HOW TWO MET IN HADES
The great gates of the stockade swung slowly open, and a motley crowd
came in from the barges which had brought them from Tiumen, and the
older inhabitants gathered in long lines to see them pass, all except
the dicers, who remained intent on their game.
But Pavlof lay where he was. The sight of the weary women and
children, smelling like wild beasts from the close confinement of the
barges, was always a saddening one.
The newcomers were drafted off to the already crowded kameras, and
the grey-clad droves settled again to their aimless wanderings.
While Pavlof still lay musing over his late studies--the man with the
barrow, the man with the dog, and the man who was like a
carthorse--one of the newly arrived came out of the log house where
he had been to deposit his grey sack containing his belongings, and
strolled along past the spot where Pavlof lay. A big man with fair
hair and beard. It was only when he had passed that Pavlof got an
impression of him. But the impression was so startling that he
jerked out an involuntary "Good God!" and sat up suddenly and
remained staring intently after the man. He argued himself out of
the impression and leaned back against the wooden house again.
But presently the newcomer came strolling back. Pavlof sat up again
in rigid scrutiny. Then their eyes met and Pavlof sprang up and ran
to him.
"Palma! Is it possible?" he gasped, with a mighty fear dragging
rough hands across his heart-strings.
"What--Pavlof?" and their hands gripped tightly.
"It's good to see the face of a friend even in hell," said Palma,
with something of his old heartiness. "All the same, I'm sorry to
see you here, Paul Ivanuitch."
"And I you, Serge Petrovitch. And your wife--Hope Ivanovna?" he
asked anxiously. "She is not here?"
"No, thank God! She is not here."
"Thank God for that!" said Pavlof earnestly. "But where she is I do
not know, nor whether I have anything to thank God for in her not
being here. It is twelve months since they took me and I have had no
word of her since," and his face broke for a moment, and then pinched
the tighter.
"Sit down here in the sun and tell me your news," said Pavlof.
"Where are you for?"
"Kara--ten years."
"And why?"
"God knows!" said Palma, as he threw himself down on the dry spot
where Pavlof had been sitting, and Pavlof dropped alongside. "I
don't know, and they don't know, or at all events they haven't told
me. I have thought and thought till my brain cracks with thinking,
and the nearest I can get to it is that some of the folks we used to
help have got mixed up with some of these other matters and so they
drag us in. It is what I always feared, but if the work was to be
done we had to take the risk. I tell you what, Pavlof," he said,
thumping the ground with an angry fist, "I know now what it is that
turns men's souls to gall and bitterness and makes devils of them.
It is damnable work such as this. I never counselled force. I never
did a thing but what I believed for the good of my fellows. But--my
God!--if--ever--I--get--free, some one shall pay for all this."
"And all for what?" said Pavlof quietly. "For teaching men and women
to look up instead of down, and that they are no longer slaves."
"Slaves they are and slaves they will remain until they break their
bonds for themselves," said Palma hotly. "It will come, Pavlof. It
must come. A nation cannot be ground down for ever by the handful on
top."
"It will come in time, but the time is long, and the grinding is very
bitter," and the silence that fell on them for a space was filled
with gloomy thoughts.
"Where have they had you?" asked Pavlof presently.
"Petropavlovsk. And you?"
"Schlusselburg."
There was no need for details. Those two words supplied them to the
very last letter. They have meant torture, madness, death, to many a
man--and many a woman too--whose only crime was too advanced thought
for their fellows.
"And Hope Ivanovna? How will she fare in your absence, Serge
Petrovitch? Even if they have not taken her too?" It was the one
thought and fear that had been churning through his brain ever since
he had learned that she was not there.
"Ach God! Paul Ivanuitch, that is where they hit a man when he is
down," said Palma, boiling over again at thought of it all, and
emphasising his points with his fist on the ground. "The thought of
her, alone and friendless, comes near to driving me crazy at times.
She may be alive. She may be dead. She may be in the gutter. You
know how things would go. They would seize everything I had and put
in an administrator, and nothing gets through their fingers.
And--and----" he stumbled, and looked piteously at Pavlof, his face
working with deep emotion, and the bold blue eyes, which had always
looked so merrily on the world, swimming now in a mist of bitterness.
"Ach!--you cannot understand!" he jerked. "In a few months I was to
have been a father, Paul Ivanuitch, and I had persuaded her to go to
the country to give herself a chance. And here I am"--and the heavy
fist smashed into the ground again--"and I do not know whether she is
alive, or whether the child is alive. I do not know whether I am
still a husband, or whether or not I am a father. God! I know only
that I am no longer a man, but am becoming a devil at thought of it
all. May his blackest curse blight them all for ever and for ever
and for ever!"
And again a bitter silence fell upon them.
"Truly, the grinding is bitter," said Pavlof at last.
