Pavel

“ The appearance of the provision waggon, full of empty sacks and some barrels, at a corner diagonally across the street was to serve as a signal for Pavel to walk up to a deserted ditch-bridge, where the runaway was expected to emerge from under the sacks and to put on a military cap. Then Makar and Boulatoff [208] would gain the droshky, mount it, and be driven to the Palace—the best hiding place one could find in all Miroslav.
Pavel was calm, determined, ready to shoot and to be shot at. By degrees he grew fidgety. Presently Clara passed along. ”

“ I've even come across one very fine, splendid, plucky chap. But turn it which way I will, I'm no use to him with my pamphlets, and that's all about it! Pavel—a man in the factory here— (he's Vassily's right hand, a very clever, very sharp fellow, a future "head" . . . I fancy I wrote to you about him) —he has a friend, a peasant, Elizar is his name . . . a clear brain, too, and a free spirit, untrammelled in every way; but directly we meet, it's as though there's a wall between us! his face is nothing but a "No!" ”

“ Pavel flung himself into a chair.
'What are you saying, Pavel Andreitch! Calm yourself . . . Aren't you ashamed? Don't forget whom you're talking about, Pavel Andreitch!' lisped the cashier.
'Forget whom I'm talking about? What do I care for his being made head-clerk? A fine person they've found to promote, there's no denying that! ”

“ Pavel was radiant.
“Then, Alexey Ivanovitch, change your clothes—dress up, will you? Dress up in your own style—you know so well how to do it.”
Pavel Pavlovitch danced about Velchaninoff as he dressed. His state of mind was exuberantly blissful.
“What in the world does the fellow mean by it all?” thought Velchaninoff.
“I'm going to ask you one more favour yet, Alexey Ivanovitch,” cried the other. “You've consented to come; you must be my guide, sir, too.” ”

“ Nikolai Petrovitch had lost his wife, Pavel Petrovitch had lost his memories; after the death of the princess he tried not to think of her. But to Nikolai, there remained the sense of a well-spent life, his son was growing up under his eyes; Pavel, on the contrary, a solitary bachelor, was entering upon that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes that are akin to regrets, when youth is over, while old age has not yet come. ”

“ I am a ruined man, prince. Thirty-six years have I served the Czar and there is not a blemish on my record.”
“But why should you call yourself a ruined man, Alexandre Alexandrovich,” Pavel said impetuously. “I don’t see why it should be too late to straighten it all out. I’m going to see my uncle. Or, better still, my mother will see him. We can’t let it go that way. We should all be a lot of scoundrels if we did. ”

“ I don't want to see trouble and horrors and sin, and all sorts of beastliness. I don't want it! But——"
He stopped and grew pale.
"Well?" said Pavel.
"No, that's not it. I only meant——" began Lunev, and his voice dropped.
"You always speak of yourself," observed Pavel.
"And whom do you speak of? Of her? But who is it she troubles, me or you? Every man cares for his own wounds, and groans with his own voice. I don't speak of myself only, I speak of every one, for every one troubles me."
"I'll go," said Gratschev, and got up heavily.
"Ah," cried Ilya. "Don't be hurt, try to understand. ”

“ The little parlour was delightfully warm, with a dim consciousness of sleigh-furs, hack drivers in absurd winter caps, pedestrians huddling themselves and wriggling and grunting for an effeminating background to one’s sense of shelter. The even heat of the white glazed oven seemed to be gleaming and stirring over the surface of the tiles like something animate, giving them an effect of creamy mellowness that went to one’s heart together with the delicious warmth they radiated. Ever and anon a sleigh bell would tinkle past and sink into Pavel’s mood. ”

“ There seemed to be something cowardly, sneaking, about all this which jarred on Pavel’s sense of the knightly magnificence of the Czar and left him with a bad taste in the mouth, as the phrase is.
Alexandre Alexandrovich, then, had done no wrong, and yet he had been banished as “living poison,” treated by everybody as a criminal, until he came to believe himself one. Why, of course he was better than Novikoff. ”

