§15
While I am on this subject, I shall tell here the story of what happened eighteen months later to a bailiff of my father’s. Though a peasant, he was a man of intelligence and experience; he had several teams of his own which he hired out, and he served for twenty years as bailiff of a small detached village.
In the year which I spent at Vladímir, he was asked by the people of a neighbouring village to supply a substitute as a recruit for the Army; and he turned up in the town with the future defender of his country at the end of a rope. He seemed perfectly self-confident and sure of success.
“Yes, bátyushka,” he said to me, combing with his fingers his thick brown beard with some grey in it, “it all depends on how you manage these things. We put forward a lad two years ago, but he was a very poor miserable specimen, and the men were very much afraid that he would not do. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you must begin by collecting some money—the wheel won’t go round unless you grease it!’ So we had a talk together, and the village produced twenty-five gold pieces. I drove into the town, had a talk with the people in the Crown Court, and then went straight to the President’s house—a clever man, bátyushka, and an old acquaintance of mine. He had me taken into his study, where he was lying on the sofa with a bad leg. I put the facts before him. He laughed and said, ‘All right, all right! But you tell me how many of them you have brought with you; for I know what an old skin-flint you are.’ I put ten gold pieces on the table with a low bow. He took them up and played with them. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I’m not the only person who expects payment; have you brought any more?’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘we can go as far as ten more.’ ‘You can count for yourself,’ says he, ‘where they are to go to: the doctor will want a couple, and the inspector of recruits another couple, and the clerk—I don’t think more than three will be needed in that quarter; but you had better give me the lot, and I’ll try to arrange it for you.’”
“Well, did you give it?” I asked.
“Certainly I did; and the man was passed for the Army all right.”
Enlightened by this method of rounding off accounts, and attracted probably by the five gold pieces to whose ultimate destination he had made no allusion, the bailiff was sure of success this time also. But there is many a slip between the bribe and the palm that closes on it. Count Essen, an Imperial aide-de-camp, was sent to Vladímir to inspect the recruits. The bailiff, with his golden arguments in his pocket, found his way into the presence of the Count. But unfortunately the Count was no true Russian, but a son of the Baltic provinces which teach German devotion towards the Russian Tsar. He got angry, raised his voice, and, worse than all, rang his bell; in ran a secretary, and police-officers on the top of him. The bailiff, who had never dreamed of the existence of a man in uniform who would refuse a bribe, lost his head altogether; instead of holding his tongue, he swore by all his gods that he had never offered money, and wished that his eyes might fall out and he might die of thirst, if he had ever thought of such a thing. Helpless as a sheep, he was taken off to the police-station, where he probably repented of his folly in insulting a high officer by offering him so little.
Essen was not content with his own clear conscience nor with having given the man a fright. He probably wished to lay the axe to the tree of Russian corruption, to punish vice, and to make a salutary example. He therefore reported the bailiff’s nefarious attempt to the police, the Governor, and the Recruiting Office. The offender was put in prison and ordered to be tried. Thanks to the absurd law, which is equally severe on the honest man who gives a bribe and the official who pockets it, the affair looked bad, and I resolved at all costs to save the bailiff.
I went at once to the Governor, but he refused to interfere. The President and Councillors of the Criminal Court shook their heads: the aide-de-camp was interested in the case, and that frightened them. I went to Count Essen himself, and he was very gracious—he had no wish that the bailiff should suffer, but thought he needed a lesson: “Let him be tried and acquitted,” he said. When I repeated this to the inspector of police, he remarked: “The fact is, these gentlemen don’t understand business. If the Count had simply sent him to me, I should have warmed the fool’s back for walking into a river without asking if there was a ford; then I should have sent him about his business, and all parties would have been satisfied. But the court complicates matters.”
I have never forgotten what the Count said and what the inspector said: they expressed so neatly and clearly the view of justice entertained in the Russian Empire.