Part 2

Later on in the day a boy of seventeen got into the train. He carried a large box. I was reading a book by Gogol, and had put it down for a moment on the seat. He took it up and said, “I very much like reading books.” I asked him how he had learnt. He said he had been at school for one year, and had then learnt at home. He could not stay at school as he was the only son, his father was dead, and he had to look after his small sisters; he was a stone quarrier and life was very hard. He loved reading. In winter the moujiks came to him and he read aloud to them. His favourite book was called _Ivan Mazeppa_. What that work may be I do not know. I gave him my Gogol. I have never seen any one so pleased. He began to read it--at the end--then and there, and said it would last for several evenings. When he got out he said, “I will never forget you,” and he took out of his pocket a lot of sunflower seeds and gave them to me. As we neared Moscow the carriage got fuller and fuller. Two peasants had no railway tickets. One of them asked me if I would lend my ticket to him to show the guard. I said, “With pleasure, only my ticket is for Moscow and yours is for the next station.” When the guard came one of the peasants gave him 30 kopecks. “That is very little for two of you,” the guard said. They had been travelling nearly all the way from Yaroslav; but finally he let them be. We arrived at Moscow in the evening.

While talking with a person who had had a lot to do with the workmen in Moscow, I was told that they had been much demoralised by the extreme Revolutionary Party, and that now they preferred doing nothing and living at the expense of others to working. “The other night,” my informant told me, “a friend of mine, a hospital nurse, was waked at midnight by two workmen whom she knew well, and had always known to be most respectable men. ‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘We have come for Brownings,’ they said (Colt pistols). ‘I haven’t any Brownings,’ she said. ‘Are you not afraid some other hooligans might come and rob you?’ they asked. ‘No,’ she answered; ‘but what do you want Brownings for?’ ‘We are going out _expropriating_,’ they said, as quietly as if they had remarked that they were going to their dinner. She then argued with them until four in the morning, and saw that in any case they did not go out expropriating on that night.” But this word “expropriation” put into vogue by the revolutionaries, has had a disastrous effect on the working classes, who think they have only to stretch out their hands and take by right anybody else’s property.

I travelled back to St. Petersburg in a third-class carriage, which was full of recruits. “They sang all the way (as Jowett said about the poetical but undisciplined undergraduate whom he drove home from a dinner party) bad songs,--very bad songs.” Not quite all the way, however. They were like schoolboys going to a private school, putting on extra assurance. In the railway carriage there was a Zemstvo “Feldsher,” a hospital assistant who had been all through the war. We talked of the war, and while we were discussing, a young peasant who was in the carriage joined in and startled us by his sensible and acute observations on the war. “There’s a man,” said the Feldsher to me, “who has a good head. And it is sheer natural cleverness. That’s what a lot of the young peasants are like. And what will become of him? If only these people could be developed!” A little later I began to read a small book. “Are you reading Lermontov?” asked the Feldsher. “No,” I answered, “I am reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” “Ah,” he said with a sigh, “you are evidently not a married man, but perhaps you are engaged to be married?”

Just as I was preparing to sleep, the guard came and began to search the corners and the floor of the carriage with a candle as if he had dropped a pin or a penny. He explained that there were twelve recruits in the carriage, but that an extra man had got in with them and that he was looking for him. He then went away. Thereupon one of the recruits explained to me that the man was under one of the seats and hidden by boxes, as he wished to go to St. Petersburg without a ticket. I went to sleep. But the guard came back and turned me carefully over to see if I was the missing man. Then he began to look again in the most unlikely places for a man to be hid. He gave up the search twice, but the hidden man could not resist putting out his head to see what was happening, and before he could get it back the guard coming in at that moment caught sight of him. The man was turned out, but he got into the train again, and the next morning it was discovered that he had stolen one of the recruits’ boxes and some article of property from nearly everybody in the carriage, including hats and coats. This he had done while the recruits slept, since when they stopped singing and went to sleep they slept soundly. Later in the night a huge and old peasant entered the train and crept under the seat opposite to me. The guard did not notice him, and after the tickets had been collected from the passengers who got in at that station the man crept out, and lay down on one of the higher berths. He remained there nearly all night, but at one of the stations the guard said: “Is there no one for this station?” and looking at the peasant, added: “Where are you for, old man?” The man mumbled in pretended sleep. “Where is your ticket?” asked the guard. No answer. At last when the question had been repeated thrice, he said: “I am a poor, little, old man.” “You haven’t got a ticket,” said the guard. “Get out, devil, you might lose me my place--and I a married man. Devil! Devil! Devil!” “It is on account of my extreme poverty,” said the old man, and he was turned out.

