THE SIBERIANS.
"He is one of the Siberians," says my comrade of the road, after
quoting some verses from a Polish poet.
"One of the Siberians?"
"Yes," replies the Pole. "In these countries you find a people of whom
the world has scarcely heard; a new people, I might say; for, while in
physique they are like the fighting men who followed Sobieski to the
walls of Vienna, they are in mind akin to the patient and laborious
monks who have built up the shrines of Solovetsk. Time has done his
work upon them. A sad and sober folk, they go among us by the name of
our Siberians."
"They are Poles by birth?"
"Yes, Poles by genius and by birth. They are our children who have
passed through fire; our children whom we never hoped to see in the
living world. Once they were called our Lost Ones. In Poland we have a
tragic phrase, much used by parting friends: 'We never meet again!'
For many years that parting phrase was fate. An exile, sent beyond the
Ural Mountains, never came back; he was said to have joined our Lost
Ones; he became to us a memory like the dead. We could not hope to see
his face again, except in dreams. To-day that line is but a song, a
recollection of the past; a refrain sung by the waters of Babylon. In
Vilna, in Kazan, in Kief, in a hundred cities widely parted from each
other, you will find a colony of Poles, now happy in their homes, who
have crossed and recrossed those heights; men of high birth, and of
higher culture than their birth; men who have ploughed through the
snows of Tomsk; who have brought back into the West a pure and
bruised, though not a broken spirit."
"Are these pardoned men reconciled to the Emperor?"
"They are reconciled to God. Do not mistake me. No one doubts that the
reigning Emperor is a good and brave man; high enough to see his duty;
strong enough to face it, even though his feet should have to stumble
long and often on the rocks. But God is over all, and his Son died for
all. Alexander is but an instrument in His hands. You think me
mystical! Because my countrymen believe in the higher powers, they are
described by Franks, who believe in nothing, as dreamers and
spiritualists. We dream our dreams, we see our signs, we practise our
religion, we respect our clergy, we obey our God."
"I have heard the Poles described as women in prayer, as gods in
battle!"
"Like the young men of my circle," he continues, after a pause, "I
took a part in the rising of '48; a poor affair, without the merit of
being either Polish or Slavonic. That rising was entirely French.
While young in years I had travelled with a comrade in the west of
Europe; living on the Rhine, and on the Seine, where we forgot the
religion of our mothers and our country, and learned to think and to
speak of Poland as of a northern France. We called ourselves
republicans, and thought we were great philosophers; but the idol of
our fancies was Napoleon the Great, under whose banner so many of our
countrymen threw away their lives. We ceased to appear at church, and
even denied ourselves to the Polish priest. We hated the Tsar, and we
despised the Russians with all our souls. Two years before the
republic was proclaimed in the streets of Paris, we returned to
Warsaw, in the hope of finding some field of service against the Tsar;
but the powers had been too swift for us; and Cracow, the last free
city of our country, was incorporated with the kaisar's empire on the
day when I was dropped from the tarantass at my father's door. France
bade us trust in her, and in the secret meetings which we called among
our youthful friends, we gave up the good old Polish psalms and signs
for Parisian songs and passwords. In other days we sang 'The Babe in
Bethlehem,' but now, inspired with a foreign hope, we rioted through
the Marseillaise. We had become strangers in the land, and the hearts
of our people were not with us. The women fell away, the clergy looked
askance, but the unpopularity of our new devices only made us laugh.
We said to ourselves, we could do without these priests and fools; men
who were always slaves, and women who were always dupes. As to the
crowd of grocers and bakers--we thought of them only with contempt.
Who ever heard of a revolution made by chandlers? We were noble, and
how could we accept their help? The year of illusion came at length.
That France to which every Polish eye was strained, became a republic;
and then a troop of revellers, strong enough to whirl through a polka,
threw themselves on the Russian guns, and were instantly sabred and
shot down. Ridden over in the street, I was carried into a house; and,
when my wounds were dressed, was taken to the castle royal, with a
hundred others like myself, to await our trial by commission, and our
sentence of degradation from nobility, exile to Siberia, and perpetual
service in the mines. My friend was with me in the street, and shared
my doom."
"Had you to go on foot?"
"Well--no. For Nicolas, though stern in temper, was not a man to break
the law. Himself a prince, he felt a proud respect for the rights of
birth; and as a noble could not be reduced to march in the gangs like
a peddler and a serf, our papers were made out in such a way that our
privileges were not to end until we reached Tobolsk. There the
permanent commission of Siberia sat; and there each man received his
order for the mines. We rode in a light cart, to which three strong
ponies were tied with ropes; and when the roads were hard, we made two
hundred versts a day. Our feet were chained, so that we could not take
off our boots by night or day; but the people of the steppe over which
we tore at our topmost speed, were good and kind to us, as they are to
exiles; giving us bread, dried fish, and whisky, on the sly. They knew
that we were Poles, and, as a rule, their popes are only too much
inclined to abuse the Poles as enemies of God; but the Russians, even
when they are savages, have a tenderness of heart. They know the
difference between a political exile and a thief; for the Government
stamps the thief and murderer on the forehead and the two cheeks with
a triple vor; a black and ghastly stamp which neither fire nor acid
will remove; and if they think a Pole very wicked in being a Catholic
they feel for his sufferings as a man. Twice I tried to escape from
the mines; and on both occasions, though I failed to get away, the
kindness of the poor surprised me. They dared not openly assist my
flight, but they were sometimes blind and deaf; and often, when in
hunger and despair I ventured to crawl near a cabin in the night, I
found a ration of bread and fish, and even a cup of quass, laid ready
on the window-ledge."
