Yet "illegal" or "irregular" people, as they were styled by the officers of the law, came and went, moving about with impunity under the very noses of the police, and, as a rule, escaping scot-free. They found shelter in houses of friends and sympathisers--persons of all classes, some of them least likely on the face of it to assist the Nihilists. Stepniak tells us in his "Underground Russia" that these _likrivateli_, as they are called in Russian, or "concealers," were to be found among the highest aristocracy as well as in the ranks of Government officials, including even members of the police, all of them people who, for some reason or other, hesitated to give active support to the conspiracy, but who were nevertheless well disposed towards it, and proved this by hiding individuals for whom there was a hue-and-cry. Stepniak describes various types of this very numerous and varied class.
One of these sympathisers with Nihilism was known among the conspirators as the _dvornik_, because in his anxious care for the safety of his companions he ruled them as tyrannically as the doorkeeper, whose functions as an unpaid assistant of the police have been already described. This man made it his business to impress caution on his comrades, and so strictly, that when anyone was known to be under surveillance he would arrange for his concealment, and insist constantly on changing the hiding-place. The _dvornik_ was quite a specialist in the business of circumventing the police. He knew them by heart and all their ways. On one occasion he hired an apartment exactly opposite the house in which the chief of the secret police lived, and watched it so closely day after day that he became acquainted with numbers of persons employed by the Police. He knew half the spies in St. Petersburg by sight, and had made a study of their peculiar methods, their manner of watching, the way they started on a hunt, how they pursued their quarry. After a time he could "spot" any new spy, could penetrate the cleverest disguises of the old hands and detect small signs that betrayed them to him, but were quite unseen by others. In the same way he had thoroughly mastered St. Petersburg: he knew his way all over the city, was acquainted with all sorts of places of refuge and with every house that had two outlets, so that he was invaluable in helping anyone to escape. A fugitive placed under his guidance could be conveyed with absolute safety from one part of the city to another, so clever was he in covering up his tracks.