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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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The Blue Book Magazine, May 1947,
with "Honevitch, the Bear-Snarer"
A far-flung adventure in transmigration—from
London to Siberia, to the court of Catherine the Great.
IT is probable that if the aspiring writer who used the pen-name of Hobart Honey had told friends that an elderly Lama from Tibet had presented nim with a large bottleful of pills, each of which when taken would return him to a life of incarnation he had lived before, the said friends would not have believed it. But that did not worry Mr. H. He knew, like most of the well-informed readers of this magazine, that it was true enough. And he knew, too, that it could be occasionally as awkward as it was true. They were good pills, but effective though they were, they had a flaw—bad timing.
In Mr. Honey's opinion their timing was definitely faulty. Not, of course, in the sense that they failed to run to scheduled time. They were faultless—almost too faultless—about that. More perfect return-tickets to the Past, the Far Past, even the Remote Past[*], could not be issued. They took him there and they brought him back, sharply, to time.
[* Why, one of them once took him back to the Garden of Eden where Mr. Honey found himself to be the personal servant of Adam—introduced him, in fact, to Eve. The facts were, of course, duly reported in the Blue Book Magazine at the time. —Bertram.]
It was not that kind of timing which Mr. Honey groused about—it was the timing of the exact moment of his arrival in a past incarnation and his departure therefrom which seemed to him to have been worked carelessly into the pills.
He frequently felt as if he had been pitched back into (and in due course out of) a past life, rather than ushered carefully and ceremoniously into and out of the same.
It was around about the fortieth one of the pills that he got, so to put it, a run of red—he arrived at his destination and quit again at the very moment when, if it had been left to him, he would have chosen to be a good deal before time or a long way behind—overdue, in fact.
For example, one pill landed him back in a life in the year A.D. 96, when he was a fighting Bishop—for five minutes only. At the sixth minute he quite unintentionally interposed his sconce between the battle-ax of a total stranger and his own horse's crupper with the result that that incarnation ended forthwith and Mr. Honey was immediately on his way home again.
The next pill took him back to a brief spell of life in Merrie England in the year A.D. 822. Mention of this visit is made in the old book known as Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which, reporting the event in one small news-item, says: "This year two aldermen were slain whose names were Burhelm and Mucca."
Mr. Honey was Mucca—for about ten minutes.
The timing of the next pill was just as faulty. He awoke one Friday after-noon in the year 1521, just in time to be tomahawked and subsequently scalped by an Apache chief engaged in furious battle with a tribe of red Indians then known as the Hairy Hownows—now extinct. (They were rendered extinct that afternoon by the Apaches.) Mr. Honey was for three minutes their Second-in-Command.
In 1392 he was captured in battle against another clan of professional cannibals on a South Sea island—mainly because he was too fat to be a really fast retreater. In those days it was regarded by the superstitious to be a sure sign of bad luck to be captured by cannibals if one went more than about forty pounds in weight.
This contretemps brought the list of brief incarnations to an end for a time. Mr. H. was, on the whole, glad about that....
Then one evening, when he felt very much in the mood for a change from normal, he settled comfortably in his easy-chair before the warmly-glowing electric fire, poured some port wine and beamed on his old black hearth-rug cat Peter, who was purring like a drowsy dynamo.
"Just the very evening to go romancing back to the medieval," he said, and forthwith took off a large double backhander of port and then pitched a pill after it, leaned back and shut his eyes.
It seemed to him as his lids fell, that the fire went out instantly—fuse gone, probably—and that Peter's purring suddenly went sour on him, as sour as the howling of a hungry wolf.
That, in fact, was precisely what it was—in the plural. All around him it sounded as if half the wolves in the Russia of those days—round about the year 1764—were howling fit to sprain their howlers or larynxes. And he was so cold that, for all practical purposes, fire might as well have never been invented.
OPENING his eyes, he found he was in bed—if an unsoft
position on top of a big brick oven-like fireplace strewn with
greasy bearskins can be properly described as a bed. It was as
pitch-black as only a midwinter night in Siberia could be, and
as cold. He was Honevitch the bear-snarer, and consequently
was used to the howling of wolves and the freezing of frost.
