Chapter 13

EXILE—THE MAYOR AT POKROVO—THE VOLGA—PERM

On the morning of the 10th of April an officer of gendarmes took me to the house of the governor-general. There, in the private part of the building, my relatives were allowed to come and say good-bye to me.

Of course it was all awkward and wrung the heart; the prying spies and clerks, the reading of the instructions to the gendarme who was to take me, the impossibility of saying anything without witnesses: in fact, more distressing and painful surroundings could not be imagined.

I heaved a sigh of relief when at last the carriage rolled off along Vladimirka.

‘Per me si va nella città dolente, Per me si va nel eterno dolore——’

At a station somewhere I wrote those two lines, which apply equally well to the portals of Hell and the Siberian high-road.

Seven versts from Moscow there is a restaurant called ‘Perov’s’; there one of my most intimate friends had promised to wait for me. I suggested to the gendarme a drink of vodka. It was a long way from the town. We went in, but my friend was not there. I tried every device to linger in the tavern; at last the gendarme would stay no longer and the driver was starting the horses—when suddenly a troika dashed up straight to the restaurant. I flew to the door ... two strangers, merchants’ sons, out for a spree, noisily dismounted from the chaise. I looked into the distance—not one moving point, not one man could be seen on the road to Moscow ... it was bitter to get in and drive off. I gave the driver twenty kopecks, and we flew like an arrow from the bow.

We drove without stopping; the gendarme had been ordered to do not less than two hundred versts in the twenty-four hours. This would have been quite endurable at any time but the beginning of April. In places the road was covered with ice, in places with mud and water; moreover, as we drove towards Siberia it got worse and worse at every station.

The first incident of my journey was at Pokrovo.

We had lost several hours owing to the ice which was floating down the river and cutting off all communication with the opposite bank. The gendarme was in a nervous fidget; all at once the superintendent of the posting-station at Pokrovo announced that there were no horses. The gendarme pointed out that in the permit he was instructed to give them couriers’ horses if there were no post horses. The superintendent replied that those horses had been taken by the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs. I need hardly say that the gendarme began to quarrel and made a row. The superintendent ran to try and get private horses and the gendarme went with him.

I got tired of waiting for them in the superintendent’s dirty room. I went out at the gate and began walking in front of the house. It was my first walk unescorted by a soldier after nine months’ imprisonment.

I had walked up and down for half an hour when suddenly I was met by a man wearing a uniform with epaulettes and a blue _pour le mérite_ on his neck. He looked at me with marked persistence, passed me, and at once turning back asked me with a fierce air: ‘Is it you who are being taken by a gendarme to Perm?’

‘Yes,’ I answered without stopping.

‘Excuse me, excuse me, but how dare he?...’

‘With whom have I the honour to speak?’

‘I am the mayor,’ answered the stranger in a voice which betrayed a profound sense of the dignity of that public position. ‘Upon my soul! I am expecting the Deputy Minister from hour to hour, and here there are political prisoners walking about the streets. What an ass your gendarme is!’

‘Will you please address yourself to the gendarme in person.’

‘It is not a matter of addressing myself, I’ll arrest him. I’ll order him a hundred strokes and send you on with a policeman.’

I nodded without waiting for him to finish his speech and strode rapidly back into the station.

From the window I could hear him fuming at the gendarme and threatening all sorts of things. The gendarme apologised but did not seem much frightened. Three minutes later they both came in. I was sitting turned toward the window and did not look at them.

From the mayor’s questions to the gendarme, I saw that he was consumed by the desire to find out for what offence, how and why, I was being sent into exile. I remained obstinately silent. The mayor began addressing me and the gendarme indiscriminately: ‘No one cares to enter into our position. Do you suppose it is pleasant for me to have to swear at a soldier and cause unpleasantness to a man whom I have never seen in my life? It is the responsibility! The mayor is in charge of the town. Whatever happens, I have to answer for it; if government funds are stolen, it is my fault; if the church is burnt down, it is my fault; if there are a great many men drunk in the street, it is my fault; if there is not enough liquor drunk, it is my fault too’ (the last phrase pleased him very much and he went on in a more cheerful tone). ‘It’s a good thing you met me, but if you had met the Minister and you walking up and down, he would have asked, how is this, a political prisoner out for a walk? Put the mayor under arrest....’

At last I was weary of his eloquence and, turning to him, I said: ‘Do what your duty requires, but I beg you to spare me your admonitions. I see from what you say that you expect me to bow to you; it is not my habit to bow to strangers.’

