He. “No, I don’t, I am illegitimate. I was born when mother was at Kara.”
On the Amur steamer going to Sahalin, there was a convict with fetters on
his legs who had murdered his wife. His daughter, a little girl of six, was
with him. I noticed wherever the convict moved the little girl scrambled
after him, holding on to his fetters. At night the child slept with the
convicts and soldiers all in a heap together. I remember I was at a funeral
in Sahalin. Beside the newly dug grave stood four convict bearers ex
officio; the treasury clerk and I, in the capacity of Hamlet and Horatio,
wandering about the cemetery; the dead woman’s lodger, a Circassian, who
had come because he had nothing better to do; and a convict woman who had
come out of pity and had brought the dead woman’s two children, one a baby,
and the other, Alyoshka, a boy of four, wearing a woman’s jacket and blue
breeches with bright-coloured patches on the knees. It was cold and damp,
there was water in the grave, the convicts were laughing. The sea was in
sight. Alyoshka looked into the grave with curiosity; he tried to wipe his
chilly nose, but the long sleeve of his jacket got into his way. When they
began to fill in the grave I asked him: “Alyoshka, where is your mother?”
He waved his hand with the air of a gentleman who has lost at cards,
laughed, and said: “They have buried her!”
The convicts laughed, the Circassian turned and asked what he was to do
with the children, saying it was not his duty to feed them.
Infectious diseases I did not meet with in Sahalin. There is very little
congenital syphilis, but I saw blind children, filthy, covered with
eruptions--all diseases that are evidence of neglect. Of course I am not
going to settle the problem of the children. I don’t know what ought to be
done. But it seems to me that one will do nothing by means of philanthropy
and what little is left of prison and other funds. To my thinking, to make
something of great importance dependent upon charity, which in Russia
always has a casual character, and on funds which do not exist, is
pernicious. I should prefer it to be financed out of the government
treasury.