“How is Tolstoy?”
“I don’t know. Who is he? Is he a wrestler?” he replied.
Evidently the prophet was not unknown but in his own country.
This fair is a great chance to see the Russian peasant with his own produce. Visitors to Moscow in Lent are seldom shown this really interesting sight, much more humanly interesting than the Kremlin, the churches and museums. For Russia can boast of very little antiquity in her civilisation or her buildings. Much more interesting than her little past is her present.
At the fair all is Russian—even the oranges and lemons come from the groves of South Russia and the Caucasus. One gets another glimpse of the Russian harmony, the harmony of which the winter, the forests, the church, the peasants, the beggars are integral parts. This Russian life is actually organic, and all that is of it is necessarily akin to all. This picture is undiscordant. Happy, rude, contented Russia! All these old-world folk are like grown-up children playing shop with mudpies. What careless laughter rings about this snowy fair; what absurd wit and earthly humour! Crowds of jokes are about—mostly of the low Chaucerian kind. Indeed, one cannot help asking how much this fair has changed since the fourteenth century. Nature has turned out mushrooms, cranberries, crab-apples, oranges, honey, Russian men and women in just about the same cast as she does to-day—and probably even the hand-made chess-men differed little from these on sale now. The world does not change very much.
CHAPTER X
DEPARTURE FROM MOSCOW
ALL the winter I had been in correspondence with Kharkov in connection with my lost luggage. Early in April I received a notification that the box had been found. The Customs House then sent me in a bill of charges, so much for every day the box had remained in their possession. The railway and Customs made two pounds profit out of the loss of my box; they actually charged me for the loss! So slowly, moreover, did the business go forward that it seemed to me I should not recover my property before I left Moscow. Even after they received the money they seemed in no hurry to proceed. But one day I did actually go out to a goods station and get my box into a sledge and take it home. The end was sudden, so sudden that I could not help laughing at the contrast. A carter took me down into a dark cellar to identify the box, and the said box, high up among large packing-cases, was identified. In its transit from that high position to terra firma it managed to displace a quarter of a ton case, which came down with a crash like thunder. We were both knocked down, and both very badly bruised, though I think the carter came off second best; a stream of blood was pouring down his face. “Oh, Lord God!” I heard him exclaim. He was looking at the Ikon in the room; it sounded as if he was swearing at it.
“Any limbs broken?” said he.
“No.”