THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
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THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF MARY
BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
AUTHOR OF
‘WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM,’ ETC.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1915
PREFACE
The quotation “Martha, Martha, thou art cumbered about with many things:
but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part which
shall not be taken away from her” is as common in Russia as “faith
without works is dead” is common here. Speaking roughly, Eastern
Christianity is associated with Mary’s good part and Western
Christianity with the way of Martha and service. The two aspects seem to
be irreconcilable, but they are not; and I have called my book _The Way
of Martha and the Way of Mary_ because the ways of the sisters are as
touchstones for Christianity, and in their reconciliation is a great
beauty.
If you would know what a nation is, you must ask what is the religion of
the people. Without a national religion a nation is not a nation but a
collection of people. It is a truism to say that what is best in a
nation springs from its religion, from some central idealism to which
every one in the nation has access—the idea of the nation. There is a
“British idea,” an “American idea,” a “German idea,” a “Russian idea.”
This is profoundly true of Russia; for all that is beautiful in her
life, art, and culture springs from the particular and characteristic
Christian idea in the depths of her. She is essentially a great and
wonderful unity. It is of that essential unity that I write, and in
writing hope to show on the one plane Russia, and on another the
splendour of the true Christian idea.
This book was written in Russia and in Egypt during 1914 and 1915. In
1913 I was in America and wrote my study of American ideals in contrast
to Russian ideals. I returned to Russia in January 1914 eager to look at
the East afresh and compare it with the West. In setting out for Russia
the fundamental idea in my mind was that of Russia as a religious
country where one found refuge from materialism and worldly cares, and I
hoped to find stories and pictures of life with which to clothe the
beautiful idea of the sanctuary. The book I was going to write I always
called in my mind “the sanctuary book,” and my notion was to make a book
that should also be a sanctuary itself—a book in which the reader could
find sacred refuge.
Much has intervened. My quest resolved itself first of all into a
seeking for what I call the Russian idea, then into a study of Russian
Christianity. My new volume is necessarily one of seeking and finding, a
making of discoveries. One chapter led me on to another, and the scope
of my study increased till it took in the whole question of what Eastern
Christianity is and how it is in contrast to Western Christianity.
Athwart this peaceful work came the typhoon of the Great War, and my
hand was claimed by the new friendship between England and Russia, the
friendship of brothers in arms. It was fitting to seize the opportunity
to make that friendship wider and deeper by describing and interpreting
the Russian people to larger audiences. But I carried the purpose of
this book with me, and much of what is written here was first put into
words on public platforms in the winter of 1914-15. Finally, as a
culmination to this personal work, on the 16th April 1915 I gave a
lecture at the Royal Institution on “The Russian Idea,” and therein
collected together and summarised all that I had said during the winter.
That evening I read almost all that is vital in Part I. of this book.
In May, in order to carry on this study I went to Egypt to visit the
shrines and monasteries of the Desert, some of the sources of
inspiration of Eastern Christianity, and to make a journey to Russia the
way Christianity came to her. In these journeyings and doings lie the
chronological and geographical scheme of this new volume.
I feel that this book, the hardest of all my books to write, is not in
any sense a collection or a medley of impressions and stories, but has
one and the same object and quest running through the whole of it; and
that in order to understand it even in a small way it is necessary to
read the whole of it, and perhaps re-read it. It is an organic unity,
and reflects in its form something of the Russian idea and of Sancta
Sophia itself.
_The Way of Martha and The Way of Mary_ is an interpretation and a
survey of Eastern Christianity, and a consideration of the ideas at
present to the fore in Christianity generally.
Christianity is not yet a system: it is chaotic in its tenets and the
manner of its profession. This _young_ religion of Christianity! Perhaps
6000 years hence it will have crystallised out, but as yet it is in the
confused grandeur of youth. It has all possibilities. A young man or
young woman of to-day can live by Christianity because it is young with
them. Probably any true book on Christianity must reflect this fact. As
yet Christianity is running germs: it is in being’s flood, in action’s
storm. It is not all logical, symmetrical, like a thesis demonstrated
and proved to a class in moral philosophy.
Christianity is a great live religion still absorbing all that is true
in other religions. It is _the word_. It is part of our language, and by
means of it we express what is deepest in ourselves. There has not been
in history such a powerful medium of self-expression. Words are our
means of inter-communication, of understanding one another and telling
one another what is in the heart, that is—of communion with one another.
That communion is deep and tender, and the knowledge of it, like the
knowledge of God, passeth understanding; all that we know is that love
kindles from it. I make this affirmation as one whose special medium is
the written and the spoken word.
STEPHEN GRAHAM.
MOSCOW, _September 1915_.
