Complete Story. The Footprint of Princess Crubetskoi.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue XII, 20 September 1902, Page 714

Complete Story. The Footprint of Princess Crubetskoi.

By

TIGHE HOPKINS.

Two things were to note in respect of the round which Captain Strode, Governor of John Howard Prison, N.W., made on a gusty morning of March. The first, that it was an early hour for him; the second, that lie had put on his uniform in place of the old” tweed shooting jacket which he wore in ordinary. These things being observed the staff concluded that Somebody was coming. The common tourist of prisons arrives with a printed order from the Home Office, which allows him to walk through the building at a stated hour in the company of a “principal” warder, who shows him the clean corridors, the cleaner cells, and the prisoners, who are cleanest of all. The visitor may not speak to the prisoners, and the prisoners may not speak to the visitor, who goes away thinking that prison is a very clean, quiet place—which it is. But the governor does not put oft his shooting Jacket. Having finished his round, Captain Strode called a parade of the wardera yvho were not on duty and inspected them carefully In the outer square of the prison. Dismissing them, he turned to his chief warder and said: “I will go through C again.” “Yes, sir.” Chief Warder Sykes, stout and flprid, his grey beard trimmed to a point, knew no more than the rest who was the Somebody that was unquestionably coming. The steel-barred gate of C hall was unlocked again, and the governor and the chief warder entered. Oh, the silence and the cleanliness of those halls! If one could shout or sing out once, or spill a bucket of water over that spotless concrete! The noiseless, shining hall, with its three tiers of cells on either side, had the faint smell of clean but caged humanity. There were three hundred prisoners locked in C— three hundred all but the half dozen whom a warder was teaching to stitch bags at a table in the centre of the long, narrow ward. The governor stopped at a cell on the left side. “Open C 23’s door,” he said to the chief warder, and the key turned in the lock, and the governor went in. A sallow, little wiry man sat at an iron hand-loom weaving towels. He let the beam go and stood up to attention, his hands at his sides, as the governor entered. “Any complaints, Orloff?” “No complaints, sir,” answered the prisoner, who wore the knickerbocker suit of a convict, as distinguished from the trouser suit of a short-term man. “Your English prisons are too comfortable.” His English was fluent, with a foreigner's stress on the wrong syllables. "More comfortable than the Russian ones?” “Much more comfortable than the Russian ones, sir.” “Then, I hope you won’t be making the change again just yet.” Sentenced recently for a crime of violence in England, the prisoner Orloff lay under suspicion of complicity in a worse affair in Russia. He smiled. "It will be time for me to think of that, sir, when I have finished my sentence here. I am very comfortable here.” Returning to his office, Capiain Strode said briefly to his chief warder.

“A lady to visit the prisoner this morning. The Princess Trubetskoi.

Russian. She will be here at eleven.” It is a rule of the Home Office, very rarely departed from, that no lady may visit the maie sine of H.M. prisons. If she is unhappy enough to be the wife, sister, or lover of a convict, she sees him at an interval of months in the visitors’ room, with a warder at her elbow—she is never admitted within the prison proper. During the service of Chief Warder Sykes one very august lady had been conducted as a visitor through the halls, and no other. But the chief warder had taken to himself the governor’s habit of silence. He waited for a further word, but Captain Strode walked ahead and said nothing. Mr Sykes followed him to the door of his office under the colonnade, with the pretty little garden plot in front, just against the boundary wall of the prison. Captain Strode passed into his office without a word. “Very well, sir,” said the chief warder, and withdrew. Within, as without, there. is no superfluity of ornament in prison (an economy which is, perhaps, not wholly of the wisest), and except for its pieces of strictly utilitarian furniture, the governor’s room was only less bare than the eell he had just quitted. The unpapered walls, tinted a feeble mauve, had for their sole embellishments a map of England, a copy of the rules, and the table of the warders’ hours; and the contents of the bookease of varnished deal included nothing more alluring than a Blue Book. The table was heaped with papers, and the papers, like the books, were mostly blue. Unlocking his drawer, Captain Strode took from it a letter (blue again) and a telegram.

The letter, which carried the printed address of the Home Office and the legend “Private and Confidential,” was exactly a fortnight old; the tele-

gram had been received by Captain Strode that morning. The letter, to which was affixed a signature well known in the service; ran to the effect that H.M. Commissioners of Prisons had granted special permission to t'he Princess Anna Trubetskoi to visit John Howard Prison on any day and at any hour of her choice. One sentence in the letter was given the dignity of a thin underline: “The Princess may express a desire to speak with the convict Oi-loff, and if this request is made it need not be refused.” The letter was at once a formal mandate from the Home Office and a word of friendly instruction to the governor, who stood in favour at headquarters as a safe old watchdog of the service. The telegram, addressed from Claridge’s Hotel, was briefly that the Princess Trubetskoi would visit the prison that morning.

