My greetings to all.
Yours,
M.
P.S. The treatment is good. My health: Fever, cough, headache.
I forgot to say my comradeship in the party of the revolutionists is taken by me, not only as an acceptance of its program and tactics, but much higher. It means to me sacrifice of life, of hopes, of sentiments, for the realization of its ideas. It means to dispose of each minute of life in such a way that the cause shall gain.
M.
Luchenovsky was succeeded by a wise and humane man, who valued human life, even that of simple peasants. In the province of Tamboff Cossacks ceased to riot through the villages, looting at will and preying upon the helpless inhabitants. The taking of this one life, at the sacrifice of her own, ended for the time, at least, an era of darkness in Tamboff and saved the honor of untold women and the lives of many.
The two officers who so foully abused her went unpunished so far as the Russian authorities were concerned, but after the lapse of a few weeks Abramov was found dead in the street one night, and several weeks later Zhdanov’s lifeless body was also discovered.
Hundreds of men in Tamboff had wished and prayed for the death of Luchenovsky. But only a girl dared. Whether that girl had hysteria (as some asserted), or not, is of small consequence. Joan of Arc was a neurasthenic.
That night, after my visit to Spiradonova, when dark had settled over Tamboff, I stumbled down a littered street not more than a hundred yards from the prison to a poor little cottage, once painted red, now weather-worn and shabby. Within sat a middle-aged woman with large, dark eyes and creased, anxious face. I found her in an inner room, sitting with folded arms by a low-burning lamp. “Yes, Marie Spiradonova is my daughter,” she said. Then with quiet voice, not untouched with pride, she told me about the childhood days of the girl now shut apart from her by prison walls. She told me how from an early age Marie was studious, and thought to study medicine. Her three sisters all turned toward medicine, and two are dentists. Marie’s ambition was to be a doctor. She studied very hard, but when her country fell under deeper and darker oppressions, she could think of nothing but the sufferings of her people, so she gave up everything to serve the movement that was making for freedom.
I knew that two of Marie’s sisters were also in prison at that time, one for merely having received a letter from Marie, and the other had been taken as a suspected propagandist. There was no direct charge against her.