The ‘regent’ was in no way distinguished except by his musical abilities;
he was a well-fed, soft, stupidly handsome, rosy servant-boy; his manner
of speaking with a slight burr and his rather sleepy eyes called up
before me a whole series, as when you see one reflection behind another
in the looking-glass, of Sashkas, Senkas, Alyoshkas, and Miroshkas.
The secretary, too, was a purely Russian product, but a more striking
specimen of his type. He was a man over forty, with an unshaven chin
and battered face, in a greasy coat, unclean and soiled inwardly and
outwardly, with small crafty eyes and that peculiar smell of Russian
drunkards, made up of the ever-persistent aroma of vodka fumes mixed with
a flavour of onion and cloves to conceal it. Every feature of his face
approved and abetted every evil suggestion; it would doubtless have found
response and appreciation in his heart, and would if profitable have
received his aid. He was the prototype of the Russian petty official,
the Russian shark, the Russian sharper. When I asked him whether he was
pleased at the approaching emancipation of the peasants, he answered: ‘To
be sure—most certainly,’ and added with a sigh: ‘Good Lord, the lawsuits
and the cases there will be! And the prince has brought me here as though
to spite me at a time like this.’
Before Golitsyn arrived, this man had said to me with a show of genuine
feeling: ‘Don’t you believe what people will tell you about the prince
oppressing the peasants, or how he meant to set them free for a big
redemption money without any land. That is all a story spread by his
enemies. It is true he is hasty-tempered and extravagant, but he has a
good heart and has been a father to his peasants.’
As soon as he had quarrelled with the prince he cursed his lot and
lamented that he had trusted such a swindler. ‘Why, he has done nothing
all his life but squander money in debauchery and ruin his peasants; you
know he is just keeping up a pretence before you now—but he is really a
beast, a robber....’
‘When were you telling lies: now, or when you praised him?’ I asked him,
smiling.
The secretary was overcome with confusion. I turned on my heel and went
away. Had this man not been born in the servants’ hall of the Prince
Golitsyn, had he not been the son of some village constable, he would
long ago, with his abilities, have been a minister—a Valuev, or I don’t
know what.
An hour later the ‘regent’ and his mentor appeared with a note from
Golitsyn. He asked me, with apologies, whether I could go and see him to
put an end to these wretched difficulties. The prince promised beforehand
to accept my decision without dispute.
There was no getting out of it; I went.
Everything in the house betrayed an extraordinary excitement; the French
servant Picot hurriedly opened the door to me, and, with the solemn
fussiness with which doctors are conducted to a consultation at the
bedside of a dying man, led me into the drawing-room. There I found
Golitsyn’s second wife, flustered and irritated. Golitsyn himself, with
no cravat, his heroic chest bare, was pacing up and down the room with
huge strides. He was furious, and so stammered twice as much as usual;
his whole face betrayed his suffering from the blows, kicks and punches
that were surging inwardly but could have no outlet in the actual world,
though they would have been his answer to the insurgents in the Tambov
province.
‘For G-G-God’s sake, forgive me for t-t-troubling you about these
b-b-blackguards.’
‘What is the matter?’
‘P-p-please ask them yourself; I will merely listen.’
He summoned the ‘regent,’ and the following conversation took place
between us:—
‘Are you dissatisfied in any way?’
‘Yes, very much dissatisfied; that is why I want to go to Russia.’
The prince, who had a voice as strong as Lablache’s, emitted a leonine
moan: another five blows in the face had to be stifled within him.
‘The prince cannot keep you; so tell us what it is you are dissatisfied
with.’
‘Everything, Alexandr Ivanovitch.’
‘Well, do speak more definitely.’
‘What can I say? Ever since I came away from Russia I have been run off
my legs with work, and had only two pounds of pay, and what the prince
gave me the third time, in the evening, was more by way of a present.’
‘And how much ought you to have received?’
‘That I can’t say, sir....’
‘Have you a definite agreement?’
‘No indeed, sir. The prince, when he was graciously pleased to run away’
(this was said without the slightest malicious intention), ‘said to me:
“If you like to come with me, I’ll make your future,” says he, “and if
I have luck, I’ll give you a good salary; but if not, then you must be
satisfied with a little”; so I took, and came.’
He had come from Tambov to London on such terms. Oh, Russia!
‘Well, and what do you think? has the prince been lucky or not?’
