Part 3

My hostess was delightful with the peasants. She has taught among them, nursed them, cared for them, and understands their souls. She sits with pen and paper on the sunny verandah of the big sunny house and writes at dictation whilst the peasant wife, with her hands dangling at her side, maunders on about the cow, the hole in the roof which needs mending, the state of the crops, little Willie’s health, the amount of work these Austrian prisoners do, and so on. She puts down literally what the _baba_ says, as if she were doing an exercise in phonetics, and never corrects a word or a wrong expression or a grammatical error. The consequence is that the soldiers at the other end actually hear their wives speaking to them, and highly appreciate it. The letters which Mme. E. writes for the wives are the best.

Still, letters are makeshift ways of talking to one’s nearest, and it is a great day in the village when a soldier actually returns, a wounded man invalided back or a man with some sort of message. Alas, Russian troops get very little “leave” whilst they are well. It often happens that from the day of mobilisation to the peace day when the men come home, nothing is seen or heard of the common soldier--especially when he cannot write. Lists of casualties in the ranks are not published, and the village has to wait patiently to know whom it has lost and who are saved. More attention is paid to officers, even to ensigns, and I met down here in Voronezh Province a private who had been sent from the front to convey to the home people the decorations and last tidings of a young ensign who had perished leading his men. This officer had been greatly beloved by the soldiers--they rushed to him when he fell, and he seemed merely to be asleep. But one bullet had gone through his mouth and two through his skull. He was given the Cross of St. George after his death, and a soldier was detached to carry the last honours home and tell the tale of his death. Incidentally the soldier brought to the village his story of the war.

A rainy summer in the village. In many places the priests prayed for the rain to stop. The hay rotted where it lay, and could not be taken in, but the wheat and the rye were good everywhere. And the fruit harvest was good. Some one made a handsome profit on apples, since the common price in Moscow was threepence or fourpence apiece. Despite the dearth of sugar, jam-making was carried on in the country to an even greater extent than usual. People felt that it was a good way to save sugar for the winter, to put it into jam. Russian jam is much sweeter than ours, and is often put in tea as a syrup. It is never spread on bread and butter. Mme. E. obtained several sacks of soft sugar, about three hundredweight in all, and the half of that she used for making jam.

The orchard’s fruit, however, had been sold in advance in the spring. An Armenian had come, considered the blossom, and offered a price which was accepted. He had made a good speculation as it turned out, and he put a watchman in among the trees with a dog to see that nothing was stolen. The watchman was one of the unfortunate refugees from the territory now occupied by the Germans. Two years ago he had been a prosperous farmer with his own land and horses and cows and what not, now he is a miserable half-savage in sheepskins lying in a rain-soaked straw shelter in the orchard--sans land, sans wife, sans everything. A Roman Catholic he, but he went to the Orthodox Church on Sunday, as did also the Hungarian prisoners, for they said in their halting way what it is difficult for the more prosperous to understand, that _Bog odin_, God is One, and that if there be no Catholic church by, it is as easy to pray to God in the church that there is.

VI

FATHER YEVGENY

THE faces in the passing crowd are always somewhat of an enigma. There are so many that we do not know, each with his own wide story, which, however, does not touch our story. One is tempted to go up and place the hand in the slightly unwilling and doubtful hand of the stranger and say, “I know you, do I not?” And it is always somewhat of a miracle if in the midst of the sea of faces there suddenly turns up the familiar face. There happened to me when I returned to Moscow after my stay at Mme. E.’s a miracle of this kind. I met one of my pilgrims again, one of those I accompanied to Jerusalem five years ago, whom I did not expect to see again--the aged hermit Yevgeny.

I passed and repassed him twice, and he for his part stopped and seemed to be vaguely wondering what he should do next. ’Twas outside the Yaroslavsky station, and I was hurrying to catch a suburban train to visit some friends. There was a great swirl of traffic, and many trams were circling and groaning, emptying and receiving passengers.

