And ice, mast-high, came floating by
As green as emerald.”
As the sun set the whole sky became pink, and the distant mountains were like ghostly caverns of ice.
We arrived at eight. It was dark, and the other ice-breaker was starting on its return journey to the sound of military music.
About eleven o’clock we resumed our journey. The train was so full that it was impossible not only to get a seat in the first-or second-class, but at first it seemed doubtful whether we should obtain a place of any kind in the train. I jumped into a third-class carriage, which was at once invaded by a crowd of muzhik women and children. An official screamed ineffectually that the carriage was reserved for the military; upon which an angry muzhik, waving a huge loaf of bread (like an enormous truncheon), cried out, pointing to the seething, heterogeneous crowd: “Are we not military also—one and all of us reservists?” And they refused to move.
The confusion was incredible, and one man, by the vehement way in which he flung himself and his property on his wooden seat, broke it, and fell with a crash to the ground. The third-class carriages were formed in this way: the carriage was not divided into separate compartments, but was like a corridor carriage, with no partition and no doors between the carriage proper and the corridor. It was divided into three sections, each section consisting of six plank beds, three on each side of the window, and one placed above the other, forming three stories. There was besides this one tier of seats against and over the windows in the passage at right-angles to the regular seats. The occupant of each place had a right to the whole length of the seat, so that he could lie down at full length. I gave up my seat in the first carriage, as I had lost sight of my luggage and my servant, and I went in search of the guard. The guard found places for Brooke and myself in a carriage occupied mostly by soldiers. He told them to make room for us. It seemed difficult, but it was done. I was encamped on a plank at the top of the corridor part of the carriage. I remember being awakened the next morning by a scuffle. A party of Chinese coolies had invaded the train. They were drunk and they slobbered. The soldiers shouted: “Get out, Chinese.” They were bundled backwards and forwards, and rolled on to the platform outside the train, where they were allowed to settle. It was now, in this railway carriage, that I for the first time came into intimate contact with the Russian people, for in a third-class railway carriage the artificial barriers of life are broken down, and everyone treats everyone else as an equal. I was immensely interested. The soldiers began to get up. One of them, dressed in a scarlet shirt, stood against the window and said his prayers to the rising sun, crossing himself many times. A little later a stowaway arrived; he had no ticket, and the under-guard advised him to get under the seat during the visit of the ticket collector. This he did, and he stayed there until the visit of the ticket collector was over, and whenever a new visit was threatened, he hid again.
After the first day, I was offered a seat on the ground floor in the central division of the carriage, because I had a bad foot, and the fact was noticed. My immediate neighbours were Little Russians. They asked many questions: whether the English were orthodox; the price of food and live stock; the rate of wages in England; and they discussed foreign countries and foreign languages in general. One of them said French was the most difficult language, and Russian the easiest. The French were a clever people. “As clever as you?” I asked. “No,” they answered; “but when we say clever we mean nice.”
I gradually made the acquaintance of all the occupants of the compartment. They divided the day into what they called “occupation” and “relaxation.” Occupation meant doing something definite like reading or making a musical instrument—one man was making a violin—relaxation meant playing cards, doing card tricks, telling stories, or singing songs. In the evening a bearded soldier, a native of Tomsk, asked me to write down my name on a piece of paper, as he wished to mention in a letter home that he had seen an Englishman. He had never seen one before, but sailors had told him that Englishmen were easy to get on with, and clean—much cleaner than Russians. He told me his story, which was an extremely melancholy one. He had fallen asleep on sentry-go and had served a term of imprisonment, and had been deprived of civil rights. For the first time I came across the aching sadness one sometimes met with among Russians, an unutterable despair, a desperate, mute anguish. The conversation ended with an exchange of stories among the soldiers. One of them told me a story about a priest. He wondered whether I knew what a priest meant, and to make it plain he said: “A priest, you know, is a man who always lies.”
I asked the bearded man if he knew any stories. He at once sat down and began a fairy-tale called The Merchant’s Son. It took an hour and a half in the telling. Very often the men who in Russia told such stories could neither read nor write, but this man could read, though he had never read the story he told me in a book. It had been handed down to him by his parents, and to them by his grandparents, and so on, word for word, with no changes. This is probably how the Iliad was handed down to one generation after another. Later on I was told stories like this one by men who could neither read nor write. The story was full of dialogue and reiteration, and every character in it had its own epithet which recurred throughout the story, every time the character was mentioned, just as in Homer. When he had finished his story, he began another called Ivan the Little Fool. It began in this kind of way: “Once upon a time in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived a King and a Queen, who had three sons, all braver and brighter than pen can write or story can tell, and the third was called Ivan the Fool. The King spoke to them thus: ‘Take each of you an arrow, pull your bow-string taut, and shoot in different directions, and where the arrow falls there shall you find a wife.’ The eldest brother shot an arrow, and it fell on a palace just opposite the King’s daughters’ quarters; and the second son shot an arrow, and it fell opposite the red gate of the house where lived the lovely merchant’s daughter; and the third brother shot an arrow, and it fell in a muddy swamp and a frog caught it. And Ivan said: ‘How can I marry a frog? She is too small for me.’ And the King said to him: ‘Take her.’” And then the story went on for a long time, and in it Ivan the Fool was, of course, far more successful than his two elder brothers. Another soldier told me a version of the story of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury.
The ballad says that King John asked the Abbot three questions. The first one was how much he was worth; the second one how soon he could ride round the world; and the third question the Abbot had to answer was, what the King was thinking of. And the Abbot answered the third question by saying: “You think I’m the Abbot of Canterbury, but I am really only his shepherd in disguise.” The soldier told it in exactly the same way, except that the Abbot became a Patriarch, and King John the Tsar of Moscow, and the shepherd a miller. And when he had finished, he said: “The miller lives at Moscow and I have seen him.”