“And the Shah?” I asked. “Oh, they’ve caught him,” he replied. “He’ll come and live in the Caucasus also. It is much better for him.”
At this point he began to put his samovar up. It was nearing the daily prayer time. He went leisurely into his dwelling again and shut the windows, and passed into his inner room, where a square carpet lay.
Presently I heard the faint sound of his voice. I pictured him, as he was no doubt, kneeling on his carpet, praying in the words of his hand-written volumes to the one God—praying for the time of peace for Persia, and for all the world, and at the same time resigned and gentle before the Eternal Will.
So my acquaintance began with Ali Pasha. I think he was a noble man, and by far the most refined and courteous of the dwellers at the mill. I might almost add, though it would sound paradoxical, he was the most Christian. Nowadays surely all men are Christian, even Mahommedans, Buddhists and Confucians. It is only the name that they lack, the same religion is in all of them.
There was a woman near by who worked at a brewery and worked very hard, although she drank too much. Alimka and Fatima were her children, and they were so starved that they would rob the chickens of the waste food thrown in the yard. I noticed that Ali lent the woman money and helped her with the children. And when a Punch and Judy show came into the yard Ali subscribed more generously than anyone else so that the children might have a treat. And when I took little Jason under my care Ali backed me up. He even tried to rescue another bird and pass it on to me.
But he was very punctilious in the performance of the services of his own religion. Special praying men came in to pray for him at different times during the summer, and their loud keening sounded in my ears long after I had gone to bed. Then when the Feast of Ramazan came he lived the life of a hermit.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SORROWING MAN
A WOMAN in Vladikavkaz, being told she could not live long, grew so much in love with the idea of death that she ordered her coffin in advance, and lay in it in her bedroom and had a mock funeral, just to see what it felt like. That was an incident rather typical of the life of the intelligentia of the place. There are many nerveless, sad, despairing people there, people with no apparent means of happiness, people of morbid imagination and a will to be unhappy. All around them Nature has outdone herself with seductive charm; the sun flashes on the mountains, the myriad flowers smile in the valleys, the happy peasantry flood the town with jovial, laughing faces, but all in vain. “The fact is,” as I said to Ivan Savilief, “Adam was only the first modern man; the peasants are still living in their Edens. All your modern Adam and Eves have got to get saved somehow.” The Baptist, who, it must be remembered, was still a peasant, and by no means one of the educated classes, was very happy. And his notion was that the sad people needed to believe; they needed faith. They got as near to happiness as it was possible for them. They got as far as feet could carry them, but for the last gulf they needed wings.
Here is a story of a Russian man, one who failed to accomplish his happiness.