“ He too, vibrated, like that string, with excitement, and whispered hurriedly, disconnectedly his grievances and complaints, and Ilya felt that Pavel's words fell on his heart like sparks, stirring to life in his own breast something dark and contradictory, that constantly troubled him, now flaming up, now sinking down. It seemed as though, in place of the dull, evil doubt, with which till now he had faced life, something else was suddenly kindled in his soul, brightening its darkness and shaping for it rest and relief for ever.
"Why is a man holy, if he's enough to eat? ”

“ It was indeed Pavel Pavlovitch.
He gazed in amazement and dread at Velchaninoff, falling back before him just as though he saw a ghost. So great was his consternation, that for some time it was clear that he did not understand a single word of what his wife was telling him—which was that Velchaninoff had acted as her guardian angel, and that he (Pavel) ought to be ashamed of himself for never being at hand when he was wanted. ”

“ While they were thus conversing of Alexandre and the Dandy, Pavel stretched himself full length on the sofa and dozed off. When he opened his eyes, about two hours later, he found Parmet tiptoeing awkwardly up and down the room, his shadow a gigantic crab on the wall. Pavel broke into a boisterous peal of laughter.
“Here is a figure for you! All that is needed is an artist to set to work and paint it.”
“Are you awake? Look here, Pasha. ”

“ Pavel was meanwhile putting the case of the Polish woman to Onufri, one of the two servants who accompanied [10] them in their present travels—a retired hussar with a formidable moustache in front of a pinched hollow-cheeked face.
“Her highness, your mother, is good as an angel, sir,” was Onufri’s verdict.
“And you are stupid as a cork,” Pavel snarled. His sense of the desecration to which the person of his Czar was being subjected by mingling with people like the widow of a hanged rebel rankled in his heart. ”

“ That's what they give us nowadays for our money!' Nezhdanov himself, as he clambered into the cart and sat beside Pavel, thought to himself, 'Lord! what idiocy! But there, not one of us knows just how one ought to stir up the people—isn't that it, perhaps? There's no time to analyse now. Tear along! Does your heart ache? Let it!'
They drove into the village street. In the very middle of it a good many peasants were crowding round a tavern. Pavel tried to restrain Nezhdanov; but he flew head over heels out of the cart, and with a wailing shout of 'Brothers!' he was in the crowd. ”

“ Anna Nicolayevna’s eyes grew red and then filled with tears, as she shrank deeper into the corner of the couch.
She was left in a frame of mind that was a novel experience to her. Her pity was lingering about a stalwart military figure with the gloom and glint of martyrdom on his face—the face of Alexander II. Quite apart from this was the sense of having been initiated into a strange ecstasy of thought and feeling—of bold ideas and broad human sympathies. She was in an unwonted state of mental excitement. Pavel seemed to be a weightier personage than ever. ”

“ She wept over the fate of Hessia and her prison-born child, yet she felt that if Pavel asked her to marry him at once she would not have the strength to resist him. Nay, to marry him was what her heart coveted above all else in the world.
Being an “illegal,” she had to slip into the big ancient city quietly. As she passed through the streets, alone on a droshky, she made a mental note of the difference in general pictorial effect between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but she was too excited to give her mind to anything in particular. ”

“ Now I am ashamed of myself for having harboured such ideas in [53] my mind. Every Christian whose acquaintance I happen to make turns out to be an angel rather than a human being.”
“Why these compliments?” Pavel snarled. “Most of the Christians I know are knaves. The whole world is made up of knaves for that matter.”
When Pani Oginska came home and saw them together, she said:
“I knew I should find you two making love to each other.”
A month or two after Pavel’s return to St. Petersburg a tall blond young man with typical Great-Russian features looked him up at the university. ”

“ Pavel asked, grimly.
“Oh, no,” Orlovsky answered with something like dismay. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s as an organiser of communistic colonies that he is going to emigrate. Only he says the Jewish people have a more direct claim upon him than Russia.”
“There is a revolutionist for you!” Pavel roared, bitterly. “I never did attach much importance to that fellow. The sooner he goes the better. God speed him.”
[360]
“You’re too hard on him, Pasha. He’s a good fellow. If we had Clara here she would straighten it all out. We miss her very much. ”

