Chapter XX. The Lame Musician-Tramp

A peasant ferried me to the other side of the river. He asked me where I was going and I replied "To Pinyega, then to Gee." I offered him ten copecks for his trouble but he waved his hand and said, "You are going to Cee; go into the monastery there and buy me a candle, and light it before the Ikon of Nicholas the Wonder-worker." He landed me on a wide and desolate stretch of sand. Cart tracks a foot deep showed the way to places of habitation, and I followed them, trudging heavily through the deep loose dust and gravel. I came to a clump of trees and discovered the regular post-road to the town of Kholmagora. I sat down on a bank to consider whether I should take the road, or try my luck along the Dwina shore.

There seemed to be no one about, but whilst I was looking at a map of the province up comes a funny looking lame man with a concertina under his arm, asks where I am going, and evidently has no intention of leaving me now that he has found a companion.

He decided me; he knew a path along the river shore, and I gave up the idea of going to Kholmagora by the straight way. The musician, though he dragged one leg as if it were hanging on by a string, was quite a fast walker.

He was a short, one-eyed man of fair complexion, but dirty face. His other eye had been destroyed in a factory accident, when he was a boy. "Twas a German factory," he said, "and that's all I know about Germans. They expect you to work hard. They say to me it's salvation when a factory comes, everyone has money. But I lost my eye in a factory, and then I took to the road. All the way from Khersonsky Government to Archangel I've tramped and never starved, often in prison, but always merry!"

We were a funny couple going along this desert shore — myself and this one-eyed tramp musician. I, unusually tall and broad, with an immense bundle on my back, and he, little and lame with no baggage, but always fingering and thrumming on the rusty concertina between his hands.

He went on. "A German overseer said to me, I don't believe in beggars, travelling musicians and the like, they ought to be working, to be making something. That's the German way. They use men to make goods. They don't think of making men. All the same, they made a musician of me. It's three years since I left home now, three years from village to village, town to town, thousands of miles, countryman."

"There's plague in Kherson now; aren't you afraid to go back?"

"There's always plague there; my grandfather died of it."

"Why is that? I should have thought it would disappear."

"It can't disappear. Even if nobody suffers from it, it is there all the time, looking at us with envious eyes.

God keeps it back, God lets it go; that is the way always. The same with the cholera."

"Are many sick of the cholera now?" I asked.

"None in the North," he replied, "that is because there are no Jews there, and God is pleased. But at Chukh-Cherema they thought they had found the cholera fiend, Kholershtchik. There was a man, a picture-maker, who came over, a nicely dressed young man, the like the people had never seen before, and he had a box of tubes which he said were colours, and a drunken moujik spread the news in the village that he was the cholera fiend, and had brought cholera powders and was sprinkling them all round the village. A mob of Ziriani came down and threw the young man and all his things into the Dwina. If anyone thinks I'm a devil I show them my baptism cross. How about you?"

I couldn't prove I wasn't a devil, and hoped I mightn't be called upon to do so.

We came opposite to the village of Chukh-Cherema, where the deed of violence had been done, and we rowed across to it in an old woman's boat which was lent to us on our side. The village is chiefly remarkable for a beautiful wooden church surmounted by nine little domes. It was a peasant-built and peasant-adorned chapel — the cupolas representing the nine orders of angels, I am told. There was nothing in the aspect of the people to suggest that they were different from other villagers I had seen, or that they were capable of such an absurdity as my companion had recounted.

Church of the Prophet Elijah, Chukh-Cherema with nine domes

Church at Ust-Pinyega (with separate belfry)

We did not stay there, however, but passed on to Rovdina, and the village where the poet Lomonosof was burn, now called Lomonosofsky.

"It's merry on the road," said I.

"Always merry, countryman," he replied, and struck up a lively air on the concertina.

"Where do you take most money?" I asked. "In towns or in the villages?"