CONTENTS
I. THE RUSSIAN IDEA—
1. TO RUSSIA 1
2. MODERN RUSSIA AND HOLY RUSSIA 12
3. PEREPLOTCHIKOF AGAIN 29
4. AT THE THEATRE 37
5. THE MOVEMENTS OF THE PEOPLES 48
6. LET US GO INTO THE TAVERN 58
7. IN THE CHURCH 73
8. IN THE MARKET-PLACE 86
9. THE RUSSIAN IDEA 90
10. THE LABYRINTH 105
II. MARTHA AND MARY—
1. THE _PODVIG_ 111
2. THE HERMITAGE OF FATHER SERAPHIM 121
3. TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME 130
4. BACK TO MOSCOW 136
5. THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING 143
6. THE TWO HERMITS 155
7. AT THE CONVENT OF MARTHA AND MARY 161
8. THE WAY OF MARTHA 168
9. MARTHA’S TRUE WAY 178
10. MAKING WEST EAST 182
11. THE ECCLESIASTICAL CHURCH AND THE LIVING CHURCH 190
12. WITNESS UNTO THE TRUTH 200
13. THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD 206
III. THE DESERT AND THE WORLD—
1. A CHAIN OF HAPPENINGS 217
2. THE HERMITS 221
3. IN THE DESERT 235
4. THE WORLD 246
5. ST. SOPHIA 256
6. FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA 263
APPENDICES—
1. WAR AND CHRISTIANITY 273
2. THE CHOICE OF EAST AND WEST 280
_Frontispiece_—MARTHA AND MARY.
I
THE RUSSIAN IDEA
I
TO RUSSIA
KIEF, _January 1914_.
All night long from Paris to Cologne the train speeds like a bird,
joyously screaming. I am in the carriage next the engine, and as I lie
full length in the darkened empty carriage I look out on snow-patched
fields and hills, now partly obscured by wild volumes of vapour, now
fierily illumined by the glow of the furnace, the black sky raining
showers of red sparks on to the vague night landscape, the engine racing
forward past signal-boxes and stations, clattering along the changing
points of the rails of junctions, knowing apparently that all signals
are _for_, never anticipating any hindrance, skirling and leaping in the
exuberance of accomplishment.
We pass the Belgian frontier at three in the morning near Namur, and the
German at Herbesthal in the dim glimmering before dawn. The world that
becomes visible as the sun rises is the ordered world of the Germans.
Everything is prim, everything is as it should be; the fields are
symmetrical, the palings are vertical and in good repair, the manure
heaps are compact; where houses are being pulled down or set up there is
no disorder whatever; nothing is scattered about, everything is
collected and numbered. At the little stations we pass through, the
station-master in brilliant red and blue is standing erect at that point
on the platform that it is his duty to occupy. On the train a woman in
uniform has appeared. She has put thirty or forty little tablets of soap
and two dozen hand-towels into the lavatory; she has picked up the bits
of paper that lay scattered in the corridor all night; she has washed
everything in the lavatory; put water in the cistern and boiled water in
the carafe. The conductor, a well-groomed military man, has come and
allotted us definitely numbered seats in the carriages and has seen that
our respective hand-luggage occupies just that space in the rack which
is above our numbered seats.
At Cologne there are just four minutes to cross the subway and get into
the Berlin express. My porter—luggage-dragger, as the precise Germans
call him—takes me across at a run and puts me in the train, and my
registered box of books and papers and what-not is not allowed to miss
the connexion. I hardly sit down in the speckless third-class carriage
of the real German train before the whistle goes and we slip past the
great black piles of Cologne Cathedral in the background. All day long
we tear over Germany at sixty miles an hour to Berlin.
At Paris I had registered my box to the Charlottenburg Station of
Berlin, but to my dismay the train did not stop there. I had only ten
minutes in which to change francs to marks, get my ticket to the Russian
frontier, have my luggage weighed and registered, and get into the
train. And I do not speak German, but the Germans understood. I was put
down at Zoological Gardens Station. My porter understood the situation
at once, ran me along to some stairs, and pointed down them. I went
down; he went “to expedite my baggage,” so I understood. I took my
ticket, and in doing so offered the girl in the booking-office about six
more marks than was necessary. She pushed back the superfluous silver
without a smile. Turning round, I saw my trunk reposing on the weighing
machine. My porter pointed to the registration window. I paid two marks
and obtained my receipt and went up the stairs to the platform for the
Russian train, and had two minutes to spare.
How efficient the Germans are! They have a great excellence in their
way. They permit no one to lose himself, they permit no disorder,
everything is done by the chronometer rather than by the watch. They
have a genius for orderliness, neatness, and precision. They have our
English ideal of thoroughness and smartness, but they seem to have
consummated it whilst we have paused in the ways of Destiny and changed
our mind in favour of something different. If we could see Germans in a
friendly spirit there are many English who would bow down in admiration
to their civilisation. For the Saxon part of English nature has a
similar instinct for order, for living one’s life like a neatly-worked
mathematics paper. It is the aboriginal Celtic base in us which with
much that came over with the Normans has frustrated the Saxon element in
our race. The British earth itself has formed us, inspired us: hence our
kindliness, verve, and imaginativeness, human tenderness. Thanks to the
ancient Briton in us, we are more like the Russians than the Germans.
_There_ is a people who are the antipodes of the Germans—wild in their
emotions, anarchic in their spirits, amused by laws and regulations,
lacking in the instincts that make “progress” possible. Naturally the
Russians can’t stand the Germans. As a Russian said to me when I
recounted how once I left a Kodak behind in the waiting-room at Cologne
station, wired from Dusseldorf my Russian address, and eventually
received the apparatus in good condition at Rostof-on-the-Don, “The
Germans are an accurate people. O Lord, how accurate they are!”