The mayor was confused.

‘It is always like that among us,’ A—— A—— used to say; ‘whichever is first to begin scolding and shouting always gets the best of it. If you allow an official to raise his voice, you are lost; hearing himself yelling, he becomes a wild beast. If at his first rude word you begin shouting, he is invariably scared and gives way, thinking you are a determined person and that such persons had better not be irritated too much.’

The mayor sent the gendarme to inquire about horses and, turning to me, observed by way of apology: ‘I have acted like this for the sake of the soldier; you don’t know what our soldiers are like—one must not allow the slightest slackness, but, believe me, I can discriminate—allow me to ask you what unlucky chance....’

‘At the conclusion of our trial we were forbidden to speak of it.’

‘In that case.... Of course.... I do not venture ...’ and the mayor’s eyes expressed agonies of curiosity. He paused.

‘I had a distant relative, he was a year in the Peter-Paul fortress. You see, I, too—excuse me, it worries me. I believe you are still angry? I am a military man, stern, accustomed to the service; I went into the regiment at seventeen. I have a hasty temper, but it is all over in a minute. I won’t touch your gendarme, the devil take him entirely....’

The gendarme came in with the reply that the horses could not be driven in from the grazing-ground in less than an hour.

The mayor informed him that he forgave him on my intercession. Then turning to me he added:

‘And to show that you are not angry, you will not refuse my request. I live only two doors away; allow me to ask you to take pot-luck at lunch with me.’

This was so funny after our encounter that I went to the mayor’s and ate his dried sturgeon and caviare and drank his vodka and Madeira.

He became so affable that he told me all his domestic affairs, even describing his wife’s illness which had lasted seven years. After luncheon he took with proud satisfaction a letter from a vase standing on the table and gave me to read ‘a poem’ by his son, deemed worthy of being read in public at the examination for the Cadet School. After obliging me with such marks of complete confidence, he adroitly passed to an indirect question about my case. This time I partly gratified his curiosity.

This mayor reminded me of the secretary of the district court of whom our friend Shtchepkin used to tell: ‘Nine police-captains came and went, but the secretary remained unchanged, and went on managing the district as before. “How is it you get on with all of them?” Shtchepkin asked him. “Oh, it’s nothing; with God’s help we get round them somehow. Some certainly were hot-tempered at first, would stamp with their forelegs and their hindlegs, shout, swear for all they were worth, say they’d kick me out, and they’d report me to the governor—well, as you see, I know my place, one holds one’s tongue and thinks; give him time, he’ll be broken in! This is just first being in harness! And, as a matter of fact, they can be driven all right!”’

When we reached Kazan the Volga was in all the glory of the spring floods. The whole distance from Uslon to Kazan we had to float on a punt, the river had overflowed for fifteen versts or more. It was a cloudy day. The ferry had broken down, a number of carts and conveyances of all sorts were waiting on the bank. The gendarme went to the station superintendent and asked for a punt. The man gave it reluctantly, saying that it would be better to wait, that it was not safe to cross. The gendarme was in a hurry because he was drunk and because he wanted to show his power.

They put my carriage on a little punt and we floated off. The weather seemed calmer. Half an hour later the Tatar put up a sail, when suddenly the storm began to rage again. We were carried along with such violence that, running upon a log, we crashed against it so that the wretched punt was broken and the water poured over the deck. The position was disagreeable; however, the Tatar succeeded in getting the punt on to a sandbank. A merchant’s barge came into sight. We shouted to it and asked them to send a boat; the bargemen heard us and floated by without doing anything.

A peasant came up with his wife in a little canoe made out of a tree-trunk, asked us what was the matter, and, remarking ‘Well, what of it? Stop up the hole and go your way rejoicing. What’s there to mope about? It’s because you are a Tatar, I suppose, you can’t do anything,’ climbed on to the punt.

The Tatar certainly was very much alarmed. First, when the water had poured over the sleeping gendarme, the latter had leapt up and at once began beating the Tatar. Secondly, the boat was government property, and the Tatar kept repeating: ‘Here it will go to the bottom, what will become of me! what will become of me!’

I comforted him by saying that if it went to the bottom he would go with it.

‘It is all right, master, if I drown, but how if I don’t?’

