The officer carefully went through all these dossiers. We were then arranged in processional order. The soldiers surrounded us; the officer lifted his cap and crossed himself.
“A pleasant journey! Good-bye!” called out the prison officials.
“Thanks. Good-bye!” cried the officer. He then gave the signal to start, and off we marched at a slow pace to the station.
On account of the conditions attached by the Grand Duke of Baden to my extradition, I had till now been treated sometimes as an ordinary criminal, sometimes as a “political”; but from the moment I joined this convoy I was treated frankly as a “political.”[[42]] This being so, I was not placed among the ordinary criminals when we reached the train, but was put in the compartment reserved for the escort. Here there was a fair amount of room, and one could be pretty comfortable, while the others were packed like herrings in a barrel; but, on the other hand, the society of the soldiers was not very enlivening, as they dared not exchange a word with me in presence of the officer.
After four-and-twenty hours we arrived at Kiëv, where we were to have a day’s rest. We got out of the train, were formed up in procession, encircled by the soldiers, and marched by a roundabout way through the suburbs to the prison.
A strange emotion possessed me, when, after years of wandering both in Russia and abroad, I once again passed through the streets of my native town. I had not been here since I had fled from prison in 1878, six years before; and now I returned in chains, with the ominous yellow diamond on my back, a convict doomed to years of exile.
“Get on, get on! Mind what you’re about!” I heard a rough voice say, and felt a poke in my back from the butt-end of a rifle.
“This is the beginning,” I thought, and pictured all the humiliation and suffering that lay before me. However, the officer had remarked the incident, and coming up, reprimanded the soldier who had hustled me.
When we came to the prison gate the convicts were told off one by one like sheep, and let through the door in turn. I was taken straight to the office. Here everything was altered, and everywhere faces were strange to me. Fat old Captain Kovàlsky was gone, and the rest of the staff had been changed too.
“It was from this prison you escaped?” asked a haughty-looking man in uniform, the new governor, Simàshko. I assented.