I OUGHT to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many
good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians. A large square
photograph I keep always on my mantel-piece; it helps me to maintain my
head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all
literary work. It presents in the centre a neatly-written address in
excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading,
around which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read,
but which, in spite of their strange lettering, I know to be the names of
good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the
kindly idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of
encouragement. The individual Russian is one of the most charming
creatures living. If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know
it; not only by every action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as
useful in this grey old world, by generous, impulsive speech.
We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative.
Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy who was sent out by his father to
fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not
show his face again beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years.
Then one evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old
couple, and announced himself as their long-lost child, returned at last.
“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” grumbled the old man, “and blarm me
if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”
I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man
entered and took his seat at a table near by. Glancing round, and
meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and nodded.
“Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must just speak to my
brother—haven’t seen him for over five years.”
He finished his soup and leisurely wiped his moustache before strolling
across and shaking hands. They talked for a while. Then my friend
returned to me.
“Never thought to see him again,” observed my friend, “he was one of the
garrison of that place in Africa—what’s the name of it?—that the Mahdi
attacked. Only three of them escaped. Always was a lucky beggar, Jim.”
“But wouldn’t you like to talk to him some more?” I suggested; “I can see
you any time about this little business of ours.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, “we have just fixed it up—shall be
seeing him again to-morrow.”
I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian
friends in a St. Petersburg Hotel. One of the party had not seen his
second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly eighteen months. They sat
opposite to one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of
the dinner one of them would jump up from his chair, and run round to
embrace the other. They would throw their arms about one another,
kissing one another on both cheeks, and then sit down again, with moist
eyes. Their behaviour among their fellow countrymen excited no
astonishment whatever.
But the Russians’s anger is as quick and vehement as his love. On
another occasion I was supping with friends in one of the chief
restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up
till the previous moment had been engaged in amicable conversation,
suddenly sprang to their feet, and “went for” one another. One man
secured the water-bottle, which he promptly broke over the other’s head.
His opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and leaping
back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched against my
hostess.
“Do please be careful,” said the lady.
“A thousand pardons, madame,” returned the stranger, from whom blood and
water were streaming in equal copiousness; and taking the utmost care to
avoid interfering with our comfort, he succeeded adroitly in flooring his
antagonist by a well-directed blow.
A policeman appeared upon the scene. He did not attempt to interfere,
but running out into the street communicated the glad tidings to another
policeman.
“This is going to cost them a pretty penny,” observed my host, who was
calmly continuing his supper; “why couldn’t they wait?”
It did cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round
about before as many minutes had elapsed, and each one claimed his bribe.
Then they wished both combatants good-night, and trooped out evidently in
great good humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their
heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed
freely as before.
They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are possessed
with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath. The workers—slaves it
would be almost more correct to call them—allow themselves to be
exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet
every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution
is coming.
But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can
be sure that his own servants are not police spies. I was discussing
politics with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old
housekeeper entered the room—a soft-eyed grey-haired woman who had been
in his service over eight years, and whose position in the household was
almost that of a friend. He stopped abruptly and changed the
conversation. So soon as the door was closed behind her again, he
explained himself.
“It is better to chat upon such matters when one is quite alone,” he
laughed.
“But surely you can trust her,” I said, “She appears to be devoted to you
all.”
“It is safer to trust no one,” he answered. And then he continued from
the point where we had been interrupted.
“It is gathering,” he said; “there are times when I almost smell blood in
the air. I am an old man and may escape it, but my children will have to
suffer—suffer as children must for the sins of their fathers. We have
made brute beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon
us, cruel, and undiscriminating; right and wrong indifferently going down
before them. But it has to be. It is needed.”
It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing to all progress
a dead wall of selfishness. The history of Russia will be the history of
the French Revolution over again, but with this difference: that the
educated classes, the thinkers, who are pushing forward the dumb masses
are doing so with their eyes open. There will be no Maribeau, no Danton
to be appalled at a people’s ingratitude. The men who are to-day working
for revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers,
delicately-nurtured women, rich landowners, prosperous tradesmen,
students familiar with the lessons of history. They have no
misconceptions concerning the blind Monster into which they are breathing
life. He will crush them, they know it; but with them he will crush the
injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they love
themselves.
The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more
pitiless than were the men of 1790. He is less intelligent, more brutal.
They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian cattle, the while they work.
They sing it in chorus on the quays while hauling the cargo, they sing it
in the factory, they chant on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the
corn they may not eat. It is of the good time their masters are having,
of the feastings and the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children,
of the kisses of the lovers.
But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to
translate it for you he shrugs his shoulders.
“Oh, it means,” he says, “that their time will also come—some day.”
It is a pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing-rooms of
Moscow and St. Petersburg, and somehow the light talk and laughter die
away, and a hush, like a chill breath, enters by the closed door and
passes through. It is a curious song, like the wailing of a tired wind,
and one day it will sweep over the land heralding terror.
A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as
manager of a large factory in St. Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish
employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the first week when paying his
workpeople. By a miscalculation of the Russian money he paid the men,
each one, nearly a rouble short. He discovered his error before the
following Saturday, and then put the matter right. The men accepted his
explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever. The
thing astonished him.
“But you must have known I was paying you short,” he said to one of them.
“Why didn’t you tell me of it?”
“Oh,” answered the man, “we thought you were putting it in your own
pocket and then if we had complained it would have meant dismissal for
us. No one would have taken our word against yours.”
Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that
all classes have come to accept it as part of the established order of
things. A friend gave me a little dog to bring away with me. It was a
valuable animal, and I wished to keep it with me. It is strictly
forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages. The list of the pains and
penalties for doing so frightened me considerably.
“Oh, that will be all right,” my friend assured me; “have a few roubles
loose in your pocket.”
I tipped the station master and I tipped the guard, and started pleased
with myself. But I had not anticipated what was in store for me. The
news that an Englishman with a dog in a basket and roubles in his pocket
was coming must have been telegraphed all down the line. At almost every
stopping-place some enormous official, wearing generally a sword and a
helmet, boarded the train. At first these fellows terrified me. I took
them for field-marshals at least.
Visions of Siberia crossed my mind. Anxious and trembling, I gave the
first one a gold piece. He shook me warmly by the hand—I thought he was
going to kiss me. If I had offered him my cheek I am sure he would have
done so. With the next one I felt less apprehensive. For a couple of
roubles he blessed me, so I gathered; and, commending me to the care of
the Almighty, departed. Before I had reached the German frontier, I was
giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men with the dress and
carriage of major-generals; and to see their faces brighten up and to
receive their heartfelt benediction was well worth the money.
But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian officialdom is not
so gracious. By the expenditure of a few more coins I got my dog through
the Customs without trouble, and had leisure to look about me. A
miserable object was being badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and
he—his lean face puckered up into a snarl—was returning them snappish
answers; the whole scene suggested some half-starved mongrel being
worried by school-boys. A slight informality had been discovered in his
passport, so a fellow traveller with whom I had made friends informed me.
He had no roubles in his pocket, and in consequence they were sending him
back to St. Petersburg—some eighteen hours’ journey—in a wagon that in
England would not be employed for the transport of oxen.
It seemed a good joke to Russian officialdom; they would drop in every
now and then, look at him as he sat crouched in a corner of the
waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his
face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees
on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying
very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders
whether it is thinking.
The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet all things seem
to be known to him. There is a prison on the banks of the Neva, in St.
Petersburg. They say such things are done with now, but up till very
recently there existed a small cell therein, below the level of the ice,
and prisoners placed there would be found missing a day or two
afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the
fishes of the Baltic. They talk of such like things among themselves:
the sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fire, the field-workers going and
coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their whispers deadened by
the rattle of the looms.
I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago, and there was
one I was sent to in a small street leading out of the Avenue Louise. It
was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small. They
covered the walls of every room.
“These pictures,” explained to me the landlady, an old, haggard-looking
woman, “will not be left, I am taking them with me to London. They are
all the work of my husband. He is arranging an exhibition.”
The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was a widow, who had
been living in Brussels eking out a precarious existence as a
lodging-house keeper for the last ten years.
“You have married again?” I questioned her.
The woman smiled.
“Not again. I was married eighteen years ago in Russia. My husband was
transported to Siberia a few days after we were married, and I have never
seen him since.”
“I should have followed him,” she added, “only every year we thought he
was going to be set free.”
“He is really free now?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “They set him free last week. He will join me in
London. We shall be able to finish our honeymoon.”
She smiled, revealing to me that once she had been a girl.
I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London. It was said
the artist showed much promise. So possibly a career may at last be
opening out for him.
Nature has made life hard to Russian rich and poor alike. To the banks
of the Neva, with its ague and influenza-bestowing fogs and mists, one
imagines that the Devil himself must have guided Peter the Great.
“Show me in all my dominions the most hopelessly unattractive site on
which to build a city,” Peter must have prayed; and the Devil having
discovered the site on which St. Petersburg now stands, must have
returned to his master in high good feather.
“I think, my dear Peter, I have found you something really unique. It is
a pestilent swamp to which a mighty river brings bitter blasts and
marrow-chilling fogs, while during the brief summer time the wind will
bring you sand. In this way you will combine the disadvantages of the
North Pole with those of the desert of Sahara.”
In the winter time the Russians light their great stoves, and doubly
barricade their doors and windows; and in this atmosphere, like to that
of a greenhouse, many of their women will pass six months, never
venturing out of doors. Even the men only go out at intervals. Every
office, every shop is an oven. Men of forty have white hair and
parchment faces; and the women are old at thirty. The farm labourers,
during the few summer months, work almost entirely without sleep. They
leave that for the winter, when they shut themselves up like dormice in
their hovels, their store of food and vodka buried underneath the floor.
For days together they sleep, then wake and dig, then sleep again.
The Russian party lasts all night. In an adjoining room are beds and
couches; half a dozen guests are always sleeping. An hour contents them,
then they rejoin the company, and other guests take their places. The
Russian eats when he feels so disposed; the table is always spread, the
guests come and go. Once a year there is a great feast in Moscow. The
Russian merchant and his friends sit down early in the day, and a sort of
thick, sweet pancake is served up hot. The feast continues for many
hours, and the ambition of the Russian merchant is to eat more than his
neighbour. Fifty or sixty of these hot cakes a man will consume at a
sitting, and a dozen funerals in Moscow is often the result.
An uncivilised people, we call them in our lordly way, but they are
young. Russian history is not yet three hundred years old. They will
see us out, I am inclined to think. Their energy, their
intelligence—when these show above the groundwork—are monstrous. I have
known a Russian learn Chinese within six months. English! they learn it
while you are talking to them. The children play at chess and study the
violin for their own amusement.
The world will be glad of Russia—when she has put her house in order.