CHAPTER XIII

HOW HOPE GOT GLIMPSE OF HELL

The Free Command at Kara was a community hybrid of the ticket-of-leave and exile systems. Prisoners who had served their terms in the prison or the mines without discredit were permitted to live outside, where and how they could, on condition that they did not leave the neighbourhood.

Government made them a trifling allowance of a few pence a day, they were permitted to receive remittances from home if there was any one there able to send them, and they might supplement their meagre incomes within certain very narrow lines if they could find any means of doing so. Exercise of the professions was absolutely forbidden, and as most of them were professional men, or in training therefor, their hardships were many.

Life in the Free Command was less like living death than the life of the prisons and the mines, but it was subject to many bitter trials, not the least of which was the constant and ruthless surveillance of their insolent Cossack guards. At any hour of the day or night the sheepdogs might walk in upon them to see that they were still there and plotting no mischief.

More than once, Hope, lying listless in her little inner room, had been startled by the sudden intrusion of a coarse hairy face, surmounted by a fur shako, and two dull eyes, which glared stolidly at her and roved insolently round the room, and at last took themselves disappointedly away.

The officer in charge of the political prisoners and their wolfish keepers was one Captain Sokolof. Sokolof was in most respects a typical gendarme official, obstinate, conservative, none too quick of understanding outside the circumscribed routine of his profession. But, on the other hand, he was not intentionally more brutal than circumstances seemed to him to demand. He carried out the instructions transmitted to him from headquarters to the very last letter. Of his own accord he never added to them, and that was much.

His position was not without its anomalies, but he did not allow them to trouble him. Colonel Zazarin, as Governor, held supreme power, but Sokolof was in charge of the politicals, and was answerable for them, not to Zazarin, but to the Minister of the Interior. It was a command within a command, but as Zazarin never interfered with Sokolof they got on well enough and rarely clashed.

Sokolof's right-hand man was one Lieutenant Razia, a reduced copy of his chief, smaller in body, smaller in mind, if anything still more stubbornly wedded to the last letter of the law as demeaned by the Ministry of the Interior, since all his hopes of advancement lay therein; withal something of a brute in his callosity and harshness to those in his power, and hated accordingly, both in the prison and out of it. He was a low-browed, black-a-vised fellow, with a powerful projecting under-jaw, and most of his head behind his ears like a monkey's. Pavlof took a dislike to him at first sight, and never had reason to change his opinion.

Captain Sokolof had had a sharp attack of typhus in the summer, and was still unfit for duty. During his sickness and slow convalescence his duties and his mantle had fallen on Lieutenant Razin, and Razin made the most of them. So much so, indeed, that the souls of the prisoners--to whom Razin, if he could have managed it, would have permitted no such high indulgence--were stirred within them to the supreme point of revolt. And the revolt of the utterly helpless against irresponsible power armed to the teeth is one of the strange sights of the world.

An in-prisoner at Kara possesses nothing save his bare life, and such trifling ameliorations as the irresponsibles of their grace permit him. These are at best capricious, and when the small mind finds itself in power it loses no opportunity of self-magnification by the arbitrary exhibition thereof. It fusses and worries and curtails privileges which, small as they are, are still to the prisoner very spice of the life that is drearier than death. Under such conditions the trodden worms sometimes turn, and then comes the amazing sight of the powerless fighting the all-powerful, ants _versus_ giants, a struggle that stirs one even in the hearing.

How shall men--and women no less--without a weapon, make head against their keepers armed to the teeth? How shall men possessed of nothing fight legionaries with the empire behind them? Even when a man has nothing, so long as he lives he has his life; and when a man counts his life as less than nothing he rises above his nature and becomes a menace and a danger to the oppressor.

The power which strips him of every thing but life thereby leaves him his sole means of defence. With their bare lives the abjects fight the ruthlessness that would trample them below the mud, and they generally win.

For, strangely enough, the autocratic power which condemns its victims to extremest bitterness of life still objects to their dying. Savage as are its methods, it still covets rank among the civilised of the earth; and an acute, hypersensitive fear of forfeiting its precarious position serves to hold its punitive hand just this side of death. It insists on life where death would be a grace. At times, indeed, its victims are driven to madness and despair. But that is not of first intention, it is incidental to the system, not authorised by it. For how shall a Government, which cannot keep its sheep in hand, control the doings of its underlings and wolf-dogs in the pastures five thousand miles away?

So when, through extra brutality, or the callous stupidity which is kin to it, the oppressed are driven to despair, they calmly say, "We prefer to die"; and, since other means are denied them, they say, "We will die of hunger," and they refuse to eat.

