CHAPTER V

HOW TWO MET IN HADES

The great gates of the stockade swung slowly open, and a motley crowd came in from the barges which had brought them from Tiumen, and the older inhabitants gathered in long lines to see them pass, all except the dicers, who remained intent on their game.

But Pavlof lay where he was. The sight of the weary women and children, smelling like wild beasts from the close confinement of the barges, was always a saddening one.

The newcomers were drafted off to the already crowded kameras, and the grey-clad droves settled again to their aimless wanderings.

While Pavlof still lay musing over his late studies--the man with the barrow, the man with the dog, and the man who was like a carthorse--one of the newly arrived came out of the log house where he had been to deposit his grey sack containing his belongings, and strolled along past the spot where Pavlof lay. A big man with fair hair and beard. It was only when he had passed that Pavlof got an impression of him. But the impression was so startling that he jerked out an involuntary "Good God!" and sat up suddenly and remained staring intently after the man. He argued himself out of the impression and leaned back against the wooden house again.

But presently the newcomer came strolling back. Pavlof sat up again in rigid scrutiny. Then their eyes met and Pavlof sprang up and ran to him.

"Palma! Is it possible?" he gasped, with a mighty fear dragging rough hands across his heart-strings.

"What--Pavlof?" and their hands gripped tightly.

"It's good to see the face of a friend even in hell," said Palma, with something of his old heartiness. "All the same, I'm sorry to see you here, Paul Ivanuitch."

"And I you, Serge Petrovitch. And your wife--Hope Ivanovna?" he asked anxiously. "She is not here?"

"No, thank God! She is not here."

"Thank God for that!" said Pavlof earnestly. "But where she is I do not know, nor whether I have anything to thank God for in her not being here. It is twelve months since they took me and I have had no word of her since," and his face broke for a moment, and then pinched the tighter.

"Sit down here in the sun and tell me your news," said Pavlof. "Where are you for?"

"Kara--ten years."

"And why?"

"God knows!" said Palma, as he threw himself down on the dry spot where Pavlof had been sitting, and Pavlof dropped alongside. "I don't know, and they don't know, or at all events they haven't told me. I have thought and thought till my brain cracks with thinking, and the nearest I can get to it is that some of the folks we used to help have got mixed up with some of these other matters and so they drag us in. It is what I always feared, but if the work was to be done we had to take the risk. I tell you what, Pavlof," he said, thumping the ground with an angry fist, "I know now what it is that turns men's souls to gall and bitterness and makes devils of them. It is damnable work such as this. I never counselled force. I never did a thing but what I believed for the good of my fellows. But--my God!--if--ever--I--get--free, some one shall pay for all this."

"And all for what?" said Pavlof quietly. "For teaching men and women to look up instead of down, and that they are no longer slaves."

"Slaves they are and slaves they will remain until they break their bonds for themselves," said Palma hotly. "It will come, Pavlof. It must come. A nation cannot be ground down for ever by the handful on top."

"It will come in time, but the time is long, and the grinding is very bitter," and the silence that fell on them for a space was filled with gloomy thoughts.

"Where have they had you?" asked Pavlof presently.

"Petropavlovsk. And you?"

"Schlusselburg."

There was no need for details. Those two words supplied them to the very last letter. They have meant torture, madness, death, to many a man--and many a woman too--whose only crime was too advanced thought for their fellows.

"And Hope Ivanovna? How will she fare in your absence, Serge Petrovitch? Even if they have not taken her too?" It was the one thought and fear that had been churning through his brain ever since he had learned that she was not there.

"Ach God! Paul Ivanuitch, that is where they hit a man when he is down," said Palma, boiling over again at thought of it all, and emphasising his points with his fist on the ground. "The thought of her, alone and friendless, comes near to driving me crazy at times. She may be alive. She may be dead. She may be in the gutter. You know how things would go. They would seize everything I had and put in an administrator, and nothing gets through their fingers. And--and----" he stumbled, and looked piteously at Pavlof, his face working with deep emotion, and the bold blue eyes, which had always looked so merrily on the world, swimming now in a mist of bitterness. "Ach!--you cannot understand!" he jerked. "In a few months I was to have been a father, Paul Ivanuitch, and I had persuaded her to go to the country to give herself a chance. And here I am"--and the heavy fist smashed into the ground again--"and I do not know whether she is alive, or whether the child is alive. I do not know whether I am still a husband, or whether or not I am a father. God! I know only that I am no longer a man, but am becoming a devil at thought of it all. May his blackest curse blight them all for ever and for ever and for ever!"

And again a bitter silence fell upon them.

"Truly, the grinding is bitter," said Pavlof at last.

