Lost Face

There had been no chance to escape.  From the beginning, when he dreamed the fiery dream of Poland’s independence, he had become a puppet in the hands of Fate.  From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St. Petersburg, in the Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the fur-thieves, Fate had been driving him to this end.  Without doubt, in the foundations of the world was graved this end for him for him, who was so fine and sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who was a dreamer, and a poet, and an artist.  Before he was dreamed of, it had been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and to die in this far land of night, in this dark place beyond the last boundaries of the world…