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in comfort in foreign parts, and so continued up to the revolution of February. Then he took fright, and began to look on himself as a criminal. Not that his conscience troubled him ; what troubled him was the thought of the gendarmes who would meet him at the frontier, the thought of dungeons, of a troika, of the snow, and he resolved to postpone his return. Suddenly the news reached him that his brother had been arrested in connection with the Shevchenko case. There really was some risk for him, and he at once resolved to return. It wa� at that time that I made his a cquaintance at Nice. Savich set off, having bought a minute phial of poison for the journey, which he intended as he crossed the frontier to insert in a hollow tooth and to bite if he should be arrested.
As he neared his native land his fright grew greater and greater, and by the time he arrived at Berlin it had become a suffocating anguish. Hmvever, Savich mastered himself and took his seat in a carriage. He remained there for the first five stations; farther than that he could not bear it. The engine stopped to take in water; on an entirely different pretext he left his carriage. The engine whistled and the train moved off without Savich ; and that was just what he wanted. Leaving his trunk to the mercy of fate, he returned to Berlin by the first train going in the opposite direction. Thence he sent a telegram concerning his luggage, and went to get a visa for his passport to Hamburg.
'Yesterday you were going to Russia, and to-day you are going to Hamburg,· remarked the policeman, vd10 had no intention of refusing the visa. The frightened Savich said: 'Letters-! have received letters,' and probably his expression as he said it was such that it was only by the Prussian official's neglect of his duty tha t he was not arrested. Thereupon Savich, like Louis-Philippe, escaping though pursued by no one, arrived in London. In London a hard life began for him, as for thousands and thousands of others; for years he maintained an honest and resolute struggle with poverty. But for him, too, destiny provided a comic trimming to all tragic events. He made up his mind to give lessons in mathematics, drawing and even French ( for English people! ) .
After consulting this man and that, he saw that i t could not be clone without an advertisement or visiting cards.
'But the trouble was this: how would the Russian government look a t it? I thought and thought about it, and I had anonymous cards printed.'
It was a long time before I could get over my delight at this grand invention: it had never entered my head that it was possible to have a visiting-card without a name on it.
The Free Russian Press and "The Bell"
5 5 1
With the help of his anonymous cards, and with great perseverance and fearful self-denial (he used to live for days together on bread and potatoes) , he succeeded in getting afloat, was employed in selling things on commission, and his fortunes began to mend.
And this was just at the time when the fortunes of another officer of the Pavlovsky bodyguard took a thoroughly bad turn ; defeated, robbed, deceived, and made a fool of, the commanding officer of the Pavlovsky regiment17 departed into eternity. Dispensations followed and amnesties; Savich too wished to take advantage of the Imperial mercies, so off he writes to Brunnov18
and asks whether he comes under the amnesty. A month later Savich is invited to the Embassy. 'My case is not so simple,' he thought ; 'they have been thinking it over for a month.'
'We have received an answer,' the senior secretary says to him; 'you have inadvertently put the Ministry in a difficult position; they have nothing about you. They have applied to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and they can find no file relating to you either. Tell us plainly what it was; it cannot have been anything of consequence.'
'Why, in 1 849 my brother was arrested and afterwards exiled.'
'Well?'
'That was all.'
'No,' thought Nikolay, 'he is joking'; and he told Savich that if that was the case the Ministry would make further inquiries.
A couple of months went by. I can imagine what went on during these two months in Petersburg: references, reports, confidential inquiries, secret questions passed from the Ministry to the Third Division, from the Third Division to the Ministry, the reports of the Governor-General of Kharkov . . . reprimands, observations . . . but Savich's file could not be found.
The Ministry reported to London to that effect.
Brunnov himself sends for Savich.
'Here,' he says-'look at the answer: there is nothing anywhere concerning you. -Tell me, what business was it you were mixed up in?'
'My brother . . .'
17 It was of the lzmaylovsky regiment that Nicholas I was Colonel-in·
Chief. (A.S.)
l 8 The Russian representative in London 1856--8 was not Brunnov but M. I. Khrebtovich. F. I . Brunnov was Russian plenipotentiary in England.
1 840--54 and 1 858-74, with the rank of ambassador from 1 860. (A.S.)
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'I have heard all that, but with what affair were you yourself connected?'
'There was nothing else.'
Brunnov, who had never been surprised at anything from his birth up, was surprised.
'Then what do you ask for a pardon for if you have done nothing?'
'I thought that it was better, anyway.'
'So quite simply you don't need to be amnestied: you need a passport,' and Brunnov ordered a passport to be given him.
In high delight Savich dashed off to us.
After describing in detail the whole story of how he had managed to be amnestied, he took Ogarev by the arm and led him away into the garden.
'For God's sake, give me some advice,' he said to him. 'Alexander lvanovich always laughs at me-that is his way; but you have a kind heart. Tell me candidly: do you think I can safely go through Vienna? '
Ogarev did not justify this good opinion; h e burst out laughing ; but not only Ogarev-I can imagine how the faces of Brwmov and Nikolay for two minutes lost the wrinkles traced by weighty affairs of State and smiled when Savich, amnestied, walked out of their office.
But with all his eccentricities Savich was an honest man. The other Russians who rose to the surface, God knows whence, strayed for a month or two about London, called on us with letters of introduction written by themselves and vanished God knows whither, were by no means so harmless.
The melancholy case which I am going to relate took place in the summer of 1 862. The reaction was at that time in its incubation stage, and from its internal, hidden rottenness nothing had yet emerged into the open. No one was afraid to come and see us; no one was afraid to take copies of The Bell and other publications of ours away with him; many people boasted of the expert way in which they conveyed them over the frontier.
When we advised them to be careful, they laughed at us. We hardly ever wrote letters to Russia: we had nothing to say to our old friends, for we were drifting ever farther and farther away from them; with our new, unknown friends we corresponded through The Bell.
In the spring Kelsiev rcturnPd from Moscow and Petersburg.
His journey is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable episodes of that period. The man who had slipped under the noses of the