The House of the Dead or Prison Life in Siberia Part 36

"You're----"

"I say! Shut up, do! What's the good of all this row?" was the cry from all sides.

On the evening of the day the "mutiny" took place, I met Petroff behind the barracks after the day's work. He was looking for me. As he came near me, I heard him exclaim something, which I didn't understand, in a muttering sort of way; then he said no more, and walked by my side in a listless, mechanical fashion.

"I say, Petroff, your fellows are not vexed with us, are they?"

"Who's vexed?" he asked, as if coming to himself.

"The convicts with us--with us n.o.bles."

"Why should they be vexed?"

"Well, because we did not back them up."

"Oh, why should you have kicked up a dust?" he answered, as if trying to enter into my meaning: "you have a table to yourselves, you fellows."

"Oh, well, there are some of you, not n.o.bles, who don't eat the regulation food, and who went in with you. We ought to back you up, we're in the same place; we ought to be comrades."

"Oh, I _say_. Are you our comrades?" he asked, with unfeigned astonishment.

I looked at him; it was clear that he had not the least comprehension of my meaning; but I, on the other hand, entered only too thoroughly into his. I saw now, quite thoroughly, something of which I had before only a confused idea; what I had before guessed at was now sad certainty.

It was forced on my perceptions that any sort of real fellowship between the convicts and myself could never be; not even were I to remain in the place as long as life should last. I was a convict of the "special section," a creature for ever apart. The expression of Petroff when he said, "are we comrades, how can that be?" remains, and will always remain before my eyes. There was a look of such frank, nave surprise in it, such ingenuous astonishment that I could not help asking myself if there was not some lurking irony in the man, just a little spiteful mockery. Not at all, it was simply meant. I was not their comrade, and could not be; that was all. Go you to the right, we'll go to the left!

your business is yours, ours is ours.

I really fancied that, after the mutiny, they would attack us mercilessly so far as they dared and could, and that our life would become a h.e.l.l. But nothing of the sort happened; we did not hear the slightest reproach, there was not even an unpleasant allusion to what had happened, it was all simply pa.s.sed over. They went on teasing us as before when opportunity served, no more. n.o.body seemed to bear malice against those who would not join in, but remained in the kitchens, or against those who were the first to cry out that they had nothing to complain of. It was all pa.s.sed over without a word, to my exceeding astonishment.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] An insulting phrase which is untranslatable.

[8] French in the original Russian.

CHAPTER VIII.

MY COMPANIONS

As will be understood, those to whom I was most drawn were people of my own sort, that is, those of "n.o.ble" birth, especially in the early days; but of the three ex-n.o.bles in the place, who were Russians, I knew and spoke to but one, Akim Akimitch; the other two were the spy A----n, and the supposed parricide. Even with Akim I never exchanged a word except when in extremity, in moments when the melancholy on me was simply unendurable, and when I thought I really never should have the chance of getting close to any other human being again.

In the last chapter I have tried to show that the convicts were of different types, and tried to cla.s.sify them; but when I think of Akim Akimitch I don't know how to place him, he was quite _sui generis_, so far as I could observe, in that establishment.

There may be, elsewhere, men like him, to whom it seemed as absolutely a matter of indifference whether he was a free man, or in jail at hard labour; at that place he stood alone in this curious impartiality of temperament. He had settled down in the jail as if he was going to pa.s.s his whole life, and didn't mind it at all. All his belongings, mattress, cushions, utensils, were so ordered as to give the impression that he was living in a furnished house of his own; there was nothing provisional, temporary, bivouac-like, about him, or his words, or his habits. He had a good many years still to spend in punishment, but I much doubt whether he ever gave a thought to the time when he would get out. He was entirely reconciled to his condition, not because he had made any effort to be so, but simply out of natural submissiveness; but, as far as his comfort went, it came to the same thing. He was not at all a bad fellow, and in the early days his advice and help were quite useful to me; but sometimes, I can't help saying it, his peculiarities deepened my natural melancholy until it became almost intolerable anguish.

When I became desperate with silence and solitude of soul, I would get into talk with him; I wanted to hear, and reply to _some_ words falling from a living soul, and the more filled with gall and hatred with all our surroundings they had been, the more would they have been in sympathy with my wretched mood; but he would just barely talk, quietly go on sizing his lanterns, and then begin to tell me some story as to how he had been at a review of troops in 18--, that their general of division was so-and-so, that the manoeuvring had been very pretty, that there had been a change in the skirmisher's system of signalling, and the like; all of it in level imperturbable tones, like water falling drop by drop. He did not put any life into them even when he told me of a sharp affair in which he had been, in the Caucasus, for which his sword had got the decoration of the Riband of St. Anne. The only difference was, that his voice became a little more measured and grave; he lowered his tones when he p.r.o.nounced the name "St. Anne," as though he were telling a great secret, and then, for three minutes at least, did not utter a word, but only looked solemn.

