Part 8

When we arrived at the monastery in the holy wood we were accommodated in a cell, and a novice brought in the samovar at once. No passports were required, no charge was made. We found at the monastery some two or three hundred other pilgrims, most of whom had been there several days. A pleasant collection of churches, hostelries, little shops, and work-sheds set on a fair hill among ancient pines, a peaceful shelter and sanctuary after the wild weather and desolation of the moors. We wandered about the buildings in the dusk, listened to the antique chimes, and then returned to sleep a few hours before the midnight bell to the first service of the morrow. About one in the morning we left our cells and all muffled up and mysterious followed other pilgrims across the soft new snow to the door of the Cathedral of the Assumption. Then in the witching hour of night we entered the church—such an immense church it seemed, barely lit by the few struggling tapers, and we such a few people in it. The peasants, however, paid no attention to numbers, and they stood and prayed and crossed themselves and gave the responses for hours and hours, at last receiving the blessing of the priest, kissing the cross in his hand, being marked on the brow with holy water, stepping up to the altar and kissing through a hole in some canvas a part of the remains of the saint. There was nothing touching in the service except the demeanour of the pilgrims, no music worth mentioning. Our leaving our beds to come and stand for hours on the cathedral floor without an inclination to shirk or go out was a _podvig_—an inbred part of the Russian character now.

I went to a fuller service later in the day, in a church much more alight with candles, taken by a deacon with a deep spirit-summoning voice, and mellowed by wonderful choral accompaniments, a long service requiring patience from the aged folk who came to take part in it.

A seventy-five-year-old dame explained in one of the monastery dining-rooms, as some twenty of us with wooden spoons sat round four huge Russian basins of soup and helped ourselves together—“I felt I might die before it ended, but I prayed to the holy _Ugodnik_, Father Seraphim, to ask God to give me strength to stay till the end of the service.”

“Why not to God direct?” I asked.

“It’s not for a poor creature like me to trouble God to attend to me,” said she. “No, I ask the _Ugodniki_, if they have time, to go to Him and ask Him at a convenient moment....”

“As to the Tsar,” said some one.

“But God has time for every one,” said another, “and can attend to everything at once....”

“_Pozhalui_, I suppose so ...” said the old woman meekly in a cracked voice, and went on with her soup.

I talked with one of the monks about Father Seraphim. What a character the Russian hermit was; there is material in his life for the pen of another Carlyle writing a new Past and Present. He was silent all those thirty-five years, and then opened his mouth. Alas! no one could tell me the first words that he spoke. He was actually silent all the time that Napoleon was ravaging Russia, during the time when he was in occupation of the holy mother of Russian cities, Moscow. Napoleon was popularly understood in Russia as Antichrist, and when the news of the terrible French sacrilege spread over Russia there were all manner of extravagant rumours about the end of the world.

By this time Seraphim had obtained a name of great sanctity. Sick men had been restored to health by drinking from the hermitage well, the leprous had discharged their disease by touching the garments of the holy but silent man. So when Napoleon came to Moscow, the crowd appealed to Seraphim to work a miracle.

“They are burning our sacred shrines,” they cried, “they are using our cathedrals as places of execution, they are murdering our priests and our pilgrims. Is it naught to thee, Father?”

But Seraphim was silent.

And others said, “He is called Napoleon, but he is in reality Antichrist. Lead us, O Seraphim, against him in the name of the Lord.”

But Seraphim was silent. His face retained unchanged its look of exaltation; his uplifted eyes still seemed bent on some unearthly vision; his attentive ears seemed to be listening to some other voices. The old monk never spoke a word. Napoleon and the world had no power to shatter his vision. Napoleons might come and go, but the truth to which he was a witness remained unchanging, unchanged. And if Napoleon had come to Sarof and pulled the hermitage down about Seraphim’s ears, the old monk would still have prayed on in silence.

