A Rock in the Baltic

But with a woman of Katherine’s temperament the final outburst had to come, and it came on the day that the first flurry of snow fell through the still air, capering in large flakes past the windows of the flat down to the muddy street far below. Katherine was standing by the window, with her forehead leaning against the plate glass, in exactly the attitude that had been her habit in the sewing-room at Bar Harbor, but now the staccato of her fingers on the sill seemed to drum a Dead March of despair. The falling snow had darkened the room, and one electric light was aglow over the dainty Chippendale desk at which Dorothy sat writing a letter. The smooth, regular flow of the pen over the paper roused Katherine to a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly she brought her clenched fist down on the sill where her fingers had been drumming.

“My God,” she cried, “how can you sit there like an automaton with the snow falling?”

Dorothy put down her pen.

“The snow falling?” she echoed. “I don’t understand!”

“Of course you don’t. You don’t think of the drifts in Siberia, and the two men you have known, whose hands you have clasped, manacled, driven through it with the lash of a Cossack’s whip.”

Dorothy rose quietly, and put her hands on the shoulders of the girl, feeling her frame tremble underneath her touch.

“Katherine,” she said, quietly, but Katherine, with a nervous twitch of her shoulders flung off the friendly grasp.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Go back to your letter-writing. You and the Englishman are exactly alike; unfeeling, heartless. He with his selfish stubbornness has involved an innocent man in the calamity his own stupidity has brought about.”

“Katherine, sit down. I want to talk calmly with you.”

“Calmly! Calmly! Yes, that is the word. It is easy for you to be calm when you don’t care. But I care, and I cannot be calm.”

“What do you wish to do, Katherine?”

“What can I do? I am a pauper and a dependent, but one thing I am determined to do, and that is to go and live in my father’s house.”

“If you were in my place, what would you do Katherine?”

“I would go to Russia.”

“What would you do when you arrived there?”

“If I had wealth I would use it in such a campaign of bribery and corruption in that country of tyrants that I should release two innocent men. I’d first find out where they were, then I’d use all the influence I possessed with the American Ambassador to get them set free.”

“The American Ambassador, Kate, cannot move to release either an Englishman or a Russian.”

“I’d do it somehow. I wouldn’t sit here like a stick or a stone, writing letters to my architect.”

“Would you go to Russia alone?”

“No, I should take my father with me.”

“That is an excellent idea, Kate. I advise you to go north by to-night’s train, if you like, and see him, or telegraph to him to come and see us.”

Kate sat down, and Dorothy drew the curtains across the window pane and snapped on the central cluster of electric lamps.

“Will you come with me if I go north?” asked Kate, in a milder tone than she had hitherto used.

“I cannot. I am making an appointment with a man in this room to-morrow.”

“The architect, I suppose,” cried Kate with scorn.

“No, with a man who may or may not give me information of Lamont or Drummond.”

Katherine stared at her open-eyed.

“Then you have been doing something?”

“I have been trying, but it is difficult to know what to do. I have received information that the house in which Mr. Lamont and Mr. Drummond lived is now deserted, and no one knows anything of its former occupants. That information comes to me semi-officially, but it does not lead far. I have started inquiry through more questionable channels; in other words, I have invoked the aid of a Nihilist society, and although I am quite determined to go to Russia with you, do not be surprised if I am arrested the moment I set foot in St. Petersburg.”

“Dorothy, why did you not let me know?”

“I was anxious to get some good news to give you, but it has not come yet.”

“Oh, Dorothy,” moaned Katherine, struggling to keep back the tears that would flow in spite of her. Dorothy patted her on the shoulder.

“You have been a little unjust,” she said, “and I am going to prove that to you, so that in trying to make amends you may perhaps stop brooding over this crisis that faces two poor lone women. You wrong the Englishman, as you call him. Jack was arrested at least two days before he was. Nihilist spies say that both of them were arrested, the Prince first, and the Englishman several days later. I had a letter from Mr. Drummond a short time after you received yours from Mr. Lamont. I never showed it to you, but now things are so bad that they cannot be worse, and you are at liberty to read the letter if you wish to do so. It tells of Jack’s disappearance, and of Drummond’s agony of mind and helplessness in St. Petersburg. Since he has never written again, I am sure he was arrested later. I don’t know which of the two was most at fault for what you call stubbornness, but I believe the explosion had more to do with the arrests than any action of theirs.”