During all that first year I had strange pa.s.sages of feeling, in which I hated Akim Akimitch with a bitter hatred, I am sure I cannot say why, moments when I would despairingly curse the fate which made him my next neighbour on my camp-bed, so close indeed that our heads nearly touched.

An hour afterwards I bitterly reproached myself for such extravagance.

It was, however, only during my first year of confinement that these violent feelings overpowered me. As time went on, I got used to Akim Akimitch's singular character, and was ashamed of my former explosions.

I don't remember that he and I ever got into anything like an open quarrel.

Besides the three Russian n.o.bles of whom I have spoken, there were eight others there during my time; with some of whom I came to be on a footing of intimate friendship. Even the best of them were morbid in mind, exclusive, and intolerant to the very last degree; with two of them I was obliged to discontinue all spoken intercourse. There were only three who had any education, B--ski, M--tski, and the old man, J--ski, who had formerly been a professor of mathematics, an excellent fellow, highly eccentric, and of very narrow mental horizon in spite of his learning.

M--tski and B--ski were of a mould quite different from his. Between M--tski and myself there was an excellent understanding from the first set-off. He and I never once got into any sort of dispute; I respected him highly, but could never become sincerely attached to him, though I tried to. He was sour, embittered, and mistrustful, with much self-control; this was quite antipathetic to me; the man had a closed soul, closed to everybody, and he made you feel it. I felt it so strongly that perhaps I was wrong about it. After all, his character, I must say, was stamped with both n.o.bleness and strength. His inveterate scepticism made him very prudent in his relations with everybody about him, and in conducting these he gave proof of remarkable tact and skill.

Sceptic as he was, there was another and a reverse side in his nature, for in some things he was a profound and unalterable believer with faith and hope unshakable. In spite of his tact in dealing with men, he got into open hostilities with B--ski and his friend T--ski.

The first of these, B--ski, was a man of infirm health, of consumptive tendency, irascible, and of a weak, nervous system; but a good and generous man. His nervous irritability went so far that he was as capricious as a child; a temperament of that kind was too much for me there, so I soon saw as little of B--ski as I could possibly help, though I never ceased to like him much. It was just the other way so far as M--tski was concerned; with him I always was on easy terms, though I did not like him at all. When I edged away from B--ski, I had to break also, more or less, with T--ski, of whom I spoke in the last chapter, which I much regretted, for, though of little education, he had an excellent heart; a worthy, very spiritual man. He loved and respected B--ski so much that those who broke with that friend of his he regarded as his personal enemies. He quarrelled with M--tski on account of B--ski, and they kept up the difference a long while. All these people were as bilious as they could be, humoursome, mistrustful, the victims of a moral and physical supersensitiveness. It is not to be wondered at; their position was trying indeed, much more so than ours; they were all exiled, transported, for ten or twelve years; and what made their sojourn in the prison most distressing to them was their rooted, ingrained prejudice, especially their unfortunate way of regarding the convicts, which they could not get over; in their eyes the unhappy fellows were mere wild beasts, without a single recognisable human quality. Everything in their previous career and their present circ.u.mstances combined to produce this unhappy feeling in them.

Their life at the jail was perpetual torment to them. They were kindly and conversible with the Circa.s.sians, with the Tartars, with Isaiah Fomitch; but for the other prisoners they had nothing but contempt and aversion. The only one they had any real respect for was the aged "old believer." For all this, during all the time I spent at the convict establishment, I never knew a single prisoner to reproach them with either their birth, or religious opinions, or convictions, as is so usual with our common people in their relations with people of different condition, especially if these happen to be foreigners. The fact is, they cannot take the foreigner seriously; to the Russian common people he seems a merely grotesque, comical creature. Our convicts had and showed much more respect for the Polish n.o.bles than for us Russians, but I don't think the Poles cared about the matter, or took any notice of the difference.

I spoke just now of T--ski, and have something more to say of him. When he had with his friend to leave the first place a.s.signed to them as residence in their banishment to come to our fortress, he carried his friend B---- nearly the whole way. B---- was of quite a weak frame, and in bad health, and became exhausted before half of the first march was accomplished. They had first been banished to Y--gorsk, where they lived in tolerable comfort; life was much less hard there than in our fortress. But in consequence of a correspondence with the exiles in one of the other towns--a quite innocent exchange of letters--it was thought necessary to remove them to our jail to be under the more direct surveillance of the government. Until they came M--tski had been quite alone, and dreadful must have been his sufferings in that first year of his banishment.

