The Russian Government is notoriously tender-hearted. But even the worm
will turn....
Scholars who have treated the life of the ex-monk Bazhakuloff divide it
into five clearly marked periods: the probationary, dialectical,
political, illumined and expiatory.
The first began in youth when, being driven from his father's house by
reason of his vagrant habits and other incorrigible vices, he entered a
monastery near Kasan. Despite occasional lapses prompted by the hot
blood of his years and punished with harsh disciplinary measures, he
seems to have performed his monkish duties with sufficient zeal. It was
observed, however, that with increasing years he became unduly
interested in questions of dogma. He talked too freely; he was always
arguing. Being unable to read or write, he developed an astonishing
memory for things he had heard and faces he had seen; he brought them
up at inconvenient moments. He grew factious, obstreperous, declaring
that there was much in the constitution of the Holy Russian Church
which ought to be amended and brought up to date. What people wanted,
he said, was a New Jerusalem. A violent altercation with his Superior
touching the attributes of the Holy Ghost ended in a broken jaw-bone on
the part of the older man, and the expulsion of the younger. The
dialectical period had set in. The convent inmates, on the whole, were
glad to see the last of him--particularly the Father Superior.
We next find him living in a large barn about fifteen miles from
Moscow. The Superior being unwilling to publish the true facts of the
broken jaw-bone, a certain fame, the fame of an earnest but
misunderstood religious innovator, had preceded him. Adherents, barely
twenty at first, gathered to his side. These disciples, humble
analphabetics like himself, have left us no word of what passed at
those long discussions. Certain it is that he now began to formulate
the rules of his Revised Church. They were to live on charity, to go
bare-headed, and to wear red blouses--like the Christians of old. The
charm of these simple regulations spread abroad, and gained him fresh
recruits. There were now some cultured folk among them, who collected
his saying into the GOLDEN BOOK. He decided to limit his disciples to
the "Sacred Number 63," and to call them "Little White Cows." Asked why
he chose this title, he answered that cows were pure and useful animals
without which humanity could not live; even so were his disciples. The
innate good sense of this speech increased his reputation. About this
time, too, he would sometimes prophesy, and undergo long periods of
motionless self-abstraction. At the end of one of these latter, after
tasting no food or drink for three and a half hours, he gave utterance
to what was afterwards known as the First Revelation. It ran to this
effect: "The Man-God is the Man-God, and not the God-Man." Asked how he
arrived at so stupendous an aphorism, he answered that it just came to
him. There were troubles in the neighbourhood over the audacity of this
utterance; some called it a divine inspiration, to the majority it was
known as the Unnamable Heresy. For a brief while the town was formed
into two camps, and the Chief of Police, a prudent official, was at his
wit's end what to do with these inflammable elements, seeing that the
ex-monk's followers had now swelled to several hundreds and contained
not a few of the more influential aristocrats of the city. In this
dilemma, he applied for instruction to the Procurator of the Holy
Synod. That gentleman, having considered the case, rashly decided that
a visionary of this stamp might be useful for furthering certain
projects of his own. He hoped, by placing under an obligation, to
fashion out of the young reformer an amenable instrument--a
miscalculation which he lived (though not for long) to repent. Under
the Procurator's aegis, Bazhakuloff was summoned to the Capital. The
political period was beginning. Moscow, on the whole, was glad to see
the last of him--particularly the Chief of Police.
There began the most brilliant epoch of his life. By steps which it is
needless to trace, he fought and wormed his way into the favour of the
Court. A good deal of his worldly success may well have been due, as
his enemies assert, to an incredible mixture of cringing, astuteness,
and impudence. It stands to reason, however, that a man of this type
must have possessed sterling qualities of his own to be found
occupying--all this was years and years ago--a suite of apartments in the
Palace, where he lived in splendour, a Power behind the Throne, the
Confidental Adviser of the Highest Circles. His monkish garb was soon
encrusted with orders and decorations, no State function was complete
without his presence, no official appointment, from the highest and
lowest sphere of government, was held to be valid without his sanction.
