Lucy Harding: A Romance of Russia

In the summer of 189– I was one of a party of tourists who were going to St. Petersburg. There were eight of us, all women, strong, fearless and self-reliant, and all natives of Massachusetts. Two were from Boston, three from its suburbs, and three, including myself, from Ridgefield, a pretty little inland town among the Worcester hills. We had a guide, of course, Henri Smeltz, a German, and if his credentials, which I now think he wrote himself, were to be believed, he was fully competent to take charge of eight women with opinions of their own and as much knowledge of the country they were to visit as he had. It had been the dream of my life to see the water-soaked city, and when the opportunity came I accepted it eagerly, with, however, some dread of the fatigue of the long journey and the annoyances I might meet in the capital of the czar. I was not a good sailor and I had a great dislike for train travel, and by the time we had crossed the Atlantic and the Continent and were on the Gulf of Finland, I was in a rather limp and collapsed condition. But I rallied as the bright July day wore on, and when the Russian officers came on board I was quite myself and felt able to cope with them all if necessary. I had nothing to fear. I was an American citizen and wore the colors of my country in a knot of ribbon on my dress. My passport was all right, so far as I knew. But better than this was the fact that I could speak Russian with a tolerable degree of accuracy. I was fond of languages, and during my school days had mastered German and French to the extent of reading and writing them fluently. My teacher was Nicol Patoff from St. Petersburg, who, outside of his school hours, had a class in Russian which I joined, and astonished both Nicol and myself by the readiness with which I acquired the difficult language which the most of my companions gave up in despair after a few weeks’ trial and in spite of the entreaties of Nicol, who assured them that with a little patience what seemed so hard would be very easy.

He was a tall, handsome young man, with large, dark eyes which seemed always on the alert, as if watching for or expecting something which might come at any moment. All we knew of him was that he was from St. Petersburg. That his father, who was dead, had once been wealthy, in fact had belonged to the minor nobility, but had lost most of his money, and this necessitated his son’s earning his own living, which he could do better in America than elsewhere. This was the story he told, and although he brought no credentials and only asked to be employed on trial, his frank, pleasing manners and magnetic personality won him favor at once, and for two years he discharged his duties as teacher of languages in the Ridgefield Academy to the entire satisfaction of his employers. Many conjectured that he was a nihilist, but there was about him a quiet reserve which kept people from questioning him on the subject, and it was never mentioned to him but once. Then a young girl asked him laughingly if he had ever known a nihilist intimately.

“But, of course, you haven’t,” she added. “I suppose they only belong to the lower classes. You might see them without knowing them well.”

For a moment the hot blood surged into Patoff’s face, then left it deadly pale as he replied: “I have seen and known hundreds of them. They belong to all classes, high and low, rich and poor—more to the rich, perhaps, than the very poor. They are as thick as those raindrops,” and he pointed to a window, against which a heavy shower was beating. “There is much to be said on both sides,” he continued, after a few moments. “You are subjected to tyranny and surveillance, whichever party you belong to. It is a case of Scylla and Charybdis. Of the two it is better to be with the government than to be hounded and watched wherever you go and suspected of crimes you never thought of committing. A nihilist is not safe anywhere. His best friend may betray him, and then the gendarmes, the police. You have no idea how sharp they are when once they are on your track.”