Then it becomes a case of endurance and bitter suffering on the one side, and of much trepidation on the other. For if these men die wholesale, and in such a manner, inquisition must follow and a calling to account. Yet the ruthlessness that has provoked so dire a test fears for its future control if it yield too soon. And so the dreadful duel goes on. On the one side threats and futile attempts at forced feeding, followed in due course by promises; and on the other side the long-drawn agonies of slow starvation and the invincible determination to die sooner than give in.

Such is a hunger-strike among the Siberian exiles, and when Pavlof came in one day from his visitation of the prison with a clouded face, Madame Roskova was quick to perceive it.

It was the day Hope broke cover perforce and joined them in the outer room, and Madame had been jubilantly waiting his coming to reap the reward of her careful ministry.

"Here she is, Serge Petrovitch, and almost herself again! A little frozen yet, maybe, but you must complete the cure yourself. Nu! What's the matter with the man now?" as Pavlof bent and kissed Hope's forehead, and the blood rushed up into her pale face to meet his unavoidable salute.

"There is trouble up at the prison, Anna Vassilievna," he said gravely.

"What, then?" she asked, startled. For trouble inside the prison had more than once sent ripples over the high stockade, and had led to general restrictions and a tightening of bonds.

"Razin has gone too far. He has nagged and bullied till they are desperate. They have declared a hunger-strike, and some of them are not in condition to stand much of it."

"Da! That is bad. Who is in it?"

He named a dozen or so, and at mention of some of them Madame broke out into expressions of pity.

"Da! They will die," she said forebodingly. "No one knows what it is like till they have been through it. We tried it once in the women's kamera at Irkutsk. They took away all our underclothing, that we had bought with our own money too, and made us wear convict clothes. And they took away our mats and made us sleep on the bare boards, and they threatened to whip us. So we struck, and sometimes of a night I find myself lying in the cold and dark again, and not a scrap of food inside my lips for ten days. And mostly we were very still. The silence was like the coming of death, only full of agonies at first. And some of us moaned, though it was a point of honour among us not to, and one night I bit my finger nearly through and sucked the blood to keep myself quiet. Ah God! a terrible, terrible time! And I am sorry for them."

"And how did it end?" asked Hope, anxiously horrified.

"Oh, they gave way when two of us died. It was the fourteenth day, I heard afterwards. We lost count ourselves. You see, we just lay day and night without moving, and there was nothing to mark the time. We beat them," she said, with a gleam in her kind eyes, "but it was very terrible," and sat, hands in lap, unusually idle, brooding over the thought of it.

So deeply did their minds become engaged upon this matter that, for the moment, their personal concerns fell into the background, and Hope had time to accustom herself, unwatched, to the innumerable little awkwardnesses of the false position into which fate had cast her.

Pavlof almost lived in the prison, but refused to sleep there. The kameras at night are unwholesome at best, and he did not consider the scattered huts of the Free Command wholesome places for women to sleep alone in.

So he always came home to them sooner or later, and brought with him the shadow of the silent struggle which was going on behind the grim teeth of the great stockade.

He told them briefly of the grievous suffering patiently endured, for the agonies come first, and are followed by the lethargy which, failing respite, sinks quietly into death.

He told them, as the days passed, of the growing discomfort of the authorities. The strikers demanded the dismissal of the infamous Razin, in addition to the restitution of their abrogated privileges.

Too ready a compliance on the part of the governor would be equivalent to the hanging of a sword above his head for similar emergencies; too late a compliance meant loss of life and trouble with the authorities at home. Colonel Zazarin was a man of wrath in those days, and it was dangerous to approach him.

He would endeavour to strike the happy mean--happy, that is, for himself, but a lengthening horror for the rest--by yielding to the prisoners' demands when, in his opinion, they had purchased the right with a sufficiency of suffering. The risk lay in missing the psychological moment when the scale should stand on the even balance between life and death, and on Pavlof, as acting medico, was laid the heavy responsibility of deciding when that moment had arrived.

Day after day he spent in the gloomy kameras, gloomier now than ever, with death in its grimmest form hanging over them, waiting with the patience of the inevitable till the time should come to drop silently and finally down.

Several times each day he registered the falling temperatures and weakening pulses of the sufferers, suffering much himself in all that they endured. More than once he urged Zazarin to step down and save them. But in Zazarin's judgment the malcontents had not yet suffered enough, and he held grimly aloof. For the doctor being a prisoner himself, Zazarin took measure of him by himself, believed that he would magnify the risks, and so discounted all his representations.

