On the morning of my going I received an anonymous love letter,
begging me to stay. I concluded it was a composition of Garbage and Nikolai Georgitch,
but as I afterwards learned, it came from
the girl who had been singing on the cliffs.
I could not stay, however, for I had in front of me the prospect
of upwards of a thousand verst tramp, and if once
the autumn rains set in and cut me off two or three hundred miles from a railway
station, I should be in a miserable plight. The
roads often become so bad in autumn that one sinks to the knee in soft mud, or
one has to wade through flooded clayey meadows. More than all the road dangers
of man or of beast, I feared the weather.
Yet the skies seemed auspicious on the day I left. It was truly
the hottest morning of the summer, a sultry breathless day suggestive of some
July days in the Caucasus.
The whole village turned out to see me off, even the fair
stranger I was treating so ungallantly. Pereplotchikof grasped my hand and held it in both his,
lifting it up and down in a grandmotherly way, and the rest crowded round
begging me to write or to remember them, and eventually when their terms
expired, to meet them at Moscow. The peasants all said, "Come again, milosti
prosim, as we ask for mercy, do us the honour!" I bade them good-bye; there was a thick,
confused murmur of blessings,
handkerchiefs waved, and in half a dozen strides I
had turned the corner of the village and got away. A stirring send off is a more
trying ordeal than a thousand mile tramp itself.
Once more I was on the road, and each pine tree as I passed it,
passed never to be seen again, certainly never to be seen so again.
On my way I went through Bobrovo
once more, and called upon my host to say farewell, and drink his health in
home-brewed beer. It happened to be the day of his "Angel," his name day, and despite his previous
asseverations to me of teetotalism, he was quite
over the edge of sobriety. With him was a boon companion who had just returned
from a pilgrimage to Solovetz.
"Did you get there?" I asked. It often
happens that through the drunkenness of the sailor-monks the pilgrim vessels
never reach their destination.
He shook his head. "No," he
replied. "God prevented us as a punishment for our
sins, and sent a storm."
"How was that? I should have thought that pilgrims were not very
sinful."
He looked at me with lack-lustre eye, and growled — "There was a
student fellow on the boat, a-playing of the balalaika."
He probably referred to one of the revolutionaries, who had got
a day off by shamming religious mania, but who, once aboard the pilgrim boat,
had taken a Bank Holiday view of the affair. As for my moujik pilgrim, I smiled at him
and I thought, "Ah well, you may get drunk upon a pilgrimage, but
play upon a balalaika God forbid!"
It was some hours before I got away from Bobrovo, for the Khosaika
brought in the samovar and a whortleberry pie. The furrier and his
pilgrim companion drank up a great quantity of beer and vodka, and the
conversation took up a very low direction — absolutely unchronicable here.
The road lay again through dense forest to Koskova, and I reached that
village about ten at
night; my head in the mosquito bag, for the little
gnats swarmed in clouds.
It was too late to get put up in a cottage. At least I didn't
feel inclined to disturb the sleeping villagers, so as the night was warm, I tried sleeping in a wooden hulk by the
riverside.
This was my first night out since May, when I was tramping near
Kutais. It
was very dreary. For one thing, there was no
darkness to soothe away the impressions of the day, no stars to look up at, no
moon, only a dim soulless twilight, and cold wandering mists stealing along the
river banks. The night was warm, but my hulk was cold as ice, and I lay and
shivered, and wished for half a dozen blankets or a sheltered mountain
cave.
At four in the morning, I gave up my attempts and took refuge in
a large barn that I found well stocked with hay and straw quite near the water's
edge. This was at the house of the ferryman. I slept there all the morning, and
when I sought out my host to have tea and porridge it was already
noon.
Up and down the street of Koskova a quaint procession was taking
place — the priest, the old men of the village and the two village beggars. They
carried handmade Ikons and Crosses, and sang
portions of the Church Service. I asked a woman what was the reason, and learned
that some years before, on that day, the priest had held a service, praying God
to make the cows whole. There had been an appalling epidemic among the cattle.
The whole village set aside a day and prayed, and the result was God had mercy,
and the cows recovered, and the pestilence passed away. So in thankfulness, the
priest had made a new festival all by itself, specially for
Koskova village, and now each year, on the anniversary
of the day of prayer, the Ikons are taken in procession in the morning and
everyone keeps open doors in the afternoon.
The Ikons went by to the church. My host without his hat,
staggered across the road to his threshold and stared at me angrily. When he
heard I wanted a meal, he at once became friendly, probably foreseeing that I
should pay him the price of a drink.
The samovar was brought in and
porridge and milk; my host brought a tabouret close
up to mine and said to me in an ingratiating whisper.
"Order what you like: all is
at your service."
"Have you eggs?" I asked.
"No, but order it, and I will find some."
"I shan't trouble if you haven't
any of your own."
"Will you not order something better to drink?"
"What do you mean?"
"Something hot for us together.
"You mean vodka. I don't drink it."
The moujik looked extremely
sorrowful. " But I have brought you tea and porridge
and milk," he said. "And yet you won't drink with
me."
I said I would give him twenty copecks for the meal and he could
spend it how he liked.
