Late one evening a foreign steamer stopped in the roads of Dué in
Sahalin and asked for coal. The captain was asked to wait till
morning, but he did not want to wait over an hour, saying that if
the weather changed for the worse in the night there would be a
risk of his having to go off without coal. In the Gulf of Tartary
the weather is liable to violent changes in the course of half an
hour, and then the shores of Sahalin are dangerous. And already it
had turned fresh, and there was a considerable sea running.
A gang of convicts were sent to the mine from the Voevodsky prison,
the grimmest and most forbidding of all the prisons in Sahalin. The
coal had to be loaded upon barges, and then they had to be towed
by a steam-cutter alongside the steamer which was anchored more
than a quarter of a mile from the coast, and then the unloading and
reloading had to begin--an exhausting task when the barge kept
rocking against the steamer and the men could scarcely keep on their
legs for sea-sickness. The convicts, only just roused from their
sleep, still drowsy, went along the shore, stumbling in the darkness
and clanking their fetters. On the left, scarcely visible, was a
tall, steep, extremely gloomy-looking cliff, while on the right
there was a thick impenetrable mist, in which the sea moaned with
a prolonged monotonous sound, "Ah! . . . ah! . . . ah! . . . ah!
. . ." And it was only when the overseer was lighting his pipe,
casting as he did so a passing ray of light on the escort with a
gun and on the coarse faces of two or three of the nearest convicts,
or when he went with his lantern close to the water that the white
crests of the foremost waves could be discerned.
One of this gang was Yakov Ivanitch, nicknamed among the convicts
the "Brush," on account of his long beard. No one had addressed him
by his name or his father's name for a long time now; they called
him simply Yashka.
He was here in disgrace, as, three months after coming to Siberia,
feeling an intense irresistible longing for home, he had succumbed
to temptation and run away; he had soon been caught, had been
sentenced to penal servitude for life and given forty lashes. Then
he was punished by flogging twice again for losing his prison
clothes, though on each occasion they were stolen from him. The
longing for home had begun from the very time he had been brought
to Odessa, and the convict train had stopped in the night at
Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window, had tried to see his
own home, and could see nothing in the darkness. He had no one with
whom to talk of home. His sister Aglaia had been sent right across
Siberia, and he did not know where she was now. Dashutka was in
Sahalin, but she had been sent to live with some ex-convict in a
far away settlement; there was no news of her except that once a
settler who had come to the Voevodsky Prison told Yakov that Dashutka
had three children. Sergey Nikanoritch was serving as a footman at
a government official's at Dué, but he could not reckon on ever
seeing him, as he was ashamed of being acquainted with convicts of
the peasant class.
The gang reached the mine, and the men took their places on the
quay. It was said there would not be any loading, as the weather
kept getting worse and the steamer was meaning to set off. They
could see three lights. One of them was moving: that was the
steam-cutter going to the steamer, and it seemed to be coming back
to tell them whether the work was to be done or not. Shivering with
the autumn cold and the damp sea mist, wrapping himself in his short
torn coat, Yakov Ivanitch looked intently without blinking in the
direction in which lay his home. Ever since he had lived in prison
together with men banished here from all ends of the earth--with
Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Chinese, Gypsies, Jews--
and ever since he had listened to their talk and watched their
sufferings, he had begun to turn again to God, and it seemed to him
at last that he had learned the true faith for which all his family,
from his grandmother Avdotya down, had so thirsted, which they had
sought so long and which they had never found. He knew it all now
and understood where God was, and how He was to be served, and the
only thing he could not understand was why men's destinies were so
diverse, why this simple faith which other men receive from God for
nothing and together with their lives, had cost him such a price
that his arms and legs trembled like a drunken man's from all the
horrors and agonies which as far as he could see would go on without
a break to the day of his death. He looked with strained eyes into
the darkness, and it seemed to him that through the thousand miles
of that mist he could see home, could see his native province, his
district, Progonnaya, could see the darkness, the savagery, the
heartlessness, and the dull, sullen, animal indifference of the men
he had left there. His eyes were dimmed with tears; but still he
gazed into the distance where the pale lights of the steamer faintly
gleamed, and his heart ached with yearning for home, and he longed
to live, to go back home to tell them there of his new faith and
to save from ruin if only one man, and to live without suffering
if only for one day.
The cutter arrived, and the overseer announced in a loud voice that
there would be no loading.
"Back!" he commanded. "Steady!"
They could hear the hoisting of the anchor chain on the steamer. A
strong piercing wind was blowing by now; somewhere on the steep
cliff overhead the trees were creaking. Most likely a storm was
coming.