Thus he began life under the new name. He was startled, after a few days, to find how easy it was to assume a fresh identity; he conscientiously tried to forget all about Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill and to remember only Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, and soon the transference came to require surprisingly little effort. Forrester had cautioned him not to be in any great hurry to begin his real work, so at first he merely made small purchases at the bookshop whose address he had been given, without attempting to get to know anyone. Gradually, however, the youthful, studious-looking fellow who bought text-books on economic history (that was the subject finally fixed on) attracted the attention of the bookseller, a small swarthy Jew of considerable charm and culture. His name was Axelstein. A.J. had all along decided that, if possible, he would allow the first move to be made by the other side, and he was pleased when, one afternoon during the slack hours of business, Axelstein began a conversation with him. Both men were exceedingly cautious and only after a longish talk permitted it to be surmised that they were neither of them passionate supporters of the Government. Subsequent talks made the matter less vague, and in the end it all happened much as Forrester had foreshadowed—A.J. was introduced to several other frequenters of the shop, and it was tacitly assumed that he was a most promising recruit to the movement.
A few days later he was admitted to a club to which Axelstein and many of his customers belonged. It met in an underground beer-hall near the Finland station. Over a hundred men and women crowded themselves into the small, unventilated room, whose atmosphere was soon thick with the mingled fumes of beer, makhorka tobacco, and human bodies. Some of the men were factory-workers with hands and clothes still greasy from the machines. Others belonged to the bourgeois and semi-intelligentsia—clerks in government offices, school teachers, book-keepers, and so on. A few others were university students. Of the women, some were factory-workers, some stenographers, but most were just the wives of the men.
A.J. allowed himself to make several friends in that underground beer- hall, and the reality of its companionship together with the secrecy and danger of the meeting, made a considerable impression on him. Often news was received that one or another member had been arrested and imprisoned without trial. Police spies were everywhere; there was even the possibility, known to all, that some of the members might themselves be spies or agents provocateurs. Caution was the universal and necessary watchword, and at any moment during their sessions members were ready to transform themselves into a haphazard and harmless group of beer-drinking and card-playing roisterers.
It was only by degrees that A.J. came to realise the immensity of the tide that was flowing towards revolution. That club was only one of hundreds in Petersburg alone, and Petersburg was only one of scores of Russian cities in which such clubs existed. The movement was like a great subterranean octopus stirring ever more restlessly beneath the foundations of imperial government. An arm cut off here or there had absolutely no effect; if a hundred men were deported to Siberia a hundred others were ready to step instantly into the vacant places. Everything was carefully and skilfully organised, and there seemed to be no lack of money. The Government always declared that it came from the Japanese, but Axelstein hinted that most of it derived from big Jewish banking and industrial interests.
A.J. became rather friendly with an eighteen-year-old university student named Maronin. He was fair-haired, large-eyed, and delicate-looking, with thin, artistic hands (he was a fine pianist) and slender nostrils; his father had been a lawyer in Kieff. The boy did no real work at the university and had no particular profession in view; he lived every moment for the revolution he believed to be coming. A.J. found that this intense and passionate attitude occasioned no surprise amongst the others, though, of course, it was hardly typical.
Young Alexis Maronin interested A.J. a great deal. He was such a kindly, jolly, amusing boy—in England A.J. could have imagined him a popular member of the sixth-form. In Russia, however, he was already a man, and with more than an average man’s responsibilities, since he had volunteered for any task, however dangerous, that the revolutionary organisers would allot him. Axelstein explained that this probably meant that he would be chosen for the next ‘decisive action’ whenever that should take place. “He is just the type,” Axelstein explained calmly. “Throwing a bomb accurately when you know that the next moment you will be torn to pieces requires a certain quality of nerve which, as a rule, only youngsters possess.”
Regularly every week A.J. transmitted his secret reports and received his regular payments by a routine so complicated and devious that it seemed to preclude all possibility of discovery. He found his work extremely interesting, and his new companions so friendly and agreeable, on the whole, that he was especially glad that his spying activities were not directed against them. He was well satisfied to remain personally impartial, observing with increasing interest both sides of the worsening situation.
One afternoon he was walking with Maronin through a factory district during a lock-out; crowds of factory workers—men, women, and girls—were strolling or loitering about quite peaceably. Suddenly, with loud shouts and the clatter of hoofs, a troop of Cossacks swept round the street-corner, their lithe bodies swaying rhythmically from side to side as they laid about them with their short, leaden-tipped whips. The crowd screamed and stampeded for safety, but most were hemmed in between the Cossacks and the closed factory-gates. A.J. and Maronin pressed themselves against the wall and trusted to luck; several horsemen flashed past; whips cracked and there were terrifying screams; then all was over, almost as sharply as it had begun. A girl standing next to Maronin had been struck; the whip had laid open her cheek from lip to ear. A.J. and Maronin helped to carry her into a neighbouring shop, which was already full of bleeding victims. Maronin said: “My mother was blinded like that—by a Cossack whip,”—and A.J. suddenly felt as he had done years before when he had decided to fight Smalljohn’s system at Barrowhurst, and when he had seen the policeman in Trafalgar Square twisting the suffragette’s arm—only a thousand times more intensely.
Throughout the summer he went on making his reports, attending meetings, arguing with Axelstein, and cultivating friendship with the boy Alexis. There was something very pure and winsome about the latter—the power of his single burning ideal gave him an air of otherworldliness, even in his most natural and boyish moments. His hatred of the entire governmental system was terrible in its sheer simplicity; it was the system he was pledged against; mere individuals, so far as they were obeying orders, roused in him only friendliness and pity. The Cossack guards who had slashed the crowd with their whips were to him as much victims as the crowd itself, and even the Emperor, he was ready to admit, was probably a quite harmless and decent fellow personally. The real enemy was the framework of society from top to bottom, and in attacking that enemy, it might and probably would happen that the innocent would have to suffer. Thus he justified assassinations of prominent officials; as human beings they were guiltless and to be pitied, but as cogs in the detested machine there could be no mercy for them.