Chapter 11

KRUTITSKY BARRACKS—GENDARMES’ TALES—OFFICERS

Three days after the Tsar’s arrival, late in the evening—all these things are done in darkness to avoid disturbing the public—a police officer came to me with instructions to collect my belongings and set off with him.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘You will see,’ was the policeman’s intelligent and polite reply. After this, of course, I collected my things and set off without continuing the conversation.

We drove on and on for an hour and a half, at last we passed the Simonov Monastery and stopped at a heavy stone gate, before which two gendarmes with carbines were pacing up and down. This was the Krutitsky Monastery, converted into a barracks of gendarmes.

I was led into a little office. The clerks, the adjutants, the officers were all in light blue. The officer on duty, in a casque and full uniform, asked me to wait a little and even suggested that I should light the pipe I held in my hand. After this he proceeded to write an acknowledgment of having received a prisoner; giving it to the policeman, he went away and returned with another officer. ‘Your room is ready,’ said the latter, ‘come along.’ A gendarme held a candle for us, we went down the stairs and took a few steps across the courtyard into a long corridor lighted by a single lantern; on both sides were little doors, one of them the officer on duty opened; it led into a tiny guardroom behind which was a small, dark, cold room that smelt like a cellar. The officer who conducted me then turned to me, saying in French that he was ‘_désolé d’être dans la nécessité_’ of searching my pockets, but military service, duty, his instructions.... After this eloquent introduction, he very simply turned to the policeman and indicated me with his eyes. The policeman on the spot thrust an incredibly large and hairy hand into my pockets. I observed to the police officer that this was quite unnecessary, that I would myself, if he liked, turn my pockets inside out without such violent measures; moreover, what could I have after six weeks imprisonment?

‘We know,’ said the polite officer with a smile of inimitable self-complacency, ‘how things are done in the police station.’ The officer on duty also smiled sarcastically. However, they told the policeman he need only look. I pulled out everything I had.

‘Scatter all your tobacco on the table,’ said the officer who was _désolé_.

In my tobacco pouch I had a penknife and a pencil wrapped up in paper; from the very beginning I had been thinking about them and, as I talked to the officer, I played with the tobacco pouch, until I got the penknife into my hand. I held it through the material of the pouch, and boldly shook the tobacco out on the table. The policeman poured it in again. The penknife and pencil had been saved; so there was a lesson for the officer for his proud disdain of the ordinary police.

This incident put me in the best of humours and I began gaily scrutinising my new domain.

Some of the monks’ cells, built three hundred years ago and sunk into the earth, had been turned into secular cells for political prisoners.

In my room there was a bedstead without a mattress, a little table, on it a jug of water, and beside it a chair, a thin tallow candle was burning in a big copper candlestick. The damp and cold pierced to one’s bones; the officer ordered the stove to be lighted, and then they all went away. A soldier promised to bring some hay; meanwhile, putting my greatcoat under my head, I lay down on the bare bedstead and lit my pipe.

A minute later I noticed that the ceiling was covered with ‘Prussian’ beetles. They had seen no light for a long time and were running towards it from all directions, crowding together, hurrying, falling on to the table, and then racing headlong, backwards and forwards, along the edge of the table.

I disliked black beetles, as I did every sort of uninvited guest; my neighbours seemed to me horribly disgusting, but there was nothing to be done, I could not begin by complaining about the black beetles and my nerves had to submit. Two or three days later, however, all the ‘Prussians’ moved next door to the soldier’s room, where it was warmer; only occasionally a stray beetle would run in, prick up his whiskers and scurry back to get warm.

Though I continually asked the gendarme, he still kept the stove closed. I began to feel unwell and giddy, I tried to get up and knock to the soldier; I did actually get up, but with that all I remember ended....

When I came to myself I was lying on the floor with a splitting headache. A tall gendarme was standing with his hands folded, staring at me blankly, as in the well-known bronze statuettes a dog stares at a tortoise.

‘You have been finely suffocated, your honour,’ he said, seeing that I had recovered consciousness. ‘I’ve brought you horse-radish with salt and kvass; I have already made you sniff it, now you must drink it up.’ I drank it, he lifted me up and laid me on the bed; I felt very faint, there were double windows and no pane that opened in them; the soldier went to the office to ask permission for me to go into the yard; the officer on duty told him to say that neither the colonel nor the adjutant were there, and that he could not take the responsibility. I had to remain in the room full of charcoal fumes.

I got used even to the Krutitsky Barracks, conjugating the Italian verbs and reading some wretched little books. At first my confinement was rather strict; at nine o’clock in the evening, at the last note of the bugle, a soldier came into my room, put out the candle and locked the door. From nine o’clock in the evening until eight next morning I had to sit in darkness. I have never been a great sleeper, and in prison where I had no exercise, four hours’ sleep was quite enough for me; and not to have candles was a real affliction. Moreover, the sentry uttered every quarter of an hour from both sides of the corridor a loud, prolonged shout.

