Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/442

426 note in person, in order that I might take the bull by the horns and find out definitely what the matter was. The chief of the passport bureau, an Italian whose name I have now forgotten, read the communication attentively, looked scrutinizingly at me, crossed the room and held a whispered consultation with a subordinate, and then returning said: "Mr. Kennan, have you ever had a permit to reside in the Russian Empire before this time?"

"I have," I replied.

"Do you remember when?"

"Yes, in 1868."

"Will you be kind enough to tell me at about what season of the year?"

"It was some time in the spring, and I think in March."

He touched a bell to summon a clerk, and said to the latter, "Find the permit to reside that Mr. George Kennan, an American citizen, took out in March, 1868."

The clerk bowed and withdrew. In three or four minutes he returned bringing the original permit to reside that I had taken out eighteen years before, and a printed schedule of twenty or thirty questions concerning myself and my life which I had then answered in writing. The chief examined carefully my earlier record as an officer of the Russian-American Telegraph Company, held another whispered consultation with a subordinate, and then, coming back to me, said, "There are certain informalities, Mr. Kennan, in your present papers that would justify us in keeping you here until we could communicate with the governor-general of Eastern Siberia; but if you will bring me a formal letter from the American Minister, asking that you be allowed to leave the Empire without regard to such informalities, I will give you the necessary permission."

I could not see how a formal letter from the diplomatic