EXILE.
A week before the last rising of the Poles took place, an officer of
high rank in the Russian service came in the dead of night, and
wrapped in a great fur cloak, to a friend of mine living in St.
Petersburg, with whom he had little more than a passing acquaintance--
"I am going out," he said, "and I have come to ask a favor and say
good-bye."
"Going out!"
"Yes," said his visitor. "My commission is signed, my post is marked.
Next week you will hear strange news."
"Good God!" cried my friend; "think better of it. You, an officer of
state, attached to the ministry of war!"
"I am a Pole, and my country calls me. You, a stranger, can not feel
with the passions burning in my heart. I know that by quitting the
service I disgrace my general; that the Government will call me a
deserter; that if we fail, I shall be deemed unworthy of a soldier's
death. All this I know, yet go I must."
"But your wife--and married one year!"
"She will be safe. I have asked for three months' leave. Our passes
have been signed; in a week she will be lodged in Paris with our
friends. You are English; that is the reason why I seek you. In the
drojki at your door is a box; it is full of coin. I want to leave this
box with you; to be given up only in case we fail; and then to a man
who will come to you and make this sign. I need not tell you that the
money is all my own, and that the charge of it will not compromise
you, since it is sacred to charity, and not to be used for war."
"It is a part, I suppose," said my friend, "of your Siberian fund?"
"It is," said the soldier; "you will accept my trust?"
The box was left; the soldier went his way. In less than a week the
revolt broke out in many places; slight collisions took place, and the
Poles, under various leaders, met with the success which always
attends surprise. Three or four names, till then unknown, began to
attract the public eye; but the name of my friend's midnight visitor
was not amongst them. General ---- grew into sudden fame; his rapid
march, his dashing onset, his daily victory, alarmed the Russian
court, until a very strong corps was ordered to be massed against him.
Then he was crushed; some said he was slain. One night, my friend was
seated in his chamber, reading an account of this action in a journal,
when his servant came into the room with a card, on which was printed:
THE COUNTESS R----.
The lady was below, and begged to see my friend that night. Her name
was strange to him; but he went out into the passage, where he found a
pale, slim lady of middle age, attired in the deepest black.
"I have come to you," she said at once, "on a work of charity. A young
soldier crawled to my house from the field of battle, so slashed and
shot that we expected him to die that night. He was a patriot; and his
papers showed that he was the young General ----. He lived through the
night, but wandered in his mind. He spoke much of Marie; perhaps she
is his wife. By daylight he was tracked, and carried from my house;
but ere he was dragged away, he gave me this card, and with the look
of a dying man, implored me to place it in your hands."
"You have brought it yourself from Poland?"
"I am a sufferer too," she said; "no time could be lost; in three days
I am here."
"You knew him in other days?"
"No; never. He was miserable, and I wished to help him. I have not
learned his actual name."
Glancing at the card, my friend saw that it contained nothing but his
own name and address written in English letters; as it might be:
_George Herbert,
Sergie Street,
St. Petersburg._
He knew the handwriting. "Gracious heavens!" he exclaimed, "was this
card given to you by General ----?"
"It was."
In half an hour my friend was closeted with a man who might intervene
with some small hope. The minister of war was reached. Surprised and
grieved at the news conveyed to him, the minister said he would see
what could be done. "General Mouravieff," he explained, "is stern, his
power unlimited; and my poor adjutant was taken on the field.
Deserter, rebel--what can be urged in arrest of death?" In truth, he
had no time to plead, for Mouravieff's next dispatch from Poland gave
an account of the execution of General ---- _by the rope_. On my
friend calling at the war-office to hear if any thing could be done,
he was told the story by a sign.
"Can you tell me," inquired the minister, "under what name my second
adjutant is in the field? He also is missing." The caller could not
help a smile. "You are thinking," said the minister, "that this Polish
revolt was organized in my office? You are not far wrong."
Archangel, Caucasus, Siberia--every frontier of the empire had her
batch of hapless prisoners to receive. The present reign has seen the
system of sending men to the frontiers much relaxed; and the public
works of Archangel occupied, for a time, the place once held in the
public mind by the Siberian mines. Not that the Asiatic waste has been
abandoned as an imperial Cayenne. Many great criminals, and some
unhappy politicians, are still sent over the Ural heights; but the
system has been much relaxed of late, and the name of Siberia is no
longer that word of fear which once appalled the imagination like a
living death. It is no uncommon thing to meet bands of young fellows
going up the Ural slopes from Mesen and Archangel, in search of
fortune; going over into Siberia as into a promised land!
Many of the terrors which served to shroud Siberia in a pall have been
swept away by science. The country has been opened up. The tribes have
become better known. Tomsk, a name at which the blood ran cold, is
seen to be a pleasant town, lying in a green valley at the foot of a
noble range of heights. It is not far from Perm, which may be regarded
as a distant suburb of Kazan. The tracks have been laid down, and in a
few months a railroad will be made from Perm to Tomsk.
The world, too, has begun to see that a penal settlement has, at best,
a limited lease of life. A man will make his home anywhere, and when a
place has become his home, it must have already ceased to be his jail.