A few weeks later Colonel Semyonov (brother of the celebrated actress, afterwards Princess Gagarin) allowed them to leave me a candle, forbade anything to be hung over the window, which was below the level of the courtyard, so that the sentry could see everything that was being done in the cell, and gave instructions that the sentries should not shout in the corridor.

Then the commanding officer gave us permission to have ink and to walk in the courtyard. Paper was given in a fixed amount on condition that none of the leaves were torn. I was allowed once in twenty-four hours to go, accompanied by a soldier and the officer on duty, into the yard, which was enclosed by a fence and surrounded by a cordon of sentries.

Life passed quietly and monotonously, the military punctuality gave it a mechanical regularity like the cæsura in verse. In the morning, with the assistance of the gendarme, I prepared coffee on the stove; at nine o’clock the officer on duty, in gloves, enormous gauntlets, in a casque and a greatcoat, appeared, clanking his sabre and bringing in with him several cubic feet of frost. At one, the gendarme brought a dirty napkin and a bowl of soup, which he always held by the edge, so that his two middle fingers were perceptibly cleaner than the others. We were fed fairly decently, but it must not be forgotten that we were charged two roubles a day for our keep, which in the course of nine months’ imprisonment ran up to a considerable sum for persons of no means. The father of one prisoner said quite simply that he had not the money; he received the cool reply that it would be stopped out of his salary. If he had not been receiving a salary, it is extremely probable that he would have been put in prison.

In conclusion, I ought to observe that a rouble and a half was sent to Colonel Semyonov at the barracks for our board from the ordnance house. There was almost a fuss about this; but the adjutant, who got the benefit of it, presented the gendarmes’ division with boxes for first performances or benefit nights, and with that the matter ended.

After sunset there followed a complete stillness, which was not disturbed by the footsteps of the soldiers crunching over the snow before the window, nor the far-away calls of the sentries. As a rule I read until one o’clock and then put out my candle. Sleep carried me into freedom, sometimes it seemed as though I woke up feeling—ough, what a horrible dream I have had—prison and gendarmes—and I would rejoice that it was all a dream; and then, all at once, there would be the clank of a sabre in the corridor, or the officer on duty would open the door, accompanied by a soldier with a lantern, or the sentry would shout inhumanly, ‘Who goes there?’ or a bugle under my very window would outrage the morning air with its shrill reveille....

In moments of dullness when I was disinclined to read, I would talk with the gendarmes who guarded me, particularly with the old fellow who had looked after me when I was overcome by the charcoal fumes. The colonel used, as a sign of favour, to free his old soldiers from regular discipline, and set them to the easy duty of guarding a prisoner; a corporal, who was a spy and a rogue, was set over them. Five or six gendarmes made up the whole staff.

The old man, of whom I am speaking, was a simple, good-hearted creature, given to all sorts of kind actions, for which he had probably had to pay a good deal in his life. He had passed through the campaign of 1812, his chest was covered with medals, he had served his full time and remained in the army of his own free will, not knowing where to go. ‘Twice,’ he told me, ‘I wrote to my home in the Mogilev province, but I got no answer, so it seems as though there were none of my people left: and so I feel a little uneasy to go home, one would stay there a bit and then wander off like a lost spirit, going hither and thither to beg one’s bread.’ How barbarously and mercilessly the army is organised in Russia with its monstrous term of service! A man’s private life is everywhere sacrificed without the slightest scruple and with no compensation.

Old Filimonov had pretensions to a knowledge of German which he had studied in winter quarters after the taking of Paris. He very felicitously adapted German words to the Russian spirit, calling a horse, _fert_, eggs, _yery_, fish, _pish_, oats, _ober_, pancakes, _pankutie_.

There was a naïveté about his stories which made me sad and thoughtful. In Moldavia during the Turkish campaign of 1805 he was in the company of a captain, the most good-natured man in the world, who looked after every soldier as though he were his own son and was always foremost in action. ‘A Moldavian girl had captivated him and then we saw our captain was in trouble, for, do you know, he noticed that the girl was making up to another officer. So one day he called me and a comrade—a splendid soldier, he had both his legs blown off afterwards at Maly-Yaroslavets—and began telling us how the Moldavian girl had treated him and asked would we care to help him and give her a lesson. “To be sure, sir,” we said, “we are always glad to do our best for your honour.” He thanked us and pointed out the house in which the officer lived, saying, “You wait on the bridge at night; she will certainly go to him, you seize her without any noise and drop her in the river.” “That is easily done, your honour,” we said, and my comrade and I got a sack ready. We were sitting there when towards midnight the Moldavian girl runs up. “Why, you are in a hurry, madam,” said we, and gave her one on the head. She never uttered a squeal, poor dear, and we popped her into the sack and over into the river; and next day the captain went to the officer and said: “Don’t you be angry with your Moldavian girl, we detained her a little, and now she is in the river, and I am ready for a little fun with you with the sabre or with pistols, which you like.” So they hacked at each other. The officer gave our captain a bad cut on the chest, the poor, dear man pined away and a few months later gave up his soul to God.’

