“Where are you off to?” the officer of our convoy once asked, when some tramps saluted him, cap in hand.
“Your Excellency knows; we’re going to the Government’s lodgings,” the rogues replied, grinning.
“Oh, get along with you, then, in God’s name!” the officer laughed; and then told us that he had escorted this very lot into exile a few months back.
“Government lodgings” was the recognised euphemism for prison, and it was perfectly true that most of these vagabonds would find their way back there soon enough; by autumn hardly a man of them would be still at large. Meanwhile they begged their way along. The Siberian natives were liberal in almsgiving; partly from obedience to their religion, which enjoins charitable deeds, but not a little from fear, as, if refused, these tramps are not slow in revenging themselves. In many places there was a regular custom of putting out food on the window-sill at night—a bowl of thickened milk, a piece of bread, or some curd-cheese. The peasants would even leave open the door of the bath-house (generally placed at a little distance from the other houses), that the wanderers might find shelter. They were admitted very unwillingly to the dwelling-houses, from a not unjustifiable mistrust of their conduct; and that reminds me of the following episode.
One day as we were on the march a criminal told me that he had known Tchernishevsky.[[61]] This naturally excited my interest, and I asked him how and where he had met that great martyr to our cause. He told me that he had once before been exiled, and sent to Viluisk, in Yakutsk. Tchernishevsky was there at the same time; they were let out of prison together, and interned in the same town. The man could tell me nothing except some details of the way in which Tchernishevsky had passed his time in exile; but that was enough to make my heart warm towards him. It seemed to me that a criminal who had known personally one of the noblest men in Russia must have something in him a little different from the rest. When he had told me all he could of Tchernishevsky, I asked him how he himself came to be going back into exile.
“I got sick of that cursed hole, Viluisk,” he said, “and got away with some other tramps. We’d been a few days on the road when one stormy night we came to a village. It was pouring in torrents, and we could find nobody who would let us in, till at last an old man opened the door of his hut. We begged him in God’s name to give us shelter.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘will you promise to leave us old folks in peace?’
“‘What do you take us for, grandfather?’ said we. ‘Have pity on us!’
“So he let us in, and the old woman gave us something to eat, and they allowed us to lie on the stove by turns. Well, they went to sleep, and we just did for them, and went off with everything that could be of any use to us. We didn’t get far: the peasants came after us and caught us; and then there was the usual game—trial and sentence to penal servitude. But on the way here I made a ‘swop,’ and now I’m going into exile as ‘of unknown antecedents.’”