Chapter XXXIII. Tramping up the Yug Valley (the author's journey through the land of Vologda)

I was ferried from Ust-Yug across to the south side of the river Sukhon, and then walked along the sandy shore to the estuary of the Yug. It was a hot summer day, and the sun made the harvest fields resplendent. I commenced my tramp down a broad and fertile valley towards Nikolsk, two hundred miles to the south.

There were many villages, for the land supports many people, and the forest lies only on the far horizon. It is still the country of the peasants, there being no large property owners and no country seats. Each village has its own land, and the villagers work upon it in the communal system. Each village also has its Government assessor or tither, and he determines the amount of the harvest that shall go in lieu of taxes. Each settlement that I came to had a notice up, stating the name of the place and the number of people and houses, as for instance,

A beautiful corner five versts from Ust-Yug

Evidently in this census, children were not taken account of.

I had a glorious summer walk, my feet healed and all my limbs and body ready for any adventure. No adventure was forthcoming, however, and after about twenty-five miles, I sought shelter for the night. My plan in that matter was to go to the cleanest house in the village. Often outside appearances are very deceptive, and this evening when I made my choice, the woman of the house warned me off.

"You can come if you like," she said, "but it's not good. There are so many bugs that I'm afraid they would destroy you. Go to the end house of the village, that is the only place where there are no bugs."

I was only too thankful to follow her advice, and I sought out the end cottage of this long village — the name of the village, by the way was Zerakhimy. Here the mistress was for some reason, on the roof, and her skirt and petticoat were pulled right up as far as they would go and tied up underneath her arms. We had a short conversation in shouts, she speaking the broadest dialect of Vologda Russian I've ever heard. In fact her Russian was to mine as the broadest Cumberland Border Scotch is to Claphamese. But we understood one another, and I got a night's lodging, and there were no bugs — she had got rid of them somehow with borax. But still, the beetles!

Shall I have a beetley page ? There is so much that I have forborne to say about beetles, just to escape having beetles in every chapter. They have been my constant foes and companions. Let me write down here the sorrow that they gave me. Even at Ust-Yug, before having that jam-tart tea, I killed one hundred and three — I always count when I begin killing — and at night before going to bed, I killed one hundred and forty-three. I once used to collect beetles, but I have never been able to take up a cockroach in my hand. The idea of beetles crawling on me in my sleep is terrifying, and has given me many wakeful hours and realistic dreams. I have covered every portion of my body, limbs and face, and yet am sure hundreds have been on me in the night. There were hundreds of them, there were thousands. They swarmed on the walls and on the floors. They were in the wooden dishes, in the soup, in the bread, in the mushroom tub. They dropped from the table to the floor. I remember as I write, a room at a place called Annie in Kostroma Province. I was in a new cottage where, on the new white pine ceiling there were not hundreds, but thousands and tens of thousands, like the stars of a summer night with the milky way and all the constellations. Cockroaches they were, big and little, but mostly big, and they had long shivering antennae. I have seen them on the holy Ikons. I have seen earwigs on the Virgin's nose. But the Russian does not mind. I have even heard it said that a house that has no beetles is not quite proper. By the way, there is a perennial literary joke about cockroaches in bad cabbage soup. It began in Gogol, and the pages of Tchekof are fairly speckled with the theme . . .

When I remarked to my host that he seemed to have plenty of beetles, he took up my hat which I had left carelessly on the table, and shook at least a dozen out of it, and then added that it was a sign of a good harvest, and the bread-corn was ripening, "Glory be to God!"

He and his wife were a very naive and simple couple — childless and lonely, strange to say, and I evidently gave them a very happy evening telling of my travels. When I told them that London had six or seven millions of people, and was more than twice the size of Moscow and St Petersburg put together, they crossed themselves and asked God for mercy. The woman stared for some time without addressing a word to me, ejaculating hoarsely at intervals. "Oh Lord have mercy. Oh Lord have mercy." She was conceiving a notion that I was some very important person in disguise, a Grand Duke or a general, or a brother of the Tsar perhaps.

Next morning the man proposed to drive me nineteen versts for one rouble fifty (three shillings and sixpence) and I overheard his wife say, "Oh, be careful, don't ask him too much, don't bring any unhappiness down upon us."

After a while I said to the man:

"You know the word 'certificate'?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, I have a certificate from the Governor of Archangel."

"There, you see," said his wife.

"And I can have the Zemsky horses at three copecks a verst."

"Oh!"

"You see," said his wife. "That's the sort of person he is; you'd better be careful."

"So if I want to, I can do the journey for six greeven — one and fourpence."

