CHAPTER V
Peter was a light sleeper. Walking or driving past the palace at night was forbidden. As it was impossible to avoid all noise in the house during the day he slept on his yacht.
To-day when he lay down, he felt wretchedly tired. Possibly he had got up too early and worn himself out at the Dockyards. He yawned, stretched himself, closed his eyes, and was already beginning to fall asleep, when he started as if from sudden pain. It was the thought of his son Alexis. It never quite left him; but when he was quiet and by himself it began to assert itself with renewed vigour like a probed wound.
He tried to sleep, yet sleep would not come. Thoughts surged through his brain.
He had received a few days ago Tolstoi’s letter informing him that Alexis would on no consideration return. Would he really be driven to go to Italy himself, and begin a war with the Emperor and England, perhaps with the whole of Europe, now when he ought to be thinking of nothing save the termination of the war with Sweden and the establishment of peace? Why should the Lord punish him with such a son?
“Oh, heart of Absalom! who hatest all thy father’s work and wishest thine own father’s death,” he moaned pressing his head against his hands.
He remembered how his son had described him before the Emperor and the whole world as a malefactor, a tyrant, an atheist. How his son’s friends, the long-bearded priests and monks, called him Peter the Antichrist.
“Fools!” he thought with calm contempt. How could he have accomplished all he had without God’s help? And how could he help believing in God when God had always been with him, from his youngest days until this hour? Questioning his conscience as if he were his own confessor, he recalled his life.
Was it not God who had implanted in his heart the desire to learn? At sixteen he scarcely knew how to write; and could only do addition and subtraction sums with the greatest difficulty. But even then he already felt what afterwards he so clearly realised. “The salvation of Russia lies in knowledge. All other nations have adopted the policy of keeping Russia in ignorance and have prevented her acquiring knowledge, especially in military affairs, lest she should realise her own powers.” He decided to go abroad himself and learn. When this decision was known in Moscow, the Patriarch, Boyars, Tsaritsas and Princesses came to him, laid his son Alexis at his feet, wept, and with foreheads bowed to the floor implored him not to go to school to the foreigners; for the like had never happened in Russia before. The people too wept, and saw him off as if to his death. And yet he went, and something unheard of happened; the Tsar took into his hands and wielded an axe instead of a sceptre. “My rank is that of a mere scholar, and I need teachers. You cannot buy for money what you do yourself.” And God blessed his labours: a formidable army had been the outcome of his playing at soldiers, with what Sophia contemptuously termed—“grooms and riffraff”; the little toy boats in which he sailed on artificial lakes had led to a victorious fleet. His first contest with the Swedes was the defeat at Narva. “The whole action was like child’s play, without the least approach to military art. And now as I think it over, I consider it a dispensation of God, for when this misfortune befell us, necessity drove us from indolence to hard work, and made us apply ourselves to the study of military art night and day.” The defeat seemed hopeless. Charles XII went about boasting, “whips, and not swords, would have sufficed to have driven the Russian canaille not only from their own country, but out of the world.” If the Lord had not helped him then, surely he would have been lost!
There had been no copper for cannons. Peter melted down church bells. The monks threatened him with God’s punishment. But he knew God was with him. There were no horses; men harnessed themselves and dragged the new artillery “cast in tears.”
All was in a ferment like new wine. Outside the state war; within revolution, a mutiny in Astrakhan and Boulavinsk. Charles crossed the Vistula, the Niemen, and entered Grodno, two hours after Peter left it. Expecting day by day to see the Swedes advance towards Moscow or Petersburg, he reinforced both cities, and prepared them for siege. At the same time he was very ill, so ill that his life was despaired of. Again God intervened. Charles, contrary to all expectations and probabilities, stopped in his course, turned south-west and marched towards Small Russia. The mutiny subsided of itself. “The Lord had wonderfully quenched flame with flame, and showed us anew that all depends not on man’s will but God’s.”
Then came the first victories over the Swedes. At the battle of Lesnoy, having stationed Cossacks and Kalmucks with spears in the rear, he ordered them to mercilessly demolish all deserters, not excepting even the Tsar. They stood the whole day under fire, their ranks remained unbroken, they did not yield an inch; four times the guns became red hot with firing, four times the pouches and cartridges boxes had to be filled with cartridges. “Since I began to serve, I have not witnessed such play. We executed this dance well before the eyes of the hot-headed Charles. Henceforward the Swedes became more manageable.”