‘Lucky? no, indeed! Though to be sure, he might....’
‘That is a different question. If he is not lucky, then you ought to be
satisfied with a small salary.’
‘But the prince himself has told me that for my duties and my abilities,
according to the rate of pay here, I ought not to get less than four
pounds a month.’
‘Prince, are you willing to pay him four pounds a month?’
‘I shall be d-d-delighted.’
‘That is capital; what more?’
‘The prince promised that if I wanted to go back he would pay my return
fare to Petersburg.’
The prince nodded and added: ‘Yes, but only if I were pleased with him!’
‘Are you displeased with him?’
Then the pent-up torrent burst out; the prince leapt up. In a tragic
bass, which gained weight from the quiver on some vowels and the little
pauses before some of the consonants, he delivered the following speech:
‘Could I be p-p-pleased with that m-milksop, that p-p-pup? What enrages
me is the foul ingratitude of the beggar. I took him into my service
from the very poorest family of peasants, barefoot, devoured by lice;
I trained the rascal. I have made a m-m-man of him, a m-musician, a
“regent”; I have trained the scoundrel’s voice so that he could get a
hundred roubles a month in Russia in the season.’
‘That is all very true, Yury Nikolayevitch, but I don’t share your view
of it. Neither he nor his family asked you to make a Ronconi of him; so
you can’t expect any special gratitude on his part. You have trained him
as one trains a nightingale, and you have done a good thing, but that is
the end of it. Besides, that is not the point.’
‘You are right; but I meant to say, see what I have to put up with, see
what I have done for the rascal....’
‘So you consent to pay his fare?’
‘The devil take him. For your sake, simply, for your sake, I will....’
‘Well, the matter is settled, then: and do you know what the fare is?’
‘I am told it is twenty pounds.’
‘No, that is too much. A hundred roubles from here to Petersburg is
enough. Will you give that?’
‘Yes, I will.’
I worked out the sum on paper and handed it to Golitsyn; the latter
glanced at the total ... it amounted, if I remember rightly, to just over
thirty pounds. He handed me the money on the spot.
‘You can read and write, of course?’ I asked the young man.
‘Of course, sir.’
I wrote out a receipt for him in some such form as this: I have received
from Prince Yury Nikolayevitch Golitsyn thirty odd pounds (so much in
Russian money), being salary owing to me and my fare from London to
Petersburg. With that I am satisfied, and have no other claims against
him.
‘Read it for yourself, and sign it.’
The young man read it, and made no movement to sign it.
‘What is the matter?’
‘I can’t, sir.’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘I am not satisfied.’
A restrained leonine roar—and, indeed, I was on the point of crying out
myself.
‘What the devil is the matter? You said yourself what you claimed.
The prince has paid you everything to the last farthing. Why are you
dissatisfied?’
‘Why, upon my word, sir, and the straits I have been put to ever since I
have been here.’
It was clear that the ease with which he had obtained the money had
whetted his appetite.
‘For instance, sir, I ought to have something more for copying music.’
‘You liar!’ Golitsyn boomed, as Lablache can never have boomed; the piano
responded with a timid echo; Picot’s pale face appeared at the crack of
the door and vanished with the speed of a frightened lizard.... ‘Wasn’t
copying music a part of your definite duty? Why, what else had you to do
all the time when there were no concerts?’
The prince was right, though he need not have frightened Picot by his
_contrabombardo_ voice.
The ‘regent,’ being accustomed to notes of all sorts, did not give
way, but, dropping the music-copying, turned to me with the following
absurdity: ‘And then, too, there is something for clothes. I am quite
threadbare.’
‘But do you mean to tell me that Yury Nikolayevitch undertook to clothe
you, as well as to give you about fifty pounds a year salary?’
‘No, sir; but in old days the prince did sometimes give me things, but
now, I am ashamed to say so, I have come to going about without socks.’
‘I am going about without s-s-socks myself,’ roared the prince, and,
folding his arms across his chest, he looked haughtily and contemptuously
across at the ‘regent.’ This outburst I had not expected, and I looked
into his face with surprise; but, seeing that he was about to continue, I
said very gravely to the precious singer: ‘You came to me this morning to
ask for my mediation: so you trusted me?’
‘We know you very well, we have no doubt of you at all, you will not let
us be wronged.’