We reached the Russian frontier at one in the morning, and, passing in
single file, gave up our passports to the sentry. At the Custom-house
the baggage was submitted to a vigorous examination. An armed Customs
officer in a heavy overcoat with black astrakhan collar directed the
operations; three or four porters and inspectors fumbled in the trunks,
turning things almost upside down, and a slim girl of twenty-five, a
female expert, scrutinised all the clothes for the things that men were
not likely to see of themselves—embroidery, lace, silk underwear, neatly
packed away Paris blouses, feathers, new costumes with artificial
creases and tacked-in dirty linings. But I am not smuggling anything
through, and no one takes the trouble even to look at the contents of my
books.
I take my ticket to Kief and a supplement to Warsaw. At half-past three
we are allowed to board the Russian train and spread out our bedding and
make ourselves comfortable. The station is dark and gloomy, the
dreariest station in western Russia. As we stand at the windows of the
train and look out a strange procession comes up out of the
darkness—threescore of men in irons, following a soldier who carries on
a pole high above his head a flaming naphtha torch. The faces of the men
are pale, furtive, hairy, their shoulders awkward; some are in old
blouses, some in collars, some in sheepskins; they are Jews, Poles,
Russians, chained together in fours, marching along the railway track to
a barred convict-train waiting at a siding. Foot soldiers accompany them
with drawn swords in their uplifted hands. They come out of the darkness
like living shadows and disappear into the darkness again.
“_Soloveiki_,” says the conductor disparagingly.
“Well,” says a Russian, “I don’t suppose they’re heroes. Poland swarms
with thieves and smugglers, and people smuggling themselves across the
frontier in order to get to America.”
“They are human beings,” says another. “They are in chains and we free.
It is a heavy sight.”
But the second bell and the third bell sound, and the train moves
gradually out of the station and nearly every one lies down to sleep.
Even when we arrive at Warsaw many of the passengers are snoring and
have to be awakened up by acquaintances or porters.
Across the two miles of the slush-covered cobbles of Warsaw, through
driving rain and sleet, in an open _droshky_ at dawn, from the Vienna to
the Brest station.
“_A vam ne skoro!_” says the Russian porter who greets me. “Your train
is not soon. The next for Kief is at four o’clock in the afternoon.”
I have breakfast. I stroll into the rainy city and back, have a plate of
hot soup, read the papers, write letters.
Opposite me in the Kief train was a little girl in simple but antique
national attire, in soiled clothes, but having a fresh and delicate
classical face and black hair in two plaits, one about each little ear—a
rare beauty: it was a piquant pleasure just to look at her.
“When do we get to Kharkof?” she asked.
“Seven, to-morrow night.”
“Oh, what a long time! It’s a long way: it’s the first time I’ve been
away from home.”
As the guard blew his whistle she stood up, looked towards the city, and
crossed herself.
“Are you a little Russian?” I asked.
“No; a Pole. I was once a Jewess, but have just been baptized. See....”
She showed me a little crucifix, and the figure of the Virgin on a
little medallion hanging from her neck.
“You’re a Catholic now?”
“Yes; and I don’t like the Jews.”
I wondered whether in view of the ill odour in which the Jews were at
that time, she had been told by her mother to announce her conversion
very distinctly.
“Such a mama I have!” said she, turning out a basket of provisions—two
bags of nuts, several pots of jam, biscuits, a Polish Christmas pudding.
There were in the carriage besides myself and the girl opposite me a
Russian student, a young Polish _flaneur_, and a middle-aged, grizzly,
smelly, Polish peasant. The young convert offered us all nuts. She was
very engaging. She took out a long bottle, put it to her lips and drank
from it. She told me it was cold tea with sugar at the bottom of the
bottle, but to the Pole announced that it was vodka.
He was fool enough to believe her, and at once cast about in his mind
some means of doing her an ill turn. He came over and made love to her
in excited whispers, and was so rude and urgent that at last the girl
refused to have anything more to do with him, and turned sullen and
angry. He for his part sneaked off to another compartment, and we saw no
more of him. After a while the girl relaxed and smiled, took out a large
but cracked hand-mirror, looked at her pretty face, and patted the curls
to her temples. I got a kettleful of boiling water and made tea for the
grizzly peasant and her and myself. Then the peasant climbed on to the
shelf above and spread out his big overcoat and slept on it, and the
little girl, after explaining that she was going to live with Poles in
Kharkof, and that her father played the violin and she the mandoline,
and that she was going to take a part in a “troop” and earn her living,
undid her black locks, put down a quilt and a pillow, and curled herself
up and slept. The conductor came round and searched under the seats for
“hares,” the flickering candle burned low, and I was about to turn in
and sleep when the Russian student, who had been trying to read a
newspaper by the aid of a dip of his own, finally gave up the task and
set himself to talk to me.
“How far are you going? Where from? What for? How long have you been
away from Russia? What interest can Russia have for you? I should have
thought the West more interesting....” and so on, the usual flood of
questions.
Then my questions. “Has much happened in Russia during the year? What
are people talking about? What are they doing? What is in the air?”
