The next morning, I’d just gotten out of bed, when the telephone station summoned me.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Just now,” the day watchman I— — v answered from the wharf, “the general's ordered you kept from boarding the steamer.”

Greatly alarmed, I ran to the governor.

“You were given a travel ticket mistakenly,” the general told me. “We don't have the right to let you leave the island without a decision from Petersburg.”

“So please send a telegram!”

Incensed by this new obstacle to my leaving, I went to the steamer for my things. Sensing my upset, the passengers were very sorry for everything that was happening and couldn't imagine what it meant. I, too, didn't understand a thing. In the meantime, the general notified, by telegram, the district commander who had issued me the ticket. For his part, he telegraphed Aleksandrovsk to hold and return me to Rykovsk.

“From one hour to the next it gets worse!” I thought. “It's as if I’m some fugitive, or guilty for the issuing of the ticket. Just last year, I applied for a passport with the permission of the governor himself, and now it's ‘Stop!’ “

The Tymovsk commander's latest request was, of course, not fulfilled, and the general decided I could wait in Aleksandrovsk for the answer to his telegram.

One of my exile acquaintances who is Jewish had left for Vladivostok the previous autumn. After setting foot on mainland soil, he telegrammed me in a rapture: “Like an Israelite, I’ve crossed the sea and stepped from an Egypt of labor and servitude into the Promised Land of the Asiatic mainland.” But next day, by order of Sakhalin's governor, he was arrested, supposedly due to a mistaken release, and returned to Sakhalin aboard the first steamer.

Thank God that, although I was being detained there on the wharf, I would definitely not be scandalously returned from Vladivostok under convoy, like some vagabond!

Melancholy days followed. I was recalling so many disappointments and oppressive insults after eight years on Sakhalin, heightening even more my emotional torment.

Comrades tried to distract me, during the day, by dreaming up various walks through Aleksandrovsk's neighborhoods, and during the evening, by arranging literary soirées.