‘Very good. Well, this is how I settle the matter: sign the receipt at
once or give me back the money, and I will give it back to the prince and
decline to meddle any further.’
The ‘regent’ had no inclination to hand the money to the prince; he
signed the receipt and thanked me. I will spare you the description of
his reckoning it in roubles. I could not din into him that the rouble was
not the same in the exchange as it was when he left Russia.
‘If you imagine that I am trying to cheat you of thirty shillings, this
is what you had better do: go to our priest and ask him to reckon it for
you.’ He agreed to do so.
It seemed as though all were over, and Golitsyn’s breast no longer heaved
with such stormy menace; but as fate would have it, the sequel recalled
our fatherland as the beginning had.
The ‘regent’ hesitated and hesitated, and suddenly, as though nothing
had happened between them, turned to Golitsyn with the words: ‘Your
Excellency, as the steamer does not go from Hull for five days, be so
gracious—allow me to remain with you for the while.’ My Lablache will
give it him, I thought, devotedly preparing myself for the shock of the
sound.
‘Of course you can stay. Where the devil would you go?’
The ‘regent’ thanked the prince and went away.
Golitsyn by way of explanation said to me: ‘You see he is a very good
fellow; it is that b-b-blackguard, that thief, that unclean Yuss leads
him astray.’
Let Savigny and Mittermeyer do their best to formulate and classify the
ideas of justice developed in our orthodox fatherland between the stable
where they flog the house-serfs and the master’s study where they fleece
the peasants.
The second _cause célèbre_, that is, the one with the aforesaid Yuss, was
not so successful. Golitsyn came in, and he suddenly shouted so loud, and
the secretary shouted so loud that there was nothing left but to come to
blows with each other, and then the prince of course would have smashed
the mangy sharper. But as everything in that household followed the laws
of a peculiar logic, it was not the prince who fought with the secretary,
but the secretary who fought with the door. Brimming over with spite and
invigorated by an extra glass of gin, he aimed a blow with his fist at
the big glass window in the door, and broke it to bits.
‘Police!’ roared Golitsyn. ‘Burglary! Police!’ and going into the
drawing-room he fell exhausted on the sofa. When he had recovered
a little, he explained to me among other things how great was the
ingratitude of the secretary. The man had been his brother’s trusted
agent and had swindled him—I do not remember how—and was on the point
of being brought to trial. Golitsyn was sorry for him; he entered so
thoroughly into his position that he pawned his only watch to buy him
off. And so having the fullest proof that he was a rogue, he took him
into his service as a steward!
There could be no doubt whatever that he had cheated Golitsyn at every
turn.
I went away. A man who could smash a glass door with his fist could find
justice and protection for himself. Moreover, he told me afterwards
himself when he asked me to get him a passport to return to Russia, that
he had proudly offered Golitsyn a pistol and suggested casting lots which
should fire.
If this was so, the pistol was certainly not loaded.
The prince spent his last penny in pacifying the Servile Revolt, and none
the less ended, as might have been expected, by being imprisoned for
debt. Any one else would have been clapped in prison, and that would have
been the end of it; but even that could not happen to Golitsyn simply in
the common way.
A policeman used to conduct him between seven and eight o’clock every
evening to Cremona Gardens; there he used to conduct a concert for
the edification of the _lorettes_ of all London, and with the last
wave of his ivory sceptre a policeman, till then unobserved, would
spring up as though out of the earth and escort the prince to the cab
which took the captive in the black swallow-tail and white gloves to
prison. There were tears in his eyes as he said ‘Good-bye’ to me in the
Gardens. Poor prince! Another man might have laughed at it, but he took
his captivity to heart. His relations redeemed him at last; then the
Government permitted him to return to Russia, and banished him at first
to Yaroslavl, where he could conduct religious concerts together with
Felinski, the Bishop of Warsaw. The Government was kinder to him than his
father; as free a liver as his son, he advised the latter to go into a
monastery. The father knew the son well; and yet he was himself so good a
musician that Beethoven dedicated a symphony to him.
Following the exuberant figure of the Assyrian god, of the fleshy
ox-Apollo, a series of other Russian curiosities must not be forgotten.
I am not speaking of flitting shades like the ‘colonel russe,’ but of
those who, stranded by fate and various adventures, have remained a long
time in London; such as the clerk in the War Office who, having got
into a mess with his accounts and debts, threw himself into the Neva,
was drowned ... and popped up in London, an _exile_, in a fur cap and a
fur-lined coat, which he never abandoned, regardless of the muggy warmth
of a London winter.