“Oh,” said he, “the Futurists are walking about with gilded noses and
dyed faces. The Jew-haters of the Black Hundred want to raise a temple
in memory of the Christian boy Yushinsky. Everyone has been discussing a
play of Artsibashef called _Jealousy_. Literary Russia has been giving a
welcome to the Belgian poet Verhaeren, such as you in England have been
giving Anatole France. Every one is either hearing or giving lectures
about Verhaeren. But I suppose most clamour of all has been raised about
Gorky and Dostoieffsky and the Theatre of Art at Moscow. They propose to
perform Dostoieffsky’s _Demons_ at the Theatre of Art, and Gorky has
raised a great protest. He holds that Dostoieffsky is so reactionary in
tendency that he ought not to be played at the great democratic theatre.
Not only that, but he holds that Tolstoy, and indeed all Russian
literature, is on the wrong side in the struggle for the liberation of
the people. He is almost ready to say, ‘Burn the works of Tolstoy and
Dostoieffsky; burn them, and let us be free!’”
“How does Russia take it?” I asked. “It is indeed true that
Dostoieffsky’s work is not on the side of progress and freedom. He
believed in suffering; he believed in the Russian Church, and was a
Christian.”
“Russia is mostly against Gorky,” said the student. “Merezhkovsky, for
instance, has written a brilliant article against him in the _Russian
Word_, and he says, ‘Yes, Gorky is keenly sensitive, but in Italy or
Greece, where he lives,[1] he is too far away to feel what Russia is
now. Russia has changed much in the last eight years. Her wounds have
healed up, many of them; she has the great hope of the convalescent. If
Gorky breathed Russian air he would understand that there was now in
Russia a strong religious movement.’”
“And what do you think?” I asked. “Do you possibly agree with Gorky?”
“No. I don’t think it is right to steal an instrument from the other
side’s box of tricks. The Censorship is one of their weapons, not one of
ours. The people have loved Dostoieffsky more than they have loved any
other Russian author; he is still beloved. We Russians are a religious
and loving people. We will never sacrifice humanity for ideas....”
We talked a long time. When I lay down on my shelf to sleep I felt only
gladness that I was coming back to Russia, coming to live with her and
for her once more, after a year in England and America. It seemed to me
a pity that Gorky had not come back the year before when so many exiles
took advantage of the Tsar’s manifesto, and returned to the open arms of
a loving, astonishingly patriotic people!
Next morning at dawn I arrived at Kief, said “Good-bye” to the little
girl who was sleepily stretching herself, and to the student who was
chatting with a new acquaintance in the gangway and smoking a cigarette.
The grizzly peasant I let snore on....
A fine crowd this of the Kief streets: stalwart, diverse, interested in
one another, attractive-faced, they are a refreshment, such a
refreshment, after Paris and New York.
But I do not reckon that I have achieved the first stage of my journey
back till I enter the Cathedral of St. Vladimir and light candles before
Queen Olga, King Vladimir, and the Mother and Child, baring my head in
the presence of Russia and accepting her sanctuary from the West.
Footnote 1:
He had not then returned to Russia.
II
MODERN RUSSIA AND HOLY RUSSIA
KIEF, _January 1914_.
One of the first friends I visited in Kief was Little-Russian Katia, a
typical Russian of to-day, with the problems and prospects of the
new-formed middle class.
At the time of the Boer War Katia ran away from school and set off on
foot for South Africa as a Russian pilgrim would set out for Jerusalem,
with a bundle on her back and a stick in her hand. She would beg her way
to the Transvaal and collect money to help the Boers! At the same
school, in the time of the riots in Kief, the first class presented an
ultimatum to the masters and directors, demanding among other things the
right to hold meetings, the right to get books from the public
libraries, and equal justice for all pupils irrespective of race, be
they Russians, Poles, or Jews! A go-ahead school as far as the scholars
were concerned. If a mistress in a fit of anger strikes one of her
class, straight away a boycott of her lessons is arranged, and no one
answers her questions, no one does any homework for her.
Katia learnt at school to adore above all things the works of Oscar
Wilde. She professes to know his works almost by heart; she sleeps with
_The Happy Prince_ under her pillow. On a wall in her bedroom hangs a
large portrait of Oscar Wilde; in a corner is the sacred ikon, before
which on festival nights and for holy days she lights a little lamp. She
was the last Russian I had seen when I left Kief some fifteen months
before. She was then engaged to Sasha, a thinly-clad, stern,
poverty-stricken student, who in order to travel thirty versts on the
railway free would take a conductor’s job and examine the tickets in the
second class. If she married Sasha he would get drunk and beat her; they
would live dogs’ lives—so every one said. The father, a rich
manufacturer, was opposed to Sasha, but then the father was a tyrant;
the mother, not on speaking terms with the father, gave countenance to
the engagement. Sasha was able to come to all meals and stay as long as
he liked with Katia. When Katia was indisposed and thought fit to lie in
bed, he might spend whole evenings sitting by her. That was all _comme
il faut_, for in Russia a betrothed couple are already called bride and
bridegroom and have such freedom.
The father, however, cut short Katia’s pocket-money and cut short his
wife’s housekeeping money, and made coarse jokes at the expense of the
house-hold. Though Katia was twenty-two years of age she had no passport
of her own. Her father simply kept her name written on his own passport,
and in that way cut off the chance of his daughter’s running away from
home. You cannot get far in Russia without a passport of your own. You
certainly cannot get married without a passport and without many
documents.
