"IT WAS THE QUAINT CUSTOM AT FUNERALS IN FAIRVILLE TO FOLLOW MOURNERS IN LINE FROM THE GRAVE"
Once when her brass-toed shoe kicked his heel by the railroad,—along which, the littlest distance away, was the historic spot where Uncle John had got the bullet,—she said "Thank you" aloud.
She meant it for the peaches, for she had just remembered that it wasn't very polite not to thank people for things. But still he seemed not to see, not to hear; and directly, in this blind, groping way, as if he were falling to pieces somehow, there he was turning into Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store, where they only sold lady things.
Hope Carolina waited outside, openly and shamelessly watching to see what he was going to do. She never peeped secretly; that wouldn't be respectable.
In a minute she said, "Oh!" her eyes stretched wide with delighted wonder; for he was buying lady things—fairy lace, shimmering satin, narrow doll-baby ribbon, as lovely as heaven! When he went out, quickly, as if he were almost running, Hope Carolina still waited, wondering what Miss Sally and Miss Polly, the two old-maid sisters, who were Democrats and very nice people themselves, were going to do with the splendor which still lay upon the counter.
But they did not tell. They told something else—a thing so full of wonder, so dreadful, that, with another exclamation, one which drew four astonished maiden eyes to her suddenly blanched cheeks, the child took to her heels and fled as if pursued by a thousand terrors.
She thought of it all the time she was eating more hot corn-bread and sorghum at dinner—the thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other; the thing which seemed so new, so strange, so loud and awful, like the hellfire things Baptist ministers talked about.
Then, after supper, she fell asleep in the pineapple bed, still thinking of it; and all the next day, still playing funeral by the paling fence, she thought of it again. And that night, when once more she lay in the pineapple bed, there it was again, the strange loud thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other—said in a soft, crying way.
All at once she had a waked-up feeling; she sat bolt upright in bed and thought, "Comp'ny." There were voices coming across the passageway from the parlor. A light streamed, too; and when she stood faintly bathed in its glow, she saw that Mrs. Preston was there—Mrs. Preston, in the deep mourning she had vowed never to put off as long as her beloved State lay with her head in the dust. But something in her lap brightened it now, this shabby, soldier-widow black: a slim cross, divine with green and white, as daintily delicate, with its tremulous myrtle stars, as had been the lady things in Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store.
Mrs. Preston was saying that she was going to send it "anonymously." Then she asked Ma if she knew that he had had to attend to all the arrangements himself. "Even the dress," went on Mrs. Preston, crying a little; and Uncle John coughed in the deep, growly way gentlemen always cough when they are ashamed to cry themselves.
Then they all began talking about funerals, saying to each other they would like to go, but how could they? Uncle John saying at last, with more of the growly, coughy way, that no, no, they "couldn't flout him."
It would be more cruel, far, far more cruel, said Uncle John, than to stay away. Besides,—didn't the ladies know?—it was private. "Though," the speaker went on, his worn, somber face lighting up with something like a gleam of comfort, "I reckon that was to keep those other white hounds away as well as the rest of us."
Ma nodded. They weren't gentlemen-born, as he was, she sighed—"born to Southern best." And then, with a "Poor wretch—poor, proud, degraded wretch!" she handed out the thing she had been making—a white rosette as beautiful as any rose—and told Mrs. Preston to put it "there," touching the myrtle cross with fingers kissing-soft.
But Mrs. Preston only said back, "He's refused even the minister!" and seemed more unhappy, oh, mighty unhappy.
Hope Carolina gasped with the wonderment of it all. How funny it seemed, how dreadfully funny, that everybody had forgotten everything just because a child had gone up into the sky: Uncle John the bullet, and Mrs. Preston the lost paradise next door, and Ma the barbecue speeches that made niggers vote any which way—all, all that Radicals had ever done to them!
After a while one of the voices spoke again—whose, Hope Carolina could never tell:
"Think, there won't be a white face there!" And then, after a pause, another voice:
"No, not one!"