The next morning I had a long conversation with the young peasant who, the Feldsher said, had brains. I asked him, among other things, if he thought the Government was right in relying on what it calls the innate and fundamental conservatism of the great mass of the Russian people. “If the Government says that the whole of the peasantry is Conservative it lies,” he said. “It is true that a great part of the people is rough--uneducated--but there are many who know. The war opened our eyes. You see, the Russian peasant is accustomed to be told by the authorities that a glass (taking up my tumbler) is a man, and to believe it. The Army is on the side of the Government. At least it is really on the side of the people, but it feels itself helpless. The soldiers are afraid of being punished. If they could act together like they did at Kharkov this summer (a regiment mutinied there and all the troops sent to quell the mutiny joined the mutineers) all would be over in a day--and the Government will never yield except to force. There is nothing to be done.” And we talked of other things. The recruits joined in the conversation, and I offered a small meat patty to one of them, who said: “No, thank you. I am greatly satisfied with you as it is, without your giving me a meat patty.”

The theft which had taken place in the night was discussed from every point of view. “We took pity on him and we hid him,” they said, “and he robbed us.” They spoke of it without any kind of bitterness or grievance, and nobody said, “I told you so.” Then we arrived at St. Petersburg.

DOWN THE VOLGA

On the way to Ribinsk my carriage was occupied by a party of workmen, including a carpenter and a wheelwright, who were going to work on somebody’s property in the government of Tver; they did not know whose property, and they did not know whither they were going. They were under the authority of an old man who came and talked to me, because, he said, the company of the youths who were with him was tedious. He told me a great many things, but as he was hoarse and the train made a rattling noise, I could not hear a word he said. There were also in the carriage two Tartars and a small boy about thirteen years old, who had a domineering character and put himself in charge of the carriage. The discomfort of travelling third class in Russia does not consist in the accommodation, but in the fact that one is constantly waked during the night by passengers coming in and by the guard asking for one’s ticket. The small boy with the domineering character--he wore an old military cap on the back of his head as a sign of strength of purpose--contributed in no small degree to the general discomfort. He apparently was in no need of sleep, and he went from passenger to passenger telling them where they would have to change and where they would have to get out, and offering to open the window if needed. I had a primitive candlestick made of a candle stuck into a bottle; it fell on my head just as I went to sleep, so I put it on the floor and went to sleep again. But the small boy came and waked me and told me that my bottle was on the floor, and that he had put it back again. I thanked him, but directly he was out of sight I put it back again on the floor, and before long he came back, waked me a second time,--and told me that my candlestick had again fallen down. This time I told him, not without emphasis, to leave it alone, and I went to sleep again. But the little boy was not defeated; he waked me again with the information that a printed advertisement had fallen out of the book I had been reading, on to the floor. This time I told him that if he waked me again I should throw him out of the window.

Later in the night a tidy-looking man of the middle class entered the carriage with his wife. They began to chatter, and to complain of the length of the benches, the officious boy with the domineering character lending them his sympathy and advice. This went on till one of the Tartars could bear it no longer, and he cried out in a loud voice that if they wanted beds six yards long they had better not travel in a train, and that they were making everybody else’s sleep impossible. I blessed that Tartar unawares, and after that there was peace.

The comfort of travelling third class in Russia is that there is always tea to be had. One would need the pen of Charles Lamb to sing the praises of Russian tea. The difference between our tea and Russian tea is not that Russian tea is weaker or that it has lemon in it. I have heard Englishmen say sometimes: “I don’t want any of your exquisite Russian tea; I want a good cup of strong tea.” This is as if you were to say: “I don’t want any of your soft German music; I want some nice loud English music.” It is a question of kind; not of degree. You can have tea in Russia as strong as you like. The difference is not in the strength, but in the flavour and in the fact that it is always made with boiling water, and is always fresh. But if you put a piece of lemon into a strong cup of Ceylon tea and think that the result is Russian tea you are mistaken. Russian tea is an exquisitely refreshing drink, and I sometimes wonder whether tea in England in the eighteenth century, the tea sung of by Pope and of which Dr. Johnson drank thirty-six cups running, was not probably identical with Russian tea. It certainly was not Ceylon tea.

