CHAPTER XV
A TASTE OF PRISON LIFE
OUTSIDE in the corridor the man from Schirmskad was waiting, and the two drove me to the railway station and hustled me into a railway carriage. They would not say where I was being taken, but I did not care much, and five minutes after I entered the train, I was fast asleep.
When I awoke it was daylight. A bleak, desolate, grey morning, for the snow had come at last, and was falling heavily. I was cold and stiff from the cramped position, and sore from the jolting of the train—one never understands how a train can jolt until after an experience in what they call a fast train in Russian Poland—and as I sat up, yawned, and rubbed my eyes, every bone in my body seemed to ache.
My guards were both asleep. Had I been minded I could have taken their weapons and shot them both as they rolled in their corners, snoring loudly enough to have drowned the sound of the shots.
I roused them both, and with a great shew of politeness told them what I could have done. They both swore at me.
“It’s really very wrong of you to go to sleep in such a case,” I said amiably. “You had no right to subject a prisoner to such a temptation. I fear I shall be compelled to report you.”
“You’re a cool hand,” growled the Schirmskad man.
“Not nearly so cold as you would soon have been if I had done it,” I retorted, and the grimness of the joke seemed to appeal to them. “But Englishmen don’t do that kind of thing.”
“To hell with the English,” he said.
“That’s not pretty, but it’s nothing to what you’ll feel like saying before you are through with me. One of you took me for a spy, or a conspirator, and the other for a thief or a murderer. It was brilliant.”
“Who are you, then?” growled the Warsaw man. They were both sleepy and ill-tempered, and thus very easy to bait.
“If I had been either spy or murderer, I suppose even you can see that I should have shot you just now instead of going on contentedly to explain things.” The train ran through a station then, and I caught sight of the name Tischnov. I knew the place to be some twenty miles from Warsaw. I began to chuckle, and presently burst into a loud laugh.
“What is it now?”
“I am thinking of your promotion,” I grinned. “They tell me that the man who makes the biggest mistakes gets promoted instantly for fear the blunder should be known and police prestige suffer. I expect you’ll be heads of departments by to-morrow, you two, with decorations.”
“We’ve had enough of your insolence.”
“You asked me why I smiled. Why, when your Minister of the Interior hears from my dear old friend, General von Eckerstein—he used to represent Germany at Petersburg, you know—how you’ve treated me, you’ll get such a sweet message from him.”
The Schirmskad man swore, but his companion looked serious. I continued to chaff them with much enjoyment for ten miles; and the Warsaw agent grew more and more uneasy at every word I dropped relative to my having well-known friends.
“What do you know about General von Eckerstein?” he asked at length.
“That he doesn’t like his friends to wear this kind of ornament;” and I held up my handcuffs.
“If you’ll give me your word not to escape, I’ll take them off,” he replied, very sheepishly.
“Not for the world, now. I shall be able to tell the General how it feels to be dragged through the streets of Warsaw manacled like a felon.”
The two whispered together for some minutes, and then the Warsaw man said: “We’re not afraid of your escaping. I’ll take them off.”
I let him do it, of course. “A bit uncomfortable about it all, eh? It’s beginning to dawn on you at last that I’m not a dangerous revolutionary?” I said, as I rubbed my chafed wrists. “You’re only at the beginning of your lesson, though.”
“I have done no more than my duty,” he muttered.
“We shall see about that before the day’s over, my friend,” I answered sharply.
When we reached Warsaw I was driven to the police headquarters. I was expected, and after a few minutes I was taken to a room where some half dozen men were awaiting me, among them being the two who had brought me to Warsaw. The chief was sitting at a heavily bepapered table.
“Stand there,” he said, pointing to a spot opposite to him.
Two things were evident. The chief was a man high in authority—the deferential manner of the rest shewed this—and the proceedings were stage-managed with a view to impress me with the solemnity and seriousness of the occasion. I took my cue accordingly, and was as nonchalant as I could be. “Why stand?” I asked.
“You are a prisoner,” he rapped out, with a frown.
“On what charge?”
“Don’t question me. Your name?”
I looked at him steadily and kept silent. The frown deepened and he repeated “Your name; do you hear?”
“Of course I hear you; but if I am a prisoner I decline to answer any questions until I know the charge against me.”
“Don’t trifle with me. Refuse to answer and you go to the cells.”
“That as you please. Your agent there knows my name perfectly well and that I am a British subject. I claim my rights as one.”
The reply only served to increase his anger. The flesh about his nose and mouth began to grow white as it will with some men in passion. He was a bully, and probably hated the English like so many of his countrymen.
“Answer me, you——” The epithet was lost in the loud cough of a man near him.
“You have the only answer I shall give until I know the charge.”
“Take him away,” he ordered, with a wave of the hand.
“I demand to communicate with the British Consul,” I said, “and with my friend, General von Eckerstein.”
“Take him away,” he repeated; and I was led off and placed in a cell. If he thought to frighten me, the effort had failed. He had put himself in the wrong, and I knew that my turn would come.
It was a filthy, foul-smelling place they put me in, and they kept me in it all day without food or even water.
In the evening I was taken again before the man, and the scene of the morning was repeated in pretty much the same terms and with the same result. But my back was up, and I vowed I’d rather starve than give in.
I passed a miserable night, famished with hunger, parched with thirst, and half stifled with the reeking foulness of the place.
In the morning an official came to the cell to try a different method. He was less of a ruffian than his superior, and sought to convince me of the uselessness of contumacity.