The peasant reflected some minutes.

"Or I myself could take you for that money," he hazarded.

But I had no anxiety for any equipage, certainly not any that had to be paid for, and I signified my determination to walk.

Whereupon they felt very happy, and their doubts were cleared. "Come again, Stephan," said the man, holding my arm and endeavouring to kiss me, his wife meanwhile nudging him to remind him to be less familiar, "Come again, but give me a kiss before we part, on the lips, polna, full, full . . ." I always draw the line at being kissed. It would have been absurd to have been carted along, that fresh and sunny morning. I never felt more fit for walking, and had marched ten miles before eight o'clock, and turned neither to the right nor to the left, nor had I lingered by the way. I then came to the village of Mikhninsk, where stepping into a little cottage to get a pitcher of milk, I met a strange character.

A sickly looking youth was sitting in a chair, plaiting bark boots. At his feet were two babies playing with the bits of bark. Evidently the rest of the household were in the harvest fields. He asked me to sit down, and there I sat, waiting his pleasure. We did not s peak for ten minutes, and during that time I came to the conclusion that he was either the village genius or the village idiot. He was evidently of my own age, but thin and wretched, wearing a wisp of straw-coloured beard; his forehead was large and furrowy, and he had a pair of large shadowy eyes that at once marked him out as an unusual person.

So it turned out. He was a peasant member of the intelligentia, a consumptive, too weak to do field work, and having all his force and energy in his head. He broke the silence by asking if I had any books with me. Such a question was not the breaking of one silence, but of several silences. I looked at him in astonishment. What sort of books did he mean, detective stories, church stories, socialistic pamphlets?

"Anything, no matter what it is," he replied.

I handed him a Russian topographical journal — the magazine of the "Society for the Exploration of Northern Russia," and he received it eagerly.

"What will you find to read in that?" I asked He was thumbing the pages.

"The History of Pitch-boiling," said he," that is good. I want to know about that, I want to know about everything. We have a little circle in the village. This village is not like any other village hereabout : we concern ourselves with serious matters. We read together, we have even heard of London and England, give me something about England."

"What have you read about England?" He took from a shelf near the Ikons a dozen or so books and circulars, his little hoard of literature —

Kropotkin's "Field, Factory and Workshop," in Russian.

"The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith, also in Russian.

"The Diseases of Cows."

"Remedies against Drunkenness."

"The Human System."

Mueller's "Exercises."

"The Elements of Physiology," and one or two leaflets on the uses of medicine.

"You are a doctor," I suggested.

He smiled. "I cure," he said.

"But you can get no drugs hereabout."

"I boil the grasses," he replied.

We then had a conversation on England and the Protestant religion, and he showed himself to be strangely intellectual but extraordinarily eager and fanatical. He even said, "All religions amount to the same thing in the end," which shows how emancipated he was. But his greediness to talk and exchange ideas told me how famished he was for intellectual comradeship. Several times, when I proposed going, he came across to me and clung hold of my arm, saying:

"No, no, don't go yet; don't go, I entreat you; give up your pilgrimage and make your home here."

I did not accept the invitation, but stayed until the afternoon, when I went on to Levina. At Levina, women were sowing the winter rye in the track of the harrow, women with aprons full of grain who held with one hand and threw out with the other in rhythmic sweeps.

I passed on through several villages, and tried to find harbour for the night, but failed because all the inhabitants were in the fields. The succeeding day was to be a prazdnik, and therefore everyone was working late. At last, at Podvolotchia, fifty versts from Ust-yug, I met a sleepy old gaffer, who bade me welcome. Even whilst I waited for his other folk to come in, it had already become dark. I was now far out of the land of the white night, and what is more, the season had changed. I forget the first time I saw the moon after leaving the land of the midnight sun, but here she was beautiful and clear and round. I saw her rise into a dark sky made gentle by mist ; she was pacific. I went out into the road before going to bed. It was a wonderful night. The moon was just above us, and the pine - built village looked portentous, solemn. The two-storey houses and the church were gigantic. And even the little buildings and all the wooden carts and harvest implements obtained a grandeur in the new light, as if they had been wrought with a more ancient and original power than is manifested in these days.

