CHAPTER XXVI.

FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO MOSCOW.

MY roughest railroad ride in Europe was from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It did not improve the road to be told, as I was, that it was built by American engineers; but it did jolt me so naturally that I felt at home as soon as we were under way. And there was a slight infusion of a familiar morality in the excuse made for the present condition of the road, that the managers of it under the government were seeking to buy it, and were letting it run down that they might get it at a lower figure!

A great throng of friends were at the station to take leave of the passengers about to set off for Moscow. It is a ride of about twenty hours; hardly a journey to call for as much leave-taking as with us demands a voyage over sea. The journey of four hundred miles includes the whole night and part of two days, and only one train a day, with no good place to stop for the night, so that we are literally shut up to the necessity of going through at once. The arrangements for sleeping are of the rudest kind. Into the cars the passengers brought pillows and blankets, preparing to make themselves as comfortable as circumstances would permit. The fare through was $15, and my little trunk of less than fifty pounds weight was $1.50 extra. As soon as we were off, a man decorated with three medals entered with an armful of newspapers for sale, and as many bought them and read them as in a car going out of New York or Boston. It was a good sign. Small thanks are due to the government from the press, however. It is subjected to the strictest censorship. No foreign papers are allowed to come into the country, unless they are _subscribed for_ by permission, and _then_ they are interdicted if any thing dangerous to the existing order of things is in them. Nothing unfriendly to good morals is allowed to be printed, and an excellent regulation requires the examination and approval of all plays before they can be put upon the stage. These barbarians of the north will not have the luxury of the “dirty drama” which is so fascinating to the highly cultivated Parisians and New Yorkers.

A lady and gentleman entered the car as we were just starting, and could not get a double seat; it was a long car like our own, with seats on each side of the passage. They could find separate seats, but they were to ride all night, and of course desired to sit side by side. They sought to make exchanges, but in vain. Seeing their distress, my son and I agreed to separate and surrender our places to them. Their gratitude was equal to their surprise. “We were French, they were sure.” Not at all. “Ah no, we were English.” By no means. “And pray, would we tell them of what nation?” AMERICANS: and they were nearly overcome with pleasure, and poured out their grateful acknowledgments.

At Lubanskaia we stopped to dine, and you will be more amused by reading the names of some of the places we touched in passing, than by the names of the dishes we had for dinner. Thus we passed through Kolpinskaia, Sablinskaia, Ouschkinskaia, Babinskaia, Tehondoskaia, Volkhooskaia, Guadskaia, Mainvisheskaia, Bourgurnskaia, Borooenskaia, Okouloviskaia, Zarebchenkeskaia, Kaloschkooskaia, Ostaschkooskaia, Reschchilkooskaia, Paadsulnelchookaia; but I am getting a headache in copying them out of the time-table, and will spare you. Wales is nothing to Russia for hard names.

The station-houses are well built, and refreshment rooms well supplied; so that you get comfortable meals on the route.

At Tver we crossed the Volga, and here we had the first sight of that famous river. It is at this point downward navigable for steamers, and we might step on board of one and steam away two thousand miles to Astrachan! Tver is a place of remarkable historical interest, which lingers around the cathedral and the monastery in which a bishop was murdered by order of John the Terrible, though his death was reported as occasioned by the fumes of a stove.

As night drew on we learned that one car in the long train was fitted up for sleeping, and we were glad to pay a couple of roubles apiece for the chance of a horizontal nap. Toward midnight the process of reconstruction commenced. The long car is divided into four compartments, each eight feet square; across each side is swung a shelf, the seats below are converted into berths, and two more are made _up_ on the floor; a pillow of homœopathic proportions is assigned to each passenger, and unless a man is afraid it will get into his ear he takes it. By a ladder of seven steps I ascended to the topmost perch, and there sought to rest. Alas! the search was vain. My refuge in sleeplessness is to old-time hymns, and Watts often composes me to slumber as his cradle lullaby did when the best of mothers sang it in my infancy. But now the only lines that haunted me were these, and perfectly descriptive of my present experience,—

“So when a raging fever burns, We shift from side to side by turns; And ’tis a poor relief we gain, To change the place and keep the pain.”

For half a dozen Russians sat together in this little chamber; all smoking, all laughing, all talking, and in that jargon of a language worse to hear than any other that ever crashed upon my auricular nerves. There was no railroad law to be invoked to stop them. We were two, they were six. They wanted to smoke and talk all night; we were invalids, fighting for a wink of sleep. As the night wore on, they grew more earnest. At frequent stops by the way they rushed out and returned fortified with strong drink; the smoke, the breaths, the smells, the talk became intolerable. I put my woe-begone visage over the edge of the shelf, and arresting their attention by a groan, asked if any of them spoke the French language? A military officer in uniform rose and said he did. Then in tearful accents I said, “You behold two American travellers who have paid for these luxurious couches to get a little rest in their weary travels. If you gentlemen are to keep up this discourse, sleep is as impossible as if we were under the tortures of the Inquisition; is it too much to hope that you will soon suffer this discourse of yours to come to an end for the night, to be renewed at some future day.” Before my speech was finished he had begun to laugh, and assuring me of his regret that we had been disturbed, he represented to his friends the wishes of two _Amerikaners_, and they soon turned in.

