Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

The elements of a thousand plots will be apparent even at this early stage of the story. But far more fabulous-seeming things followed immediately.

Ubrik took the basket containing the little girl and started home. On the way, following his unhappy weakness, he entered a tavern and began to spend some of the money he had been paid. He got drunk, staggered home without the little girl in her basket and returned the following day to find that a nameless Jew had claimed this strange parcel and disappeared.

Not long afterwards, it seems, Countess Satorin, plagued by her natural feelings, came to see her daughter and had to be told the story. The outraged mother finally exacted an oath that he devote his worthless life to the quest for the stolen child. Ubrik began his work, apparently sobered by the death of his wife, the theft of the little girl and the charge her mother had laid upon him. After several years he rose in the ranks of the Russian intelligence service and was made captain of the Warsaw police.

About this time the keeper of the inn where Ubrik had lost the little girl was seized with a mortal disease and called the police captain to his bedside, confessing that he had turned the little girl over to a Jewish adventurer named Aaron Koenigsberger, whose address in Germany the dying man supplied. Captain Ubrik proceeded to Germany, confronted Koenigsberger with the confession of his accomplice and dragged the abductor back to Poland to face the courts. Koenigsberger, to avoid punishment, assisted in the search for the little girl and guided Captain Ubrik to Kiev, where he had sold the child to another Jew named Gerson. The Gersons appeared to be respectable people, who had taken the little girl to console them in their own childlessness. They deplored that she had been stolen several years earlier by a band of Gypsies. Captain Ubrik, at length satisfied that this story was true, set out on an Odyssean journey in quest of the child. For more than eleven years he followed Gypsy bands through all parts of western and southern Russia and into Austria and Germany. At last, in a village not an hour’s journey from Warsaw, he discovered the missing daughter of the Countess Satorin and returned her to her mother, as a grown woman who believed herself to be a Jewess and could now at last explain why her supposed people had always said she looked like a “Goy.”

The woman recovered as Judith Gerson seems to have been satisfactorily documented as the missing daughter of the countess. At any rate, she was taken into the Satorin family and christened Elka Satorin. Her father had meantime died, leaving the bulk of his fortune and the title to his supposed son, Alexander. Elka Satorin, however, inherited her mother’s property and, a few years later, married the boy who had been substituted for her in the cradle.

This was the strange match from which Barbara Ubrik was spawned into a life that was to be darkened with more sinister adventures. The year of her birth is given as 1828, so that she was a tot of three when her father was dragged away to the marshes and mines of Russia in Asia.

I must confess that I set down so fantastic a tale only after hesitation and skeptical misgiving. It, and what is to follow, reads like a piece of motion picture fustian, an old wives’ tale. The meter of reasonableness and probability is not there. The whole yarn is too crudely colored. It is sensation; it is melodrama. But it seems also to be the truth. My sources are old books by reputable chroniclers, containing long quotations from the story of Masilewski, the detective, from the testimony of Wolcech Zarski, the lover who appeared in Barbara Ubrik’s life at a disastrous moment, from the proceedings of an ecclesiastical trial. Indeed, the whole thing seems to be a matter of court record in Warsaw and in Cracow, the old Polish capital. This being so, we must conclude that fiction has been once more detected in the act of going to life even for its ultimate extravagances.

The years following the great revolt of 1831 were full of torment for Poland. Nicholas I, weary of what he termed the obstinacy of the people, began a series of the most dire repressions, including the closing of the Polish universities, the revocation of the constitution, the persecution of the Roman priests and a general effort to abolish the Polish language and national culture. The old nobility, made up of devout Roman Catholics and chauvinistic patriots, was especially sought out for the reactionary discipline of the czar, and a family like that of Barbara Ubrik, whose chief had been sent to Siberia for treason, was naturally among the worst afflicted.

The attempt from St. Petersburg to uproot the church of Rome was the cause of an intense devotionalism among the Poles, with the result that many men and women of distinguished families gave themselves up to the religious life and entered the monasteries and convents. This passion touched the Ubriks as well as others and Barbara, naturally of a passionate and enthusiastic nature, decided as a girl that she would retire from the world and devote herself to her forbidden faith. Her mother, Elka Satorin-Ubrik, once a ward of the Jewish family in Kiev and later the prisoner of the Gypsies, strongly opposed such a course, but in 1844, when she was 16 years old, the girl could no longer be restrained. She presented herself to the Carmelite cloister of St. Theresa in Warsaw in the spring of that year and was admitted to the novitiate.

From the beginning, however, the spirited young noblewoman seems to have been most ill-adapted to the stern regulations hedging life in a monastery of the unshod cenobite Carmelites. She had brought into the austere atmosphere of the nunnery something that has played havoc with rules and good intentions under far happier environments than that of the cloister; namely, young beauty. The older and less favored nuns saw it first with misgiving and soon with envy, a sin which seems not altogether foreign to the holiest places. What was more directly in line with evil consequences, Father Gratian, the still youthful confessor of the cloister, also saw and appraised the charms of the youthful sister and was quite humanly moved.