Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part III · Chapter 3 4 (2/2)

We held a council, and decided that Maróvsky should sail as quickly as possible to the mouth of the Amúr. Some purchases of grain might perhaps be made in Japan before the close of navigation. Meanwhile I was to go with all possible speed up the river, to determine the losses, and do my best to cover the two thousand miles up the Amúr and the Shilka⁠—in boats, on horseback, or on board steamer if I met one. The sooner I could warn the Chitá authorities, and dispatch any amount of provisions available, the better it would be. Perhaps part of them would this same autumn reach the upper Amúr whence it would be easier to ship them in the early spring to the low lands. If only a few weeks or even days could be saved, it might make an immense difference in case of a famine.

I began my two thousand miles’ journey in a rowboat, changing rowers at each village, every twenty miles or so. It was very slow progress, but there might be no steamer coming up the river for a fortnight, and in the meantime I could reach the places where the barges were wrecked, and see if any of the provisions had been saved. Then, at the mouth of the Usurí (Khabaróvsk) I might secure a steamer. The boats which I found at the villages were miserable, and the weather was very stormy. We kept along the shore, of course, but we had to cross some branches of the Amúr, of considerable width, and the waves driven by the high wind continually threatened to swamp our little craft. One day we had to cross a branch of the river nearly half a mile wide. Choppy waves rose like mountains as they rolled up that branch. My rowers, two peasants, were seized with terror; their faces were white as paper; their blue lips trembled; they murmured prayers. But a boy of fifteen, who held the rudder, calmly kept a watchful eye upon the waves. He glided between them as they seemed to sink around us for a moment, but when he saw them rising to a menacing height in front of us, he gave a slight turn to the boat and steadied it across the waves. The boat shipped water from each wave, and I bailed it out with an old ladle, noting at times that it accumulated more rapidly than I could throw it out. There was a moment, when the boat shipped two such big waves, that at a sign from one of the trembling rowers I unfastened the heavy sack, full of copper and silver, that I carried across my shoulder⁠ ⁠… For several days in succession we had such crossings. I never forced the men to cross, but they themselves, knowing why I had to hurry, would decide at a given moment that an attempt must be made. “There are not seven deaths in one’s life, and one cannot be avoided,” they would say, and, signing themselves with the cross, they would seize the oars and pull over.

I soon reached the place where the main destruction of our barges had taken place. Forty-four of them had been wrecked by the storm. Unloading had been impossible, and very little of the cargo had been saved. Two thousand tons of flour had been destroyed. With this news I continued my journey.

A few days later, a steamer slowly creeping up the river overtook me, and when I boarded her, the passengers told me that the captain had drunk himself into a delirium and jumped overboard. He was saved, however, and was now lying ill in his cabin. They asked me to take command of the steamer, and I had to consent; but soon I found to my great astonishment that everything went on by itself in such an excellent routine way that, though I paraded all day on the bridge, I had almost nothing to do. Apart from a few minutes of real responsibility, when the steamer had to be brought to the landing-places, where we took wood for fuel, and saying a word or two now and then to encourage the stokers to start as soon as the dawn permitted us faintly to distinguish the outlines of the shores, matters took care of themselves. A pilot who would have been able to interpret the map would have managed as well.

Traveling by steamer and a great deal on horseback, I reached at last Transbaikália. The idea of a famine that might break out next spring on the lower Amúr oppressed me all the time. I found that on the Shilka the small steamer did not progress up the swift river rapidly enough; so I abandoned it and rode with a Cossack a couple of hundred miles up the Argúñ, along one of the wildest mountain tracks in Siberia, never stopping to light our campfire until midnight had overtaken us in the woods. Even the ten or twenty hours that I might gain by this exertion were not to be despised, for every day brought nearer the close of navigation; ice was already forming on the river at night. At last I met the Governor of Transbaikália and my friend Colonel Pedashénko on the Shilka, at the convict settlement of Kara, and the latter took in hand the care of shipping immediately all available provisions. As for me, I left immediately to report all about the matter at Irkutsk.

People at Irkutsk wondered that I had managed to make this long journey so rapidly; but I was quite worn out. However, I recuperated by sleeping, for a week’s time, such a number of hours every day that I should be ashamed to mention it now. “Have you taken enough rest?” the governor-general asked me, a week or so after my arrival. “Could you start tomorrow for St. Petersburg, as a courier, to report there yourself upon the loss of the barges?”