But both of these things seemed a little too surplus tonight.
So he scratched himself and got off his brick bed to replenish
the fire from a stack of wood that took up two-thirds of the
total room of the hut which was his home.
If he had possessed a watch or clock he would have looked at it, but he had neither. Instead he tried to estimate the time by the volume of the howling of the wolves. Failing in this, he placed a large ax handy, threw another and greasier bearskin on the bed, scratched himself some more and scrambled back on the stove. The scrapings of wolf-claws on the solid timber of the hut and the loud, hungry snufflings of the big beasts at the threshold of the door did not worry him: these things were but wintertime lullabies. Honevitch had been a bear-catcher all his life and had long ago become used to things which would have fretted and worried anybody but a Siberian bear-sharp into a trance.
He knew instinctively that the dawn was not far off, so he settled tranquilly down to smoke a pipe of something closely resembling tobacco and to make plans for the future. He could afford to be philosophical about conditions in general—for this, he figured, was his last season in the bear trade.
Honevitch was a young man of about twenty-four. Like most bear-snarers he was of herculean build, unquestionable courage, and very little intelligence. He was, of course, good at bears; he knew how to lure them to him and deal with them when he had lured them; how to cure their hams and cook these when he had cured them; but about other matters he was less well-informed.
There had been, for example, an occasion recently when he thought he had begun to learn about the ladies, from a young lady in the nearest village about twelve to fifteen versts—or Russian miles—away from the hut in the dense, vast and gloomy pine forest which was home to him. She had taken a sudden tremendous interest in him when she saw him in the village store put down, in payment for some groceries—worth perhaps five dollars—a lovely nugget of gold worth certainly five hundred.
The storekeeper naturally could not make change, but the lady, who chanced to be in the tiny store, smilingly offered to collect the change later and let him have it when she saw him again. She then invited him to come to tea at her little place on the following Thursday. She was a not-too-dismally unattractive young woman, named Niceski Bebbyoff. He had accepted the invitation, rather shyly[*], and, impressed by her generous and kindly interest, had promised to bring her a nugget of gold for herself if she cared for such things. She explained carefully that she collected them as a hobby—the way some people collected stamps—and that had been that.
[* These bear-sharps were often shy. It came from living their lives in the gigantic Russian forests with only the trees, the bears, the wolves and the snow for really interesting company. —Bertram.]
Niceski, however, had an unfortunate habit of talking in her sleep. Sometimes she told the truth in her slumbers, and sometimes she fell short of it. Something went wrong during one of these midnight gossips with herself, with the mortifying result that when Honevitch rolled up at tea-rime on the following Thursday, her husband, a soldier on leave, was impatiently awaiting him with a large musket to which was attached a long and rusty bayonet. The bear-catcher, unarmed save for the light ax which he used for braining wolves, had just sufficient intelligence to guess that the armament of the military man was a subtle hint that young men who came to tea with his wife were expected to take their bite and sup not nearer than a mile and a quarter from the lady. He took the hint and, coming to the incorrect conclusion that the ladies were a little more uncertain than the bears, confined his activities, in the main, to the bears.
But not entirely; for some weeks before, he had made an important discovery.
IT was during a spell of really cold weather—about
79°F. below zero—that, pursuing a bear with a
particularly good pelt into deeper recesses of the vast
pine forest than he had ever reached before, he came upon a
place—a large clearing—which bore abundant signs
of the handiwork of man. It was in fact the beginnings of one
of those incredibly rich gold mines for which Siberia has
since become notorious, if not actually famous. In a shed were
the frozen bodies of half a dozen men and nineteen leather
sacks full of nuggets and gold-dust. But not a living soul was
left there. The men had died of smallpox.
Honevitch did not stand about thinking while he made up his mind quickly, as one out of doors in 79°F. below is apt to do. Helping himself to as big a sack as he felt he could carry, he hit for home. It was impossible to do anything for the men—not even to bury them, for the ground was frozen as hard as steel.
