In one store kept by a Persian, I was immensely amused by the owner’s admiration for the beard of a German friend who was with me. It was too droll to see the solemn red-bearded merchant in his high conical hat of black felt tenderly stroking the astonished German’s beard between the palms of his hands. However, I believe my friend’s beard produced such an impression, that the carpets shown us were of the best, and the prices asked not too exorbitant.
Throughout the bazaar the streets are so extremely narrow that you could in many places spring from one house to another across the street. Everywhere the mud is more than ankle deep. At the street corners you are run over by rough carts dragged creaking drearily along by grim-looking buffaloes, and if you avoid this fate, a stalwart waterman—with bare brown legs and a round skullcap of white felt, with only one garment on, and that all open at the chest, displaying a skin of red copper colour, with a huge jar of terra-cotta on his shoulder filled with the precious fluid which he so seldom uses—will jostle and knock you down. Nor must you lose your temper; for to strike or roughly handle one of these gentry in their own domains would be to call down the wrath of the whole bazaar on your devoted head. Here they have no notion of fair play, and in a moment you would be hustled, beaten, stoned, and all as pitilessly as a welsher on an English racecourse; and if, half dead, you escaped without a knife between your ribs, you might indeed think yourself lucky.
The most interesting shops to me were the furriers, in which I saw an enormous number of lynxes’ skins, brought, so they said, from the Black Sea coast; and the armourers’ shops, in which with the roughest tools they executed most elaborate and beautiful handles in silver and black for blades of every quality and date.
Having purchased my costume and seen as much of the bazaar as I cared to, I returned to Tiflis proper, and here the streets were fast filling with the gymnasts returning from school. The difference between a Russian gymnast and an English schoolboy is as great as that between the climates in which they live. Everywhere the Russian gymnast has the same costume—a blue frock-coat with brass buttons and a quasi military-peaked cap. His whole bearing, however small he may be, is that of a little old man, half soldier, half scholar, and in all sedate and quite a man of the world. He has, as far as I have seen, no games; bear-fighting is unknown to him; that sterner kind of fighting, which in English schooldays generally takes place behind the chapel, is equally so; he wears gloves if he can afford it, he speaks French, and makes a poor imitation of French manners; he is nearly as much addicted to spectacles as a German student, is not the least bit shy in ladies’ society, and smokes with an easy grace that many a freshman might envy. Poor fellow, his precocious social qualities are dearly bought at the sacrifice of all the merry, untamed roughness of the English schoolboy.
Everywhere the streets teem with uniforms, from that of the gymnast of eight years old to that of the general of eighty. But be not alarmed, pacific sojourner in the streets of Tiflis! Many, nay most of these warlike-looking men are at least as peaceable civilians as yourself. That gorgeous apparel which you believe must cover the manly form of a dashing cavalry officer, is but the official dress of a telegraphist or an apothecary’s clerk. All those medals and orders adorn the breast, not of a veteran general, but of a well-fed, contented tailor. Why he got them he perhaps can explain to you. I have seen the phenomenon of a peaceable civilian’s breast blazing with brass plates and orders at a Governor’s reception, but I never could understand the cause of that phenomenon.
To atone for the warlike aspect of many of its well-fed citizens, Tiflis presents to you, in common with other towns in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, some strangely domestic specimens of the officer proper. Any day of the week you may meet on the boulevard, with sword clanking by his side and perhaps some fair dame with him, a young dragoon in full uniform, with a poultice tied round his neck, or a large white cloth bandaging his manly cheeks to cure the faceache. Such a facecloth we are accustomed to see round the scullery-maid’s red face in England, but in full uniform it seems a strange appendage to heroic youth.
