Part 11

At all times of the day the samovar is left simmering, ready for any one of the multitudinous household to brew tea, and constantly replenished _zakuska_ dishes deck the sideboard. Guests, attendants, children, and friends come and go in the utmost freedom. Such is the _Hazan’s_ life.

In another part of the building there stuffs to repletion an army of dependents. Servants, artisans, drivers from the caravans which pass up from China by the road below the house, a whole other below-stairs world is here. Twenty caravan teamsters, _karetniki_ or _isvoschniki_ of the sledges and carts that fill the ample courtyard, huddle in the back rooms for tea. An old bespectacled maker of string-net doilies, who reads Alexander Pushkin’s poems, is working out a week’s board in the room where the chickens are kept. The housewife does not disdain, either, to find a place for the traveling _sapojnik_, who will put leather reinforcements on the felt boots which have been worn through at the heel. It is a large easy way of living, this of the man who holds a leading place in the border city.

A mixture of crudeness and culture, of luxury and hardship, of Orient and Occident, runs through the quaint fabric of frontier society, with its medley of races and types. Fine avenues flanked by stuccoed houses pierce the main city. Back of them lie the log houses of the plainer citizens, while the outskirts are occupied by the felt huts of the Buriats and Mongols. Students in uniform elbow Cossacks of the Guard, and maidens from the seminary brush the Mongol wood-choppers.

“Téatre?” suggests one evening the twenty-year-old son of your host. Of course the invitation is accepted. At eight o’clock you put on your felt boots, and tramp down past dark-shuttered log houses and the silent white church into the field, where stands a barn-like building placarded with the programme. The young guide secures seats at the ticket-counter of rough lumber. Seventy-five kopecks they are, each. With them are handed out eight numbered slips of red paper. Then together you break a way to the front rows, through the crowd of burly Cossacks of the garrison, bearskin-capped students, citizens with shiny black boots, and here and there a husky stolid-faced Buriat. Keeping hat and coat on, as does every one else, we find seats on the rough benches wheresoever we like or can; for nothing is reserved save the elevated perch of the musicians, where a four-piece orchestra drones out a monotonous Russian march. What a fire-trap! is the first thought. To each of the posts that sustain the rafters is fastened a lamp shedding an uncertain light on the hangings of bright-red cotton cloth, in dangerous proximity to which, utterly disregarding the “no smoking” signs, stand the crowd of forty-kopeck admissions, rolling and smoking perpetual _papirosi_.

As the impatient audience begins to pound and stamp, a bell rings, and the curtain rises on two comic characters busily engaged in packing for a hurried departure from their lodging. The stage has become a room, with red-cotton-covered walls and bright green curtains. A merchant comes with a bill for comestibles six months due. He is quieted with extravagant tales of forthcoming change for a hundred-thousand-rouble note. The landlady enters, and the shoemaker’s apprentice with a pair of mended boots. Both are likewise cajoled and bullied away. The Jewish money-lender is more difficult, but at length, to the manifest delight of the audience, he, too, is staved off, and the pair draw the vivid green curtains and go out through a window for parts unknown, amid much glee and applause.

We now go out to the “buffet” and contribute to the dangers of conflagration by smoking an offered cigarette. We also add to the theatre’s income by buying a glass of hot _chai_ for ten kopecks. Something special is in the air for the next act. The audience is buzzing and moving in eager expectancy. We return to our seats. The curtain rises upon a double row of two-_pud_ (sixty-four-pound) weights, such as are used at the bazaar to sell frozen beef. Amid a thunder of stampings on the plank floor one of the escaping debtors of the last act, dressed in tights, comes out from behind the green curtains, and lifts one of these above his head. Then he poises one with each hand. Finally a wooden harness is adjusted to his body, and sixteen weights (or about half a ton), are heaped upon him by the jack-booted Buriat stage-attendant on one side, and the defrauded merchant of the first play on the other. It is the most unspectacular performance possible, this athletic test, but it takes the place of a football match in Siberia. The applause is ferociously appreciative.