It is in the nature of every penal settlement to become unsafe in
time; and a province of Siberia, peopled by Poles, would be a vast
embarrassment to the empire, a second Poland in her rear. Even now,
long heads are counting the years when the sons of political exiles
will occupy all the leading posts in Asia. Will they not plant in that
region the seeds of a Polish power, and of a Catholic Church? It is
the opinion of liberal Russians that Siberia will one day serve their
country as England is served by the United States.
The exiles sent to the frontiers are of many kinds; noble, ignoble;
clerical, lay; political offenders, cut-throats, heretics, coiners,
schismatics; prisoners of the Court, prisoners of the Law, and
prisoners of the Church. The exiles sent away by a minister of police,
by the governor of a province, are not kept in jail, are not compelled
to work. The police has charge of them in a certain sense; they are
numbered, and registered in books; and they have to report themselves
at head-quarters from time to time. Beyond these limits they are free.
You meet them in society; and if you guess they are exiles, it is
mainly on account of their keener intelligence and their greater
reserve of words. They either live on their private means, or follow
the professions to which they have been trained. Some teach music and
languages, some practise medicine or law; still more become
secretaries and clerks to the official Russ. A great many occupy
offices in the village system. In one day's drive in a tarantass I saw
a dozen hamlets, in which every man serving as a justice of the peace
was a Pole.
Not less than three thousand of the insurgents taken with arms in
their hands during the last rising at Warsaw, were sent on to
Archangel. At first the number was so great that an insurrection of
prisoners threatened the safety of the town. The governor had to call
in troops from the surrounding country, and the war-office had to
fetch back all the Prussian and Austrian Poles whom, in the first
hours of repression, they had hurried to the confines of the Frozen
Sea.
They lived in a great yellow building, once used as the arsenal of
Archangel, before the Government works were carried to the South; and
their lot, though hard enough, was not harder than that of the people
amongst whom they lived. They were gently used by the officers, who
felt a soldierly respect for their courage, and a committee of foreign
residents was allowed to visit them in their rooms. The food allowed
to them was plentiful and good, and many a poor sentinel standing with
his musket in their doorways must have envied them the abundance of
bread and soup.
In squads and companies these prisoners have been brought back to
their homes; some to their families, others to the provinces in which
they had lived. Many have been freed without terms; some have been
suffered to return to Poland on the sole condition of their not going
to Warsaw. A hundred, perhaps, remain in the arsenal building, waiting
for their turn to march. Their lot is hard, no doubt; but where is the
country in which the lot of a political prisoner is not hard? Is it
Virginia? is it Ireland? is it France?
These prisoners are closely watched, and the chances of escape are
faint; not one adventurer getting off in a dozen years. A Pole of
desperate spirit, who had been sent to Mesen as a place of greater
security than the open city of Archangel, slipped his guard, crawled
through the pine woods to the sea, hid himself in the forest, until he
found an opportunity of stealing a fisherman's boat, and then pushed
boldly from the shore in his tiny craft, in the hope of being picked
up by some English or Swedish ship on her outward voyage. Four days
and nights he lived on the open sea; suffering from chill and damp,
and torn by the pangs of hunger and thirst, until the paddle dropped
from his hands. His strength being spent, he drifted with the tide on
shore, only too glad to exchange his liberty for bread. When the
officer sent to make inquiries drove into Mesen, he found the poor
fellow lying half dead in the convict ward.
Beyond this confinement in a bleak and distant land, the Polish
insurgents do not seem to be physically ill-used. Their tasks are
light, their pay is higher than that of the soldiers guarding them,
and some of the better class are allowed to work in cities as
messengers and clerks. At one time they were allowed to teach--one man
dancing, a second drawing, a third languages; but this privilege has
been taken from them on the ground that in the exercise of these arts
they were received into families, and abused their trust.
It is no easy thing to mix these Polish malcontents with the general
race, without producing these results which a jealous police regard as
a "corruption" of youth.
Man for man, a Pole is better taught than a Russian. He has more
ideas, more invention, more practical talent. Having more resources,
he can not be thrown in the midst of his fellows without taking the
lead. He can put their wishes into words, and show them how to act. A
prisoner, he becomes a clerk: an exile, he becomes on overseer, a
teacher--in fact, a leader of men. Sent out into a distant province,
he gradually but surely asserts his rank. An order from the police can
not rob him of his genius; and when the ban is taken from his name, he
may remain as a citizen in the town which gives him a career and
perhaps supplies him with a wife. He may get a professor's chair; he
may be made a judge; if he has been a soldier, he may be put on the
general's staff.
All this time, and through all these changes, he may hold on to his
hope; continuing to be a Pole at heart, and cherishing the dream of
independence which has proved his bane. The country that employs him
in her service is not sure of him. In her hour of trial he may betray
her to an enemy; he may use the power in which she clothes him to deal
her a mortal blow. She can not trust him. She fears his tact, his
suppleness, his capacity for work. In fact, she can neither get on
with him nor without him.
In the mean time, Poles who have passed through years of exile into a
second freedom are coming to be known as a class apart, with qualities
and virtues of their own--the growth of suffering and experience
acting on a sensitive and poetic frame. These men are known as the
Siberians. A Pole with whom I travel some days is one of these
Siberians, and from his lips I hear another side of this strange story
of exile life.