XI

A NUN IN VIVISEPULTURE

Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of personages. And more than one of the tragic incidents of opera may be, if diligence and intuition are not lacking, traced back to this forgotten Polish woman and her exorbitant adventures. Time and creative interpretation have fashioned her case into one of the classic legends of disappearance.

In the Polish insurrection of 1830-31, a certain Alexander Ubrik played a part sufficiently noteworthy to get himself exiled to Siberia for life, leaving behind him a wife and four young daughters, the third of whom, Barbara, was the chief figure of the subsequent affair. But the Ubrik family had already known the feel of the romantic fabric and there had already been a remarkable disappearance mystery involving a relative no more remote than the mother of Barbara and wife of the banished Alexander. It is with this part of the family history that much of the literary offspring deals.

About the year 1800, according to the account of the celebrated Polish detective Masilewski, extensively quoted by his American friend and compeer, the late George S. McWatters of the United States Secret Service, the first of the series of astonishing scenes involving the Ubrik family was played in Warsaw. There was then resident in the Polish capital one Jaromir Ubrik, the profligate son of an old and noble Polish house who had wasted his substance in gambling and roistering. Ubrik, though fallen into disrepute among his former friends, was still intimate with a few of the aristocratic families, among them that of Count Michael Satorin.

The Countess Satorin had borne her lord several daughters but no son to succeed to the title. When, in the year mentioned, Mme. Satorin yielded still another daughter, her husband being then absent in Russia, she sought to forestall the wrath and disappointment of her spouse by substituting a male child. It happened that the wife of Jaromir Ubrik had borne a son only two days earlier and died in childbirth. For the consideration of ten thousand florins, Ubrik consented to exchange children with the countess, who said she was additionally persuaded to the arrangement by the fact that the Ubrik blood was as good as her own and the boy thus fit to wear a title. The little Ubrik boy was, accordingly, delivered to the countess and her little daughter turned over to Jaromir Ubrik, nestled in a down lined basket with a fine gold chain and cross about her neck.

The elements of a thousand plots will be apparent even at this early stage of the story. But far more fabulous-seeming things followed immediately.

Ubrik took the basket containing the little girl and started home. On the way, following his unhappy weakness, he entered a tavern and began to spend some of the money he had been paid. He got drunk, staggered home without the little girl in her basket and returned the following day to find that a nameless Jew had claimed this strange parcel and disappeared.

Not long afterwards, it seems, Countess Satorin, plagued by her natural feelings, came to see her daughter and had to be told the story. The outraged mother finally exacted an oath that he devote his worthless life to the quest for the stolen child. Ubrik began his work, apparently sobered by the death of his wife, the theft of the little girl and the charge her mother had laid upon him. After several years he rose in the ranks of the Russian intelligence service and was made captain of the Warsaw police.

About this time the keeper of the inn where Ubrik had lost the little girl was seized with a mortal disease and called the police captain to his bedside, confessing that he had turned the little girl over to a Jewish adventurer named Aaron Koenigsberger, whose address in Germany the dying man supplied. Captain Ubrik proceeded to Germany, confronted Koenigsberger with the confession of his accomplice and dragged the abductor back to Poland to face the courts. Koenigsberger, to avoid punishment, assisted in the search for the little girl and guided Captain Ubrik to Kiev, where he had sold the child to another Jew named Gerson. The Gersons appeared to be respectable people, who had taken the little girl to console them in their own childlessness. They deplored that she had been stolen several years earlier by a band of Gypsies. Captain Ubrik, at length satisfied that this story was true, set out on an Odyssean journey in quest of the child. For more than eleven years he followed Gypsy bands through all parts of western and southern Russia and into Austria and Germany. At last, in a village not an hour’s journey from Warsaw, he discovered the missing daughter of the Countess Satorin and returned her to her mother, as a grown woman who believed herself to be a Jewess and could now at last explain why her supposed people had always said she looked like a “Goy.”

