The form of the recitations was almost invariably the parable. Some simple scene or fable was narrated, so harmless and childlike on the surface, that the enemy could find no handle for his rage, but inwardly it was charged with a significance like hidden flame. It is a form very natural to Russia, for it has grown out of the peasants’ folk-tale and proverb, and the perpetual danger of open expression has kept it alive. So in Gorky’s well-known parable, which was one of the many recited, the falcon soars in freedom through the sunlit air, and the snake remains coiled under the dark and chilly stones; but presently the falcon falls to the ground wounded and dying, while the snake congratulates himself upon the pleasing security of his own habits. Sometimes it was but a common scene of military life that was narrated; sometimes there came a brief outburst of triumph, “O sleepless nights, your fruits are seen at last!” And in one poem the part of women in Russia’s revolution was described almost without subterfuge.
In the souls of the audience only one thought lived. A suppressed excitement breathed throughout the hall. As the words of the speakers or singers rose and fell, the air trembled with the beat of all those minds in unison. There was no sound. Each great word was awaited as one awaits the notes of a solemn music. But it was not the words that were the greatest thing, it was not the performers, not the martyrs, nor even the audience. The greatest thing was the common faith of all. Under that outward scene of gleaming lights and varied personality one felt the secret touch of danger, and only in danger is the highest community to be found. One felt the deep and passionate glow of a life brief and insecure. One felt the spirit careless of everything—of joy, of passion, of life itself—of everything, but the one great cause—the only thing that counted, the soul of the crowd, the consciousness that breathed through the air and kept us still. The words ceased. There was a gasp while like one man the great assembly drew in its breath, and then with a rushing wind rose the tempest of applause. And yet it was not the words, nor even the speaker: it was the revolution that was adored.
To have a cause like that, to dwell with danger for the sake of it every day and night, to confront continually an enemy vital, pitiless, almost omnipotent, and execrable beyond words—what other life can compare to that, not only in grandeur, but in the satisfaction of intellect and courage and love and every human faculty? So tyranny brings its compensations.
At various intervals the audience trooped out from the hall, and walked up and down the great ante-rooms and passages provided in all Russian places of assembly. They greeted each other, they embraced, drank tea, and buzzed with conversation. The intervals lasted about three-quarters of an hour, and were of the highest interest to every one. The first ended just before midnight, the second about two. Whether the third ever ended I did not discover, for I was lost in memories of English audiences, upon whose faces a real expression begins to dawn soon after eleven—an expression of impatient anxiety whether they will catch the last ‘bus home to bed.
CHAPTER XV
A BLOODY ASSIZE
At the end of January I left St. Petersburg for Riga and the Baltic Provinces. As in other parts of Russia, the hopes of change had faded there, and the whole land lay prostrate under a bloodthirsty suppression, the more savage because it was encouraged by a double race hatred—the ancient feud of German, Russian, and Lett. As I came at sunrise through the fir forests and frozen heaths of Livonia, twenty-five men were being shot in cold blood among the sandhills beside the railway. They were tied together in a row by their feet and arms, and they fell together; but the firing was so bad that many were hardly hit at all, and had to be finished off at close quarters before they were heaped together into a trench already prepared for them. When I reached the town, the first thing I met was a party of twenty soldiers with fixed bayonets driving along four boys of eighteen or nineteen, who marched with their hands in the pockets of their long coats and their caps drawn low down over their pale and weary faces. They were being taken to the castle, where, I was told, a hundred more lay ready for killing, and would probably be slaughtered on the sandhills next morning. It was a fitting entrance for me into these once peaceful and civilized provinces, where now the bloody assize was raging.
The daily papers in Riga are, for the most part, German, but, for once, they were on the side of the Government and the Russian troops, because the leaders of the attempted revolution and the victims in its suppression were Letts. So they would not be likely to exaggerate the injustice and brutality of the assize. Yet each of them, above its tender German love-story or bit of art criticism, displayed columns of tabulated slaughter, and the whole local news of the three Baltic Provinces consisted of shootings, hangings, and floggings. The accounts were generally arranged by villages. For instance, from one number of the leading Riga paper I take the following reports, almost at random, out of the columns that appeared above an excellent appreciation of Ruskin’s “Præterita”—
“Tarwast.—The whole population of the village over the age of fifteen was brought before the court-martial to-day. Six were shot on the spot, including one woman; nine were flogged with strokes varying from twenty-five to two hundred.”
I need not say that two hundred strokes of a wooden rod delivered by soldiers on the naked body of either a woman or a man would mean almost certain death in its most terrible form.
“Semzel.—Yesterday six revolutionaries were shot, and four the day before. In the neighbouring parish of Lemberg twenty-four were flogged.