Part 3

That evening I went to a restaurant at which there was a musical performance. I fell into conversation with a young merchant sitting at the next table, and he said to me after we had had some conversation, “You are, I suppose, from the Caucasus.” I said “No.” We talked of other things, the Far East among other topics. He then exclaimed: “You are, I suppose, from the Far East.” I again said “No,” and we again talked of other things. He had some friends with him who joined in the conversation, and they were consumed with curiosity as to whence I had come, and I told them they could guess. They guessed various places, such as Archangel, Irkutsk, Warsaw, and Saghalien, and at last one of them cried out with joy: “I know what place you belong to; you are a native of Nijni.” They went away triumphant. Their place was taken by a very old merchant, a rugged, grey-headed, bearded, peasant merchant. He contemplated the singing and dancing which was taking place on the stage for some time, and then he said to me, “Don’t you wish you were twenty years younger?” I said I did, but I did not think that I should in that case be better equipped for this particular kind of entertainment, as I should be only twelve years old. “Impossible,” said the old man indignantly. “You are quite bald, and bear every sign of old age.”

I left Nijni on the wrong steamer--that is to say, by a line I did not mean to patronise because I knew it was the worst. There was no help for it, because my passport was not ready in time. I took a first-class cabin on a big steamer full of children with their nurses and parents. The children ran about the cabin all day long without stopping. Children, I notice, are the same all over the world; they play the same games: they make the same noise. In this case there were five sisters and a small brother. What reminded me much of all children in general and of my own experience as a child in particular was that the boy suddenly began to howl because his sisters wouldn’t let him play with them; and he cried out, “I want to play too,” and the sisters, when the matter was finally brought before an arbitration court of parents, who were playing cards, said that the boy made all games impossible. Also there were three nurses in the cabin, who, whatever the children did, told them not to do it, and every now and then one heard familiar phrases such as “Don’t sit on the oilcloth with your bare legs,” “Don’t lean out of the window with that cold of yours.” The passengers on the boat were uninteresting.

There was a couple who spoke bad French to each other out of refinement, but who relapsed into Russian when they had really something interesting to say. There was a student who played the pianoforte with astonishing facility and amazing execution; there were the elder sisters of the small children, who also played the pianoforte in exactly the same way as young people play it in England--that is to say, with convulsive jerks over the difficult passages and uninterrupted insistence on the loud pedal and a foolish bass. The grown-up members of the party played “Vindt” all day.

When we arrived at Kazan I got out to look at the town. It also possesses a Kremlin with white walls and crenelated towers and old churches, a museum which contains the most uninteresting and heterogeneous collection of objects imaginable, and a large monastery. It is the most stagnant-looking city I have ever seen.

The Volga beyond Nijni is considerably broader. It is never less than 1200 yards in breadth, and from Nijni onwards, on the right bank of the river, there is a range of lofty hills, mostly wooded, but sometimes rocky and grassy, which go sheer down into the river. The left bank is flat, and consists of green meadows. Below Kazan it is joined by the river Kama, and becomes a mighty river, never less than three-quarters of a mile in breadth. These facts could be derived quite easily and more abundantly from a handbook of geography. “What does the Volga look like?” is the question, I suppose, people wish to have answered. My answer to that is that in various parts of its course the Volga reminds me of almost every river I have ever seen, from the Dart to the Liao-he and from the Neckar to the Nile. Below Kazan its aspect is gloomy and sombre, a great stretch of broad brown waters, a wooded mountainous bank on one side, a monotonous plain on the other. But if the weather is fine--and it was gloriously fine after we reached Kazan--the effects of light on the great expanse of water are miraculous. It is at dawn that one sees the magic of these waters; at dawn and at sunset that the great broad expanse, turning to gold or to silver according as the sky is crimson, mauve, or rosy and grey, has a mystery and majesty of its own. We met other steamers on the way, but during the whole voyage from Nijni to Astrakan we only passed two small sailing boats.