Katia’s sweetheart was not at all abashed by his own poverty or by the
rudeness of the father. He came to all parties and functions in his
shabby clothes. He lectured the father and mother on their behaviour. He
was even hard and brusque to Katia herself upon occasion. But he stood
up for her dignity, and would have fought any one who insulted her.
* * * * *
Returning to Kief this month I rather wondered how far Katia’s romance
had got. Perhaps she and Sasha were now man and wife. But I could not
imagine it. One of the felicities of travelling is to pay surprise
visits. I had heard nothing from Katia in the interim. So I rang at the
door and gave my name to a strange servant and went in and....
Exclamations! “Oh, how fine! on the twenty-fifth of January is my
wedding,” says the same beautiful Katia.
“I congratulate you. I did not know whom to visit first,” said I, “you
or Sasha.”
“Sasha is in Moscow,” says Katia with a troubled expression.
“Will you live in Kief?” I ask.
“_I_ in Kief,” says she with meaning emphasis.
So it is not Sasha that she is marrying.
Presently in comes a bright-looking soldier of rather charming manners,
and he is introduced as the bridegroom. He is a guest in the house and
has been living there some weeks—Fedor Leonidovitch Smirnoff—who has
completed his university course in law, and is now serving his term in
the army.
“The date is absolutely settled?” I suppose.
“If papa will take out the papers in time,” says Katia.
But the new young man is on good terms with the father. He has evidently
plenty of money of his own, and he is a _persona grata_.
“What of Sasha?” I ask Katia aside.
“We quarrelled,” says she. “God, how we quarrelled! We were rowing in a
boat on the Dnieper, and when I told him it was no good, we could never
be married, he shot at me with a revolver. I had to save myself by
jumping into the water.”
“You’ve chosen a nice young man this time. Perhaps you are more likely
to be happy with him.”
“Yes. Everybody likes him.”
Fedor is certainly a relief after the sternness of Sasha. He is affable,
he is interested in the prices of all things, and is bourgeois, but he
says that success and money and luxury do not tempt him. He would like
to give up everything and try and find out what life means. He would
like to be a wanderer as I am, or to go into a monastery.
All the same, the career assigned to him seems to be that of a lawyer,
and as a lawyer, not as a vagabond, will he win the hand of Katia. He
will live with her as a wealthy bourgeois European, and not as a
Russian.
This modern Kief is a mill where purely Russian types go in and
Europeans come out.
“Once a European, always a European,” says some one.
“A European may become an American,” I hazard.
“But he can never become a Russian again.”
“What am I?” asks Katia of me, “a Russian or a European?”
“I don’t know. You are changing perhaps. But keep a Russian!”
One evening, on Katia’s advice, I took a sledge across the snow-covered
city to Solovtsof’s theatre and saw _Jealousy_ performed, a story that
has had a vast vulgar success in Russia. It is by Artsibashef, the
author of the most notorious books of the last ten years. He is the
voice of the bourgeois, of the new commercial middle-class Europeans
being turned out at such an astonishing rate by the modern industrialism
of Russia. He concerns himself almost entirely with sexual problems, and
the relation of woman to man. His outlook in life is something like that
of Bernard Shaw, but his criterion in life is not racial progress so
much as physical happiness. He mirrors the life of those whose aim is
money, whose relaxation is feasting and flirtation. He reflects the
growing non-Christian Russia, the increasing mass of Parisian types of
men and women obscuring the real Russia.
A crowded theatre, nobody in evening dress, many women pretentiously
dressed, many rich town-folk in the stalls, clerks and their sweethearts
or their wives in other parts of the house. The play is very well
staged, well upholstered, and is vociferously received. What they are
cheering is nothing more or less than a series of opinions about women,
a disparagement and uglification of the symbol “woman,” of what is
holiest.
But to quote the opinions gives the play.
In woman first of all it is necessary to awaken curiosity.
Women do not value those who pray to them.
Woman, of course, likes admiration, but only gives herself to the
man who despises her a little.
Men are most interesting when they are angry.
Woman is only interesting, vivacious, clever, when she is bathed in
the atmosphere of love.
Man is interested in his business, in sport, in thought, but woman
is only interested in herself, and if she seems to have interest in
other things it is only feigned. Her sole object is to make herself
more alluring, more interesting.
We seek Lauras and Beatrices, not knowing that such creatures are
only the incarnation of male fancy, and do not and cannot exist.
Girls are charming, but when you marry one you find her to be a
tedious _baba_ like the rest. At the piano they tinkle, “I am a
princess, I am a princess.” All young girls are princesses, but you
never come across a queen.
A woman lies in a way that a man would not wish to lie, and indeed
cannot lie. She lies with her whole being. When a man deceives he
grows cool, and in that betrays himself. But a woman returns from
another man’s love specially languorous, caressing, and tender....
Sin must surely set her soul ablaze. Even the most sinful man is
ashamed of deceit, and that prevents him from lying effectively. A
woman quite sincerely reckons she has a right to deceive. She thinks
that to deceive not only does not humiliate her, but, on the
contrary, makes her more interesting.
