Through that obscure episode, as he says, in the history of ideas in Russia, the file came into his hands, and inspired him with an ardent resolution to regain his liberty.  When it slipped through his fingers it was as if it had gone straight into the earth.  He could by no manner of means put his hand on it again in the dark.  He groped systematically in the loose earth, in the mud, in the water; the night was passing meantime, the precious night on which he counted to get away into the forests, his only chance of escape.  For a moment he was tempted by despair to give up; but recalling the quiet, sad face of the heroic girl, he felt profoundly ashamed of his weakness.  She had selected him for the gift of liberty and he must show himself worthy of the favour conferred by her feminine, indomitable soul.  It appeared to be a sacred trust.  To fail would have been a sort of treason against the sacredness of self-sacrifice and womanly love.

There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like a white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman’s spiritual superiority—­his new faith confessed since in several volumes.  His first tribute to it, the great act of his conversion, was his extraordinary existence in the endless forests of the Okhotsk Province, with the loose end of the chain wound about his waist.  A strip torn off his convict shirt secured the end firmly.  Other strips fastened it at intervals up his left leg to deaden the clanking and to prevent the slack links from getting hooked in the bushes.  He became very fierce.  He developed an unsuspected genius for the arts of a wild and hunted existence.  He learned to creep into villages without betraying his presence by anything more than an occasional faint jingle.  He broke into outhouses with an axe he managed to purloin in a wood-cutters’ camp.  In the deserted tracts of country he lived on wild berries and hunted for honey.  His clothing dropped off him gradually.  His naked tawny figure glimpsed vaguely through the bushes with a cloud of mosquitoes and flies hovering about the shaggy head, spread tales of terror through whole districts.  His temper grew savage as the days went by, and he was glad to discover that that there was so much of a brute in him.  He had nothing else to put his trust in.  For it was as though there had been two human beings indissolubly joined in that enterprise.  The civilized man, the enthusiast of advanced humanitarian ideals thirsting for the triumph of spiritual love and political liberty; and the stealthy, primeval savage, pitilessly cunning in the preservation of his freedom from day to day, like a tracked wild beast.