Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/38

 balcony and looked across the river at the place of horrors where so many of Russia's noblest men and women had gone to their deaths, the poor victims of tyrant princes and their ministers. The abominable cruelties practised upon the martyrs for Russian freedom have been as familiar to one's mind as the alphabet, and for almost as long. One's youngest, purest and best emotion has been given throughout one's life to those who have endured torture, disgrace and death for truth and liberty.

I recalled a meeting with Volkhovsy in England, deaf and crippled by his sufferings in this hideous fortress; of Prince Kropotkin, one of the oldest of the surviving victims of Czarist tyranny; of Madame Breshskovski, the "grandmother of the Revolution"; of Marie Spirodovna, whose special sufferings as a young woman were loathsome and unspeakable. In sad procession these figures of tortured and wounded and dead passed silently before my eyes as I leaned over the stone balcony and gazed into the red light of the sky behind the dark fortress we were sometime soon to visit.

And into my dreams they pursued me. The room in the Narishkin Palace which I shared with Madame Balabanov was once on a time a beautiful salon. A scanty curtain which stretched only half-way across the room made a pretence of