People at Irkutsk wondered that I had managed to make this long journey so rapidly; but I was quite worn out. However, I recuperated by sleeping, for a week’s time, such a number of hours every day that I should be ashamed to mention it now. “Have you taken enough rest?” the governor-general asked me, a week or so after my arrival. “Could you start tomorrow for St. Petersburg, as a courier, to report there yourself upon the loss of the barges?”
It meant to cover in twenty days—not one day more—another distance of 3,200 miles between Irkutsk and Níjni Nóvgorod, where I could take the railway to St. Petersburg; to gallop day and night in post carts, which had to be changed at every station, because no carriage would stand such a journey full speed over the frozen roads. But to see my brother Alexander was too great an attraction for me not to accept the offer, and I started the next night. When I reached the low lands of West Siberia and the Urals, the journey really became a torture. There were days when the wheels of the carts would be broken in the frozen ruts at every successive station. The rivers were freezing, and I had to cross the Ob in a boat amidst floating ice, which threatened at every moment to crush our small craft. When I reached the Tom River, on which the floating ice had just frozen together during the preceding night, the peasants refused for some time to take me over, asking me to give them “a receipt.”
“What sort of receipt do you want?”
“Well, you write on a paper: ‘I, the undersigned, hereby testify that I was drowned by the will of God, and through no fault of the peasants,’ and you give us that paper.”
“With pleasure—on the other shore.”
At last they took me over. A boy—a brave, bright boy whom I had selected in the crowd—headed the procession, testing the strength of the ice with a pole; I followed him, carrying my dispatch box on my shoulders, and we two were attached to long lines, which five peasants held, following us at a distance—one of them carrying a bundle of straw, to be thrown on the ice where it did not seem strong enough.
Finally I reached Moscow, where my brother met me at the station, and thence we proceeded at once to St. Petersburg.
Youth is a grand thing. After such a journey, which lasted twenty-four days and nights, arriving early in the morning at St. Petersburg, I went the same day to deliver my dispatches, and did not fail also to call upon an aunt, or rather upon a cousin of mine. She was radiant. “We have a dancing party tonight. Will you come?” she said. Of course I would! And not only come, but dance until an early hour of the morning.
When I reached St. Petersburg and saw the authorities, I understood why I had been sent to make the report. Nobody would believe the possibility of such a destruction of the barges. “Have you been on the spot?” “Did you see the destruction with your own eyes?” “Are you perfectly sure that ‘they’ have not simply stolen the provisions, and shown you the wreck of some barges?” Such were the questions I had to answer.
The high functionaries who stood at the head of Siberian affairs at St. Petersburg were simply charming in their innocent ignorance of Siberia. “Mais, mon cher,” one of them said to me—he always spoke French—“how is it possible that forty barges should be destroyed on the Nevá without anyone rushing to save them?” “The Nevá!” I exclaimed, “put three—four Nevás side by side and you will have the lower Amúr!”
“Is it really as big as that?” And two minutes later he was chatting, in excellent French, about all sorts of things. “When did you last see Schwartz, the painter? Is not his Ivan the Terrible a wonderful picture? Do you know why they were going to arrest Kukel?” and he told me all about a letter that had been addressed to him, asking his support for the Polish insurrection. “Do you know that Chernyshévsky has been arrested? He is now in the fortress.”
“What for? What has he done?” I asked.
“Nothing in particular, nothing! But, mon cher, you know—State considerations! … Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a government cannot tolerate that: that’s impossible! intolérable, mon cher, dans un État bien ordonné!”
Count Ignatyev asked no such questions: he knew the Amúr very well—and he knew St. Petersburg, too. Amidst all sorts of jokes and witty remarks about Siberia, which he made with an astounding vivacity, he said to me, “It is a very lucky thing that you were there on the spot and saw the wrecks. And ‘they’ were clever to send you with the report. Well done! At first nobody wanted to believe about the barges. ‘Some new swindling,’ it was thought. But now people say that you were well known as a page, and you have only been a few months in Siberia; so you would not shelter the people there, if it were swindling; they trust in you.”
The Minister of War, Dmitri Milútin, was the only man high in the administration at St. Petersburg who took the matter seriously. He asked me many questions: all to the point. He mastered the subject at once, and all our conversation went on in short sentences, without hurry, but without any waste of words. “The coast settlements to be supplied from the sea, you mean? The remainder only from Chitá? Quite right. But if a storm
