Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/205

Rh window-shutters, and Miss Armfeldt would go cautiously to the door, inquire who was there, and when satisfied that it was one of her companions would take down the bar and give him admission. The small, dimly lighted cabin, the strained hush of anxiety and apprehension, the soft, mysterious knocking at the window-shutters, the low but eager conversation, and the group of pale-faced men and women who crowded about me with intense, wondering interest, as if I were a man that had just risen from the dead, made me feel like one talking and acting in a strange, vivid dream. There was not, in the whole environment, a single suggestion of the real, commonplace, outside world; and when the convicts, with hushed voices, began to tell me ghastly stories of cruelty, suffering, insanity, and suicide at the mines, I felt almost as if I had entered the gloomy gate over which Dante saw inscribed the dread warning, "Leave hope behind."

About nine o'clock, just as I had taken out my note-book and begun to write, a loud, imperative knock was heard at the side window-shutter. Madam Kolénkina exclaimed in a low, hoarse whisper, "It's the gendarmes! Don't let them come in. Tell them who of us are here, and perhaps they'll be satisfied." Everybody was silent, and it seemed to me that I could hear my heart beat while Miss Armfeldt went to the door and with cool self-possession said to the gendarmes, "We are all here: my mother, I, Kurteíef, Madam Kolénkina, and" — the other names I could not catch. After a moment's parley the gendarmes seemed to go away, Miss Armfeldt shut and re-barred the door, and coming back into the room said with a smile, "They were satisfied; they didn't insist on coming in." Then, turning to me, she added in English: "The gendarmes visit us three times a day to see what we are doing, and to make sure that we have not escaped. Their visits, however, have grown to be formal, and they do not always come in."

Conversation was then resumed, and for two hours or more I listened to stories of convict life in prison, on the road, or at the mines, and answered, as well as I could, the