CHAPTER VII
CONCERNING MONSTERS AND ABORTIONS
“Since monsters or abortions are known to occur among human beings, animals and birds, and are in all countries collected as curiosities, a decree was issued some years ago that the aforesaid monstrosities should with us also be presented to public museums; but ignorant people try to conceal these things, thinking such deformities are caused by the devil, or by witchcraft and spells,—which is an impossibility, since God alone is the Creator of every living thing and not the devil, who has no dominion whatever over creatures.—Such monstrosities are the result of internal injury, or of the mother’s fear and imagination during the time of her pregnancy. There are many examples of children bearing the marks of whatever frightened their mothers. We renew this decree, so that without fail such abortions should be brought to the governors of each town, the bringer to receive payment for the same as follows: ten roubles for the body of a human prodigy, five for that of an animal, three for that of a bird; if alive, a hundred roubles for a human prodigy, fifteen for an animal, seven for a bird. And if they are exceptional more will be given. Those, who in spite of this decree, continue to conceal abortions must be reported, and when convicted will be fined a tenth of what their prodigy is worth and the money given to the informers. If the above-named deformities die, they shall be preserved in spirit, and if that is not within reach, double-distilled brandy or plain brandy, and securely sealed so as to prevent them putrefying; the brandy will be paid for out of a special fund.”
Peter had been very fond of his “Eminent dwarf” and had arranged a magnificent funeral for him.
First came thirty choristers walking two and two, all little boys, a tiny priest followed them, robed, and with a censer in his hand; he had been chosen from among all the Petersburg clergy for his short stature. Six small black horses covered with long black caparisons were drawing the small coffin on a toy carriage. Then solemnly, hand in hand, under the guidance of a diminutive master of ceremonies, who carried a huge staff, there walked twelve pairs of dwarfs, in long black mantles bordered with white crêpe, and the same number of female dwarfs,—all ranged according to their size, the smaller in front, the taller at the back, ranged like organ pipes. These dwarfs were humpbacked, fat-bellied, splay-mouthed, splay-footed, some like badger hounds and others more grim-looking than ludicrous. The procession was flanked on both sides by giant grenadiers and imperial guards, who bore in their hands burning torches and funeral tapers. One of the giants, dressed in a baby’s shirt, was conducted in leading strings by two of the tiniest dwarfs with long grey beards; another, swaddled like a newborn infant, was drawn in a carriage by six tame bears.
Last of all came the Tsar, accompanied by all his generals and senators. Dressed as a Dutch naval master-drummer, he marched along with an important air, beating the drum.
The procession, followed by the crowd, passed along the Nevsky Prospect, from the wooden bridge across the river Fontanna to the cemetery in the Jamskoy Quarter. People looked out of their windows, ran out of their houses, and seized by superstitious fears, did not know whether to cross themselves or to spit; while the foreigners were saying—“Such a procession can be seen nowhere else save in Russia!”
It was five o’clock in the afternoon. Darkness was swiftly setting in. Wet snow fell in large flakes. Along both sides of the Prospect the two rows of bare limes and the low roofs of the houses gleamed in their white shroud. The fog thickened. In the muddy yellow mist illumined by the dull red glare of the torches the absurd procession seemed a nightmare, a diabolical suggestion.
The crowd, though frightened, ran after it, splashing in the mud and whispering strange weird tales about the unclean spirits which were supposed to have taken up their abode in Petersburg.
Quite lately the night-watchman at the Troïtsa Church heard a noise in the nave, as if caused by hurried footsteps. And in the belfry too, somebody had been running up and down the ladder steps so heavily that the floors trembled, and when in the morning the clerk went to ring the bells, he saw that the ladder had been torn off and the bell rope coiled up.
“It is the devil himself,” urged some.
“Not the devil, but an evil spirit,” suggested others.
An old woman, who sold herrings on the Ochta, had herself seen the ghost at a spinning wheel, quite naked, lean, black, with a tiny head about the size of a thimble; you could not tell the body from a straw.
“Was it not the house-haunting spirit?” asked some one.