The action of the drama shows two women, one who may be dismissed as a
wanton, the other is a flirt who loves her husband best of all. The
latter coquettes in various ways with an officer, a student, and a
savage Caucasian prince. She leads them on to the last limit of
propriety, and evidently finds her sole zest of life in the vanity of
having lovers always expecting rendezvous and secret kisses.
The only words spoken on behalf of woman come from an old fellow who has
been three times married—and deceived and made foolish by three women in
turn. He says:—
Woman is a magnificent, delicate instrument on which each can play all
that he can and will. Of course, put some Beethoven at the piano, and he
will find you a wonderful sonata; but put some giftless strummer there,
and he rattles out a vulgar polka. We are just such giftless fools, and
swear at the instrument because it produces no music. No, friends, you
are wrong; woman is sensitive, hospitable, tender, poetic. God gave us
woman as an adornment of our lives; we ourselves have spoiled her and
complain.
The play _Jealousy_ is a sort of public trial of woman, and when at the
end the crazy husband of the woman who flirted but loved him best
strangles her, it is a sort of verdict, sentence, and execution in one.
How serious the trial is may be judged from the fact that each of the
audience is given a pencil and a piece of paper and asked to record his
opinion as to whether the man was justified in committing the murder.
How repulsive the whole thing! A play that should put “Woman” adequately
on the stage needs many women and the various kinds of men who need from
women the things that women can give—faith, love, children. For setting
or for evidence it needs the world. The powers of life and death must
stalk across the stage. The stakes for which men bid must be there, and
also the
Stars silent over us,
Graves under us silent.
_Jealousy_ is the reflection of a shameful way of life. It is trivial,
mean, parochial, the rage of talk for a day among the bourgeois of
Russia, interesting now, as opposed to the story of Antony and
Cleopatra, interesting for ever.
“And what do _you_ think of woman?” asked a Kief friend.
“Why,” said I, “the beast was a beast until a woman loved him. Then he
became a man, even a prince. So it is with all of us. When a woman
kisses a man, even an ugly, wretched, despised creature, he knows that
he has found grace and is precious in the sight of God. When a woman
smiles on a man she bids him live.
“The world is kept fresh by women and children, by their faith and their
influence and their prayers. It would have rotted away but for them.
“The love and the faith of women empower men to do things. No man who is
out on the adventurous tracks of life but has women behind him, and
their love even far away keeps him alive. A woman has cords from her
soul to the far-off hands of man, and at her will can empower men to
lift their hands and do things. She has spiritual nervous force.”
“But if these cords get broken?” said my friend.
“Ah, then indeed she is in a different position. She finds herself
stranded in destiny. She may become a man’s plaything or worse. Or she
may become a militant suffragist or a believer in secular education or a
propagandist of eugenism and hygienics.”
“In England,” says my friend. “But in Russia we have no woman’s
movement. She becomes one of Artsibashef’s women, no more; a man’s
plaything and fetish.”
Even so.
* * * * *
What has Artsibashef’s play got to do with Russia? It has a good deal to
do with her because of thousands such as Katia who are at the
cross-roads. With her cross, hard, but loving student Sasha she might
have been poor and unhappy, but, on the other hand, she would save her
soul’s health. Whereas with her new-found bourgeois Fedor she may easily
enter the world and the atmosphere of _Jealousy_.
Among those I visited at Kief was a certain Vassia, a poverty-stricken
doctor who worked from morning to night healing men and women, a
specialist in internal diseases but practising in a poor district. He
did not receive a fifth of his fees; he healed on trust.
“They come to me suffering: how can I refuse to help?” he would urge
when people tried to harden his heart against those who couldn’t pay.
An extraordinarily kind, impracticable fellow, with a flat in complete
disorder, with an adopted child but no wife; lazy and thieving servants.
Neighbours have stolen much of his furniture, even the ikons from some
of the rooms; and the candles burn in the empty corners from which the
ikons have been stolen! That is Russian.
Vassia and I were invited to an astonishing all-night feast given in
honour of Katia on the occasion of her last name-day before marriage.
We sat down to dinner at six, we got up from dinner at half-past eleven;
we went to the drawing-room and talked and sang till a quarter past
twelve, then we returned to the dining-room for tea and coffee and
dessert.
The funniest moments were when the bride’s father sat on the floor
pretending he was drunk, and when the bridegroom, to prove he was not
tipsy, crawled under the table on all fours among the guests’ feet and
went from one end to the other, and then jumped up and gave a military
salute.
They drank too much. They were near quarrelling at the end. One of the
guests shouted in a loud voice that Katia’s brother had played the piano
like a bootmaker.
Then the toasts! They drank twice to everybody in the room, and the men
kissed the hands of the women as well as clinking glasses with them. All
the bridegroom said at dinner was, “So-and-so, for what reason do you
not drink?” though So-and-so was often half-seas over. They drank to
absent friends, to Freedom, to Truth, to English Literature—“Let us
drink to English Literature, ‘urrah!”—to Russian dancing, to Katia, to
Katia’s figure (“thank God she isn’t like a telegraph pole”), to Katia’s
future happiness.
She changed her dress between dinner and dessert.
Some of the women present had a private view of the bride’s linen—eight
dozen chemises at a hundred and forty roubles the dozen, and all the
rest on a similar scale.