“ Come, get up. Up with you, now. There is a good fellow!”
The old hussar obeyed distressedly.
Instead of going to the place where he expected to see Makar, Pavel went to the house of Major Safonoff, the gendarme officer, an uncomfortable-looking frame building across the river. As he approached it, Masha, the major’s sister, who stood at a second story window at that moment, apparently waiting for somebody, burst out beckoning to him and stamping her feet. Her excited gesticulations drew the attention of a knife-grinder and two little girls. [114] Pavel dropped his eyes. ”

“ It is sweet to be suffering for liberty, he says.”
Makar was at the other end of the same corridor, and a message from him reached Pavel by way of a dozen walls.
“Hello, old boy!” it said. “At last I have completed the revolutionary programme I have been so long engaged upon. It’s a dandy! It is not the same I spoke to you about in Moscow. It covers every point beautifully. It would save the party from every mistake it has ever made or is liable to make.”
One day Pavel learned that Clara had arrived in the fortress, after a long confinement and no end of examinations [430] in Miroslav. ”

“ What a pity we have nothing with us. We could get enough to treat the crowd at Orlovsky’s.”
Pavel made no reply. Whenever he came across a berry that looked particularly tempting he would offer it to her silently and resume his work. He was oppressively aware of his embarrassment in her presence and the consciousness of it made him feel all the more so. He was distinctly conscious of a sensation of unrest, both stimulating and numbing, which had settled in him since he made her acquaintance. ”

“ The days of hair-splitting are dead and buried. There is plenty of work to do—living, practical work.”
Orlovsky leaped up from his samovar, a fishy look in his eye, and grasping Pavel’s hand he pressed it hard and long. Pavel felt in the presence of the most provincial Nihilism he had ever come across. ”

“ We have some tip-top fellows and girls. Of course, we’re mere privates in the ranks of the revolution.”
But Pavel’s mind was on the speaker’s sackcoat of checkered grey, which was so tight on him that his prominent thighs were bulging out and the garment seemed on the point of bursting. The sight of it annoyed Pavel in the same way as Mme. Shubeyko’s smile had done, and he asked Orlovsky why he should not unbutton himself, to which the other answered, half in jest, half in earnest, that he was getting so fat that he was beginning to look “like a veritable bourgeois, deuce take it.” ”

“ He could not resist making the remark disdainfully.
“Yes, I have,” said Pavel, quietly.
“It's no business of mine that he's a fool and a knave, out of pure idiocy!” thought Velchaninoff. “I can't help hating him, though I feel that he is not even worth hating.”
“I'm a permanent husband,” said Pavel Pavlovitch, with the most exquisitely servile irony, at his own expense. “I remember you using that expression, Alexey Ivanovitch, long ago, when you were with us at T——. ”

“ Wild with rage, Pavel Pavlovitch again made straight for Velchaninoff, and tugged him by the coat-sleeve.
“One moment, sir!”
“Oh, my goodness! he's always coming in with his ‘one moments’!” said someone. ”

“ Lunev was irritated, he felt that all these lives, Pavel's, Masha's, stirred him to wrath, excited him, and not knowing where to direct his feelings, he vented them on his friend.
"Every one wants to be decent and happy, you too, but you say to her, I love you, therefore live with me, and suffer want; do you think that's the way to take it?"
"How should I then?" asked Pavel gently.
The question calmed Ilya a little, involuntarily he fell to thinking of it. "It would be easier for me to kill her with my own hands," said Pavel.
Gavrik looked in. "Ilya Jakovlevitch! shall I open the shop!" ”

“ True he would put his arm round my waist and clap me kindly on the shoulder and approve of my way of living, but I felt that he despised my nullity just as much as before and only suffered me to please his daughter, but I could no longer laugh and talk easily, and I thought myself ill-mannered, and all the time was expecting him to call me Panteley as he did his footman Pavel. How my provincial, bourgeois pride rode up against him! ”

“ Pavel’s unbounded faith in the party instilled new faith into her. The great point was that he was a member of the aristocracy. If a man like him had his whole heart in the struggle, the movement was certainly not without foundation. Moreover, Boulatoff was close to the revolutionary centre, and he obviously spoke from personal knowledge. All sorts of questions worried her, many of which were answered at the present gathering, partly by herself, partly by others. ”