The woman recovered as Judith Gerson seems to have been satisfactorily documented as the missing daughter of the countess. At any rate, she was taken into the Satorin family and christened Elka Satorin. Her father had meantime died, leaving the bulk of his fortune and the title to his supposed son, Alexander. Elka Satorin, however, inherited her mother’s property and, a few years later, married the boy who had been substituted for her in the cradle.

This was the strange match from which Barbara Ubrik was spawned into a life that was to be darkened with more sinister adventures. The year of her birth is given as 1828, so that she was a tot of three when her father was dragged away to the marshes and mines of Russia in Asia.

I must confess that I set down so fantastic a tale only after hesitation and skeptical misgiving. It, and what is to follow, reads like a piece of motion picture fustian, an old wives’ tale. The meter of reasonableness and probability is not there. The whole yarn is too crudely colored. It is sensation; it is melodrama. But it seems also to be the truth. My sources are old books by reputable chroniclers, containing long quotations from the story of Masilewski, the detective, from the testimony of Wolcech Zarski, the lover who appeared in Barbara Ubrik’s life at a disastrous moment, from the proceedings of an ecclesiastical trial. Indeed, the whole thing seems to be a matter of court record in Warsaw and in Cracow, the old Polish capital. This being so, we must conclude that fiction has been once more detected in the act of going to life even for its ultimate extravagances.

The years following the great revolt of 1831 were full of torment for Poland. Nicholas I, weary of what he termed the obstinacy of the people, began a series of the most dire repressions, including the closing of the Polish universities, the revocation of the constitution, the persecution of the Roman priests and a general effort to abolish the Polish language and national culture. The old nobility, made up of devout Roman Catholics and chauvinistic patriots, was especially sought out for the reactionary discipline of the czar, and a family like that of Barbara Ubrik, whose chief had been sent to Siberia for treason, was naturally among the worst afflicted.

The attempt from St. Petersburg to uproot the church of Rome was the cause of an intense devotionalism among the Poles, with the result that many men and women of distinguished families gave themselves up to the religious life and entered the monasteries and convents. This passion touched the Ubriks as well as others and Barbara, naturally of a passionate and enthusiastic nature, decided as a girl that she would retire from the world and devote herself to her forbidden faith. Her mother, Elka Satorin-Ubrik, once a ward of the Jewish family in Kiev and later the prisoner of the Gypsies, strongly opposed such a course, but in 1844, when she was 16 years old, the girl could no longer be restrained. She presented herself to the Carmelite cloister of St. Theresa in Warsaw in the spring of that year and was admitted to the novitiate.

From the beginning, however, the spirited young noblewoman seems to have been most ill-adapted to the stern regulations hedging life in a monastery of the unshod cenobite Carmelites. She had brought into the austere atmosphere of the nunnery something that has played havoc with rules and good intentions under far happier environments than that of the cloister; namely, young beauty. The older and less favored nuns saw it first with misgiving and soon with envy, a sin which seems not altogether foreign to the holiest places. What was more directly in line with evil consequences, Father Gratian, the still youthful confessor of the cloister, also saw and appraised the charms of the youthful sister and was quite humanly moved.

The official story is silent as to details but it appears that in 1846 Sister Jovita, as Barbara Ubrik had been named in the convent, bore a child. Very naturally, she was called before the abbess, who appears in the accounts as Zitta, confronted with her sin and sentenced to the usual and doubtless severe punishments. In the progress of her chastisement she seems to have declared that Father Gratian was the guilty man.

This was the beginning of the young man’s troubles. Detective Masilewski, in his report on the investigation of the case, says that the motivation of the nun’s subsequent mistreatment was complex. Father Gratian naturally wanted to defend himself from the serious charge. The abbess, Zitta, was quite as anxious both to discipline the nun and to prevent the airing of a scandal, especially in times of suspicion and persecution, when the imperial attitude toward the holy orders was far from friendly and any pretext might have been seized for the closing of a nunnery and the expropriation of church property. Masilewski says, also, that Sister Jovita possessed a considerable property which was to belong to the cloister and that there was, thus, a further material motive.