“Fine batiste and lace,” said an old lady present, rubbing her fingers
together as if feeling the linen; “fine batiste that at the first wash
goes into shreds from the chemicals the laundresses use. I wouldn’t
accept such garments as a gift. It is a sin to wear them. Nowadays, when
you live in a city and the washerwoman won’t wash naturally, the only
thing to do is to wear cheap things and replace them continually.”
What was interesting to me was the complete absence of attention on the
part of the bridegroom. He could not have treated an enemy more
negligently.
It even prompted the German governess, who had unfortunately got a
little drunk with champagne, to cry out—
“The bridegroom has not kissed the bride once; why is it?”
Poor Katia! she did not seem to have one true friend amongst all these
people, and was possibly marrying to escape from father and home....
But away from these problems! Thousands of sleigh-horses flog the
grey-white snow of the Kief streets, flocked with Christmas traffic. The
sleighs are loaded with baskets of cakes and sweets. Men are driving,
carrying in their arms huge Christmas trees. There are men struggling
with little pigs and live geese and turkeys designed for the market or
the Christmas dinner. On the slippery sidewalks urchins are crying with
cheerful irrelevance:—
“Five copecks, aluminium wonder lights, cold fire without smoke, without
smell.”
“Five copecks, warm socks to put inside boots or goloshes.”
In the Jewish old-clothes market of the Podol there are tremendous
crowds, and much business is being done. The mood of Jewry is happy in
the Christmas orgy of trade. All is calm after the ritual trial, and the
fear of persecution is all gone in the reality of good business. All
Kief seems to be in the streets buying; and the tram-cars tinkling their
alarm bells are crowded to the last inch of the step-boards.
But somewhere there is another Kief, a quiet radiant city, silent but
for the footfalls of monks or pilgrims on the snow—the sanctuaries,
monasteries, ruins, shops, hostelries of the Petcherskaya Lavra. This
Kief stands high on those cliffs of the Dnieper whence the Russians sent
tumbling down their old god Peroun; it looks upon the river to which
King Vladimir at the dawning of Russian faith stepped down with his
whole army to be baptized. Yellow walls, half a mile long, twenty feet
high, go down, alongside steep, snowy, rutty, over-drifted roads, from
church to church. Peasant men and women in chestnut-coloured sheepskins,
fur-edged and embroidered, are plodding up and down with bundles on
their shoulders. Bright gilded domes of churches glitter above white
walls, and from many kolokolnyas come antique-sounding chimes. As you
look down from a tower you see beyond the thirty-five churches of the
beautiful Lavra the blue and white Dnieper, half frozen and snowed over,
half free as yet from winter’s grip—you see beyond all the far snowy
steppes and forests of Little Russia.
Here, in a historical sense, is Holy Russia, for the whole cliff on
which the monasteries are built is holy ground. The foundations are
honeycombed with cells of the primeval hermits and saints of Russia. You
enter dark and narrow passages in the rock, places in which you cannot
stand erect, and you wander candle in hand from shrine to shrine in the
depths of the earth. An old monk with black cloak, grey hair, and yellow
five-times broken twisted candle, leads you from skeleton to skeleton
wrapped in purple pall; shows you now and then a skull, a dried-up hand;
points out the picture of the likeness of the saint whose remains you
salute, indicating the nickname the hermit bore in the days when he was
upon the world, thus: the industrious, the silent, the bookless, the
faster, the healer, the herbalist, and so on; thrusting the glimmer of
his torch into the intense darkness of the cell which the father had
occupied when alive. All day long the peasants wander from sepulchre to
sepulchre in this unlocked cemetery or dungeon of the dead, kissing the
coffins, laying personal ikons upon the relics in order that they may
receive special sanctification, dropping their farthings on the palls,
listening to services in remote underground churches, gathering unusual
impressions of death, tasting the sweet emotions of religion.
In the hostelries, where are accommodated upon occasion as many as
20,000 pilgrims, you may wander at will and see peasant Russia sprawling
on sheepskins and reading holy books, or making tea. You may go into the
refectories and see 500 pilgrims sit down together to a free monastery
dinner of cabbage soup and porridge and kvass, or you may sit with them
yourself and eat. On this Christmas Eve just past I sat with such a
party in the twilight waiting for the first star to come out, the signal
to make the holy meal of _Sotchelnik_. It was a different Russia from
Katia’s, this of the 500 uncouth, shaggy-headed men and women at long
dark tables, waiting in front of huge Russian basins full of soup, as
the shades of night came down, and the lamp before the Virgin and Child
grew brighter and brighter.
You tread with gentle steps across the giving snow and enter one of the
churches, and find yourself in an irregularly grouped crowd of antique,
hairy, patriarchal-looking men in sheepskins and birch-bark boots. There
are no pews or seats, there is no electric light, but there is the gloom
and effulgence of much gold and of many half-illuminated paintings and
frescoes. You stand with peasant Russia on a stone floor in the glimmer
and shadow of an immense candle-lit temple. You pass through with a
candle to the front, to the altar-rail lit by scores of steady silver
flames, the votive tapers of the pilgrims; you find yourself in the
presence of a radiant line of calm, attentive, singing faces. This is
Holy Russia independent of historical association. The music you hear in
Russian churches robs you of the sense of time. On Christmas Eve in
Russia you hear the music of the herald-angels, and see at the same
time, in the likeness of the listening Russian peasants, the shepherds
who heard the angels sing. You veritably escape from “the world” and
from “to-day,” and are so potently reminded of the beauty and mystery of
man’s life that you shake off all dull cares and the reproach of failure
or success, the soil and stain of circumstance, and know that what is
_you_ is something utterly beautiful before God.
