Chapter V. The Flower of Happiness

I had a talk with a baba about the spiritual welfare of the village. She was not content with it. The people were very "raw," she said. It was probably because they had so few church services. "But," said I, "you have a beautiful new-painted wooden church. I should have thought you were all very religious."

"We have a church, barin, but it is always locked up because there is no priest. The priest ought to come, but he lives six miles away, and is always very drunken. It is a great sorrow. We began building the church long ago, that is, the moujiks began. We had a meeting, and one moujik agreed to do this, another to do that; one to give this thing and another that; some were to fell the trees, others to hack them into shape, others to fix them together and build. They began the work very slowly; it was holy work and God does not require us to build quickly. It was two and a half years before the church was built, that is, the church walls and the door. Then it had to be ornamented inside, and some of us gave Ikons. We saved up money to buy paint — paint is very dear — and then they painted it all white, as you see, with a red roof. Again we saved money and bought a little steeple, and when we had saved more we booglit a trig one, and then we bought a bell. It was 'all a beautiful offering to God. All the while they were building they were more holy than they have ever been since. When it was all finished they were very happy, and we had a great holiday and kept open house, inviting all the people from Tripusovo and Liavlia and Koskova and the villages round about, and everyone got dreadfully drunk. It was the worst holiday I ever remember, and no good came of it at all, for I said it was not at all correct to drink so much vodka. No one paid any attention to me, and everyone drank and drank again with a "Glory to Thee, O God," and they thought God was very pleased. But we women folk knew better, and not one of us touched a drop of liquor, and every now and then we crossed ourselves and prayed to God, "Oh, Lord have mercy!"

"And after all you have no services in your church?" I put in sympathetically.

"None, barin, they thought they would get a priest of their own, but it turned out quite differently. We had to depend on the priest of Koskova. He had to take the two villages together, and as he is too drunken to attend his own church properly, it isn't likely he's coming to say Mass in ours. I say it is just like a curse."

"And does he never come, never at all?" I asked. "When he comes he has to be carried in a cart. One of the moujiks goes and fetches him, and tells him what he has to do; that is, when we have a marriage or there is a dying man who wants him. But he is a very good man. I have seen him in church sometimes, perfectly sober, and he goes through the service beautifully. Pity that the devil is always biting him I".

"I suppose he won't be here to-morrow?" I enquired. "To-morrow is a great festival, is it not?"

"To-morrow is St. John. He ought to come to bless the fields, but he won't do that even at Koskovo, may the Lord God in heaven forgive him! All is doing well as you know, the grass and the rye is beautiful, and if only we escape frosts for three weeks we shall reap well, Glory be to God. But I fear the curse. With no one to sprinkle holy water in the fields on the day of St John, there is no knowing what calamity may overtake us. And our very life depends on the hay and the rye."

I decided that on the morrow I would - cross the river to Kekhtya and there see the carrying of the Ikons through the fields and the sprinkling of the holy water on the crops. Meanwhile I should spend St. John's Eve at Bobrovo and see whether, as the old woman averred, the festival had become more pagan than Christian.

It is the greatest night of the Russian summer, a night of enchantment and wonder. The ordinary life of the world is suspended on that night, and the invisible becomes the real; it is no common night; who goes abroad on that night shall see strange things.

In the old days of Russia it used to be a festival in the worship of Fire and Water, or the festival of John the Bather, a prehistoric prophet not connected with John the Baptist, I am told, though always inextricably interwoven with him in the popular mind. Who was the John who bathed, none can say; he belongs to the time when Christianity was only a rumour. But his customs survive, and on the twenty-third of June the young men of the village light bonfires and jump through them, and the village maidens bathe in the river and crown themselves with weeds. Those who seek happiness go into the woods to find the blossom that opens at midnight. As the poet Balmont writes —

With ecstasy we chanted it, and we may not sing it more, we recall it to our lips till the Night comes round again. The light that shone that night shall wrap it from our memory. But we, like the flowers, know the reason of our joy, and each one dreams her little dream of heaven.

And Natasha, the hired girl, took twelve different grasses and made a wreath to put on her hair before going to bed that night; buttercup, rattray, marguerite, dead nettle, grass, wild parsley, St John's wort, clover. . . She wished to dream under that magic crown and see the vision of her happiness. They mean destiny, but happiness and destiny are synonymous in these parts. I talked to Natasha, and she said to me —

"It is true, for it is written in the Evangeli, that at twelve o'clock to-night, twelve blossoms are born in the woods, and one of the blossoms is that of happiness. Many will go in search of it."