“And I was the cause of that,” wailed Katherine.

“No, no, my dear girl. No one is to blame but the tyrant of Russia. Now the Nihilists insist that neither of these men has been sent to Siberia. They think they are in the prison of ‘St. Peter and St. Paul.’ That information came to me to-day in the letter I was just now answering. So, Katherine, I think you have been unjust to the Englishman. If he had been arrested first, there might be some grounds for what you charge, but they evidently gave him a chance to escape. He had his warning in the disappearance of his friend, and he had several days in which to get out of St. Petersburg, but he stood his ground.”

“I’m sorry, Dorothy. I’m a silly fool, and to-day, when I saw the snow—well, I got all wrought up.”

“I think neither of the men are in the snow, and now I am going to say something else, and then never speak of the subject again. You say I didn’t care, and of course you are quite right, for I confessed to you that I didn’t. But just imagine—imagine—that I cared. The Russian Government can let the Prince go at any moment, and there’s nothing more to be said. He has no redress, and must take the consequences of his nationality. But if the Russian Government have arrested the Englishman; if they have put him in the prison of ‘St. Peter and St. Paul,’ they dare not release him, unless they are willing to face war. The Russian Government can do nothing in his case but deny, demand proof, and obliterate all chance of the truth ever being known. Alan Drummond is doomed: they dare not release him. Now think for a moment how much worse my case would be than yours, if—if—” her voice quivered and broke for the moment, then with tightly clenched fists she recovered control of herself, and finished: “if I cared.”

“Oh, Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy!” gasped Katherine, springing to her feet.

“No, no, don’t jump at any false conclusion. We are both nervous wrecks this afternoon. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t care—I don’t care, except that I hate tyranny, and am sorry for the victims of it.”

“Dorothy, Dorothy!”

“We need a sane man in the house, Kate. Telegraph for your father to come down and talk to us both. I must finish my letter to the Nihilist.”

“Dorothy!” said Katherine, kissing her.

CHAPTER XII —THE DREADED TROGZMONDOFF

THE Nihilist was shown into the dainty drawing room of the flat, and found Dorothy Amhurst alone, as he had stipulated, waiting for him. He was dressed in a sort of naval uniform and held a peaked cap in his hand, standing awkwardly there as one unused to luxurious surroundings. His face was bronzed with exposure to sun and storm, and although he appeared to be little more than thirty years of age his closely cropped hair was white. His eyes were light blue, and if ever the expression of a man’s countenance betokened stalwart honesty, it was the face of this sailor. He was not in the least Dorothy’s idea of a dangerous plotter.

“Sit down,” she said, and he did so like a man ill at ease.

“I suppose Johnson is not your real name,” she began.

“It is the name I bear in America, Madam.”

“Do you mind my asking you some questions?”

“No, Madam, but if you ask me anything I am not allowed to answer I shall not reply.”

“How long have you been in the United States?”

“Only a few months, Madam.”

“How come you to speak English so well?”

“In my young days I shipped aboard a bark plying between Helsingfors and New York.”

“You are a Russian?”

“I am a Finlander, Madam.”

“Have you been a sailor all your life?”

“Yes, Madam. For a time I was an unimportant officer on board a battleship in the Russian Navy, until I was discovered to be a Nihilist, when I was cast into prison. I escaped last May, and came to New York.”

“What have you been doing since you arrived here?”

“I was so fortunate as to become mate on the turbine yacht ‘The Walrus,’ owned by Mr. Stockwell.”

“Oh, that’s the multi-millionaire whose bank failed a month ago?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“But does he still keep a yacht?”

“No, Madam. I think he has never been aboard this one, although it is probably the most expensive boat in these waters. I am told it cost anywhere from half a million to a million. She was built by Thornycroft, like a cruiser, with Parson’s turbine engines in her. After the failure, Captain and crew were discharged, and I am on board as a sort of watchman until she is sold, but there is not a large market for a boat like ‘The Walrus,’ and I am told they will take the fittings out of her, and sell her as a cruiser to one of the South American republics.”

