back to those old times again? The way they are treating the young people now! … Yes, it breaks down all endurance at last…. It breaks it down! Yes! Wait a bit!’

I had never seen Baburin in such a condition. Musa turned positively white…. Baburin suddenly cleared his throat, and sank down into a seat. Not wishing to constrain either him or Musa by my presence, I decided to go, and was just saying good-bye to them, when the door into the next room suddenly opened, and a head appeared…. It was not the cook’s head, but the dishevelled and terrified-looking head of a young man.

‘Something’s wrong, Baburin, something’s wrong!’ he faltered hurriedly, then vanished at once on perceiving my unfamiliar figure.

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.’

‘I think, Musa Pavlovna,’ I observed, ‘that you are exaggerating a little. Knowing the character of Paramon Semyonitch, I should have felt sure beforehand that he would sympathise with every … sincere impulse; but, on the other hand, I have always regarded him as a man of sense…. Surely he cannot fail to realise all the impracticability, all the absurdity of conspiracies in Russia? In his position, in his calling …’

‘Oh, of course,’ Musa interrupted, with bitterness in her voice, ‘he is a working man; and in Russia it is only permissible for noblemen to take part in conspiracies, … as, for instance, in that of the fourteenth of December, … that’s what you meant to say.’

‘In that case, what do you complain of now?’ almost broke from my lips, … but I restrained myself. ‘Do you consider that the result of the fourteenth of December was such as to encourage other such attempts?’ I said aloud.

Musa frowned. ‘It is no good talking to you about it,’ was what I read in her downcast face.

‘Is Paramon Semyonitch very seriously compromised?’ I ventured to ask her. Musa made no reply…. A hungry, savage mewing was heard from the attic.

Musa started. ‘Ah, it is a good thing Nikander Vavilitch did not see all this!’ she moaned almost despairingly. ‘He did not see how violently in the night they seized his benefactor, our benefactor—maybe, the best and truest man in the whole world,—he did not see how they treated that noble man at his age, how rudely they addressed him, … how they threatened him, and the threats they used to him!—only because he was a working man! That young officer, too, was no doubt just such an unprincipled, heartless wretch as I have known in my life….’

Musa’s voice broke. She was quivering all over like a leaf.

Her long-suppressed indignation broke out at last; old memories stirred up, brought to the surface by the general tumult of her soul, showed themselves alive within her…. But the conviction I carried off at that moment was that the ‘new type’ was still the same, still the same passionate, impulsive nature…. Only the impulses by which Musa was carried away were not the same as in the days of her youth. What on my first visit I had taken for resignation, for meekness, and what really was so—the subdued, lustreless glance, the cold voice, the quietness and simplicity—all that had significance only in relation to the past, to what would never return….

Now it was the present asserted itself.

I tried to soothe Musa, tried to put our conversation on a more practical level. Some steps must be taken that could not be postponed; we must find out exactly where Baburin was; and then secure both for him and for Musa the means of subsistence. All this presented no inconsiderable difficulty; what was needed was not to find money, but work, which is, as we all know, a far more complicated problem….

I left Musa with a perfect swarm of reflections in my head.

I soon learned that Baburin was in the fortress.

The proceedings began, … dragged on. I saw Musa several times every week. She had several interviews with her husband. But just at the moment of the decision of the whole melancholy affair, I was not in Petersburg. Unforeseen business had obliged me to set off to the south of Russia. During my absence I heard that Baburin had been acquitted at the trial; it appeared that all that could be proved against him was, that young people regarding him as a person unlikely to awaken suspicion, had sometimes held meetings at his house, and he had been present at their meetings; he was, however, by administrative order sent into exile in one of the western provinces of Siberia. Musa went with him.

‘Paramon Semyonitch did not wish it,’ she wrote to me; ‘as, according to his ideas, no one ought to sacrifice self for another person, and not for a cause; but I told him there was no question of sacrifice at all. When I said to him in Moscow that I would be his wife, I thought to myself—for ever, indissolubly! So indissoluble it must be till the end of our days….’

IV

1861

Twelve more years passed by…. Every one in Russia knows, and will ever remember, what passed between the years 1849 and 1861. In my personal life, too, many changes took place, on which, however, there is no need to enlarge. New interests came into it, new cares…. The Baburin couple first fell into the background, then passed out of my mind altogether. Yet I kept up a correspondence with Musa—at very long intervals, however. Sometimes more than a year