At the beginning of 1863 I received a letter written in a tiny,
extraordinarily fine handwriting, and headed with the text: _Licite
Venire Parvulos_. In the most elaborately flattering and cringing
expressions the _parvulus_, whose name was Polles, asked permission
to call upon me. I did not like the letter at all. The man himself I
liked even less. A cringing, subdued, furtive man, with a shaven chin
and a pomaded head, he told me that he had been at a dramatic school in
Petersburg and had received some sort of pension there. He almost overdid
the patriotic Pole, and after sitting a quarter of an hour with me,
confided that he came from France, that he had been miserable in Paris,
and that the centre of everything there was Napoleon.
‘Do you know, it has often struck me, and I am more and more convinced
that I am right: the thing to do is to kill Napoleon.’
‘What prevents you then?’
‘What do you think about it?’ Parvulus asked, somewhat embarrassed.
‘I don’t think about it at all. Why, it is you who are thinking about
it.’ And I immediately told him the story which I always make use of when
people rave about bloody deeds and ask advice concerning them.
‘No doubt you know that when Charles V. was in Rome a page took him over
the Pantheon. On returning home, the boy told his father that the idea
had occurred to him to push the emperor down from the top gallery. The
father flew into a rage: “You” (here I vary the term of abuse to suit the
character of the would-be Tsaricide[44]) “wretch, scoundrel, fool, and
so on. How can such criminal ideas occur to you? If they can, they are
sometimes acted upon, but never spoken of.”’
When Polles had gone, I made up my mind not to be at home to him again.
A week later he met me near my house; he told me that he had called
twice and had not found me in, talked some sort of nonsense, and added:
‘I called to see you partly to tell you of an invention I have made
for sending anything secretly by post, to Russia for instance. You are
probably often in need of communicating something in secret?’
‘Quite the contrary, never. I never write to any one in secret. Good
morning.’
‘Good-bye. Remember, if ever you or Ogaryov would like a little music, my
violoncello and I are at your service.’
‘Very much obliged to you.’
And I lost sight of him in the full conviction that he was a spy—whether
a Russian or a French one, I don’t know; perhaps international, as the
paper _Le Nord_ is international.
He never turned up among the real Polish exiles, and not one of them knew
him.
After a prolonged search, Demontowicz and his Parisian friends had
pitched on Colonel Lapinski as the most capable military leader for the
expedition. He had fought for a long time in the Caucasus on the side of
the Circassians, and understood mountain warfare so thoroughly that there
could be no doubt of his skill on the sea. It could not be called a bad
choice. Lapinski was in the fullest sense of the word a condottiere. He
had no settled political convictions. He could have fought on the side
of the White or the Red, the clean or the dirty; belonging by birth to
the Galician gentry, by education to the Austrian army, he was strongly
inclined towards Vienna. Russia and everything Russian he hated with a
savage, irrational and incorrigible hatred. He probably knew his trade,
he had spent years in active warfare and had written a remarkable book
about the Caucasus.
‘This is what happened to me once in the Caucasus,’ Lapinski used to
tell. ‘A Russian major, living with a whole household not far from us,
seized some of our people, I don’t know how or why. I heard about it and
said to my men, “Look here, it is a sin and a shame; are you stolen like
women? Go to his place, take everything you find and bring it here.” They
are mountaineers, you know; you don’t need to say much to them. A day
or two afterwards they brought me the whole family—servants, wife and
children—but they did not find the major himself at home. I sent word to
him that if he released our people and paid a ransom, we would give him
back our prisoners at once. Of course they sent our men, paid the fine,
and we released our Moscow visitors. The next day a Circassian came to
me: “Look here,” he said, “what’s happened; when we let the Russians go
yesterday,” he said, “a boy of four was forgotten; he was asleep, so he
was forgotten; what is to be done?”
‘“Ah, you dogs, you can’t do anything properly; where’s the child?”
‘“With me. He screamed and screamed—well, I was sorry for him and took
him home.”
‘“Allah has sent you luck, it seems; I won’t hinder it. Let them know
that they have forgotten the child and you have found him, and ask for
a ransom.” My Circassian’s eyes fairly sparkled. Of course the father
and mother were in a fluster, they gave anything he liked to ask. It was
funny.’
‘Very.’
Here is another trait showing the character of the future hero of Polish
independence.
Before he set off, Lapinski came to see me. He arrived not alone, and
somewhat disconcerted by the expression on my face, made haste to say:
‘Allow me to introduce my adjutant.’
‘I have had the pleasure of meeting him already.’
It was Polles.
‘Do you know him well?’ Ogaryov asked Lapinski when they were alone.
‘I met him in the boarding-house in which I am staying now. He seems a
nice fellow and very obliging.’
‘But do you trust him?’
‘Of course. Besides, he plays the violoncello charmingly and will
entertain us on the voyage.’
It was said that the colonel found him entertaining in other ways.
We told Demontowicz later on that to our thinking Polles was a very
suspicious character. Demontowicz observed: ‘Yes, I don’t trust either of
them much, but they won’t play us any tricks’; and he took his revolver
out of his pocket.
