“LOVE US WHEN WE ARE DIRTY FOR EVERYONE WILL LOVE US WHEN WE ARE CLEAN!”
IN February Moscow was overrun by an epidemic of typhus. It did not
spring from the frozen drains so much as from the indigestible black
bread which is sold in the poorer parts of the city. On 10th February I
gave up black bread for ever; I have not eaten it since—at least not
Moscow black bread; Caucasian black bread is another matter. The bread
diet had become too much for me. I lay in bed all one day feeling more
dead than alive, and the prospect of typhus seemed very real. I
recovered, and then substituted porridge and milk for the old diet. I
showed Shura and Nicholas how to make this in the Scotch way, and they
got very keen on it and showed other students. So I might almost claim
to have introduced Scotch porridge to Moscow University. The Russian
peasants and poor people in general make a porridge of buck-wheat,
_Kasha_ they call it, but I am quite sure it is less cheap, less
wholesome, and less tasty than oatmeal porridge.
Moscow in winter is remarkable for its poor people, its labourers, its
beggars, its students. Cab-drivers in Moscow take twopence-halfpenny a
mile, and I have frequently taken a sledge from Sukareva Tower to the
Vindavsky Station for fifteen copecks—4d., a distance of two miles. At
the Khitry market one may often see men and women with only one cotton
garment between their bodies and the cruel cold. How they live is
incomprehensible; they are certainly a different order of being from
anything in England. And the beggars! They say there are 50,000 of them.
The city belongs to them; if the city rats own the drains, they own the
streets. They are, moreover, an essential part of the city; they are in
perfect harmony with it; take away the beggars and you would destroy
something vital. Some are so old and weather-battered that they make the
Kremlin itself look older, and those who lie at the monastery doors are
so fearfully pitiable in their decrepitude that they lend power to the
churches. Moscow would be a different place without the gaunt giants who
hang down upon one and moan for bread; without the little cripples who
squirm upon the pavement and scream their wants at the passer-by. To me,
though I found them a plague at first, they were a perpetual interest.
There were among them some of the strangest people one could expect to
meet anywhere: worn-out, yellow-whiskered men with icicles in their
beards, limbless trunks of men, abortions of men and women. I saw many
nationalities; Letts, Poles, Jews, Tartars, Tatars, Bohemians,
Caucasians, Chinese, Bokharese, specimens of all the peoples who exist
under the Russian Eagle. Rich Russians allege that they collect five
shillings a day, which is on a par with the tales of wealth amassed by
organ-grinders in London. The daily task of each is to obtain twopence—a
penny for a pound of black bread, a penny for a bed in a night house.
They just about manage this, sometimes getting a little more, sometimes
a little less. The surplus goes in vodka.
The question has to be faced by the traveller—What are you going to do
with the beggars? I felt the need of a definite policy. At first, when
we ourselves were near starving, I said “_No_” consistently, for I
hadn’t any money. Then when money came I hardened my heart and said, “It
is better to be a thief than a beggar: it is more manly. If I give to
beggars I make it more profitable to be a beggar; I attract other people
to beggary. If I withhold my money I drive some beggars to robbery, and
then the police have to deal with them.” If the people were properly
looked after there would be no need to rob or beg. This was a clear
decision, and I held by it rigorously for a long time, till at last I
came to the conclusion that it was more unpleasant to refuse some
beggars than to give alms. Truly, whether an Englishman gives or gives
not he feels he does wrong. Eventually I abandoned my principle and gave
when I felt inclined. The Russian has no mental scruples. He is
generally, providentially, ignorant of the science of economics. One
fact is evident to him: the beggar is cold and hungry and it is
Christian to help him. And the Socialists are too busy over bigger
things to define their attitude to the poor wretch whom they deem to be
a victim of tyranny. It is a common happening to see a crowd of
unfortunate creatures being driven to the police-station by a couple of
soldiers. To the democrat that is sufficient evidence of tyranny. Still,
I have been told the beggars have nothing to fear from the authorities.
The beggar is a holy institution; he keeps down the rate of wages in the
factories; he is the pillar of the church, for he continually suggests
charity; he is necessary to the Secret Police; where else could they
hide their spies?
The beggars have the most extraordinary licence and think nothing of
walking in at a back-door and staring at you for a quarter of an hour.
It is this licensed insolence that makes him a terror to the nervous
Russian, who always considers himself watched by spies. Nicholas
appeared to be continually suspecting and dreading spies. On the second
day after we arrived at the Samarkand lodging-house he discovered a spy
on the same floor, so he said. Often when I was walking with him in the
town he would say to me in a whisper, “Slow down and let the man behind
us get past.” Once we slowed down in vain, and then put on speed in
vain; we could not rid ourselves of a beggar who persisted in following
us. Nicholas suddenly turned round in terror at a dark corner and
clutched hold of the beggar with both hands and shook him. Then it was
the beggar’s turn to have a fright, but he only asked meekly:
“Why did you do that to me, barin?”
The word “barin,” “bar,” means a master; it is interesting that the word
spelt backwards, _rab_, means a slave. Russians say this is not merely a
coincidence.
The different way in which beggars address one would make an interesting
study. I remember one night a dreadful amorphous remnant of a man, lying
in a currant box outside the Cathedral of St Saviour, addressed me in
this fashion:
“Imagine that I am God!”
One seldom, however, hears such a dramatic utterance. Much commoner is
lighter banter. I remember a cheeky boy came up to me smiling and
certain.
“A copeck, dear count!”
“Haven’t got one, your Majesty,” I replied.
