Part 38

He hesitated for some time, but then, regaining his audacity, he said, ‘Polakóff has admitted that this letter of yours was written to him.’

Now I knew he was lying. Polakóff would have admitted everything concerning himself; but he would have preferred to be marched to Siberia rather than to involve another person. So, looking straight in the face of the procureur, I replied, ‘No, sir, he has never said that, and you know perfectly well that your words are not true.’

He became furious, or pretended to be so. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘if you wait here a moment, I will bring you Polakóff’s written statement to that effect. He is in the next room under examination.’

‘Ready to wait as long as you like.’

I sat on a sofa, smoking countless cigarettes. The statement did not come, and never came.

Of course there was no such statement. I met Polakóff in 1878 at Geneva, whence we made a delightful excursion to the Aletsch glacier. I need not say that his answers were what I expected them to be: he denied having any knowledge of the letter, or of the person the letters V. E. represented. Scores of books used to be taken from me to him, and back to me, and the letter was found in a book, while the envelope was discovered in the pocket of an old coat. He was kept several weeks under arrest, and then released, owing to the intervention of his scientific friends. V. E. was not molested, and delivered my papers in due time.

Later on, each time I saw the procureur, I teased him with the question: ‘And what about Polakóff’s statement?’

I was not taken back to my cell, but an hour later the procureur came in, accompanied by a gendarme officer. ‘Our examination,’ he announced to me, ‘is now terminated; you will be removed to another place.’

A four-wheeled cab stood at the gate. I was asked to enter it, and a stout gendarme officer, of Caucasian origin, sat by my side. I spoke to him, but he only snored. The cab crossed the Chain Bridge, then passed the parade grounds and ran along the canals, as if avoiding the more frequented thoroughfares. ‘Are we going to the Litóvsky prison?’ I asked the officer, as I knew that many of my comrades were already there. He made no reply. The system of absolute silence which was maintained toward me for the next two years began in this four-wheeled cab; but when we went rolling over the Palace Bridge I understood that I was taken to the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.

I admired the beautiful river, knowing that I should not soon see it again. The sun was going down. Thick grey clouds were hanging in the west above the Gulf of Finland, while light clouds floated over my head, showing here and there patches of blue sky. Then the carriage turned to the left and entered a dark arched passage, the gate of the fortress.

‘Now I shall have to remain here for a couple of years,’ I remarked to the officer.

‘No, why so long?’ replied the Circassian who, now that we were within the fortress, had regained the power of speech. ‘Your affair is almost terminated, and may be brought into court in a fortnight.’

‘My affair,’ I replied, ‘is very simple; but before bringing me to a court you will try to arrest all the socialists in Russia, and they are many, very many; in two years you will not have done.’ I did not then realize how prophetic my remark was.

The carriage stopped at the door of the military commander of the fortress, and we entered his reception hall. General Korsákoff, a thin old man, came in, with a peevish expression on his face. The officer spoke to him in a subdued voice, and the old man answered, ‘All right,’ looking at him with a sort of scorn, and then turned his eyes toward me. It was evident that he was not at all pleased to receive a new inmate, and that he felt slightly ashamed of his rôle; but he seemed to add, ‘I am a soldier, and only do my duty.’ Presently we got into the carriage again, but soon stopped before another gate, where we were kept a long time until a detachment of soldiers opened it from the inside. Proceeding on foot through narrow passages, we came to a third iron gate, opening into a dark arched passage, from which we entered a small room where darkness and dampness prevailed.

Several non-commissioned officers of the fortress troops moved noiselessly about in their soft felt boots, without speaking a word, while the governor signed the Circassian’s book acknowledging the reception of a new prisoner. I was required to take off all my clothes, and to put on the prison dress--a green flannel dressing-gown, immense woollen stockings of an incredible thickness, and boat-shaped yellow slippers, so big that I could hardly keep them on my feet when I tried to walk. I always hated dressing-gowns and slippers, and the thick stockings inspired me with disgust. I had to take off even a silk undergarment, which in the damp fortress it would have been especially desirable to retain, but that could not be allowed. I naturally began to protest and to make a noise about this, and after an hour or so it was restored to me by order of General Korsákoff.

Then I was taken through a dark passage, where I saw armed sentries walking about, and was put into a cell. A heavy oak door was shut behind me, a key turned in the lock, and I was alone in a half-dark room.

