by James Hilton
A.J. was too tired and depressed at that moment to consider the matter with any zest, and the guard continued, with a curious mixture of friendliness and officialdom: “Ah, I see—you are upset—perhaps, then, you will be so good as to tell me and I will make out the list. Oh yes, I can write—I am a man of education, like yourself. Come now, there is no time to lose. You will want heavy winter clothes, the usual cooking utensils, blankets, and things like that. Oh yes, and books—you are permitted by the regulations to take books with you. You are a reader, of course? Ah, education is a wonderful thing, is it not? Perhaps you would like me to have your books packed up and sent with the other things?”
“There are too many of them,” A.J. answered dully. “Far too many to carry.”
“But you would be allowed to take a dozen or so. Do you mean that you have more than a dozen books? You are perhaps a professor, then, eh? Ah well, I will ask them to send on a dozen for you, anyhow.”
And in due course the pertinacious fellow, whose name was Savanrog, compiled his list and the bureaucratic machine, with numerous clankings and rumblings, got to work upon it. Savanrog was delighted when, a few days later, the complete assortment of articles arrived. By that time A.J. had grown more resigned to his fate, a few days of solitary confinement in a comparatively clean and comfortable cell having helped considerably towards such a state. “You see,” Savanrog exclaimed, taking both A.J.’s hands in his and shaking them, “I have managed it all for you! Oh yes, I do not let anything slip past me. It is the turn of fortune that has brought us together, Peter Vasilevitch—I have done my duty—and as for our acquaintance, it has been a thing of delight. I have always counted it a privilege to make myself known to eminent politicals like yourself.”
“But surely I am not an eminent political?” A.J. answered, half-smiling.
“Ah, you are too modest. Were you not the friend of Maronin, who killed Daniloff, Minister of the Interior?”
A.J. let the question pass. It was the first intimation he had had that his offence was reckoned as ‘friendship’ with the boy-assassin. He had sometimes feared that he would be ranked as an accessory to the crime itself; in which case, of course, his status would have been that of a criminal, not a political. Savanrog’s chatter was, in its way, reassuring.
At last the morning came when he was ordered to prepare for the journey. Savanrog, at the final moment, shook hands with him, kissed him on both cheeks, and gave him a black cigar. “It will be a breach of regulations to smoke it, until you are across the Urals,” he told him, with a last spasm of official correctitude. Then, leading A.J. into the corridor, he marched him into a courtyard in which a hundred or so other prisoners were already on parade, and with a great show of blustering brutality, pushed him into line. A.J. did not recognise any of the faces near him. He was ordered to separate his luggage into two bundles, a personal one to carry on his back, and a larger one consisting of things he would not require until the end of the journey, wherever and whenever that might be. The larger bundles of all the prisoners were then collected into a van and carried away. Afterwards the men themselves were divided up into two detachments, and here came the final welcome proof that A.J. was a political; he was not put into the group of those who had to wait for the blacksmith to manacle their wrists together. Finally the whole melancholy procession was led out through the prison-gate into the street. It was only a very short distance to the railway station, and the throngs on the pavements stared with just that helpless, half-compassionate, half-casual curiosity which A.J. had observed on so many previous occasions when he had himself formed part of them.
After marching into a goods yard beyond the station and halting beside a train, the manacled prisoners were pushed into cattle-trucks, but the politicals were allowed to choose their own places in ordinary third-class rolling-stock, passably clean and comfortable. A.J. found himself cordially welcomed by the men of his compartment. There were five of them, with one exception all young like himself. The exception was a very ancient fellow with a huge head and a sweeping beard. Even before the train moved off A.J. was told a good deal about his fellow-passengers. The old man’s name was Trigorin—just Trigorin—he seemed to possess no other. His offence had been the preaching of roadside sermons in which had occurred certain remarks capable of seditious interpretation. He had been exiled once before for a similar offence. “I am an old man,” he said, “and nothing very dreadful can happen to me now. But of course it is different for you youngsters.”