Towards ten o’clock in the morning we arrived at Ribinsk, and there I embarked on a steamer to go down the Volga as far as Nijni-Novgorod. I took a first-class ticket and received a clean deck cabin, containing a leather sofa (with no blankets or sheets) and a washing-stand with a fountain tap. We started at two o’clock in the afternoon. There were few passengers on board. The Volga was not what I had expected it would be like (what place is?). I had imagined a vast expanse of water in an illimitable plain, instead of which there was a broad, brown river, with green shelving though not steep banks, wooded with birch trees and fir trees and many kinds of shrubs; sometimes the banks consisted of sloping pastures and sometimes of cornfields. In the evening we arrived at Yaroslav, an extraordinarily picturesque little city on the top of a steep bank. All day long the sky had been grey and heavy with long piled-up clouds, but the sun as it set made for itself a thin strip of gold beneath the grey masses, and when it had sunk the masses themselves glinted like armour, and the strip beneath became a stretch of pure and luminous twilight. In the twilight the town was seen at its best. I went ashore and walked about the streets of the quiet city: a sleepy town, with trees and grass everywhere (the trees very dark in the twilight); the houses low, two-storeyed, and all painted white, with pale green roofs as white as ghosts in the dusk, ornamented with pilasters and Eighteenth-century and Empire arches and arcades. Every now and then one came across a church with the remains of the sunset making the gilt minarets glisten. The whole was a symphony in dark green, white and lilac (the sky was lilac by now). The shops were all shut, the houses shuttered, the passers-by few. The grass grows thick on the cobble-stones. I wandered about thinking how well Vernon Lee would seize on the “genius loci” of this sleepy city, dreaming in the lilac July twilight, with its alternate vistas of luminous white houses and dark glooms of trees. How she would extract the spirit of the place, and find the exact note in other places with which it corresponded, whether in Gascony, or Tuscany, or Bavaria; and I reflected that all I could do would be to say I had seen Yaroslav--I had walked about in it, and that it was a picturesque city.

We left Yaroslav at eleven at night. In the dining-room of the steamer I had left a Tauchnitz volume called _Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther_, by the author of _Elizabeth and her German Garden_. I was looking forward to reading this before going to sleep; but this was not to be. The volume had disappeared. The next morning the matter was explained. There was a family travelling in the steamer, consisting of a mother, a daughter, and a son. The mother was very young-looking, although both the daughter and son were grown up; they had found the book and thought (I suppose) it had been left behind, or that it belonged to the public library. This book occupied them for the rest of the journey. They talked of nothing else. The mother had read it before. The daughter must have sat up late reading it, because she handed it over to the son early in the morning. They all thought it intensely amusing and interesting, but they evidently disagreed about it. These are the things, by the way, which ought to please an author. An author is delighted with a few neatly-turned “clichés” in a literary journal, turned out machine-made from the brains of literary men who have lost all their freshness of palate and can no more enjoy a book than a tea-taster can enjoy a cup of tea; but the reward really worth getting is the passionate interest of the man in the street, of a family, for instance, on a steamer between Yaroslav and Nijni-Novgorod. What they disagreed about was the character of the heroine. The girl loathed her. The mother faintly tolerated her. The son liked her. The girl’s argument was clear and forcible. She said she thought that Fräulein Schmidt was an egotist and fundamentally intolerant, and that she looked down on humanity from a pedestal of superiority. She said she felt the same thing about Elizabeth; Elizabeth and Fräulein Schmidt, she argued, enlisted your understanding, your sense of amusement in a most subtle way, in describing the pain of being interrupted in some delicious occupation by a dreadful bore. The girl said that all these descriptions of bores amused her immensely, but they made her sympathise with the bore. She preferred them to Elizabeth and to Fräulein Schmidt. She felt sure Elizabeth and Fräulein Schmidt had no conception of how trying she probably was to the poor bores. Fräulein Schmidt had infinite tolerance for clever and charming people like Professor Martens and her father, but of the people like the stepmother she never gave one a glimpse of the good side.

Now the daughter argued that these people always have a good side. The son said they did not, that they were described just as they were. The daughter said she had studied music in Berlin and Leipzig, and had lived in three German families, and that she had often endured a great deal from people exactly like Fräulein Schmidt’s stepmother; but she had always found that they were at the same time pathetic in their kindness at times. Fräulein Schmidt never gave you a hint of a kind side. She merely said these people starved the soul--which was nonsense; nobody, she added, starves one’s soul, one does that oneself. The mother said that Fräulein Schmidt probably understood the good side of the boring people, and did not mention it because it is not so amusing to describe. The daughter answered that it was interesting, if not amusing, and often touching. Fräulein Schmidt thought herself superior to everybody, because she read Matthew Arnold.

The son said that as far as he got he thought that the people described were just like those whom he had known at Heidelberg; that Fräulein Schmidt was charming and Mr. Anstruther loathsome. “Yes,” said the girl, “but she makes him loathsome on purpose. One wonders how Rose-Marie could ever have liked him for one second. She flatters herself, too, by being careful to let us know the old man thought she was like Hebe. She was evidently not a bit like Hebe.” And so the discussion continued without end.