“Father Yevgeny,” said I. “Do you not recognise me?”

He seemed taken aback, and shrank rather as if the devil had taken a new form to tempt him. I recalled that he was considerably troubled by the devil.

“We met at Jerusalem, did we not?” said I. “Don’t you remember, we used to read the Bible together in the mornings?”

Then he recognised me, and a bright and happy smile transfigured his pallid, wrinkled cheeks and sunken eyes.

He lifted up his bent shoulders and kissed me, first on one cheek, then on the other, and proclaimed in a loud voice, “God has done this. It is a miracle. He meant that we should meet again. But how changed you are! You have grown taller. Yes, it is you. But it is a miracle. God has done it.”

We were a strange contrast. I in a light summer suit and wearing a straw hat; he, in any case a remarkable figure, tall though drooping, with yellowish-white ancient locks and toothless gums. Several people stopped to look at us, and some approached more closely to hear what we were talking about. The representatives of two contrary worlds seemed to have met, for I clearly belonged to that gay, worldly, commercial Moscow which is so out of touch with Holy Russia, and the monk was one of those forbidding figures one would not expect to smile and be demonstrative in the public street.

I wrote him my address, and he promised to come to me on the morrow. I then sped on to catch the train, my heart full of delight at this surprising meeting, this true miracle to which the bright Sunday had given birth.

Next day Yevgeny came to the hotel at which I was staying and asked for me. He had put on for the occasion an old straw hat and over it a surprisingly old and dirty Egyptian sun-helmet. In his hand he bore a tall cypress staff with a cross on the top, a true palmer’s staff, but a rare enough sight in Moscow.

The porter of the hotel is artificially made fat like a swell coachman, and he wears in his hat a circle of tips of peacock-feathers which make him look very grand. It is his business to know every one who goes in and out of the great hotel. Probably for the first time in his experience a monk made to enter the establishment. Father Yevgeny and he--again two worlds confronting one another.

“No. 214 on the second floor,” said the respectful man in charge of keys and correspondence.

“This way!” said a small boy, pointing to the lift.

But old Yevgeny had never been on a lift in his life.

“My sinful old legs will carry me up,” said he--he mounted the many stretches of broad carpeted stairway to the second floor, which is really the third. There was a timid knock at my door, and my visitor had arrived.

“Father Yevgeny!” I cried.

I showed him his portrait in my book, and translated aloud the chapter written there about him. He seemed to be extremely pleased. We considered the portraits of the other pilgrims in turn. Abraham, who had been twenty times to Jerusalem, was of a Cossack family. The man carrying the lantern designed for the holy fire was now dead. The priest standing beside the dead pilgrim in the picture was now at Troitskaya Lavra. I made Father Yevgeny a present of the volume, and he bade me write in it in Russian, “To the hermit Yevgeny of Mount Athos.”

“How is it you come to be in Moscow and not at Mount Athos?” I asked.

“The war prevented me. I had come back to Russia to visit my native village before I died, and whilst I was here the war broke out. I was hastening back, but our Moscow Metropolite put his hand on my head one Sunday after morning service and said, ‘Thou art thinking of going to Afon--wait, do not go.’ Then war with Turkey commenced, and the way was stopped. Good Father Philaret of the Bogoyavlensky Monastery gave me shelter, and that is where I am living now.”

He recounted how, when the war broke out, he had a vision. He looked up into the sky, and it was filled with little white clouds hurrying southward. He was mistaken in thinking them clouds; he saw later that they were in fact the hosts of the angels ranging themselves on the side of Serbia to save her from the Austrians.