It wanted fifteen minutes of eleven when the governer had given a final glance at these despatches, but he had no further orders to issue. His prison was ready for inspection. He felt a rather special interest in the coming of the Princess Anna Trubetskoi, but it was in no setise the interest of gallantry .The governor was a bachelor of fifty, with nothing of the beau in his appearance—short, thick-set, and small-eyed, but with a skin of diamond clearness. There was no thought in his mind of an aesthetic appeal when he put off his shooting jacket for his uniform. The interest of the governor in the Princess was strictly and entirely professional. She was known to him merely as an amateur of prisons,

who had visited (with the especial approval, it was hinted, of the Imperial Government) every gaol of note in Europe. Her hostility to Nihilism was equalled only by her zest of penal reform, and Captain Strode was entertaining himself with the assurance that she had seen no prison which would bear comparison with his.

On the stroke of eleven the gatewarder presented himself at the governor’s door, saluted, and tendered a visiting-card. Scarcely glancing at it, Captain Strode rose and followed his messenger to the outer gate of the prison, where a small neat brougham with dark blue whee's awaited permission to enter beneath the archway. Captain Strode, standing at the wicket in the great double door,- signalled the coachman to advance; the door was thrown open, the carriage passed in, and the door was closed and locked behind it.

An upright, soldier-like young man, with his dark moustache brushed out straight, stepped from the brougham and bowed to the governor as he handed out the lady. She was not an inch above the medium height, and the loose sack jacket with the collar that came above the ears seemed rather to accentuate than to conceal the slimness of the figure within. What a pallid face showed through the light veil, and how strained the look it wore! Seemingly, the Princess had not passed emotionless through the prisons of Europe. The straight, black-brown hair that showed a little underneath her toque was slightly touched with grey, and the ivory cheeks bore two little lines, running from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth. Yet the face was that of a woman below thirty. She had the eyes, thought the Governor, of the Nihilist Orloff.

He doffed his cap of office as he said to her: “I have your card, madame; and you, doubtless, have your passport.” “Ah, you are so strict, monsieur le gouverneur,” and the wan face was lighted by the sweetest smile. “I did not know that I should need it, but I brought it.” The Princess drew from an inner pocket, and handed to the governor, a long blue envelope. Captain Strode, through his gold spectacles,

skimmed the enclosure. “And this gentleman, madame, 1M your brother, Captain Poniatieff. who is mentioned in the letter?” It was the customary missive in the fine round hand of the Home Office, sign- 1 ed with the spreading quill of the secretary to H.M. Commissioners. “My brother, monsieur,” said the Princess Trubetskoi. “You make me feel as if I were In St. Petersburg.” “A compliment, madame! I think, however, that we are now quite in order.” He handed the official letter to his chief warder, who passed it to the gate-warder, who gave it to the warder at the door of the reception room on »the right, who doubtless did the proper thing by it. The chief warder opened the light iron gate just beyond the big outer door of the prison, and the governor and his visitors passed through. At once the Princess became an animated being. Not often before had the governor of John Howard Prison been so famously catechised. “This is the model prison of Dondon, monsieur, is it not?” She paused on the gravel path, her eyes everywhere. “It is the newest, madame, and the best that we have been able to build so far.” “Who built it?” “Every stone was set up by convict labour.” “Vraiment! But how did you secure your prisoners before the wall was raised?” “We had a little wooden hoarding enclosing the ground, madame. and a wise governor.” “And nobody escaped?” “Nobody attempted.” “You have notions of discipline,” said the Princess. “We have- been trying for more than fifty years to better them, madame,” returned the governor. Wherever they stopped the Princess renewed her questions. Captain Poniatieff, who had scarcely any English, said little but observed keenly, and required his sister to translate most of the governor’s replies. The m-litary bearing of the warders seeme<: greatly to Impress him, and he made his sister ask whether, in the event of an assault, they relied solely upon their batons. The governor