In the morning, looking down from the shelf, I counted thirty-two stumps of cigars lying on the floor, in one quarter, and at least a hundred must have been consumed in that one compartment.

At half-past seven we stopped for coffee. A forlorn-looking set of men and women crept out for fresh air and refreshment. They had been badly stayed with, all of them. But the longest night has its morning, and so had this. The coffee was good; we paid five times as much for it as it was worth, even there, but we were comforted with the beverage. At one end of the car was a wash-bowl and water, and over it a notice: “Towel, 5 copakes; soap, 15 copakes,”—so for about 20 cents you could have the use of everybody’s towel and soap!

The face of the country improves as we get on. More trees, more hills, more culture, and signs of thrift on every hand.

Into the car came a venerable ecclesiastic of the Greek type. A heavy gold cross was suspended from his neck and hung on his broad breast; and his gray hair rested in curls on his shoulders. The scarlet and gold on his robes attracted the eye of the stranger, but he seemed to challenge no special attention from the people with whom he came in contact. We called him the Patriarch Nicon at once, for he came in upon us as at Krukova, which is the station where we would stop, if we had time to make a visit at the Monastery of New Jerusalem, or Voskresenski, which, being interpreted, meaneth Resurrection. This monastery was founded in 1657 by the Patriarch Nicon, whose story is told by Dean Stanley in his lectures on the Greek Church, and condensed into the travel books in the hands of wanderers in these wilds.

At this village of the Resurrection, Nicon, a patriarch of the Greek Church, was wont to stop in his journeys through the country, and in 1655 he built a church here, and the Czar of all the Russias did him the honor to come to its consecration and name it the New Jerusalem. Nicon obtained a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at old Jerusalem, and he made one like it here. He found hills and vales and brooks like those in the Holy Land, and gave them names to correspond, which they bear to this day, though two hundred years have since gone by. The river Istra became Jordan, and he made a little one for Kedron, and called a village at a distance Nazareth, and one nearer by was Bethany; and with these sacred associations he gathered around him the odor of sanctity, and with it came dreams of power and glory, such as priests are apt to have when they leave the service of God and substitute their own imaginings for the teachings of his word. The Czar saw what he was at, and soon let him down from his Jerusalem. The Patriarch began to claim civil as well as sacerdotal power. Just as the Bishop of Rome became a king as well as priest, so Nicon would sway a sceptre as well as a shepherd’s crook. He put stringent laws upon his inferior clergy, and they became restive under his authority. He rode into town on an ass in profane imitation of Christ, and the people could not see the sense of being compelled to cast their garments in the way of him who was so unlike the meek and lowly Jesus whom they would have loved to honor. His tyranny drove them to revolt, and many sects sprang up which even now continue to maintain their existence in the empire and in a certain hostility to the regular Greek Church of the empire. Nicon grew more and more despotic, as his enemies grew formidable in numbers and power. He seized in the houses of the nobles, wherever he could find them, all pictures not painted in the style that pleased his royal will. In all his dealings with them he claimed the authority of the sovereign. He was fast becoming the pope of the north. At last the Emperor, no longer willing to acknowledge the lordly assumptions of this proud subject, refused to honor his festivals with the royal presence, or to recognize the Patriarch as spiritual father. Nicon was enraged at this slight, and thinking to humble the Czar, threw off his robes of office, resigned his crozier, and retired to his monastery at Resurrection. The sepulchre would have been a more fitting place for retirement. Hither he supposed the Czar would hasten, and with apologies, penitence, and tears beseech him to return and resume his reign. He reckoned without his host. The Czar could make and unmake such ecclesiastics, and he put another man in his place, and left poor Nicon to chew the cud of regret in his ignominious solitude. He stood it six years, and then sent word to the Czar that, after long fasting and prayer, he had been honored with a vision of the prophet Jonah, in a dream, who had told him it was his duty to resume his seat on the patriarchal throne of Moscow. But the Czar could not see it. Jonah said nothing to him about it, and he had an idea that unhappy Nicon might, indeed, have had a great many dreams of the same kind, but that Jonah was not the man to make patriarchs for him. He called a council of Eastern patriarchs, presided in the midst of it himself, and this council came very naturally to the decision that Nicon should be degraded and banished to a monastery in Novgorod. The next Czar who came to the throne pardoned Nicon, who soon after died.

Such was the sad career of a great genius, whose brief reign was signalized by the aggrandizement of the Russian Church, for he magnified five patriarchates,—Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Moscow. And now his remains are lying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he built, in the chapel of Melchisedek, at the foot of the Golgotha, and over his tomb hang the heavy chains which, to mortify his body, he wore around his person, while he put heavier chains on the souls of those whom he reduced beneath his ghostly power.

I think there is a lesson in the life and death of such a man, and that we may read in it the workings of human ambition and pride, even under the garments of holy offices; we see the conflict between church and state, whenever they are allied, and the doom that awaits the men who pervert the institutions of religion to their own glory and the oppression of others.

We are now approaching Moscow. Two thousand miles by rail we have come. The whole region over which we are now passing seems to be one dead level of lowly toiling, dreary living, without one sign of such enterprising life and energy as we would find in France or England, not to speak of that young world in the West, to which freedom seems to have taken her flight.

The train is moving slowly into town. We have come to Moscow. We are at the gates of the Kremlin!