Yevgeny and I spent the whole day together. In the evening I had to leave Moscow, and he saw me off at the station. He talked a great deal about his visions. For instance, he had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. One sunny afternoon in the monastery yard he fell into a trance, and in the trance he saw what he had wanted to see all his life--a vision of the Kingdom. “There are really four heavens,” said he. “The first is so splendid, so full of light, that it is almost impossible to look at it; and in the midst of the light sit the Holy Trinity. Round and round them all the while and for ever the cherubs keep moving and they sing oi-oi-oi-ei-ei-ei-ai-ai-ai ... and never cease for a moment. In the second heaven I saw the apostles and the prophets. In the third heaven were the holy _ugodniki_, and in the fourth were a great crowd of all sorts and conditions of men and women all in white. There were many, many of our Russians there--I was so glad, so full of joy that I went. And then suddenly it all vanished, and I found myself in the monastery yard and on my knees, and my hands were on the white head of an old, old pilgrim woman. I asked her if she had seen anything, but she had seen nothing.”

I asked Father Yevgeny about the Mount Athos heresy, and the Name-of-Godites, as the heretics were irreverently called. I had a faint suspicion that Yevgeny might be one of them. But he was very robustly against them. “It all sprang from one man who was himself illiterate,” said he. “He held that as the Three were One, therefore Jesus and God were one and the same, and that in the beginning Jesus made the heavens and the earth. And he got a great following among the Russian monks. But he was altogether in the wrong, and if he had read he would have understood that Jesus the Son of God was born in the fulness of time, and the Name of God must therefore have priority. Ah! now they have all confessed they were wrong, and have been pardoned.”

We walked out into the Moscow streets, and all the while the old monk talked most energetically, and made astonishing gestures. One moment he saw a large triangle on a poster and spat to one side as he passed. “The symbol of the masons,” said he. “To-day the Cross is fighting the triangle, that is one meaning of the war. Do you know, many of the stewards of the old vodka shops were secretly masons, and it was found that they cut out on the floor underneath the shop counters, a cross--so that the drunkards might trample it under foot.” Yevgeny’s large intellectual face with wizened white eyebrows, and fine eyes at the bottom of caverns of wrinkled flesh, was full of animation, his gap-toothed mouth blurted the long torrent of words which it could hardly control, his long black gown from neck to ankles flapped in the wind.

I was sorry to have to part with him again so soon. But I promised to re-find him when I returned to Moscow. He came with me to the Kursky station. “God meant that we should meet again,” said he. “It was a miracle. All my life is full of miracles.” He told me the miracles of his birth. His mother was one of the serfs. She married, but was eight years childless. This caused her great grief, and she did not cease to pray to God that she might bear a child. “If it be a boy, he shall be either a soldier or a monk,” she promised God. Interesting that she should feel that to be a soldier was also to be consecrated to God. Yevgeny was born, and when he grew up he volunteered to be a soldier, and went to fight the Turks. He was wounded, and as he lay on the battlefield in great pain, and facing death, he promised his life to God. He then rapidly recovered, and, fulfilling his promise, entered a monastery. Since then all his life he has allowed himself to be guided by visions and inspirations rather than by reason.

In the vague light in the train, all the passengers were quarrelling over places, and the porters were struggling with baskets and bundles. The old monk stood on the grey platform and embraced me very warmly, and then I stepped up, and the third bell tinkled and the whistle blew, and the train slowly ran out--leaving Yevgeny at the far end of the platform and the space of unoccupied rails behind the train, momentarily increasing.

VII

A RUSSIAN COUNTESS

I MADE a journey into the depths of one of the central provinces and visited Countess X. She had been in England when the war broke out, and before she could get back to Russia her husband had volunteered and had already been taken prisoner by the Germans. In her it was possible to visualise something of the personal tragedy of the war. A charming and rather beautiful woman, the war commenced when she was on the threshold of life, when, as she said, life seemed to promise so much. She is only thirty-four, and is yet white-haired and deaf and feels herself becoming older every month. “When my husband comes back he will find me an old woman.”

