The whole audience rose, and stood in absolute silence till some one gave out the first note. The hymn consists of only one line, three times repeated, and its only words are, “To their eternal memory.” Yet all the church services I have heard were frivolous compared to it. For it celebrated the martyrdom of men and women whom the worshippers had known, and whose danger they had shared. I do not know what it is that gives so profound a solemnity to Russian popular music, or how it comes that a Russian crowd produces such a deep volume of musical sound. Perhaps there is an unconscious influence from the old Church music, always so solemn and grave, so free from sentiment and tune. More likely the nature of both arises from the monotonous unhappiness of Russian life, the melancholy of long oppression, and the nearness of death from day to day; at all events, it must have a different origin from the comfortable and profane spirit that produces “A little bit off the top” or “The old bull and bush.”
When the hymn had been sung, we were definitely told that Father Gapon would not be present, but had sent a letter, which was read. It called upon the work-people to take courage again, and to set about rebuilding the unions and clubs which had been destroyed by the massacre. While the letter was being read, great excitement arose among the audience because police spies had been discovered among the teachers’ conference in the neighbouring hall. Spies, disguised as schoolmasters, disguised as women! Teachers are not a militant race; should not the hard-handed work-people flow over into the conference and protect the innocent instructors of the coming State? It is spies that drive men crazed with hatred, and even the reptile governments that use them shoot them. That very morning the post and telegraph clerks had proclaimed that they would never end their strike until the enormous system of spying into letters, newspapers, and telegrams had been abolished. Of all the methods by which a cowardly government can harass the people who feed it, none is more despicable than the entanglement of espionage with which it surrounds itself. But as to abolition, what would then become of all those swarms of censors, blackers-out, interpreters, letter-openers, secret police, cabdrivers, porters, and provocative agents who seek their meat from Government? Will not all these men struggle for existence like others, being human creatures, though no one would suppose so? Or who will pay the rent of all those houses, like that house beside the Moika Canal where muffled figures hang carelessly about the doors, and sledges stop for no apparent reason, and the men and women who come out have acquired the look of vultures?
But for the moment the Government which feeds the vultures was afraid for its own skin. The police and spies slunk out of the conference without compulsion, and in the workmen’s meeting the five-minutes’ speeches began. They went with that extraordinary dash and fire which appear to be the common heritage of nearly all Russian speakers. How they have managed to inherit such a power is one of the mysteries of this mysterious revolution. In a land where public speaking has usually been punished by exile or death, we find a whole race of orators. Carlyle used to speak of a “great dumb Russia” with admiration, and foretell a strange time when Russia found her voice. That autumn she had found her voice, and certainly the time was strange. One workman after another got up and said his brief say, without pause or hesitation, inspired by that passion of conviction which only unendurable wrong can give. A woman also spoke, with similar brevity and power.
The demands made in those little speeches of condensed flame and rushing words were for rights which English workmen have long ago won for themselves. The object of the meeting was to re-establish the eleven unions of workmen which Father Gapon had instituted before the massacre of last January. Such unions were hardly to be distinguished from the trade unions of our country, and there was nothing in the least Utopian or savage about the Gapon programme. His followers refused even to call themselves a party. They had no newspaper as their organ. The Word (Slovo), which had once most befriended them, had lately gone over completely to the reaction. One of the most applauded speakers at that morning’s meeting denounced the leaders who urged the workmen to organize themselves into armed bands, whereas knowledge, he said, must come before arms, and not battalions but unions must be organized. Only one other purpose remained before the meeting—to demand complete amnesty for Father Gapon and all political offenders, especially for those who had taken on themselves the hateful task of political assassination in the time of darkness before freedom appeared.
