And this man was Markoff’s hireling! What, I wondered, was the actual price placed upon my head?
For a whole week—seven weary days—I was compelled to remain there in Olekminsk. I wanted to push forward, but the exiled doctor would not allow it.
There was a small and wretched colony of political exiles in the village, and I visited them. Fancy a poet and littérateur, one of those rare Russian souls whose wonder-working effusions must ultimately enlighten and enfranchise the people—a Turgenieff—immured for life in that snowy desert. Yet in Olekminsk there was such a one. He lived in a wretched one-roomed, log-built cabin within a stone’s-throw of the house wherein I so nearly lost my life—a tall, alert, deep-eyed man, whom even the savagery of his surroundings could not dispirit or cool the ardour of his wonderful genius. From his prolific pen flowed a ceaseless stream of learning and of light; he wrote and wrote, and in this writing forgot his wrongs and sorrows. The authorities—the local officials who wield such autocratic authority in those parts—were overjoyed to see him in this mood. They fostered his rich whim, they encouraged him to write his books, the manuscripts of which they seized and sold in Petersburg and Berlin, Paris and London.
Yet he lived in a smoky, wooden hovel, banked up by snow, and wrote his books upon a rough wooden bench, which was polished at the spot over which his forearm travelled with his pen.
No exile, I found, was allowed to carry on any business, teach in a school, till the soil, labour at a trade, practise a profession, or engage in any work otherwise than through a master. If I wanted any service, an exile would sometimes come and offer to perform it, but I would have to pay his master, upon whose bounty he must depend for remuneration.
The doctor, named Kasharofski who bandaged me was not a revolutionist, or at all intemperate in his political view’s. He was one of the thousands of Markoff’s victims sacrificed in order that the Chief of Secret Police should remain in favour with the Emperor. Therefore he was not in favour with many of his fellow-exiles, who held pronounced revolutionary views. He was on pleasant visiting terms with the chief of police, and I often went to his wretched, carpetless hut, around which were sleeping bunks, and spent many an hour with him listening to the cruel, inhuman wrong from which he had suffered at the hands of that marvellously alert organisation, the Secret Police.
One grey, snowy afternoon, while I sat with him in his bare wooden hut, one room with benches around for beds, and he smoked a cigar I had given him, he burst forth angrily against the exile system, declaring: “The whole government is a monstrous mistake. Russia has been striding in vain to populate Siberia for a thousand years, but she will never succeed so long as she continues in her present policy of converting the land into a vast penitentiary wherein the prisoners are prevented from making an honest livelihood, and so driven, if criminals, to a further commission of crime. Beyond doubt there are rogues of the very worst type in Russia and Siberia, but certainly it is plain that their mode of punishment will never tend to elevate or reform them; further, it is utterly impossible that Siberia, under its present system of government, should ever be populated or improved, as have been the penal colonies of the French and English.”
His words were, alas! too true. What I had seen of Siberia and its exile system—those terrible prisons where men and women were herded together and infected with typhoid and smallpox; those wretched hovels of the political settlement, and those chained gangs of despairing prisoners on the roads—had indeed filled me with horror. The condition of those exiles, both socially and morally, was utterly appalling.
The day after my conversation with Doctor Kasharofski, after a week of irritating delay, in which every moment I feared that I was losing valuable time, I set forth again upon my last stage, the journey of four hundred miles of snow-covered tundra and forests of cheerless silver birch to Yakutsk.
Did Madame de Rosen still live, or had Markoff taken good care that, even though I escaped the assassin’s knife, I should never meet her again in the flesh?