The journey to Moscow took two days, and then there was considerable delay while the prison-train was shunted round the city and linked up with other coaches from different parts of the country. Finally the complete train, by this time very long, set out at a slow pace on its tremendous eastern journey. To many of the prisoners there was something ominous in the fact that they were now actually on the track of the Trans-Siberian, and spirits were low during the first few hours. A.J., however, did not share the general gloom; he remembered Siberia from his previous visit, and the name did not strike any particular terror into his mind. When some of the young men spoke with dismay of the possible fate in store for them, he felt strongly tempted to tell them that parts of Siberia, at any rate, were no worse than many parts of Europe. Trigorin, however, saved him from any temptation to recount his own experiences. Trigorin described how conditions had improved since the opening of the railway; during his first exile, he said, he had had actually to walk three thousand miles from railhead at Perm, and much of the way through blinding rain and snow. He gave lurid and graphic descriptions of the horrors of the old forwarding prisons at Tiumen and Tomsk, and of the convict barges on the rivers, and of the great Siberian highway along which so many thousands of exiles had been driven to misery and death. “Things are much better now,” he said, with sadly twinkling eyes. “We politicals are pampered—no floggings, hospitals if we fall ill—what more can we expect, after all? You youngsters, whose knowledge of Siberia comes from Dostoievski’s book and a few lurid novelettes, can’t realise what a good time politicals have nowadays. We die, of course, but only of loneliness, and a man may die of that in bed in his own home, may he not?”
A mood of curious fatalism sank upon A.J. during those days and nights of travel. The journey was not too arduous; the food was coarse, but sufficient in quantity and fairly nourishing; the military guards were easygoing fellows, especially after all the politicals had given parole that they would not attempt to escape during the train-journey. The future, of course, loomed grimly enough, but A.J. did not seem to feel it; his mind had already attuned itself to grimness. He kept remembering his interviews with Stanford and Forrester, and their repeated assurances that the game was one of ’heads somebody else wins and tails you lose.’ Well, he had lost, and he could not complain that he had not been amply warned of the possibility. He felt, however, that he had had distinctly bad luck; it had been pure misfortune, and not any personal carelessness or stupidity of his own, that had led to his present position. But for his friendship with Maronin all would have still been well. Yet he did not regret that friendship. It was, on the contrary, one of the few things in his life that he prized in memory.
He remembered one of Stanfield’s remarks: “If anything goes wrong, you will have to become a Russian subject completely.” That seemed of peculiar significance now that things had gone wrong, and it was true, too, that whether he willed it so or not, he was becoming Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov in a way he had certainly never been before. He wondered frequently whether by this time the Secret Service people knew all about his trouble. Most probably information had reached them, by their own secret channels, within a few hours of his arrest. He could picture their attitude—a shrug of the shoulders, a vaguely pitying look, and then—forgetfulness. Perhaps Stanfield might have commented to Forrester or Forrester to Stanfield: “Well, he didn’t last long, eh? Still, we warned him. Wonder if he’ll play the fool by trying to make out he’s English?”
A.J. had
no intention of so playing the fool. It was not merely that he had given his word, but that his common sense informed him how utterly useless it would be. Apart from his knowledge of the English language, there was nothing at all he could advance in support of any claim he might make to be other than the Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov set out with authentic-looking detail on his passport and papers of identity. And even supposing he managed to persuade the authorities to enquire into his case, the result could only mean a communication to the British Embassy, with what result he had been warned. “The British authorities would merely arch their eyebrows with great loftiness and disown you,” had been Stanfield’s way of putting it. No, there was nothing to be gained by attempting the impossible; the only course was simple endurance for the time being, and later, if he could manage it, escape. Henceforward he was doomed to be Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov without qualification, and, rather curiously, he now began to feel what he had hardly felt before—a certain pride in his new identity. He was Peter Vasilevitch Ouranov, exiled to Siberia for a political offence; and he felt that same quiet, unending antagonism towards the imperial authorities that the other exiles felt; he began to understand it, to understand them, to understand why they were so calm, why they so rarely roused the sleeping fury in their souls. They were saving it, as themselves also, for some vaguely future day.
