“And how did you finish him off?” she asked.
“I choked him. That bear knocked me down, but Steinmetz shot him. We were four days out in the open after that elk. This is a lynx—a queer face—rather like De Chauxville; the dogs killed him.”
“But why do you not paper the room,” asked Etta, with a shiver, “instead of this gloomy panelling? It is so mysterious and creepy. Quite suggestive of secret passages.”
“There are no secret passages,” answered Paul. “But there is a room behind here. This is the door. I will show it to you presently. I have things in there I want to show you. I keep all my medicines and appliances in there. It is our secret surgery and office. In that room the Charity League was organized.”
Etta turned away suddenly and went to the narrow window, where she sat on a low window-seat, looking down into the snow-clad depths.
“I did not know you were a doctor,” she said.
“I doctor the peasants,” replied Paul, “in a rough-and-ready way. I took my degree on purpose. But, of course, they do not know that it is I; they think I am a doctor from Moscow. I put on an old coat, and wear a scarf, so that they cannot see my face. I only go to them at night. It would never do for the Government to know that we attempt to do good to the peasants. We have to keep it a secret even from the people themselves. And they hate us. They groan and hoot when we drive through the village. But they never attempt to do us any harm; they are too much afraid of us.”
When Etta rose and came toward him her face was colorless.
“Let me see this room,” she said.
He opened the door and followed her into the apartment, which has already been described. Here he told further somewhat bald details of the work he had attempted to do. It is to be feared that he made neither an interesting nor a romantic story of it. There were too many details—too much statistic, and no thrilling realism whatever. The experiences of a youthful curate in Bethnal Green would have made high tragedy beside the tale that this man told his wife of the land upon which God has assuredly laid His curse—Aceldama, the field of blood.
Etta listened, and despite herself she became interested. She was sitting in a chair usually occupied by Steinmetz. There was a faint aroma of tobacco-smoke. The atmosphere of the room was manly and energetic.
Paul showed her his simple stores of medicine—the old coat saturated with disinfectants which had become the recognized outward sign of the Moscow doctor.
“And do other people, other noblemen, try to do this sort of thing too?” asked Etta at length.
“Catrina Lanovitch does,” replied Paul.
“What? The girl with the hair?”
“Yes,” answered Paul. He had never noticed Catrina’s hair. Etta’s appraising eye had seen more in one second than Paul had perceived in twenty years.
“Yes,” he answered. “But, of course, she is handicapped.”
“By her appearance?”
“No; by her circumstances. Her name is sufficient to handicap her every moment in this country. But she does a great deal. She—she found me out, confound her!”
Etta had risen; she was looking curiously at the cupboard where Paul’s infected clothes were hanging. He had forbidden her to go near it. She turned and looked at him.
“Found you out! How?” she asked, with a queer smile.
“Saw through my disguise.”
“Yes—she would do that!” said Etta aloud to herself.
“What is this door?” she asked, after a pause.
“It leads to an inner room,” replied Paul, “where Steinmetz usually works.”
He passed in front of her and opened the door. As he was doing so Etta went on in the train of her thoughts:
“So Catrina knows?”
“Yes.”
“And no one else?”
Paul made no answer; for he had passed on into the smaller room, where Steinmetz was seated at a writing-table.
“Except, of course, Herr Steinmetz?” Etta went on interrogatively.
“Madame,” said the German, looking up with his pleasant smile, “I know everything.”
And he went on writing.
XXVI
Bloodhounds
The table d’hôte of the Hôtel de Moscou at Tver had just begun. The soup had been removed; the diners were engaged in igniting their first cigarette at the candles placed between each pair of them for that purpose. By nature the modern Russian is a dignified and somewhat reserved gentleman. By circumstance he has been schooled into a state of guarded unsociability. If there is a seat at a public table conveniently removed from those occupied by earlier arrivals the newcomer invariably takes it. In Russia one converses—as in Scotland one jokes—with difficulty.
A Russian table d’hôte is therefore anything but hilarious in its tendency. A certain number of grave-faced gentlemen and a few broad-jowled ladies are visibly constrained by the force of circumstance to dine at the same table and hour, et voilà tout. There is no pretence that any more sociable and neighborly motive has brought them together. Indeed, they each suspect the other of being a German, or a Nihilist, or, worse still, a Government servant. They therefore sit as far apart as possible, and smoke cigarettes between and during the courses with that self-centred absorption which would be rude, if it were not entirely satisfactory, to the average Briton. The ladies, of course, have the same easy method of showing a desire for silence and reflection in a country where nurses carrying infants usually smoke in the streets, and where a dainty confectioner’s assistant places her cigarette between her lips in order to leave her hands free for the service of her customers.
The table d’hôte of the Hôtel de Moscou at Tver was no exception to the general rule. In Russia, by the way,