The peasant and the others stopped up the hole with all sorts of things. The peasant struck it with his axe and knocked in some little plank; then, up to his waist in the water, helped to drag the punt off the sandbank and we were soon floating off into the channel of the Volga. The river rushed us along savagely. The wind and the sleet cut the face, the cold penetrated to the bone, but soon the monument of Ivan the Terrible began to stand out from the fog and the floods of water. It seemed as though the danger were over, when suddenly the Tatar shouted in a plaintive voice, ‘A leak, a leak!’ and the water began pouring vigorously in at the hole that had been stuffed up. We were in the very centre of the river, the punt moved more and more slowly, one could foresee that it would soon sink altogether. The Tatar took off his cap and prayed. My valet, overcome with terror, wept and said: ‘Farewell, mother, I shall not see you again.’ The gendarme swore and vowed to thrash them all as soon as they got to the bank.

At first I too was frightened; besides, the wind and the rain added confusion and uproar. But the thought that it was absurd that I should perish without having _done anything_, that youthful ‘_Quid timeas, Caesarem vehis!_’ got the upper hand and I calmly awaited the end, convinced that I could not perish between Uslon and Kazan. Later on, life breaks us of this proud confidence and punishes us for it; that is why youth is bold and full of heroism, while with the years a man grows cautious and is rarely carried away.

A quarter of an hour later, we were ashore near the walls of the Kazan Kremlin, drenched and shivering. I went into the nearest tavern, drank off a glass of foaming wine, ate a fried egg, and set off to the post-office.

In villages and little towns there is a room at the posting-station for travellers, in big towns every one puts up at hotels and there is nothing at the posting-stations for travellers. I was taken to the posting-station. The superintendent of the station showed me his room; there were women and children in it and a sick and bedridden old man; there was absolutely not a corner where I could change my clothes. I wrote a letter to the general of gendarmes and asked him to assign a room to me somewhere that I might get warm and dry my clothes.

An hour later the gendarme returned and said that Count Apraxin had ordered that a room should be given me. I waited a couple of hours; no one came and I sent the gendarme off again. He came back with the answer that Colonel Pol, to whom the General had given the order to find me a room, was playing cards at the Nobles’ Club and that a room could not be found me till next day.

This was barbarous; and I wrote a second letter to Count Apraxin asking him to send me on immediately, saying that I might find shelter at the next posting-station. The Count was graciously pleased to be in bed, and the letter was left until the morning. There was nothing for it. I took off my wet clothes and lay down on the table of the post-office wrapped in the greatcoat of the ‘elder’; for a pillow I took a thick book and laid some linen upon it.

In the morning I sent out for some breakfast. The post-office officials were by now assembling. The clerk in charge submitted to me that it really was not the right thing to have breakfast in a public office, that it did not matter to him personally, but that the postmaster might not like it.

I answered him jocosely that a man cannot be turned out who has no right to go, and if he has no right to go he is obliged to eat and drink where he is detained....

Next day Count Apraxin gave me permission to remain three days in Kazan and to put up at the hotel.

I spent those three days wandering about the town with the gendarme. The Tatar women with their covered faces, their broad-cheeked husbands, mosques of the true faith side by side with orthodox churches, all was suggestive of Asia and the East. In Vladimir, in Nizhni there is a feeling of nearness to Moscow, here of remoteness from her.

In Perm I was taken straight to the governor. He was holding a great reception; his daughter was being married that day to an officer. He insisted on my going in, and I had to present myself to the whole society of Perm in a dirty travelling coat, covered with mud and dust. The governor, after talking all sorts of nonsense, forbade me to make acquaintance with the Polish exiles and ordered me to come to him in a few days, saying that then he would find me work in the office.

This governor was a Little Russian; he did not oppress the exiles, and altogether was a harmless person. He was improving his position somehow on the sly, like a mole working unseen underground; he was adding grain to grain and laying by a little hourly for a rainy day.

From some inexplicable idea of discipline, he used to order all the exiles who lived in Perm to appear before him at ten o’clock in the morning on Saturdays. He would come out with his pipe and a list, verify whether we were all present, and, if any one was not, send a policeman to find out the reason and, after saying scarcely anything to any one, would dismiss us. In this way in his reception-room I became acquainted with all the Polish exiles, whose acquaintance he had warned me I must not make.

The day after my arrival the gendarme went away, and for the first time since my arrest I found myself in freedom.

In freedom ... in a little town on the Siberian frontier, with no experience, with no conception of the surroundings in which I had to live.

From the nursery I had passed into the lecture-room, from the lecture-room to a circle of friends—it had all been theories, dreams, my own people, no practical responsibilities. Then prison to let it all settle. Practical contact with life was beginning here near the Ural Mountains.

