APOGEE AND PERIGEE

Our acquaintances, and the Russian ones especially, used to meet at our house on Sunday evenings. In 1862 the number of the latter greatly increased: merchants and tourists, journalists and officials of all the departments, and of the Third Section⁠[29] in particular, were arriving for the Exhibition. It was impossible to make a strict selection; we warned our more intimate friends to come on another day. The respectable boredom of a London Sunday was too much for their discretion, and these Sundays did to some extent lead to disaster. But before I tell the story of that, I must describe two or three samples of our native fauna who made their appearance in the modest drawing-room of Orsett House. Our gallery of living curiosities from Russia was, beyond all doubt, more interesting than the Russian Section at the Great Exhibition.

In 1860 I received from a hotel in the Haymarket a Russian letter in which some unknown persons informed me that they were Russians and were in the service of Prince Yury Nikolayevitch Golitsyn, who had secretly left Russia: ‘The prince himself has gone to Constantinople, but has sent us by another route. The prince bade us wait for him and gave us money enough for a few days. More than a fortnight has passed; there is no news of the prince; our money is spent, the hotel-keeper is angry. We don’t know what to do. Not one of us speaks English.’ Finding themselves in this helpless position, they asked me to get them out of it. I went to them and arranged things. The hotel-keeper knew me, and consented to wait another week.

Five days later a sumptuous carriage with a pair of dapple-grey horses drove up to my front-door. However often I explained to my servants that no one was to be admitted in the morning—even though he should arrive in a four-in-hand and should be called a duke—I could never overcome their respect for an aristocratic turn-out and title.

On this occasion both these temptations to transgression were present, and so a moment later an immense man, stout and with the handsome face of an Assyrian bull-god, was embracing me and thanking me for my visit to his servants.

This was Prince Yury Nikolayevitch Golitsyn. It was a long time since I had seen so solid and characteristic a specimen of old Russia, so choice a flower of our fatherland.

He at once began telling me some incredible story, which afterwards turned out to be true, of how he had given a Cantonist an article from the Kolokol to copy, and how he had parted from his wife; how the Cantonist had given the police information against him, and how his wife did not send him money; how the Tsar had sent him into perpetual banishment to Kozlov, in consequence of which he had made up his mind to escape abroad, and had carried off with him over the Moldavian frontier some young lady, a governess, a steward, a ‘regent’ and a maid-servant.

At Galatz he had picked up also a valet who spoke five languages after a fashion, and seemed to him to be a spy. Then he explained to me that he was an enthusiastic musician and was going to give concerts in London; and that therefore he wanted to make the acquaintance of Ogaryov.

‘They d-do make you p-pay here in England at the C-customs,’ he said with a slight stammer, as he completed his course of universal history.

‘For goods, perhaps, they do,’ I observed, ‘but the Customs-house is very lenient to travellers.’

‘I should not say so. I paid fifteen shillings for a crocodile.’

‘Why, what do you mean?’

‘What do I mean? Why, simply a crocodile.’

I opened my eyes wide and asked him: ‘But what is the meaning of this, prince? Do you take a crocodile about with you instead of a passport to frighten the police on the frontier?’

‘It happened like this. I was taking a walk in Alexandria, and I saw a little Arab selling a crocodile. I liked it, so I bought it.’

‘Oh, did you buy the little Arab too?’

‘Ha-ha!—no.’

A week later the prince was already installed in Porchester Terrace, that is, in a large house in a very expensive part of the town. He began by ordering his gates to be for ever wide open, which is not the English custom, and a pair of dapple-grey horses to be for ever waiting in readiness at the door. He lived in London as though he were in Kozlov or in Tambov.

He had, of course, no money, that is, he had a few thousand francs, enough to pay for the advertisement and title-page of a London life; they were spent at once; but he made a sensation, and succeeded for a few months in living free from care, thanks to the stupid trustfulness of the English, of which the foreigners from all parts of the Continent have not yet been able to cure them.