Since then Honevitch over a period of weeks laboriously had transferred all the gold to his own hut and was now merely waiting for an opportunity to get it away—far away. He honestly thought it was his gold, by virtue of the fact that he had found it!
But therein he was slightly in error,
Actually, it was the property of the Empress Catherine, the ruler of Russia.
The discovery had been made by a party of gold experts specially sent secretly from Saint Petersburg by the Empress—and though all but one of these men had perished, the survivor had managed to get back to Saint Petersburg and to deliver his report before he too died.
Honevitch thus was greatly mistaken in imagining he was the only man who knew the location of the mine, and of the existence of the nuggets.
Catherine knew about those things too, and had already sent for her dividends. She was a lady who required a good deal of money in her business, if one may put it that way.
Indeed she was needing a fairly stiff infusion of gold into her accounts just then, for she had come to the conclusion that the time had arrived when she was in the mood to pension off her favorite boy-friend, G. Orloff, Count—as he was in fact in the mood to be pensioned off. He had been her favorite rather longer than at least forty per cent of her earlier favorites, and she knew he was going to cost her plenty in the way of pension.[*] She had already given him more land than he could ride round at a gallop in a mouth. But he wanted a little ready money in his pension too, and Catherine's gold experts had found it for her.
[* All quite in order. In those days a man was not considered quite a gentleman if he accepted money from any lady under royal status. But if he stood Queens-high, so to express it—made the grade as a Queen's favorite—he was expected to cash in heavily on the appointment—and usually did. The best historians are in hearty agreement with me that Queen C. was no tightwad. —Bertram.]
It was some of this gold which Honevitch had blundered upon and innocently pinched for himself—a proceeding which could only lead to trouble.
HONEVITCH was rather drowsily watching the first light of
dawn suggest itself below the door, when abruptly the wolves
stopped howling and began yelping, and a second later a sudden
fusillade of shots broke out all around the hut. Judging from
the whining of bullets, the soft thud of horses' hoofs on the
wolf-flattened snow, the jingle of harness, and the hoarse
shouting of men, the bear-snatcher had visitors.
He opened the door an inch or two and looked out with one eye.
The last wolf was dodging away through the trees and a party of heavily armed Cossacks was surrounding the hut by order of a gigantic troop Sergeant-Major on a big black horse.
Honevitch closed the door—uselessly, of course.
The Sergeant-Major saw the movement and spurred up to the door, beating violently upon it with the butt of a pistol that looked like a piece of serious, even grave, artillery.
"Come out of that, you bloodshot gorilla! You're under arrest. Come on—hump yourself, you lousy scarecrow, or I'll pull you out by the ear-lugs!" he roared.
He fired his artillery into the door.
"If you ain't out of that in a lot less than half-a-second I'll come in and grind you into small caviar and sell you for a penny a pot, to the poor!" He bellowed. "Great ghastly sturgeons! Get going, d'ya hear me! Hey, you dumb, daft, drunken Cossacks, set this house afire and stand by to hog him when he bolts! Don't stand there like a lot of half-froze statues, damn you! Earn your miserable rations, you cockeyed, bellyless, stable-sweepings! Go on—get on—jump to it, you imitation sons of witches and whatnots! Ain't you ever arrested a bear-sharp before?"
It occurred to Honevitch that the gentleman outside wished to meet him.
He opened the door and stepped out.
"Good morning, comrade," he said, smiling politely.
"Don't give me any of your back-answers, blast you!" replied the Sergeant-Major, closing the circuit between his pistol-butt and Honevitch's head. "Here, get a move on, Corporal. Tie the big stiff up while he's cockeyed! And see here, you, whatever you call yourself, you're under arrest—charged with stealing about forty million roubles' worth of Her Imperial Majesty's gold out of her royal private mine over at the new find at Forest Cold Corner! All right! Handcuff him and flop him in the sledge! Wouldn't be in his shoes for all the vodka in White Russia. Lively now!"