I got out at Samara, and spent the night at a hotel. The next day I embarked again for Astrakan, after having explored the town, in which I failed to find an object of interest. From Samara to Saratov the hills on the right bank of the river diminish in size, and instead of descending sheer into the river they slope away from it, and as the hills diminish the vegetation grows more scanty. The left bank is flat and monotonous as before. From Samara to Saratov I travelled third class, to see what it was like on board the steamer. There are on the steamer four official classes and an unofficial fifth class. The third class have a general cabin on the lower deck with two tiers of bunks. The fourth class have a kind of enclosure, which contains one large broad board on which they encamp. The fourth class contains the “steerage” passengers. It is indescribably dirty. The fifth class is composed of still dirtier and still poorer people, who lie about on boxes, bales, or on whatever vacant space they can find on the lower deck. They lie for the most part like corpses, in a profound slumber, generally face downwards, flat upon the floor. The third class is respectable and decently clean; it has, moreover, one immense advantage--some permanently open windows. In the first class there was among the company a great aversion to draughts. They had not what some one once called “La passion des Anglais pour les courants d’air.” In the third class there was no such prejudice. The passengers were various. There were two students, some merchants, twenty Cossacks going home on leave, a policeman, a public servant, several peasants, and a priest.

On the bunk just over mine sprawled a large bearded Cossack, who at once asked me where I was going, my occupation, my country, and my name. I answered more or less in the words of the song that

“My name it is Jack Rover, From over the hills I come; I get my living on the ups and downs;”

in fact, that I was a newspaper correspondent and an Englishman. I then lay down on my bunk. Another Cossack from the other side of the cabin called out at the top of his voice to the man who was over me: “Who is that man?” “He is a foreigner.” “Is he travelling with goods?” “No, he is just travelling, nothing more.” “Where does he come from?” “I don’t know.” Then, looking down at me from his bunk, the Cossack who was above me said, “Thou art quite bald, little father. Is it illness that did it or nature?” “Nature,” I answered. “Should’st try an ointment,” he said. “I have tried many and strong ointments,” I said, “including onion, tar and paraffin, none of which were of any avail. There is nothing to be done.” “No,” said the Cossack, with a sigh. “There is nothing to be done. It is God’s business.”

There is no particular discomfort in travelling third class on the steamer. The bunks are, with the aid of blankets, as comfortable as those in the first class. One can obtain the same food, and there is plenty of fresh air. Nevertheless, if one only travels thus for a day and a night it is indescribably fatiguing, because one has to change and readjust one’s hours. For at the first streak of dawn the people begin to talk, and by sunrise they have washed and are having tea. It is not as if they went to bed earlier. For all day long they talk and they go to sleep quite late, about eleven. But they have the blessed gift possessed by Napoleon and Sarah Bernhardt of snatching half-hours or five minutes of sleep whenever they feel in need of it. If one travels like this for several days running, one gets used to it, of course, and one also acquires the habit of snatching sleep at odd moments during the daytime, but if one travels like this for a day or two the result is, as I have said before, extreme bodily fatigue.

The public servant, who had a small post in some provincial town, came and talked to me. He asked me if Shaliapin, the famous singer, had sung at Nijni. Shaliapin, he added, was his master. “I have,” he said, “a magnificent bass voice.” “Are you fond of music?” I asked. “Fond of music!” he cried. “When I hear music I am like a wild animal. I go mad.” “Do you mean to go on the stage?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “when I have learnt enough. In the meantime I am a public servant--I am in the Government service.” “That, I suppose, you find tedious,” I said. “It is more than tedious, it is disgusting,” and he began to abuse the Government. I said there was a great difference between the Russia of to-day and the Russia of four years ago. “There is no difference at all,” he said; “we have obtained absolutely nothing except paper promises.” I said: “I am not talking of what the Government has done or failed to do; I am talking of the general aspect of things, of Russian life as it strikes a foreigner. I was here three or four years ago, and I am struck by the great difference between then and now. Had I met you then you would not have talked politics with me; there were no politics to talk.” “That is true,” he answered, “we have now a political life.”

Here one of the Cossacks asked him who he was. “I am a famous singer,” he answered. “I have sung at the Merchants’ Club at the district town of A----. I am a pupil of Shaliapin, who is the king of basses and is well known throughout the whole civilised world, and who has sung in America. He is a Russian. Think of that.” The Cossack seemed impressed. The singer got out at one of the stations; perhaps one day he will be as well known as Shaliapin; perhaps, on the other hand, he has merely been called and will not be chosen.

The people in the cabin had their meals at different times of the day, the chief meal consisting of tea, which took place twice a day. Every time we stopped at a place a flood of beggars invaded our cabin asking for alms. The interesting point is that they received them. They were never sent empty away, and were invariably given either some coppers, some bread, or some melon. I am sure there is no country in the world where people give so readily to the poor as in Russia. One has only to walk about the streets in any Russian town to notice this fact. Here in the third-class saloon it especially struck me. I did not see one single beggar turned away without a gift of some kind. One little boy was given a piece of bread and a large slice of water-melon.

