A PRIVATE SLEDGE.
CHAPTER V
THE OPEN LAND
Under the waning moon, before the dawn of a December day, I drove out of the town of Toula in my tiny sledge—so close to the snow that the great black horse with his high yoke looked monstrous in the twilight. It is a typical Russian town, about a hundred miles south of Moscow, and as nearly as possible in the centre of the country. Two great roads cross each other there, and pass on to the points of the compass. Oldish churches, surrounded by a fortified wall, make a kind of Kremlin. Ancient houses conceal cavernous shops in the thickness of their own walls. Across a wooden bridge stands the Government small-arms factory, with workmen’s villages beyond. Strange figures in filthy rags moved up and down, beggars and shaggy peasants, high-school boys, and fur-capped girls. It has long been rather a revolutionary little town, and during the strike, ten days before, nineteen workmen had been shot upon the street.
In spite of solemn warnings, I had come out from the cities to see something of the country, having with difficulty induced a ruined German-Russian to venture with me as interpreter, for the sake of bread. As usual, the danger was nothing compared to the fear. What danger there was in the villages came from the police agents and officials, who hounded on the peasants with the cry that every stranger was a revolutionist conspiring against the Tsar to rob them of God and the land. For in those progressive days the police were dreading lest they should lose their livelihood of flogging and brutality at fifteen shillings a week.
My road went uphill to a high and bare plain, over which the snow was driven by the wind in showers so blinding that the horse kept turning round and appealing to us as reasonable beings to return. Horizon, road, and every mark were lost in whirling grey. But, after we had struggled on for two or three hours, the snow ceased to fall, and the wintry sun appeared low in the sky, making the distant ridges of the wide country shine with pale crimson or gleam like a far-off sea. Most of the land was bare and open ground, the snow blotting out the “stripes” where the peasants grew their crops in summer. But as we went further, lengths of forest came into view, looking brown at a distance, though generally made up of young silver birch, their silky white stems flecked with black. Birch woods supply the fuel of the country; next to food, the first necessity of the peasant’s life. There was some oak, but very little fir or pine. The birch in this region is the favourite, either because it grows best or burns best; and it is almost the only fuel in Moscow.
The peasants’ wooden sleighs passing to and fro bore loads of sawn birch, dragged by miserable little ponies, so caked with mire that their coats looked like a crocodile’s armour. At their side floundered the peasants in sheepskin jackets, with the wool side turned inwards. The jacket was gathered with a belt round the waist, and the skirt stuck out all round, reaching to the knees. Then came the high top-boots of felt or bast, rarely of leather. Men and women were not to be distinguished, except that, instead of a cap, the women usually wore a handkerchief or shawl knotted over head and ears. There was no special grace about the costume; but even the rich ladies of Russian cities find it hard to appear graceful when padded round with fur and wool six or seven inches deep. At the best, they can only appear rich.
Beside the road at one place stood a mouldering wooden inn (tractir), where passers-by could get thawed and have a glass of tea at three farthings. The owner of the estate, being something of a philanthropist or a teetotaller for others, had forbidden beer and spirits, so that the innkeeper was pale with anxiety how to pay his £4 rent, to say nothing of the taxes. Should he borrow, and go to ruin that way, or allow himself to be flogged to prove his poverty? I suggested that times were changing, and flogging might cease, but he only smiled with the politeness of superior knowledge. “No flogging, no taxes,” was to him the law of government.
In one corner hung three great icons, or holy pictures of the saints, glittering with tin and brass—very different in size and expense from the miniature icon which hangs in every bedroom of the wealthy Russian hotels, as a kind of apology to God, like our grace at a City dinner. Otherwise, there was no ornament in the house, except one of those ill-omened iron mugs, for which the crowd crushed each other to death on the coronation day of the present unhappy Tsar, nine years before, when the plain of Khodinsky Polé, on the north-west outskirts of Moscow, stood thick with suffocated peasants.
I next passed a great smelting works, newly finished, its fine furnaces and machinery never used, but already deserted and allowed to go to ruin. I could not discover whose money had been devoted to this characteristic fraud, or into whose pockets it had passed. Then came a few small gardens and summer residences built on the Crown land; for most of the land in that district is part of the Tsar’s vast estates, amounting to a fortieth part of the whole of European Russia, not counting the landed property of the Imperial family. But all the houses were deserted and empty, and one was burnt, and smouldered still.
Driving further on, I came to a large country house, where one of the ancient families of the Russian nobility was still living in the midst of its own land. I happened to be bringing them letters from friends, as the post was not working, and I found a house-party there, beguiling the winter day with much the same occupations as a house-party in England—doing embroidery, playing battledore with racquets and a soft ball, pushing a marble up a kind of bagatelle-board, examining their guns, and taking the dogs for walks in the woods. At a wandering luncheon of various courses, they maintained a quiet converse, marked by the gracious silliness, the “cheerful stoicism,” which is the justification of the aristocrat’s existence.