Red blouses, one of several keys to his favour, could be counted by
thousands. He crushed opposition with an iron hand. He wrought a
miracle or two; but what chiefly accounted for the almost divine
veneration in which he was held was a succession of lucky
prophecies--none luckier than that wherein, during one of his moments of
inspired self-abstraction, he foretold the early and violent death of
the former protector, the man to whom he owed this rise to the
pinnacles of fame. For even so it fell out. Not many days later the
Procurator of the Holy Synod was found murdered in bed by an unknown
hand. A certain journalist, writing from Switzerland, boldly states
that the Procurator was murdered at the instigation of Bazhakuloff and
claims to have heard, from an eye-witness whom he does not name, of a
bitter quarrel between the two on the subject of a certain lady as to
whose identity we are also left in doubt. It may be true; such things
have happened ere now. This particular writer's credibility, however,
is none of the best; he has been convicted over and over again of
forcing the note in his diatribes against what he calls "retrogression
into idolatry." There was certainly a good deal of unrest in the
country during the period of the ex-monk's ascendency; no less than
13,783 persons had been banished to Siberia, and 3,756 executed at his
orders. Yet nothing, it seemed, could shatter his position when, with
appalling suddenness, a thunderbolt descended. Nobody knows to this day
what took place. It was something Russian; some scandal in the Highest
Spheres which may see the light of day, centuries hence, when the
Imperial Archives are disclosed as musty court history to the eyes of
students curious in such matters. At this crisis, when 44,323 persons,
mostly liberals, were awaiting trial in the prisons of the Capital, the
ex-monk would doubtless have been quietly removed after the fashion of
court favourites, not by his adherents, now numbering many hundred
thousands, threatened a revolution. A secret compromise was effected.
He was banished, with every outward mark of disgrace, to a monastery in
the remote and inhospitable region of Viatka, there to meditate upon
the instability of human affairs. The illumined period was drawing
nigh. The Capital, on the whole, was glad to see the last of
him--particuarly the prisoners awaiting trial.
The diet and discipline nearly killed him at first. He was consoled by
knowing that his fame had spread far and wide. The Court being
unwilling to publish the true facts of his disgrace, he was regarded as
a martyr, a victim of political intrigue, an injured saint. Disciples
multiplied. The GOLDEN BOOK was filled with priceless sayings--wise and
salutary maxims which echoed from end to end of the country. The New
Jerusalem took on a definite shape; the nucleus of the movement, the
initiated among his followers, were retained as the "Sacred 63"; he
called them his apostles and himself their Messiah, which some people
thought rather presumptuous of him. His reputation for sanctity became
such that he was once more a power to be reckoned with; the Court, in
fact, was on the verge of receiving him into favour again, when the
Second Revelation was announced. It ran to this effect: Flesh and blood
of warm-blooded beasts is Abomination to the Little White Cows. Asked
how he contrived to formulate so novel and tremendous a proposition, he
answered that it just came to him. His followers--there were about three
million of them now--instantly refused to touch the Unclean Thing, and
all would have gone well but for the fact that the Army was tinctured
with the New Faith, and that the Grand Dukes had recently become
involved in extensive and lucrative contracts for supplying the troops
with mean. The soldiery refusing to eat either beef or mutton or pork,
percentages declined. These leaders took up a firm patriotic attitude.
The health and morale of the entire Army, they declared, was dependent
upon a sound nutritive diet obtainable only through the operation of
certain radioactive oxydised magneto-carbon-hydrates which exist
nowhere save in the muscular tissue of animals. This new heresy
endangered the very foundations of Empire! They were not people to
compromise where questions of national prosperity were concerned. They
suggested, privately, that he should cancel his Revelation. He refused.