Hope Carolina jumped in bed, trembling.
Presently Mrs. Preston went, and then everybody else went to bed. But still Hope Carolina trembled. For that was exactly what Miss Polly and Miss Sally Graham had said—about the white face.
After a while she knew. It meant, oh, the mightiest, biggest disgrace on earth not to have white people at your funerals. They went to black funerals, even—good black funerals.
"Oh!" moaned Hope Carolina suddenly, loud enough for everybody to hear. But she cried silently. It was a way she had.
She cried again in the night, too—so loudly everybody did hear; but the dream mother who came and loved her, putting her head on the dear place, drove away all the lumps in her throat. After that the dark was still like the dear place, and like arms around her, too.
She had forgotten the dream mother when breakfast came; but she hadn't forgotten the other thing—the thing about the white face.
Ma said anxiously once to Uncle John, "Do you think she can be sick, brother?" and Uncle John shook his head, though he knew, too, of the tearful night.
Hope Carolina sat very still, not seeming to hear even when Ma announced that the funeral was at nine o'clock. She ate her breakfast like a ravenous cherub, smiling silently, mysteriously, whenever her mother looked at her with adoring eyes. Sometimes these dear, watching eyes, as blue as jewels, set wide apart under a low brow crowned with waved, satin-bright brown hair, filled slowly. But the darling child, who had certainly proved her excellent condition, only grinned back sweetly. All Hope Carolina was thinking of was that she had a hole—she was still wearing the soiled pink calico—and that her frilled white apron was mussed, and that shoe-strings wouldn't tie good. In the tarnished gilt-framed mirror behind Ma's lovely head she could see her own. That was all right; beautiful! She had doused it with water, the round baby poll, and plastered the short hair smooth, so that under this close, shining cap her apple cheeks seemed fresher than ever.
Ma kissed them in passing, going then swiftly, with her eyes closed tight lest she herself should see, to shut windows on that side of the house. Hope Carolina knew. Children mustn't look out of windows when funerals were going on. They mustn't play in the yard, either, till after they were over.
The big clock in the corner ticked, ticked, ticked, seeming to say always, "Hurry up, hurry up." And then—it was the longest, longest while afterward—Ma called from another room that Hopey (it was the foolish home name) could go and play in the yard now, for it was nine o'clock.
"Quite half-past, darling," went on the liquid Southern voice, still tremulous with emotion, still with the yearning anxiety for its own that the death of any child of kindred age brings to the mother breast. But there was no answer, and for a very good reason.
Down the long clay road which led from living and now pitying Fairville to the little cemetery where slept its quiet dead, Hope Carolina was running.
A mile and a half is a long way for a wee fat maiden to go when the August sun is beating down upon bare heads and necks, and red clay roads spread sun-baked ruts and furrows as sharp as knives. As many times as her years, Hope Carolina fell by the way; oftener, indeed. But the good folk in the scattered blind-closed houses along the way—who, too, a half-hour ago had whispered tremulously, "There won't be a white face"—saw no sign of tears.
"It's only Hope Carolina," called somebody, and other watchers laughed; for all knew the wandering ways of this wise and fearless child.
And so, stumbling, falling, struggling to her feet again,—wiping away blood once, even, with impatient hand,—on, on the little figure in pink and white had gone, a brave and storm-driven flower in the cruel road. And at last there were the shining crosses and columns of the dead. One inclosure, radiant with more magnolias and angel poplars, more stately and wonderful than all the rest, was the dear Preston plot.
The child, who had paused anxiously at the open gate, sighed, sighed with immense relief, to see it still without the sacrilege of Radical invasion. He hadn't taken that, too! Then, a step farther, she stopped again. The red clayey place he had taken had neither fence nor flowers. Only a tree grew near his place, a great solitary pine, with the low wailing of whose softly swaying needles singing was mingled.