But the prince did have his fling. The concerts began. London was impressed by the prince’s title on the placards, and at the second concert the room (St. James’s Hall, Piccadilly) was full. The concert was magnificent. How Golitsyn had succeeded in training the chorus and the orchestra is only known to himself, but the concert was absolutely first-rate. Russian songs and prayers, the Kamarinsky and the Mass, fragments from Glinka’s opera and from the Gospel (Our Father)—it was all splendid. The ladies could not sufficiently admire the colossal fleshy contours of the handsome Assyrian god, so majestically and gracefully wielding his ivory sceptre; the old ladies recalled the athletic figure of the Emperor Nicholas, who had conquered the hearts of the London fair most of all by the tight doeskin collants, white as the Russian snows, of his Horse Guard uniform.

Golitsyn found the means of making this success his ruin. Intoxicated by the applause, he sent at the end of the first half of the concert for a basket of bouquets (remember the London prices), and before the beginning of the second part of the programme he appeared on the platform; two liveried servants carried the basket, and the prince, thanking the singers and chorus, presented each with a bouquet. The audience received this act of gallantry on the part of the aristocratic conductor with a storm of applause. My prince, towering to his full height and beaming all over, invited all the musicians to supper at the end of the concert.

At this point not only London prices but also London habits must be considered. Without sending previous notice in the morning, there is no place where one can give a supper to fifty persons at eleven o’clock at night. The Assyrian chief walked valiantly along Regent Street at the head of his musical army, knocking at the doors of various restaurants; and at last he knocked successfully. A restaurant-keeper, grasping the situation, rose to the occasion—cold meats and ardent beverages.

Then followed a series of concerts with every possible variation, even with political tendencies. At each of them the orchestra struck up Herzen waltzes, an Ogaryov quadrille, and then the Emancipation Symphony ... compositions with which the prince is very likely even now enchanting Moscow audiences, and which have probably lost nothing in moving from Albion, except their names; they could easily be altered to Potapoff waltzes, Mina waltzes, and Komissaroff’s Partitur.

With all this glory there was no money, he had nothing to pay with. His purveyors began to murmur. And little by little there was actually something like the slave revolt of Spartacus....

One morning the prince’s factotum, that is, his steward who styled himself his secretary, together with the ‘regent,’ that is, not the father of Philippe of Orleans, but a fair-haired, curly-headed Russian lad of two-and-twenty who led the singers, came to me.

‘We have come to see you, Alexandr Ivanovitch, sir.’

‘What has happened?’

‘Why, Yury Nikolayevitch is treating us very badly. We want to go back to Russia, and we ask him to settle our account—do not fail in your gracious kindness, defend us.’

I felt myself instantly surrounded by the atmosphere of ‘Home,’ which seemed to rise up like steam in a bath-house.

‘Why do you come to me with this complaint? If you have serious grounds for complaining of the prince, there is a Court of Justice here for every one, which will not turn aside in favour of any prince or any count.’

‘We have heard of that indeed, but why go to law? You had much better go into it.’

‘What good will it be to you if I do go into it? The prince will tell me to mind my own business; I shall look like a fool. If you do not want to go to law, go to the ambassador; the Russians in London are in his care, not in mine....’

‘But where should we be then? As soon as Russian gentlemen sit together, what chance can there be of settling with the prince? But you see, you are on the side of the people; so that is why we have come to you. Do be gracious, and take up our cause.’

‘What fellows you are! But the prince won’t accept my decision; what will you gain by it?’

‘Allow me to lay before you,’ the secretary retorted eagerly, ‘he will not venture on that, sir, as he has a very great respect for you; besides, he would be afraid. He would not be pleased to get into the Kolokol—he is ambitious.’

‘Well, listen, to waste no more time; here is my decision. If the prince will consent to accept my mediation, I will undertake the matter; if not, you must go to law; and as you know neither the language nor the mode of proceeding here, if the prince really is treating you unfairly, I will send you a man who knows English and English ways and speaks Russian.’

‘Allow me,’ the secretary was beginning.

‘No, I won’t allow you, my dear fellow. Good-bye.’

I will say a word about them too.

The ‘regent’ was in no way distinguished except by his musical abilities; he was a well-fed, soft, stupidly handsome, rosy servant-boy; his manner of speaking with a slight burr and his rather sleepy eyes called up before me a whole series, as when you see one reflection behind another in the looking-glass, of Sashkas, Senkas, Alyoshkas, and Miroshkas.

