“English ships come to Kronstadt, and we load them. The men on board do not speak Russian, but we understand each other. For instance, we load, and their inspector comes. We call him ‘inspector’ (I forget the Russian word he used, but it was something like skipador); they call him the ‘Come on.’ The ‘Come on’ comes, and he says, ‘That’s no good’ (‘Niet dobrò’[14]); he means not right (nié horosho), and then we make it right. And when their sailors come, we ask them for matches. When we have food, what we call coshevar, they call it ‘all right.’ And when we finish work, what we call shabash (it means ‘all over’), they call ‘seven o’clock.’ They bring us matches that light on anything,” and here he produced a box of English matches and lit a dozen of them just to show. “When we are raggèd, they say, ‘No clothes, plenty vodka,’ and when we are well dressed, they say, ‘No plenty-vodka, plenty-clothes.’ Their vodka,” he added, “is very good.” Then followed an elaborate comparison of the wages and conditions of life of Russian and English workmen. Another man joined in, and being told about the correspondent, said: “I would like to read your writings, because we are a rough people and we read only the Pieterbourski Listok, which is, so to speak, a ‘black-gang’ (reactionary) newspaper. Heaven knows what is happening in Russia! They are hanging, shooting, and bayoneting everyone.” Then he went away. The dock labourer went on for hours talking about the “Come on,” the “All right,” and the “Seven o’clock.”
I went back to my berth and slept, till the dock labourer came and fetched me, and said that I had to see the soldiers. I went into the next compartment, and there were two soldiers; one was dressed up, that is to say he had put on spectacles and a pocket-handkerchief over his head, and was giving an exhibition of mimicry, of recruits crying as they left home, of mothers-in-law, and other stock jokes. It was funny, and it ended in general singing. A sailor came to look on. He was a non-commissioned officer, and he told me in great detail how a meeting at Sveaborg had been put down. He said that the loyal sailors had been given 150 roubles (£15) apiece to fight. I think he must have been exaggerating. At the same time he expressed no sympathy with the mutineers. He said that rights were all very well for countries such as Finland. But in Russia they only meant disorder, and as long as the disorder lasted, Russia would be a feeble country. He had much wanted to go to the war, but he had not been able to. In fact, he was thoroughly loyal and bien pensant.
We arrived at Vologda Station some time in the evening. The station was crowded with peasants. While I was watching the crowd, a drunken peasant entered and asked everybody to give him ten kopecks. Then he caught sight of me, and said that he was quite certain I would give him ten kopecks. I did, and he danced a kind of wild dance and finally collapsed on the floor. A man was watching these proceedings, a fairly respectably dressed man in a pea-jacket. He began to talk to me, and said that he had just come back from Manchuria, where he had been employed at Mukden Station. “In spite of which,” he added, “I have not yet received a medal.” I said that I had been in Manchuria. He said he lived twenty versts up the line, and came to the station to look at the people—it was so amusing. “Have you any acquaintances here?” he asked. I said, “No.” “Then let us go and have tea.” I was willing, and we went to the tea-shop, which was exactly opposite the station. “Here,” said the man, “we will talk of what was, of what is, and of what is to be.” As we were walking in, a policeman who was standing by the door whispered in my ear: “I shouldn’t go in there with that gentleman.” “Why?” I asked. “Well, he’s not quite reliable,” he answered in the softest of whispers. “How?” I asked. “Well, he killed a man yesterday and then robbed him,” said the policeman. I hurriedly expressed my regret to my new acquaintance, and said that I must at all costs return to the station. “The policeman has been lying to you,” said the man. “It’s a lie; it’s only because I haven’t got a passport.” (This was not exactly a recommendation in itself.) I went into the first-class waiting-room. The man came and sat down next to me, and now that I examined his face I saw that he had the expression and the stamp of countenance of a born thief. One of the waiters came and told him to go, and he flatly refused, and the waiter made a low bow to him. Then, gently but firmly, I advised him to go away, as it might lead to trouble. He finally said: “All right, but we shall meet in the train, in liberty.” He went away, but he sent an accomplice, who stood behind my chair. He, too, had the expression of a thief.
After waiting for several hours I approached the train for Yaroslav. Just as I was getting in, a small boy came up to me and said in a whisper: “The policeman sent me to tell you that the man is a well-known thief, that he robs people every day, and that he gets into the train, even into the first-class carriages, and robs people, and he is after you now.” I entered a first-class carriage and told the guard there was a thief about. I had not been there long before the accomplice arrived and began walking up and down the corridor. But the guard, I am happy to say, turned him out instantly, and I saw nothing more of the thief or of his accomplice.
