Chapter VI. The Gospel of the End of the World

The Khosaika chaffed Natashaon the morrow, asking if she had seen her future husband. The hired girl was only sixteen, but marriage had already become a yearly possibility. I think very probably the vision of happiness she hoped to see was a husband, for it is not pleasant to remain unmarried a day longer than is possible. Natasha already looked forward to a menage of her own, and grumbled at having to work for other people. She seemed confused at the question of the Khosaika, and the latter said "We shall go on holiday to-day; perhaps someone will ask you."

This was St. John's festival, a great day of promenading, — gulanie, as it is called, and many bachelors seek wives on that day. Over at Kekhtya I should see how all the girls were dressed out, and how the young men walked up and down, considering which one it would be best to have. The harvest season was coming on, and it would be very advantageous to have a wife to work for one then. Moreover, this year the harvest was going to be a good one by all appearances, and the more hands in the fields, the richer one would reap.

"But be careful," said the Khosaika, "they are a bad lot over the water. Here we are peaceful and honest, and we never lock our doors at night, but there, every third person is a thief or a wizard. We go to bed at eight in the evening, and rise at two in the morning, but there they walk the streets and swagger and drink as in a town along the boulevards, up till midnight — think of it — and don't get up till the sun is in the south. Many pagans and Raskolniki are there, and last year a man came out of the forest and made the people hang themselves — a magician. I don't know how it happened, but nobody on this side thinks anything of the Kekhtyites."

It is strange how people on the opposite sides of rivers grow at enmity with one another. Rivers are the sharpest of boundary lines and have been responsible for many wars. The word "rival" itself means some one on the opposite side of a river. And of course at Kekhtya they said even worse things of the Bobrovites.

As the moujiks were keeping open house at Kekhtya, I got a passage over the water in a boat belonging to a family that was going across to visit some relatives. There was a brisk wind, and we put up two sails; a woman sat at the helm and steered with an oar—river boats are all rudderless — and two children with birch-bark basins scooped out the water from the bottom of the vessel — we leaked badly. I sat on the "nose" wrapped in a heavy coat, and watched how we weathered the seas.

There was a storm on the Dwina; it was no longer a calmly rippling river, but a wild ocean full of crested waves. We rose to the height of high waves and then fell with a rush into the undulations between. The water splashed over us. The exciting waves with the big white backs, the children called sheep, bardni, and we counted the little waves in between.

It was ten miles to Kekhtya, our course being a long detour to get past the island, and the last part of the way we were travelling laterally, with the waves on our sides, so standing some chance of being capsized. But we reached Kekhtya safely.

I called at the house of the priest, but he was out with the Ikons in the fields, and when I went out to find him, I came upon a procession of people with banners and crosses and Ikons coming from the function. The prayers for the crops had already been made. I was disappointed, but the promenading had begun and the singing. At the cemetery was a little procession of village girls weeping and sobbing over the graves — so propitiating the dead, or showing their sympathy with them, an ancient peasant custom in the North. This over, they walked down the wide village street and were joined by twice their number keening and singing the Bathing hymns, the most unpleasant screeching sound that was ever put forth as singing. Young men lit the Ivanovy bonfires, a survival of fire-worship I am told, and there was jumping through the fire. But Kekhtya went through these customs somewhat half-heartedly I thought. Vodka was taking the place of other diversions, and only the women dressed themselves in their brightest and walked and sang, and when they were tired of walking they sat in a long line on pine trunks outside the cottages and sang more. A reeling drunken soldier would stumble past them; then three self-conscious hobbledehoys, howling the chorus of the songs and giggling at themselves and the girls; then three or four others, escorting a young man who has a concertina, but can't play it, for Archangel is the most unmusical province in all Russia; then another staggering drunkard. Then perhaps the svakh would be seen, interviewing some maiden on behalf of one of the self-conscious hobbledehoys — the svakh is a man who arranges marriages. The young man who wants to marry does not consider it delicate to ask the girl himself, and courtship is not thought of, far less understood.

I put up at a cottage and ordered the samovar. I call it a cottage from habit, but it was a large two-storeyed house, and I was able to sit in the upper storey and watch the street from the windows. Whilst I was having tea, the little girls and boys, all the children of eleven or twelve years, came and played rounders, using for bat, a stout cudgel, and for ball, a piece of pine wood. The wife bazaar, the screeching singing and the promenading continued monotonously though now and then one or two of the young women would join the "rounder" party. As I looked up the street I saw all the cottage windows wide open — the elders were sharing conviviality round the samovar, or the bottle. I came to the conclusion that I had seen enough of the festival. So I borrowed a boat and rowed myself up the little Kekhtya river, through meadow and forest to the shrine of the Old Believers, where there had been very strange happenings the year before.