The secretary, too, was a purely Russian product, but a more striking specimen of his type. He was a man over forty, with an unshaven chin and battered face, in a greasy coat, unclean and soiled inwardly and outwardly, with small crafty eyes and that peculiar smell of Russian drunkards, made up of the ever-persistent aroma of vodka fumes mixed with a flavour of onion and cloves to conceal it. Every feature of his face approved and abetted every evil suggestion; it would doubtless have found response and appreciation in his heart, and would if profitable have received his aid. He was the prototype of the Russian petty official, the Russian shark, the Russian sharper. When I asked him whether he was pleased at the approaching emancipation of the peasants, he answered: ‘To be sure—most certainly,’ and added with a sigh: ‘Good Lord, the lawsuits and the cases there will be! And the prince has brought me here as though to spite me at a time like this.’

Before Golitsyn arrived, this man had said to me with a show of genuine feeling: ‘Don’t you believe what people will tell you about the prince oppressing the peasants, or how he meant to set them free for a big redemption money without any land. That is all a story spread by his enemies. It is true he is hasty-tempered and extravagant, but he has a good heart and has been a father to his peasants.’

As soon as he had quarrelled with the prince he cursed his lot and lamented that he had trusted such a swindler. ‘Why, he has done nothing all his life but squander money in debauchery and ruin his peasants; you know he is just keeping up a pretence before you now—but he is really a beast, a robber....’

‘When were you telling lies: now, or when you praised him?’ I asked him, smiling.

The secretary was overcome with confusion. I turned on my heel and went away. Had this man not been born in the servants’ hall of the Prince Golitsyn, had he not been the son of some village constable, he would long ago, with his abilities, have been a minister—a Valuev, or I don’t know what.

An hour later the ‘regent’ and his mentor appeared with a note from Golitsyn. He asked me, with apologies, whether I could go and see him to put an end to these wretched difficulties. The prince promised beforehand to accept my decision without dispute.

There was no getting out of it; I went.

Everything in the house betrayed an extraordinary excitement; the French servant Picot hurriedly opened the door to me, and, with the solemn fussiness with which doctors are conducted to a consultation at the bedside of a dying man, led me into the drawing-room. There I found Golitsyn’s second wife, flustered and irritated. Golitsyn himself, with no cravat, his heroic chest bare, was pacing up and down the room with huge strides. He was furious, and so stammered twice as much as usual; his whole face betrayed his suffering from the blows, kicks and punches that were surging inwardly but could have no outlet in the actual world, though they would have been his answer to the insurgents in the Tambov province.

‘For G-G-God’s sake, forgive me for t-t-troubling you about these b-b-blackguards.’

‘What is the matter?’

‘P-p-please ask them yourself; I will merely listen.’

He summoned the ‘regent,’ and the following conversation took place between us:—

‘Are you dissatisfied in any way?’

‘Yes, very much dissatisfied; that is why I want to go to Russia.’

The prince, who had a voice as strong as Lablache’s, emitted a leonine moan: another five blows in the face had to be stifled within him.

‘The prince cannot keep you; so tell us what it is you are dissatisfied with.’

‘Everything, Alexandr Ivanovitch.’

‘Well, do speak more definitely.’

‘What can I say? Ever since I came away from Russia I have been run off my legs with work, and had only two pounds of pay, and what the prince gave me the third time, in the evening, was more by way of a present.’

‘And how much ought you to have received?’

‘That I can’t say, sir....’

‘Have you a definite agreement?’

‘No indeed, sir. The prince, when he was graciously pleased to run away’ (this was said without the slightest malicious intention), ‘said to me: “If you like to come with me, I’ll make your future,” says he, “and if I have luck, I’ll give you a good salary; but if not, then you must be satisfied with a little”; so I took, and came.’

He had come from Tambov to London on such terms. Oh, Russia!

‘Well, and what do you think? has the prince been lucky or not?’

‘Lucky? no, indeed! Though to be sure, he might....’