It began at once; the day after my arrival, I went with a porter from the governor’s office to look for a lodging and he took me to a big house of one storey. In spite of my protesting that I was looking for a very little house or, still better, part of a house, he obstinately insisted on my going in.

The landlady made me sit down on her sofa and, learning that I came from Moscow, asked if I had seen Mr. Kabrit in Moscow. I told her that I had never even heard the name.

‘How is that?’ observed the old woman; ‘I mean Kabrit,’ and she mentioned his Christian name and his father’s name. ‘Upon my word, sir, why, he was our vice-governor!’

‘But I have been nine months in prison, perhaps that is why I have not heard of him,’ I said, smiling.

‘Maybe that is it. So you will take the house, my good sir?’

‘It is too big, much too big; I told the man so.’

‘You can’t have too much of a good thing,’ she said.

‘That is so, but you will want more rent for so much of a good thing.’

‘Ah, my good sir, but who has talked to you about my price? I have not said a word about it yet.’

‘But I know that such a house cannot be cheap.’

‘How much will you give?’

To get rid of her, I said that I would not give more than three hundred and fifty roubles.

‘Well, I would be thankful for that. Bid the man bring your bits of trunks, darling, and take a little glass of Teneriffe.’

Her price seemed to me fabulously low. I took the house, and, just as I was on the point of going, she stopped me. ‘I forgot to ask you, are you going to keep your own cow?’

‘Good Heavens, no!’ I answered, almost appalled by her question.

‘Well, then, I will let you have cream.’

I went away thinking with horror where I was and what I was that I could be considered capable of keeping my own cow. But before I had time to look round, the governor informed me that I was transferred to Vyatka because another exile who had been allotted to Vyatka had asked to be transferred to Perm, where he had relations. The governor wanted me to leave the next day. This was impossible; thinking to remain some time in Perm, I had bought all sorts of things and I had to sell them even at half-price. After various evasive answers, the governor gave me permission to remain forty-eight hours, exacting a promise that I would not seek an opportunity of seeing the other exiles.

I was preparing to sell my horse and all sorts of rubbish the next day when suddenly the police-master appeared with an order to leave within twenty-four hours. I explained to him that the governor had given me an extension of time. The police-master showed me the instructions, in which he certainly was directed to see me off within twenty-four hours. The document had been signed that very day and, consequently, after the conversation with me.

‘Ah,’ said the police-master, ‘_I_ understand, I understand; our fine gentleman wants to throw the responsibility on me.’

‘Let us go and confront him with it.’

‘Let us!’

The governor said that he had forgotten the permission he had given me. The police-master asked slyly whether he wished him to make a fresh copy of the instructions.

‘Is it worth while?’ the governor remarked simply.

‘We have caught him,’ said the police-master, gleefully rubbing his hands, ‘the scribbling soul!’

The Perm police-master belonged to a special type of military men turned into officials. They are men who have had the luck in the army to come in contact with a bayonet or to be hit by a bullet, and so to be given such posts as that of local police-master or executive clerk.

In the regiment they have acquired certain airs of frankness, have learnt by heart various phrases about the inviolability of honour and the noble feelings, and also sarcastic jeers at the ‘scribbling gentry.’ The younger among them have read Marlinsky[130] and Zagoskin,[131] know the beginning of the _Prisoner of the Caucasus_ and _Voynarovsky_, and often repeat verses. Some, for instance, will say every time they see a man smoking:

‘The amber smoked between his lips.’

They are all without exception deeply and volubly conscious that their position is far inferior to their merits, that only poverty keeps them in this ‘world of ink,’ that if it were not for their wounds and lack of means, they would be commanding army corps or have the rank of adjutant-generals. Every one of them will quote a striking instance of some old comrade and say: ‘Why, Kreits, or Ridiger, was made a cornet with me. We lodged together. Called each other Petrusha and Alyosha—but there, I’m not a German, you see, and I had no backing—so I can stay a policeman. Do you imagine it’s easy for an honourable man with our ideas to do police work?’

Their wives are even louder in their complaints, and with heavy hearts go to Moscow every year to put money into the bank, on the pretext that a mother or aunt is ill and wants to see them for the last time.

And so they live in comfort for fifteen years. The husband, railing against his destiny, thrashes the police, beats the workpeople, cringes to the governor, screens thieves, steals legal documents, and repeats verses from the _Fountain of Bahtchisaray_.[132] The wife, complaining of destiny and provincial life, grabs everything she can get, takes tribute from petitioners and shops, and raves over moonlight nights.