assured him they had no other weapon. In the great airy kitchen the white - capped and white - aproned warder - eook presented them with pannikins of the soup that was being- served for dinner. “Ver’ fine soup!” said Captain Poniatieff, his first complete sentence in English. The comparative cheerfulness of the cells (into each of which, the Governor observed, the sun penetrated at some hour of the day) pleased the Princess. Captain Poniatieff thought them not quite solid enough. “Yet we have no escapes, sir,” said Captain Strode. “Point d’evasions, mon cher,” interpreted the Princess, and her brother smiled politely. The Princess asked whether there were no worse cells in the prison than the Ones they had inspected. She was aware that the English Government no longer tolerated dungeons, but she had heard of punishment cells called “black holes.” A punishment cell was promptly unlocked. It was bare, except for a plank bed, and very dim, but the torture of darkness was not felt there. The cell chanced to be tenanted by a middle-aged Malay, who was seated on the edge of his wooden bed twirling his thumbs. The patience of the governor endured all questions and all criticisms, for the further - he led his visitors the more was he convinced that the triumph of John Howard Prison was great. The Princess, indeed, made no scruple to say that she had not seen its like. The workshops, where trades were in progress or in course of being taught, were inspected; and, last of all, the library, among the contents of which a few volumes in French and a Spanish grammar attracted notice. The Princess was curious to know whether books in foreign languages were often asked for. “Our educated prisoners,” answered the governor, “read everything they can get hold of; here is a French history which, as you may see, has passed through many hands. The librarian, our chaplain, is asked now and then for a book in some language almost unheard of.” “I do not suppose you have any books in Russian?” the Princess. “I think not, ma dame. Your country does not supply us with many prisoners; though, by the way, we have a Russian in our keeping- just now. I don’t know what his reading is, but he reads English as easilv as I do.” “A Russian?” said the Princess. “Who is he, monsieur?” “The man Orloff is serving the first months of his sentence here.” “You do not mean!” The Princess flushed angrily. “Tu entends?” she said to. her brother. “Ce vilain d’Orloff est ici.” “Tiens!” he exclaimed. “We have seen him?” The governor explained that a convict spent the first nine months of his sentence in separate confinement, leaving his cell only for chapel and exercise. “But we passed the cell,” he continued, “not five minutes ago. You shall see the man, if you please.” From the moment that Orloff's name had fallen, the Princess had shown all the excitement of indignation. “This man, monsieur,” she said to the governor, “is canaille, base, vile. He is of the Nihilists, and in Russia we know what he has done. What he has done here is little, but in Russia !” To her brother she said abruptly, “Veux tu le voir? M. le gouverneur nous accorde la permission.” Captain Poniatieff, less . moved than his sister, seemed not overeager to embrace the offer. “For you to say,” said he, shrugging his shoulders.

“Are you sure, monsieur, that it is Orloff?” asked the Princess.

“For myself,” replied the governor, “I never set eyes on him till he was brought here. As far as we know, this is his first sentence in England. I may tell you, however, that since his admission here he has been seen

by Russian, French and English detectives, two of whom are prepared to swear that he is the Orloff who is wanted in Russia for the affair which the Princess seems to hint at. There has been some talk of raising the question of extradition; but I don’t quite see how that can be dealt with until he has settled his account in this country. He was sentenced at the Old Bailey to five years’ penal servitude.”

“Allons!” said the Princess, with an effort. “I will see him—but I wish T had not known that he was here.”

“Come, then, madame,” the governor replied. “We have not twenty steps to go. The man is lodged in the hall we have just passed through, quite close to the door.”

They descended from the library, a room near the governor’s office, to the colonnade or covered way which communicated with the first hall of the prison. Rain was falling, but there were not six yards to traverse in the open. The gate or grille of light iron bars which shut off C hall from the rest of the prison was unlocked again, and Captain Strode stopped at the cell marked twentythree.

“It is a matter of form, madame,” he said, as he shook out a key from his bunch; ’“but I must ask you to give me your word that you'will hand no written message to the prisoner, nor any tool or weapon.” “Monsieur,” said the Princess Trubetskoi, “I gave you the only paper that I had; I never carry tools, and I have no weapon.” “You see,” said the governor, with a smile, as he turned his key in the lock of cell twenty-three, “in prison, we are the most timid of people. The maxim of the Home Office is, that ‘Suspicion sleeps at wisdom’s gate.’ ” It was Captain Strode’s one quotation from the poets. As he threw open the door of the cell, little Orloff looked up from his loom.

“La, la! I not moch like,” said Captain Ponaitieff, as his sister went in alone. “Orloff? No, I trust him never.”

The Princess had left the door ajar; but the nerves of Captain Poniatieff, who had held himself stf reserved, seemed now on edge. He fluttered in a fidget to and fro in front of the cell door, drew the governor away, led him back, and said perpetually, “You think safe? Orloff! • In Russia we should tie some chains at him.” Then, as if ashamed of his nervousness for his sister, Captain Poniatieff, with a Herculean effort at English, launched desperately into praise of the prison.

“Ver’ fine preesen! We viseet many preesen—-France. Jairmany, Eetaly, Swedain. The Princess, she go all the time in preesens.- But Zhon Hovard! No; it is not to make compareesen. C’est la prison des prisons. Ver’ splendid!”

