Page:The Career of a Nihilist.djvu/23

their party,—and the beginning of the sentence sounded ugly,—more ugly than Andrey suspected, for she guessed the next two letters that were to follow. But she kept her own counsel, and went on dictating.

“Five, three.”

“Seven, nine;” Andrey echoed, looking at the key for the final letter.

“Quick!” Lena exclaimed impatiently. “Don’t you see it is an a.”

The ill-omened a was put down by Andrey.

The next letter was an r, which was still worse.

The third, the fourth, the fifth letters were set down, and their last doubts, if they had any, vanished. Without another word they went on deciphering with feverish impatience to the end of the line, and after a few minutes’ work they both saw in black on white, “Boris has been recently arrested in Dubravnik.”

They looked at each other in blank consternation. Arrests, like death, always appear absurd, incredible, even when they are fully anticipated.

“In Dubravnik! What the deuce had he to do in that damned Dubravnik?”

“Let us go on,” Lena said; “perhaps we shall learn. There must be some further details about his arrest.”

They resumed their irritatingly slow work, unravelling in some ten minutes, that seemed an hour, another couple of lines. They only learned that Boris, with two other friends, had been arrested, after a severe fight with the police. This was little, but it was enough to show that the case was desperate. Whatever had been Boris’s part in the struggle, he was a doomed man. According to a new law, all complicity in such acts was punished with death. And Boris was not the man to hold his hand whilst others were fighting.

“Poor Zina!” they both sighed.

Zina was Boris’s wife.

After a short pause Lena again poured forth a series of figures, which in a few minutes yielded the name of the woman whose lot they had been pitying. “Zina———”

“Zina! Is it possible?” Andrey exclaimed.

His first thought was that she also had been arrested.

But after another five minutes of painful suspense it became clear that he was mistaken.

“Zina,” the letter informed them, “has gone to Dubravnik to