PRESIDENT: Our creed?

EIGHTH CONSPIRATOR: To annihilate.

PRESIDENT: Our duty?

NINTH CONSPIRATOR: To obey.

PRESIDENT: Brothers, the questions have been answered well. There are none but Nihilists present. Let us see each other’s faces.

THE CONSPIRATORS unmask. Michael, recite the oath.

MICHAEL: To strangle whatever nature is in us; neither to love nor to be loved, neither to pity nor to be pitied, neither to marry nor to be given in marriage, till the end is come; to stab secretly by night; to drop poison in the glass; to set father against son, and husband against wife; without fear, without hope, without future, to suffer, to annihilate, to revenge.

PRESIDENT: Are we all agreed?

CONSPIRATORS: We are all agreed. (They disperse in various directions about the stage.)

PRESIDENT: ’Tis after the hour, Michael, and she is not yet here.

MICHAEL: Would that she were! We can do little without her.

ALEXIS: She cannot have been seized, President? But the police are on her track, I know.

MICHAEL: You always do seem to know a good deal about the movements of the police in Moscow – too much for an honest conspirator.

PRESIDENT: If those dogs have caught her, the red flag of the people will float on a barricade in every street till we find her! It was foolish of her to go to the Grand Duke’s ball. I told her so, but she said she wanted to see the Czar and all his cursed brood face to face for once.

ALEXIS: Gone to the State ball!

MICHAEL: I have no fear. She is as hard to capture as a she-wolf is, and twice as dangerous; besides, she is well disguised. To-night it is a masked ball. But is there any news from the Palace, President? What is that bloody despot doing now besides torturing his only son? What sort of whelp is this Czarevitch, by the way? Have any of you seen him? One hears strange stories about him. They say he loves the people; but a king’s son never does that. You cannot breed them like that.

PRESIDENT: Since he came back from abroad a year ago his father has kept him in close prison in his palace.

MICHAEL: An excellent training to make him a tyrant in his turn; but is there any news, I say?

PRESIDENT: A council is to be held to-morrow, at four o’clock, on some secret business the committee cannot find out.

MICHAEL: A council in a king’s palace is sure to be about some bloody work or other. But in what room is it to be held?

PRESIDENT (reading from letter): In the yellow tapestry room called after the Empress Catherine.

MICHAEL: I care not for such long-sounding names. I would know where it is.

PRESIDENT: I cannot tell, Michael. I know more about the inside of prisons than of palaces.

MICHAEL (speaking suddenly to ALEXIS): Where is this room, Alexis?