The preparations proceeded slowly; rumours of the expedition spread
more and more widely. At first the company furnished a steamer which on
being inspected by an experienced sailor, Count S., turned out to be
good for nothing. All the cargo had to be shifted. When everything was
ready and a good part of London knew all about it, the following incident
occurred: Cwerczakiewicz and Demontowicz informed all who were taking
part in the expedition that they were to assemble at ten o’clock on such
and such a railway platform to go to Hull by a special train provided by
the railway company. And so at ten o’clock the future warriors began to
assemble. Among them were Italians and a few Frenchmen; poor, reckless
men, sick of a life spent in homeless wandering, and men who were true
lovers of Poland. And ten o’clock came and eleven o’clock, but still no
train appeared. Little by little, rumours of this long journey reached
the homes from which our heroes had mysteriously vanished, and by twelve
o’clock the future warriors were joined in the station waiting-rooms by a
troop of women, inconsolable Didos deserted by their fierce adorers, and
ferocious landladies who had not been paid, probably for fear they should
spread the news abroad. In violent excitement they raised a furious
uproar, and wanted to complain to the police; some of them had children;
all the latter screamed and all the mothers screamed. The English stood
round, staring in astonishment at the picture of ‘The Exodus.’ In vain
some of the elders of the party inquired whether the special train would
soon come in, and showed their tickets. The railway officials had never
heard of any such train. The scene was becoming more and more uproarious
... when suddenly a messenger from the leaders galloped up to tell the
waiting warriors that they had all gone mad, that the train was at ten
o’clock in the evening, not in the morning, and that they had thought
this so evident that they had not even written it. The poor warriors
returned with their bags and their wallets to their deserted Didos and
softened landladies.
At ten o’clock in the evening they went off. The English gave them three
cheers.
Next morning a marine officer whom I knew came to me from one of the
Russian steamers.
The steamer had received an order the previous evening to set off full
steam next morning and follow the _Ward Jackson_.
Meanwhile the _Ward Jackson_ had stopped at Copenhagen for water, had
spent some hours at Malmö waiting for Bakunin, who was intending to go
with them to incite the peasants in Lithuania to rise, and had been
seized by the orders of the Swedish Government.
The details of this affair and of Lapinski’s second attempt have been
described by himself in the papers. I will only add that even in
Copenhagen the captain had said he would not take the steamer to the
coast of Russia, as he did not want to expose it and himself to danger;
that even before they reached Malmö things had come to such a pass that
Demontowicz threatened not Lapinski but the captain with his revolver.
He did, however, quarrel with Lapinski too, and sworn foes they went to
Stockholm, leaving their luckless followers at Malmö.
‘Do you know,’ Cwerczakiewicz or some of his associates said to me, ‘the
person who is most suspected of being chiefly responsible for the vessel
being stopped at Malmö is Tugenbold?’
‘I don’t know him at all. Who is he?’
‘Oh yes, you do, you have seen him with us: a young fellow without a
beard—Lapinski brought him to see you once.’
‘Then you are speaking of Polles?’
‘That is his pseudonym, his real name is Tugenbold.’
‘What are you saying?’ and I rushed to my writing-table. Among letters
I had put aside as of special importance I found one sent me two months
previously. This letter was from Petersburg; it warned me that a certain
Dr. Tugenbold was in relations with the Third Section, that he had
returned, but had left his younger brother as his agent, and that the
younger brother was to come to London.
That Polles and he were one and the same person there could be no doubt.
I let my hands fall in despair.
‘Did you know before the expedition started that Polles was Tugenbold?’
‘Yes I knew. It was said he had changed his name because his brother was
known in the country for a spy.’
‘Why didn’t you say a word to me?’
‘Oh, it just didn’t come up.’
And Tchitchikov’s Selifan[45] knew that the chaise was broken and did not
say a word.
We had to telegraph to Malmö after the arrest. Even then neither
Demontowicz nor Bakunin[46] could do anything effective; they quarrelled.
Polles was thrown into prison over some diamonds collected from Swedish
ladies for the Polish cause and spent by him on riotous living.
At the same time that a crowd of armed Poles, a large quantity of
expensive ammunition, and the _Ward Jackson_ remained honourable
prisoners on the coast of Sweden, another expedition was being got up by
the Whites; it was to go by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. At the head
of it was Count Sbyszewski, brother of the man who wrote the remarkable
pamphlet, _La Pologne et la Cause de l’Ordre_. He was a first-rate naval
officer in the Russian service, but he abandoned it when the insurrection
broke out, and now took a steamer, which had been secretly equipped,
to the Black Sea. He had been to Turin for a secret interview with the
leaders of the opposition there, among others with Mordini.
‘The day after my interview with Sbyszewski,’ Mordini himself told me,
‘the Minister of Internal Affairs drew me aside in the evening and said:
“Do please be more careful; you were visited yesterday by a Polish
emissary who wants to take a steamer through the Straits of Gibraltar; be
that as it may, why do they chatter about it beforehand?”’
The steamer, however, did not reach the shores of Italy: it was seized at
Cadiz by the Spanish Government. When they no longer needed them, both
the Governments allowed the Poles to sell their arms and let the steamers
go.
Disappointed and incensed, Lapinski arrived in London. ‘The only thing
left to do,’ he said, ‘is to form a society of assassins and kill the
greater number of all the rulers and their advisers, or to go back again
to the East, to Turkey.’
Disappointed and incensed, Sbyszewski arrived.
‘Well, are you going off to kill kings, like Lapinski?’
‘No, I am going to America.... I am going to fight for the Republic. By
the way,’ he asked Tchorszewski, ‘where can one enlist here? I have a few
comrades with me, and all without bread to eat.’
‘Simply, at the Consul’s.’
‘No, we want to go on to the South; they are short of men now, and they
offer more favourable conditions.’
‘Impossible; you could not go to the South!’
... Fortunately Tchorszewski guessed right; they did not go to the South.
_May 3, 1869._