"I'll see you damned first."
"Very well. I'm sorry for you. A few months in a comfortable prison,
with the best of food, books to read, paper and pens at your disposal,
permission to communicate with your friends as often as you please so
long as I see your letters before they are sent away, ought to be
preferable to ending your life in the mines of frozen Siberia; but the
choice is yours."
"It is."
"Then why don't you accept my offer?"
"Because I don't believe you. You will get all that you want out of me,
and then I will travel East any way."
"That is a chance that you will have to take." I arose and walked
across the room to give him an opportunity to think it over. "You look
to me like one who has seen better days," I said, when I returned. "You
evidently came from a very good family; you are an educated man, and
you are young. In all probability you joined the nihilists without
really meaning to do so, and having later been selected for this work
here, on account of your ability, you were afraid to refuse it. Suppose
that I should keep you imprisoned a year, or even two, what is that to
the fate that awaits you if you refuse to do as I ask, or to that which
you would have met, if you had refused to obey the men who commanded
you to come here? Answer me."
"A joke."
"Precisely. Now, here is another question. If I should let you go free
after you betray those men to me, what would your life be worth the
moment you got upon the street, even if I provided you with passports
out of the country?"
"Nothing."
"They would find you, wouldn't they?"
"To a certainty."
"And kill you?"
"As surely as you stand there."
"On the other hand, if I send you to a prison here in St. Petersburg,
as I have proposed, you will be thought by them to be dead, or in
Siberia, which is about the same thing. In the mean time you can write
to any one whom you wish to have know that you are still alive; you can
receive replies under an assumed name, and----"
"Enough, sir. I accept. You guessed rightly when you said that I am not
a nihilist at heart. I am one because I love a woman who is one. That
will suffice for the present. Later, I may tell you more about it. I am
disposed to make another condition concerning her but I see that it
would be useless; and perhaps you will grant me a favor if I ask it,
when you discover that I have not deceived you in what I shall tell
you."