Condemned as a Nihilist Part 10

"Surely we have met before!" the prisoner said. "I know your face quite well."

"And I know yours also," G.o.dfrey replied.

"Now that you speak I know you. You are the young Englishman, G.o.dfrey Bullen."

"I am," G.o.dfrey replied; "and you?"

"Alexis Stumpoff."

"So it is!" G.o.dfrey exclaimed in surprise, and, delighted at this meeting, they shook hands cordially.

"But what are you here for?" G.o.dfrey asked. "I thought that you had obtained an appointment at Tobolsk."

"Yes, I was sent out as a.s.sistant to the doctor of one of the prisons. I suppose you understood that it was not the sort of appointment one would choose."

"I was certainly surprised when I heard that you were going so far away," G.o.dfrey said, "as my friends told me that you had property. It seemed almost like going into banishment."

"That was just what it was," the young doctor laughed. "I had been too outspoken in my political opinions, and one or two of our set had been arrested and sent out here; and when I was informed, on the day after I pa.s.sed my examinations, that I was appointed to a prison at Tobolsk, it was also intimated to me that it would be more agreeable to go there in that capacity than as a prisoner. As I was also of that opinion, and as, to tell you the truth, some of our friends were for pushing matters a good deal farther than I cared about doing, I was not altogether sorry to get out of it."

"But how is it that you are here as a prisoner?" G.o.dfrey asked.

"That is more than I can tell you. Some two months ago the governor of the prison entered my room with two warders, and informed me briefly that I was to be sent here as a prisoner. I had ten minutes given me to pack up my things for the journey, and half an hour later was in the cabin of a steamer, with a Cossack at the door. What it was for, Heaven only knows. I had never broken any regulations, never spoken to a political prisoner when in the hospital except to ask him medical questions, and had never opened my lips on politics to a soul there."

"I think perhaps I can enlighten you," G.o.dfrey said; and he related to him the attempt to blow up the emperor at the Winter Palace, and the fate of Petroff Stepanoff and Akim Soushiloff.

"That does indeed explain it," Alexis said. "I was very intimate with both of them, and it is quite enough to have been intimate with two men engaged in a plot against the life of the Czar to ensure one a visit to Siberia. So that is it! I have thought of everything, and it seemed to me that it must have been something at St. Petersburg--that my name had been found on a list when some of the Nihilists were arrested, or something of that sort; for I certainly did join them, but that was before there was any idea of taking steps against the Czar. No wonder you are here, after being mixed up in that escape of Valerian Ossinsky, and then being caught again with four Nihilists just after that terrible attempt to blow up the Czar. I wonder they did not hang you."

"I wonder too," G.o.dfrey said. "I suppose if I had been a year or two older they would have done so; but I can a.s.sure you I had not the slightest idea that Petroff and Akim were Nihilists. I do think that the country is horribly misgoverned, but as a foreigner that was no business of mine; and however strongly I felt, I would have had nothing to do with men who tried to gain their end by a.s.sa.s.sination. I was just as innocent in the affair of Ossinsky. I behaved like a fool, I grant, but that was all. I had met the woman, who as I now know was Sophia Perovskaia, but she was only known to me then from having met her once in Petroff and Akim's room, and she was introduced to me as Akim's cousin Katia. I met her at the Opera-house, and she told me a c.o.c.k-and-bull story about a young officer who had come to see a lady there, and had left his regiment at Moscow without leave to do so. His colonel, who was at the Opera-house, had heard of his being there and was looking for him, and I was persuaded to change dominoes with him to enable him to slip off."

"Oh that was it!" Alexis said. "I wondered how you got mixed up in the affair, and still more why they let you out after your having been caught in what they considered a serious business. Well, here we are, victims both, and it is a curious chance that has thrown us together again."

"Well, what is our life here?" G.o.dfrey asked.

Alexis shrugged his shoulders. "As a life it is detestable, though were it for a short time only there would be nothing to grumble about. We are fairly fed; we have each a patch of ground, where we can grow vegetables. The twelve men in these huts can visit and talk to each other. When that is said all is said. Oh, by the way, we are also permitted to make anything we like! that is, we can buy the materials if we have money, and the work can be sold in the town. There is one man has made himself a turning-lathe, and he makes all sorts of pretty little things. There is another man who was an officer in the navy; he carves little models of ships out of wood and bone. Another man paints.

I have not decided yet what I shall do. I had two or three hundred roubles when I was sent off here, and as I only spent four or five on the road, I have plenty to last me for some time for tea and tobacco."

"But how do you get them?"

"The warders smuggle them in. It is an understood thing, and there is no real objection to it, though they are very strict about bringing in spirits. Still we can get vodka if we have a mind to; it is only a question of bribery."