But, whatever else may have actuated either the priest or the abbess, Sister Jovita aggravated matters by her own conduct. The severity of her punishment led her to desire liberty and she sought to renounce her vows and return to her family. Such a course would probably have been followed by a public repetition of the charges made by the young nun, and every effort was accordingly made to prevent her from leaving the order. She was locked into her cell, loaded with penances and almost unbelievably severe punishments and prevented from communicating with her mother and sisters.

Not long afterwards love again intruded itself into the story of Sister Jovita and further complicated the situation. This was in the last months of 1847. It appears that a young lay brother whose worldly name was Wolcech Zarski happened about this time to meet the beautiful young nun, while occupied at the convent with some official duties, and straightway fell in love with her. She told him of her experiences and sufferings and he, a spirited young man and not yet a monk, immediately laid plans to elope. Owing to the stringent discipline and the careful watch kept over the offending sister, this departure was not quickly or easily accomplished. Finally, however, on the night of May 25th, 1848, Zarski managed to pull his beloved to the top of the convent wall by means of a rope. In trying to descend outside, she fell and was injured, with the result that flight was impeded.

Zarski seems, however, to have had the strength to carry his precious burden to the nearest inn. Here friends and human nature failed him. The friends did not appear with a coach and change of feminine clothing, as they had promised, and the superstitious dread of the innkeeper’s wife led her to send immediate word to the convent. Before he could move from the neighborhood, Zarski was overcome by a bevy of stout friars and Sister Jovita carried back to the nunnery.

The monasteries and nunneries of Poland had still their own judicial jurisdiction, so Zarski could not enter St. Theresa’s by legal means. He tried again and again to communicate with his beloved by stealth, but the Abbess Zitta was now fully awake to the danger and every effort was defeated. The young lover tried one measure after another, appealed to ecclesiastical authorities, consulted lawyers, besieged officials. At length he was told that the object of all this devotion was no longer in St. Theresa’s but had been removed to another Carmelite seat, the name of which was, of course, refused.

Here political events intervened. Nicholas I had grown slowly but surely relentless in his attitude toward the Roman clergy in Poland, whom he considered to be the chief fomenters and supporters of the continued Polish resistance. Nicholas simply closed the monasteries and cloisters and drove the clergy out of Poland. It was the kind of drastic step always taken in the past in response to religious interference in political matters.

Now the unfortunate Zarski was at his dark hour. The nuns were scattered into foreign lands where he, as a foreigner, could have little chance of either legal or official aid, where he knew nothing of the ways, was acquainted with no one, could count on no encouragement. Worse yet, he was not rich. He had to stop for months and even years at a time and earn more money with which to press his quest. His tenacity seems to have been heroic; his faith tragic.

One evening in the summer of 1868, twenty years after Sister Jovita had last been seen, Detective Masilewski was driving homeward toward Warsaw, after a day’s hunt, when an old peasant stepped before the horse, doffed his hat and asked:

“Are you the secret detective, Mr. Masilewski?”

On being answered affirmatively he handed the investigator a letter, explaining that an unknown man had handed it to him with a tip to pay for its delivery. The note said simply:

“Dear Sir: In the convent of St. Mary of the Carmelites at Cracow, a nun by the name of Jovita, her real name being Barbara Ubrik, has been held a captive for twenty years, which imprisonment has made her a lunatic. I do not care to mention my name but vouch for the truth of my assertion. Seek and you will find.“Your correspondent.”

“Your correspondent.”