Both she and her husband belong to the old nobility of Russia; in the library face themselves old paintings of her ancestor and his, both conspirators in the plot to murder Paul I, both expelled from St. Petersburg of that day and ordered to live on their estates, where it is said they did not behave too sweetly to their serfs. The present Count is an idealist, an admirer of the great idealistic classics of Russian literature, a man who loves the peasants, and ordinarily spends most of his time on his estates. The Countess deplored the sort of men he would bring into dinner, knowing not the usage of the knife, drinking the water of the finger-bowls, and what-not, but country manners never touched him--he simply did not see what was being done.

When war broke out he was in such a hurry to get to the front that he accepted a commission in some town regiment where, as a rule, the nobility do not figure, and he went forward on the great wave of Russian enthusiasm which led to Tannenberg. There he was taken prisoner with many thousand others, and was removed into the depths of Germany. As a prisoner he made an attempt to escape, but was arrested before he reached the frontier. For this offence he was put in a fortress in Saxony and confined for a long time solitarily. But he was not treated too badly by the Germans and was given pens and paper and books. He wrote to the Countess for one of my books, of which there had been considerable talk before the war. That was my “Russian Pilgrims.” The Countess had bought a copy, lent it to Mme. S., who had passed it on to the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, and they had all found it interesting. It was sent to Count X. in Germany and he translated it. It was rather touching from my point of view to know that a Russian prisoner had spent so many solitary hours with me, working at a book I wrote. When my “Martha and Mary” was published he had that book also sent to him and he translated it, and wrote so much about the consolation that the Countess averred she felt jealous of my name occurring so often in his letters. Unfortunately, “Martha and Mary” had already been translated.

The Countess disapproved of her husband’s idealism and would rather have had him of a more careless worldly type. She craved life, not merely ideas, and was afraid that the sedentary life of her husband in the fortress would so tell on his mind that when he came back he would be less practical than ever.

“Life is going to be good,” he wrote. “I have not known till now what possibilities it held, what wisdom there was in men, what beauty. All will begin again when I come back to Mother-of-God village” (the place where his land is situated). “I want to re-read all our poets. Their voices are going to sound again. Do you know Solovyof? He is wise and tender and beautiful. When I come back I will not stray from Mother-of-God village, not to Petrograd or to Moscow. But we will sit together and read Solovyof; you shall read him aloud to me and I will be content....”

“Ah, but I dread that,” said the Countess. “I should not want to sit and read Solovyof. I want to live for my boy at least. We cannot go on living here if my boy is to be educated properly. But then--you know what Tolstoy said to women, ‘Never use your influence with your husbands to make them act contrary to their convictions.’ Do you agree to that? I do not. I use all the influence I have.

“Life has been a great disillusion for me. It promised so much. Once I used to think there was nothing more wonderful than what life was going to bring. Now I see it is empty. There is nothing coming. Then the war goes on from week to week and month to month, interminably and without any gleam of hope of an end. It is very well to say the war will end by Christmas, next Christmas next again. I do not believe it. My boy is thirteen, delicate, enthusiastic, excitable, and already he is experiencing the emotion of love. He lost his heart lately to one of his cousins. She is twenty and is somewhat amused. The other day he picked up my hand and kissed it, which was somewhat unusual, and I turned to him. There were tears in his eyes and he looked up at me and said, ‘Ah, mother, how sorry I am it is not Vera’s hand.’ Galling, was it not?”

The Countess, for all her inward sadness and her deafness, was extremely vivacious, and when she did not hear she imagined what you said and was very often right. “I am sorry if sometimes I do not hear,” she said. “Teach me to speak to you so that you will hear,” said I, which is a simple sentence but a suggestive thought.

An interesting and sad time I spent with the Countess. Her quiet tragedy, that of being robbed of a husband and robbed of precious time, is part of the great universal tragedy of war, which touches rich and poor alike, simple and noble. The war has come athwart many promising lives in this generation and robbed the whole of the past and of the future of all mortal significance. Still, it has also given spiritual treasure in the heart, in the soul, hidden treasure--that is what we must not overlook.