"How long are you here for, Alexis?"

"Fifteen years."

"I am supposed to be in for life," G.o.dfrey said.

"Fifteen years is as bad as life," the young doctor said. "What is the use of your life after having been shut up here for fifteen years?"

"Well, I don't mean to stay, that is one thing," G.o.dfrey said. "There can't be any difficulty in escaping from here."

"Not the least in the world," Alexis said quietly. "But where do you propose to go?"

"I have not settled yet. It seems to me that any one with pluck and energy ought to be able to make his way out of this country somehow; besides, from what I hear great numbers do get away, and take to the woods."

"Yes, but they have to give themselves up again."

"That may be; but I hear also that if they give themselves up a long way from the prison they escape from, and refuse to give any account whatever of themselves, they are simply sent to prison again as vagabonds. In that case they are treated as ordinary convicts. Now from what I hear, an ordinary convict is infinitely better off than a political one. Of course you have to a.s.sociate with a bad lot; still that is better than almost solitary confinement. The work they have to do is not hard, and if they are well conducted they are let out after a time, whereas there is no hope for a political prisoner. At any rate, even if I knew that if I was retaken I should be hung at once, I should try it."

"But the distance to the frontier is enormous, and even when you get there you would be arrested at the first place you come to if you have no papers; besides, how could you get through the winter?"

"I should get through the winter somehow," G.o.dfrey said stoutly. "There are hundreds and thousands of people in scattered villages who live through the winter. Why shouldn't I? I would make friends with the natives in the north, and live in their huts, and hunt with them. But I am not thinking of that. The distance is, as you say, enormous, and the cold terrible. My idea is to escape by the south."

"It is a desert, G.o.dfrey."

"Oh they call it a desert to frighten people from trying to escape that way. But I know there is a caravan route by which the teas come from China; besides, there are tribesmen who wander about there and pick up a living somehow. I don't say that I am going to succeed; I only say I am going to try. I may lose my life or I may be sent back again. Very well, then, I will try again some other way. We are not far from the Chinese frontier here, are we?"

"No; the frontier is at Kiakhta, not more than three or four hundred miles away."

"What are the people like?"

"They are called Buriats, and are a sort of Mongol tribe, living generally in tents and wandering with their flocks and herds through the country like the patriarchs of old."

"If they have large flocks and herds," G.o.dfrey said, "the reward the Russians offer for escaped convicts can't tempt them much. Most likely they are hospitable; almost all these wandering tribes are. If one had luck one might get befriended and stick for a time to one of these tribes in their wanderings south, and then get hold of some other people, and so get pa.s.sed on. There can't be anything impossible in it, Alexis. We know that travellers have made their way through Africa alone. Mungo Park did, and lots of other people have done so, and some of the negro tribes are, according to all accounts, a deal more savage than the Asiatic tribes. Once among them it doesn't much matter which way one goes, whether it is east to China or west to Persia."

Alexis sat and looked with some wonder at his companion. "By the saints, G.o.dfrey Bullen, I begin to understand now how it is that your people, living in a bit of an island which could be pinched out of Russia and never missed, are colonizing half the world; how they go in ships to explore the polar seas, have penetrated Africa in all directions as travellers, go among the wildest people as missionaries. We are brought up to have everything done for us: to think as we are told to think, to have officials keep their eyes over us at every turn, to be punished if we dare to think independently, till we have come to be a nation of grown-up children. You are only a boy, if you will forgive my calling you so, and yet you talk about facing the most horrible dangers as coolly as if you were proposing going for a promenade on the Nevski. We won't talk any more about it now, for you have made me feel quite restless. There, you have been here two hours, and I have forgotten all my duties as host, and have not even offered you a cup of tea; it is shameful." And Alexis brought out a samovar and soon had water boiling and tea made.

After they had drunk it they went out of the hut, and G.o.dfrey was introduced to the other exiles. Two of them who lived together were quite old men; they had been professors at the University of Kieff, and were exiled for having in their lectures taught what were considered pernicious doctrines. There were three military and two naval officers, a n.o.ble, another doctor, and two sons of merchants. All received him cordially, and G.o.dfrey saw that in any other place the society would be a pleasant one; but there was an air of settled melancholy in the majority of the faces, while the sentry fifty yards away, and the high prison wall behind, seemed ever in their minds.

By common consent, as it seemed, no allusion was ever made to politics.

