Would success crown my efforts, or had, alas! poor Marya de Rosen succumbed to the brutal treatment meted out to her by the Cossack captain.
After three eager, breathless hours, which seemed weeks to me, we at last drove into the long wide thoroughfare which is the principal street of that northerly town—a road lined by small, square wooden houses, with sloping roofs, each surrounded by its little stockade. The town seemed practically deserted, a dreary, dismal, silent place, of which half the inhabitants were exiles or the free children of exiles. The remainder were, as I afterwards discovered, free Russians—merchants who had emigrated there for the advantage of trade, together with a host of Government officials—Cossack, civil, police, revenue, church, etc.
Without much difficulty we found the Guestnitsa Hotel, a wretched place, verminous and dirty, like every other hotel in all Siberia was before the enlightening days of the great railroad. Here I established myself, and sent Petrakoff with a note to the Governor-General, asking for audience without delay.
Scarcely had I washed, shaved and made myself a trifle presentable—though I fear my unshorn hair presented a somewhat shaggy appearance—when the agent of police returned with a note from His Excellency General Vorontzoff, Governor-General of the province, expressing his regret that owing to being compelled to make a military inspection during that day he was unable to receive me until five o’clock in the evening.
Thus was I compelled to await His Excellency’s pleasure.
The fame of Alexander Vorontzoff was well-known in Petersburg. He was a hard, hide-bound bureaucrat, without a spark of pity or of human feeling. And for that reason the camarilla surrounding His Majesty the Emperor had managed to obtain his appointment as Governor-General of Yakutsk. He was the catspaw of that half-dozen astute Ministers who terrorised the Emperor and his Court, and by so doing feathered their own nests. “Politicals” committed by Markoff to his tender mercies were shown little consideration, for was not his appointment as Governor-General mainly on account of his brutal treatment of offenders during his term of office at Tomsk?
Hartwig, had, more than once, mentioned this man as the most cruel, inhuman official in all Siberia. Therefore, being forewarned, I was ready to meet him on his own ground.
Many a man, and many a delicate woman, transported there from Russia, although quite as innocent of revolutionary ideas as my friend Madame de Rosen, had lived but a few short days on their arrival at the prison at Yakutsk, horrible tales of which had even filtered through back to Petersburg and Moscow.
One fact well-known was that, two years before, when smallpox had broken out at the prison, this brutal official caused a whole batch of prisoners to be placed in a room where a dozen other prisoners were lying in the last stages of that fatal disease, with the result that over two hundred exiles became infected, and of them one hundred and eighty died without receiving the least medical attention.
Such an action stood to his credit in the bureau of the Ministry of the Interior at Petersburg! He had saved the Empire the keep of a hundred and eighty prisoners—mostly the victims of Markoff and the camarilla!