PART FIFTH

THE FORTRESS--THE ESCAPE

This was, then, the terrible fortress where so much of the true strength of Russia had perished during the last two centuries, and the very name of which is uttered in St. Petersburg in a hushed voice.

Here Peter I. tortured his son Alexis and killed him with his own hand; here the Princess Tarakánova was kept in a cell which filled with water during an inundation--the rats climbing upon her to save themselves from drowning; here the terrible Minich tortured his enemies, and Catherine II. buried alive those who objected to her having murdered her husband. And from the times of Peter I., for a hundred and seventy years, the annals of this mass of stone which rises from the Nevá in front of the Winter Palace were annals of murder and torture, of men buried alive, condemned to a slow death, or driven to insanity in the loneliness of the dark and damp dungeons.

Here the Decembrists, who were the first to unfurl in Russia the banner of republican rule and the abolition of serfdom, underwent their first experiences of martyrdom, and traces of them may still be found in the Russian Bastille. Here were imprisoned the poets Ryléeff and Shevchénko, Dostoévsky, Bakúnin, Chernyshévsky, Písareff, and so many others of our best contemporary writers. Here Karakózoff was tortured and hanged.

Here, somewhere in the Alexis ravelin, was still kept Necháieff, who was given up to Russia by Switzerland as a common-law criminal, but was treated as a dangerous political prisoner, and would never again see the light. In the same ravelin were also two or three men whom, rumour said, Alexander II., because of what they knew, and what others must not know, about some palace mystery, ordered to be imprisoned for life. One of them, adorned with a long grey beard, was lately seen by an acquaintance of mine in the mysterious fortress.

All these shadows rose before my imagination. But my thoughts fixed especially on Bakúnin, who, though he had been shut up in an Austrian fortress, after 1848, for two years chained to the wall, and then was handed over to Nicholas I. who kept him in this fortress for six years longer, came out, when the Iron Tsar’s death released him after an eight years’ imprisonment, fresher and fuller of vigour than his comrades who had remained at liberty. ‘He has lived it through,’ I said to myself, ‘and I must, too; I will not succumb here!’

My first movement was to approach the window, which was placed so high that I could hardly reach it with my lifted hand. It was a long, low opening, cut in a wall five feet thick, and protected by an iron grating and a double iron window-frame. At a distance of a dozen yards from this window I saw the outer wall of the fortress, of immense thickness, on the top of which I could make out a grey sentry-box. Only by looking upward could I perceive a bit of the sky.

I made a minute inspection of the room where I had now to spend no one could say how many years. From the position of the high chimney of the Mint I guessed that I was in the south-western corner of the fortress, in a bastion overlooking the Nevá. The building in which I was incarcerated, however, was not the bastion itself, but what is called in a fortification a reduit; that is, an inner two-storied pentagonal piece of masonry which rises a little higher than the walls of the bastion, and is meant to contain two tiers of guns. This room of mine was a casemate destined for a big gun, and the window was an embrasure. The rays of the sun could never penetrate it; even in summer they are lost in the thickness of the wall. The room held an iron bed, a small oak table, and an oak stool. The floor was covered with painted felt, and the walls with yellow paper. However, in order to deaden sounds, the paper was not put on the wall itself; it was pasted upon canvas, and behind the canvas I discovered a wire grating, back of which was a layer of felt; only beyond the felt could I reach the stone wall. At the inner side of the room there was a washstand, and a thick oak door in which I made out a locked opening, for passing food through, and a little slit protected by glass and by a shutter from the outside: this was the ‘Judas,’ through which the prisoner could be spied upon at every moment. The sentry who stood in the passage frequently lifted the shutter and looked inside--his boots squeaking as he crept toward the door. I tried to speak to him; then the eye which I could see through the slit assumed an expression of terror, and the shutter was immediately let down, only to be furtively opened a minute or two later; but I could not get a word of response from the sentry.

Absolute silence reigned all round. I dragged my stool to the window and looked upon the little bit of sky that I could see; I tried to catch some sound from the Nevá, or from the town on the opposite side of the river; but I could not. This dead silence began to oppress me, and I tried to sing, slowly at first, and louder and louder afterwards.

‘Have I then to say farewell to love for ever’--I caught myself singing from my favourite opera of Glinka, ‘Ruslán and Ludmíla.’

‘Sir, do not sing, please,’ a bass voice resounded through the food-window in my door.