At the many small stations at which we called on the banks of the river there were crowds of itinerant vendors who sold various descriptions of food--hot pies, fried fish, gigantic water-melons, apples, red currants, and cucumbers. The whole duration of each stop at any of these places was occupied by the unloading and loading of the steamer with goods. This is done by a horde of creatures in red and blue shirts called loaders, who have a kind of ledge strapped on to their backs which enables them to support enormous loads. Like big gnomes, during the whole of the stop, they are seen scurrying from the hold of the steamer to the wooden quay and back again to the steamer. On the quay itself, either placidly looking on and munching sunflower seeds or else wildly gesticulating over a bargain at a booth, a motley herd of passengers and inhabitants of the place is swarming: many-coloured, bright, ragged, and squalid, like the crowds depicted in a sacred picture waiting for a miracle or a parable under the burning sky of Palestine.

Samara and Saratov have not the features which characterise the towns of the Upper Volga. They have no Kremlin, no remains of a fortress dominating the town and enclosed in old walls. Saratov is a collection of wooden houses which look as if they had been made by a Swiss artisan for the Earl’s Court Exhibition and exposed on the side of a steep hill.

Between Saratov and Tzaritsin the character of the river changes altogether, the vegetation begins to dwindle, the great hills on the right bank of the river diminish, and the farther one travels south the lower they become. The left bank is flat, monotonous, and green as before. The river itself broadens, and in some places it is several kilometres wide. You get the impression that you are travelling on a large lake or on a sea rather than on a river. The farther south one travels the greater is the beauty of the river. It is a solemn, majestic river; one understands its having been the mother and inspirer of a quantity of poetry, of folk-song and folk-lore; and one understands, too, how appropriate the deep octaves, the broad slow-dying notes and echoes of the Volga songs are to these great melancholy spaces of shining water. Every day on the steamer between Saratov and Astrakan I awoke at dawn and went out on to the deck to sniff the freshness and to watch the process of daybreak. The soft, grey sky trembled into a delicate tint of lilac, and over the far-off banks of the river, which were distant enough to have the appearance of a range of violet hills, came the first blush of dawn, and then a deeper rose, while the whole upper sky was washed with a clean daffodil colour, which was reflected in silver on the blue water. And then the sun rose--a huge red ball of fire, casting golden scales beneath him on to the water.

Towards noon, perhaps, the sky will be piled with white clouds, and the river looks like an immense hard glass, reflecting in unruffled detail every curve and shadow of the cloudland, and the small motionless trees of the banks which in the sunless heat are as unreal as a mirage. Later in the afternoon the water seems to grow more and more luminous; the sensation of some kind of enchantment, of something wizard-like and unreal increases, and one would not be surprised to catch sight of the walls of Tristram’s Castle in the air, the wizard walls to which he promised to bring Iseult--the castle built of the stuff of which rainbows are made, of fire, dew, and the colours of the morning. But with the sunset this feeling of unreality and enchantment ceases and gives way; the nearer bank stands out in sharp outline, intensely real between purple skies and grey waters, and over the farther bank hangs the intense blue of woody distances. Between Tzaritsin and Astrakan the character of the river changes yet again. The hills on the right bank vanish altogether; both the banks are flat now--unlimited steppes possessing scant vegetation and culminating in steep banks of yellow sand. It was here that the river reminded me of the Nile.

Tzaritsin itself is a great trade centre; the best caviare and the best water-melons are to be obtained here. Most of the third-class passengers got out at Tzaritsin. I was amused by the process, which I watched on shore, of a huge block of stone being hauled up a hill by a gang of workmen. The spectacle was so utterly unlike anything one sees in other countries. Pieces of rock are also hauled up hills in other lands, but the manner in which it is done is entirely different. Seven men were hauling the rope; they were ragged, dirty, and dressed in red and blue shirts, stained and dusty, while their tufts of yellow hair stuck out of their tattered peaked caps. By the block of stone stood the leader of the gang. Then suddenly, when he thought the time had come, he intoned a chant, a solo, about fifteen notes, which might have been written in the Scotch scale (the scale of G major without the F sharp), plaintive and unexpected; then he beat time with a wave of his left hand, and at the fourth beat the whole gang chimed in, continuing the melody in parts and hauling as they sang, and then abruptly ending on the dominant. Then after a short pause the leader again intoned his solo and the chorus again made harmonies to the plaintive melody, and this was repeated till the block of stone was hauled up the hill.

