But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is not so gracious. By the expenditure of a few more coins I got my dog through the Customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about me. A miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and he—his lean face puckered up into a snarl—was returning them snappish answers; the whole scene suggested some half-starved mongrel being worried by school-boys. A slight informality had been discovered in his passport, so a fellow traveller with whom I had made friends informed me. He had no roubles in his pocket, and in consequence they were sending him back to St. Petersburg—some eighteen hours’ journey—in a wagon that in England would not be employed for the transport of oxen.
It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom; they would drop in every now and then, look at him as he sat crouched in a corner of the waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders whether it is thinking.
The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things seem to be known to him. There is a prison on the banks of the Neva, in St. Petersburg. They say such things are done with now, but up till very recently there existed a small cell therein, below the level of the ice, and prisoners placed there would be found missing a day or two afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the fishes of the Baltic. They talk of such like things among themselves: the sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fire, the field-workers going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by the rattle of the looms.
I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago, and there was one I was sent to in a small street leading out of the Avenue Louise. It was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small. They covered the walls of every room.
“These pictures,” explained to me the landlady, an old, haggard-looking woman, “will not be left, I am taking them with me to London. They are all the work of my husband. He is arranging an exhibition.”
The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was a widow, who had been living in Brussels eking out a precarious existence as a lodging-house keeper for the last ten years.
“You have married again?” I questioned her.
The woman smiled.
“Not again. I was married eighteen years ago in Russia. My husband was transported to Siberia a few days after we were married, and I have never seen him since.”
“I should have followed him,” she added, “only every year we thought he was going to be set free.”