They then sent him a confidential messenger offering the choice of
assassination or deportation within the space of three hours. He
inclined to the latter alternative, and was straightway conveyed to the
frontier by special train with as many rouble notes in his pocket as he
had been able to scrape together in the flurry of departure. Some
disturbances broke out when the news of his banishment became known; a
few whiffs of grape-shot worked wonders. The majority of his adherents
abjured their error; the rest of them, aided by charitable
contributions from a secret committee of enthusiasts, found their way
abroad to dwell under the shadow of the banished Messiah. The expiatory
period was approaching. Russia, on the whole, was glad to see the last
of him--particularly the Grand Ducal party.
A broken man, he decided to establish himself on Nepenthe, drawn
thither partly on account of the climate but chiefly by the report of
its abounding lobsters and fishes, an article of diet of which he was
inordinately fond. Disciples followed singly, and in batches. Their
scarlet blouses became a familiar object in the streets of the place;
good-natured and harmless folks for the most part who, if they ran up
bills with the local trades-people which they failed to pay, did so not
out of natural dishonesty but because they had no money. They used to
bathe, in summertime, at a certain little cove near the foot of the
promontory on which Madame Steynlin's villa was situated. She watched
their naked antics at first with disapproval--what could you expect, she
would say, from Russians? Then she observed them eating raw crabs and
things. It struck her that they must be hungry. Being a lady of the
sentimental type, childless, and never so happy as when feeding or
mothering somebody, she took to sending them down baskets of food, or
carrying it herself. They were so poor, so far from their homes, so
picturesque in those red shirts and leathern belts!
Of late years Madame Steynlin had given up marrying, having at last,
after many broken hopes, definitely convinced herself that husbands
were only after her money. Rightly or wrongly, she wanted to be loved
for herself; loved, she insisted, body and soul. Even as the fires of
Erebus slumber beneath their mantle of ice, she concealed, under a
varnish of conventionality--the crust was not so thick in her case--a
nature throbbing with passion. She was everlastingly unappeased,
because incurably romantic. All life, she truly declared, is a search
for a friend. Unfortunately she sought with her eyes open, having never
grasped the elementary truth that to find a friend one must close one
eye: to keep him--two. She always attributed to men qualities which, she
afterwards discovered, they did not possess. Her life since the
marrying period had been a breathless succession of love affairs, each
more eternal than the last.
In matters such as these, Madame Steynlin was the reverse of the
Duchess. True to her ideal of La Pompadour, that lady did not mind how
many men danced attendance on her--the more the merrier. Nor did she
bother about their ages; for all she cared, they might be, and often
were, the veriest crocks. She was rather particular, however, about
stiff collars and things; the appearance and conversation of her
retinue, she avowed, should be of the kind to pass muster in good
society. Madame Steynlin liked to have not more than one man escorting
her at a time, and he should be young, healthy-looking, and full of
life. In regard to minor matters she preferred, if anything, Byronic
collars to starched ones; troubling little, for the rest, what costume
her cavalier was wearing or what opinions he expressed. In fact, she
liked youngsters to be frank, impetuous, extravagant in their views and
out of the common rut. The two ladies had been likened to Divine and
Earthly Love, or to Venus Urania and Venus Pandemos--a comparison which
was manifestly unfair to both of them.
It was during this summer bathing that Madame Steynlin had made
acquaintance of what was, at the time, the Master's favourite disciple.
His name happened to be Peter--Peter Arsenievitch Krasnojabkin. He was a
fine son of earth--a strapping young giant who threw himself into
eating, drinking, and other joys of life with enviable barbaric zest.
There was not an ounce of piety in his composition. He had donned the
scarlet blouse because he wanted to see Nepenthe and, like the
Christians of old, had no money. Driven by that roving spirit which is
the Muscovite's heritage and by the desire of all sensible men to taste
new lands, new wine, new women, he professed himself a Little White
Cow. It was quite the regular thing to do. It brought you to the notice
of that secret committee of enthusiasts who paid your travel expenses;
it gave you a free trip to the sunny south. Everyone wondered how he
had managed to rise so rapidly in the Master's graces. Madame Steynlin
now stepped between them. She grew fond of Peter, and marked him for
her own. He fulfilled every one of her conditions as to age, costume
and opinions. Besides, he was always so gloriously hungry! She invited
him to take luncheon once or twice and then began to take Russian
lessons from him. "He is only a boy," she would say.
