'Theft is a great vice; but I know the police, I know how they torment them-they will question him, they will flog him; to give up one's neighbour to the lash is a far worse crime ; besides, huw can one telclass="underline" perhaps what I have done may touch his heart ! '
His domestics shook their heads and said, 'Er hat einen Raptus'; the benevolent ladies said, 'C'est un brave homme, mais ce n'est pas tcut a fait en regle, cda,' and tapped their foreheads.
But Haas rubbed his hands and went his own way .
. . . Sokolovsky had hardly finished his anecdotes, when several others at once bpgan to tell theirs ; it \Vas as though we had all returned from a long journpy-thcrc was no end to the questions, jokes, and witticisms.
Physically. Satin had suffered more than the rest; he was thin and had lost part of his hair. He had been at his mother's in the country in the Tambov province when he heard that we had been arrested, and at once set off for Moscow, for fear that his mother should be alarmed by a visit of the gendarmes; but he caught cold on the way and reached home in a high fpvcr. The policP
found him in bed, and it was impossible to move him to the police station. He was placed under arrest at home, a soldier from the police station was put on guard inside th£> bedroom and the local police superintendPnt was s<'t to act as a male nurse by the patient"s bedside, so that on coming to himself after his delirium hP met thP attcntii'C gazP of the on£'. or thP wizened phiz of the other.
At the beginning of the winter he was moved to the Lefortovsky Hospital ; it appearerl there was not a single empty private room for a prisoner, but such trifles were not deemed \vorth considering; a corner parti tioned off, with no stove, was found.
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the sick man \Vas put in this southern verandah and a sentry posted to watch him. What the temperature in this stone closet was like in winter may be judged from the fact that the sentry was so benumbed with cold at night that he would go into the corridor to warm himself at the stove, begging Satin not to tell the duty officer of it.
The hospital authorities themselves saw that such tropical quarters were impossible in a latitude so near the pole, and mowd Satin to a room near the one in which frost-bitten patients were rubbed.
Before we had time to describe and listen to half our adventures, the adjutants began suddenly bustling about, the gendarme officers drew themselves up, and the policemen set themselves to rights: the door opened solemnly and little Prince Sergey Mikhaylovich Golitsyn walked in en grande tcnue with a ribbon across his shoulder; Tsynsky \vas in court uniform, and e,·en the auditor, Oransky, had put on some sort of pale-green civil-military uniform for the joyful occasion. The commandant, of course, had not come.
Meanwhile the noise and laughter had risen to such a pitch that the auditor came menacingly into the room and obse1·ved that loud conversation and, above all, laughter, showed a subversive disrespect to the will of His Majesty, which we were to hear.
The doors were opened. Officers divided us into three groups: in the first was Sokolovsky, the painter Utkin, and an officer callPd lbayev; we were in the second ; in the third, the tutti frutti.
The sentence regarding the first category was read separately.
It was terrible ; condemned for lese-majcste they were sent to the Schli.issPihurg for an indefinite period. All three listened to this savagP sentence like heroes.
"'lwn Oransky. drawling to give himself importance, read, with pauses, that for 'll;Sc-majcstc and insulting the Most August Famiclass="underline" \', ct crtrra.' Sukolovsky observed:
'\V ell, I never insultf'd the family.'
Among his pap<'I'S besidf's that poem were found some resolutions written in jest as though by the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, with intf'ntional mistakes in spelling, and those orthographical <'!Tors help<'d to convict him.
Tsynsky, to show that he could be free and easy and affable, said to Sokolo,·sky a fter the spntence:
'I say, you',·e been in Schli.isselburg before?'
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'Last year,' Sokolovsky answered promptly, 'as though I felt in my heart what was coming, I drank a bottle of Madeira there.'
Two years later Utkin died in the fortress. Sokolovsky, half dead, was released and sent to the Caucasus; he died at Pyatigorsk. Some remnant of shame and conscience led the government after the death of two to transfer the third to Perm.
-Ibayev's death was sui gencris: he had become a mystic.
Utkin, 'a free artist confined in prison,' as he described himself in his signature to questionnaires, was a man of forty; he had never taken part in any kind of politics, but, being of a generous and impulsive ternperaml.'nt, he gave free rein to his tongue in the commission and was abrupt and rude to the members of it.
For this he was done to death in a damp cell, in which the water trickled down the walls.
Ibayev's greater guilt lay in his epaulettes. Had he not been an officer, he would never have been so punished. The man had happened to be present at some supper party, had probably drunk and sung like all the rest, but certainly neither more nor louder than the others.
Our turn came. Oransky wiped his spectacles, cleared his throat, and began reverently announcing His Majesty's will. In this it was represented that the Tsar, after examining the report of the commission and taking into special consideration the youth of the criminals, commanded that we should not be brought to trial, but that we should be notified that by law we ought, as men convicted of lesc-majeste by singing seditious songs, to lose our lives or, in virtue of other laws, to be transported to penal servitude for life. Instead of this, the Tsar in his infinite mercy forgave the greater number of the guilty, leaving them in their present abode under the supervision of the police.
The more guilty he commanded to be put under reformatory treatment, which consisted in being sent to civilian duty for an indefinite period in remote provinces, to live under the superintendence of the local authorities.
It appeared that there were six of the 'more guilty': Ogarcv, Satin, Lakhtin, Obolensky, Sorokin, and I . I was to be sent to Perm. Among those condemned was Lakhtin, who had not bl.'en arrested at all. When he was summoned to the commission to hear the sentl.'nce, he supposed that it was as a warning, to be punished by hearing how others were punished. The story was that someone of Prince Golitsyn's circle, being angry with Lakhtin's wife, had obliged him with this agreeable surprise. A man of delicate health, he died three yaars later in exile.
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'Yhen Ornmky had finished reading, Colonel Shubinsky mnde a speech. In choice language and in the style of Lomonosov he informed us that i t was due to the good offices of the noble gentlf'man who had presided at the commi ttee that the Tsar had been so merciful.
Shubinsky waited for all of us to thank Prince Golitsyn, but this did not come off.
Some of those \vho \vere pardoned nodded, stealing a steal thy gla nce nt us as they did so.