“House spirits don’t visit churches,” he was informed.
“Perhaps it was a stray one; they are liable to the same plague as cows and dogs. That’s why they play pranks.”
“It’s the spring. In spring the house spirits moult, they shed their old skin; that is the reason they rummage about.”
“Whether it be a house spirit, devil, or ghost, one thing is clear,” they all agreed, “the spirit was a bad one.”
In the muddy yellow mist illumined by the dull red flare of the torches, which cast monstrous shadows from the dwarfs, the procession itself seemed to be a manifestation of things evil.
More terrible tales yet went from mouth to mouth in the crowd as the dwarf’s funeral went by.
On the Finnish side of the river, a priest, for the performance of some mad act, had attired himself in a goat’s skin with horns, and this skin had at once stuck to him, and in this guise he was to be taken at night to execution. The son of a dragoon, Zwarikin, had sold his soul to the devil “who had appeared to him in the shape of a foreigner; the compact had been signed with blood.” In the Apothecary’s garden, the cemetery, thieves had opened a grave, broken the coffin and begun to drag out the body by his feet. They did not finish however, for they got frightened and ran away. In the morning, some one saw the feet sticking out of the grave; the news spread of the resurrection of the dead. In the Tartar Quarter, beyond the Crown works, an infant had been born with a cow-horn for a nose, and in the Mitny Dvor, a pig with a human face. “These are bad omens for the town where they happened.” In one place a cock with five legs had appeared. In Ládoga blood had rained from the sky. The earth had trembled and groaned; three suns had appeared.
“Some evil will happen, some evil,” they all repeated.
“Petersburg will perish—and not only Petersburg, but the whole world is coming to an end. The day of judgment! Antichrist!”
Frightened by these tales, a little boy, dragged along by his mother in the crowd, suddenly broke into sobs and screamed with fright. A woman in rags with a half crazy look, began shrieking in an inhuman voice. She was hurriedly taken to a neighbouring house. The Tsar did not dally with these hysterical women whom the people thought were possessed; he flogged the devil out of them. “The tail of the knout reaches further than the devil’s tail,” he used to remark when informed of the pranks of Satan.
Many of the senators and nobles showed terror in their faces.
Prior to the procession starting, Shafiroff had handed to the Tsar the letters of Tolstoi and the Tsarevitch, brought by messenger from Naples.
The Tsar had them unopened in his pocket; he probably did not want to read them in public. Shafiroff, however, from a short note received by him from Tolstoi knew already the amazing news; it spread like wildfire.
“The Tsarevitch is returning!”
“Peter Tolstoi, the Judas, has lured him! it is not the first he has led to perdition!”
“It is said the father has promised to marry him to Afrossinia!”
“Marry him? What next, fool! The block, not marriage, is in store for him.”
“And suppose the marriage comes off?”
“That marriage will be celebrated in the he-goat’s bog; the best man and match maker—the hatchet and block!”
“Fool! Fool! He is running blindfold to destruction.”
“The young ox is on the brink of the precipice.”
“He won’t keep his head on long!”
“No! He may be pardoned. He is the Tsar’s own son, not a stranger. Even the serpent does not devour her young. First a severe lesson, and then pardon.”
“It is too late to teach, he is no longer a child and adults don’t change.”
“They should have taught him while he was tall as a bench is wide; but now that he covers the whole length of it, it is too late!”
“Come into my mortar, and I’ll bray thee with my pestle, sweetheart! that will be his lesson!”
“They’ll soothe the child finely, he won’t make a sound; they’ll see to that!”
“And we, too, shall in all probability have a hot time.”
“A great calamity, brothers; even two minds are not enough to get one out of this scrape.”
Among the nobles, as among the people, all repeated.
“Evil will befall us! Evil will befall us!”
Meanwhile on tramped the Tsar, tramping, marching through the mud, beating the drum, drowning the melancholy funeral chants. The mist thickened, the fog grew denser. Everything seemed to lose its precision, dissolve, grow phantom-like, and the whole town, together with its people, houses and streets, as if it would lift in another instant, together with the fog, and vanish into thin air.