Petersburg.—The murder of the Procurator of the Holy Synod is regarded in a measure as the symptom of the general situation in Russia. It is reported that the château of the Duke of Mecklenburgh in S. E. Russia has been pillaged and destroyed by rioters.
Berlin.—On the arrival of the express train from Berlin at Wirballen on the Russian frontier today, a passenger was arrested, and Nihilist documents were discovered in his trunks. This is the third Nihilist arrest within the fortnight. The Berlin police have received information from Petersburg of numerous revolutionists having recently left France. They are now maintaining from Berlin a vigorous agitation against the Tsar’s Government. From London, too, the whereabouts of several suspects have been reported. In most cases the Berlin authorities are powerless to effect arrests, but they always supply full information to Russia, so that suspicious characters are always detained in passing the frontier.
Anarchy Advancing
The Kreuzzeitung, which is unusually well-informed in Russian affairs, expresses the opinion that one of the immediate consequences of the triumph of Japan will be a general rising of the Russian peasants against their landlords, and of the army against the aristocracy. The same paper declares that revolutionary agents of Social Democratic tendencies have long been systematically poisoning the minds of the people.
He turned back to “The Gathering of the Storm,” and read the ominous paragraph again. “Warning enough, in all conscience,” he said: “first, the Public Prosecutor assassinated at Odessa, then the Chief of Secret Police of Petersburg, then the Procurator of the Holy Synod; and now a hekatombe, sovereign, royalty, aristocracy, government, bureaucracy, all annihilated, and Anarchy in excelsis. France will take fire at any minute now, that’s absolutely certain. Oh, how horrible! But we’re all Christians, Flavio; and this is only one of the many funny ways in which we love one another.”
He rose and went to the window. The yellow cat deliberately stretched himself, yawned, and followed; and proceeded to carry out a wonderful scheme of feints and ambuscades in regard to a ping-pong ball which was kept for his proper diversion. The man looked on almost lovingly. Flavio at length captured the ball, took it between his forepaws, and posed with all the majesty of a lion of Trafalgar Square. Anon he uttered a little low gurgle of endearment, fixing the great eloquent mystery of amber and black velvet eyes, tardy, grave, upon his human friend. No notice was vouchsafed. Flavio got up; and gently rubbed his head against the nearest hand.
“My boy!” the man murmured; and he lifted the little cat on to his shoulder. He went downstairs. He could not work; and he was going to take an easy; and he wanted a novel, he said to his landlady. He feared that he had read all the books in the house. Yes, and those in the drawing-room too. After a quarter of an hour, application to a neighbour produced three miserable derelicts, a nameless sixpenny shudder, a Braddon, and an Edna Lyall. Not to seem ungracious, he took them upstairs; and pitched them into a corner, to be returned upon occasion. That salient trait of his character, the desire not to be ungracious, the readiness to be unselfish and self-sacrificing, had done him incalculable injury. This world is infested by innumerable packs of half-licked cubs and quarter-cultivated mediocrities who seem to have nothing better to do than to buzz about harassing and interfering with their betters. Out of courtesy, out of kindness, he was used to give way; but all the same he tenaciously knew and clung to his original purpose. He knew that delay was his enemy: yet he invariably would stand aside and let himself be delayed. And now towards the end of his youth, he was poor, lonely, a misanthropic altruist.
He returned to his armchair, breathing a long sigh of irritation and exhaustion: broke up three cigarette dottels for a (tobacco famine was afflicting him), rolled them in a fresh paper, and applied a match. Flavio, with an indulgent protestant mew, bounded from his knee to a bedroom chair; and coiled himself up to sleep.
The armchair was placed directly in front of the fireplace, the ordinary garret-coloured iron fireplace and mantel of a suburban lodging-house attic. To the grey wall above the mantel a large sheet of brown packing-paper was tacked. On this background were pinned photographs of the Hermes of Herculaneum, the terra-cotta Sebastian of South Kensington, Donatello’s liparose David and the vivid David of Verrocchio, the wax model of Cellini’s Perseys, an unknown Rugger XV prized for a single example of the rare feline-human type, and the O.U.D.S. Sebastian of Twelfth Night of 1900. Tucked into the edges of these were Italian picture postcards presenting Andrea del Sarto’s young St. John, Alessandro Filipepi’s Primavera, a page from an old Salon catalogue showing Friant’s Wrestlers, another from an old Harper’s Magazine showing Boucher’s Runners, a cheap and lovely chromo of an olive-skinned black-haired cornflower-crowned Pancratius in white on a gold ground, the visiting-cards of five literary agents, and a postcard tersely inscribed Verro precipitevolissimevolmente. The mantel-shelf contained stone bottles of ink, pipes, a miniature in a closed morocco case, a cast of Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s seal from Oxford, two pairs of silver spectacles in shagreen cases, four tiny ingots of pure copper, a sponge gum bottle, and an open book with painted covers showing Eros at the knees of Psyche and a mysterious group of divers in the clear of the moon. The door was at a yard to the left of the fireplace, at a right-angle. Uncared-for clothes, black serge and blue linen, hung upon it. A small wooden washstand stood between the door and the armchair, convenient to the writer’s hand. A strawboard covered the hole in its top; and supported ink-bottles,
