The Governor of Perm was a Little Russian; he was not hard upon the exiles and behaved reasonably in other respects. Like a mole which adds grain to grain in some underground repository, so he kept putting by a trifle for a rainy day, without anyone being the wiser.
§6
From some dim idea of keeping a check over us, he ordered that all the exiles residing at Perm should report themselves at his house, at ten every Saturday morning. He came in smoking his pipe and ascertained, by means of a list which he carried, whether all were present; if anyone was missing, he sent to enquire the reason; he hardly ever spoke to anyone before dismissing us. Thus I made the acquaintance in his drawing-room of all the Poles whom he had told me I was to avoid.
The day after I reached Perm, my keeper departed, and I was at liberty for the first time since my arrest—at liberty, in a little town on the Siberian frontier, with no experience of life and no comprehension of the sphere in which I was now forced to live.
From the nursery I had passed straight to the lecture-room, and from the lecture-room to a small circle of friends, an intimate world of theories and dreams, without contact with practical life; then came prison, with its opportunities for reflexion; and contact with life was only beginning now and here, by the ridge of the Ural Mountains.
Practical life made itself felt at once: the day after my arrival I went to look for lodgings with the porter at the Governor’s office; he took me to a large one-storeyed house; and, though I explained that I wanted a small house, or, better still, part of a house, he insisted that I should go in.
The lady who owned the house made me sit on the sofa. Hearing that I came from Moscow, she asked if I had seen M. Kabrit there. I replied that I had never in my life heard a name like it.
“Come, come!” said the old lady; “I mean M. Kabrit,” and she gave his Christian name and patronymic. “You don’t say, bátyushka, that you don’t know him! He is our Vice-Governor!”
“Well, I spent nine months in prison,” I said smiling, “and perhaps that accounts for my not hearing of him.”
“It may be so. And so you want to hire the little house, bátyushka?”