Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/170

154 that attend the life of a brodyág [a vagrant or tramp].

"I had once a convict servant," said a prison official at Kará to me, "who was one of these irreclaimable vagrants, and who ran away periodically for the mere pleasure of living a nomadic life. He always suffered terrible hardships; he had no hope of escaping from Siberia; and he was invariably brought back in leg-fetters, sooner or later, and severely punished; but nothing could break him of the practice. Finally, after he had become old and gray-headed, he came to me one morning in early summer — he was then living in the free command — and said to me, 'Bárin, I wish you would please have me locked up.' 'Locked up!' said I. 'What for? What have you been doing?' 'I have not been doing anything,' he replied, 'but you know I am a brodyág. I have run away many times, and if I am not locked up I shall run away again. I am old and gray-headed now, I can't stand life in the woods as I could once, and I don't want to run away; but if I hear General Kukúshka calling me I must go. Please do me the favor to lock me up, your High Nobility, so that I can't go.' I did lock him up," continued the officer, "and kept him in prison most of the summer. When he was released the fever of unrest had left him, and he was as quiet, contented, and docile as ever."

There seems to me something pathetic in this inability of the worn, broken old convict to hear the cry of the cuckoo without yielding to the enticement of the wild, free, adventurous life with which that cry had become associated. He knew that he was feeble and broken; he knew that he could no longer tramp through the forests, swim rapid rivers, subsist upon roots, and sleep on the ground, as he once had done; but when the cuckoo called he felt again the impulses of his youth, he lived again in imagination the life of independence and freedom that he had known only in the pathless woods, and he was dimly conscious