‘And the Moldavian girl was drowned, then?’ I asked.

‘Yes, she was drowned,’ answered the soldier.

I looked with surprise at the childish carelessness with which the old gendarme told me this story. And he, as though guessing what I felt or thinking of it for the first time, added, to soothe me and pacify his conscience: ‘A heathen woman, sir, as good as not christened, that sort of people.’

On every Imperial holiday the gendarmes are given a glass of vodka. The sergeant allowed Filimonov to refuse his share for five or six times and to receive them all at once. Filimonov scored on a wooden tally-stick how many glasses he had missed, and on the most important holiday would go for them. He would pour this vodka into a bowl, would crumble bread into it and eat it with a spoon. After this meal he would light a big pipe with a tiny mouthpiece, filled with tobacco of incredible strength which he used to cut up himself, and therefore rather wittily call ‘Self-Cut.’ As he smoked he would fold himself up in a little window, bent double—there were no chairs in the soldiers’ rooms—and sing this song:

‘The maids come out into the meadow Where was an anthill and a flower.’

As he got more drunk the words would become more inarticulate until he fell asleep. Imagine the health of a man who had been twice wounded and at over sixty could still survive such feasts!

Before I leave these Flemish barrack scenes _à la_ Wouverman[125] and _à la_ Callot,[126] and this prison gossip, which is like the reminiscences of all prisoners, I will say a few words about the officers.

The greater number among them were rather good-natured men, by no means spies, but men who had by chance come into the gendarmes’ division. Young noblemen with little or no education and no fortune, who did not know where to lay their heads, they were gendarmes because they had found no other job. They performed their duties with military exactitude, but I never observed a trace of zeal in any of them, except the adjutant, but then he, of course, was an adjutant.

When the officers had made my acquaintance, they did all sorts of little things to alleviate my lot, and it would be a sin to complain of them.

One young officer told me that in 1831 he was sent to find and arrest a Polish landowner, who was in hiding somewhere in the neighbourhood of his estate. He was charged with being in relations with revolutionary emissaries. From evidence that the officer collected, he found out where the landowner must be hidden, went there with his company, put a cordon round the house and entered it with two gendarmes. The house was empty—they walked through the rooms, peeping into everything and found no one anywhere, but yet some traces showed clearly that there had been persons in the house lately. Leaving the gendarmes below, the young man went a second time up to the attic; looking round attentively he saw a little door which led to a loft or some little cupboard; the door was fastened on the inside, he pushed it with his foot, it opened, and a tall, handsome woman stood facing him. She pointed in silence to a man who held in his arms a girl of about twelve, who was almost unconscious. This was the Pole with his wife and child. The officer was embarrassed. The tall woman noticed this and asked him: ‘And will you have the cruelty to ruin them?’ The officer apologised, saying the usual commonplaces about the inviolability of his military oath, and his duty, and, at last, in despair, seeing that his words had no effect, ended with the question: ‘What am I to do?’ The woman looked proudly at him and said, pointing to the door: ‘Go down and say there is no one here.’ ‘Upon my word, I don’t know how it happened and what was the matter with me, but I went down from the attic and told the corporal to collect the men. A couple of hours later we were looking vigorously in another part, while he was making his way over the frontier. Well, woman! I admit it!’

Nothing in the world can be more narrow-minded and more inhuman than wholesale condemnation of entire classes in accordance with the label, the moral catalogue, the leading characteristics of the class. Names are dreadful things. Jean Paul Richter says with absolute truth: ‘If a child tells a lie, frighten him with his bad conduct, tell him he has told a lie, but don’t tell him he is a liar. You destroy his moral confidence in himself by defining him as a liar. “That is a murderer,” we are told, and at once we fancy a hidden dagger, a brutal expression, evil designs, as though murder were a permanent employment, the trade of the man who has happened once in his life to kill some one. One cannot be a spy or trade in the vice of others and remain an honest man, but one may be a police officer without losing all human dignity; just as one may conceivably find women of a tender heart and even nobility of character in the unhappy victims of “public incontinence.”’

I have an aversion for people who cannot, or will not, take the trouble to go beyond the name, to step across the barrier of crime, of a complicated false position, but either chastely turn aside, or harshly thrust it all away from them. This is usually done by cold, abstract natures, egoistic and revolting in their purity, or base, vulgar natures who have not yet happened, or have not needed, to show themselves in practice. They are through sympathy at home in the dirty depths into which others have sunk.