A student who was taken ill one morning died in the University hospital on the evening of the next day. We went to look at the body. It was emaciated as if by long illness, the eyes were sunk in their sockets, and the features were distorted. Near him lay his attendant who had caught the infection during the night.
We were told that the University was to be closed. The notice was read in our faculty by Denísov, the professor of technology; he was depressed and perhaps frightened; before the end of the next day he too was dead.
All the students collected in the great court of the University. There was something touching in that crowd of young men forced asunder by the fear of infection. All were excited, and there were many pale faces; many were thinking of relations and friends; we said good-bye to the scholars who were to remain behind in quarantine, and dispersed in small groups to our homes. There we were greeted by the stench of chloride of lime and vinegar, and submitted to a diet which, of itself and without chloride or cholera, was quite enough to cause an illness.
It is a strange fact, but this sad time is more solemn than sad in my recollection of it.
The aspect of Moscow was entirely changed. The city was animated beyond its wont by the feeling of a common life. There were fewer carriages in the streets; crowds stood at the crossings and spoke darkly of poisoners; ambulances, conveying the sick, moved along at a footpace, escorted by police; and people turned aside as the hearses went by. Bulletins were published twice a day. The city was surrounded by troops, and an unfortunate beadle was shot while trying to cross the river. These measures caused much excitement, and fear of disease conquered the fear of authority; the inhabitants protested; and meanwhile tidings followed tidings—that so-and-so had sickened and so-and-so was dead.
The Archbishop, Philaret, ordained a Day of Humiliation. At the same hour on the same day all the priests went in procession with banners round their parishes, while the terrified inhabitants came out of their houses and fell on their knees, weeping and praying that their sins might be forgiven; even the priests were moved by the solemnity of the occasion. Some of them marched to the Kremlin, where the Archbishop, surrounded by clerical dignitaries, knelt in the open air and prayed, “May this cup pass from us!”
§19
Philaret carried on a kind of opposition to Government, but why he did so I never could understand, unless it was to assert his own personality. He was an able and learned man, and a perfect master of the Russian language, which he spoke with a happy flavouring of Church-Slavonic; but all this gave him no right to be in opposition. The people disliked him and called him a freemason, because he was intimate with Prince A. N. Golitsyn and preached in Petersburg just when the Bible Society was in vogue there. The Synod forbade the use of his Catechism in the schools. But the clergy who were under his rule trembled before him.
Philaret knew how to put down the secular powers with great ingenuity and dexterity; his sermons breathed that vague Christian socialism to which Lacordaire and other far-sighted Roman Catholics owed their reputation. From the height of his episcopal pulpit, Philaret used to say that no man could be legally the mere instrument of another, and that an exchange of services was the only proper relation between human beings; and this he said in a country where half the population were slaves.
Speaking to a body of convicts who were leaving Moscow on their way to Siberia, he said, “Human law has condemned you and driven you forth; but the Church will not let you go; she wishes to address you once more, to pray for you once again, and to bless you before your journey.” Then, to comfort them, he added, “You, by your punishment, have got rid of your past, and a new life awaits you; but, among others” (and there were probably no others present except officials) “there are even greater sinners than you”; and he spoke of the penitent thief at the Crucifixion as an example for them.