‘That is a different question. If he is not lucky, then you ought to be satisfied with a small salary.’

‘But the prince himself has told me that for my duties and my abilities, according to the rate of pay here, I ought not to get less than four pounds a month.’

‘Prince, are you willing to pay him four pounds a month?’

‘I shall be d-d-delighted.’

‘That is capital; what more?’

‘The prince promised that if I wanted to go back he would pay my return fare to Petersburg.’

The prince nodded and added: ‘Yes, but only if I were pleased with him!’

‘Are you displeased with him?’

Then the pent-up torrent burst out; the prince leapt up. In a tragic bass, which gained weight from the quiver on some vowels and the little pauses before some of the consonants, he delivered the following speech: ‘Could I be p-p-pleased with that m-milksop, that p-p-pup? What enrages me is the foul ingratitude of the beggar. I took him into my service from the very poorest family of peasants, barefoot, devoured by lice; I trained the rascal. I have made a m-m-man of him, a m-musician, a “regent”; I have trained the scoundrel’s voice so that he could get a hundred roubles a month in Russia in the season.’

‘That is all very true, Yury Nikolayevitch, but I don’t share your view of it. Neither he nor his family asked you to make a Ronconi of him; so you can’t expect any special gratitude on his part. You have trained him as one trains a nightingale, and you have done a good thing, but that is the end of it. Besides, that is not the point.’

‘You are right; but I meant to say, see what I have to put up with, see what I have done for the rascal....’

‘So you consent to pay his fare?’

‘The devil take him. For your sake, simply, for your sake, I will....’

‘Well, the matter is settled, then: and do you know what the fare is?’

‘I am told it is twenty pounds.’

‘No, that is too much. A hundred roubles from here to Petersburg is enough. Will you give that?’

‘Yes, I will.’

I worked out the sum on paper and handed it to Golitsyn; the latter glanced at the total ... it amounted, if I remember rightly, to just over thirty pounds. He handed me the money on the spot.

‘You can read and write, of course?’ I asked the young man.

‘Of course, sir.’

I wrote out a receipt for him in some such form as this: I have received from Prince Yury Nikolayevitch Golitsyn thirty odd pounds (so much in Russian money), being salary owing to me and my fare from London to Petersburg. With that I am satisfied, and have no other claims against him.

‘Read it for yourself, and sign it.’

The young man read it, and made no movement to sign it.

‘What is the matter?’

‘I can’t, sir.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘I am not satisfied.’

A restrained leonine roar—and, indeed, I was on the point of crying out myself.

‘What the devil is the matter? You said yourself what you claimed. The prince has paid you everything to the last farthing. Why are you dissatisfied?’

‘Why, upon my word, sir, and the straits I have been put to ever since I have been here.’

It was clear that the ease with which he had obtained the money had whetted his appetite.

‘For instance, sir, I ought to have something more for copying music.’

‘You liar!’ Golitsyn boomed, as Lablache can never have boomed; the piano responded with a timid echo; Picot’s pale face appeared at the crack of the door and vanished with the speed of a frightened lizard.... ‘Wasn’t copying music a part of your definite duty? Why, what else had you to do all the time when there were no concerts?’

The prince was right, though he need not have frightened Picot by his contrabombardo voice.

The ‘regent,’ being accustomed to notes of all sorts, did not give way, but, dropping the music-copying, turned to me with the following absurdity: ‘And then, too, there is something for clothes. I am quite threadbare.’

‘But do you mean to tell me that Yury Nikolayevitch undertook to clothe you, as well as to give you about fifty pounds a year salary?’

‘No, sir; but in old days the prince did sometimes give me things, but now, I am ashamed to say so, I have come to going about without socks.’

‘I am going about without s-s-socks myself,’ roared the prince, and, folding his arms across his chest, he looked haughtily and contemptuously across at the ‘regent.’ This outburst I had not expected, and I looked into his face with surprise; but, seeing that he was about to continue, I said very gravely to the precious singer: ‘You came to me this morning to ask for my mediation: so you trusted me?’

‘We know you very well, we have no doubt of you at all, you will not let us be wronged.’