Next morning it was raining. I had slept on a mattress, and had not been disturbed once in the night. I was therefore ready for walking, but the road looked uninviting. I went out to get some sugar for my tea, slipping from one door to another, and then when I had found an old dame with half a pound to spare, I returned; and I watched my hostess kneading a barley bannock with dried mushrooms, thereby preparing a peerog, a pie, though an English person would scarcely call it such. The sleepy old gaffer sat staring at her, and took snuff every ten minutes. He was the. dirtiest peasant I remember. Snuff-taking generally means dirtiness, and fortunately it is a rare habit. One interesting thing the old man told me, it was that tea-drinking, though at present so universal, is only a modern custom among the Russian peasants; and the samovar, though a national institution, was not heard of a hundred years ago. Then only rich persons drank tea, and the peasants did not even care for it. It was a court dish. Now, not to possess a samovar or to go without tea, is to be worse than a beggar. The woman then explained to me that it was impossible to eat rye bread, because it was a fast: the mushroom pie was a substitute; would Hike some? I had a little with my tea; it was what the Russians call "originalny no vsotaky vkusny," original, but all the same tasty. For my part, I prefer the fast dish to the ordinary.

I was asked to stay all day, but I did not look forward to a long dull day in a dirty izba, and, if the worst came to the worst, I had no objection to rain. I had a thick cloak and rubber overboots and a waterproof knapsack — why should I fear rain?

But it was a strange tramp. It rained all day without remission, and for twenty miles there was not a single human habitation. I had entered one of the largest forests in Russia — indeed Vologda Province is the most forested in Europe, it has more pines than even the province of Archangel. I passed out of the jurisdiction of the town of Ust-yug, and entered that of Nikolsk. Ust-yug is rich and small; Nikolsk is poor and vast — and the roads of the district of Nikolsk are perhaps the worst in the empire. It took half an hour to walk a mile on them. Splash, splash, up to the ankle, up to the knee, stuck, fixed, slipping, stumbling . . . the road was made up of young birch trees planted in the mud and ill-balanced. Treading on one end of one of these little trunks, one suddenly lifted up the other, which aimed mud like a catapult, oneself meanwhile sliding into the bog. Some of the logs floated: in parts where young rivers rushed across, they had frankly floated away and left a miry bed behind. They were broken, they rolled and slipped, they sank, they jumped — and from the indifferent heavens came the steady sulky wet.

Wet, wet. I found a hut in the forest and sat crouched under the roof waiting for the rain to stop, and I sang songs, but as if provoked by my merriment, light came into the sky, and it rained harder. And what a little sky there was, no view, no horizon — only in front of me stretched the long road like a vista of switchback railway.

I got out of the hut and walked three miles more, and then took rest and shelter in the forest itself under a bearded hoary fir, where the earth and moss was dry and crisp as if it had not rained for months. The branches of the trees met overhead in the blackness of an overhead London fog. I took off my cloak and hung it up to dry, and sat down on a pile of soft moss, and wrote letters to England, or cut shapes out of birch bark just to while away the time.

And the whole of this long wet solitary day, not a man passed me, and I heard not even, the tinkling of a cow-bell. I might have slept the whole night in the forest, but the idea of damp and of bears deterred me, and in the afternoon I braced myself together and took the road again. There was one way of avoiding the slough, that was, by walking in tight-rope style on the long trunks placed lengthwise to keep the lateral ones in order. Thus did I walk ten miles, and at length, after long expectation, came to Polovishensky Clearing, a patch of rusty grass and two fields of wretched rye as yet uncut, unripened. The forest stood around it like a leaguer; black, forbidding. One imagined that it held in leash wolves, who were ready at a word to rush at the few wretched izbas and destroy them and their human kind, so giving the forest back its own.

Here fortunately there was a Government Post-House, or I had looked for poor hospitality among such wretched peasants. For in Russia, as elsewhere, extreme poverty means extreme dirt. It was dark night when I opened the door and looked in — one never knocks in the country — and asked could I have a lodging for the night. There was a small company present. I asked for the samovar, for eggs, for peerog. It was my only meal since morning, and I felt I could do myself justice.

I remember little of my evening at Polovishensky beyond a little man to whom I made some remarks about the state of the road, and after everything I said he answered with the same phrase, "sovershenno pravilno — altogether correct. Later, a man began playing the balalaika, and the same man shouted in applause Brrravo! Brrravo! He pronounced the word in a way that suggested that a firework had just been let off, something like a rocket that hesitates a moment on a railing, and then in a flash, tears through the air into the sky.

In my note book I observe I wrote next day: "I slept last night in a mix up of human kind — but slept. . ."

The next day was as rainy, and I walked twenty or thirty versts through the forest to Svobodaita, where there is a broad clearing. The road thither is just a sluttish cart track, into which all the forest streams poured as if it were a river.