A single person was singing—a single black person. She knew by the soft mellow roll of the voice, the sweet, oh, honey-sweet sound of the hymn words, which she herself had sung many times at the Baptist Sunday-school, where she had to go when there was no Episcopal minister. The great figure towering above the tiny, dusky group, with bare woolly head and working, apelike face uplifted to the sky, took on a new grandeur.
But only for a moment did she think of Pete, so marvelously changed. The hymn was ending—they were a long way past the dear line, Safe on his gentle breast.
Now they were moving, the little "crowd of mo'ners over yonder,"—all black it looked, house-servants mostly,—and quickly, with a breathless fear of being too late, she rushed forward and thrust her head between the singer and a sobbing petticoated figure beside him.
Then she drew back smiling, smiling divinely.
The grief-stricken eyes at the other side of the little grave—a grave heaped with Radical roses, sweet with one Democrat myrtle cross—had seen it, the white face.
"You go fust, honey, jus' behin' him," Pete whispered, as, trudging valiantly along with the rest, Hope Carolina passed out of the cemetery gate.
It was the quaint custom at funerals in Fairville, especially funerals with negroes, to follow mourners in line from the grave as well as to it. What had been begun through a lack of sidewalks had been continued as a ceremony of passionate respect.
Pete bent soft, wet, grateful eyes upon her, pushing her close behind the one carriage as he spoke—eyes as dear and tender as any old nigger eyes Hope Carolina had ever looked into. All at once she understood: Pete, bad Pete, loved the Radical judge.
She nodded comprehendingly, including all the other black faces—which seemed to look toward her, too, with a doglike gratitude—in her flashing smile.
"Of course!"
So it came to pass that Fairville's terrible prophecy was falsified. In his darkest hour the Radical Judge was not forsaken of all his race; still unconscious of fatigue and hurt in the cruel clay road, the little white Democrat, who had toiled this hard way before, led and redeemed the funeral procession of his child.
POVERTY AND DISCONTENT IN RUSSIA
BY GEORGE KENNAN
In an address delivered in New York City on the 14th of January, 1908, Paul Milyukov, historian, statesman, and leader of the Constitutional Democratic party in the third Russian Duma, after reviewing dispassionately, from a liberal point of view, the unsuccessful attempt at revolution in the great empire of the north, summed up, in the following words, his conclusions with regard to the present Russian situation:
"The social composition of the future Russia is now at stake; the fate of future centuries is now being determined"; but, "wherever we turn or look, we meet only with new trouble to come, nowhere with any hope for conciliation or social peace. This, I am afraid, is not the message that you expected from me, and I should be much happier myself if I could answer your wish for information with words of hope, and with the glad tidings that quiet and security have returned to Russia; but I am here to tell you the truth."
Americans who have not followed closely the sequence of events in Russia since October, 1905, may feel inclined to ask, "Why should Mr. Milyukov take such a pessimistic view of the future, when his country has not only a representative assembly, but an imperial guaranty of political freedom and 'real inviolability of personal rights'?" The answer is not far to seek. A representative assembly that has no power, and an imperial guaranty that affords no security, do not encourage hopeful anticipations. Russia has never had a representative assembly, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the words; and as for the imperial guaranty of political freedom, it was written in water.
Twenty-seven months ago, when Count Witte reported to Nicholas II. that Russia had "outgrown its governmental framework," and when the Czar himself, recognizing the necessity of "establishing civil liberty on unshakable foundations," directed his ministers to give the country political freedom and allow the Duma to control legislation, there seemed to be every reason for believing that the crisis had passed and that the people's fight for self-government had been won; but, unfortunately, the unstable Czar, who would run into any mold, but would not keep shape, did not adhere to his avowed purpose for a single week. In the words of a Russian peasant song:
The Czar promised lightly to go,
And made all his plans for departing;
Then he called for a chair,
And sat down right there,
To rest for a while before starting.
