FRESH FEARS—THE COLONEL OF GENDARMERIE—INQUIRY INTO THE CASE OF GENERAL MEZENTZEV’S MURDER—MEETING WITH BOGDANOVITCH—DEPARTURE

During my imprisonment in the Petersburg House of Detention my spirits were altogether more cheerful than they had been since my first arrest. At Freiburg I had been in a chronic state of excitement and unrest, longing for the freedom that seemed so near. In the Fortress of Peter and Paul I had been downcast and despairing. Now I had reached a condition of equanimity and indifference.

“Hard labour in the Siberian mines,” I thought to myself. “What does it matter whether it be for ten years or fifteen? It is much the same to me.” My future was done for, my life gone. It is hard for a man to reconcile himself to such a thought, particularly when he feels physically sound and healthy, but one does somehow get accustomed to it. At times there will arise sudden hopes, dreams of unexpected luck, of happiness in a distant future; and then wild visions chase one another in dazzling pictures through one’s brain. But I had lived through too many bitter self-deceptions of the kind when I was at Freiburg; and I was only annoyed with myself when I found my fancy dallying with them, and tried to extinguish them at once. “Nonsense!” I cried to myself; “if anything, the only unexpected turn Fate will do you will be some bad trick.” And I steadfastly made up my mind to the worst.

68Weeks had gone by since my change of prisons, and during that time I had not been once up for examination. I did not know in the least how my affair was going. “Perhaps in ‘high circles’ they’ve taken a new departure, and invented some other means of treating me as a political criminal. Why am I not brought before the court? Why do they not send me to Odessa? Something must be happening.” I had begun to fidget in this way occasionally, when one July morning, as I came back from my walk feeling rather cheerful, the warder said to me, “Make yourself ready; they have come to fetch you!” A hired droschky awaited me at the door, and I and a gendarme got into it. From him I could learn nothing as to our destination, and although this uncertainty did not last long, it made me feel uncomfortably nervous. After about half an hour the carriage stopped in the courtyard of a large building. I was taken into a small cell with a tiny window, whose panes were of thick ribbed glass. As I was pacing up and down here I noticed an officer at the peephole in the door observing me closely.

“May I come in?” he asked, hesitatingly opening the peephole window.

“A strange question! I am at your disposal, not you at mine,” said I. The door opened, and smiling apologetically, a young man in the uniform of a colonel of gendarmerie stepped in.

“Allow me to introduce myself”—he bowed and clicked his spurs together—“Colonel Ivànov.”

“I do not understand,” said I. “Will you please tell me where I am, and why I have been brought here?”

“This is the office of the gendarmerie headquarters; you have been brought here for examination, and will soon be taken before the Public Prosecutor. I only wanted to have a chat with you, and revive some old memories. We have many common acquaintances.”

“But how do you know me?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh, excuse me,” he cried, smiling, “there is hardly 69an intelligent person in all Russia who does not know you by name.”

The young gentleman appeared to class himself among the “intellectuals”—that set in Russian Society which just at this time was protesting against the reactionary tendency and making its influence felt in some of the best Russian journals. In the language of that section of the Press it was customary to designate the revolutionists by the harmless title of “intellectuals.”

“Oh, we have many common acquaintances,” the colonel resumed. “I knew all your comrades—Malinka, Drebyàsghin, Maidànsky. I was formerly adjutant of gendarmerie at Odessa, and made acquaintance with them there. They were really delightful people.”

Now I understood why this man was a colonel already, notwithstanding his youth. The big political cases during the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties had given many officers of gendarmerie and of the law grand opportunities for self-advancement. The lives and freedom of the “politicals” were the merchandise by which they founded their fortunes. This gentleman had no doubt played no insignificant part in condemning to penal servitude or to death those comrades of mine on whom he was now lavishing his compliments. Perhaps he had been the originator of the happy thought by which the traitor Kùritzin was induced to sacrifice so many victims.[30]

My interview with this engaging young man was not exactly to my mind, and I was glad to be called away. I was taken to a comfortably furnished apartment, where Kotliarèvsky was seated in an armchair before a large table, looking over some pap............