They had all strong opinions, and had sacrificed everything for them, but of what use to discuss matters the course of which they were powerless to influence in the smallest degree. Free, there was probably not one of them but would again have striven in one way or another to bring about reforms, either by instructing the ignorant, rousing the intelligent, or frightening the powerful. But here, with no hope of returning, the whole thing was best forgotten. The past was dead to them, and they were without a future. The news that G.o.dfrey brought of the blow that had been struck against the Czar roused them for a few days. The war then was still being carried on. Others were wielding the weapons they had forged, but of what had happened afterwards G.o.dfrey was ignorant. Four men had been arrested or killed; but whether they had played an important part in the matter he knew not, nor whether others had shared their fate. All he could say was, that so far as he heard, numerous arrests had taken place.

But the excitement caused by the news very speedily died away, and they again became listless and indifferent. All worked for a little time in their gardens, but beyond that only those who had made some sort of occupation for themselves had anything to interest themselves actively in. Sometimes they played chess, draughts, or cards, but they did so, as G.o.dfrey observed, in a half-hearted manner, with the exception, indeed, of one of the professors, who was by far the strongest chess-player of the party, and who pa.s.sed all his time in inventing problems which, when complete, he carefully noted down in a book, with their solutions.

"When I am dead," he said one day to G.o.dfrey, who was watching him, "they will send this book to a nephew of mine; you see I have written his name and address outside. He is a great chess-player, and will send it to England or France to be published; and it is pleasant for me to think that my work, even here in prison, may serve as an amus.e.m.e.nt to people out in the world."

Except in the dulness and monotony of the life there was little to complain of, and G.o.dfrey was surprised to find how far it differed from his own preconceived notions of the life of a political prisoner in Siberia. It was only when, by an effort, he looked ahead for years and tried to fancy the possibility of being so cut off from the world for life, that he could appreciate the terrible nature of the punishment.

Better a thousand times to be one of the murderers in the prison behind the wall. They had work to occupy their time, and constantly changing a.s.sociates, with the knowledge that by good conduct they would sooner or later be released and be allowed to live outside the prison.

When at eight o'clock in the evening the prisoners were locked up in their huts, he endeavoured to learn everything that Alexis Stumpoff knew of Siberia.

He found that his knowledge was much more extensive than he had expected. "As I came out nominally, G.o.dfrey, as a free man, I brought with me every book I could buy on the country, and I almost got them by heart. It seemed to me that I was likely to be kept here for years, if not for life. I might be sent from one government prison to another, from Tobolsk to the eastern sea; therefore every place possessed an interest for me. Besides this, although I was not actually a political prisoner myself I was virtually so, and my sympathies were wholly with the prisoners, and I thought that I might possibly be able to advise and counsel men who came under my charge: to describe to them the places where they might have relations or friends shut up, and to dissuade those who, like yourself, meditated escape, for my studies had not gone far before I became convinced that this was well-nigh hopeless. I learned how strict were the regulations on the frontier, how impossible, even if this were reached, to journey on without being arrested at the very first village that a fugitive entered, and that so strict were they that although numbers of the convict establishments were within comparatively short distances of the frontier, escapes were no more frequent from them than from those three thousand miles to the east.

When I say escapes I mean escapes from Siberia. Escapes from the prisons are of constant occurrence, since most of the work is done outside the walls. There are thousands, I might almost say tens of thousands, get away every spring, but they all have to come back again in winter. The authorities trouble themselves little about them, for they know that they must give themselves up in a few months."

"Yes, my guard told me about that. He said they were not punished much when they came in."

"Sometimes they are flogged; but the Russian peasant is accustomed to flogging and thinks but little of it. More often they are not flogged.

They have, perhaps, a heavier chain, for the convicts all wear chains--we have an advantage over them there--and they are put on poorer diet for a time. They lose the remission of sentence they would obtain by good behaviour, that is all, even when they are recognized, but as a rule they take care not to give themselves up at the prison they left, but at one many hundred miles from it. In the course of the summer their hair has grown again. They a.s.sert stoutly that they are free labourers who have lost their papers, and who cannot earn their living through the winter. The authorities know, of course, that they are escaped convicts, but they have no means of identifying them. They cannot send them the rounds of a hundred convict establishments; so instead of a man being entered as Alexis Stumpoff, murderer, for instance, he is put down by the name he gives, and the word vagabond is added. The next year they may break out again; but in time the hardships they suffer in the woods become distasteful and they settle down to their prison life, and then, after perhaps six, perhaps ten years of good conduct they are released and allowed to settle where they will. So you see, G.o.dfrey Bullen, how hopeless is the chance of escape."

"Not at all," G.o.dfrey said. "These men are most of them peasants--men without education and without enterprise, incapable of forming any plan, and wholly without resources in themselves. I feel as certain of escaping as I am of being here at present. I don't say that I shall succeed the first time, but, as you say yourself, there is no difficulty in getting away, and if I fail in one direction I will try in another."