We went upstairs; the air seemed a trifle less odorous there. Even there we agreed it was impossible to stay. About a hundred beggars were already asleep, and most of the rest were making themselves comfortable.
It was a large dark room, unventilated, and having all the windows sealed with putty, so that not the slightest draught of air came through. There were, of course, no fires in the room; it was heated by hot-water pipes. One would say the floor had not been cleaned since the day it was first used. It was rotten and broken and covered with black slime. The snow from the beggars’ boots melted in the warm room, as it had done every night this winter. Huge gnawn holes in the cornice showed where the rats had been. Yet in this den, on such a floor, human beings lay and slept! Pigs would have been housed better.
Yet in a gloomy corner opposite the entrance a little lamp burned before the sacred picture of Jesus. The Ikon stood there and looked upon the scene. It seemed to say, “God is here also, He does not disclaim even this; and in His sight even these are men and have souls.”
A Socialist government would make a difference in a place like this. The walls would be of white tiles and would shine like a station on the electric railway. There would be couches and mattresses, parqueted floors, electric light, baths, a reading-room next door, a free restaurant below. And there would be no Ikon. They would feel they didn’t need the sanction of God for what the reason approved.
I said this to Nicholas. He had bought a bottle of vodka, and was treating a man who said he was an ex-student and literary man.
“Shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves!” said the man.
“Nice mess they’d make of it,” said Nicholas. “They’d have to clean the beggars and dress them, and then shut up the pawnshops and the vodka shops, and then give them some work.”
“None of the beggars will do any work in the winter,” said the man; “there are workhouses already, but they won’t go there. There’s more fun on the streets, and then our work is more acceptable to God; we keep the people charitable. We stand outside taverns and theatres and tobacconists, and by our poverty remind the customers of God’s blessings. We restrain their self-indulgence.”
This was evidently an impossible line of argument. I asked him how the people came to be beggars. In his case it was vodka, and he had met scores of students reduced to the same plight. Most of the beggars were just tramp labourers, in the summer they would go to the country again; the women were the off-scourings of the streets. There were many more women beggars than men, but they died off more quickly. “The intelligentia of Moscow lead such a life,” said he. “The very Socialists, who want to make the place clean, lead dirty lives themselves. Look at the hundreds of girls shouting themselves deaf on the Tverskoe Boulevard, look at the students arm-in-arm with them, think of the average middle-class Russian’s life. He gorges himself with food, rots his mind with French novels, and openly confesses what women are to him.”
“We shall have to get rid of the reformers before we shall reform Russia,” said Nicholas, solemnly.