Almost every characteristic of the Father and every circumstance of his life had something in it that is emblematic and suggestive. In his old age, when he became so famous, he received thousands of letters, most of which, however, he answered without opening! It is told how in his old age the light of sainthood shone from his brow, and on one occasion a holy man coming to visit him in his cell found the light too strong for his eyes and shielded them with his hands.

“What is the matter?” said Father Seraphim.

“The light shines from your head, O holy one.”

“Do not be afraid,” said the Father. “You also are bright as I am or you could not have seen me thus. I see you also a shining one. Thank God that it has been given to miserable Seraphim to see a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.”

The Father during his hermitage scooped out of the trunk of a lightning-stricken oak the coffin that should hold his remains when he died, and he pulled it in at the door of his hut, slept in it at night, and prayed beside it by day.

He was an extraordinary ascetic, and yet in the picture that you get of him in his old age, when he relaxed his asceticism, he is distinguished by the warmth of his love and the sweetness of his counsel. The pilgrims who come to him he calls his “joys”; before even the wicked he falls down and he kisses their feet. When he gives his benediction he also gives a handful of that dried black bread, _sukaree_, with which he fed Mishenka, the bear which he tamed in the woods—Father Seraphim’s bread which came down from heaven, the bread of the _podvig_.

My pilgrim acquaintance took me to the various shrines, and we knelt and kissed the thousand-day stone still standing before the great rough-hewn cross that the saint made, kissed the ikons, crossed ourselves before many forest shrines, and eventually came to the far shrine where Seraphim spent so many years in the wilderness. Here an aged monk, taking the place of the _starets_, asked us our Christian names and where we came from. He had a great sack of _sukaree_ similar to that which Seraphim had dispensed, and he gave us each a handful with his parting benediction. At the well, now made into an elaborate bath-house, men one side and women the other, my pilgrim had a bath. It struck me as rather interesting that the monks of Sarof had fitted a dozen or so taps to Seraphim’s natural spring and conducted it through pipes—that is the true ecclesiastical function, to put taps to living water.

I went into the bath-house and watched some peasants stand under the frigid douche, and when my friend had put his clothes on again—without drying himself—we took each a bottle of the water and put it in our pockets.

Then away again from Sarof and home over the snow. I carried the _sukaree_ and the water from the well that I might give them to the old grandmother at Vladikavkaz when I went south—the actual _sukaree_ with which Father Seraphim fed the bear! Some weeks later when I went to the Caucasian city I call my Russian home I took the old lady my gift from the Father. Next day behold her doling out half-thimblefuls of the water to her visitors and giving them each a crumb of the comfort of St. Seraphim to eat.

III TOLSTOY’S FLIGHT FROM HOME

ASTAPOVO RAILWAY STATION.

From a historical figure to a contemporary figure. From the simplicity of a mediæval choice such as Seraphim’s to the difficulty of the choice that confronts a modern.

Nothing in Tolstoy’s life is so interesting to me as the circumstances of his death, his flight from home to the monastery, his perishing on a wayside station like some aged pilgrim broken down on the way to Jerusalem. The story is such a beautiful, pathetic, touching one that the station of Astapovo may well be an object of pilgrimage for people who can feel in themselves the poignancies of life, and who are interested in the destinies of mankind.

Not a place for sightseers, however! A dreary journey at the rate of eighteen miles an hour and at the end of it all this little station on a by-line. In the waiting-room are peasants in rags, in sheepskins, in old blouses, peasants sleeping on forms; bundles on the floor, heaps of bundles, tied-up sacks, ancient green trunks. On one side of the room is a grandfather’s clock, on the other is a little wooden chapel with ikons and votive candles. From the clock to the chapel runs a long linoleum-covered bar, and on the ikon side of it are scores of fresh loaves, while on the clock side are vodka and wine. On the top of the clock burns a paraffin lamp. There is praying and disputing and tea-drinking, children crying, bundles, boxes, pointsmen with dim lanterns, a mouldy-looking gendarme, and it is five o’clock in the morning.