Kief has been called many names—the Canterbury of Russia, the Russian
Jerusalem, the Font of Russia—but it may most truly be called the
Russian Bethlehem, the place where Christ was born in Russia, adored by
rude shepherds, sought by the noble and the wise.
III
PEREPLOTCHIKOF AGAIN
MOSCOW, _February 1914_.
I went to Moscow to see my old friend Vassily Vassilievitch
Pereplotchikof, the painter. He received me in his house in the Sadovia,
in that mysterious sitting-room of his where scores of his paintings are
always standing with their faces to the wall, like very shy young
maidens who wait till it is their turn to be shown to society and to
their prospective suitors.
During the summer in America which I had tramped, he had been seeking
impressions on the barren Arctic island of Nova Zemlia. What a contrast
in our fields of action! He in the silent snow-swept island; I on the
luxurious mainland of the New World. Vassily Vassilitch prefers places
like Nova Zemlia, where, as it were, candles are burning in corners from
which ikons have been taken away. We exchanged our impressions.
Nova Zemlia has only a hundred inhabitants, one steamer calls there in
the year. There is only one post. In winter there is three months
darkness without light; in summer two months light without darkness. The
ice and snow do not melt away even in July, and the colonists—trappers
and hunters—live a stark life in opposition to the storm and stress of
nature. They are dead to the world—the world all dead to them until the
prow of their one annual steamer comes into view on the ocean in July.
The day of its arrival they call their Easter, and they do not hold
Easter according to the calendar in the dark and terrible spring, but
postpone their holiday till life is born again with the coming of the
ship. Their resurrection day is when their brother-man comes again to
them. In the arriving of the ship they see Jesus walking towards them on
the sea.
Vassily Vassilitch told me this with a subtle emphasis. I felt rich in
having Vassily Vassilitch as a friend, for I realised he was able to
tell me sacred things. This evening of our seeing one another again he
read me many poems which he had written “not to print, but for his own
pleasure.” All that he says has a deep human interest, a significant
emphasis and luminous suggestiveness that may be recognised in his
paintings also.
Vassily Vassilitch left Archangel for Nova Zemlia one morning in July.
The boat steamed placidly and peacefully out of the vast and enlarged
Dwina into the White Sea, and then out of the White Sea into the cold
and buffeting Arctic. On board were two Government officials going to
consider “Colonisation,” an English artillery officer, an astronomer, a
journalist from Archangel, a monk going to relieve another monk and
spend the winter on the island, peasant fur-buyers, carpenters, and
workmen.
The monk was one of the most interesting characters, and told how a
Samoyede once in a storm dug a hole in the snow and lay there three or
four days, and slept till it was over. When the blizzard ceased he broke
out of his white grave and went home. He told how there was once such a
storm on Easter Eve that he and the villagers had to crawl to church on
hands and knees. Coming home they were all blown about half a mile out
of their course.
From the hunting expeditions the islanders nearly always brought home
young bears taken alive, and they fed them and reared them and
eventually sold them into menageries and circuses. The monk had two
young bears one season and they were very much attached to him. They
followed him everywhere and would take food from his hands alone. If by
any chance he escaped them and got away by himself to do something they
raised a _scandal_. However, on the return journey to Archangel the monk
lost one of them. When they were some 250 miles out at sea one of the
bears broke her fastenings, jumped into the ocean and swam away. And she
swam all the way back to the harbour and was recaptured by the Samoyedes
there. The other bear gave a lot of trouble at Archangel by absolutely
refusing to be tended by any one else but the monk who had brought him.
But at last the monk exchanged his cassock with some one else, and it
was found that the bear at once transferred his obedience, and that he
could be managed by any one who wore the monk’s garments. The monk
therefore sold the cassock with the bear, and both are now part of the
stock-in-trade of a circus. In this case the habit did make the monk.
The boat had an open hatchway, and the captain was for ever crying out:—
“More careful, people! Don’t fall down the hole. Once the Governor of
Archangel fell down there; he didn’t get hurt because he fell on a
chambermaid who was passing. Once an official fell through and broke
twelve bottles of various drinks; he didn’t get hurt either, but was
much upset when we gave him the bill for the drinks. Another official
was reading a bit of paper and stepped over and fell on some baskets—he
also didn’t get hurt; but be careful all the same. And various ordinary
passengers fell....”
But, as it happened, some tremendous weather overtook the ship, and not
many dare move from their places in the cabins. So the hatchway remained
open without misadventure.
It was touching—Vassily Vassilitch’s account of their coming into view
of the shore, and the whole population of the little colony standing
staring at the ship with greedy eyes, the first visitors to them from
the great family of mankind on the rest of the world, their Easter. Poor
lonely ones! With what thirst they exchanged the first greetings and
questions!
“How have you got on?”
“Any sick?”
“Any dead?”
“Have you shot many bears?”
“How’s trade?”