Poltava! Never in his whole life did he feel God’s help more than on that day. Again good luck, almost a miracle! On the eve Charles had been wounded by a Cossack’s stray shot. Again, quite at the beginning of the day of battle, a shell struck the king’s litter. The Swedes thinking Charles was killed, confusion ensued in their ranks. Peter looked at the flying Swedes and felt he was lifted on invisible wings; he knew the day of the Poltava battle was the day of Russia’s resurrection, and the radiant sun of that day the sun of the new Russia.
Now the existence of Petersburg is assured; henceforth it will be possible to sleep peacefully in Petersburg. This town, created in defiance of the elements, amid bogs and woods, “grows like a child in beauty,” “it is a holy land, a paradise of God.” Is it not also a great miracle, a sign of God’s favour towards him, which will not pass away but remain visible before the face of the coming generations?
And now, when everything seemed to be accomplished, it all falls. God has withdrawn, and abandoned him? Having granted him victories over external foes He strikes Peter in his very heart, in his own flesh and blood, in his son. His son’s most dreaded allies are not the foreign troops, but the armies of knaves, parasites and extortioners and other worthless folk which swarm in the Empire.
Peter judged how things would go after his death by the way they went during his last absence from Russia, when in the space of a couple of months all had begun to creak and stagger like some old vessel which had struck in a storm.
Enormous corruptions sprang into being. Ukase succeeded ukase in regard to bribery, the last always more severe than the preceding. Nearly every one of them began with the words: “Should any one defy this our last decree,” but it was generally followed up by another containing the same threats and the addition that it was the last.
At times his heart would sink in despair. He felt a terrible impotence. Alone against them all, like a great wild animal bitten to death by gnats and flies.
Realising he could do nothing by force, he resorted to cunning. He encouraged tale-bearing. He instituted a special order of informers. This started universal chicanery and slander. “The informers see nothing—do not attend to their business, but live like parasites, shielding one another, because they all work into each other’s hands.” Knaves denounce knaves, impeachers denounce impeachers, informers informers, and the arch informer himself appears to be the arch knave.
A loathsome abyss, a bottomless cesspool, stables of Augeas which no Hercules can cleanse. Foulness penetrates everywhere—earth becomes mud, or dissolves like the snow in spring. The ancient rot re-appears on the surface. A stench spreads all over Russia, such as rose from the Poltava battlefield which drove the army away, choked by the stench of innumerable corpses.
Russian hearts are dull because darkness reigns in their minds. They refuse the good for they recognise it not. The nobles and the simple folk are well represented by Jeremy and Thomas, two proverbial characters: “Jeremy does not teach; and Thomas knows nothing.” Laws are powerless in that state of things.
“Our understanding is dull, our hands unskilled, the people of our nation are heavy-minded,” said the old people to him.
Once a Dutch boatswain told him the old legend:—
“Some sailors noticed in the ocean an unknown island. They moored their vessel to it, landed and made a fire to cook their food. Suddenly the earth began to shake and sank; they narrowly escaped being drowned; what seemed to them an island was in reality a sleeping whale.”
Was all this new enlightenment of Russia a fire made on the back of a leviathan, the inert mass of a sleeping people?
Cursed labours of a Sisyphus, labour similar to that of the convicts on Rogerwick, who build a breakwater; no sooner does a storm rise than in one hour the labours of years lie destroyed; and again they build, and again it is destroyed, and so on without end.
“We all see,” an intelligent peasant once told him, “that you are a great sovereign and labour hard, but with little success, because helpers are wanting. You with the strength of ten men are pulling up while a million pull down hill! What can come of this?” “A burden, a terrible burden,” groaned Peter on his couch, anguished as if the weight of Russia lay on him alone.
“Wherefore hast thou afflicted Thy servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in Thy sight, that Thou layest the burden of all this people upon me? Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that Thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which Thou swearest unto their fathers? I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me. And if Thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favour in Thy sight; and let me not see my wretchedness!”
Suddenly he again remembered Alexis and felt that this terrible burden, the deadly inertia of Russia, was incarnate in Alexis alone, his own son.
At last by a supreme effort of will he once more gained mastery over himself, called his orderly, dressed and returned by boat to the palace, where senators accused of bribery and corruption were summoned to appear before him.