Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/354

338 the Russian revolutionary movement, and the life of political exiles in prison, on the road, or at the mines. Here I obtained many of the facts that I have set forth in previous chapters, and here I heard, for the first time, the terrible history of the Kharkóf central prison, and the narrative of the desperate hunger-strike of the four women in the prison at Irkútsk. Stories more ghastly and pathetic I had never read nor imagined; and night after night I went back to the hotel in a state of emotional excitement that made it impossible for me to sleep, and equally impossible to turn my thoughts into any other channel. All that I could do was to lie for hours on the floor, picturing to myself in imagination the scenes and events that had been described or related to me with such torturing vividness. It is one thing to read in cold, expressionless type such narratives of suffering, injustice, and bereavement as those that I have tried to reproduce in the preceding chapters; it is another and quite a different thing to hear them from the trembling lips of the men and women who have been actors in the tragedies described, and who have themselves gone down into the valley of the shadow of death. If, while listening to such stories, my eyes filled with tears and my hands were clenched in fierce though silent and helpless indignation, I am not ashamed of it — it would have been a relief to me sometimes if I could have cried.

The emotional strain of our East-Siberian experience was perhaps harder to bear than the mere physical suffering. One can endure cold, hunger, jolting, and fatigue with a certain philosophic cheerfulness; but emotional excitement — the constant appeal made by suffering to sympathy — exhausts nervous strength with great rapidity and eventually depresses all the vital powers. In our case there was not only the emotional strain, but the strain of constant anxiety and apprehension. We were liable, at almost any moment, to be arrested and searched; and what the