§5
This seems an opportunity to give some general account of the treatment shown to servants in our household.
Neither my father nor my uncle was specially tyrannical, at least in the way of corporal punishment. My uncle, being hot-tempered and impatient, was often rough and unjust to servants; but he thought so little about them and came in contact with them so seldom, that each side knew little of the other. My father wore them out by his fads: he could never pass over a look or a word or a movement without improving the occasion; and a Russian often resents this treatment more than blows or bad language.
Corporal punishment was almost unknown with us; and the two or three cases in which it was resorted to were so exceptional, that they formed the subject of conversation for whole months downstairs; it should also be said that the offences which provoked it were serious.
A commoner form of punishment was compulsory enlistment in the Army, which was intensely dreaded by all the young men-servants. They preferred to remain serfs, without family or kin, rather than carry the knapsack for twenty years. I was strongly affected by those horrible scenes: at the summons of the landowner, a file of military police would appear like thieves in the night and seize their victim without warning; the bailiff would explain that the master had given orders the night before for the man to be sent to the recruiting office; and then the victim, through his tears, tried to strike an attitude, while the women wept, and all the people gave him presents, and I too gave what I could, very likely a sixpenny necktie.
I remember too an occasion when a village elder spent some money due from peasants to their master, and my father ordered his beard to be shaved off, by way of punishment. This form of penalty puzzled me, but I was impressed by the man’s appearance: he was sixty years old, and he wept profusely, bowing to the ground and offering to repay the money and a hundred roubles more, if only he might escape the shame of losing his beard.
While my uncle lived with us, there were regularly about sixty servants belonging to the house, of whom nearly half were women; but the married women might give all their time to their own families; there were five or six house-maids always employed, and laundry-maids, but the latter never came upstairs. To these must be added the boys and girls who were being taught housework, which meant that they were learning to be lazy and tell lies and drink spirits.
As a feature of those times, it will not, I think, be superfluous to say something of the wages paid to servants. They got five roubles a month, afterwards raised to six, for board-wages; women got a rouble less, and children over ten half the amount. The servants clubbed together for their food, and made no complaint of insufficiency, which proves that food cost wonderfully little. The highest wages paid were 100 roubles a year; others got fifty, and some thirty. Boys under eighteen got no wages. Then our servants were supplied with clothes, overcoats, shirts, sheets, coverlets, towels, and mattresses of sail-cloth; the boys who got no wages received a sum of money for the bath-house and to pay the priest in Lent—purification of body and soul was thus provided for. Taking everything into account, a servant cost about 300 roubles a year; if we add his share of medical attendance and drugs and the articles of consumption which came in carts from the landlord’s estates in embarrassing amount, even then the figure will not be higher than 350 roubles. In Paris or London a servant costs four times as much.
Slave-owners generally reckon “insurance” among the privileges of their slaves, i.e., the wife and children are maintained by the master, and the slave himself, in old age, will get a bare pittance in some corner of the estate. Certainly this should be taken into account, but the value of it is considerably lessened by the constant fear of corporal punishment and the impossibility of rising higher in the social scale.
My own eyes have shown me beyond all doubt, how the horrible consciousness of their enslaved condition torments and poisons the existence of servants in Russia, how it oppresses and stupefies their minds. The peasants, especially those who pay obrók,[[19]] are less conscious of personal want of freedom; it is possible for them not to believe, to some extent, in their complete slavery. But in the other case, when a man sits all day on a dirty bench in the pantry, or stands at a table holding a plate, there is no possible room for doubt.
[19]. Obrók is money paid by a serf to his master in lieu of personal service; such a serf might carry on a trade or business of his own and was liable to no other burdens than the obrók.
There are, of course, people who enjoy this life as if it were their native element; people whose mind has never been aroused from slumber, who have acquired a taste for their occupation, and perform its duties with a kind of artistic satisfaction.