Not even so much as an attempt was made to carry the "freedom manifesto" into effect, and before the ink with which it was written had fairly had time to dry, the rejoicing people, who assembled with flags and mottos in the streets of the principal cities to celebrate the dawn of civil liberty, were attacked and forcibly dispersed by the police, and were then cruelly beaten or mercilessly slaughtered by adherents of a national monarchistic association, hostile to the manifesto, which called itself the "Union of True Russians."[27] According to the conservative estimate of Mr. Milyukov, these "true Russians," with the sympathy and coöperation of the police, killed or wounded no less than thirteen thousand other Russians, whom they regarded as not "true," in the very first week after the freedom manifesto was promulgated. One not familiar with Russian conditions might have supposed that the Czar would use all the force at his command to stop these murderous "pogroms" and to punish the police and the "true Russians" who were responsible for them; but he seems to have regarded them as convincing proof that all true Russians would rather have autocracy than freedom, and, instead of insisting upon obedience to his manifesto and punishing those who resorted to wholesale murder as a means of protesting against it, he not only allowed the slaughter to go on, but, a few months later, showed his sympathy with the "true Russians" by telegraphing to their president as follows:
"Let the Union of the Russian People serve as a trustworthy support. I am sure that all true Russians who love their country will unite still more closely, and, while steadily increasing their number, will help me to bring about the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."[28]
Disappointed at the Czar's failure to stand by his own manifesto, and exasperated by the murderous attacks of the Black Hundreds upon defenseless people in the streets, the Social Democrats, the Social Revolutionists, and the extreme opponents of the government generally resorted to a series of armed revolts, which finally culminated in the bloody barricade-fighting in the streets of Moscow in December, 1905. Taking alarm at these revolutionary outbreaks, and yielding to the reactionary pressure that was brought to bear upon him by the ultra-conservative wing of the court party, the Czar abandoned the reforms which he had declared to be the expression of his "inflexible will,"[29] and permitted his governors and governors-general to "put down sedition" in the old arbitrary way, with imprisonment, exile, the Cossack's whip and the hangman's noose.
Long before the meeting of the first Duma the freedom manifesto had become a dead letter; and in July, 1906, when Mr. Makarof, the Associate Minister of the Interior, was called before the Duma to explain the inconsistency between the "inflexible will" of the Czar, as expressed in the freedom manifesto, and the policy of the administration, as shown in a long series of arbitrary and oppressive acts of violence, he coolly said that while the freedom manifesto "laid down the fundamental principles of civil liberty in a general way," it had no real force, because it did not specifically repeal the laws relating to the subject that were already on the statute-books. He admitted that governors-general were still arresting without warrant, exiling without trial, suppressing newspapers without a hearing, and dispersing public meetings by an arbitrary exercise of discretionary power; but he maintained that in so doing they were only obeying imperial ukases which antedated the freedom manifesto and which that document had not abrogated. In all provinces, he said, where martial law had been declared, or where it might in future be declared, governors and governors-general were not bound by the academic statement of general principles in the October manifesto, but were free to exercise discretionary power under the provisions of certain earlier decrees relating to "reinforced and extraordinary defense." These decrees, until repealed, were the law of the land, and they authorized and sanctioned every administrative measure to which the interpellations related, freedom manifestos to the contrary notwithstanding.[30]
The Czar's abandonment of the principles set forth in the freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, put an end to what Mr. Milyukov has called "the ascending phase" of the Russian liberal movement. Count Witte, who had persuaded the Czar to sign the manifesto, was forced to retire from the Cabinet, and the new government, taking courage from the apparent loyalty of the army and the successful suppression of sporadic revolutionary outbreaks in various parts of the empire, returned gradually to the old policy of ruling by means of "administrative process," under the sanction of "exceptional" or "temporary" laws.
