The Secret of the Night | Page 2

am a stickler for
discipline. Just because one is gay of a spring morning, discipline
should not be forgotten. I invited the officers to drink in a private room,
and sent the subalterns into the main hall of the restaurant. Then the
soldiers were thirsty, too, and I had drinks served to them out in the
courtyard. Then, my word, there was a perplexing business, for now the
horses whinnied. The brave horses, Feodor Feodorovitch, who also
wished to drink the health of the Emperor. I was bothered about the

discipline. Hall, court, all were full. And I could not put the horses in
private rooms. Well, I made them carry out champagne in pails and
then came the perplexing business I had tried so hard to avoid, a grand
mixture of boots and horse-shoes that was certainly the liveliest thing I
have ever seen in my life. But the horses were the most joyous, and
danced as if a torch was held under their nostrils, and all of them, my
word! were ready to throw their riders because the men were not of the
same mind with them as to the route to follow! From our window we
laughed fit to kill at such a mixture of sprawling boots and dancing
hoofs. But the troopers finally got all their horses to barracks, with
patience, for the Emperor's cavalry are the best riders in the world,
Feodor Feodorovitch. And we certainly had a great laugh! - Your
health, Matrena Petrovna."
[*The "Barque" is a restaurant on a boat, among the isles, near the Gulf
of Finland, on a bank of the Neva.]
These last graceful words were addressed to Madame Trebassof, who
shrugged her shoulders at the undesired gallantry of the gay Councilor.
She did not join in the conversation, excepting to calm the general, who
wished to send the whole regiment to the guard-house, men and horses.
And while the roisterers laughed over the adventure she said to her
husband in the advisory voice of the helpful wife:
"Feodor, you must not attach importance to what that old fool Ivan tells
you. He is the most imaginative man in the capital when he has had
champagne."
"Ivan, you certainly have not had horses served with champagne in
pails," the old boaster, Athanase Georgevitch, protested jealously. He
was an advocate, well-known for his table-feats, who claimed the
hardest drinking reputation of any man in the capital, and he regretted
not to have invented that tale.
"On my word! And the best brands! I had won four thousand roubles. I
left the little fete with fifteen kopecks."
Matrena Petrovna was listening to Ermolai, the faithful country servant

who wore always, even here in the city, his habit of fresh nankeen, his
black leather belt, his large blue pantaloons and his boots glistening
like ice, his country costume in his master's city home. Madame
Matrena rose, after lightly stroking the hair of her step-daughter
Natacha, whose eyes followed her to the door, indifferent apparently to
the tender manifestations of her father's orderly, the soldier-poet, Boris
Mourazoff, who had written beautiful verses on the death of the
Moscow students, after having shot them, in the way of duty, on their
barricades.
Ermolai conducted his mistress to the drawing-room and pointed across
to a door that he had left open, which led to the sitting-room before
Natacha's chamber.
"He is there," said Ermolai in a low voice.
Ermolai need have said nothing, for that matter, since Madame Matrena
was aware of a stranger's presence in the sitting-room by the
extraordinary attitude of an individual in a maroon frock-coat bordered
with false astrakhan, such as is on the coats of all the Russian police
agents and makes the secret agents recognizable at first glance. This
policeman was on his knees in the drawing-room watching what passed
in the next room through the narrow space of light in the hinge-way of
the door. In this manner, or some other, all persons who wished to
approach General Trebassof were kept under observation without their
knowing it, after having been first searched at the lodge, a measure
adopted since the latest attack.
Madame Matrena touched the policeman's shoulder with that heroic
hand which had saved her husband's life and which still bore traces of
the terrible explosion in the last attack, when she had seized the infernal
machine intended for the general with her bare hand. The policeman
rose and silently left the room, reached the veranda and lounged there
on a sofa, pretending to be asleep, but in reality watching the garden
paths.
Matrena Petrovna took his place at the hinge-vent. This was her rule;
she always took the final glance at everything and everybody. She

roved at all hours of the day and night round about the general, like