“Grandpa dead,” said all the children and moped.

But Anna felt very troubled. What was she to do with him, a man without a name, without a family, without a village? A man who had over five hundred roubles in his Bible! Poor Anna! Had she but had a little cunning she might have put by those five hundred roubles to be a little fortune for herself. Grandfather had died very suddenly or he would have told her to do so. Anna was simple enough to go and tell the police her story, and an official came, looked at the man, and took away the Bible, saying he would have it examined. In the Bible lay the precious notes! Then Anna bought white robes and took off Adam’s rags, and washed his body, and laid him upon some clean boards, and bought a cheap coffin, and hired a man to dig a grave, and she went and buried him, and put a little Ikon on his breast, and held a lighted candle over his tomb, and sang the thrice-holy hymn, “Holy, holy, holy,” and went home. Adam was no more; they were poor; the official never returned with the Bible; no one asked about the missing passport. But what the greedy official had not guessed, and what Adam had never divulged, was that in his rags, in one of his many deep pockets, was secreted another sum of money, a thousand roubles. This Anna found, and was wiser than before, having learnt from experience. To-day she keeps a little cookshop and is prosperous, and the peasants say that she, better than any of the wives of the village, knows how to make good soup.

Such was the story the tramp told me. He liked telling it, and now, as I have repeated it, I find the same personality in the friend of the woman and in my acquaintance. Surely Adam did not really die. Adam never really dies.

One other thing he said to me that remains; there are two Adams—the Adam before he tasted the fruit and the Adam after he had tasted. Most Russians retain their Eden happiness, but whenever one of them tastes of the Tree of Knowledge his old happiness is cursed; the time has come for him to leave Eden and seek the new happiness. Adam was the first modern man. The tramps have found the second Eden.

CHAPTER XXIX
THE BAPTIST CHAPEL

I HAVE continually come across Protestants in Russia. They are undoubtedly increasing in numbers very rapidly. Several times when I was out in the mountains I came across proselytising Baptists and Molokans. The Molokan is a sect of Protestant exclusively Russian, I think. They differ from orthodox peasants by their ethics. They hold it a sin to smoke or to drink, and they do not recognise the Ikons. Even in Lisitchansk there had been a Baptist family, and in Moscow I had found Lutherans.

M. Stolypin’s ukase marked the decease of Pan-Slavism, that policy summarised in the words—one Tsar, one Tongue, one Church. It was comparatively little noticed, this Emancipation Bill of Russia, but it will probably prove a more important concession to the forces of Democracy than any other fruit of the Revolutionary struggle. It began a new era: historians in the future will take it as a starting-point in the history of Russian freedom. Meanwhile, despite rumours to the contrary, Russia as a whole is as peaceful as Bedfordshire. The Revolutionary storm has passed away; the new issues of life and death germinate in silence. The flushed red fruit burst out, the seeds were scattered. To-day the seeds gather strength and grow and put forth shoots, and even the ordinary observer is aware of the beginning of a crop whose nature is sufficiently enigmatical. On another day there will be another harvest. And if Elizabethan Puritans meant ultimately the Whitehall gallows, one may ask apprehensively for the significance of the Puritanism that is springing into existence in the reign of Nicholas II.

I was talking to the pastor one evening shortly after I came.

“We increase, brother,” said he to me, “we increase. Three years ago there were only 120 of us and now we are 300; in three more years we shall be half a thousand, not less.”