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One morning, when I had just sat down to my breakfast, the locksmith Wladyslaw Piotrowski, Kowalski's nearest friend, came to my window and asked me to accompany him to our patient. 'It might ease his last hour when he sees that he is not quite forsaken, said the kind man. 'Perhaps you would like to take a book with you, he added. I took the New Testament and went with him.
As soon as this was read to him, he was taken to a kibitka, with three horses, irons were put on, and he was placed between two armed soldiers; the gates of the fortress were shut, and the road to Siberia was before him. An employee came up to M. Piotrowski, and timidly offered him a small packet, saying "Accept this from my saint."
M. Piotrowski gives an account of it, from which I abridge the following: It was planned by the Abbe Sierosiuski, a Polish Catholic priest who had been exiled for taking part in the rebellion of 1831. He was sent to serve in the ranks of a Cossack regiment in Western Siberia, and after a brief period of military duty was appointed teacher in the military school at Omsk.
After some time he was visited by Prince Bibikoff, the governor-general of that section of the country, one of the men whose names are most associated with the sufferings of Poland: he tried by intimidation and persuasion to induce the prisoner to reveal his projects and the names of his associates. Piotrowski held firm, but the prince on withdrawing ordered his chains to be struck off.
It is the season of gain and good humor, and the people show it by unbounded gaiety. Piotrowski took courage, returned the salutations of the passers-by for how could he be distinguished in such a crowd? The gates of Irbit were reached on the third day. "Halt, and shew your passport," cried an official; but added in a whisper "Give me twenty copecks, and pass quickly."
After the usual routine of questions and denials, Piotrowski suddenly exclaimed in Polish, as one who can hold out no longer, "Well, then, yes! I am no British subject, but a Pole of the Ukraine. I emigrated after the revolution of 1831: I came back because I could bear a life of exile no longer, and I only wished to breathe my native air.
It being Holy Week, Piotrowski was forced to conform to the innumerable observances of the Greek ritual prayers, canticles, genuflexions, prostrations, crossings and bowings, as manifold as in his own, but different. His inner consciousness suffered from this hypocrisy, but it was necessary to his part.
One of the most remarkable escapes from Siberia was that of Rufin Piotrowski, a Polish emigrant who left Paris in 1844 to return to his native country, with impossible plans and crude ideas for her relief.
At one station a man in the uniform of the Russian civil service timidly offered him a parcel wrapped in a silk handkerchief, saying, "Accept this from my saint." Piotrowski, repelled by the sight of the uniform, shook his head. The other flushed: "You are a Pole, and do not understand our customs.
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