When Pyotr Nikolayevich was murdered and the court case began, the trial gave the group of revolutionaries in the district town a powerful cause for agitation, and they denounced it outspokenly. Tyurin’s visits to the village and his conversations with the peasants were referred to in the court proceedings. Tyurin’s house was searched and some revolutionary pamphlets discovered, and he was arrested and taken away to Petersburg.
Turchaninova travelled to Petersburg after him and went to the prison to try to see him, but they would not permit her to see him on just any day, but only on a public visiting-day, and even then she was only allowed to talk to Tyurin through a double iron grille. This visit strengthened her feelings of moral outrage still further. Her indignation finally reached its climax when she was faced with a young and handsome officer of the gendarmes who was obviously ready to grant her some concessions, provided she would agree to certain proposals of his. This incident drove her to the highest pitch of fury and hatred against all representatives of authority. She went to the chief of police in order to lodge a complaint. The chief of police echoed the words of the gendarme: that there was nothing they could do, and that the matter was under the jurisdiction of the Minister. She sent in a written memorandum to the Minister requesting an interview; it was refused. Then she decided that a desperate act was called for, and she bought a revolver.
XXII
The Minister was receiving visitors at his usual hour. After passing over three petitioners and talking for a while with a provincial governor, he went up to a pretty dark-eyed young woman in black who was standing there holding a piece of paper in her left hand. A lecherous glint appeared in the Minister’s eyes at the sight of this charming petitioner, but remembering his position the Minister adopted a serious expression.
‘And what can I do for you?’ he asked, advancing towards her.
She made no reply, but swiftly drew out the revolver from beneath her cape, aimed it at the Minister’s chest and fired, but she missed.
The Minister made a grab at her arm but she stepped back away from him and fired a second shot. The Minister fled. The young woman was immediately seized and held. She was shaking and unable to speak. Then suddenly she burst into hysterical laughter. The Minister had not even been wounded.
The woman was Turchaninova. She was sent to a special detention prison pending the investigation of her case. Meanwhile the Minister, who had received congratulations and commiserations from persons in the very highest places and even from the Sovereign himself, appointed a commission to investigate the conspiracy which had led to this attempt on his life.
There was of course no conspiracy whatever; but the officials of both the secret and civil police forces went assiduously to work to search out all the threads of the nonexistent conspiracy, conscientiously justifying their salaries and their expenditure. Rising early in the morning when it was still dark, they conducted search after search, transcribed papers and books, perused diaries and private letters, and wrote out extracts from them in beautiful handwriting on the finest paper. They questioned Turchaninova any number of times and set up confrontations with witnesses in their efforts to get her to reveal the names of her accomplices.
The Minister was a kindly man at heart and felt very sorry for this healthy, attractive Cossack girl, but he told himself that he carried grave responsibilities to the state which he was bound to discharge, however painful this might prove to be. And when a former colleague of his, a court chamberlain who knew the Tyurin family, met him at a court ball and began to ask him about Tyurin and Turchaninova, the Minister shrugged his shoulders, crinkling the red sash he was wearing across his white waistcoat, and said:
‘Je ne demanderais pas mieux que de lâcher cette pauvre fillette, mais vous savez – le devoir.’9
And meanwhile Turchaninova was sitting in her detention cell, exchanging occasional furtive tapped messages with her fellow-prisoners and reading the books she was given, but sometimes she would fall into a mood of fury and despair, beating on the walls with her fists, screaming and laughing.
XXIII
One day when Mariya Semyonovna had been to the local treasury office to draw her pension and was on her way home, she met a teacher whom she knew.
‘Good day, Mariya Semyonovna, have you been to collect your pay then?’ he called out to her from the opposite side of the road.
‘Yes, I have,’ replied Mariya Semyonovna. ‘It will do to plug a few gaps at least.’
‘Well, you should have plenty to plug the gaps and still have some left over,’ said the teacher, and he said goodbye to her and went on his way.
‘Goodbye,’ said Mariya Semyonovna, and as she was looking back at the teacher she walked straight into a tall man with extremely long arms and a stern face. As she came near to the house where she lived she was surprised to see this same long-armed man again. He watched her go into the house, stood there for a while, then turned and walked off.
At first Mariya Semyonovna felt alarmed, then her alarm turned to a sort of melancholy. But by the time she had gone inside and distributed little gifts to her old father and her little scrofulous nephew Fedya, and petted the little dog Trezorka, who yelped with delight, she was feeling cheerful again, and handing over the money to her father she got on with the housework, to which there never seemed to be an end.
The man she had bumped into was Stepan.
After leaving the coaching inn where he had murdered the innkeeper Stepan had not gone back to the town. And strange to say, not only did the memory of the innkeeper’s murder not distress him, but he actually found himself returning to it in his mind several times each day. It gave him pleasure to think that he was capable of doing the deed so cleanly and skilfully that no one would ever find him out or prevent him from doing the same thing again, to other people. As he sat in a tavern drinking his tea and his vodka he kept scrutinizing the people around him with the same thought always in mind: how he could set about murdering them. To find himself a bed for the night he went to the house of a man who came from his own district, a drayman. The drayman was out. He said he would wait and sat down to chat with the man’s wife. Then, when she turned her back on him to tend the stove, it occurred to him that he could kill her. Surprised at himself, he shook his head, but then he took his knife from the top of his boot, threw her to the floor and cut her throat. The children started screaming, so he killed them too, and left the town at once that same day. Once out of the town he went into a village inn, where he stopped and had a good night’s sleep.
The next day he walked back to the district town, and overheard Mariya Semyonovna’s conversation with the teacher while he was walking down the street. He was frightened by the way she had stared at him, nevertheless he decided to break into her house and take the money which she had drawn. When night came he broke the lock and went upstairs into a bedroom. The first person to hear him was the younger, married daughter. She cried out. Stepan immediately cut her throat. The son-in-law woke up and grappled with him. He got hold of Stepan by the throat and struggled with him for quite some time, but Stepan was too strong for him. Having finished off the son-in-law Stepan, now in a state of some agitation and excited by the struggle, went behind a partition. On the other side of the partition Mariya Semyonovna was lying in bed. She raised herself on the bed and looked at Stepan with gentle, frightened eyes and crossed herself. Once again her look frightened Stepan. He lowered his gaze.