"And we are between the stones. But--sometimes--that which is between the stones will catch fire, Paul Ivanuitch, and then the grinders will see hell--as they did in France. God grant I be there to see it too!--and to help! I was becoming a man, and they have turned me back to the beasts. Hope Ivanovna is an angel, and she was making a man of me, and they will grind her to powder, like the rest of us. She would wait and wait, and hope and hope, and strive after news of me and find nothing, and then maybe she would die."

"I do not think she would die, Serge Petrovitch. She is very brave. She is too bold-hearted to be crushed by them. It is wonderful what a woman can stand."

"Ay--but--there are times"--said Palma gloomily.

"Ah--that. For that you must trust in God, Serge Petrovitch--as she would."

"It is true," nodded Palma. "I did not know so great good existed till I came to know her. They are nearer God than we are.... My God! My God!" he groaned, thinking only of his lost happiness, and forgetful for the moment of Pavlof. "And we were so happy and growing happier every day. And now----" and his fist rose and fell in a miserable abandonment of hope.

It was the first time in twelve dreary months that he had been able to speak to any one of all that had been in his heart. There was a gloomy satisfaction in unloading himself to one who knew and could understand.

"We grew nearer to one another with every day that passed," he went on reminiscently, losing sight, in the opened flow of his own thoughts, of the fact that one man's joy may be, and often is, his neighbour's pain. "She had won me, heart and soul, to her work in spite of myself, Paul Ivanuitch. It was for her work's sake that she married me. She told me so, and I, like a fool, believed that in time I could wean her from it and have her all to myself. But it was all the other way. Since ever we were married I have had no other thought than what would please her most. I had come to see through her eyes. I had come to love the things she loved because she loved them. And now----" and he came to earth again with angry fist.

"And she, Serge Petrovitch?" asked Pavlof quietly, and if Palma had glanced at his face he would have found it white and cold. "She had come to love you also?"

"Surely," said Palma, with conviction. "A man may be mistaken about any other woman's feelings but never about his wife's, Paul Ivanuitch. Yes, she had come to love me, and our love was growing day by day."

And the silence that fell on them now was gloomy only on Pavlof's part, for Hope's love evoked a glow in Palma's heart even in the bare recollection.

And presently it came to him that their talk had been wholly of himself and his affairs.

"And you, Paul Ivanuitch, why did they take you?" he asked.

"I was working quietly among the poor, as Hope Ivanovna would have had me"--he could not forbear himself that trifling share in her--"and I had no thought of ill to any man. But they carried me off one night and my place knew me no more."

Palma nodded. "And never said what for or why."

"Yes. They gave me credit for an intention to place myself in a position of illegality. But no such intention was in me--that is, as I interpret the laws."

"And where are you for?"

"The provinces--five years. Minusinsk I'm assigned to."

Palma nodded. "That is not so bad. Escape from the provinces is not difficult, they say, though it's none too easy to get back home. I was talking to a man who had been through it, as we came along on the barge. He got home all right, but he could not keep out of it, and now he's going to Kara with chains on his legs."

"Yes, it generally ends that way, I believe. Which is your kazarm?"

"Number eight. It was crammed to suffocation, they say, before we came in, and now there are twenty more of us. The days are bearable, but the nights are simply hell."

"Simply hell. If Dante had slept for a week in a Siberian kamera he'd have had something more to write about."

"And when do we go on? Do you know?"

"I think we were only waiting for you. I saw them selecting a convoy guard this morning."

"The sooner the better."

That night, in his fetid corner under the over-loaded sleeping-bench, Paul Pavlof found it more impossible to sleep even than usual.

It was not an easy matter at any time, with over a hundred foul fellow-sleepers above and all around one. The sighs, the coughs, the groans, the stertorous snortings and snorings, the restless movements which travelled spasmodically along the packed sleeping-benches from whatever spot they started till they stopped on the pachyderm carcase of some heavier sleeper than usual, the quarrels, the cursings, the jingle and clink of fetters, the poisonous, ammoniacal smells of all those foul bodies, the sickening heat, the insects and vermin--truly, to any man accustomed to the simple virtues of cleanliness of body and mind, sleep in such a place was not a matter of easy accomplishment, and Palma's short, descriptive word was amply earned. Yet at times Pavlof had found sleep not impossible.

But that night it was very far beyond him. He lay awake and with his eyes wide open, too, in spite of the pungency of the atmosphere which weighed on his eyelids like coins on the eyes of the dead, and set his eyeballs smarting. And, though the mirk and reek, and the heavy darkness, and the thick log walls of the kazarm cut short his bodily vision, the white soul of him looked past these and caught glimpses of visions of another kind, and in the sight of them he smiled. Now, when a convict on the great Siberian road smiles to himself in his kamera of a night, he is half-brother to the saints or joint tenant with a madman, and the madman, I am inclined to think, has the pleasanter time of it.