The Sergeant-Major dismounted and damned and blasted his way into the hut, followed by his Sergeant.
"Yeah, there's the plunder!" he bawled, eying the sacks. He cut the thong of one and drew out a handful of nuggets.
"See, Sergeant, that's gold, that is! Don't want any better evidence than that. Gold! Count the bags, Sergeant," he ordered, and absent-mindedly dropping the nuggets into his haversack, pulled out a dirty notebook and pencil.
"How many bags, Sarge?" he demanded.
"Eighteen bags!" reported the Sergeant, trying to kick one bag into a dark corner. He had forgotten the weight of gold, however, and nearly sprained his ankle./p>
"What's that? Can't you count? I don't see no eighteen bags of gold there. Thirteen—no, twelve bags, I make it! You want to be a bit more careful, you bloody fool! When you been in the Army as long as what I have, you'll count things a damn' sight more particular! What school was you dragged through, anyway? Here, count 'em again!"
The Sergeant counted the nineteen bags again.
"How many?" bawled the Sergeant-major.
"Twelve, Major!"
"That's a bit better!"
The Sergeant-major scrawled in his notebook:
Gold-bags, twelve (one doz.)
"Here y'are, Sarge—sign that as witness to the discovery of the plunder. That's evidence, that is! Have to be produced in Saint Petersburg, that will—Hey, wass'at? W'at say? Them other bags—seven of 'em. That must be bags of flour and beans—what you think they are? Gorblimey, I never see such a sergeant in my life! Don't you know a bag o' beans when you see one? Put 'em in the spare sledge."
He added to his list of "evidence:"
Flour-bags, four.
Bean-bags, three.
"Sign as witness again, Sarge—and keep a bag of the flour for yourself. Might be glad of a bit of flour puddin' before you get to Sin Pete—if ever!"
He ran his bloodshot crocodile eye round the hut like the experienced old trooper he was.
"Nothing else worth a farthing here. Come on, Sarge, look alive! Load up the sledges!"
He stamped out.
"Get in, six men, you—you—you—you—you—and you, and cart out the evidence of this bloody awful crime!"
He whirled on the men loading the bulky captive.
"Hey, what's that? Prisoner too long to fit the sledge! Well, double him up a bit—bimeby he'll straighten up automatic-like? Come on—stir yourselves, you graven images! W't the hellski you gawpin' at, you pie-faced lot of Mamma's darlings! Perish me pink, of all the jelly-bellied bunch of blondies! Right, Sergeant? Troop, fall in!" And five seconds later Honevitch was taking a sleigh ride to Saint Petersburg and the vengeance of the Empress. He never realized that he had Niceski Bebbyoff to thank for providing the Cossacks with information which put them on his track—and if he had known he would not have thanked her.
THE troop handed him, and what was left of the "evidence,"
over to another troop a hundred miles on; they handed him
to another at their boundary and so on. He was thus relayed
eventually to Saint Petersburg.
It was very fortunate for Honevitch that the Commandant of the military police who took him over at the end of his lengthy journey chanced to be a peculiarly fastidious but kindly man. When, next morning, curious to see a person with nerve enough to rob the Empress of twelve sacks of gold, the Commandant stepped into the cell into which the unfortunate bear-sharp had been pitched, both he and the man who accompanied him had a shock.
He confessed afterward that at first glance he had thought Honevitch was a bear himself—and a most damnably dirty one, at that.
For a long time the Commandant stared fascinatedly at the prisoner.
"It is a new kind of bear, Count," he said. "D'you think the escort may have changed him on the journey?"
The person called Count—none other than G. Orloff, retiring favorite of the Empress, and a relative and great personal friend of the Commandant—took a deep sniff at a bottle of perfumed salts which he carried.
"No, my dear Nicholas, it is a man," he said. "But he does not appear to have had a bathroom in his house."
He lit a cigar.
"Forgive my smoking in your prison, Nicholas. It is a little stuffy in here."