J--ski was the old man always deep in prayer, of whom I spoke a little earlier. All the political convicts were quite young men while J--ski was at least fifty years old. He was a worthy, gentlemanlike person, if eccentric. T--ski and B--ski detested him, and never spoke to him; they insisted upon it that he was too obstinate and troublesome to put up with, and I was obliged to admit it was so. I believe that at a convict establishment--as in every place where people have to be together, whether they like it or not--people are more ready to quarrel with and detest one another than under other circ.u.mstances. Many causes contributed to the squabbles that were, unfortunately, always going on.

J--ski was really disagreeable and narrow-minded; not one of those about him was on good terms with him. He and I did not come to a rupture, but we were never on a really friendly footing. I fancy that he was a strong mathematician. One day he explained to me in his half-Russian, half-Polish jargon, a system of astronomy of his own; I have been told that he had written a work upon the subject which the learned world had received with derision; I fancy his reasonings on some things had got twisted. He used to be on his knees praying for a whole day sometimes, which made the convicts respect him exceedingly during the remnant of life he had to pa.s.s there; he died under my eyes at the jail after a very trying illness. He had won the consideration of the prisoners, from the first moment of his coming in, on account of what had happened with the Major and him. When they were brought afoot from Y--gorsk to our fortress, they were not shaved on the road at all, their hair and beards had grown to great lengths when they were brought before the Major. That worthy foamed like a madman; he was wild with indignation at such infraction of discipline, though it was none of their fault.

"My G.o.d! did you ever see anything like it?" he roared; "they are vagabonds, brigands."

J--ski knew very little Russian, and fancied that he was asking them if they were brigands or vagabonds, so he answered:

"We are political prisoners, not rogues and vagabonds."

"So-o-o! You mean impudence! Clod!" howled the Major. "To the guard-house with him; a hundred strokes of the rod at once, this instant, I say!"

They gave the old man the punishment; he lay flat on the ground under the strokes without the slightest resistance, kept his hand in his teeth, and bore it all without a murmur, and without moving a muscle.

B--ski and T--ski arrived at the jail as this was all going on, and M--ski was waiting for them at the princ.i.p.al gate, knowing that they were just coming in; he threw himself on their neck, although he had never seen them before. Utterly disgusted at the way the Major had received them, they told M--ski all about the cruel business that had just occurred. M--ski told me later that he was quite beside himself with rage when he heard it.

"I could not contain myself for pa.s.sion," he said, "I shook as though with ague. I waited for J--ski at the great gate, for he would come straight that way from the guard-house after his punishment. The gate was opened, and there I saw pa.s.s before me J--ski, his lips all white and trembling, his face pale as death; he did not look at a single person, and pa.s.sed through the groups of convicts a.s.sembled in the court-yard--they knew a n.o.ble had just been subjected to punishment--went into the barrack, went straight to his place, and, without a word, dropped down on his knees for prayer. The prisoners were surprised and even affected. When I saw this old man with white hairs, who had left behind him at home a wife and children, kneeling and praying after that scandalous treatment, I rushed away from the barrack, and for a couple of hours felt as if I had gone stark, staring, raving mad, or blind drunk.... From that first moment the convicts were full of deference and consideration for J--ski; what particularly pleased them, was that he did not utter a cry when undergoing the punishment."

But one must be fair and tell the truth about this sort of thing; this sad story is not an instance of what frequently occurs in the treatment by the authorities of transported n.o.blemen, Russian or Polish; and this isolated case affords no basis for pa.s.sing judgment upon that treatment.

My anecdote merely shows that you may light upon a bad man anywhere and everywhere. And if it happen that such a one is in absolute command of a jail, and if he happen to have a grudge against one of the prisoners, the lot of such a one will be indeed very far from enviable. But the administrative chiefs who regulate and supervise convict labour in Siberia, and from whom subordinates take their tone as well as their orders, are careful to exercise a discriminating treatment in the case of persons of n.o.ble birth, and, in some cases, grant them special indulgences as compared with the lot of convicts of lower condition.

There are obvious reasons for this; these heads of departments are n.o.bles themselves, they know that men of that cla.s.s must not be driven to extremity; cases have been known where n.o.bles have refused to submit to corporal punishment, and flung themselves desperately on their tormentors with very grave and serious consequences indeed; moreover--and this, I think, is the leading cause of the good treatment--some time ago, thirty-five years at least, there were transported to Siberia quite a crowd of n.o.blemen;[9] these were of such correct and irreproachable demeanour, and held themselves so high, that the heads of departments fell into the way, which they never afterwards left, of regarding criminals of n.o.ble birth and ordinary convicts in quite a different manner; and men in lower place took their cue from them.

