Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

Old Jaczewski’s health grew ever worse and in 1833 the whole family went abroad. In Baden Wanda met a wealthy Polish emigré and married him. The old man’s condition rapidly declined, and at the beginning of 1833, while they were still abroad, he died. His wife he had not permitted to follow him, and to the very last he was unable to forgive her for the mistake he had made in marrying her. Pani Jaczewska returned to the country with Albina. The chief interest in Albina’s life was Migurski. In her eyes he was the greatest of heroes and a martyr, to whose service she had resolved to dedicate her own life. Before going abroad she had already struck up a correspondence with him, at first on her father’s behalf, then on her own. After her father’s death she returned to Russia and went on writing to him; and once her eighteenth birthday was past she declared to her stepmother that she had decided to travel to Uralsk to join Migurski and there become his wife. Her stepmother at once began accusing Migurski of selfishly wanting to relieve his own difficult situation by captivating a rich young woman and compelling her to share his misfortune. Albina grew angry and informed her stepmother that no one but she could think of imputing such base thoughts to a man who had sacrificed everything for his own nation, that Migurski had on the contrary refused the help she had offered him, and that she had decided irrevocably to join him and become his wife, if only he was prepared to grant her that happiness. Albina was now of age and had some money – the thirty thousand zlotys which her late uncle had left to each of his two nieces. So that there was nothing to hold her back.

In November 1833 Albina, as if for the last time, said farewell to the family who were tearfully seeing her off on her journey to this distant, unknown realm of barbarous Muscovy, took her seat alongside her devoted old nurse Ludwika whom she was taking with her, in her father’s old covered sleigh, newly repaired for this long journey, and set off on the highroad.

V

Migurski was living not in the barracks, but in separate quarters of his own. Tsar Nicholas I required that Polish officers who had been reduced to the ranks should not only have to put up with the hardships of an austere military life, but also suffer all the humiliations to which private soldiers were subjected at that time. But the majority of the ordinary men whose duty it was to carry out his orders were fully aware of the harshness of treatment meted out to these demoted officers, and without regard to the danger involved in any failure to carry out the Tsar’s will, deliberately failed to carry it out whenever they could. The semi-literate commander of the battalion to which Migurski had been assigned, a man who had been promoted from the ranks, understood the situation of this once wealthy, well-educated young man who had now lost everything: he felt sorry for him, respected him, and made all kinds of concessions in his favour. And Migurski could not help appreciating the generous spirit of the lieutenant colonel with the white side-whiskers on his puffy military face, and to recompense him Migurski agreed to give lessons in mathematics and French to his sons, who were preparing for entry to the military academy.

Migurski’s life at Uralsk, which had now been dragging on for some six months, was not only monotonous, dreary and dull, but very hard into the bargain. Apart from the battalion commander, from whom he attempted as far as possible to distance himself, his sole acquaintance was an exiled Pole, an uneducated and disagreeable man of a thrusting disposition who worked in the fishing trade. The principal hardship for Migurski lay in the difficulty he experienced in getting used to a life of poverty. Following the confiscation of his estate he had been left quite without financial means, and he was making ends meet by selling off whatever gold objects still remained to him.