From time to time a Social Democrat raised his arm and burst into a violent and threatening speech against the meeting. Once there was a deliberate attempt to empty the hall by a free fight, and the timid began edging out at the doors, chiefly under the belief that the yelling democrat who was denouncing the Gaponists was secretly an agent of the police. It may have been so, but I think he was only a Social Democrat insisting upon the creed by which alone the Marxists would drive the world to salvation. This Catholic kind of Social Democrat is often distinguished by a certain intolerance and pedantry which give a power and consistency such as religious Catholicism has, but form a barrier against wider sympathies and human freedom. “No salvation but by us” is their motto, and when an erring meeting cries them down, they feel defrauded of their right to redeem mankind.
On the other hand, a speaker who brought greetings from the Belgian Anarchists was politely listened to, though in the towns Russia has no Anarchist party now. Tolstoy bears an honoured name such as Rousseau bore in France, and his portrait is welcome in shop-windows; but among revolutionists his Anarchism is too gentle, and his Christianism too dull. Outside his own circle of disciples among the peasants, the flame of his spirit may kindle many, but his actual followers are few. When every one is remodelling the State with impassioned zeal, it seems hardly opportune to raise the question whether it is not better to have no State at all.
The speeches were over by about one, and then the meeting split up into groups to reorganize the unions. By an arrangement among one or two friends, we left the Salt Town separately, and gradually reassembled in a room above a little restaurant, some distance away. There we found Father Gapon himself hiding from the police, with a bottle of beer before him, and a few supporters at his side, rather obviously his inferiors. At the time he was not afraid of political arrest. Probably Durnovo himself would hardly have dared to strike at him then. But the danger was that he might be handed over to the Church as a renegade priest and imprisoned till death in some monastery for the good of his soul.
Outwardly there was little of the priest left about him then, unless it was his evident want of the commonplace kinds of knowledge that most people have. It was said that his stay in England that summer had changed him so much that his own friends could not recognize him, and he had been present at the meeting unobserved. But there was not really much difference, except that he had cut his hair and beard like ordinary men, and put on modern clothes instead of the survival of classical raiment which most European priests prefer. The transparent eyes of lightish brown, generally looking down or cast a little sideways—these were the same. So were the nose and thin face, the thin and delicately arched eyebrows, the thin hands and slight figure, the blood just showing under the pale brown skin—a rare thing in a Russian; and, indeed, both by name and race I believe he comes of a Dnieper Cossack or, some say, a Greek stock. If the Russian police cannot see these things, Scotland Yard could beat them. The outward look seemed to reveal at once a delicate and sensitive nature rather than strength of resolution or fire of purpose—one of those natures in which we easily detect the child still lying hid beneath the maturity of manhood. Something of a child’s craft, perhaps, lay there too, and of a woman’s methods, unwilling to be hated or despised even by the enemy. Equally childlike was that evident love of pleasure which made him rejoice in Paris and London as in glorious bazaars where the toys were all real things, and the dolls were living women, all made to squeak and shut their eyes.
Yet this was the man who struck the first blow at the heart of tyranny and made the old monster sprawl. At first, perhaps, his heart was simpler in its ignorance, and pleasure, being unknown, did not move him. But when theorists condemned him for opportunism, as they did daily, I remembered that he, at all events, knew the work-people in their daily life and not as an abstract proletariat, and that he, at all events, had accomplished something. It is much to be regretted, but it sometimes happens that the opportunist is the only man who does accomplish something.
The conversation naturally ran upon the meeting, and upon a danger to the movement that would very likely arise from the unbending attitude of the Social Democrats, who with impracticable pride hated a Social Revolutionary more than a Grand Duke, just as true Catholics enjoyed burning a Protestant more than a pagan. To Father Gapon the great danger before the country appeared to be the immense conflict between the Social Democrats, representing the town work-people, and the host of peasants, numbering over four-fifths of Russia’s population. But as he spoke, warning voices were heard, a danger appeared before us all, and suddenly the picturesque little figure had vanished, and the rest of us were drinking beer over a sleepy game of cards, till with a yawn we rose, and one by one made our way down the busy street.