“By all means!” said I. And from that minute—perhaps it was the beginning of 1831—we were inseparable friends; and from that minute Ketcher’s friendly laugh or fierce shout became a part of my life at all its stages.
The acquaintance with Vadim brought a new and gentler element into our camp.
As before, our chief meeting-place was Ogaryóv’s house. His invalid father had gone to live in the country, and he lived alone on the ground-floor of their Moscow house, which was near the University and had a great attraction for us all. Ogaryóv had that magnetic power which forms the first point of crystallisation in any medley of disordered atoms, provided the necessary affinity exists. Though scattered in all directions, they become imperceptibly the heart of an organism. In his bright cheerful room with its red and gold wall-paper, amid the perpetual smell of tobacco and punch and other—I was going to say, eatables and drinkables, but now I remember that there was seldom anything to eat but cheese—we often spent the time from dark till dawn in heated argument and sometimes in noisy merriment. But, side by side with that hospitable students’ room, there grew more and more dear to us another house, in which we learned—I might say, for the first time—respect for family life.
Vadim often deserted our discussions and went off home: when he had not seen his mother and sisters for some time, he became restless. To us our little club was the centre of the world, and we thought it strange that he should prefer the society of his family; were not we a family too?
Then he introduced us to his family. They had lately returned from Siberia; they were ruined, yet they bore that stamp of dignity which calamity engraves, not on every sufferer, but on those who have borne misfortune with courage.
§23
Their father was arrested in Paul’s reign, having been informed against for revolutionary designs. He was thrown into prison at Schlüsselburg and then banished to Siberia. When Alexander restored thousands of his father’s exiles, Passek was forgotten. He was a nephew of the Passek who became Governor of Poland, and might have claimed a share of the fortune which had now passed into other hands.
While detained at Schlüsselburg, Passek had married the daughter of an officer of the garrison. The young girl knew that exile would be his fate, but she was not deterred by that prospect. In Siberia they made a shift at first to get on, by selling their last belongings, but the pressure of poverty grew steadily worse and worse, and the process was hastened by their increasing family. Yet neither destitution nor manual toil, nor the absence of warm clothing and sometimes of daily food—nothing prevented them from rearing a whole family of lion-cubs, who inherited from their father his dauntless pride and self-confidence. He educated them by his example, and they were taught by their mother’s self-sacrifice and bitter tears. The girls were not inferior to the boys in heroic constancy. Why shrink from using the right word?—they were a family of heroes. No one would believe what they endured and did for one another; and they held their heads high through it all.
When they were in Siberia, the three sisters had at one time a single pair of shoes between them; and they kept it to walk out in, in order to hide their need from the public eye.
At the beginning of the year 1826 Passek was permitted to return to Russia. It was winter weather, and it was a terrible business for so large a family to travel from Tobolsk without furs and without money; but exile becomes most unbearable when it is over, and they were longing to be gone. They contrived it somehow. The foster-mother of one of the children, a peasant woman, brought them her poor savings as a contribution, and only asked that they would take her too; the post-boys brought them as far as the Russian frontier for little payment or none at all; the children took turns in driving or walking; and so they completed the long winter journey from the Ural ridge to Moscow. Moscow was their dream and their hope; and at Moscow they found starvation waiting for them.