Out of the lingering train they brought Tolstoy into just such a room and to such a scene. “They brought him through here,” says the heavy bearded man behind the bar, “and they put him first in the woman’s room and then took him to a room in the stationmaster’s house.”

The man behind the bar has trained his whiskers to look like those of Tolstoy, and is vain enough to ask me: “Did you not take me for Tolstoy’s double? Some are frightened when they see me and think I am Tolstoy’s ghost. Am I not like him?”

“Did you look as like him _then_? What did Tolstoy’s friends think of your appearance?”

“They laughed.”

“Did you have many people here?”

“Not many strangers, fifteen of the family, twenty correspondents, a general from Petrograd, two doctors.... I put them all up and fed them.”

A gruff, astonishing old fellow, this double of Tolstoy. A strange coincidence that Tolstoy should die at his station. He is heavy, awkward, unpleasant-looking, like a Guy Fawkes effigy of Tolstoy; and as you watch him cross the waiting-room it seems as if his hair might fall off and prove to be a wig, and as if one might pull his beard and whiskers away.

But he is quite obliging to me, and shows me the marble tablet in the stationmaster’s wooden wall, and directs me to the room in which everything stands just as it did then, which is being preserved so _for all time_—if Time spares Tolstoy’s memory.

The first I ever heard of Tolstoy was the discrediting whisper, “His wife banks his money; everything is in his wife’s name.” And later on, when I came to Russia, coupled with national pride in Leo Nikolaevitch was always the rumour: “When he wants to go to Moscow he travels first-class; he does not go on foot as he advises others to do. He counsels us to live simply while he himself lives in style at Yasnaya Polyana. He disbelieves in doctors, but when the least thing is the matter with him doctors are in attendance.” I suppose no one really put these things in the balance against Tolstoy’s sincerity—unless, perhaps, it was Tolstoy himself.

Tolstoy was evidently heavily oppressed by the worldly life in which he seemed to share and which he seemed to countenance. It was mirrored in his soul as the everyday reflection of life, the luxury, feasting, drinking, trivial conversation, and vulgar pride of his home.

Some time in his life, perhaps several times, Tolstoy must have been on the point of running away. In order to make his personal life correspond to his teaching, it would have been necessary to give up his wife and family and the life they insisted on living. He ought to have gone out into the wilderness and become a hermit or a pilgrim. So he would have made his personality and doctrine into one great snow-crowned mountain and holy landmark in the national life of Russia.

Tolstoy failed to do this, not through weakness, but because he felt he would lift a heavier cross and would be truer to his own ideal if he continued to lead his life in “the world,” in the midst of the frivolities and luxuries which did not pertain to him. He would live his personal life against the background of this stupidity, his flesh nailed to that cross.

His life will not stand out in relief till some one writes the evangel of his life. As yet Tolstoy is merely a great man, the author of _Anna Karenina_ and _War and Peace_. Few know the real significance of his life. But certainly it may be said of him, despite calumnies and appearances, “He had no possessions on earth; he always confessed to being a stranger and a pilgrim here. He did not believe that machinery or medicine or law were of any value to the soul of man. And though he lived in the midst of wealth he lived very simply.”

A very brilliant old man at Yasnaya Polyana. You went away impressed with his brilliance, and even if you were inclined to scoff you still acknowledged he was great. But greatness was not much to Tolstoy; it was surely nothing to him that he remained _great_ to the end. The chief fact about him was that for many years he was really _old_ and confused in spirit, troubled. In his heart of hearts he was not sure that he was living the true life. He felt a doubt that the emptiness and vanity around him were his own emptiness and vanity. The world was too much with him; the vision forsook him.

In the blaze up of the candle before death he saw his way and sought sanctuary from the world, fled....