"Who put them there, and why?"
"Poor peasants, to whom bread and fish are scarce; in order to relieve
the wants of some poor devil like myself."
"Then you began to like the people?"
"Like them! To understand them, and to see they were my brothers; but
my heart was hard with them for years. I was a man of science, as they
call it; and I told myself that in giving food to the hungry they were
only obeying the first rude instincts of a savage horde. At length a
poor priest came in a cart to the mines. Before his coming I had heard
of him--his name--his mission--and his perils; for Father Paul was a
free agent in his travels; having chosen this service in the desert
snows, instead of a stall in some cathedral-town, from a belief that
poor Catholic exiles had a higher claim on him than sleek and
fashionable folk. I knew, from the report of others, that he made the
round of Siberia, sledging from mine to mine, from mill to mill, in
order to keep alive in these Catholic exiles some remembrance of their
early faith; to say mass, to hear confessions, to marry and baptize,
to sanctify the new-made grave. Yet I hardly gave to him a second
thought. What could he do for me; a poor priest, dwelling by choice in
a savage waste, with no high sympathies and no great friends? He was
not likely to adore Napoleon, and he was certain to detest Mazzini's
name. How could I talk with such a man? The night when he arrived was
cold, his sledge was injured, and the wolves had been upon his track.
Some natural pity for his age and danger drew me to his side in our
wooden shed, and after he was thawed into life, he spoke to us, even
before he tasted food, of that love of God which was his only
strength. When he had supped on our coarse turnip soup and a little
black bread, he lay down on a mattress and fell asleep. For hours that
night I sat and gazed into his face, his white hair falling on his
pillow, and his two arms folded like a cross upon his breast. If ever
man looked like an angel in his sleep it was Father Paul. Of such men
is the Church of Christ.
"Next day I sought him in his shed, for our inspector turned this
visit into a holiday for his Catholic prisoners; and there he spoke to
me of my country and of my mother, until my heart was softened, and
the tears ran down my face. Pausing softly in his speech, he bent his
eyes upon me, as my father might have looked, and pressing me tenderly
by the hand, said: 'Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest.' 'Blessed are they that mourn; for
they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit
the earth.' I had read these words a hundred times, for I was fond of
the New Testament as a book of democratic texts; but I had never felt
their force until they fell from the lips of Father Paul. I saw they
were addressed to me. My mother was about me in the air. I laid down
my philosophy, and felt once more like a little child."
His voice is low and mellow, but the tones are firm, and touch my ear
like strings in perfect tune. After a pause, I asked him how his
change of feeling worked in his relations to the Russians.
"A Christian," he replies, "is not a slave of the flesh. His first
consideration is for God; his second for the children of God, not as
they chance to dwell on the Vistula, on the Alps, on the Frozen Sea,
but in every land alike. He yields up the sword to those who will one
day perish by the sword. His weapon is the spirit, and he hopes to
subdue mankind by love."
"Then you would yield the sword to any one who is proud and prompt
enough to seize it."
"No; the sword is God's to give, not mine to yield; and for His
purposes He gives it unto whom He will. It is a fearful gift, and no
man can be happy in whose grasp it lies."
"Yet many would like to hold it?"
"That is so. The man who first sees fire will burn himself. Observe
how differently one thinks of war when one comes to see that men are
really the sons of God. All war means killing some one. Which one?
Would you like to think that in a future world some awful coil of fate
should draw you into slaying an angel?"
"No; assuredly."
"Yet men are angels in a lower stage! We see things as we feel them.
Men are blind, until their eyes are opened by the love of God; and God
is nearest to the bruised and broken heart. Hosts of Siberians have
come back to Poland; but among these exiles there is hardly one who
has returned as he went forth."
"They are older."
"They are wiser. Father Paul, and priests like Father Paul--for he is
not alone in his devotion--have not toiled in vain. Perhaps I should
say they have not lived in vain; for the service which they render to
the proud and broken spirit of the exile, is not the word they utter,
but the doctrine they live. The poets and critics who have passed
through fire are known by their chastened style. They have put away
France and the French. They read more serious books; they speak in
more sober phrase. In every thing except their love of God and love of
country you might think them tame. They preach but little, and they
practise much; above all, they look to what is high and noble, if
remote, and set their faces sternly against the wanton waste of blood.
They know the Russians better, and they did not need the amnesty, and
what has followed it, in order to feel the brotherhood of all the
Slavonic tribes."
"You are a Panslavonist?"
"No! We want a wider policy and a nobler word. The Panslavonic party
has built a wall round Kief, and they would build a wall round Russia.
They have a Chinese love of walls. Just look at Moscow; one wall round
the Kremlin, a second wall round China-town, a third wall round the
city proper. What we need is the old war-cry of St. George--the patron
of our early dukes, our free cities, and our missionary church."