carried off to the fortress, or I don’t know where; they did not tell me. They ransacked all our papers, sealed up a great many, and took them away with them. It has been the same with our books and letters. They say a mass of people have been arrested in the town. You can fancy how I feel. It is well Nikander Vavilitch did not live to see it! He was taken just in time. Advise me what I am to do. For myself I am not afraid–I shall not die of starvation–but the thought of Paramon Semyonitch gives me no rest. Come, please, if only you are not afraid to visit people in our position.–Yours faithfully,

MUSA BABURIN.’

* * * * *

Half an hour later I was with Musa. On seeing me she held out her hand, and, though she did not utter a word, a look of gratitude flitted over her face. She was wearing the same clothes as on the previous day; there was every sign that she had not been to bed or slept all night. Her eyes were red, but from sleeplessness, not from tears. She had not been crying. She was in no mood for weeping. She wanted to act, wanted to struggle with the calamity that had fallen upon them: the old, energetic, self-willed Musa had risen up in her again. She had no time even to be indignant, though she was choking with indignation. How to assist Baburin, to whom to appeal so as to soften his lot–she could think of nothing else. She wanted to go instantly, … to petition, … demand…. But where to go, whom to petition, what to demand–this was what she wanted to hear from me, this was what she wanted to consult me about.

I began by counselling her … to have patience. For the first moment there was nothing left to be done but to wait, and, as far as might be, to make inquiries; and to take any decisive step now when the affair had scarcely begun, and hardly yet taken shape, would be simply senseless, irrational. To hope for any success was irrational, even if I had been a person of much more importance and influence, … but what could I, a petty official, do? As for her, she was absolutely without any powerful friends….

It was no easy matter to make all this plain to her … but at last she understood my arguments; she understood, too, that I was not prompted by egoistic feeling, when I showed her the uselessness of all efforts. ‘But tell me, Musa Pavlovna,’ I began, when she sank at last into a chair (till then she had been standing up, as though on the point of setting off at once to the aid of Baburin),’how Paramon Semyonitch, at his age, comes to be mixed up in such an affair? I feel sure that there are none but young people implicated in it, like the one who came in yesterday to warn you….’

‘Those young people are our friends!’ cried Musa, and her eyes flashed and darted as of old. Something strong, irrepressible, seemed, as it were, to rise up from the bottom of her soul, … and I suddenly recalled the expression ‘a new type,’ which Tarhov had once used of her. ‘Years are of no consequence when it is a matter of political principles!’ Musa laid a special stress on these last two words. One might fancy that in all her sorrow it was not unpleasing to her to show herself before me in this new, unlooked-for character–in the character of a cultivated and mature woman, fit wife of a republican! … ‘Some old men are younger than some young ones,’ she pursued, ‘more capable of sacrifice…. But that’s not the point.’