Many of the beggars have a selection of tales of woe carefully worked up
to suit the susceptibilities of different passers-by. Of this kind was
an old stalwart whom we, of the Kislovka room, used to patronise. His
usual style was:
“I was a soldier at the Turkish War and astonished three generals by my
bravery, but now devil a penny will my country give me to keep my old
bones together.”
But the two girl students who occupied the room next to ours always
averred that he told them a yarn about his daughter dying from want of
food and his wife in consumption, but never said a word about his
exploits.
Nicholas and I dressed ourselves in our worst and went to a night-house
one night. At five o’clock in the evening there was a queue like a first
night pit-crowd at His Majesty’s Theatre in London, a street full of
beggars pushing, jostling, shouting and singing. Next door to the
doss-house was a tavern, to which every now and then someone unable to
oppose temptation would dash to get a glass of vodka. Admission to this
house cost one penny. It was rather a fearsome den to go into, and I
wonder at ourselves now. I thought we should be too far down the line to
get in, but I was mistaken. Everyone was admitted. We passed through a
turnstile, and, strange to say, showed no passports. I fancy most of the
beggars are passport-less. A policeman stood at the door and scrutinised
the face of each who passed in. He had had too much vodka to do this to
any great effect, and he let us through without demur, probably taking
us for famished students, if he thought about us at all. Directly we got
in we were confronted by a huge bar stocked with basins. A boy was
serving out cabbage soup at a farthing a basinful. Another boy was
serving out _kasha_, also at a farthing a basin. On a green noticeboard,
among an array of vodka bottles, I read the following queer price-list:
farthing(s)
Lodging 3
black bread 3
soup 1
_kasha_ 1
fish 2
tea 1
beer 3
shirt (dirty) 3
A pair of old 30
trousers
coat 30
A pair of old 10
boots
The doss-house was owned by a merchant who made a handsome profit out of
it, I am told. So well he might! The accommodation was _nil_. Straw to
sleep upon. No chairs beyond three park seats. Two rooms lit by two jets
of gas each. A small lavatory that might even make a beggar faint. Men
and women slept in the same room, though they were, for the most part,
so degraded that it scarcely occurred to one that they were of different
sex.
We went upstairs; the air seemed a trifle less odorous there. Even there
we agreed it was impossible to stay. About a hundred beggars were
already asleep, and most of the rest were making themselves comfortable.
It was a large dark room, unventilated, and having all the windows
sealed with putty, so that not the slightest draught of air came
through. There were, of course, no fires in the room; it was heated by
hot-water pipes. One would say the floor had not been cleaned since the
day it was first used. It was rotten and broken and covered with black
slime. The snow from the beggars’ boots melted in the warm room, as it
had done every night this winter. Huge gnawn holes in the cornice showed
where the rats had been. Yet in this den, on such a floor, human beings
lay and slept! Pigs would have been housed better.
Yet in a gloomy corner opposite the entrance a little lamp burned before
the sacred picture of Jesus. The Ikon stood there and looked upon the
scene. It seemed to say, “God is here also, He does not disclaim even
this; and in His sight even these are men and have souls.”
A Socialist government would make a difference in a place like this. The
walls would be of white tiles and would shine like a station on the
electric railway. There would be couches and mattresses, parqueted
floors, electric light, baths, a reading-room next door, a free
restaurant below. And there would be no Ikon. They would feel they
didn’t need the sanction of God for what the reason approved.
I said this to Nicholas. He had bought a bottle of vodka, and was
treating a man who said he was an ex-student and literary man.
“Shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves!” said the man.
“Nice mess they’d make of it,” said Nicholas. “They’d have to clean the
beggars and dress them, and then shut up the pawnshops and the vodka
shops, and then give them some work.”
“None of the beggars will do any work in the winter,” said the man;
“there are workhouses already, but they won’t go there. There’s more fun
on the streets, and then our work is more acceptable to God; we keep the
people charitable. We stand outside taverns and theatres and
tobacconists, and by our poverty remind the customers of God’s
blessings. We restrain their self-indulgence.”
This was evidently an impossible line of argument. I asked him how the
people came to be beggars. In his case it was vodka, and he had met
scores of students reduced to the same plight. Most of the beggars were
just tramp labourers, in the summer they would go to the country again;
the women were the off-scourings of the streets. There were many more
women beggars than men, but they died off more quickly. “The
_intelligentia_ of Moscow lead such a life,” said he. “The very
Socialists, who want to make the place clean, lead dirty lives
themselves. Look at the hundreds of girls shouting themselves deaf on
the Tverskoe Boulevard, look at the students arm-in-arm with them, think
of the average middle-class Russian’s life. He gorges himself with food,
rots his mind with French novels, and openly confesses what women are to
him.”
“We shall have to get rid of the reformers before we shall reform
Russia,” said Nicholas, solemnly.
“Oh, I don’t blame them,” said the beggar; “it’s all part of life; we
beggars are all manure, that’s what we are; they plaster us about the
roots of Society and make the little red blossoms grow—and the white
blossoms.”
“It’s all very dirty,” I remarked.
“One learns to understand dirt, to love it even. God made the dirt; see
how the picture looks down, the eyes don’t blink.” He pointed to the
Ikon.
“Dirt is part of the Russian harmony,” I suggested with a smile.
“Yes,” said the beggar, “perhaps one day it will all be different, and
we shall have a vote and pay taxes and have jobs as well as wives and
families. But, you know, ‘you must love us whilst we are dirty, for
everyone will love us when we are clean.’”
[Illustration: A STREET SHRINE, MOSCOW]
[Illustration: PASSION MONASTERY, MOSCOW]
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