Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/124

108 peasant men and women, mostly young and completely inexperienced.

A group of peasants arrived in a big town intending to earn their living; they walked from one factory office to the other, with servile bows begging for work. But this was no easy matter for naïve, half-savage paupers, who were ready to fall at the feet of every factory-watchman, and said their prayers before every holy picture, in fact every framed picture they noticed, who wept aloud or howled in despair. Thus passed days and weeks. In the meantime the entire store of food brought from the village was consumed, the small fund spent after a few days, and so one evening the peasant boys and girls had to pass the night In the streets, hungry, and with despair in their hearts.

But the streets are cold and wet, chilly and fearful, and drive the homeless man where the lights glitter from the windows of the happy "rich." There the bands of paupers throng like moths to the light, to meet the police who are watching that "paupers shall not loiter in clean streets." The next scene takes place in the police station. After a severe passport control, the homeless vagrants are sent, by way of protection, to a night asylum.

When in 1908 I visited these asylums in Petrograd, I thought I had a nightmare, so horrible was all I saw. Already at that time I felt instinctively that out of this dark and foul underworld would come forth some unknown, monstrous avengers. They have come