"Then give it me now and let me go
and get a bottle, and we will be happy together," he replied. I gave him the
money.
In a quarter of an hour he brought back a bottle of vodka and
put it in a cupboard, and again sat down at table.
"Not going to drink any?" I queried in surprise.
His face was a battlefield of conscience and desire.
He hesitated a moment, and then brought the bottle out of the
cupboard.
"There," said he, "that is what they make us poor moujiks drink.
We don't want to, but if we don't they
put us in prison."
"What do you mean?" said I, listening to
this astounding statement. "Truth," he averred,
raising his eyebrows. "It's not true," I urged
sternly. "If you say so, I confess," he replied. "But the shop is
there, and what can we poor peasants do than spend onr money there and get drunk,
and then spend more
money? The shop is just handy and we buy, that's
how it is. Once you begin you can't stop."
"How much vodka does your village
"No one knows; thousands of bottles, for even the priest is drunken.
To-day, even in the procession he was drunk; some
people say he only keeps the holiday so that he can go to our houses and drink
and not pay for it." "Surely someone knows how
much vodka is sold.
There must be some way of finding
out. Now, you for instance, how much do you drink in a year?"
He grinned at me, and his face
seemed to suggest that I had been trying to entrap him into something. Then he
said, "I might reckon it if I were sober, but you
see I'm — "He snapped his fat thumb and first finger
on his red neck under his ear, half shut one eye, showing the whites of the
other, meaning to imply some vulgarism which might express an advanced stage of
inebriety. The Russian language has as yet no expression for "screwed" or "half-seas over."
"But," said I, "I should think you might often hear at the vodka
shop, how trade was going. Doesn't the shopman himself sometimes get drunk?"
"No," said he. "There is no conversation in the monopoly, and for
this reason — there never is a man behind the counter. They're all women. If they
were men we could make up to them, get round them and talk, but a woman's a different matter.
They used to
have men, but they found the women more reliable. "Don't the women drink?"
"Oh no, not at all. Men may drink,
but not women. Women can't drink. They take a glass of vodka and their reason is
gone — they become skonfusny (a new Russian
word for me, but evidently meaning confused; however
did the peasants find it!). Only public women drink, and they drink in the
towns. It's not considered decent."
"That's very interesting," said I.
"Now in England many women drink, and drink
heavily, especially in London and the towns. They say English children often are
drunk before they are born."
The peasant blinked his eyes, then suddenly tapped his neck
again to signify that he was too drunk to understand.
"The reason why you Russians turn
out strong and healthy, generation after generation, though the fathers be
nevertheless drunken, is because the women are sober and clean-living. The
health of a nation depends more on the mothers than on the fathers."
The moujik steadily helped himself
to vodka, no doubt encouraged by the fact that it was the women that counted.
Presently when he noticed my camera, he begged to bephotographed. I therefore
took a picture of this man, who though tipsy, had explained to me how it is
Russians are at the same time healthy and drunken. A friend came in to share
with him the day's festivity, and keep green the memory of the "Recovery of the Cows,"
and sitting at a samovar together, they were both photographed. That
night also I slept in the ferryman's barn.
…
My host ought to have been ferrying over the river all day;
he was an official ferryman, obliged to ferry anyone who should ask him at any time of the day or
night free of charge. For this. job he received eight roubles a month (17 shillings) from the
Zemstvo, the borough council. He might have found his
duties onerous, but that he always let the peasants ferry themselves
over.
"Ah!" he said, "but it's bad to be
knocked up at two in the morning to take some high official across."
"I suppose you get something for a drink in these cases," I hazarded.
"Only sometimes," he replied. "Often, very grand people give nothing at all, and one
daren't ask them."
Apparently, tips had much to do with
the poor man's drinking habits. The vodka he got through these little extras
served merely to whet his appetite, and waste the very substance of his
living.
The day after the Cow Festival he was very morose, and was
oppressed with drunkard's melancholy. He talked to me of his poverty, of the
penury of his wife and children, of his own wicked
improvidence, and the like. He planned various ways in which he might do
nothing, and receive in return a substantial wage from me. He would show me the
pope's house, "if I ordered it," would send
out for cod, and bid his wife cook it, "if I
ordered it," and so forth. He hadn't got a halfpenny to spend on himself,
and his wife wouldn't give him anything, so there was very little chance for him
if he couldn't work me up to pay him something.
I went out to see his brother-in-law, a little freckly man,
with bright red hair, nicknamed Ikra, or Caviare, perhaps
because of the look of his face; from him I learned
that the ferry-man was always getting into trouble through the loss of the
ferryboat. About once a month regularly the boat was
lost, and people had to be taken across in private boats till someone downstream
caught the lost vessel and sent it up by a steam timber tug. Only yesterday
three peasants had gone over on their own account, capsized the boat, and lost
one of the oars. One day last year, when there had been thirty people on the
boat one boy had got pushed off and drowned. There had been a great scandal.
Whilst I was talking with Ikra, a short, thick-set man with little cocked ears
came in; this was Laika,
named after a special breed of dog that is found in Archangel. He proposed that
we should go fishing in the evening: the weather was
hot and calm, and one might expect a very good catch. I agreed.
Next chapter