The Russians are a hopeless puzzle to a foreigner. They stringently prohibit the importation of the most harmless foreign newspaper, erasing whole passages in any sent to residents amongst them by post; and yet Mr. Grenville Murray’s book, ‘Russians of To-day,’ is allowed to be sold, and has had such a rapid sale that I could only secure a second-hand Tauchnitz edition for love or money; and yet no one could lash Russian vices and foibles with a truer or more unsparing hand than the author of that extremely clever book. There is a contradiction of one kind or another in every phase of Russian life. The shopkeeper, who speaks half-a-dozen languages well, cannot tell what change to give you without the help of his abacus. Bred in a wild, rough country, with splendid opportunities for field-sports, and really with plenty of pluck and muscle to excel in them, the Russian gentleman cares little or nothing for them. In the south, which alone I know, few except the military men ride much, and when they do it is not for pleasure; still fewer skate well, and the best of those who skate at all are half Germans from Riga; there are no games to correspond to our cricket, football, or tennis. Of indoor amusements dancing and cards are the Alpha and Omega. Billiards, as played in Russia, resemble skittles as much as billiards. In spite of the gorgeous apparel of their priests, and the splendour of their ceremonials, few educated Russians believe in anything; though the peasant is as truly religious as any peasant in the world. The literature most read in Russia by ladies and idle men is that of P. de Kock, and French novelists like him.
The members of the upper middle class, if that means men of a certain position and wealth, can scarcely live without perfume and cosmetics; yet in travelling, if not at home, they wash their faces much as an elephant washes his, by drawing water into their mouth and then squirting it out into their hands, whence they transfer it to their faces. Many of them despise pocket-handkerchiefs, except as a means of conveying perfume about with them. All of them will meet a male acquaintance with the bow of a courtier of Louis XV., and spit on the carpet of a lady’s boudoir.
But meanwhile I have arrived at the office for the sale of ‘podorojnas’, or travelling tickets; and as I am in need of one for the journey to Lenkoran, to be commenced on the morrow, I enter. At the desk are two clerks in uniform, with a counting-board before them. I state what I want; and after ten minutes spent in referring to a book of fares, and wrangling and reckoning over the abacus, they tell me the charge is nine roubles, but suggest that perhaps I would like a return pass. ‘Well, if I did, what would that come to?’ More reasoning, and a hotter dispute than ever. At last the answer is arrived at, nineteen roubles ten copecks. Now, according to all preconceived ideas, it seems absurd that a return fare should cost more than twice the single fare, so I declined, and asked for a single. Here a consultation ensues, which results in my being told with many smiling apologies that they had made a slight mistake: the single pass would cost ten roubles. ‘All right,’ is my answer, ‘only give it me.’ Here some one else’s business intervenes, and the second clerk turns to have a chat and a cigarette with a friend who has wandered in, probably from some other office, in an absent way. Whilst these two shock-headed counter-jumpers are exchanging elaborate bows and grandiloquent speeches, I have to wait in sad disgust. At last, when the farewell bow has been performed, and the gentleman with the dirty white shirt-front and prison crop has had the honour of saluting his friend and wishing him good-day, clerk number one induces clerk number two to return to my ‘podorojna.’ Then they make a fourth calculation, going over all the old ground again, and discover with a fine smile and bow that they have made another slight mistake—the real sum should have been ten roubles fourteen copecks. To prevent further calculations I hand in a hundred-rouble note, and here follows another problem. How much change ought they to give me? Anxious to get away I solve the problem for them, and am met merely by an incredulous stare, while the beads on the abacus are rattled up and down harder than ever. At length they make it out eighty-nine roubles eighty-six copecks, and with a sigh of relief hand me ninety roubles, adding, as they turn to the small cash drawer, ‘Now we owe you eighty-six copecks.’ I am weak enough to set them right, and hand them one of the five-rouble notes back. In return for this they hand me a three-rouble note and two singles, leaving the error as bad as ever. Again I feel impelled by conscience to interfere in their interests; and apparently much against the grain get them at last to pay me only what they owe, or rather two copecks less, for try as I would nothing could induce them to be absolutely accurate.
Glad to get my pass at last, I leave the office, meekly wondering what a pass to Lenkoran really costs, and whether it would not be cheaper in the end for Russia to have better-educated employés in Government offices, even if she had to pay them a trifle more. I took the trouble to jot down this incident exactly as it happened at the time, because I thought I might be accused of overcolouring my picture of Russian official imbecility.