Conversing, as best she could, with this child of nature, it dawned
upon her that she had hitherto been mistaken in her estimate of the
Russian character. She began to understand the inward sense of that
brotherly love, that apostolic spirit, which binds together every class
of the immense Empire--to revere their simplicity of soul and calm
god-like faith. She revised her former narrow Lutheran views and openly
confessed that she was quite wrong in declaring, as she once did, that
what the Little White Cows needed was "more soap and less salvation."
The magic of love! It softened, not for the first time, her heart
towards all humanity and in particular, on this occasion, towards the
rest of the saintly band; were they not her brothers and sisters? She
even knitted six pairs of warm woollen socks and sent them with a
polite message to the Master--a message which was left unanswered,
though the socks were never returned. As to Peter--she called him her
Little Peter or, in his more expansive moments, Peter the Great. Soon
he was always coming to the villa at meal-times and staying for hours
afterwards, while they wrestled with the complexities of Russian
genders. He made no secret of the pleasure he derived from filling his
healthy young stomach at her expense; everything supplementary to that
prime condition he took as a gift from the gods. If he had not been so
simple-minded he could have wheedled any amount of money out of her.
The affair had now been going on for four month--quite a long while, as
such affairs went.
Not for the first time did Madame Steynlin experience the drawbacks of
her house, as regards natural situation. It was, as Don Francesco often
pointed out, "the most unstrategic villa on Nepenthe." Ah, that
peninsula, that isthmus, or whatever you called the thing--what on earth
had attracted her to the place? What demon had tempted her to buy it?
How she envied the other people--Keith, for example, who, if he had been
a man of that kind, could have allowed any visitor, in the broadest
daylight, to creep in or out of his mouldy old gateway in the wall
without a soul being any the wiser! High-priced horticultural experts
had been consulted as to the best means of thickening the vegetation
and screening the approaches to the house. They had met with scanty
success. The soil was of the most sterile, intractable rock; those few
wind-blown olives were dreadfully diaphanous, and Peter's blouse
visible from afar--even from the market-place. Everything got about on
Nepenthe. People began to twit her about the progress of those "Russian
lessons." It became quite a scandal. Signor Malipizzo was more annoyed
than any one else. He hated the whole brood of Russians, and had formed
various projects for uprooting the association from the island. His
friend the Commissioner thoroughly endorsed these views. Often he
declared that something must be done about it.
The Master, despite his seclusion, had heard of the affair. He was
grieved, but not unduly so; he had other disciples to choose from.
Every new arrival from Holy Russia, regardless of sex or age, spent
some hours or days, as the case might be, alone with the Master in his
apartment, in order to be initiated into the Law and impregnated with
its full signification: such was the way of the New Jerusalem. By this
system of spiritual control he could be sure of finding a successor
sooner or later. Besides, the defection of this favourite disciple was
only a drop in the ocean of his griefs. What secretly preyed upon his
mind was that, on the verge of returning to his former state of worldly
prosperity, he had been inspired to issue that Second Revelation
regarding warm-blooded beasts. He ought to have known about the Grand
Dukes, and what a sacrilegious hot-tempered clique they were! "This
comes," he would say, "of placing the service of God above that of my
earthly masters." It kept him in exile on this island--the deadlock in
the matter of that Second Revelation. The expiatory period was not yet
over, though Nepenthe, on the whole, would have been glad to see the
last of him--particularly Signor Malipizzo.
Meanwhile, the Little White Cows lived on: the richer in houses,
sleeping fifteen or twenty in one room after the happy style of
patriarchal Russia--the humbler folk in old ruins, sheds, cellars, or
even caverns of the rock. You could do that sort of thing in a climate
like Nepenthe, if you were not fastidious in the matter of owls, bats,
lizards, toads, earwigs, centipedes, and an occasional scorpion.