‘Very good. Well, this is how I settle the matter: sign the receipt at once or give me back the money, and I will give it back to the prince and decline to meddle any further.’

The ‘regent’ had no inclination to hand the money to the prince; he signed the receipt and thanked me. I will spare you the description of his reckoning it in roubles. I could not din into him that the rouble was not the same in the exchange as it was when he left Russia.

‘If you imagine that I am trying to cheat you of thirty shillings, this is what you had better do: go to our priest and ask him to reckon it for you.’ He agreed to do so.

It seemed as though all were over, and Golitsyn’s breast no longer heaved with such stormy menace; but as fate would have it, the sequel recalled our fatherland as the beginning had.

The ‘regent’ hesitated and hesitated, and suddenly, as though nothing had happened between them, turned to Golitsyn with the words: ‘Your Excellency, as the steamer does not go from Hull for five days, be so gracious—allow me to remain with you for the while.’ My Lablache will give it him, I thought, devotedly preparing myself for the shock of the sound.

‘Of course you can stay. Where the devil would you go?’

The ‘regent’ thanked the prince and went away.

Golitsyn by way of explanation said to me: ‘You see he is a very good fellow; it is that b-b-blackguard, that thief, that unclean Yuss leads him astray.’

Let Savigny and Mittermeyer do their best to formulate and classify the ideas of justice developed in our orthodox fatherland between the stable where they flog the house-serfs and the master’s study where they fleece the peasants.

The second cause célèbre, that is, the one with the aforesaid Yuss, was not so successful. Golitsyn came in, and he suddenly shouted so loud, and the secretary shouted so loud that there was nothing left but to come to blows with each other, and then the prince of course would have smashed the mangy sharper. But as everything in that household followed the laws of a peculiar logic, it was not the prince who fought with the secretary, but the secretary who fought with the door. Brimming over with spite and invigorated by an extra glass of gin, he aimed a blow with his fist at the big glass window in the door, and broke it to bits.

‘Police!’ roared Golitsyn. ‘Burglary! Police!’ and going into the drawing-room he fell exhausted on the sofa. When he had recovered a little, he explained to me among other things how great was the ingratitude of the secretary. The man had been his brother’s trusted agent and had swindled him—I do not remember how—and was on the point of being brought to trial. Golitsyn was sorry for him; he entered so thoroughly into his position that he pawned his only watch to buy him off. And so having the fullest proof that he was a rogue, he took him into his service as a steward!

There could be no doubt whatever that he had cheated Golitsyn at every turn.

I went away. A man who could smash a glass door with his fist could find justice and protection for himself. Moreover, he told me afterwards himself when he asked me to get him a passport to return to Russia, that he had proudly offered Golitsyn a pistol and suggested casting lots which should fire.

If this was so, the pistol was certainly not loaded.

The prince spent his last penny in pacifying the Servile Revolt, and none the less ended, as might have been expected, by being imprisoned for debt. Any one else would have been clapped in prison, and that would have been the end of it; but even that could not happen to Golitsyn simply in the common way.

A policeman used to conduct him between seven and eight o’clock every evening to Cremona Gardens; there he used to conduct a concert for the edification of the lorettes of all London, and with the last wave of his ivory sceptre a policeman, till then unobserved, would spring up as though out of the earth and escort the prince to the cab which took the captive in the black swallow-tail and white gloves to prison. There were tears in his eyes as he said ‘Good-bye’ to me in the Gardens. Poor prince! Another man might have laughed at it, but he took his captivity to heart. His relations redeemed him at last; then the Government permitted him to return to Russia, and banished him at first to Yaroslavl, where he could conduct religious concerts together with Felinski, the Bishop of Warsaw. The Government was kinder to him than his father; as free a liver as his son, he advised the latter to go into a monastery. The father knew the son well; and yet he was himself so good a musician that Beethoven dedicated a symphony to him.

Following the exuberant figure of the Assyrian god, of the fleshy ox-Apollo, a series of other Russian curiosities must not be forgotten.

I am not speaking of flitting shades like the ‘colonel russe,’ but of those who, stranded by fate and various adventures, have remained a long time in London; such as the clerk in the War Office who, having got into a mess with his accounts and debts, threw himself into the Neva, was drowned ... and popped up in London, an exile, in a fur cap and a fur-lined coat, which he never abandoned, regardless of the muggy warmth of a London winter.