“Well, Mr. Johnson, you ought to be a reliable man, if the Court has put you in charge of so valuable a property.”

“I believe I am considered honest, Madam.”

“Then why do you come to me asking ten thousand dollars for a letter which you say was written to me, and which naturally belongs to me?”

The man’s face deepened into a mahogany brown, and he shifted his cap uneasily in his hands.

“Madam, I am not acting for myself. I am Secretary of the Russian Liberation Society. They, through their branch at St. Petersburg, have conducted some investigations on your behalf.”

“Yes, for which I paid them very well.”

Johnson bowed.

“Our object, Madam, is the repression of tyranny. For that we are in continual need of money. It is the poor, and not the millionaires, who subscribe to our fund. It has been discovered that you are a rich woman, who will never miss the money asked, and so the demand was made. Believe me, Madam, I am acting by the command of my comrades. I tried to persuade them to leave compensation to your own generosity, but they refused. If you consider their demand unreasonable, you have but to say so, and I will return and tell them your decision.”

“Have you brought the letter with you?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Must I agree to your terms before seeing it?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Have you read it?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Do you think it worth ten thousand dollars?”

The sailor looked up at the decorated ceiling for several moments before he replied.

“That is a question I cannot answer,” he said at last. “It all depends on what you think of the writer.”

“Answer one more question. By whom is the letter signed?”

“There is no signature, Madam. It was found in the house where the two young men lived. Our people searched the house from top to bottom surreptitiously, and they think the writer was arrested before he had finished the letter. There is no address, and nothing to show for whom it is intended, except the phrase beginning, ‘My dearest Dorothy.’”

The girl leaned back in her chair, and drew a long breath. “It is not for me,” she said, hastily; then bending forward, she cried suddenly:

“I agree to your terms: give it to me.”

The man hesitated, fumbling in his inside pocket.

“I was to get your promise in writing,” he demurred.

“Give it to me, give it to me,” she demanded. “I do not break my word.”

He handed her the letter.

“My dearest Dorothy,” she read, in writing well known to her. “You may judge my exalted state of mind when you see that I dare venture on such a beginning. I have been worrying myself and other people all to no purpose. I have received a letter from Jack this morning, and so suspicious had I grown that for a few moments I suspected the writing was but an imitation of his. He is a very impulsive fellow, and can think of only one thing at a time, which accounts for his success in the line of invention. He was telegraphed to that his sister was ill, and left at once to see her. I had allowed my mind to become so twisted by my fears for his safety that, as I tell you, I suspected the letter to be counterfeit at first. I telegraphed to his estate, and received a prompt reply saying that his sister was much better, and that he was already on his way back, and would reach me at eleven to-night. So that’s what happens when a grown man gets a fit of nerves. I drew the most gloomy conclusions from the fact that I had been refused admission to the Foreign Office and the Admiralty. Yesterday that was all explained away. The business is at last concluded, and I was shown copies of the letters which have been forwarded to my own chiefs at home. Nothing could be more satisfactory. To-morrow Jack and I will be off to England together.

“My dearest Dorothy (second time of asking), I am not a rich man, but then, in spite of your little fortune of Bar Harbor, you are not a rich woman, so we stand on an equality in that, even though you are so much my superior in everything else. I have five hundred pounds a year, which is something less than two thousand five hundred dollars, left me by my father. This is independent of my profession. I am very certain I will succeed in the Navy now that the Russian Government has sent those letters, so, the moment I was assured of that, I determined to write and ask you to be my wife. Will you forgive my impatience, and pander to it by cabling to me at the Bluewater Club, Pall Mall, the word ‘Yes’ or the word ‘Undecided’? I shall not allow you the privilege of cabling ‘No.’ And please give me a chance of pleading my case in person, if you use the longer word. Ah, I hear Jack’s step on the stair. Very stealthily he is coming, to surprise me, but I’ll surprise—”

Here the writing ended. She folded the letter, and placed it in her desk, sitting down before it.

“Shall I make the check payable to you, or to the Society?”

