ges 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.

The wild beast was making its way instinctively eastward to the Pacific
coast, and the civilised humanitarian in fearful anxious dependence
watched the proceedings with awe. Through all these weeks he could never
make up his mind to appeal to human compassion. In the wary primeval
savage this shyness might have been natural, but the other too, the
civilized creature, the thinker, the escaping "political" had developed
an absurd form of morbid pessimism, a form of temporary insanity,
originating perhaps in the physical worry and discomfort of the chain.
These links, he fancied, made him odious to the rest of mankind. It
was a repugnant and suggestive load. Nobody could feel any pity at the
disgusting sight of a man escaping with a broken chain. His imagination
became affected by his fetters i