More _chai_ and cigarettes, and we come back to hear a very pretty girl, dressed in the peasant’s costume of Little Russia, head a chorus, and to see a boy in red blouse and boots dance the wild dervish whirl which the peasants of tradition are supposed to execute. The boy is in the midst of his performance when there is a tumult among the forty-kopeckers under the musicians’ eyrie. The latter, being human, try to watch what is going on below and play jig-music at the same time, and sharps and flats fly wide of the mark till the sounds become frightful. Everybody jumps up on his bench to see a peasant having a turn with a Buriat, and further trouble brewing with a Cossack who has got upset in the mêlée. There is a chaos of tossing hats and brandished fists, and the two armed soldiers who are on guard as policemen press in, with gruff shouts to make them way. The tumult finally goes out the door and into the street, and we turn back to the poor dancer still trying to beat out his stunt.

The curtain rises next on the manager, who has been up to date weight-lifter, escaping boarder, and part of the peasants’ chorus. He is seated at a table, looking very ordinary in his street clothes. Behind him is another table covered with an assortment of crockery, mirrors, spoons, vases, pieces of cotton cloth, and a big striking clock. He calls for a volunteer from the audience for some unknown purpose, and a little rosy-cheeked uniformed Buriat schoolboy, who has been peeking behind flapping curtain between the acts, responds. The boy reaches into a box and pulls out a slip of paper. The manager reads a number from it, “_Sto piatdeciet sem_.” An eager voice from the rear answers “_Jes!_” The stage-attendant takes a glass tumbler from the table and carries it solemnly to the man who has answered. Your host nudges until you comprehend that you are to excavate the eight theatre-slips, which you do, to find that two only are seat-tickets. The rest are numbered billets, and you are liable at any moment to receive a perfumery-bottle or a candlestick from the lottery which is in progress. The scene now takes on an imminent personal interest shared with the banked forty-kopeckers behind. A breathless strain accompanies the drawing of the numbers. It mounts to a climax as the big musical clock is approached. The fateful billet is at last drawn in intense silence. Every eye is fixed on the reader. Not a Cossack speaks, not a Mongol moves.

“_Dvesti tri!_” and a sharp “_Moi!_” tells that the clock goes to ornament the table of a burly peasant, who grinningly receives it. The tense breaths are let out, the forms relax, and the crowd straggles to the door, lighting cigarettes and pulling down caps. The drama is over. Next morning at eight a soldier visits your host with a message from his chief.

“Bring to the police-station the passport of the stranger seen with you at the theatre last night.”

A town droshky will take one the few versts to Kiahta, where in the Geographical Society’s museum is the celebrated sketch of the Dalai Lama made at Urga by a Russian artist, when the young Tibetan monk had fled before the English expedition to Lhassa. Here, too, are ore samples and reconstructed Mongolian tents. But it is hard to look at fossil rhinoceros-heads and at stuffed sabre-toothed tigers and musk-deer when the camel-trains are passing and China is a verst away. A courier is necessary now, for resourceful Jacov and driver Ivan are strangers beyond the border. Perhaps our host knows of a man acquainted in Mongolia? He will inquire. Next day there presents himself a slight, bearded, intellectual man, Alexander Simeonovich Koratkov, usually called, for short, “Alexsimevich.” Bachelor of forty, educated in the Troitzkosavsk “Realistic” school. He speaks, as well as Russian, Mongolian, English, French, German, and some Chinese. He has translated for the English engineers who were brought in to work the Nerchinsk mines. He is deeply read in Buddhist mythology and sociology. Will he go down into Mongolia with you? Yes; and so it is arranged.