The threshold of our cottage was heaped up with weeds so that the poor eagle must have wondered what was to hand. The Khosaika explained that they would be sorted into twelve piles in order that the house might have blessing. Then she herself would take a bunch of twelve sorts and go to feed her cow at midnight.

"The cow is ill," she said;" blown out at the flanks. It roars, not like a cow, but like a piece of machinery. They say it is the political people, the students and godless folk whom the Government settle here that poison the cows, but that I don't believe" — There are many hundreds of political prisoners in Northern Russia, banished from the more southern districts under administrative order —

"I believe it," said Natasha. "I quite believe it; they have evil eyes; I never saw any people like them in our country."

"What nonsense!" replied the Khosaika, who considered herself superior in knowledge, having lived some while in a suburb of Archangel town." What nonsense! There is no harm in the politicals, they suffer for us, they want us to have more money, and say that the Government and the landowners ought to give us more land. I know. I haven't always lived in the country."

"All the same, when I see one on the road I am afraid," said Natasha. "I run. They are an unacceptable people; they never pray. God doesn't help them. There were many, many cows very big and swollen last year at Kekhtya, over the water, and the feldscher said it might be sorcery. The moujiks beat a student, and though the police sent one of them to prison for it, everybody was very glad, and the priest did not count it a sin,—at least, Utka didn't think he need confess it."

"All nonsense! It's nothing to do with sorcery. Cows often are ill like that, and the best thing to do is to sprinkle holy water on them and pray. I shall take grasses over to the island, and feed the cow at midnight, and she'll get right very quickly." "By the way," said I." Is the pope over at Kekhtya sober?"

"Oh yes," she replied," strangely sober."

"In that case" I said, "I shall go over to-morrow and see what is happening."

We talked for some hours in the long evening, and she showed me steel and flint which she still would use if they ran short of matches. She told me of her mother's time, when matches were very precious indeed, and one might see in the early morning an old babushka sitting half naked, with the ashes of last night's fire between her legs, blowing for all she was worth to get a flame again.

At last the good woman went out down to the boat at the Aver side, with arms full of weeds with which to feed the ailing cow, and I watched her row herself across the silent stream in the strange midnight twilight.

The village did not sleep. Smoke issued from many of the outhouse baths. There are several bath houses in the village, and every two or three families use one in conanon. The old and the sick were steaming in these frantically hot bath rooms. I saw one man come out naked, and go in again — probably the smoke in his eyes had driven him out. Does the reader know what a black banya is? He is happier in his ignorance. But the moujik would tell him that it was better than all physic to stew for an hour in his little inferno of smoke and steam, and to hold the twelve weeds on the head with one hand, while with the other he poured hot water over them in order that the precious influence might rain down.

I climbed the cliff and walked away from the village along the skirting of the forest, and as I walked I heard the strange wailing chant of the maidens singing the festival music, and the unpleasant sound of a far-away concertina. The midnight walking had begun. There was merry-making and drinking in the village houses, where vodka, the disease of modern Russia, had overtaken the old customs and superstitions. But in the quiet houses were men and women momently expecting visions under the auspices of the twelve wild flowers. Perhaps they thought each flower typified one of the apostles.

In the woods walked those in quest of happiness, and I also walked there, somewhat dreamily. The pines cast faint shadows on the moss; the wild roses burned on the sweet briars, and but for the distant singing all was perfectly silent. The night was unusually warm, and whenever I ceased moving, the mosquitoes settled on my hands and face.

I did not go far. It is dangerous to stray even a little way into that forest, for it stretches without a break a whole thousand versts to the east, and its grey firs are bewildering and fascinating. Suddenly the trees grew thicker, shoulder to shoulder, like serried ranks of warriors waiting on a hill in the night. So close were they that their branches met above, and roofed the whole forest, so that not only now at midnight, but in broad day there would be utter darkness. I stood in the dusk and looked back to the light I had left, and then to the darkness that was in front of me, as it were to the past that I knew, and to the future that was hidden from me. Deeper in the wood, in the darkness, the flowers of destiny blossomed, the flower of happiness. Looking into the blank dark future, as I stood by myself, though encompassed by all I knew, I looked out and saw the bright flowers that blossomed, and I picked that one that I loved. They say that only one of the flowers is the flower of happiness. But then my flower is mine, and the other flowers belong to others. All the world was searching in the wood that night, and if they found not happiness, it was not because the flower was not there, but because their eyes did not distinguish it, or because they did not realise, with Natasha and her sisters, that Destiny is synonymous with Happiness.