In July, 1906, when P. A. Stolypin was appointed Prime Minister, and when the first Duma was dissolved in order to prevent it from issuing an address to the people, the government abandoned even the pretense of acting in conformity with the principles laid down in the freedom manifesto, and boldly entered upon the policy of reaction and repression that it has ever since pursued. It now finds itself confronted by social and political problems of extraordinary difficulty and complexity, which are the natural and logical results of long-continued misgovernment or neglect. With the sympathetic coöperation of a loyal and united people, these problems might, perhaps be solved; but in the face of the almost universal discontent caused by the Czar's return to the old hateful policy of arbitrary coercion and restraint, it is almost impossible to solve them, or even to create the conditions upon which successful solution of them depends.
Among the most serious and threatening of these problems is that presented by the steady and progressive impoverishment of the people. Russian political economists are almost unanimously of opinion that the condition of the agricultural peasants has been growing steadily worse ever since the emancipation.[31] As early as 1871, the well-known political economist Prince Vassilchikof estimated that Russia had a proletariat which amounted to five per cent. of the whole peasant population. In 1881, ten years later, the researches of Orlof and other statisticians from the zemstvos showed that this proletariat had increased to fifteen per cent., and it is now asserted by competent authority that there are more than twenty million people in European Russia who are living from hand to mouth, that is, who possess no capital and have not land enough to afford them a proper allowance of daily bread.[32] Four years ago, the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the "black-soil" province of Voronezh reported that in that thickly populated and once fertile part of the empire the net profits of the peasants' lands barely sufficed to pay their direct taxes. Of the 28,295 families in the district, only 14,328 had land enough to supply them with the necessary amount of food, while 13,967 were chronically underfed. Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven families were unable to pay their taxes out of the net proceeds of their lands, even when they half starved themselves on a daily allowance of one pound and a third of rye flour per capita.[33] One might have expected the government to do something for the relief of a population suffering from such poverty as this, but, instead of aiding the sufferers, it punished the persons who called attention to the distress. One member of the Voronezh District Committee, Dr. Martinof, was exiled to the subarctic province of Archangel; two, Messrs. Shcherbin and Bunakof, were arrested and put under police surveillance; and two more, Messrs. Bashkevich and Pereleshin, were removed from their positions in the zemstvo and forbidden thenceforth to hold any office of trust in connection with public affairs.[34]
If the janitor of a tenement-house should notify the owner of the existence of a smoldering fire in the basement, and if the owner, instead of taking measures to extinguish the fire, should have the janitor locked up for giving information that might alarm the tenants and "unsettle their minds," we should regard such owner as an extremely irrational person, if not an out-and-out lunatic; and yet, this is the course that the Russian government has been pursuing for the past quarter of a century. Again and again it has closed statistical bureaus of the zemstvos, and in some cases has burned their statistics, simply because the carefully collected material showed the existence of a smoldering fire of popular distress and discontent in the basement of the Russian state. Now that the long-hidden fire has burst into a blaze of agrarian disorder, the government is trying to smother it with bureaucratic measures of relief, or to stamp it out with troops, military courts, and punitive expeditions; but the action comes too late. The economic distress which a quarter of a century ago was mainly confined to a few districts or provinces has now become almost universal. Long before the beginning of the recent agrarian disorders in the central provinces, a prominent Russian senator, who made an official tour of inspection and investigation in that part of the empire, described the condition of the peasants as follows:
"Among the indisputable evidences of progressive impoverishment among the peasants are the decreasing stocks of grain in the village storehouses, the deterioration of buildings, the exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of forests, the arrears of taxes, and the struggle of the people to migrate. In almost every village the penniless class is constantly growing, and, at the same time, there is a frightfully rapid increase in the number of families that are passing from comparative prosperity to poverty, and from poverty to a condition in which they have no assured means of support."
Scores if not hundreds of statements like this were made by the liberal provincial press, or by the district and provincial committees on agricultural needs; but, when the government paid any attention to them at all, it merely suspended or suppressed the newspapers for "manifesting a prejudicial tendency," or punished the committees for "presenting the condition of the people in too unfavorable a light."