“To the Society, if you please, Madam.”

“I shall write it for double the amount asked. I also am a believer in liberty.”

“Oh, Madam, that is a generosity I feel we do not deserve. I should like to have given you the letter after all you have done for us with no conditions attached.”

“I am quite sure of that,” said Dorothy, bending over her writing. She handed him the check, and he rose to go.

“Sit down again, if you please. I wish to talk further with you. Your people in St. Petersburg think my friends have not been sent to Siberia? Are they sure of that?”

“Well, Madam, they have means of knowing those who are transported, and they are certain the two young men were not among the recent gangs sent. They suppose them to be in the fortress of ‘St. Peter and St. Paul’, at least that’s what they say.”

“You speak as if you doubted it.”

“I do doubt it.”

“They have been sent to Siberia after all?”

“Ah, Madam, there are worse places than Siberia. In Siberia there is a chance: in the dreadful Trogzmondoff there is none.”

“What is the Trogzmondoff?”

“A bleak ‘Rock in the Baltic,’ Madam, the prison in which death is the only goal that releases the victim.”

Dorothy rose trembling, staring at him, her lips white.

“‘A Rock in the Baltic!’ Is that a prison, and not a fortress, then?”

“It is both prison and fortress, Madam. If Russia ever takes the risk of arresting a foreigner, it is to the Trogzmondoff he is sent. They drown the victims there; drown them in their cells. There is a spring in the rock, and through the line of cells it runs like a beautiful rivulet, but the pulling of a lever outside stops the exit of the water, and drowns every prisoner within. The bodies are placed one by one on a smooth, inclined shute of polished sandstone, down which this rivulet runs so they glide out into space, and drop two hundred feet into the Baltic Sea. No matter in what condition such a body is found, or how recent may have been the execution, it is but a drowned man in the Baltic. There are no marks of bullet or strangulation, and the currents bear them swiftly away from the rock.”

“How come you to know all this which seems to have been concealed from the rest of the world?”

“I know it, Madam, for the best of reasons. I was sentenced this very year to Trogzmondoff. In my youth trading between Helsingfors and New York, I took out naturalization papers in New York, because I was one of the crew on an American ship. When they illegally impressed me at Helsingfors and forced me to join the Russian Navy, I made the best of a bad bargain, and being an expert seaman, was reasonably well treated, and promoted, but at last they discovered I was in correspondence with a Nihilist circle in London, and when I was arrested, I demanded the rights of an American citizen. That doomed me. I was sent, without trial, to the Trogzmondoff in April of this year. Arriving there I was foolish enough to threaten, and say my comrades had means of letting the United States Government know, and that a battleship would teach the gaolers of the rock better manners.

“The cells hewn in the rock are completely dark, so I lost all count of time. You might think we would know night from day by the bringing in of our meals, but such was not the case. The gaoler brought in a large loaf of black bread, and said it was to serve me for four days. He placed the loaf on a ledge of rock about three feet from the floor, which served as both table and bed. In excavating the cell this ledge had been left intact, with a bench of stone rising from the floor opposite. Indeed, so ingenious had been the workmen who hewed out this room that they carved a rounded stone pillow at one end of the shelf.

“I do not know how many days I had been in prison when the explosion occurred. It made the whole rock quiver, and I wondered what had happened. Almost immediately afterward there seemed to be another explosion, not nearly so harsh, which I thought was perhaps an echo of the first. About an hour later my cell door was unlocked, and the gaoler, with another man holding a lantern, came in. My third loaf of black bread was partly consumed, so I must have been in prison nine or ten days. The gaoler took the loaf outside, and when he returned. I asked him what had happened. He answered in a surly fashion that my American warship had fired at the rock, and that the rock had struck back, whereupon she sailed away, crippled.”

Dorothy, who had been listening intently to this discourse, here interrupted with:

“It was an English war-ship that fired the shell, and the Russian shot did not come within half a mile of her.”

The sailor stared at her in wide-eyed surprise.

“You see, I have been making inquiries,” she explained. “Please go on.”