“Canaille, va!” And there was a sound from cell twenty-three as if a blow were struck.

“Parbleu! I knew!” said Captain Poniatieff. but the governor was first at the cell’s door.

The Princess Trubetskoi stumbled across the threshold, leaving, through the half-closed door, x glimpse of Orloff crouched in a corner of the cell.

The governor swung-to the ffenor with a crash. The breach of discipline had changed him quickly into the offended gaoler.

“Madame,” he said brusquely, “I do not allow even my warders to lay a hand upon a prisoner. If you were insulted your remedy was with me.” “Pardon,” murmured the Princess. She had thrown herself, trembling from head to foot, upon her brother's shoulder. “Pardon,” she repeated. “He knew me, and insulted me, and I struck him.” The very timbre of ter voice was altered.

“Madame will probably not wigh to stay longer,” said Captain Strode.

The Princess remained silent and quivering on her brother’s shoulder.

Captain Strode led the way to the gate of the ward, and thence straight towards the outer door of the prison.

The rain had not eeaae-d; it was a dull procession; and the princess, her arm tight in her brother’s, let her fine skirt trail over the sodden path. Under the archway, between the inker and the outer gates, the brougham waited for them. At the inner gate stood the chief warder, and as he opened it the Governor stood aside to let his visitors pass. In the act of following them his attention was arrested by a very curious mark upon the wet gravel. Captain Strode’s eyes blazed and a terrible look crossed his face, but in a moment he was cool again. By a gesture scarcely perceptible he showed the chief warder what he had seen on the path; then, quietly, to him: “The blaek ease from my cupboard—quick!”

What Captain Strode had seen was that each step the Princess Trubetskoi had taken between C hall and the gate she had just passed through had left upon the muddy walk the impress of the broad arrow, which is cut in the sole of every convict’s shoe!

Captain Poniatieff had already handed his sister into the brougham.

“I believe I must detain you for one moment longer.” said the governor, approaching the door. “It is the rule in our prisons for visitors to sign their names. The book is here in the reception room,” indicating a door immediately opposite to the door of the brougham.

The Princess seemed to hesitate, but as the governor offered her his hand to alight she roused herself and stepped out. As they entered the reception room, where the visitors’ book stood open on the desk, the chief warden entered behind them. What did he hold which caught the eye of Captain Poniatieff, whose hand went like a flash to a pocket of his overcoat?

“Hands up! You’re covered!” said the chief warder.

The Princess, who had taken up the pen to write her name, turned swiftly and looked along the barrel of Mr Sykes’ revolver. With a cry, half horror, half despair, she threw up her hands and reeled against the desk. The governor stepped beside the chief warder, took from his other hand the fellow of the pointed weapon, and raising his whistle to his lips blew a summons. The gate warder was on the scene in a moment.

“Handcuff and bring here at once the prisoner in C 23,” said the governor.

“I don’t know what birds we have trapped, Mr Sykes,” he added, “but in a minute or two w© will ask the lady to remove her veil.”

At this moment the Princess found a strained and feeble voice. “What is it?” she said. “What does this mean?”

“Madame, or sir,” said the governor, “for at this moment 1 will not

swear to your sex —it is a simple question of the shoes that you are wearing. I fancy that your bootmaker has somehow cont rivet! to identify you with one of my prisoners. A mistake? We shall clear it up in a moment!”

A tap on the door and two warders led in a grotesque little figure. He or she was correct in the tunic and knickerbockers of the convict, but his or her legs were cased in silk, and the feet in patent leather shoes. The lost game told its own disastrous tale. “H'm!” said Captain Strode, “not quite quick enough at the change, eh? Very sad. Very sad, upon my word; but these little matters are difficult to bring off neatly. Has either of you any statement to make here, or will you wait till we get to Bow-street? Plenty of time before the court rises.” “Captain Ponlateiff” still held himself defiantly, and looked as though—had his companions been armed as he was—he would have led a rush for the gate. As it was there were two very ready revolvers to be reckoned with, and warders were now swarming at the door. To make the attempt would be as useless as smiting the sea with a sword. “Come,” he said to Orloff and the “Princess.” “It is done with us. We fight not to-day.” A noise of heavy wheels rolled in under the archway—the first prison van with prisoners from the police courts. “Handcuff Orloff and the other,” said the governor. “The van will wait. What, Orloff” —as the steel circlets were slipped upon the little figure in the Paris jacket - “and you found John Howard so much more comfortable than the Russian prisons!” As the prisoners were led out from the reception room the gate warder handed the governor a telegram, which read: “Scotland Yard. —Orloff’s brother will visit the prison today disguised as Princess Trubetskoi.”