Masilewski drove on in silence, puzzled and not a little incredulous. True, he had heard of this nun and her disappearance, but she had vanished long ago and surely death had sealed the lid of this mystery, as of others. No doubt this was another of those romantic reappearances of the famous missing. Still—what if there were truth in it. But no, it must be a figment, else why had the informant hidden himself? It was an attempt to make a fool of an honest detective.

So Masilewski hesitated and waited, but the remote possibility of something grotesque and extraordinary plagued him and drove him at last to action. Even when he had determined to move, however, he knew that he must act with caution. If he were to go to the bishop of the diocese, for instance, and ask for permission to search the nunnery of St. Mary’s, the very possible result might be the transfer of the unfortunate nun to some new hiding place and the infliction of worse penalties and tortures.

If he appealed to the Austrian civil authorities (Austria having annexed the province of Cracow in 1846), he might enter the convent and find himself the victim of a hoax, which is, after all, the ultimate humiliation for a detective. There was no possible course except cautious investigation.

So Masilewski went to work. Carefully and slowly he traced back the stories of Barbara Ubrik’s mother, the exchanged babies, the theft by the old Jew and the captivity with the Gypsies. He discovered the record of Barbara’s parents’ marriage, got the young nun’s birth certificate, learned about her admittance to the convent, the part played in her life by Father Gratian and the early chastisement. How he did these things one needs hardly to recount, but unrelenting care and watchful judgment were necessary. He must never let the enemies of the nun know that a detective was at work. All he did had to be handled through intermediaries. Probably it would even be a thankless job, but it was an enigma, a temptation. He went ahead.

Finally Masilewski stumbled upon the fact that the convent of St. Mary’s contained a celebrated ecclesiastical library. The inspiration came to him at once. He or someone else must play the part of a learned student of religious and local ecclesiastical matters and get permission to use the library in St. Mary’s. After some seeking, Masilewski came upon a renegade theological student and sent this man first to the bishop and then to the Abbess Zitta. Since the head of the diocese apparently approved the student, he was permitted to enter and use the rare old books and records.

Under instructions from Masilewski, the man worked with caution. The detective invented a subject with which the man busied himself for days before a chance question, skillfully introduced into his research problem, called for an inspection of the old church law records of the convent. There was a moment of suspense and the investigator feared that he had been suspected or that the abbess would rule against any such liberty. But no suspicion had been aroused and the abbess decided that so holy and studious a young man might well be permitted to see the secret papers.

Once the records were in his hands, the mock student turned immediately to the date of the nun’s escape and found under date of June 3, 1848, this remarkable record:

“Barbara Ubrik, known under the name of Jovita, is accused of immoral actions, continued disturbances in the convent, manifold irregularities and trespasses of the rules of the convent, even of theft and cunningly plotted crime; she has refused the mercy of baptism and given her soul to the devil, for which cause she was unworthy of the holy Lord’s Supper, and by this act she has calumniated God; she has clandestinely broken the vows of purity, in so far that she held a love correspondence with the novice, Zarski, and allowed herself to elope with him; at last she has offended against the law of obedience of poverty and seclusion, and on the 25th of May, 1848, she has accomplished an escape from the convent.”

Trial was held before the abbess and judgment was thus rendered:

“The criminal has to do three days’ expiation of sins in the church, afterwards she will be lashed by all the sisters of the order and be forfeited of her clerical dignity; she herself will be considered as dead and her name will be taken from the list of the order. At last, she has forfeited the right to the holy Mass and the Lord’s Supper, and is condemned to perpetual imprisonment.”

The reader is warned not to take this as a sample of monastic life or justice as it might be discovered to-day or even as it generally existed then. Sister Jovita had simply got herself involved in one of those sad tangles of scandal which had to be kept hid at any and every price. She was the victim not of monasticism or of any form of religion but of a political situation and of her relations with other men and women, some of whom have been hard and evil from the beginning of the world, respectless of vows or trust.