"By all means, Gregori," said the Commandant politely. "Shall I send for a little brandy for you? Me, I am used to it!"
He turned and spoke kindly to the captive.
"Do you wash much where you come from?" he asked curiously.
"No, Excellency, not any. It is too cold," said Honevitch, whose wits had been considerably brightened by the Sergeant-Major of his many escorts.
"Well, my poor fellow, one cannot see you very well under all that. I shall have to have you cleansed before I dare bring you before Her Imperial Majesty!"
"Will it hurt, sir?" asked Honevitch.
"Not much, my man, but it will require chemicals, I fear," explained the kindly Commandant.
"How do they do it, sir?" asked Honevitch dubiously.
"Oh, with steam and chemicals and hot water and spirit and penetrating oils," said the Commandant.
He stepped back.
"Stand up straight—at your full height, Bear-snarer!" he ordered.
Honevitch obeyed.
He towered over the two men—who were neither of them shorties themselves—and he was broad in proportion.
"Yes, I see. You would make a fool out of any ordinary bear!"
HONEVITCH'S perfect teeth would have gleamed if they had
been, white teeth.
"Yes, sir. Bears don't fuss me."
G. Orloff stepped closer, peering into the bear-snarer's eyes.
"Why, that's odd, Nicholas—his eyes are blue," he exclaimed.
"Blue? Let me see. Why, indeed they are! I thought they were black—some optical illusion due to the color of his skin, I suppose, Gregori. Or the way that black bearskin hat comes down over his eyes. But is it a hat?"
"Take that dirty old hat off, my man!" ordered G. Orloff.
But Honevitch couldn't do it. It was his hair.
"But it is solid!" complained the Commandant, "He has been putting stuff on it. Black grease!"
He was about right. Honevitch had been wiping his hands on his hair for the last fifteen years, and bear-work is at its best a rather messy business.
The Commandant made up his mind.
"Look," he said reasonably to Honevitch, "I cant possibly take you before the Empress as you are. She isn't used to it. It won't improve your chances of mercy—if any. I am going to put a squad of men to work on you—bath attendants, Turkish-bath experts, barbers, chiropodists, callous-softeners, people like that. Why, I would be court-martialed if I brought you before the Empress the way you are! Don't be afraid. They won't hurt you much. Do exactly as you are told. I will have extra clothing issued for you to wear when you are clean!"
He called in an officer of the prison, issued his orders, and with a kindly nod to Honevitch went away with G. Orloff.[*]
[* That little spot of kindliness proved subsequently worth a large fortune to the Commandant. —Bertram.]
"Sad." said the Commandant as they strolled back to his private bar.
"Very!" agreed G. Orloff. "I expected the sight of the man who had nearly succeeded in stealing so much of the ready money of my Favorite's Pension to infuriate me. But who could be infuriated at a creature in that condition?"
"Quite so—it would be good fury wasted."
He thought for a lew moments.
"Magnificently-built creature, at all events! Did you notice his muscles?" he said presently. "Those blue eyes, too—very odd—unexpected. He's docile enough, too, You know, Gregori, it may sound absurd—probably is—but I should not be surprised if when they have—have—er—removed the upper layers of grime they come upon something not too bad."
G. Orloff laughed
"If they mine deep enough!" he said,
"What do you think the Empress will do to him, Gregori?"
"Oh, have him knouted to death, I suppose. Can't very well sentence to exile to Siberia a creature you've just carefully imported from Siberia!"
"Exactly.... Well, here we are. What will you have, Gregori? Vodka to begin with?"
They settled down to it and forgot the unfortunate bear-snarer.
IT was a week later that the young officer in charge of
Operation Honevitch reported to the Commandant—two days
before the return of the Empress to the city from a visit in
the country.
"Honevitch? Honevitch? Who is Honevitch?" asked the Commandant, puzzled. "Oh, I remember—the bear-snarer from Siberia! The gold-thief! Poor devil, his time is running short. Let me see, weren't you doing something about cleaning him up a little?"