Provisions are cheap and abundant in the Siberian towns. Sixty kopecks buy a pound of caravan tea, seventeen kopecks a pound of sugar, the sort that comes in a cone like a Kalmuck hat. It is a luxury by warrant of public opinion, so much that it has, of note, been served on baked potatoes. Before the Buddha pictures of the Buriats, a few lumps may be the choicest offering. Flour costs six kopecks a pound. Beef, if a great pud-weight forequarter is bought at the market, twenty kopecks. Frozen butter will cost twenty-five kopecks per pound. Eggs, of the Siberian cold-storage variety, forty-eight kopecks a dozen. For thirty kopecks one gets a piece of milk as big as one’s head. But do not try to go beyond the native produce, for canned goods, coffee, or sardines. It is bankruptcy speedier than buying bear-holes. A big magazine will sell pâté de foie gras, imported from France, at two roubles the tin; while beneath the Chinese caravansaries’ arcade, bales of tea will be sold at a few kopecks a pound. One gets cigars in a glass-covered box, with the government stamp, for a rouble and a half, and they will be worth about as much as the strings of twisted tobacco-rope which the Mongols carry off as their single cherished luxury.

And now for transportation. The sledge can serve no more, for the snow goes bare in places along the caravan trail. We must have a tarantass, and in time one is produced for inspection. A cask sawed in half, lengthwise, is the image of its body, a lumber-cart the model of its clumsy wheels and framework. To the tarantass is hitched the trotter, with his big bow yoke to bring the weight of collar and shafts on his back rather than against his neck. At each side of him, with much such a rig as is used to tow canal-boats, are made fast the two galloping horses.

When one goes beyond the post-route with his own equipage he has, fastened under the driver’s seat and behind his own, bags of oats and hay, which must serve as emergency-rations for the horses against the days in which none can be secured along the often deserted trail. Personal provender must be likewise stored away, bags of bread, frozen dumplings to make soup with, tea, sugar, milk-chocolate, milk, candles, cheese, matches, kettles, and whatever else one can think of, or that the ingenuity of Alexsimevich can devise. Hay is piled into the tarantass bottom to supply the want of springs.

A driver who knows the trails has been found, André Banchelski, a tall Siberian, of timbering and hunting antecedents, who has a small stock of Mongol idioms regarding the price of hay and the location of water. He has reached a very good understanding with Katrinka, one of the household dependents, and Nicolai is taking an interest in him.

To-night we go to sleep on Nicolai’s plank couch, ready for the march of the next day. All is ready. To-morrow we cross the Chinese frontier.

V

IN TATAR TENTS

The shaggy ponies, white with the frost of the morning, stand harnessed to the tarantass; André in his belted sheepskin _shuba_, whip in hand, is perched on the bag of oats; Alexsimevich sits in a greatcoat of deerskin, with only a nose and a triangle of black beard visible. The host, in his gray surtout, and the red-bloused drivers of the sledges scattered in the courtyard, all have left their samovars to see the start. The children of the family peep from behind the mother with her gray shawl-covered head. They group at one side, under the eaves of the doorway, while Josef, one of the household servants, swings back the ponderous gates. The reins are drawn in, the whip is lifted, the horses are leaning forward into their collars, when the cry of “André!” comes through the opening doorway.

From behind the gathered onlookers, who turn at the sound, runs out Katrinka, dressed in her best red frock. “André!” she cries. He pulls back the starting horses, and Katrinka lifts up to him a little bag embroidered with his initials in blue and red. “For your tobacco.”

He looks down into her eyes and smiles. “_Spasiba_ _loubesnaia_,” he says, and pushes it into the breast of his shuba.

“_De svidania_, André!” she whispers, then runs back, confused.

The teamsters laugh, pleased and amused as big children at her blushes, and her brother shouts a commentary from the gateway. “_Vperiod! vperiod!_” says the interpreter. He has reached forty now without falling before the charms of any Siberian girl, and he does not sympathize. “On! on!”

The horses swing out of the great gateway into the snowy streets, with “Good-bye! Good road!” called in chorus after us.

At a slow trot the lumbering carriage rolls through the quiet town, misty in the cold of the morning. The row of shuttered shops, with their crude pictures of the wares within, are opening for the day. The little park with the benches, which are trysting-places of summer evenings, cushioned now with six inches of snow, and the low log houses beyond, loom up and retire rearward, as we pass. The white church and the fenced cemetery of Troitzkosavsk are left behind, and we are on the broad paved road by which a sharp trot of half an hour brings us to Kiahta.