And he perished on the road, with his back to Yasnaya Polyana and the “world.” In the room where he died are the poor two-foot-six by five-foot-six iron bedstead, the table with medicine bottles, a chair, the enamel basin they washed him in. It is all to remain as it was on the day that he died. Pleasant symbolism! The world will also remain the same: it will remove his body to Yasnaya Polyana, and quarrel over the prayer to be said over the grave; it will quarrel over the rights in his autograph manuscripts; it will publish the old man’s love-letters; it will rig up in Moscow a facsimile of Astapovo Station and the room where he died; it will arrange ten-year jubilees, fifty-year jubilees, centenaries; build statues ...; but those who seek to know the true Tolstoy, the real man who had this strange life-journey, will hear the whisper, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

IV BACK TO MOSCOW

The Russians are considerably more interested in religion and religious ideas than other nations. Perhaps that is due to the greater national growth and greater national changes: questions about destiny rise to the surface of each man’s mind. The appetite for religious discussion is robust and eager. You go to a debate which begins at eight in the evening. Some one reads a lecture which lasts three hours and then there is a three hours’ general discussion. The room is packed, no windows are open, but every one is keen. A roar of general conversation ensues at the ten-minutes interval every hour and a half.

A curious story enacted itself whilst I was in Moscow this spring. A journalist discovered a group of Hindu philosophers doing a turn at a smart cabaret restaurant. In the midst of a vulgar music-hall programme they were performing rather beautifully on their native instruments. They seemed somewhat out of place; and the journalist, knowing English, sought them out and entered into conversation with them—as you can at the cabaret, where performers mix pretty freely with those who have come to eat and be amused. Two days later the story of the Hindus appeared in one of the Moscow newspapers. Their leader was the chosen missionary of Sufism, and was going through all the world preaching a new gospel. He had had a considerable fashionable success in London and Paris, and at the latter city a Russian hearing his music—which was in itself an illustration of Sufism—had said, “Come to Russia; I’ll arrange everything for you.”

“I’d like to,” said the Hindu; “I have long wished to go there.”

The Russian brought a form of contract and engaged the missionary and his fellows to play every night for six months in cabaret restaurants and music-halls in Russia. But the Hindu averred that he thought he was signing an agreement for a lecturing tour.

Readers of this story in the morning newspapers were much touched, and a lady whom I know sought out X—— at his hotel, questioned him, and found that he was indeed a serious religious man, desirous of spreading the gospel of Sufism in Russia. And she promised to rescue his mission.

In a week or so she had arranged a meeting for him, and X—— came with his fellow-Hindus and their instruments and gave a lecture and rendered some music. Several of the most cultured people in Moscow were present. Mme. Ivanova, the wife of Viacheslaf Ivanof, interpreted for him sentence by sentence, and afterwards question by question, and answer by answer. The lecture amounted briefly to this: “First there was the One and then all was peace, happiness, bliss. Then the One became the many, and there will never be peace, happiness, bliss again until the many becomes the One. Therefore we should strive towards the One and get rid of the sense of the many.”

The lecture lasted about an hour, and the Russians were pleased, curious, earnest. They took the Hindu seriously, and questioned and cross-questioned without mercy. The gentle prophet gave the sweetest replies, delicately evading, politely agreeing, playfully turning simplicities into paradoxes and back again, and all his terms of speech were definite and simple. He never took refuge in anything vague or emotional, treated the infinities and the immensities like little toys or bits of toys. Everything was clear to him, everything simple; he was above all things playful. But the Russians sent question after question and would not take evasion or smile at playfulness, till at last at half-past eleven the gentle Eastern begged to be excused if he did not answer any more questions as he was tired. Indeed he seemed worn out. But the Russians had a feeling of disappointment. For them the evening was only beginning.

The question of the many and the One, the world or the cell, the many cares of Martha or the one devotion of Mary, would keep any Russian audience speculating for an indefinite length of time.