It meant to cover in twenty days⁠—not one day more⁠—another distance of 3,200 miles between Irkutsk and Níjni Nóvgorod, where I could take the railway to St. Petersburg; to gallop day and night in post carts, which had to be changed at every station, because no carriage would stand such a journey full speed over the frozen roads. But to see my brother Alexander was too great an attraction for me not to accept the offer, and I started the next night. When I reached the low lands of West Siberia and the Urals, the journey really became a torture. There were days when the wheels of the carts would be broken in the frozen ruts at every successive station. The rivers were freezing, and I had to cross the Ob in a boat amidst floating ice, which threatened at every moment to crush our small craft. When I reached the Tom River, on which the floating ice had just frozen together during the preceding night, the peasants refused for some time to take me over, asking me to give them “a receipt.”

“What sort of receipt do you want?”

“Well, you write on a paper: ‘I, the undersigned, hereby testify that I was drowned by the will of God, and through no fault of the peasants,’ and you give us that paper.”

“With pleasure⁠—on the other shore.”

At last they took me over. A boy⁠—a brave, bright boy whom I had selected in the crowd⁠—headed the procession, testing the strength of the ice with a pole; I followed him, carrying my dispatch box on my shoulders, and we two were attached to long lines, which five peasants held, following us at a distance⁠—one of them carrying a bundle of straw, to be thrown on the ice where it did not seem strong enough.

Finally I reached Moscow, where my brother met me at the station, and thence we proceeded at once to St. Petersburg.

Youth is a grand thing. After such a journey, which lasted twenty-four days and nights, arriving early in the morning at St. Petersburg, I went the same day to deliver my dispatches, and did not fail also to call upon an aunt, or rather upon a cousin of mine. She was radiant. “We have a dancing party tonight. Will you come?” she said. Of course I would! And not only come, but dance until an early hour of the morning.

When I reached St. Petersburg and saw the authorities, I understood why I had been sent to make the report. Nobody would believe the possibility of such a destruction of the barges. “Have you been on the spot?” “Did you see the destruction with your own eyes?” “Are you perfectly sure that ‘they’ have not simply stolen the provisions, and shown you the wreck of some barges?” Such were the questions I had to answer.

The high functionaries who stood at the head of Siberian affairs at St. Petersburg were simply charming in their innocent ignorance of Siberia. “Mais, mon cher,” one of them said to me⁠—he always spoke French⁠—“how is it possible that forty barges should be destroyed on the Nevá without anyone rushing to save them?” “The Nevá!” I exclaimed, “put three⁠—four Nevás side by side and you will have the lower Amúr!”

“Is it really as big as that?” And two minutes later he was chatting, in excellent French, about all sorts of things. “When did you last see Schwartz, the painter? Is not his Ivan the Terrible a wonderful picture? Do you know why they were going to arrest Kukel?” and he told me all about a letter that had been addressed to him, asking his support for the Polish insurrection. “Do you know that Chernyshévsky has been arrested? He is now in the fortress.”

“What for? What has he done?” I asked.

“Nothing in particular, nothing! But, mon cher, you know⁠—State considerations!⁠ ⁠… Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a government cannot tolerate that: that’s impossible! intolérable, mon cher, dans un État bien ordonné!”

Count Ignatyev asked no such questions: he knew the Amúr very well⁠—and he knew St. Petersburg, too. Amidst all sorts of jokes and witty remarks about Siberia, which he made with an astounding vivacity, he said to me, “It is a very lucky thing that you were there on the spot and saw the wrecks. And ‘they’ were clever to send you with the report. Well done! At first nobody wanted to believe about the barges. ‘Some new swindling,’ it was thought. But now people say that you were well known as a page, and you have only been a few months in Siberia; so you would not shelter the people there, if it were swindling; they trust in you.”

The Minister of War, Dmitri Milútin, was the only man high in the administration at St. Petersburg who took the matter seriously. He asked me many questions: all to the point. He mastered the subject at once, and all our conversation went on in short sentences, without hurry, but without any waste of words. “The coast settlements to be supplied from the sea, you mean? The remainder only from Chitá? Quite right. But if a storm happens next year⁠—will there be the same destruction once more?” “No, if there are two small tugs to convoy the barges.” “Will it do?” “Yes; with one tug the loss would not have been half so heavy.” “Very probably. Write to me, please; state all you have said; quite plainly⁠—no formalities.”