He began, too, to breathe with comfort and comprehension the vast easy- going laziness of the country; he perceived why no one ever hurried, why trains were always late, why the word ‘sichass’ (’presently’) was so popular and universal; after all, if people were merely waiting for something to happen, there could be no special urgency about things done in the meantime. And they were waiting for something to happen—the exiles, the soldier-guards, the criminals in their chains, the railway-workers, the prison officials—a calm, passionless anticipation gleamed in their eyes when one caught them sometimes unawares. As the train rumbled eastwards this sense of anticipation and timelessness deepened immeasurably; life was just sunrise and sun-setting; food, drink, talk; the train would pull up in a siding; when would it move out again? ‘Sichass,’ of course; that might be in an hour or two, or perhaps the next day; nobody knew—nobody very much cared. When the train stopped, the prisoners sometimes climbed out and walked about the country near the track, or else lay down in the long grass with the midday sun on their faces. The nights were cold, but no snow had fallen yet. At Omsk, Krasnoiarsk, and other places, some of the men left the train, in charge of Cossack guards. Trigorin explained that they were the milder cases—men who had not definitely committed any crime, but were merely suspected of being ‘dangerous’ or of having ‘dangerous opinions.’ “It is clear,” he declared comfortingly, “that something much more serious is in store for all of us. We shall know when we reach Irkutsk.”
They reached the Siberian capital three weeks after leaving Moscow; the busy city, magnificently situated at the confluence of two rivers, gleamed brightly in the late autumnal sun. The exiles were marched from the station to the central forwarding prison and there split up into several groups. Trigorin was sent off almost immediately; he was bound for Chita, near the Manchurian frontier, and was to travel there with a contingent of local criminals. The other politicals were immensely indignant about this; it was against all the rules to put a political along with criminals, and much as they hated the penal code, such a breach of it stirred them to punctilious anger. The prison governor apologised; he was very sorry, but he could not help it; Trigorin must go with the criminals, but he would be given a separate railway coach. “Besides,” he explained, reassuringly, “they are only local murderers—not bad fellows, some of them.” Trigorin himself did not object at all, and actually rebuked his friends for their uncharitable championship. “Let us not forget,” he said, “that the only person to whom Christ definitely promised paradise was a criminal. He, the greatest of all political prisoners, was actually crucified between two of them.”
A.J.’s other fellow-passengers were also sent away, but whither, he could not discover. He himself was kept at Irkutsk. It was a better managed prison than the Gontcharnaya at Petersburg, but after the easy-going train- journey the return to routine of any kind was irksome. A.J. found most of his fellow-prisoners in a state of depression and melancholy that soon began to affect him also, especially when the freezing up of the river and the first big snowstorm of the season marked the onset of Siberian winter.
The prison governor was a good-tempered, jovial fellow who liked to make the days and nights pass by as pleasantly as possible for Himself and mankind in general. Every morning he would tour the prison and greet the men with a bluff, companionable—“Good morning, boys—how goes it?” He was always particular about their food and the warmth of their rooms, and he would sometimes pay a surprise visit to the kitchens to sample the soup that was being prepared for them. He seemed a little in awe of some of the politicals, but he was on friendly terms with most of the criminals, and enjoyed hearing them give their own accounts of their various crimes. The more bloodthirsty and exciting these were, the better he liked them; he would sometimes, at the end of a particularly thrilling recital, clap a man on the back and exclaim: “Well, you are a fellow, and no mistake! To think of you actually doing all that!”
Naturally, the criminals invented all kinds of incredibilities to please him.
