Russian essays and stories

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.

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

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]

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.

The sunflower season has arrived. Sunflowers are grown in great quantities in Russia, not for ornamental or decorative purposes but for utilitarian purposes. They are grown for the oil that is in them; but besides being useful in many ways they form an article of food. You pick the head of the sunflower and eat the seeds. You bite the seed, spit out the husk, and eat the kernel, which is white and tastes of sunflower. Considerable skill is needed when cracking the husk and spitting it out to leave the kernel intact. This habit is universal among the lower classes in Russia. It occupies a human being like smoking, and it is a pleasant adjunct to contemplation. It is also conducive to untidiness. Nothing is so untidy in the world as a room or a platform littered with sunflower seeds. All platforms in Russia are thus littered at this time of year. When I was on the steamer at Tzaritsin one of the Cossacks approached me with this question, which seemed startling: “Do you chew seeds?” At first I was at a loss to think what he meant, but I soon remembered the sunflower, and when I had answered in the affirmative he produced a great handful of dried seeds and offered them to me. I had to change three times on the way to my destination, which was the environs of Tambov. During one of the journeys the carriage, a kind of first-class saloon carriage, was occupied by a cashier carrying money, and he had with him two gendarmes with loaded rifles so as to guard him, since assaults on cashiers with the object of robbery are not becoming less frequent. On the small lines the first-class carriages are often saloon carriages in which any seat makes into a bed. When I arrived at my destination I found the country looking intensely green after a wet summer; the weather was boiling hot and the nights had the softness and the sweetness that should belong to the month of June.