I let him talk without once replying to his questions until he was in the act of leaving. “I am a British subject,” I said then, “and I have demanded no more than my rights. I have been treated like a dog and shut up in this filthy place to be starved into submission to that ruffianly bully. Go through with it if you dare. I can keep my end up, and be hanged to you all. But if I’m left to rot here, there’ll be questions which somebody will find it difficult to answer. You can’t murder Englishmen with impunity. You know that.”
He shrugged his shoulders, hesitated whether to answer, then decided not to and went away.
A couple of hours later I was taken again to be examined, and the man who had visited me was with the bully.
“Is your name Robert Anstruther?” asked the latter.
“You knew that before you sentenced me to twenty-four hours’ starvation.”
“Are you prepared now to explain your part in this business?”
“What business? What do you charge me with?”
His colleague bent and whispered to him; and a short but very heated altercation followed, which resulted in the bully ordering the other man out of the room.
Then he turned to me. “You’ll have to answer me.”
“We shall see about that,” I returned with a grin.
“I shall gaol you till you do.”
“Then we shall both be a good deal older when we meet again,” I retorted.
“You have a fancy to try a change of prisons?”
“I demand to see the British Consul and to be allowed to communicate with my friends.”
“Your friends, now. Who are they?” he sneered.
“One will do to start with. His Excellency General von Eckerstein of the German Legation at Petersburg. I wish him to know that you have tried to starve me to submit to your infernal bullying.”
“Insolent English beast,” he roared, completely losing his head in his fury. “Take the liar away.”
“I shan’t always be a prisoner,” I cried, as the man seized me. “But I shall remember that insult until I’ve made you swallow your words.” I was nearly as furious as he; but I had no time to say more, for the men took their cue from him and hustled me violently out of the room.
They passed on word that I might be ill treated with impunity; and I had a very rough and tumble time indeed while being carried to one of the gaols.
With the minor police and gaol officials in Russian Poland, the ill-treatment of prisoners is a carefully studied art; and they amused themselves congenially with me. Twenty times on that short journey I had to put the greatest restraint on myself to resist the temptation to do what they strove to goad me to do—to commit some act of violence which would have given them the excuse they sought to half batter me to death.
As it was I was hustled, struck and kicked; my clothes were nearly torn off my back, and every foul epithet which Russian and Polish malice could think of was spat at me with official brutality and contemptuousness.
I kept my head, however. I was tough enough to bear a good deal of ill-treatment; I had often taken much worse punishment in the boxing ring, and I had played football in America; so I held my temper back for the man who was the real cause of it all.
They flung me at length into a cell and locked the door upon me with a last gibe that the English were dirty cowards, and I the meanest skunk of them all.
I understood that day how men are made murderers. I brooded over my wrongs and nursed my rage against the bully who was responsible for this treatment, until if we had stood face to face I know I should have found delight in dragging him down and choking the life out of him. A fierce desire to fight him and punish him took possession of me; and for an hour or two hunger, thirst, injustice, everything was forgotten in that all but insane craving for revenge.
But rage cannot last for ever and when some rough prison food—gruel, black bread, and a pannikin of water—was thrust into my cell an hour or two later, the sight of it re-roused my hunger and blanketed my passion. So famished was I by that time that I had to clamp down the desperate impulse to cram it into my mouth with the unbridled voracity of a starving beast.
It was excellent self-discipline to eat it slowly. But I succeeded. I took it, just a mouthful at a time, with long intervals between, thus spreading out the meal over perhaps two hours or more. And at the end of the time I was myself once more, had regained my self-restraint, and was able to think.
What they meant to do with me, I could not see; but what I would do was clear enough. I would conform to every rule of the prison life and wait for the chance of communicating with my friend or with the British Consul. Let that bully break down my resolve, I would not, if I had to stay in the prison till I was grey. And when my time came, I would have a reckoning with him, even if the immediate result was only to bring me back to the prison with a real crime for the reason.
On entering the gaol I had been searched, and my watch and money, everything, indeed, taken from me. I could not, therefore, try the bribery trick again, even if the chance had offered. So I made the best of a very bad job, arranged my torn clothes in such fashion as I could, rubbed the bruises where the brutes had kicked or struck me, and got all the sleep that was possible.
The attempt to starve me was abandoned, and later in the day another meal, black bread and water this time, was served. I was left to myself that day and the whole of the next, except when the food was brought, or when I was ordered roughly to clean the cell, or when a warder in the corridor would open the grill in the door and after grinning at me would utter some vile epithet. They were a genial pleasant set of men.
On the third day, however, a fresh course was attempted. A man I had not seen before entered my cell, and after very little preface hinted that if I would pay him, he would carry some communication to my friends. Suspicious that it was a trick, I declined; and then he urged me to make a full confession of all I knew and submit to the authorities.
“What do you call this but submitting?” I retorted. “I don’t see what other course is left to me. But I have done nothing, and have no confession to make therefore.”
“By submission I mean answer the questions of Colonel Bremenhof.”
“Is that the man who interrogated me?”
“Yes. Will you not confess to——”
“I have no confession to make,” I cut in. “But I’m glad to know his name. I shan’t forget it.”
He tried to work on my fears, then. This was not England, the times were troubled, military laws prevailed, and suspects who would not account for themselves might be treated very harshly.
“I have had ample proof of that myself, thank you,” said I, drily; “and as soon as I am free, I shall see that some others learn to spell the word.”
He gave me up then and left with a curt warning. “You will not be free until you have submitted.”
It began to look as though it was to be trial of staying power; and I had all that day and half the next to ponder his warning.
Then something happened.
I had had my midday meal and was trying to sleep when I heard the shuffling of steps and the murmur of voices in the corridor.
There was a pause, the key was thrust into the lock, the door thrown open and two warders entered followed by the bully and, of all people in the world, the least expected—Volna.