In Moscow in March I met again Mme. Odintseva. A great change had come over her life. Her husband had been killed, her fortune lost, and she had changed her religion. When I met her first she was a Theosophist, a modern Hypatia whose home was a temple, an elegant woman surrounded by pictures and volumes of poetry, her own especial rooms all scented with rose de Shiraz. Now all was changed in her life; no pictures, no poets, no perfume, no elegance, and she had exchanged Theosophy for evangelical Christianity. The particulars of her husband’s death had evidently been a terrible shock to her. He had been in the habit of paying blackmail to a band of revolutionaries or depraved police, and one night he either failed to bring the money demanded of him, or he quarrelled with his persecutors, or he got tired of life and committed suicide. He was found shot dead, in a lonely spot a mile from his home. A note appointing the rendezvous was found, but the writer was never traced. His wife necessarily does not tell what she went through in mind and soul, but the astonishing result was visible in her new life and home in Moscow. All was in disorder, everything had become coarser, harder. She herself was much stouter, had given up vegetarianism, dressed very simply, read only volumes of sermons and the New Testament, referred all questions to texts in the Gospels, and went to prayer-meetings every other night.

I accompanied her on one occasion. We went to what may be styled the lowest sort of Evangelical meeting in Moscow. There is no Salvation Army there. This was something in the nature of a slum shelter meeting. The preacher was an enthusiastic barber. There were five or six hundred men and women present at the meeting, and a gendarme stood at the back to see that nothing objectionable was said.

“We have converted three gendarmes,” said Mme. Odintseva in my ear. We sat on forms at one side of the room, and could survey the whole meeting without turning our heads. The men present were straight from toil, grimy, unkempt, wild-looking. A few years ago the same type of workman grasped a revolver in his pocket and thought of barricades and revolutions. Now he has a New Testament and sings hymns in dark rooms, the tears stealing down his face the while.

As they sat waiting the opening of the service they looked a stolid, heavy, unemotional crowd, the pale broad-browed women with shawls on their heads, the heavy, unshaven, clumsy men in ill-fitting clothes heavy with dirt. But they all changed under the influence of religious feeling. There was a consciousness of unanimity in this low, vast, irregular room. Something not to be put down in words communicated itself from man to man. No one had come there to sleep through the sermon or, like Yourgis at Chicago, to get out of the cold. There was attention to the reading of the Scriptures, a communion of melancholy love and passion in the singing of the simple hymns, testifying and confessing with sobs and gesticulations in the midst of the prayers, happy cries of pain and anguish from people whose sole confession was, “I am unworthy, Lord, an unworthy one; O Lord, have mercy!”

The barber’s sermon was simple and sweet. “Read the Gospel, brothers; the whole sense of your lives is in the Gospel. If you are in doubt which way to act turn to the Gospel; do not ask other people, do not try to remember what other people have done, but be guided directly by the words of God. And if you have sinned, and if your past life has become unbearable to you, do not despair, turn to the Testament; it is just one big forgiveness from beginning to end.”

Mme. Odintseva was anxious that I should like the barber; he was a favourite of hers. Frequently during his sermon she whispered in my ear, and called my attention to points she considered good. Yes, the barber was interesting; he was giving a new criterion to the people, a new touchstone for good and evil.

After his sermon we concluded with ten minutes’ private prayer and a last hymn. In England the private prayer would have been silent, and there would have been that strange surcharged silence which suggests to the mind that there might be an explosion if one were to light a match. But in Russia though they had borrowed the idea they had understood its practice differently. The prayer was not silent.

We all stood up to pray, and as we stood there began a murmuring and a mumbling and a calling, a general muttering and a crying, a sonorous clamour, hands waving, faces thrown upward toward heaven, faces drooping and sobbing, every one saying his own prayer, and every one saying different. It was a music, a symphony of pain and anguish from an orchestra of human hearts. I did not pray, but looked about me and saw the people swaying as if a wind were blowing among them. There seemed to be no silent lips, and the barber-pastor prayed with the rest, indistinctly and personally and yet vocally. Far away, beyond the low roof of the meeting-room, a mysterious and understanding God heard each.

V THE RELIGION OF SUFFERING