Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/369

Rh would sob at intervals as she tried to tell me her story; but, as a rule, both men and women referred to injustice and suffering with perfect composure, as if they were nothing more than the ordinary accidents of life. Mr. Volkhófski showed me one day, I remember, a large collection of photographs of his revolutionary friends. Whenever a face struck me as being noteworthy, on account of its beauty or character, I would ask whose it was.

"That," he would say quietly, "is Miss A, once a teacher in a peasant school; she died of prison consumption in Kiev three years ago. The man with the full beard is B, formerly a justice of the peace in N; he was hanged at St. Petersburg in 1879. The thin-faced girl is Miss C, one of the so-called propagandists; she went insane in the House of Preliminary Detention while awaiting trial. The pretty young woman with the cross on the sleeve of her dress is Madame D, a Red Cross nurse in one of the field hospitals during the late Russo-Turkish war; she was sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude and is now at the mines of Kará. The lady opposite her on the same page is Miss E, formerly a student in the Beztúzhef medical school for women in St. Petersburg; she cut her throat with a piece of broken glass, after two years of solitary confinement in the fortress."

In this way Mr. Volkhófski went through his whole collection of photographs, suggesting or sketching hastily in a few dry, matter-of-fact words the terrible tragedies in which the originals of the portraits had been actors. He did not show the least emotional excitement, and from his manner it might have been supposed that it was the commonest thing in the world for one's friends to be hanged, sent to the mines, driven insane by solitary confinement, or tortured into cutting their throats with broken glass. His composure, however, was not insensibility, nor lack of sympathy. It was rather the natural result of long familiarity with such tragedies. One may become accustomed in time even