A letter which I have just received from the poor prisoner gives the following thoughts:

“Your book has changed much in my conception of life. I was too Martha. These last two years of captivity have been a pilgrimage for me though I have stayed in one place. Still I console myself by thinking that if I am suffering others also are, when I should, on the contrary, remember that what happens to me happens to no one else.

“I have just been told that my translations may not be sent out of Germany, but I hear that one book will soon appear in Russia. It will be good for Russians to read it now.

“You are right saying that we shall be mad with joy at our relief. I cannot yet feel myself free spiritually in prison, and for me the body’s freedom is still the greatest thing on earth, but I think of the day of deliverance as something so remote and so beautiful that I compare it with our resurrection from death.”

VIII

RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN 1916

I READ, as ever, a great number of contemporary Russian books, spent many hours in bookshops, and it may not be out of place to give my impression of the literature of the hour.

Undoubtedly the great emotional impulse of the opening of the war in Russia has passed. This is reflected very clearly in current literature. The flood of printed lectures, war-pamphlets, and poems has ceased. Volumes of war stories are no longer printed, and indeed the war as a literary topic has become of minor interest. In the clearance it is now possible to observe the great desolation which the war has wrought. There is a strange silence in Russia. What was before the war has passed; what shall be after has not begun to be. There is as yet no promise of the future anywhere.

Not that books have not been published in 1916. They have been published thickly, despite the absence of genius, the scarcity of paper, and the supposed dearth of readers. Fonvisin gets into her eighteenth thousand with “Innocent and Yet to Blame,” and “The Keys of Happiness” goes into the sixth sequel. “The End of the War,” a novel by Lef Zhdanof, runs through several editions. “Russian Master,” an enthralling yellow-back of 470 pages by Lappo-Danilevsky, is reprinted many times. The translation of the novels of W. J. Locke flood over every bookseller’s counter and railway station book-stall. New books are certainly as plentiful as ever. But they are mostly interim volumes whose object is to pass the time away till the clamour of the war be over.

Gorky, who appears more and more as an editor and essayist, has issued a volume of translated Armenian literature, but he is putting forth no creative artistic work, and perhaps finds little time for it. As a reward, however, politically-minded Radical Russia certainly looks to him for light and leading. Andreef goes on writing, but seems to have fallen into minor importance. Viacheslaf Ivanof has just written an excellent book of essays on Dostoevsky, Solovyof, Tolstoy, etc., which ought to be translated into English together with his former book “From Star to Star.” Artsibashef continues to write salacious stories for the Russian middle-class, and seems to reflect their life and mind. Igor Severanin is quiescent, but his latest volume of poems, printed on bad paper, is dedicated to his “Thirteenth,” by which he apparently means his thirteenth “lady friend.” A curious volume lately confiscated by the police is “Father Leontius and his Lady Admirers,” an account of Rasputin, written in the form of a fictitious narrative by a serious student of sectarianism and religious phenomena--Prugavin. The society ladies circle round Leontius and cry out “Alleluia!” “Sabaoth!” “Three in One and One in Three!” which seems very shocking and novel to Russians, though it only reminds the English reader of the Agapemonites at Clapton and similar phenomena. Greater than the problem of the psychology of Leontius seems to be the problem of the psychology of the refined and normal women who can hail him as God. Lef Zhdanof’s popular novel on the war is very friendly to the German people and gives them a new chance after a political revolution. Balmont, the popular poet, has written an essay in one volume entitled “Poetry as Magic,” and parts are highly reminiscent of Stevenson’s “Art of Writing.” He analyses the functions of the letters of the alphabet: _L_ is a caress; _o_ is space triumphant; _u_ is the music of noise, the cry of terror; _m_ is man shutting his lips, it is all the dumb can say in their anguish, etc.