“I never heard that it was an English ship. The gaoler sneered at me, and said he was going to send me after the American vessel, as I suppose he thought it was. I feared by his taking away of the bread that it was intended to starve me to death, and was sorry I had not eaten more at my last meal. I lay down on the shelf of rock, and soon fell asleep. I was awakened by the water lapping around me. The cell was intensely still. Up to this I had always enjoyed the company of a little brook that ran along the side of the cell farthest from the door. Its music had now ceased, and when I sprang up I found myself to the waist in very cold water. I guessed at once the use of the levers outside the cell in the passage which I had noticed in the light of the lantern on the day I entered the place, and I knew now why it was that the prison door was not pierced by one of those gratings which enable the gaoler in the passage to look into the cell any time of night or day. Prisoners have told me that the uncertainty of an inmate who never knew when he might be spied upon added to the horror of the situation, but the water-tight doors of the Trogzmondoff are free from this feature, and for a very sinister reason.

“The channel in the floor through which the water runs when the cell is empty, and the tunnel at the ceiling through which the water flows when the cell is full, give plenty of ventilation, no matter how tightly the door may be closed. The water rose very gradually until it reached the top outlet, then its level remained stationary. I floated on the top quite easily, with as little exertion as was necessary to keep me in that position. If I raised my head, my brow struck the ceiling. The next cell to mine, lower down, was possibly empty. I heard the water pour into it like a little cataract. The next cell above, and indeed all the cells in that direction were flooded like my own. Of course it was no trouble for me to keep afloat; my only danger was that the intense coldness of the water would numb my body beyond recovery. Still, I had been accustomed to hardships of that kind before now, in the frozen North. At last the gentle roar of the waterfall ceased, and I realized my cell was emptying itself. When I reached my shelf again, I stretched my limbs back and forth as strenuously as I could, and as silently, for I wished no sound to give any hint that I was still alive, if, indeed, sound could penetrate to the passage, which is unlikely. Even before the last of the water had run away from the cell, I lay stretched out at full length on the floor, hoping I might have steadiness enough to remain death-quiet when the men came in with the lantern. I need have had no fear. The door was opened, one of the men picked me up by the heels, and, using my legs as if they were the shafts of a wheelbarrow, dragged me down the passage to the place where the stream emerged from the last cell, and into this torrent he flung me. There was one swift, brief moment of darkness, then I shot, feet first, into space, and dropped down, down, down through the air like a plummet, into the arms of my mother.”

“Into what?” cried Dorothy, white and breathless, thinking the recital of these agonies had turned the man’s brain.

“The Baltic, Madam, is the Finlander’s mother. It feeds him in life, carries him whither he wishes to go, and every true Finlander hopes to die in her arms. The Baltic seemed almost warm after what I had been through, and the taste of the salt on my lips was good. It was a beautiful starlight night in May, and I floated around the rock, for I knew that in a cove on the eastern side, concealed from all view of the sea, lay a Finland fishing-boat, a craft that will weather any storm, and here in the water was a man who knew how to handle it. Prisoners are landed on the eastern side, and such advantage is taken of the natural conformation of this precipitous rock, that a man climbing the steep zigzag stairway which leads to the inhabited portion is hidden from sight of any craft upon the water even four or five hundred yards away. Nothing seen from the outside gives any token of habitation. The fishing-boat, I suppose, is kept for cases of emergency, that the Governor may communicate with the shore if necessary. I feared it might be moored so securely that I could not unfasten it. Security had made them careless, and the boat was tied merely by lines to rings in the rock, the object being to keep her from bruising her sides against the stone, rather than to prevent any one taking her away. I pushed her out into the open, got quietly inside, and floated with the swift tide, not caring to raise a sail until I was well out of gunshot distance. Once clear of the rock I spread canvas, and by daybreak was long out of sight of land. I made for Stockholm, and there being no mark or name on the boat to denote that it belonged to the Russian Government, I had little difficulty in selling it. I told the authorities what was perfectly true: that I was a Finland sailor escaping from the tyrant of my country, and anxious to get to America. As such events are happening practically every week along the Swedish coast I was not interfered with, and got enough money from the sale of the boat to enable me to dress myself well, and take passage to England, and from there first-class to New York on a regular liner.