In fact, Miller was a good and trustworthy officer, and the palace guard at that time presented no danger. It was a most quiet and untroubled period. Nothing was required of the palace guard except a punctual standing at their posts, and yet right then, during Captain Miller’s turn on guard at the palace, there took place a highly extraordinary and alarming incident, which is now barely remembered by its few surviving contemporaries.
III
At first everything went well in the guard: the posts were distributed, people were placed in them, and everything was in perfect order. The sovereign, Nikolai Pavlovich,2 was in good health, took a drive in the evening, returned home, and went to bed. The palace, too, fell asleep. A most quiet night set in. The guardroom was silent. Captain Miller pinned his white handkerchief to the high and always traditionally greasy morocco back of the officer’s chair and sat down to while away the time over a book.
N. I. Miller had always been a passionate reader, and therefore he was not bored, but read and did not notice how the night slipped by; but suddenly, towards two o’clock in the morning, he was roused by a terrible disturbance: before him the sergeant on duty appears, all pale, gripped by fear, and babbles rapidly:
“Disaster, sir, disaster!”
“What is it?!”
“A terrible misfortune has befallen us!”
N. I. Miller leaped up in indescribable alarm and was barely able to find out clearly what the “disaster” and “terrible misfortune” consisted in.
IV
The matter consisted in the following: a sentry, a private of the Izmailovsky Regiment by the name of Postnikov, standing watch outside of what is now the Jordan entrance,3 heard a man drowning in a pool filled by the Neva just opposite that place and desperately calling for help.
Private Postnikov, a former house serf, was a very nervous and very sensitive man. He had long been listening to the distant cries and moans of the drowning man and was petrified by them. In terror he looked this way and that over the whole expanse of the embankment visible to him, and neither here, nor on the Neva, as ill luck would have it, did he catch sight of a single living soul.
There was no one who could help the drowning man, and he was sure to go under …
And yet the sinking man was putting up a terribly long and stubborn struggle.
It seemed there was only one thing left for him—not to waste his strength, but to go to the bottom—and yet no! His exhausted moans and cries for help first broke off and ceased, then began to ring out again, and each time closer and closer to the palace embankment. It was clear that the man was not lost yet and was moving in the right direction, straight towards the light of the streetlamps, though, of course, all the same he would not save himself, because the Jordan ice hole lay precisely in his way. There he would duck under the ice and—the end … Now he is quiet again, and a moment later he is splashing and moaning once more: “Help, help!” And now he is already so close that you can even hear the lapping of the waves as he splashes …
Private Postnikov began to realize that it would be extremely easy to save this man. If he runs out onto the ice now, the drowning man is sure to be right there. Throw him a rope, or reach him a pole, or hand him his gun, and he’s saved. He’s so close that he can take hold of it and climb out. But Postnikov remembers his duty and his oath: he knows that he is a sentry, and a sentry dare not desert his sentry box for anything or under any pretext.
On the other hand, Postnikov’s heart is very recalcitrant: it aches, it pounds, it sinks … He’d like to tear it out and throw it under his own feet—so troubled he is by the moans and howls … It is a dreadful thing to hear another man perishing, and not give the perishing one help, when, as a matter of fact, it is perfectly possible to do so, because the sentry box is not going to run away and nothing else harmful is going to happen. “Shouldn’t I run down there, eh? … They won’t see me … Ah, Lord, only let it be over! Again he’s moaning …”
During the half hour that this went on, Private Postnikov’s heart was quite torn, and he began to feel “doubt of his reason.” He was an intelligent and disciplined soldier, with a clear mind, and he understood perfectly well that for a sentry to leave his post is such an offense that it would lead at once to court-martial, and to running the gauntlet of rod-wielders, and then to hard labor and maybe even the firing squad. But from the direction of the swollen river the moaning again comes drifting closer and closer, and a spluttering and desperate floundering can be heard.
“I’m drowning! … Help, I’m dro-o-owning!”
The Jordan ice hole is right there now … The end!
Postnikov glanced around once or twice more. Not a soul anywhere, only the streetlamps shaking in the wind and glimmering, and the wind intermittently carrying this cry … maybe the last cry …
There was another splash, another brief howl, and a gurgling in the water.
The sentry could not bear it and deserted his post.
V
Postnikov rushed to the gangway, ran with a violently beating heart down onto the ice, then to the water-filled pool and, quickly spotting where the drowning man was still struggling to stay afloat, held out the stock of his gun to him.
The drowning man seized the butt, and Postnikov pulled him by the bayonet and dragged him out onto the bank.
The saved man and his savior were thoroughly soaked, and since of the two of them the saved man was in a state of extreme exhaustion and kept trembling and falling down, his savior, Private Postnikov, could not bring himself to abandon him on the ice, but led him to the embankment and began looking around for someone to hand him over to. And meanwhile, as all this was going on, a sleigh appeared on the embankment, in which sat an officer of the then-existing Palace Invalid Command (later abolished).
This gentleman arriving at just the wrong moment for Postnikov was, it must be supposed, a man of very light-minded character, and somewhat muddleheaded besides, and also a rather impudent fellow. He leaped out of the sleigh and began asking:
“Who is this man … Who are these people?”
“He was drowning, going under,” Postnikov tried to begin.
“Drowning? Who was drowning? You? Why in such a place?”
The other man only spluttered, and Postnikov was no longer there: he had shouldered his gun and gone back to the sentry box.
Whether or not the officer grasped what had happened, he did not go into it any further, but at once picked up the saved man and drove with him to the Admiralty police station on Morskaya Street.
There the officer made a declaration to a policeman that the wet man he had brought in had been drowning in a pool opposite the palace and he, mister officer, had saved him at the risk of his own life.
The man who had been saved was all wet, chilled, and worn out. From fright and terrible exhaustion he fell into unconsciousness, and it made no difference to him who had saved him.
Around him bustled a sleepy police doctor, and in the office they were writing up a report from the verbal declaration of the invalid officer, and, with the suspiciousness peculiar to policemen, were wondering how he had come out of the water perfectly dry. The officer, who was itching to get himself the medal for lifesaving, explained it by a lucky concurrence of circumstances, but his explanation was incoherent and incredible. They went to awaken the police chief and sent to make inquiries.
And meanwhile in the palace this matter was already generating other swift currents.
VI
In the palace guardroom, all the just-mentioned turns after the officer took the saved drowned man in his sleigh were unknown. The officers and soldiers of the Izmailovsky Regiment knew only that one of their soldiers, Postnikov, had abandoned his sentry box and run to save a man, and since this was a grave violation of military duty, Private Postnikov would now certainly be tried and sent under the rods, and all high-ranking persons, from the company to the regimental commander, would get into terrible trouble, against which they could in no way either protest or vindicate themselves.