A railway company director, or rather a man who was arranging the purchase of a line, got into the carriage and began at once to harangue me about the Government and say that the way in which it had changed the election law was a piece of insolence and would only make everybody more radical. Then he told me that life in Yaroslav was simply intolerable, because all newspapers and all free discussion had been stopped. We arrived at Yaroslav on the next morning. I went on to Moscow in a third-class carriage. The train stopped at every small station, and there was a constant flow of people coming and going. An old gentleman of the middle class sat opposite to me for a time, and read a newspaper in an audible whisper. Whenever he came to some doings of the Government he said: “Disgraceful, disgraceful!”
Later on in the day a boy of seventeen got into the train. He carried a large box. I was reading a book by Gogol, and had put it down for a moment on the seat. He took it up and said: “I am very fond of reading books.” I asked him how he had learnt. He said he had been at school for one year, and had then learnt at home. He could not stay at school as he was the only son, his father was dead, and he had to look after his small sisters; he was a stone quarrier, and life was very hard. He loved reading. In winter the mouzhiks came to him and he read aloud to them. His favourite book was called Ivan Mazeppa. What that work may be, I did not know. I gave him my Gogol. I have never seen anyone so pleased. He began to read it—at the end—then and there, and said it would last for several evenings. When he got out he said: “I will never forget you,” and he took out of his pocket a lot of sunflower seeds and gave them to me. As we neared Moscow the carriage was fuller and fuller. Two peasants had no railway tickets. One of them asked me if I would lend my ticket to him to show the guard. I said: “With pleasure; only, my ticket is for Moscow and yours is for the next station.” When the guard came, one of the peasants gave him 30 kopecks. “That is very little for two of you,” the guard said. They had been travelling nearly all the way from Yaroslav; but finally he let them be. We arrived at Moscow in the evening.
I travelled back to St. Petersburg in a third-class carriage, which was full of recruits. “They sang all the way” (as Jowett said about the poetical but undisciplined undergraduate[15] whom he drove home from a dinner-party) “bad songs—very bad songs.” Not quite all the way, however. They were like schoolboys going to a private school, putting on extra assurance. In the railway carriage there was a Zemstvo “Feldsher,” a hospital orderly, who had been through the war. We talked of the war. While we were discussing it, a young peasant who was in the carriage joined in, and startled us by his sensible and acute observations on the war. “There’s a man,” said the Feldsher to me, “who has a good head. It is sheer natural cleverness. That’s what a lot of the young peasants are like. And what will become of him? If only these people could be developed!” A little later I began to read a small book. “Are you reading Lermontov?” asked the Feldsher, “No,” I answered, “I am reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” “Ah,” he said, with a sigh, “you are evidently not a married man, but perhaps you are engaged to be married?”
Just as I was preparing to sleep, the guard came and began to search the corners and the floor of the carriage with a candle, as if he had dropped a pin or a penny. He explained that there were twelve recruits in the carriage, but that an extra man had got in with them and that he was looking for him. He then went away. One of the recruits explained to me that the man was under one of the seats, and hidden by boxes, as he wished to go to St. Petersburg without a ticket. I went to sleep. But the guard came back and turned me carefully over to see if I was the missing man. Then he began to look again in the most unlikely places for a man to be hid. He gave up the search twice, but the hidden man could not resist putting out his head to see what was happening, and before he could get it back the guard coming in at that moment caught sight of him. The man was turned out, but he got into the train again, and the next morning it was discovered that he had stolen one of the recruits’ boxes and some article of property from nearly everybody in the carriage, including hats and coats. This he had done while the recruits slept, for when they stopped singing and went to sleep they slept soundly. Later in the night, a huge and old peasant entered the train and crept under the seat opposite to me. The guard did not notice him, and after the tickets had been collected from the passengers who got in at that station, the man crept out, and lay down on one of the higher berths. He remained there nearly all night, but at one of the stations the guard said: “Is there no one for this station?” and looking at the peasant, added: “Where are you for, old man?” The man mumbled in pretended sleep. “Where is your ticket?” asked the guard. No answer. At last when the question had been repeated thrice, he said: “I am a poor, little, old man.” “You haven’t got a ticket,” said the guard. “Get out, devil; you might lose me my place—and I a married man. Devil! Devil! Devil!” “It is on account of my extreme poverty,” said the old man, and he was turned out.
The next morning I had a long conversation with the young peasant who, the Feldsher said, had brains. I asked him, among other things, if he thought the Government was right in relying on what it called the innate and fundamental conservatism of the great mass of the Russian people. “If the Government says that the whole of the peasantry is Conservative, it lies,” he said. “It is true that a great part of the people is rough—uneducated—but there are many who know. The war opened our eyes. You see, the Russian peasant is accustomed to be told by the authorities that a glass (taking up my tumbler) is a man, and to believe it. The Army is on the side of the Government. At least it is really on the side of the people, but it feels helpless. The Government will never yield except to force. There is nothing to be done.” We talked of other things. The recruits joined in the conversation, and I offered a small meat patty to one of them, who said: “No, thank you. I am greatly satisfied with you as it is, without your giving me a meat patty.”