Very interesting to me were the houses of some of the British residents, and especially that of Mr. Baird, the head of the iron-works which bore his name, and which, at that time, were considered among the wonders of Russia. He was an interesting character. Noticing, among the three very large and handsome vases in his dining- room, the middle one made up of the bodies of three large eagles in oxidized silver with crowns of gold, I was told its history. When the Grand Duke Alexander —who afterward became the second emperor of that name—announced his intention of joining the St. Petersburg Yacht Club, a plan was immediately formed to provide a magnificent trophy and allow him to win it, and to this plan all the members of the club agreed except Baird. He at once said: ``No; if the grand duke's yacht can take it, let him have it; if not, let the best yacht win. If I can take it, I shall.'' It was hoped that he would think better of it, but when the day arrived, the other yachts having gradually fallen back, Mr. Baird continued the race with the grand duke and won. As a result he was for some years in disfavor with the high officials surrounding the Emperor—a disfavor that no doubt cost him vast sums; but he always asserted that he was glad he had insisted on his right.
On one occasion I was witness to a sad faux pas at his dinner-table. It was in the early days of the Crimean War, and an American gentleman who was present was so careless as to refer to Queen Victoria's proclamation against all who aided the enemy, which was clearly leveled at Mr. Baird and his iron-works. There was a scene at once. The ladies almost went into hysterics in deprecation of the position in which the proclamation had placed them. But Mr. Baird himself was quite equal to the occasion: in a very up-and-down way he said that he of course regretted being regarded as a traitor to his country, but that in the time of the alliance against the first Napoleon his father had been induced by the Russian government to establish works, and this not merely with the consent, but with the warm approval, of the British government; in consequence the establishment had taken contracts with the Russian government and now they must be executed; so far as he was concerned his conscience was entirely clear; his duty was plain, and he was going to do it.
On another occasion at his table there was a very good repartee. The subject of spiritualism having been brought up, some one told a story of a person who, having gone into an unfrequented garret of an old family residence, found that all the old clothing which had been stored there during many generations had descended from the shelves and hooks and had assumed kneeling postures about the floor. All of us heard the story with much solemnity, when good old Dr. Law, chaplain of the British church, broke the silence with the words, ``That must have been a family of very PIOUS HABITS.'' This of course broke the spell.
I should be sorry to have it thought that all my stay in the Russian capital was given up to official routine and social futilities. Fortunately for me, the social demands were not very heavy. The war in the Crimea, steadily going against Russia, threw a cloud over the court and city and reduced the number of entertainments to a minimum. This secured me, during the long winter evenings, much time for reading, and in addition to all the valuable treatises I could find on Russia, I went with care through an extensive course in modern history.
As to Russian matters, it was my good fortune to become intimately acquainted with Atkinson, the British traveler in Siberia. He had brought back many portfolios of sketches, and his charming wife had treasured up a great fund of anecdotes of people and adventure, so that I seemed for a time to know Siberia as if I had lived there. Then it was that I learned of the beauties and capabilities of its southern provinces. The Atkinsons had also brought back their only child, a son born on the Siberian steppe, a wonderfully bright youngster, whom they destined for the British navy. He bore a name which I fear may at times have proved a burden to him, for his father and mother were so delighted with the place in which he was born that they called him, after it, ``Alatow-Tam Chiboulak.''[10]
[10] Since writing the above, I have had the pleasure of receiving a letter from this gentleman, who has for some time held the responsible and interesting position of superintendent of public instruction in the Hawaiian Islands, his son, a graduate of the University of Michigan, having been Secretary of the Territory.
The general Russian life, as I thus saw it, while intensely interesting in many respects, was certainly not cheerful. Despite the frivolity dominant among the upper class and the fetishism controlling the lower classes, there was, especially in that period of calamity, a deep undertone of melancholy. Melancholy, indeed, is a marked characteristic of Russia, and, above all, of the peasantry. They seem sad even in their sports; their songs, almost without exception, are in the minor key; the whole atmosphere is apparently charged with vague dread of some calamity. Despite the suppression of most of the foreign journals, and the blotting out of page after page of the newspapers allowed to enter the empire, despite all that the secret police could do in repressing unfavorable comment, it became generally known that all was going wrong in the Crimea. News came of reverse after reverse: of the defeats of the Alma and Inkerman, and, as a climax, the loss of Sebastopol and the destruction of the Russian fleet. In the midst of it all, as is ever the case in Russian wars, came utter collapse in the commissariat department; everywhere one heard hints and finally detailed stories of scoundrelism in high places: of money which ought to have been appropriated to army supplies, but which had been expended at the gambling-tables of Homburg or in the Breda quarter at Paris.
Then it was that there was borne in upon me the conviction that Russia, powerful as she seems when viewed from the outside, is anything but strong when viewed from the inside. To say nothing of the thousand evident weaknesses resulting from autocracy,—the theory that one man, and he, generally, not one of the most highly endowed, can do the thinking for a hundred millions of people,—there was nowhere the slightest sign of any uprising of a great nation, as, for instance, of the French against Europe in 1792, of the Germans against France in 1813 and in 1870, of Italy against Austria in 1859 and afterward, and of the Americans in the Civil War of 1861. There were certainly many noble characters in Russia, and these must have felt deeply the condition of things; but there being no great middle class, and the lower class having been long kept in besotted ignorance, there seemed to be no force on which patriotism could take hold.
CHAPTER XXVII
AS ATTACH<E'> AND BEARER OF DESPATCHES
IN WAR-TIME—1855