Many of these, no doubt, were little pleased with that disposition in their superiors; such persons were pleased enough when they could do exactly as they liked in the matter, but this did not often happen, they were kept well within bounds; I have reason to be satisfied of this and I will say why. I was put in the second category, a cla.s.sification of those condemned to hard labour, which was primarily and princ.i.p.ally composed of convicts who had been serfs, under military superintendence; now this second category, or cla.s.s, was much harder than the first (of the mines) or the third (manufacturing work). It was harder, not only for the n.o.bles but for the other convicts too, because the governing and administrative methods and _personnel_ in it were wholly military, and were pretty much the same in type as those of the convict establishments in Russia. The men in official position were severer, the general treatment more rigorous than in the two other cla.s.ses; the men were never out of irons, an escort of soldiers was always present, you were always, or nearly so, within stone walls; and things were quite different in the other cla.s.ses, at least so the convicts said, and there were those among them who had every reason to know. They would all have gladly gone off to the mines, which the law cla.s.sified as the worst and last punishment, it was their constant dream and desire to do so. All those who had been in the Russian convict establishments spoke with horror of them, and declared that there was no h.e.l.l like them, that Siberia was a paradise compared with confinement in the fortresses in Russia.

If, then, it is the case that we n.o.bles were treated with special consideration in the establishment I was confined in, which was under direct control of the Governor-General, and administered entirely on military principles, there must have been some greater kindliness in the treatment of the convicts of the first and third category or cla.s.s. I think I can speak with some authority about what went on throughout Siberia in these respects, and I based my views, as to this, upon all that I heard from convicts of these cla.s.ses. We, in our prison, were under much more rigorous surveillance than was elsewhere practised; we were favoured with no sort of exemptions from the ordinary rules as regards work and confinement, and the wearing of chains; we could not do anything for ourselves to get immunity from the rules, for I, at least, knew quite well that, _in the good old time which was quite of yesterday_, there had been so much intriguing to undermine the credit of officials that the authorities were greatly afraid of informers, and that, as things stood, to show indulgence to a convict was regarded as a crime. Everybody, therefore, authorities and convicts alike, was in fear of what might happen; we of the n.o.bles were thus quite down to the level of the other convicts; the only point we were favoured in was in regard to corporal punishment--but I think that we should have had even that inflicted on us had we done anything for which it was prescribed, for equality as to punishment was strictly enjoined or practised; what I mean is, that we were not wantonly, causelessly, mishandled like the other prisoners.

When the Governor got to know of the punishment inflicted on J--ski, he was seriously angry with the Major, and ordered him to be more careful for the future. The thing got very generally known. We learned also that the Governor-General, who had great confidence in our Major, and who liked him because of his exact observance of legal bounds, and thought highly of his qualities in the service, gave him a sharp scolding. And our Major took the lesson to heart. I have no doubt it was this prevented his having M--ski beaten, which he would much have liked to do, being much influenced by the slanderous things A--f said about M----; but the Major could never get a fair pretext for doing so, however much he persecuted and set spies upon his proposed victim; so he had to deny himself that pleasure. The J--ski affair became known all through the town, and public opinion condemned the Major; some persons reproached him openly for what he had done, and some even insulted him.

The first occasion on which the man crossed my path may as well be mentioned. We had alarming things reported to us--to me and another n.o.bleman under sentence--about the abominable character of this man, while we were still at Tobolsk. Men who had been sentenced a long while back to twenty-five years of the misery, n.o.bles as we were, and who had visited us so kindly during our provisional sojourn in the first prison, had warned us what sort of man we were to be under; they had also promised to do all they could for us with their friends to see that he hurt us as little as possible. And, in fact, they did write to the three daughters of the Governor-General, who, I believe, interceded on our behalf with their father. But what could he do? No more, of course, than tell the Major to be fair in applying the rules and regulations to our case. It was about three in the afternoon that my companion and myself arrived in the town; our escort took us at once to our tyrant. We remained waiting for him in the ante-chamber while they went to find the next-in-command at the prison. As soon as the latter had come, in walked the Major. We saw an inflamed scarlet face that boded no good, and affected us quite painfully; he seemed like a sort of spider about to throw itself on a poor fly wriggling in its web.

"What's your name, man?" said he to my companion. He spoke with a harsh, jerky voice, as if he wanted to overawe us.

My friend gave his name.

"And you?" said he, turning to me and glaring at me behind his spectacles.