He bawled this speech at the top of his voice and shook his abundant black hair. His name, as I learnt afterwards, was Lavrenti Cham Khotadze; he was a handsome man, tall and strong, with red face and flashing eyes; his dense black eyebrows were too near together, so that when he was excited he looked mad. He had a fine long beard and a Roman nose. Over the wine cups he was certainly very uproarious, whatever he may have been in his church, and he emphasised his opinions by striking the table with his whole forearm. From head to foot he was enveloped in a dark blue cloak fastened with a belt at his middle.
A very dangerous political conversation ensued, and we drank a series of revolutionary toasts, one being that of the enemies of Russia—might they soon overcome her, and so let the Georgians gain possession of the Caucasus once more! They seemed to think that I might write to the English papers and fan up political animosity, and so help to bring about a European war, which would give the Tsar so much to do that the Caucasus would be enabled to gain its independence. They wished me to set the world on fire “to boil the Kaiser’s eggs,” as the saying is.
The rest of the party were well-dressed Georgians, but they did not enter into the conversation further than to confirm what the priest said. They were rather deficient in Russian. The priest himself a little discouraged the use of the Slavonic tongue, and made many malicious mistakes in his pronunciation when he used it himself. He constantly referred to the teacher who had called Georgian “sobatchy yasik”—dog’s language—and he said to me, “Did God mean all people to be alike, I ask you?”
I replied that I thought not.
“You are not a Mahometan,” asked one of the men; “you profess Jesus Christ; you are orthodox?”
I assented. “Orthodox” in Russia is as wide a term as “Christian.”
“Well,” said the priest, “God didn’t intend us all to speak the same tongue or He would have given all the same sort of faces. Now, look at my face, you can’t call it Russian.”
One of the party pulled a grey hair from the pope’s head, and there was much laughter. But one of the men said to me seriously:
“Don’t think that we are irreverent; we are only joking, we are so happy to have met you.”
This man was a carpenter and he put his personal case to me.