At Svobodaita all the village children came out and called, "Here comes a God-praying-one, Bogomoletz, here comes a pilgrim," and, of course, I easily obtained lodging for the love of God. There was one shop in the village, and I went to buy some things. The value of the goods I should put at five shillings for the lot. There was sugar, Ceylon tea, baranka biscuits, honey biscuits, cotton, there were rusty sickles, and some white bread three weeks old, which was offered at two pence a pound. It had come from Nikolsk, and was bought on special holidays. The moujiks didn't mind its staleness; they knew it was good wheaten bread, and the idea kept it fresh long after Nature had left it stale. The old crone who kept this shop added up eighteen and five in her head, and made it twenty.

I slept in a room with a big family. The babushka spread a sack on the floor for me, and though it was hard, it rested my tired limbs. The flies first appeared at this village. I had not been troubled by them before. Now they were going to vex me more and more. They bit me more effectively than any other insect, but then they were liot like English flies.

There were as many beetles as ever, and next morning a piece of bread, which I had left out by mistake, was turned into coral by the sharp holes they had bored into it.

I had much fun with the little children at this house, Nat-kow and Van-kow, toddling on the floor; I barking with great effect, and making them search for the dog, and creating much anxiety by frightening the cat. Nat-kow and Van-kow and father and mother were all clad in homespun linen clothes that the aged grandmother had woven for them at the loom. I much admired their everlasting jackets.

The sun came up and conquered the rain and dried up the mud, and I took the road, though with stiff limbs, and walked to the village of Gorodetz. Gorodetz is large enough to be called a town; it has moreover, a market place and three churches. There are many shops, and the peasants are rich. There are manufactured goods for sale, but they are all dear, since the railway is two hundred miles distant. There is an interesting black wooden church at Gorodetz, the shape of a steam roundabout, and beside it, exposed to wind and weather, are church bells on poles.

I looked over all the Gorodetz stalls for a pair of boots, but could find nothing to suit me. The two days on the log road had ruined my footgear, and as the sun dried everything this morning, I already began to feel new blisters caused by a breaking of the leather. They were Caucasian mountain boots made of wood and leather, and very comfortable as long as the wood remained unbroken. No Northern cobbler understood them or I would have had them mended.

"You'd better buy a pair of sapogi, high jack-boots," said a bootmaker, "and leave these with me, and I'll use them for going to and fro from the banya." I did not buy sapogi, for whoever went a pilgrimage in jack-boots? But I examined valenki, felt boots, such as Tolstoy recommended to vegetarians, and lapti, the plaited birch-bark boots. But I could not imagine myself comfortable in either, so I resolved to go barefoot for the time being, and hoped to obtain a pair of ordinary leather boots in the town of Nikolsk. At Liavlia we had all accustomed ourselves to walking barefoot, and besides, my feet were now well hardened by the tramping I had done. I became a bosiak, for that is what the peasant calls a barefooted tramp.

I did not go far this day. Outside Gorodetz I found a pleasant grassy bank by the side of the stream in a coign of the forest, and there I had a washing morning.

I washed out all my linen and spread it in the sun to dry, and whilst it was drying, I watched the clear fresh stream dance down in the sunlight over the pine roots. I had been feeling very disgusted with my tramp, especially with the last two days' mud and rain, but now I had found a green isle, a pleasant place, and I realised how good it was to have lived through, and to live.

Now once again the woods were behind me; there was an expanse of Nature, and the trees no longer hid everything from me. The new landscapes were very charming, diverse with sandy meadow, fresh flowing river, and dark forests shown on slopes of hills. My eyes looked out on Nature with the eagerness of one who has just risen from a sick-bed. The world was full of delightful summer freshness, rest and quietness.

I slept that night at the house of a retired ship's-carpenter, who had been to the war. He told me he had been in England three years ago — in Shanghai! Which after all, is not England. He was in the fleet that fouled the Hull fishermen. He told me everyone was drunk and mortally afraid—he himself had never seen the sea before.

The old sailor was a gentle greybeard. I had met him in the street, and he had evidently thought to use me as a shield. For presently in came his wife, a veritable Tartar. As we were in the dark I couldn't at first make out whether she was a man or a woman. She had a deep bass voice, she stamped and swore, smoked a cigarette, and wore high jack-boots and knickers. She might have been a gendarme from the way she rated the poor sailor. She was fifteen or twenty years younger than he, and not a Russian, but a Lett. The old man had picked her up at Riga, and I doubt whether she was a reputable character there.

