[CHAPTER XX]
IN ST. PETERSBURG
A police raid that I attended in St. Petersburg, although not directly connected with any tramp experience there, has remained memorable, and, after all, was due to my interest in tramp lodging houses. I explored the local vagabonds' resorts pretty carefully during my investigations, visiting among others the notorious Dom Viazewsky, the worst slum of the kind I have ever seen anywhere. On a winter's night in 1896 (the conditions have not changed, I am told), 10,400 men, women and children slept in five two-story buildings enclosed in a space about the size of a baseball diamond. Only a hundred paces away is the Anitchkoff Palace. The inmates of the Dom Viazewsky are the scum of the city's population, diseased, criminal and defiant.
On one occasion, a woman belonging to the Salvation Army was met in the dead of night by a police sergeant and some patrolmen, as she was leaving the most dilapidated of the buildings. She had been doing missionary work.
"My God!" the sergeant exclaimed, seeing her unattended. "You in here alone?"
"Oh, no, not alone, officer," the intrepid little woman replied. "God is with me."
"Huh," the officer grunted. "I wouldn't come in here alone with God for a big sum."
The raid which I attended was made on a smaller lodging house, not far from the Alexander Nevsky monastery. In a way, it was got up for my benefit, I fear, and I was later very sorry about it all. The then chief of detectives was a pleasant old gentleman, called Scheremaityfbsky. I told him that it would interest me to see how his men "worked," and he introduced me to a stalwart chap—I forget his name—who kindly offered to show me how a suspicious place was raided.
We all foregathered first at the precinct station house nearest the place of the raid, at about nine o'clock in the evening. A Scotch friend accompanied me. Here were the so-called detectives, or policemen, in citizens' clothes. A squad of uniformed patrolmen had already been sent on ahead to surround the lodging house and prevent any departures. Pretty soon we followed after them in single file, and I could hear passers-by on the sidewalk whisper, "Polizie! Polizie!" The way they used the word and stopped to stare at us might have given a stranger the impression that we were on a portentous mission, which might involve the arrest of the entire city. Arriving at the lodging house, the gates were closed behind us, and we assembled in a lower corridor, where all hands received candles. The patrolmen outside forbade both entrance and escape.