Lost Face | Page 4

before him was Big Ivan--Big Ivan the giant,
the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter
of the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so
low that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him.
Well, well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan's nerves and
trace them to the roots of his quivering soul. They were certainly doing
it. It was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live.
Big Ivan was paying for his low order of nerves. Already he had lasted

twice as long as any of the others.
Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack's sufferings much
longer. Why didn't Ivan die? He would go mad if that screaming did
not cease. But when it did cease, his turn would come. And there was
Yakaga awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in
anticipation--Yakaga, whom only last week he had kicked out of the
fort, and upon whose face he had laid the lash of his dog-whip. Yakaga
would attend to him. Doubtlessly Yakaga was saving for him more
refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-racking. Ah! that must have been
a good one, from the way Ivan screamed. The squaws bending over
him stepped back with laughter and clapping of hands. Subienkow saw
the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and began to laugh
hysterically. The Indians looked at him in wonderment that he should
laugh. But Subienkow could not stop.
This would never do. He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings
slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began
reading back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his father,
and the little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him
dancing and sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire. Once more he
saw Paris, and dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome. And once
more he saw that wild group of youths who had dreamed, even as he,
the dream of an independent Poland with a king of Poland on the
throne at Warsaw. Ah, there it was that the long trail began. Well, he
had lasted longest. One by one, beginning with the two executed at St.
Petersburg, he took up the count of the passing of those brave spirits.
Here one had been beaten to death by a jailer, and there, on that
bloodstained highway of the exiles, where they had marched for
endless months, beaten and maltreated by their Cossack guards, another
had dropped by the way. Always it had been savagery- -brutal, bestial
savagery. They had died--of fever, in the mines, under the knout. The
last two had died after the escape, in the battle with the Cossacks, and
he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the stolen papers and the money
of a traveller he had left lying in the snow.
It had been nothing but savagery. All the years, with his heart in studios,

and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery. He had
purchased his life with blood. Everybody had killed. He had killed that
traveller for his passports. He had proved that he was a man of parts by
duelling with two Russian officers on a single day. He had had to prove
himself in order to win to a place among the fur- thieves. He had had to
win to that place. Behind him lay the thousand-years-long road across
all Siberia and Russia. He could not escape that way. The only way was
ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska. The way had led
from savagery to deeper savagery. On the scurvy-rotten ships of the
fur-thieves, out of food and out of water, buffeted by the interminable
storms of that stormy sea, men had become animals. Thrice he had
sailed east from Kamtchatka. And thrice, after all manner of hardship
and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka. There had
been no outlet for escape, and he could not go back the way he had
come, for the mines and the knout awaited him.
Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east. He had been with
those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned
with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka.
He had sworn never to go back. He knew that to win to those dear
capitals of Europe he must go on. So he had changed ships and
remained in the dark new land. His comrades were Slavonian hunters
and Russian adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines;
and through the savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood.
They had massacred