"Yes, sir—we've finished at last."
"How does he come out? Fit to appear before Her Majesty for judgment? She is curious to see him and condemn him personally."
The young officer trailed.
"Oh, yes, sir! He took all we had—I doubt if he'd ever seen soap in his life. But we persevered, sir—got it all off him in the end. He will do you credit, sir, when he comes up before Her Majesty, I wonder if you'd care to inspect him, sir. He's just coming out of the shower after his steam-bath."
Something odd in the young man's voice caught the Commandant's attention.
"Glad he's presentable. Lieutenant. He'll do me no discredit, hey? But he'd have cost me my commission if I'd produced him before the Empress as he was when he arrived. Yes, I'll inspect him. Now—in the M.O.'s office."
They moved along to the prison doctor's domain, where the Commandant made himself comfortable.
"Right," he said when he was ready. "March him in!"
And the Lieutenant marched him in, just dry out the cold shower and without a rag, bar a scrap of a towel, on him.
The Commandant took one look and his eyeglass fell out,
"My God!" he said loudly.
"No, beg pardon, sir—Honevitch!" the Lieutenant corrected him.
"Yes, yes, I know the name—it was merely an exclamation! I did not mean I thought he was divine—er—by birth!"
He stared at the bear-snarer standing rigidly at attention before him.
"But this is miraculous!" he cried, and turned to the doctor.
"There's no mistake, I take it, Doctor. This is that dirty devil from Siberia they delivered here, hey?"
"Undoubtedly, Colonel!"
"But the damn' man is perfection! Good God, look at him! There isn't a statue in Greece to touch him!"
The prison doctor laughed.
"I am a great restorer—of statuary!" he said dryly.
The Commandant stared as if he could not drag his eyes off the bear-snarer.
"The muscle, Doctor—the torso! Look at the thighs! The waist! The flanks! The symmetry and balance—"
"And the beauty!" said the doctor with a touch of wistfulness. He was a plain man himself.
The Commandant raised his eyes from the wonderful torso and stared in silence.
"But it might be Adam! Apollo! Hercules! Well, I'm damned! Look at his hair! Why, the gold he stole was lustreless beside it! Have you had it curled or something, Doctor?"
"No—it is the way it is!"
"But that's impossible! The last time I saw it I thought it was a bit of black bearskin made into a hat!"
"He is twenty-four years old and I question if he has ever touched it except to wipe his hands on it," explained the doctor.
"Six feet four—not a flaw—face of a conqueror—eyes like blue ice—faultless! How—"
"How? Exactly, Colonel! Well, the structure was there to begin with—a Scandinavian throwback, perchance. God knows. Twenty years in the pine forest, say ten years of it bear-snaring—big 'uns—no drinking, no smoking, simple natural life, constant exercise, marvelous air—resinous woods—no anger, no politics, no grief, no worry, simple life. Simple strenuous life. Yes, I can understand it!
"And, do you notice, not a scratch on him! Been bear-fighting for ten years and not one scratch. I would hate to be a bear in his district! He's as strong as a bear and twice as quick, yet gentle as a kitten because perfectly controlled. By God, Colonel, what a noble sight is a perfectly proportioned man!"
The Commandant signed to the Lieutenant.
"March him out and get him dressed!" he ordered. "I must think this over! Wait!" He scribbled a note. "Send this to the Count Gregori Orloff at once!"
The door closed. For a few moments the Commandant sat thinking.
"He is, after all, a criminal—all that stolen gold—but surely the Empress can't have a really perfect creature like that knouted to death!" said the doctor.
The Commandant stared at him rather oddly.
"Her Imperial Majesty is a great lover of the arts—of statuary and so on, No, I do not think our bear-snarer is in any danger of being exactly knouted to death! Come along to my quarters, Doctor, and let us hear the Count's views. I wish there was a painting of the man!"
The Commandant was a great connoisseur of paintings.
"But there is! I had him painted by Turpintinsky. A marvelous work."
"The Count will be interested, I imagine!" said the Commandant. "Is it in the nude?"
