‘I was always the same.’
‘Why! Were you such in the corps of pages?’ he asked me with terror.
‘In the corps I was a boy, and what is indefinite in boyhood grows definite in manhood.’
He asked me some other similar questions, and as he spoke I distinctly saw what he was driving at. He was trying to obtain avowals, and my imagination vividly pictured him saying to his brother: ‘All these examining magistrates are imbeciles. He gave them no replies, but I talked to him ten minutes, and he told me everything.’ That began to annoy me; and when he said to me something to this effect, ‘How could you have anything to do with all these people—peasants and people with no names?’—I sharply turned upon him and said, ‘I have told you already that I have given my replies to the examining magistrate.’ Then he abruptly left the cell.
Later, the soldiers of the guard made quite a legend of that visit. The person who came in a carriage to carry me away at the time of my escape wore a military cap, and, having sandy whiskers, bore a faint resemblance to the Grand Duke Nicholas. So a tradition grew up amongst the soldiers of the St. Petersburg garrison that it was the grand duke himself who came to rescue me and kidnapped me. Thus are legends created even in times of newspapers and biographical dictionaries.
V
Two years had passed. Several of my comrades had died, several had become insane, but nothing was heard yet of our case coming before a court.
My health gave way before the end of the second year. The oak stool now seemed heavy in my hand, and the five miles became an endless distance. As there were about sixty of us in the fortress, and the winter days were short, we were taken out for a walk in the yard for twenty minutes only every third day. I did my best to maintain my energy, but the ‘arctic wintering’ without an interruption in the summer got the better of me. I had brought back from my Siberian journeys slight symptoms of scurvy; now, in the darkness and dampness of the casemate, they developed more distinctly; that scourge of the prisons had got hold of me.
In March or April 1876, we were at last told that the Third Section had completed the preliminary inquest. The ‘case’ had been transmitted to the judicial authorities, and consequently we were removed to a prison attached to the court of justice—the House of Detention.
It was an immense show prison, recently built on the model of the French and Belgian prisons, consisting of four stories of small cells, each of which had a window overlooking an inner yard and a door opening on an iron balcony; the balconies of the several stories were connected by iron staircases.