She spoke Russian with a strong German accent, and her ragings filled the room, so that one might have thought oneself in a low Warsaw lodging-house. Poor old greybeard! he called me " sweetheart " every time he spoke to me, and I called him "Uncle." "Wouldn't you like some tea, sweetheart?" he asked.

Then the woman snubbed him, saying the samovar was drawing outside, and she threw away her cigarette and lighted another. By the match light I caught a glimpse of a nicely cut masculine face of an intellectual type. However, when the lamp was lit, it was clear that she was a woman. All through tea-time she kept up her angry raging, but now she turned from Uncle to God, and abused the Almighty right and left, now on the score of the weather, now about the crops, and at last on account of her stupid lazy old husband. She was evidently a Protestant. Uncle was Orthodox, and he had a round hundred of holy pictures on his walls, and he crossed himself religiously and asked God for mercy.

I slept in my own cloak on a sheepskin on the floor, but it was a night of restlessness. Next day I was up and away at four in the morning, and I crossed the Yug river by a plank to plank swinging bridge, a bridge made by the villagers by tying logs together with rope. Two people could not go abreast, and there was a roped handrail with which to balance oneself. I stood on the opposite bank of the river just at the dawning, and watched peasant women drive their cows into the water, prod them with sticks, and swear at them till they swam across. A grand sight it was, to see twenty head of cattle in mid-stream, their heads stretched up out of the water. When the cows had accomplished their swimming the women followed by the plank bridge.

That morning there was a heavy thunderstorm; I still walked barefoot. The villages were in such a state that it occurred to me there might well have been lifebelts on the railings. Russian life-belts are inscribed with the words, "throw this to a drowning man." I was forced to put my boots on again, and I climbed up hill and down hill on slippery red mud. In the villages I waded.

So through the long settlement of Plasievo on to Polonina, and there I threw away my leather boots and took to lapti. I stayed at the house of a man who took me for a Pole, a strayed "political," but who said he feared no man, and would harbour me. He made me a pair of birch-bark lapti, measuring my feet to give me a good fit. He sold me also a pair of portanki, or coarse . linen putties to wind round my legs. He had a great roll of birch bark in the kitchen, and he deftly cut it into strips and commenced plaiting, whilst his wife put me out a meal of pickled mushrooms and potatoes boiled in their skins.

It turned out however, that I did not continue my journey until next day, and then my host showed me how to put the lapti on, swathed my legs with the portanki, filled the boots with soft straw, stuffed my feet into them, and bound both boots and linen to my feet by means of thin rope. I felt myself a moujik. My legs were converted into bundles. Sitting at the table having tea, I felt as little control over my legs as Guy Fawkes on a barrow. But time came to move, and I put my pack on my shoulders and took my stick and left the izba. The peasant family looked at me with approval.

I did not, however, altogether approve of myself. I am accustomed to walk briskly, but now it was no longer possible to walk other than slowly. To run or jump was out of the question. I was thirty per cent. more Russian than I had ever been before. I was in Russian boots, and such boots have a low gear. I understood the slow march of the pilgrims, for now I entered into their own metre. Step by step forward, two miles an hour, steady, easy, perfectly uneager and patient . . . so the pilgrim goes to the shrine, and so I should have to go now henceforth — or I would throw the things away, and buy a pair of leather boots in Nikolsk! But I went all the rest of my journey in lapti, and even came into Moscow in them on the day I re-entered Western life.

The author's birch bark boots in which he tramped the latter part of the Journey

The whole of my first day in lapti, I only walked fifteen miles, and these at the slowest imaginable rate. Anyone walking at such a snail pace would attract ridicule in England. I enjoyed my walk however, and I reflected on the difference of the speed of life in England and in Russia. The increase in the facilities for travel, and for getting about quickly, have not increased our leisure time, our fallow time. How good for human kind in England and in the world, if all journeys were done on foot, and if for instance, a family going to the sea-side walked there, or went in a cart, and if John o' Groats and Land's End were famous monasteries, whither hundreds of thousands pilgrimaged every year.

I met this day a pilgrim just getting home after a twelve hundred miles tramp. He had set out even before the winter snows had melted, and now in mid-August, in two or three days he would be home. He showed me holy pictures that he had brought from the monastery of St.Seraphim, below Nizhni Novgorod, St.Seraphim kneeling on a column of air, and praying for the health of a young man who was sick. The picture signified that the young man had seen a vision of St Seraphim, his name-saint. Another picture showed the same saint sitting outside his hermitage, feeding a starving bear with bread. In the latter picture, St Seraphim himself was clothed in portanki and lapti.

In the evening I came to Petraovo, and there I met an ex-soldier in the street, and he invited me to his house for the night.