“Certainly it’s the truth.”
When Yasha appeared on the threshold I observed immediately with horror that he was in a ferocious mood, but was suppressing his fury. That made him the more dangerous. He spoke slowly, picking his words deliberately, words which struck terror to my soul.
“You are a faithless woman. You always have been faithless, deceiving me continually, but you are caught now, and you won’t escape. It’s fortunate that Dmitri is a decent young fellow and repelled your advances. You can say your last prayers, you base creature.”
While speaking thus Yasha proceeded in a cold, businesslike, purposeful manner to make a noose to hang me. It was this calm about Yasha’s actions, expressive of his terrible earnestness, that made me tremble all over.
“Yasha, I am innocent, Yasha,” I sobbed, throwing myself at his feet and kissing them. “I swear that I am innocent,” I cried. “Have mercy! think what you are doing! I tell you I am innocent!”
Yasha went on with his preparations undisturbed.
He attached the rope to a hook on the ceiling and tested the noose.
“Yasha, come to your senses,” I implored, hugging his legs.
He pushed me aside, placed a stool under the rope and ordered me, in a terrible voice, to stand up on it.
“Now say your last prayers,” he repeated.
He then placed the noose around my neck and jerked the stool from under my feet. In an instant it tightened about my throat, I wanted to cry out but could not, the pressure against the crown of my head was so terrific that it seemed about to crack open. Then I lost consciousness.
As the noose was tightening around my neck Yasha came to himself and hastened to loosen it. I dropped, lifeless, to the floor. In response to his calls for help several politicals, among whom were a couple of medical students, came running to the house. They made every effort to revive me, succeeding only after long and persistent attempts. When I opened my eyes, the whole colony was at my bedside. Pressed for an explanation of his inhuman act Yasha told Dmitri’s story.
Then Prince Gutemurov revealed what he had seen the previous night, on his way home. Yasha was overwhelmed. He fell on his knees and begged my forgiveness, cursing Dmitri and promising to make short work of him. But Yasha could not find him. Dmitri learned of the disclosure and disappeared forever from Amga.
Soon afterwards, another incident occurred which further embittered my life with Yasha. In his absence Vasili, a political, came and told me that the authorities were in receipt of an order to arrest and send him to Irkutsk to be tried on a new charge, which carried with it the death-sentence. It was a regular practice of the Tsar’s government to recall exiles for second trials on some additional bit of evidence.
Vasili asked me to lend him our horse, “Maltchik,” to help him escape. Knowing how attached Yasha was to the horse, I refused Vasili’s request. But he persisted in imploring me, claiming that Prince Gutemurov had seen the order for the arrest, and that the sheriff was already on his tracks.
“But how could the horse be returned?” I asked Vasili, touched by his continuous pleading. He replied that he would leave it with a certain Yakut friend of ours, some hundred versts away, and I finally yielded, although not without misgivings. As soon as he left with “Maltchik” my anxiety grew into alarm. I hurried to Prince Gutemurov to verify Vasili’s story. How thunderstruck I was upon learning from the Prince that he knew of no order to arrest Vasili, and that he had not even seen him. It was clear that I had been swindled and that I would never see the horse again.
“My God!” I thought, “what will happen upon Yasha’s return and his discovery that ‘Maltchik’ is gone?”
The fear of death rose up before me, the impression of my recent escape from hanging still fresh in my mind. I trembled at the thought of Yasha, with the feeling of an entrapped animal seeking an escape. But there seemed to be no remedy.
It was August, 1914. Rumours of the great conflict were just reaching the remote Siberian provinces. The order for mobilization came, and there was great excitement, even in the death-bound Arctic settlements, as if suddenly a new life had been infused into that land of monotony. Upon the heels of the call to arms came the Tsar’s Manifesto, abolishing the scourge of our national life—vodka, and with it a gigantic wave of popular enthusiasm, sweeping the steppes, valleys, and forests of vast Russia, from Petrograd and Moscow, across the Ural mountains and Siberia, to the borders of China, and the Pacific coast.
There was something sublime about the nation’s response. Old men, who had fought in the Crimean War, in the Turkish Campaign of 1877–78, and The Russo-Japanese War, declared that they never saw such exaltation of spirit. It was a glorious, inspiring, unforgettable moment in one’s life. My soul was deeply stirred, and I had a dim realization of a new world coming to life, a purer, a happier and a holier world.
And when Vasili robbed me of our horse, and I was filled with the dread of Yasha’s fury, intensified by my helplessness in the face of this misfortune, the thought, “War!” suddenly flashed into my mind.
“Go to war to help save the country!” a voice within me called.
To leave Yasha for my personal comfort and safety was almost unthinkable. But to leave him for the field of unselfish sacrifice, that was a different matter. And the thought of going to war penetrated deeper and deeper into my whole being, giving me no rest.
When Yasha returned, Prince Gutemurov and several other friends were in the house ready to defend me. He had already learned from the natives, on his way home, that Vasili had escaped on our horse. He could not believe that I would have given his favourite horse to anybody