"In the towns. Sometimes in a beerhouse, as much as two roubles fifty in a night. The landlord likes it," he says, "Come to-morrow; come next festival day." He lets me sleep in the shop and I make much money. I have been at Solovetzky Monastery and played to the pilgrims, and I picked up hundreds of copecks. It's the poor men that keep us poor men alive — often in large towns I have played to beggars, and they have paid me."

"And the police?" I said. "Don't they trouble you?"

"Oh yes, sometimes. They always think that I am something else besides a musician; they search me for leaflets and foreign books, lay traps for me, dress up like moujiks and try to pump me. But I haven't any secrets."

"Up here there are lots of Old Believers," he continued, "just as there are lots of Baptists. Perhaps they disguise themselves. There was a musician I met, a balalaika player, who went about blaspheming the Ikons and the Church; he had been everywhere; a cunning one, but the police'll catch him. I put them on his track."

"What of him!" said I. "Was he a revolutionary?"

"No, he was a Baptist. He taught people to read, and gave away Bibles. He told me all about the Baptists; a very nice folk, like the Jews. He said he had converted whole villages in his time, pope and all, but that I don't believe. What would they do with the Church?"

I asked him if he had ever thought of changing his religion, but he shook his head violently. Nonconformity had evidently never tempted him.

We came to a village called Rovdina, on the Dwina shore, a collection of hamlets like Liavlia. It was evidently a place of rich peasants; the houses were all large and clean, and were even ornamented without by dabs of red paint over the windows — and paint is a great luxury. In front of some of the houses were old carved porticos. We stopped at one dwelling, being bidden in for music, and my companion's instrument procured a meal for both of us. It was taken for granted that I also was a tramping musician, that I danced or sang, or had some sort of instrument. So after much persuasion I sang "Rule Britannia!" and translated it for the edification of the company. "Britons never shall be slaves" was a pleasing sentiment. "Sing Ta-ra-ra-boom," said my companion. "What?" I asked.

"Ta-ra-ra-boom, the English song; I heard it in Odessa." So I sang the only version I knew —

"I called on Gladstone one fine day

And found him chopping trees away,

Says I, Mr Gladstone, pray

What d'you think of our Home Rule lay,

Ta-ra-ra-boom de ay" —

which the moujiks did not understand at all. "Gledstone the friend of the Armenians I have also seen," said the musician.

"What, you saw Gladstone?"

"No, the Armenians; also in Odessa, and in Rostof, very like Jews."

We left Rovdina and went on to Lomonosofskaya, of about two hundred inhabitants, a very peaceful place. The wooden ploughs were at work turning up the fields for the sowing of ths winter rye. Men and women were at work in the hay fields, and a number of home-made carts lolled lazily over the long log road of the village. A bright new church, looking none the worse for its newness, stood out like a guarantee for the religion of the village, and as if God were pleased with "his faithful slaves," the full-eared barley seemed to be waving itself to ripeness before the eyes. In the barley, bright blue cornflowers shone like stars, and along the hemp-tied village railings were banks of red willow herb, a blaze of colour.

We sat down on a log by the church, and munched black bread, looking all the time beyond the village to a long stretch of sand half a mile broad, that ran parallel with the village — yellow, unscored, silent, morose. Across the sand lay a strip of stagnant river, and beyond sand, river and forest, over the tree tops, the pale dome of a church poking up into the leaden, many-clouded sky.

The village, the birthplace of one of the greatest Russian poets, Lomonosof, was itself beautiful, and reminded me very forcibly of Ecclefechan. But there were scenes here more charming to the eye than could be witnessed in the Dumfriesshire hamlet, the peasant women for instance, coming in from their toil, clad mostly in scarlet, and with old wooden rakes and forks over their shoulders. Whilst looking on that sight I saw another which most English people would say discounted the charm of the former; a beggar girl in brown rags begging from house to house and tapping on the windows with a stick so that old crusts of black bread might be thrown out to her. But the beggar belongs to the Russian harmony.

Outside the village we came to an unfinished hay rick, and as the night was warm, we scooped out places for ourselves and lay and slept even more comfortably than on feather beds.