I have made this digression because at first I was taken in by these gentry and believed they really were rather better than the rest, which is far from being the case....

I brought away from Perm one personal memory which is dear to me.

At one of the governor’s inspections of the exiles a Polish priest invited me to go and see him. I found several Poles there. One of them sat in silence pensively smoking a little pipe; misery, hopeless misery, was apparent on every feature of his face. He was round-shouldered, even crooked, his face was of the irregular Polish-Lithuanian type which at first surprises and then attracts. The greatest of the Poles, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, had just such features. The clothes of the Pole, whose name was Tsihanovitch, gave evidence of terrible poverty.

A few days later I was walking along the deserted boulevard with which Perm is bounded on one side; it was in the second half of May, the young leaves were opening, the birches were in flower (I remember the whole avenue was of birches), and there was no one anywhere. Our provincials are not fond of _platonic_ walks. After strolling for some time, I saw at last on the other side of the boulevard, that is, where the open country began, a man botanising or perhaps simply gathering the scanty and monotonous flowers of that region. When he raised his head I recognised Tsihanovitch and went up to him.

Later on I saw a good deal of the victims of the Polish insurrection; their record is particularly rich in martyrs—Tsihanovitch was the first. When he told me how he had been persecuted by executioners in the uniform of adjutant-generals—those tools with which the brutality of the savage despot of the Winter Palace fights—then our discomforts, our prison, and our trial seemed to me paltry.

At that time in Vilna the commanding officer _on the side of the victorious enemy_ was the celebrated renegade Muravyov, who immortalised himself by the historic declaration, ‘that he belonged to the Muravyovs who hanged and not the Muravyovs who are hanged.’ For Nicholas’ narrow, vindictive outlook, men of feverish ambition and coarse callousness were always the best fitted or, at any rate, the most sympathetic.

The generals who sat in the torture chamber and tormented the emissaries, their friends or the friends of their friends, behaved to the prisoners like blackguards, with no breeding, no feeling of delicacy, and at the same time were very well aware that all their doings were covered by the military coat of Nicholas, soaked in the blood of the Polish martyrs and the tears of Polish mothers.... This Passion Week of a whole people still awaits its Luke or its Matthew.... But let them know: one torturer after another will be shamed at the bar of history and leave his name there. That will be the portrait gallery of the period of Nicholas by way of pendant to the gallery of the generals of 1812.

Muravyov spoke to the prisoners as though they were of a lower class, and swore at them in the language of the market. Once he was so carried away by fury that he went up to Tsihanovitch and would have taken him by the shoulder and perhaps have struck him, but met the fettered prisoner’s eyes, was abashed, and went on in a different tone.

I guessed what those eyes must have looked like; when he told me the story three years after the event, his eyes glowed, the veins stood out on his forehead and on his bowed neck.

‘What could you have done in chains?’

‘I could have torn him to pieces with my teeth, I could have beaten him to death with my skull, with my chains,’ he said, trembling.

Tsihanovitch was sent at first to Verhoturye, one of the remotest towns of the province of Perm, lost in the Ural Mountains, buried in snow and so far from every road that in winter there was scarcely any means of communication. I need hardly say that living in Verhoturye was worse than in Omsk or Krasnoyarsk. Being in complete solitude, Tsihanovitch occupied himself with the study of natural science, collected the scanty flora of the Ural Mountains, and at last received permission to move to Perm; and this was a great amelioration of his lot. Again he heard the sound of his own language and met with comrades in misfortune. His wife, who had remained in Lithuania, wrote that she was setting off to _walk_ to him from the province of Vilna.

When I was transferred so unexpectedly to Vyatka, I went to say good-bye to Tsihanovitch. The little room in which he lived was almost completely empty. A small, old trunk stood beside the meagre bed, a wooden table and a chair made up the rest of the furniture. It reminded me of my cell in the Krutitsky Barracks.

The news of my departure grieved him, but he was so used to disappointments that a minute later he said to me with a smile that was almost bright: ‘That’s just what I love nature for; wherever a man may be, she cannot be taken from him.’

I wanted to leave him something as a souvenir. I took a little stud out of my shirt and asked him to accept it.

‘It won’t suit my shirt, but I shall keep your stud to the end of my days and I will wear it at my funeral.’

Then he sank into thought and all at once began rapidly rummaging in his trunk. He found a little bag, from it drew out an iron chain made in a peculiar way, and, tearing several links off, gave them to me with the words: ‘That chain is very precious to me, the most sacred memories of a certain time are connected with it. I do not give you all, but take these links. I never thought that I, an exile from Lithuania, would present them to a Russian exile.’