In July of last summer, a new sect established itself at Kekhtya, the sect of suicide. A strange preacher arrived from God-knows-where, and began to preach a gospel of self-murder. He was a tail strange-looking man, middle-aged, dark, with staring eyes, if report speaks truth. He was clothed in very ancient tattered garments, and his ragged beard stood awry. To all appearance he came straight out of the forest; he gave it out that he came all the way from Siberia, where he had had a revelation from God. For some time he fasted and prayed at the old hermitage in the woods, a bygone refuge of the persecuted Old Believers, and he had all the aspects of holiness that the moujiks revere. Add to which his naked body was welted and grooved where heavy irons and chains had eaten into his flesh during some period of fearful asceticism. He had only cast off his chains when God had bidden him go and preach the End of the World. His message might not be tnie, but he was evidently a saint. After his period of preparation by prayer and fasting he began to preach in the villages round about, and as there is now a General Indulgence of Religion in Russia, he escaped molestation. And this was his doctrine. He declared that on Elijah's Day, the 20th of July, the world would come to an end, and in order that man might escape eternal damnation it was necessary to release his soul from his body before that dreadful day. His mission started at the beginning of the month. The people scouted the idea at first, but he preached with such earnestness, and with such untiring, unflagging energy, and appeared so holy that he gradually obtained success. Great crowds of moujiks came to listen to him; perhaps it tickled their minds that in ten days or a fortnight, the prophet's message must be proved true. As a general rule, the promises of holy men and priests were not so quickly to be fulfilled. Perhaps the dreadful audacity of his rhetoric held their simple natures spell bound, his "hang yourselves, drown yourselves, kill by the knife, by the gun, by the rope, it is equally acceptable to God. If your women and children do not understand, despatch them first — God loveth the cheerful giver."

The most extraordinary consternation took place in the villages, and men and women, though scarcely assenting to suicide, did begin to believe that the last day was at hand, and began to put their affairs in order, forgive one another, cease work and pray instead, weep and humiliate themselves. Those who believed in the prophet grew more and more, and at length when the harvest of souls was ripe, a day of reaping was named. The prophet bade all the people gather by the side of the lake near the Old Believer's Hermitage on the night of the nineteenth of July — that was the eve of the End of the world.

They gathered, an immense crowd, by the margin of the placid lake Slobodkh, and there, where a blasted pine leaned over the water, the prophet preached his last sermon. He commenced from the beginning of his story, recapitulating all he had ever said in any meeting, haranguing, persuading, praying. The peasants in frenzy shouted to him, lifted their heads, crossed themselves, lay on the ground kissing the earth, and every now and then the preacher paused to let the emotion come to a head. At length he showed ancient holy Ikons of the Old Believers and prayed before them, the crowd looking on in terror; then he asked the crowd's forgiveness and forgave them, forgave his mother for bearing him, and his father for begetting him, forgave mankind, and asked the forgiveness of God.

He displayed a rope and announced his intention of hanging himself, bidding the people follow his example.

"It is easy for me to die," said he, "but I show you the way." A peasant whom he had instructed fixed the rope upon the slanting blasted pine that hung over the water; and before all the people, the holy man placed his neck in the noose and hanged himself. Women sobbed, men cried and flung themselves on the ground; some of those who were in boats on the water flung themselves to drown, and others looked to the pale cloudy heavens to see them open.

The prophet died without a groan, and then suddenly whilst the peasants were wondering in what order they should mount the scaffold, a drunken man clambered to the preacher's platform and said dramatically, "Well, now, that's all over; he's hanged himself, he was a cunning one."

A peasant pulled him down, but somehow the crowd took up what he said, "It's all over, we can go home." And the whole crowd that was going to kill itself slunk away home.

That might have been all; but the dead prophet was left swinging in the wind, and his dreadful prophecy still haunted the minds of the peasantry. The following day ought to be the Day of Judgment if he had spoken the truth.

It entered the mind of many to go next morning early to the pine gallows — somewhat as the apostles to the sepulchre of Jesus — for they knew not what to expect from God. A great crowd gathered and didn't know what it had gathered for, questioned itself, and stared at the dangling corpse. The day wore on; some left the crowd, others augmented it, and in the evening when all began to doubt the fulfilment of the prophecy, an extraordinary wind sprang up, roaring in the pines and lashing the water into waves. Great thunder clouds came up out of the horizon, with far distant but ever nearing lightnings, and such a storm occurred on the lake as no one had ever known in the district before. Thunderstorms are not very frequent in the North.

Some of the peasants who thought it was the Last Day indeed, flung themselves into the water. Seven of them drowned themselves, others tried to drown, but lacking faith, or being splendid swimmers, simply couldn't do it. And the cowards and the cautious waited on the bank to be more sure that it wasn't only a thunderstorm.

But it was a thunderstorm, though such a dreadful one as really saved the reputation of the suicide. The crowd went home stupidly, or stupefied, and left the dead behind. Eventually the police came and tried to find some criminals to arrest — which was difficult, for the only ones who had offended against the law were those who had taken their own lives. The matter is now being thrashed out by a commission at Archangel. But the commission has not discovered who was the mysterious hermit who caused it all.