In one particular, however, her treatment was a definite result of certain religious beliefs then prevalent in all strict churches. She was accused of being devil ridden or possessed by the fiend and many of her cries of anguish, screams of madness and acts of defiance were attributed to such a possession. It was then customary in certain parts of Europe to drive the devil out by means of torture. This was in no sense a belief peculiar to Catholics. Martin Luther held it, and so did John Wesley, as any historian must tell you. Therefore many of Jovita’s sufferings were the result of beliefs general in those days except among the exceptionally enlightened.

With this record copied and safely in his hand, Masilewski moved immediately and directly. One morning he and a squad of Gallician gendarmes appeared before the convent of St. Mary’s and demanded admittance in the name of the emperor. The abbess, certain what was about to happen, tried to temporize, but Masilewski entered, arrested the abbess with an imperial warrant and commanded a search of the place. The mother superior, seeing that there was nothing to be gained by resistance led the company down to the lowest cellars of the building and turned over to Masilewski a key to a damp cell.

The detective opened the door, felt rats run across his shoes as he stepped inside and found, crouched in a corner on a pile of wet straw, the shrunken form of what had been the beautiful Barbara Ubrik. She was brought forth to the light of day, to see the sheen upon the autumn trees once more and the clouds sailing in the skies. Alas, she was no Bonnivard. Life had lost its colors and symmetries for her. She had long been hopelessly mad.

There is still a detail of this famous case of mystery and detection to be told. Father Gratian had disappeared when Russia drove out the clergy. Masilewski was determined to complete his work and bring the malefactor back to answer for his crimes. After the ruin of Barbara Ubrik had been lodged in an asylum, Masilewski set out to find the priest. After seven months of wandering through Austria, Prussia and Poland, the detective was rewarded with the information that Father Gratian had gone to Hamburg. He went immediately to the great German seaboard town, searched there for months and found that the man he sought had gone to London years before.

The quest began anew in the British capital. It was like seeking a flea in a hayloft, but success came at last. Masilewski was passing through one of the obscure streets when he noticed a man with the peculiar gait and bearing of priests, which seems to mark them apart to the expert eye, no matter what their physique or dress, going into a bookstall where foreign books were sold.

The detective, who was, of course, totally unknown to Father Gratian, followed into the shop and found to his delight that the priestly person was the owner of the shop. Many of the books dealt in were German or Polish. Masilewski rummaged for a long time, made a few purchases and ingratiated himself with the bibliophile. When he left he went directly to the first book expert he could find, stuffed himself with the terms and general knowledge of the book dealer and soon returned to the little shop.

On his second visit he let drop a few Polish terms which made the shopkeeper prick up his ears. As Masilewski learned more and more of the new rôle he was to play he gradually revealed that he was himself a great continental expert. Later he informed the shopkeeper of a huge sale of famous libraries that was about to be held in Hamburg and invited the London dealer to accompany him. The priestly man was too much interested and beguiled to refuse a man who could speak his own language and loved his own subject.

On the trip to Hamburg the London bookseller told, after skillful questioning, that he had once been a priest, that he had lived in Warsaw, that a love affair had driven him from the church—in short, that he was Father Gratian.

Masilewski waited until he got his man safely on the continent and then, knowing the extradition agreements in force between Austria and the various German states, placed his man under arrest, not without a feeling of pain and regret. Father Gratian, like one relieved of a strange weight, immediately accompanied Masilewski to Cracow and faced his accusers without denying the facts. He could offer no extenuation save that nature had not ordained him to be a priest and “the devil had been too strong for his weak flesh.” He confessed his part in the whole transaction and even added that he had given the unfortunate nun drugs to bereave her of her reason. He made every attempt to shield the abbess, but she, too, face to face with the authority of the empire and the church, refused to deny or extenuate.

For once the courts were more merciful than their victims. Mother Zitta was sentenced to expulsion from the order, imprisonment for five years and exile from the empire. Father Gratian was likewise expelled from the church, which he had long deserted, put to prison for ten years and exiled.

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