Its scattered houses now in turn begin. The big tea-compound, of four square white walls, flanks us and is gone. The officials’ residences and the barracks of the garrison appear and vanish behind. The street opens out into a big square, where, shimmering against the white ground, stands the great church of _Voskresenie_, the Resurrection. On its green dome, lifted high in appeal and in promise, gleams the gilded cross. In white and green and gold Russia raises inspiringly the symbols of Slavonic faith before the doors of the heathen empire. As we pass the white Russian church, the litany of the popes and the answering chant of the choir come faintly wafted from within. But even as the Christians sing, the clash of distant cymbals and the roll of a far-off prayer-drum meet and mingle with the echoes. On the hill across the border, in vivid scarlet against the snow, with painted walls, sacred dragon-eaves, and flapping bannerets, flames a Chinese temple.

Here now is the borderland of empires. The neutral strip is in front, a hundred _sagenes_ broad. The Cossack sentries stand at ease before their striped boxes, which face toward Mongolia. Far to the east and far to the west are seen stretching the long lines of posts marking the boundary. The outmost sentry, as the tarantass rolls across the strip, hails you with a last “_De svidania!_” (God speed!)

Past the Chinese boundary-post, covered with hieroglyphic placards and shaped like the lotus-bud, we drive, and in under the painted gateway of the gray-plastered wall. No Männlicher-armed Chinese regulars, like those that in Manchuria throng to hold what is lost, guard this half-forgotten road. No sentry watches; no custom-officer bids the strangers stop. Through the open gate we ride into the narrow street of the trading city of the frontier--Maimachen, the unguarded back door to China.

In life one is granted some few great impressions. None is more striking than that experienced in passing beneath the shadow of this gabled gateway. Behind are kindred men, the manners of one’s own kind, police, churches, droshkys, museums, theatres, the whole fabric of European civilization. From all these one is cut away in the moment of time taken in passing the neutral strip. Two hundred yards have thrust one into the antithesis of all western experience, into an utterly strange environment, where the most remarkable of the world’s Asian races lives and trades, works and rules.

Everything which is made sensually manifest by sight, by sound, by scent, by action, is weirdly alien. You three in the tarantass are as men from Mars, isolated, and moving among people foreign to your every interest and experience. The solitary strangeness of your little party in the tarantass, started into a forbidding land, the first confronting vision of the eternal Orient--these are the things for which men travel.

As you go slowly down the narrow lane-like street, you catch glimpses of banner-decked courtyards seen through great barred doors in the gray mud walls. Here and there a sallow blue-coated Chinaman, with skull-cap and queue, passes by, his folded hands tucked into his long sleeves, fur-lined against the cold. Chinese booths and shops are open. Waiting traders, seeing yet invisible, behind the many-paned paper windows, look outward through the peep-hole.

In the city square a halt is made before a Chinese store, for a last provisioning. At the entrance half a dozen Russian sledges are drawn up. Here can be had the supply of small silver coins indispensable for the road, canned goods of European origin, and a bottle whose contents may be less like medicine than is vodka. Though the goods come all the way from Peking on camel-back, they are much cheaper than the tax-burdened provisions over the border in Russia. Indeed many of the main Chinese stores, with their surprising stocks of wines and pâtés de foie gras, candies, and Philippine tobacco, are supported by Russian inhabitants of Kiahta and Troitzkosavsk. It is amusing to watch the enveloping of champagne-bottles in sleigh-robes, and the secreting of cigars beneath fur caps for the return journey.

We stroll a little way down the street, among the Chinese booths for native wares, where sturdy shuba-robed Mongol tribesmen are bartering sheepskins for blue cotton cloth, metal trinkets, quaint long-stemmed metal pipes, and wool-shears with big handles. They are probably getting deeper in debt, as usual, to the wily traders. We pass the haymarket in the shade of a ruined temple, where the Mongols have heaped their little bundles of provender.