"Practically, How could it be otherwise?"
The Commandant thought.
"The Count is a person of infinite tact and subtlety," he said like a person talking to himself.
THE populace of Saint Petersburg was disappointed to hear
that the Empress had decided to pass judgment on the Siberian
malefactor in the palace and that few would be admitted to
the trial. But they were used to disappointment and soon
learned to satisfy themselves with staring at a copy of the
Turpintinsky painting that was being shown in the leading
picture-shops of the city. The masterpiece itself was already
hanging in the palace collection.
There was but a couple dozen of the élite present when Honevitch was escorted by the Commandant before Catherine to answer for his crimes.
The Empress was reclining in a chair, chatting to G. Orloff, when the door opened and Honevitch strode in.
It was in its way a memorable scene.
Honevitch's eyes widened as they fell on the Empress. He forgot to bow, or to kneel down, or to grovel, as he had been instructed to do. He forgot everything. He had never seen many women, anyway, and now he was face to face with the First Lady of this vast land, a land so vast that it dwarfed whole continents, a lady who could enrich a man or beggar him with a nod, condemn him or pardon him with a word, commit him to the executioner or let him live with a sign. He dangerously forgot everything but that this was the loveliest being he had ever seen in all his life or had ever dreamed of in all his dreams. He stood staring, staring....
The Empress suddenly sat up straight, her imperious black eyes upon the tall graceful figure before her. Those nearest to her said afterward that her beautiful lips moved as if she were whispering to herself. Then her eyes half-closed for a few seconds as if she were thinking. The Commandant was unobtrusively pressing Honevitch's shoulder, to remind him that he must kneel. She saw it.
"No," she said quietly.
There was a curious silence.
Then she took her eyes off Honevitch for a second,
"This is the man who is charged with the crime of stealing gold from our newly-found gold mine in Siberia?" she asked.
"It is, Majesty," said the Commandant, bowing deeply.
"Who was in charge of the gold?"
"Six dead men," said Honevitch—quietly, he thought. But it rolled round that room like the voice of a man calling in a deep forest clearing.
"Six dead men!" echoed the Empress, and thought for a moment. She was very quick-witted. She went on:
"And so, fearing that thieves might prowl forth and steal the gold, you removed it with great labor through the deep show, the bitter cold, the ravenous wolf-packs, to a safe place in your home until such time as it could be handed over to our officials? We see no crime in this but, on the contrary, the act of a courageous, diligent and loyal subject of the Crown, You are declared innocent—and worthy of reward. What!" And her voice rose. "Have they no eyes in Siberia? No brains? Could not the veriest child perceive that here is a man unique—as free from guile as he is radiant with beauty? He is free. He has suffered greatly. We will commiserate with him alone."
She made an odd little gesture and the room emptied with extraordinary speed. Catherine, with all her faults, had a will of her own and was not loath to use it. Even G. Orloff joined the little crowd on the other side of the door. The Commandant looked significantly at him. But the ex-favorite only smiled and shrugged.
In the justice-room the Empress spoke again—so quietly now that it was hardly more than a whisper.
"Come near," she said.
Honevitch stood by her great chair.
"Kneel," she said softly.
Honevitch knelt.
He had not known a woman's voice could be so lovely or so soft as that which said then:
"Why do you tremble so?"
He did not know. But he heard a little laugh, an exquisite sound, above his head.
Soft, jeweled fingers fluttered about his crisp-curled hair, playing with it gently. Then the low, lingering voice:
"If I were a bear, show me how you would fight me, bear-fighter!"
Obediently and very quickly he raised his arms.... and there was a crash of broken glass as Mr. Honey returned to his present incarnation—just in time to see that he had swept the port decanter clean off the table into the fireplace.
"Oh, dammit all!" he said with extraordinary emphasis—considering that it was a quite inexpensive decanter.
But it was not the loss of the decanter which jarred him so much. It was the shockingly bad timing of the Lama's pill. And there was nothing whatever he could do about that—nothing at all.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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