"And we are between the stones. But--sometimes--that which is
between the stones will catch fire, Paul Ivanuitch, and then the
grinders will see hell--as they did in France. God grant I be there
to see it too!--and to help! I was becoming a man, and they have
turned me back to the beasts. Hope Ivanovna is an angel, and she was
making a man of me, and they will grind her to powder, like the rest
of us. She would wait and wait, and hope and hope, and strive after
news of me and find nothing, and then maybe she would die."
"I do not think she would die, Serge Petrovitch. She is very brave.
She is too bold-hearted to be crushed by them. It is wonderful what
a woman can stand."
"Ay--but--there are times"--said Palma gloomily.
"Ah--that. For that you must trust in God, Serge Petrovitch--as she
would."
"It is true," nodded Palma. "I did not know so great good existed
till I came to know her. They are nearer God than we are.... My
God! My God!" he groaned, thinking only of his lost happiness, and
forgetful for the moment of Pavlof. "And we were so happy and
growing happier every day. And now----" and his fist rose and fell
in a miserable abandonment of hope.
It was the first time in twelve dreary months that he had been able
to speak to any one of all that had been in his heart. There was a
gloomy satisfaction in unloading himself to one who knew and could
understand.
"We grew nearer to one another with every day that passed," he went
on reminiscently, losing sight, in the opened flow of his own
thoughts, of the fact that one man's joy may be, and often is, his
neighbour's pain. "She had won me, heart and soul, to her work in
spite of myself, Paul Ivanuitch. It was for her work's sake that she
married me. She told me so, and I, like a fool, believed that in
time I could wean her from it and have her all to myself. But it was
all the other way. Since ever we were married I have had no other
thought than what would please her most. I had come to see through
her eyes. I had come to love the things she loved because she loved
them. And now----" and he came to earth again with angry fist.
"And she, Serge Petrovitch?" asked Pavlof quietly, and if Palma had
glanced at his face he would have found it white and cold. "She had
come to love you also?"
"Surely," said Palma, with conviction. "A man may be mistaken about
any other woman's feelings but never about his wife's, Paul
Ivanuitch. Yes, she had come to love me, and our love was growing
day by day."
And the silence that fell on them now was gloomy only on Pavlof's
part, for Hope's love evoked a glow in Palma's heart even in the bare
recollection.
And presently it came to him that their talk had been wholly of
himself and his affairs.
"And you, Paul Ivanuitch, why did they take you?" he asked.
"I was working quietly among the poor, as Hope Ivanovna would have
had me"--he could not forbear himself that trifling share in
her--"and I had no thought of ill to any man. But they carried me
off one night and my place knew me no more."
Palma nodded. "And never said what for or why."
"Yes. They gave me credit for an intention to place myself in a
position of illegality. But no such intention was in me--that is, as
I interpret the laws."
"And where are you for?"
"The provinces--five years. Minusinsk I'm assigned to."
Palma nodded. "That is not so bad. Escape from the provinces is not
difficult, they say, though it's none too easy to get back home. I
was talking to a man who had been through it, as we came along on the
barge. He got home all right, but he could not keep out of it, and
now he's going to Kara with chains on his legs."
"Yes, it generally ends that way, I believe. Which is your kazarm?"
"Number eight. It was crammed to suffocation, they say, before we
came in, and now there are twenty more of us. The days are bearable,
but the nights are simply hell."
"Simply hell. If Dante had slept for a week in a Siberian kamera
he'd have had something more to write about."
"And when do we go on? Do you know?"
"I think we were only waiting for you. I saw them selecting a convoy
guard this morning."
"The sooner the better."
That night, in his fetid corner under the over-loaded sleeping-bench,
Paul Pavlof found it more impossible to sleep even than usual.
It was not an easy matter at any time, with over a hundred foul
fellow-sleepers above and all around one. The sighs, the coughs, the
groans, the stertorous snortings and snorings, the restless movements
which travelled spasmodically along the packed sleeping-benches from
whatever spot they started till they stopped on the pachyderm carcase
of some heavier sleeper than usual, the quarrels, the cursings, the
jingle and clink of fetters, the poisonous, ammoniacal smells of all
those foul bodies, the sickening heat, the insects and vermin--truly,
to any man accustomed to the simple virtues of cleanliness of body
and mind, sleep in such a place was not a matter of easy
accomplishment, and Palma's short, descriptive word was amply earned.
Yet at times Pavlof had found sleep not impossible.
But that night it was very far beyond him. He lay awake and with his
eyes wide open, too, in spite of the pungency of the atmosphere which
weighed on his eyelids like coins on the eyes of the dead, and set
his eyeballs smarting. And, though the mirk and reek, and the heavy
darkness, and the thick log walls of the kazarm cut short his bodily
vision, the white soul of him looked past these and caught glimpses
of visions of another kind, and in the sight of them he smiled. Now,
when a convict on the great Siberian road smiles to himself in his
kamera of a night, he is half-brother to the saints or joint tenant
with a madman, and the madman, I am inclined to think, has the
pleasanter time of it.