§4
My next visitor was a police-officer, not Colonel Miller this time. He summoned me to a large, rather fine room where five men were sitting at a table, all wearing military uniform except one who was old and decrepit. They were smoking cigars and carrying on a lively conversation, lying back in their chairs with their jackets unbuttoned. The Chief Commissioner, Tsinski, was in the chair.
When I came in, he turned to a figure sitting modestly in a corner of the room and said, “May I trouble Your Reverence?” Then I made out that the figure in the corner was an old priest with a white beard and a mottled face. The old man was drowsy and wanted to go home; he was thinking of something else and yawning with his hand before his face. In a slow and rather sing-song voice he began to admonish me: he said it was sinful to conceal the truth from persons appointed by the Tsar, and useless, because the ear of God hears the unspoken word; he did not fail to quote the inevitable texts—that all power is from God, and that we must render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Finally, he bade me kiss the Holy Gospel and the True Cross in confirmation of a vow (which however I did not take and he did not ask) to reveal the whole truth frankly and openly.
When he had done, he began hastily to wrap up the Gospel and the Cross; and the President, barely rising in his seat, told him he might go. Then he turned to me and translated the priest’s address into the language of this world. “One thing I shall add to what the priest has said—it is impossible for you to conceal the truth even if you wish to.” He pointed to piles of papers, letters, and portraits, scattered on purpose over the table: “Frank confession alone can improve your position; it depends on yourself, whether you go free or are sent to the Caucasus.”
Questions were then submitted in writing, some of them amusingly simple—“Do you know of the existence of any secret society? Do you belong to any society, learned or otherwise? Who are its members? Where do they meet?”
To all this it was perfectly simple to answer “No” and nothing else.
“I see you know nothing,” said the President, reading over the answers; “I warned you beforehand that you will complicate your situation.”
And that was the end of the first examination.