Or such as my friend Ivan Ivanovitch S., who, with antecedents and
future and all, with raw skin on his head where there should have been
hair, clamours for a place in my gallery of curiosities. A retired
officer of the bodyguard of the Pavlov regiment, he lived in comfort in
foreign parts, and so continued up to the revolution of February. Then
he took fright, and began to look on himself as a criminal. Not that
his conscience troubled him; what troubled him was the thought of the
gendarmes who would meet him at the frontier, the thought of dungeons,
of a troika, of the snow, and he resolved to postpone his return. All
at once the news reached him that his brother had been arrested in
connection with Shevtchenko’s case. There really was some risk for him,
and he at once resolved to return. It was at that time that I made his
acquaintance at Nice. S. was setting off, having bought a minute phial of
poison for the journey, which he intended as he crossed the frontier to
insert in a hollow tooth and to swallow if he were arrested.
As he approached his native land his panic grew greater and greater, and
by the time he arrived at Berlin it had become a suffocating anguish.
However, S. mastered himself and took his seat in the train. He remained
there for the first five stations; further than that he could not bear
it. The engine stopped to take in water; on a different pretext he
left the train. The engine whistled, the train moved off without S.;
and that was just what he wanted. Leaving his trunk to the caprice of
destiny, by the first train going in the opposite direction he returned
to Berlin. Thence he sent a telegram concerning his luggage, and went
to get a _visa_ for his passport to Hamburg. ‘Yesterday you were going
to Russia, and to-day you are going to Hamburg,’ remarked the policeman,
without refusing the _visa_. The panic-stricken S. said: ‘Letters—I
have had letters,’ and probably his expression as he said it was such
that the Prussian official ought to be dismissed the service for not
arresting him. Thereupon S., like Louis-Philippe, escaping though
pursued by no one, arrived in London. In London a hard life began for
him, as for thousands of others; for years he maintained an honest and
resolute struggle with poverty. But for him, too, destiny provided a
comic trimming to all his tragic adventures. He made up his mind to give
lessons in mathematics, drawing and even French (for English people).
After consulting various advisers, he saw that it could not be done
without an advertisement or cards. ‘But the trouble is this: how will the
Russian Government look at it? I thought and thought about it, and I have
had anonymous cards printed.’
It was a long time before I could get over my delight at this grand
invention: it had never occurred to me that it was possible to have a
visiting-card without a name on it. With the help of his anonymous cards,
and with great perseverance (he used to live for days together on nothing
but bread and potatoes), he succeeded in getting afloat, was employed in
selling things on commission, and his fortunes began to mend.
And this was precisely at the date when the fortunes of another officer
of the Pavlov bodyguard failed completely; defeated, robbed, deceived,
cheated, and deluded, the commander-in-chief of the Pavlov regiment
departed into eternity. Pardons, amnesties, followed; S. too wished to
take advantage of the Imperial mercies, and so he writes a letter to
Brunov and asks whether he comes under the amnesty.
A month later S. was summoned to the Embassy. ‘My case is not so simple,’
he thought; ‘they have been thinking it over for a month.’
‘We have received an answer,’ the senior secretary said to him; ‘you have
inadvertently put the Ministry in a difficult position; they have nothing
against you. They have applied to the Ministry of Home Affairs, and they
can find nothing relating to you either. Tell us plainly what it was; it
could not have been anything of great consequence?’
‘Why, in 1849 my brother was arrested and afterwards exiled.’
‘Well?’
‘That was all.’
‘No,’ thought the official, ‘he is joking’; and he told S. if that was
the case the Ministry would make further inquiries.
Two months passed. I can imagine what went on during these two months
in Petersburg: references, reports, confidential inquiries, secret
questions passed from the Ministry to the Third Section, from the Third
Section to the Ministry, the report of X. ... of the Governor-General ...
reprimands, observations ... but S.’s case could not be found.
The Ministry reported to that effect to London.
Brunov himself sent for S. ‘Here,’ he said—‘look—is the answer: there is
nothing anywhere concerning you.—Tell me, what case was it you were mixed
up in?’
‘My brother....’
‘I have heard all that, but with what case were you yourself connected?’