Or such as my friend Ivan Ivanovitch S., who, with antecedents and future and all, with raw skin on his head where there should have been hair, clamours for a place in my gallery of curiosities. A retired officer of the bodyguard of the Pavlov regiment, he lived in comfort in foreign parts, and so continued up to the revolution of February. Then he took fright, and began to look on himself as a criminal. Not that his conscience troubled him; what troubled him was the thought of the gendarmes who would meet him at the frontier, the thought of dungeons, of a troika, of the snow, and he resolved to postpone his return. All at once the news reached him that his brother had been arrested in connection with Shevtchenko’s case. There really was some risk for him, and he at once resolved to return. It was at that time that I made his acquaintance at Nice. S. was setting off, having bought a minute phial of poison for the journey, which he intended as he crossed the frontier to insert in a hollow tooth and to swallow if he were arrested.

As he approached his native land his panic grew greater and greater, and by the time he arrived at Berlin it had become a suffocating anguish. However, S. mastered himself and took his seat in the train. He remained there for the first five stations; further than that he could not bear it. The engine stopped to take in water; on a different pretext he left the train. The engine whistled, the train moved off without S.; and that was just what he wanted. Leaving his trunk to the caprice of destiny, by the first train going in the opposite direction he returned to Berlin. Thence he sent a telegram concerning his luggage, and went to get a visa for his passport to Hamburg. ‘Yesterday you were going to Russia, and to-day you are going to Hamburg,’ remarked the policeman, without refusing the visa. The panic-stricken S. said: ‘Letters—I have had letters,’ and probably his expression as he said it was such that the Prussian official ought to be dismissed the service for not arresting him. Thereupon S., like Louis-Philippe, escaping though pursued by no one, arrived in London. In London a hard life began for him, as for thousands of others; for years he maintained an honest and resolute struggle with poverty. But for him, too, destiny provided a comic trimming to all his tragic adventures. He made up his mind to give lessons in mathematics, drawing and even French (for English people). After consulting various advisers, he saw that it could not be done without an advertisement or cards. ‘But the trouble is this: how will the Russian Government look at it? I thought and thought about it, and I have had anonymous cards printed.’

It was a long time before I could get over my delight at this grand invention: it had never occurred to me that it was possible to have a visiting-card without a name on it. With the help of his anonymous cards, and with great perseverance (he used to live for days together on nothing but bread and potatoes), he succeeded in getting afloat, was employed in selling things on commission, and his fortunes began to mend.

And this was precisely at the date when the fortunes of another officer of the Pavlov bodyguard failed completely; defeated, robbed, deceived, cheated, and deluded, the commander-in-chief of the Pavlov regiment departed into eternity. Pardons, amnesties, followed; S. too wished to take advantage of the Imperial mercies, and so he writes a letter to Brunov and asks whether he comes under the amnesty.

A month later S. was summoned to the Embassy. ‘My case is not so simple,’ he thought; ‘they have been thinking it over for a month.’

‘We have received an answer,’ the senior secretary said to him; ‘you have inadvertently put the Ministry in a difficult position; they have nothing against you. They have applied to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and they can find nothing relating to you either. Tell us plainly what it was; it could not have been anything of great consequence?’

‘Why, in 1849 my brother was arrested and afterwards exiled.’

‘Well?’

‘That was all.’

‘No,’ thought the official, ‘he is joking’; and he told S. if that was the case the Ministry would make further inquiries.

Two months passed. I can imagine what went on during these two months in Petersburg: references, reports, confidential inquiries, secret questions passed from the Ministry to the Third Section, from the Third Section to the Ministry, the report of X. ... of the Governor-General ... reprimands, observations ... but S.’s case could not be found.

The Ministry reported to that effect to London.

Brunov himself sent for S. ‘Here,’ he said—‘look—is the answer: there is nothing anywhere concerning you.—Tell me, what case was it you were mixed up in?’

‘My brother....’

‘I have heard all that, but with what case were you yourself connected?’