Night after night Pavlof came home with gloomier face; and, full of the bitter thoughts his reports evoked in her, Anna Roskova went about her duties in the silence of a deeply touched soul which knows and understands. Her critical eye no longer troubled itself with the shortcomings of this most curious married couple. Death was abroad, nay, close at hand, and this was no time for hypercriticism of abnormal curiosities among the living. So, through the tension without and the sufferings of many, Hope's personal troubles were lightened somewhat, and her mind had little time to dwell on itself for thought of those others lying in the deepening gloom of the kameras till death should set them free. The respite was grateful to her, though the indirect cause of it shocked and wounded her sorely.

Madame Roskova questioned Paul minutely as to the symptoms of his patients each night, and lived again her own bitter experience in his telling of them.

"You will lose some of them, Serge Petrovitch," she said, with gloomy emphasis, on the twelfth night of the strike.

"I told Zazarin so yesterday. I have told him so twice to-day. Two or three are just on the line and may slip over at any time."

"He is a brute. What does he say?"

"He says that those who pull through will not forget it as long as they live."

"He is right. It wouldn't be surprising if others besides did not forget it either. The only surprising thing about it is that a man like that has been allowed to live so long."

"He is a hard man," admitted Pavlof wearily. He had just come from an ineffectual tussle with the hard man.

"Hard men and soft men are all alike when they are dead men," said Madame grimly.

"That does no good, Anna Vassilievna. The next man is just the same. The others never learn."

"I'm not so sure of that," said Madame. "If one man is killed for his brutality the next is like to go warily lest he follow."

But Pavlof shook his head. "Force never was a remedy, and it never will be. If you killed half-a-dozen Governors there would still come one who would grind us all to powder. The spring is poisoned. Until the source is sweet the water will be bitter," and weary as he was--for the bruising of the inner man tells also on the outer--he picked up his cap and flung on his coat, and went back to see if the imminent shadow had settled down on any of his patients. If Zazarin lost any of them it should not be for lack of warning.

Hope and Anna Roskova sat before the stove hopeful of better news when he returned. But he did not come back that night, and they understood that matters were at a critical stage.

In the kinship of the great shadow, Anna Roskova began to speak of things that had come within her own experience, and Hope sat frozen with horror at the recital of hardships and persecutions almost past belief--of solitary confinements, prolonged till richly dowered minds gave way; of brutal whippings, the indignities alone of which would have sufficed to break most women's spirits; of life in the huts of the Northern barbarians, which some of their company had endured and marvellously survived; of batterings at the hands of brutal Cossacks; of despairing suicides; of more merciful shootings deliberately provoked.

And in the hearing of such things, bravely borne by men and women whose gravest fault was too great a love for their down-trodden fellows, Hope's own troubles seemed light and of small account. She took shame to herself for taking them so much to heart, forgetting that the wearing of her body had had much to do with the depressing of her soul.

She longed to confide in Madame Roskova. The very relation of the whole matter between herself and Pavlof would have been such a mighty relief, both as to the past and as to the future. In the light of full knowledge Anna Roskova could have made things so easy and straightforward for her. But Pavlof had judged otherwise, and to act against his advice might bring down upon them, and on Serge, troubles beyond her understanding.

If Madame Roskova had some dim expectation that her own unburdening might provoke response in kind, she was disappointed. She gave Hope every opportunity, endeavoured even to lead her gently in that direction, but, in the fear of committing herself, Hope hardly dared to open her mouth about her own concerns, though she could question Madame eagerly enough as to the details of these terrible happenings. And Anna Roskova misjudged her of a cold and reticent nature, and marvelled at its alliance with so frank and beautiful a face.

It was midday before Pavlof came in, tired to death, but in great relief of mind. The hunger-strike was over. One of the strikers had died in the night.

"Who?" asked Madame anxiously.

"Sophie Rubova."

"Ah, the poor child. I knew her mother. Well?"

"We did our best to save her by forcing her to swallow. But it was too late. She was a mere shadow and too frail to stand any handling. I went at once to Zazarin. He was for blaming me. I reminded him of my three separate reports yesterday, of which I had copies, and he shut up. He came down to the prison and pledged his word to satisfy all their grievances. If he had only done it yesterday he might have saved the poor little Sophie. But perhaps she is better dead. She would have suffered from it all her life, as some of the others will."

"It is simple murder and that man is a devil," said Madame Roskova bitterly. "May God cast it all up to him when his time comes!"