‘There was nothing else.’
Brunov, who had never been surprised at anything from his birth up, was
surprised.
‘Then why do you ask for a pardon since you have done nothing?’
‘I thought that it was better, anyway.’
‘So the fact is you don’t need a pardon, but a passport,’ and Brunov
ordered a passport to be given him.
In high delight S. dashed off to us.
After describing in detail the whole story of how he had obtained a
pardon, he took Ogaryov by the arm and led him away into the garden.
‘For God’s sake, give me advice,’ he said to him, ‘Alexandr Ivanovitch
always laughs at me—that is his way; but you have a kind heart. Tell me
candidly: do you think I can safely go through Vienna?’ Ogaryov did not
justify this good opinion; he burst out laughing. But not only Ogaryov—I
can imagine how the faces of Brunov and his secretary for two minutes
lost the wrinkles traced by weighty affairs of State and grinned when S.,
amnestied, walked out of their office.
But with all his eccentricities, S. was an honest man.
The other Russians who rose to the surface, God knows whence, strayed
for a month or two about London, called on us with their own letters of
introduction and vanished God knows whither, were by no means so harmless.
The melancholy case which I am going to describe took place in the summer
of 1862. The reaction was at that time in its incubation stage, and the
internal hidden rottenness had not yet shown itself externally. No one
was afraid to come and see us; no one was afraid to take copies of the
_Kolokol_ and our other publications away with him; many people boasted
of the clever way they conveyed them over the frontier. When we advised
them to be careful they laughed at us. We hardly ever wrote letters
to Russia: we had nothing to say to our old friends, we were drifting
further and further away from them; with our new unknown friends we
corresponded through the _Kolokol_.
In the spring Kelsiev returned from Moscow and Petersburg. His journey
is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable episodes of that period. The
man who had slipped under the noses of the police, scarcely concealing
himself, who had been present at conversations of raskolniks and drinking
parties of comrades, with an absurd Turkish passport in his pocket, and
had returned safe and sound to London, had grown reckless.
He took it into his head to get up a subscription-supper in our honour on
the fifth anniversary of the _Kolokol_ at a restaurant. I begged him to
put off the celebration to another happier time. He would not. The supper
was not a success, there was no _entrain_ about it, and there could not
be. There were too many outsiders taking part in it.
Talking of one thing and the other between toasts and anecdotes, it was
mentioned as the simplest thing in the world that Vyetoshnikov, Kelsiev’s
friend, was going to Petersburg and was ready to take anything with him.
The party broke up late. Many people said that they would be with us on
Sunday. There was indeed a regular crowd among whom were people whom we
knew very little, and unfortunately Vyetoshnikov himself; he came up to
me and said that he was going next morning, and asked me whether I had
any letters or commissions. Bakunin had already given him two or three
letters. Ogaryov went downstairs to his own room and wrote a few words of
friendly greeting to Nikolay Serno-Solovyevitch; to them I added a word
of greeting and asked the latter to call the attention of Tchernyshevsky
(to whom I had never written) to our proposal in the _Kolokol_ to print
the _Sovremennik_ in London at our expense.
The party began to break up about twelve o’clock. Two or three guests
remained. Vyetoshnikov came into my study and took the letter. It is very
possible that even that might have remained unnoticed. But this is what
happened. By way of thanking those who had taken part in the supper, I
asked them to choose any one of our publications or a big photograph of
myself as a souvenir from me. Lyev Vyetoshnikov took the photograph; I
advised him to cut off the margin and roll it up; he would not, but said
he should put it at the bottom of his trunk, and so wrapped it in a sheet
of _The Times_ and went off. That could not escape notice.
Saying good-bye to him, the last of the party, I quietly went off to
bed—so great is one’s blindness at times—and of course never dreamed how
dearly that minute would cost me and what sleepless nights it would bring
me. It was all stupid and careless in the extreme. We might have delayed
Vyetoshnikov until Tuesday, he might have been sent off on Saturday; why
had he not come in the morning? ... and indeed why had he come himself at
all? ... and, indeed, why did we write the letters?
We were told that one of our guests telegraphed at once to Petersburg.
Vyetoshnikov was arrested on the steamer; the rest is well known.
To conclude this gloomy narrative, I will speak of a man whom I have
casually mentioned and whom I must not pass over. I mean Kelsiev.