‘There was nothing else.’

Brunov, who had never been surprised at anything from his birth up, was surprised.

‘Then why do you ask for a pardon since you have done nothing?’

‘I thought that it was better, anyway.’

‘So the fact is you don’t need a pardon, but a passport,’ and Brunov ordered a passport to be given him.

In high delight S. dashed off to us.

After describing in detail the whole story of how he had obtained a pardon, he took Ogaryov by the arm and led him away into the garden. ‘For God’s sake, give me advice,’ he said to him, ‘Alexandr Ivanovitch always laughs at me—that is his way; but you have a kind heart. Tell me candidly: do you think I can safely go through Vienna?’ Ogaryov did not justify this good opinion; he burst out laughing. But not only Ogaryov—I can imagine how the faces of Brunov and his secretary for two minutes lost the wrinkles traced by weighty affairs of State and grinned when S., amnestied, walked out of their office.

But with all his eccentricities, S. was an honest man.

The other Russians who rose to the surface, God knows whence, strayed for a month or two about London, called on us with their own letters of introduction and vanished God knows whither, were by no means so harmless.

The melancholy case which I am going to describe took place in the summer of 1862. The reaction was at that time in its incubation stage, and the internal hidden rottenness had not yet shown itself externally. No one was afraid to come and see us; no one was afraid to take copies of the Kolokol and our other publications away with him; many people boasted of the clever way they conveyed them over the frontier. When we advised them to be careful they laughed at us. We hardly ever wrote letters to Russia: we had nothing to say to our old friends, we were drifting further and further away from them; with our new unknown friends we corresponded through the Kolokol.

In the spring Kelsiev returned from Moscow and Petersburg. His journey is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable episodes of that period. The man who had slipped under the noses of the police, scarcely concealing himself, who had been present at conversations of raskolniks and drinking parties of comrades, with an absurd Turkish passport in his pocket, and had returned safe and sound to London, had grown reckless.

He took it into his head to get up a subscription-supper in our honour on the fifth anniversary of the Kolokol at a restaurant. I begged him to put off the celebration to another happier time. He would not. The supper was not a success, there was no entrain about it, and there could not be. There were too many outsiders taking part in it.

Talking of one thing and the other between toasts and anecdotes, it was mentioned as the simplest thing in the world that Vyetoshnikov, Kelsiev’s friend, was going to Petersburg and was ready to take anything with him. The party broke up late. Many people said that they would be with us on Sunday. There was indeed a regular crowd among whom were people whom we knew very little, and unfortunately Vyetoshnikov himself; he came up to me and said that he was going next morning, and asked me whether I had any letters or commissions. Bakunin had already given him two or three letters. Ogaryov went downstairs to his own room and wrote a few words of friendly greeting to Nikolay Serno-Solovyevitch; to them I added a word of greeting and asked the latter to call the attention of Tchernyshevsky (to whom I had never written) to our proposal in the Kolokol to print the Sovremennik in London at our expense.

The party began to break up about twelve o’clock. Two or three guests remained. Vyetoshnikov came into my study and took the letter. It is very possible that even that might have remained unnoticed. But this is what happened. By way of thanking those who had taken part in the supper, I asked them to choose any one of our publications or a big photograph of myself as a souvenir from me. Lyev Vyetoshnikov took the photograph; I advised him to cut off the margin and roll it up; he would not, but said he should put it at the bottom of his trunk, and so wrapped it in a sheet of The Times and went off. That could not escape notice.

Saying good-bye to him, the last of the party, I quietly went off to bed—so great is one’s blindness at times—and of course never dreamed how dearly that minute would cost me and what sleepless nights it would bring me. It was all stupid and careless in the extreme. We might have delayed Vyetoshnikov until Tuesday, he might have been sent off on Saturday; why had he not come in the morning? ... and indeed why had he come himself at all? ... and, indeed, why did we write the letters?

We were told that one of our guests telegraphed at once to Petersburg.

Vyetoshnikov was arrested on the steamer; the rest is well known.

To conclude this gloomy narrative, I will speak of a man whom I have casually mentioned and whom I must not pass over. I mean Kelsiev.