We reached Nijni-Novgorod the next morning at eight. I took a cab. “Drive,” I said, “to the best hotel.” “There is the Hôtel Rossia at the top of the town and the Hôtel Petersburg at the bottom,” the cabman answered. “Which is the best?” I asked. “The Hôtel Rossia is the best at the top of the town,” he answered, “and the Hôtel Petersburg is the best at the bottom.” “Which is the most central?” I asked. “The Rossia is the most central at the top and the Petersburg is the most central at the bottom.” “Which is nearest the Fair?” “They are neither near the Fair.” “Are there no hotels near the Fair?” “There are no hotels near the Fair _in the town_.”

We drove to the Rossia, a long way, up a very steep hill past the Kremlin: a hill like Windsor Hill, only twice as long. The Kremlin is like Windsor, supposing the outside walls of Windsor had never been restored and the Castle were taken away. When we got to the hotel the cabman said: “This part of the town is deserted in summer; nobody lives here; everybody lives near the Fair.” “But I said I wanted to be in the Fair,” I answered. “Oh!” he answered, “of course if you want to be _in_ the Fair there are plenty of hotels in the Fair.” So we drove down again, right into the lower part of the town, and thence across a large wooden bridge into the Fair.

Nijni-Novgorod occupies both sides of the Volga. On one side there is a steep hill, a Kremlin, and a town covering the hill till it reaches the quays and extending along them; on the other side is a huge plain, and the Fair. The hill part of the town is wooded and green; the Fair is a town in itself, and during the Fair period the whole business of life, shops, including hotels, theatres, banks, baths, post, exchange, restaurants, is transferred thither. The shops are one-storeyed, and occupy square blocks, which they intersect in parallel lines. They are of every description and quality, ranging from the supply of the needs of the extremely rich to those of the extremely poor. I found a room in a hotel. The hotels were crowded just then, although I was told that the Fair had never been so empty. It had not been open long, and merchants were still arriving daily with their goods. The centre of the Fair is a house called the “Glavnii Dom,” the principal house; here the post and the police are concentrated and the most important shops--Fabergé, for instance. There is, of course, a large quantity of dealers in furs and skins; I bought nothing, in spite of great temptation, except a blanket and a clothes brush. The blankets are dear. Star sapphires, on the other hand, seemed to be as cheap as dirt. But perhaps this is always the case everywhere. I never quite understood when the people had their meals here. The restaurants, of which there is a large quantity, seemed to be empty all day; they were certainly full all night. Perhaps the people did not eat during the daytime. In every restaurant there was a theatrical performance, which began at nine o’clock in the evening and went on until four o’clock the next morning, with few interruptions; it consisted mostly of singing and dancing. Politically the place was as quiet as possible, but, contrary to my expectations, it is what is called a “Progressist” place.

The newspapers are all Liberal, and Progressist “candidates” were expected to get in at the next elections. I saw a newspaper editor who complained of the new system the Government have adopted of inflicting fines, right and left, on newspapers. His newspaper, which is the chief Nijni daily, was fined 1000 roubles (£100) for having printed a leading article against capital punishment in general. He showed me the article and I read it. It was certainly abstract. He said that he expected Liberal members to be returned for Nijni, although an immense amount of pressure would no doubt be exerted to prevent such a thing happening.

I left Nijni on Saturday the 10th. What surprised and struck me most about the Fair was the great size of it. One hears of the Fair of Nijni, and one pictures to oneself a quantity of small booths in a market-place. One does not realise--at least I did not--that the Fair is a large town consisting entirely of shops, hotels, and restaurants. The most important merchandise that passes hands at the Fair consists of furs. But there are goods of every variety; second-hand books, tea and silks from China, gems from the Urals, and “art nouveau” furniture. There are also old curiosity shops rich in old Church vestments, stiff copes and jewelled chasubles, which would be found most useful by those people who like to furnish their drawing-rooms entirely with objects diverted from their proper use; that is to say, with cigarette ash trays made of Venetian wells and teapots made out of musical instruments and old book bindings. Nijni during the Fair is almost entirely inhabited by merchants--merchants of every kind and description. The majority of them wear loose Russian shirts and top-boots. I noticed that at Nijni it did not in the least signify how untidily one was dressed; however untidy one looked one was sure of being treated with respect, because slovenliness at Nijni does not necessarily imply poverty, and the people of the place justly reason that however sordid one’s exterior appearance may be there is no knowing but that one may be a millionaire. Another thing which struck me here, a thing which has struck me in several other places, was the way in which people determine your nationality by your clothes. And while they paid no attention to degree in the matter of clothes at Nijni, as to whether they were shabby or new, they paid a great deal of attention to kind. For instance, the day I arrived I was wearing an ordinary English straw hat. This headgear caused quite a sensation amongst the sellers of Astrakan fur. They crowded round me, crying out, “Vairy nice, vairy cheap, Engleesh.” I bought a different kind of hat, a white yachting cap, and loose silk Russian shirt, such as the merchants wore.