What I should like to know is when people of a country leave off singing natural folk-song tunes like “Ca’ the Yowes,” for instance, and when they begin to substitute for them the répertoire of the music-hall, How much education and progress is necessary to effect the change? I wonder whether in a hundred years’ time Russian song will have disappeared as it exists now, and whether its place will be taken by the music-hall refrains of London. This is not meant to be said in dispraise of music-halls. I appreciate and immensely enjoy music-hall tunes, especially the tunes of the stately music-halls of England. I think the English people have a genius, which other countries try in vain to imitate, for creating catching, rhythmical tune mixed with broad and sometimes inspired farce, and their achievements in this province have certainly added to the gaiety of nations, but I am for rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. The music-hall tune is a thing of the town, and songs like the “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond,” “Come o’er the Sea, Charlie,” “Ca’ the Yowes,” “Dans le jardin de mon père,” and the songs of the Volga are things of the country, and I think it is melancholy that the latter should disappear and that their place should be usurped entirely by the town-mouse and his music. But perhaps this does not happen.

The climate, when Tzaritsin is passed, grows hotter and hotter, and the breeze made by the steamer only increases the heat. The moon rises and for a while the sky is still tinged with the stain of the sunset in the west, and the water is luminous with a living whiteness. Then, rapidly, because the twilight does not last long here, comes the darkness and with it something strange and wonderful. One is aware of an extraordinary fragrance in the air. It is not merely the sweetness of summer night. It is a pungent and aromatic incense which pervades the whole atmosphere; warm and delicious and filled with the whole essence of summer. It is intoxicating and comes over one like a great wave, a breath of Elysium; a message, as it were, from the great white fields. And the night with its web of stars, and the dark waters, and the thin line of the far-off banks, make one once more lose all sense of reality. One has reached another world, the nether-world perhaps; one breathes “The scent of alien meadows far away,” and one feels as if one were sailing down the river of oblivion to the harbours of Proserpine. And this wonderful sweetness comes, I ascertained, from the new-mown hay, the mowing of which takes place late here. The hay lies in great masses over the steppes, embalming the midnight air and turning the world into paradise.

In reaching Astrakan one is plunged into the atmosphere of the East. On the quays there is an infinite quantity of booths containing every kind of fruit and a coloured herd of people living in the dust and the dirt; splendidly squalid, noisy as parrots, and busy doing nothing, like wasps. The railway to Astrakan is not yet finished, so one is obliged to return to Tzaritsin by steamer if one wishes to get back to the centre of Russia. I pursued this course; and from Tzaritsin took the train for Tambov. The train started from Tzaritsin at two o’clock in the morning; I arrived at the station at midnight, and at this hour the station was crammed with people. Imagine a huge high waiting-room with three tables d’hôte parallel to each other in the centre of it; at one end of the hall a buffet; on the sides of it under the windows are tables and long seats padded with leather, partitioned off and forming open cubicles. These seats are always occupied, and the occupants go to bed on them, wrapped up in blankets, and propped up by pillows, bags, rugs, baskets, kettles, and other impedimenta. The whole of this refreshment hall is filled with sleeping figures. There are people lying asleep on the window sills and others on chairs placed together. Some merely lay their heads on the table d’hôte, and fall into a profound slumber. It is like the scene in “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” when sleep overtook the inhabitants of the castle. There are a bookstall and a newspaper kiosk. The bookstall contains--as usual--the works of Jerome K. Jerome and Conan Doyle, some translations of French novels, some political pamphlets, a translation of John Morley’s _Compromise_, and an essay on Ruskin--a strange medley of literary food. At the newspaper kiosk the newsvendor is so busily engrossed in reading out a story which had just appeared in the newspapers of how a saintly peasant killed a baby because he thought it was the Antichrist, that it is impossible to get him to pay any attention to one. He is reading out the story to an audience consisting of the policeman, one of the porters, and a kind of sub-guard. The story is, indeed, a curious one, and has caused a considerable stir; and I intend to relate it at a future date.[2]

[2] See page 214.

The journey to Tambov was long; in my carriage was a railway official who drank tea, ate apples, and sighed over the political condition of the country. Everything was as bad as could be. “It is a heavy business,” he said, “living in Russia now.” Then, after some reflection, he added: “But, perhaps in other countries, in England for instance, people sometimes find fault with the Government.” I told him they did little else. He then took a large roll out of a basket, and, after he had been munching it for some time, he said: “After all there is no country in the world where such good bread can be got as this.” And this seemed to console him greatly.