When the peasants in one village failed to respond Catherine and her comrades moved on to another town, and little by little they brought the doctrines of revolution to the mass of ignorant people, who were looking for some means to better themselves and realize a little of the happiness of life.
The life of a traveling preacher of this sort was filled with hardship. Catherine, who had been used to every luxury, was forced to eat the coarsest food and often to go hungry. She had to sleep in houses that were filled with dirt and vermin. Her audiences were stupid in the extreme, and were often as afraid of the revolutionists as they were of the Cossacks and the Czar's officials. Moreover there was always the danger of arrest and imprisonment, followed by exile to Siberia, or death on the gallows.
One day in the town of Zlatopol, where Catherine was carrying on her revolutionary work, a police officer stopped her and demanded her passport. This passport was forged and when she showed it he suspected her. Then, when he commenced to treat her with the indignities to which the peasants were accustomed she resented it, disclosing the fact that she was from the upper classes. Her pack was torn open and the revolutionary pamphlets were found. The case against her was complete.
She was hurried to prison and thrown into a foul dungeon, where the filth and suffering forced on her were indescribable. And here she was kept for long, weary months until her case should come to trial.
It was in this prison that she first learned the secret code that prisoners in Russia used to communicate with one another. One day, as she lay on the bundle of rags that formed her couch, she heard a faint tapping on an iron pipe that ran through her cell. She responded, and on the pipe tapped out the alphabet, one tap standing for "a", two for "b" and so on. From this laborous method she learned another code which was the one generally in use among the imprisoned revolutionists; and she spent long hours communicating with friends in different parts of the prison who were in solitary confinement like herself, and whom she had never seen.
At last Catherine was brought up for trial and was sentenced to exile in Siberia. Because she told her judges that she refused to acknowledge the authority of the Czar she was given an extra sentence of five years at hard labor in the mines. She had already been in prison several years awaiting trial—and out of three hundred who had been imprisoned in the same jail more than one hundred had died or become insane.
Catherine then commenced a weary two months journey into Siberia, where she was first to go to prison and later remain as an exile. The prisoners traveled in covered wagons, that jolted and bumped endlessly over the rough roads, and at night they were thrown into roadside jails, filthy beyond description. For eight long weeks this journey continued until Catherine reached the prison at Kara.
Here she was not compelled to work after all, but was forced to eat the vilest food and wear out her soul in idleness, with no occupation except to witness the sufferings of her companions. When her prison term was ended she was taken to a little town called Barguzon near the Arctic Circle, where the thermometer often dropped to fifty below zero, and here she was kept under close guard for many years.
Words cannot describe the misery of the Siberian exiles as Catherine saw them—men, women and children, sick and forlorn, compelled to march for miles over the bleak countryside, surrounded by brutal guards who prodded them on with their bayonets. After she had been for some time at Barguzon she tried to escape with three men who were also political exiles, and sought to gain the Pacific coast a thousand miles away, where she hoped she might take ship for America. She was pursued and recaptured, and given another term in the prison at Kara on account of her attempt to escape.
Catherine was a young woman when she went into exile; she remained until she was old and her hairs were gray before her term of punishment ended. She had been in exile more than twenty years and in all that time she had not seen one of her relatives or heard the voice of a friend. At last she was set free.