A.J. soon found that the only way to keep his mind from descending into the bitterest and most soul-destroying gloom was to think of the only inspiring possibility open to a prisoner—that of escape. Together with another political he began to plan some method of getting away, not immediately, but as soon as the spring weather should make the open country habitable. This task, with all its complications, helped the winter days to pass with moderate rapidity. Unfortunately a fellow-prisoner who was a government spy (there were many of these, sometimes unknown even to the prison authorities) gave the plan away, and A.J. and his co-conspirator were summoned before the governor. His attitude was rather that of a pained and reproachful guardian whose fatherly consideration has been basely rewarded. “Really, you know,” he told them, “that was a very foolish thing to do. Your attempt to escape has already been reported to Petersburg, and it will only make your eventual punishment more severe. The original idea was to exile you to Yakutsk as soon as the season permitted, but now heaven knows where you will be sent.” And he added, almost pathetically: “Whatever made you act so unreasonably?”
So the position seemed rather more hopeless than ever. Soon, too, the easy-going governor was sent away to another prison. The Petersburg authorities transferred him to Omsk, and in his place was sent a different type of man altogether—a small, dapper, bristling-moustached martinet, whom everyone—prisoners and prison officials alike—detested with venomous intensity. It was he who, the following May, sent for A.J. and barked at him in staccato tones: “Ouranov, your case has been reconsidered by the authorities in view of your recent attempt to escape. Your revised sentence is that of banishment for ten years to Russkoe Yansk. You will go first to Yakutsk, and then wait for the winter season. You will need special kit, which you will be allowed to purchase, and I am instructed to pay you the customary exile’s allowance, dated back to the time of your entry into Siberia. Perhaps you will sign this receipt.”
A fortnight later the journey commenced. A.J. had spent part of the interval in making purchases in the Irkutsk shops; the two Cossack guards who were to accompany him to his place of exile advised him what to buy and how much to pay for it. They were big, simple-hearted, illiterate fellows and could give him few details about Russkoe Yansk, except that the journey there would take many months. A.J. suspected that with the usual Siberian attitude towards time, they were merely estimating vaguely; he could not believe that even the remotest exile station could be quite so inaccessible. The first stage was by road and water to Yakutsk. Along with hundreds of other exiles, including a few women, the trek was begun across the still frost-bound country to Katchugo,
near the source of the Lena. This part of the journey was made in twenty-mile stages and lasted over a week. The nights were spent in large barn-like sheds, horribly verminous, and well guarded by sentries on all sides.
At Katchugo the entire detachment was transferred to barges, and resigned itself to a two months’ meandering down the river to Yakutsk, which was reached towards the end of July. The horrors of that journey, under a sky that never, during the short summer, darkened to more than twilight, engraved still more deeply the mood of fatalism that had already descended on most of the prisoners. A.J. was no exception. He did not find himself worrying much, and he was not nearly so low-spirited as he had been amidst the comparatively comfortable surroundings of the Irkutsk prison. He felt scarcely more than a growing numbness, as if a part of his brain and personality were losing actual existence.
Yakutsk was almost pleasant after the barges, and the remaining weeks of the summer passed without incident. Prison regulations, owing to the remoteness of the settlement, were lax enough, and A.J. made several acquaintances. One of them, an educated exile who had been allowed to set up as a boot-repairer, had even heard of Russkoe Yansk. It was on the Indigirka river, he thought, well beyond the Arctic Circle. It could only be a very small settlement and it was years since he had heard of anyone being sent there. “Perhaps they have made a mistake,” he hazarded, with dispassionate cheerfulness. “Or perhaps the place does not exist at all and they will have to bring you back. That has happened, you know. There was a man sent to one place last year and the Cossacks themselves couldn’t find it. They looked for it all winter and then had to hurry back before the thaw began.” He laughed heartily. “I’m not inventing the story, I assure you. Some of those Petersburg officials don’t know their own country—they just stare at a map and say—’Oh, we’ll send him here—or there’—and maybe the map is wrong all the time!”