I embraced him and said good-bye.

‘When are you going?’ he asked.

‘To-morrow morning, but I will not invite you; a gendarme is always sitting in my lodging.’

‘And so a good journey to you; may you be happier than I.’

At nine o’clock next morning the police-master turned up at my lodgings and began hurrying me off. The Perm gendarme, a far more manageable person than the Krutitsky one, was busy getting the carriage ready, not concealing his joy at the hope of being able to be drunk for three hundred and fifty versts. Everything was ready. I glanced casually into the street; Tsihanovitch was passing, I rushed to the window.

‘Well, thank God,’ he said, ‘this is the fourth time I have walked past to say good-bye to you, if only from a distance, and still you did not see me.’

With eyes full of tears I thanked him. This tender, womanly attention deeply touched me; but for this meeting I should have had nothing to regret in Perm!

On the day after we left Perm there was a heavy, unceasing downpour of rain from dawn, such as is common in forest districts; at two o’clock we reached a very poor village in the province of Vyatka. There was no house at the posting-station. Votyaks[133] (who could not read or write) performed the duties of overseer, looked through the permit for horses, saw whether there were two seals or one, shouted ‘Aïda, aïda!’ and harnessed the horses, I need hardly say, twice as quickly as it would have been done had there been a superintendent. I wanted to get dry and warm and to have something to eat. Before we reached the village, the Perm gendarme agreed to my suggestion that we should rest for a couple of hours. When I went into the stifling hut, without a chimney, and found that it was absolutely impossible to get anything, that there was not even a pot-house for five versts, I regretted our decision and was on the point of asking for horses.

While I was thinking whether to go on or not to go on, a soldier came in and reported that the officer at the étape had sent to invite me to a cup of tea.

‘With the greatest pleasure. Where is your officer?’

‘In the hut near by, your honour,’ and the soldier made the familiar left-about-turn. I followed him.

A short, elderly officer with a face that bore traces of many anxieties, petty cares, and fear of his superiors, met me with all the genial hospitality of deadly boredom. He was one of those unintelligent, good-natured soldiers who work in the service for twenty-five years without promotion and without reasoning about it, as old horses serve, who probably suppose that it is their duty at dawn to put on their harness and drag something.

‘Whom are you taking, and where?’

‘Oh, don’t ask, for it is heart-rending. Well, I suppose my superiors know all about it; it is our duty to carry out orders and we are not responsible, but, looking at it as a man, it is an ugly business.’

‘Why, what is it?’

‘You see, they have collected a crowd of cursed little Jew boys of eight or nine years old. Whether they are taking them for the navy or what, I can’t say. At first _the orders were to drive them to Perm, then there was a change and we are driving them to Kazan_. I have taken them over a hundred versts. The officer who handed them over said it was dreadful, and that’s all about it; a third were left on the way’ (and the officer pointed to the earth). ‘Not half will reach their destination,’ he added.

‘Have there been epidemics, or what?’ I asked, deeply moved.

‘No, not epidemics, but they just die off like flies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly creature, like a skinned cat; he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day and eating dried bread—then again, being among strangers, no father nor mother nor petting; well, they cough and cough until they cough themselves into their graves. And I ask you, what use is it to them? What can they do with little boys?’

I made no answer.

‘When do you set off?’ I asked.

‘Well, we ought to have gone long ago, but it has been raining so heavily.... Hey, you there! tell the small fry to form up.’

They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks: it was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen, those poor, poor children! Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten.... No painting could reproduce the horror of that scene.

Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers’ overcoats, with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes looked like fever or chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows straight from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves.

And note that they were being taken by a kind-hearted officer who was obviously sorry for the children. What if they had been taken by a military political economist?

I took the officer’s hand and, saying ‘Take care of them,’ rushed to my carriage. I wanted to sob and felt that I could not control myself.

What monstrous crimes are secretly buried in the archives of the infamous reign of Nicholas! We are used to them, they are committed every day, committed as though nothing were wrong, unnoticed, lost in the terrible distance, noiselessly sunk in the silent bogs of officialdom or shrouded by the censorship of the police.

Have we not seen with our own eyes seven hungry peasants from Pskov, who were being forcibly removed to the province of Tobolsk and were pitched without food or night’s lodging in the Tverskoy Square in Moscow until Prince D. V. Golitsyn ordered them to be cared for at his own expense?