All the while one has an eerie undefined sentiment that something is lacking. It is not that the houses which face the narrow main street are low and poor, that the gray mud-walled compounds are grimly unwelcoming with their closed iron-studded gates. It is not that the small stocks of goods in the shops tell of a vanished prosperity, now that the bulk of the tea-trade has left. It is not anything material, but an oppressive indefinable feeling that something is lacking. Only when Alexsimevich makes a chance remark, do you realize consciously what it was you instinctively felt, “It is queer to be in a city where there is not a woman or child.”

Some have explained the exclusion law which controls the situation by the self-sufficiency of the Chinese, who wished no real settlement of their people here,--the fruit of a pride deep-rooted as that underlying the custom which brings every corpse back to China for burial. Others, by the desire to avoid transmitting to the Empire the diseases that are rife in Mongolia. Whatever the basis, the regulation is in full force to-day. At one time merchants in Maimachen kept their wives across the border in Russia, which under a subterfuge was not technically forbidden. But the ability to hide behind a technicality is a blessing enjoyed especially in democracies. It did not go with the chief of police, who came down for a squeeze which made it more profitable to pay the women’s fare home than to continue to offend.

Associating with the native Mongol women is here precluded by the fact that there are no settlements near by from which the Chinese might get indigenous consolation. A deserted tract lies behind the town. Only camel-drivers, wood-cutters, and sellers of cattle come into Maimachen, and they leave at night. For though the Mongols, in their pointed hats, pass along the streets, none may lawfully live within the stockaded walls, and none keep shop beneath the carved eaves of the houses which flank its narrow streets. This is the prerogative of Chinese traders from beyond the far-off Wall.

The spectacled merchant Tu-Shiti, who has become prosperous from the sale of Mongol wool, retakes for a visit, every two years, the long camel-trail to Kalgan and China. The tea-trader, Chantu-fou, drinks his wares alone. The slant-eyed clerks and booth-keepers trotting down the streets in their skull-caps, hands tucked up the sleeves of their blue jackets, plan no theatre-parties or amity balls, or sleigh-rides in the biting air, as over the way in Kiahta. The seller of sweetmeats will never be told to be sure and inclose the red and black New Year’s card. There is no red-cheeked Chinese boy to smile as he munches your sugar; to puzzle over your ticking watch as at Kotoi, or to tease the tame crane in the courtyard. Not a girl appears on the narrow streets. It is the sentence passed upon the generations of Chinese who have gone to Mongolia, that no woman of their race shall pass the Wall. And so it must remain, for never a home will be founded till China, the unchanging, shall change.

Back and forth through the thoroughfares go the little men with the queues flapping against their backs and their sallow uncommunicative faces. Are they thinking of the time when they will have made their little fortunes and can get back to China to enjoy them? As they wait for customers in the little booths, do they plan the homes which none of their blood may ever possess in Mongolia? When they sleep on their wooden platforms, do they dream of faces in the Kingdom of the Sun? Never will one know. Around the thoughts of the Chinaman arise the ramparts of his isolation. What he believes, what he hopes, what he dreams are not for you. The soul of China is behind the Wall.

The tarantass rolls out of the quaint weather-worn gateway of the woman-less city of Maimachen. “How much they miss!” says André, filling his pipe from the new pouch. “How much they escape!” retorts Alexsimevich.

When in hot haste Pharaoh ordered out his great war-chariot to pursue the rebellious Children of Israel, and thundered through his pyloned gateway with plunging horses urged by the shouts of his Nubian charioteers, he must have experienced, despite contrasts, much the same physical sensations as those which we feel when the tarantass starts in full gallop across the level plain to the distant range of mountains; but where Pharaoh’s robe was white with dust, ours is white with snow, and the sun, which baked his road, makes ours endurable.

The horses leap free under the knotted lash of the Siberian driver. With the rumble of low thunder the ponderous wooden wheels bound over the rutty road, hurling the springless tarantass into the air and from side to side. You brace yourself with baggage and hold to the sides, but toss despite all, like corn in a popper. The hay on which you sit shifts away to one side, leaving the bare boards to rub through clothes and packs. A sudden splinter makes you jump like a startled deer beside the way. In this noisy tarantass, down the narrow road grooved with the ruts of the Mongol carts and sledges that have gone northward, you tumble and groan and bump and roll out across the open country.