comers. For
her, the police-station was a dungeon, and she fancied the Count chained
to a dank and slimy wall in a painful position, chilled to the marrow by
the touch of the dripping stone, his teeth chattering, his face distorted
with suffering. Of course he was in a solitary cell, behind a heavy door,
braced with clamps and bolts and locks and studded with great dark iron
nails. Without, the grim policemen were doubtless pacing up and down with
drawn swords, listening with a murderous delight to the groans of their
victim as he writhed in his chains. In the eyes of the poor and the young,
the law is a very terrible thing, taking no account of persons, and very
little of the relative magnitude of men's misdeeds. The province of
justice, as Vjera conceived it, was to crush in its iron claws all who had
the misfortune to come within its reach. Vjera had never heard of Judge
Jeffreys nor of the Bloody Assizes, but the methods of procedure adopted
by that eminent destroyer of his kind would have seemed mild and humane
compared with what she supposed that all men, innocent or guilty, had to
expect after they had once fallen into the hands of the policeman. She was
not a German girl, taught in the common school to understand something of
the methods by which society governs itself. Her early childhood had been
spent in a Polish village, far within the Russian frontier, and though the
law in Russian Poland is not exactly the irresponsible and blood-thirsty
monster depicted by young gentlemen and old maids who traverse the country
in search of horrors, yet it must be admitted by the least prejudiced that
it sometimes moves in a mysterious way, calculated to rouse some
apprehension in the minds of those who are governed by it. And Vjera had
brought with her her childish impressions, and applied them in the present
case as descriptive of the Munich police-station. The whole subject was to
her so full of horror that she had not dared to ask Schmidt for the
details of the Count's situation. To her, a revolutionary caught in the
act of undermining the Tsar's bedroom, could not be in a worse case. She
would not have believed Schmidt, had he told her that the Count was
sitting in an attitude of calm thought upon the edge of a broad wooden
bench, his hands quite free from chains and gyves, and occupied in rolling
cigarettes at regular intervals of half an hour--and this, in a clean and
well-ventilated room, lighted by a ground glass lan