Through Libava pass the greater number of those who are going to America. Every ten days the Russo-Asiatsky Lloyd embarks a thousand or two thousand emigrants, every week vessels sail for London and Hull carrying Russians who have booked by the Cunard and the White Star and other lines. From Russia there pass over to America more colonists than from any other country in the world—upwards of 275,000 people every year. A great number of these are Jews and Poles and Lithuanians. For many years the number of actual Russians had been few; but in 1913 there were of Russians alone more than of any other nationality in the world. They are richer Russians these. They have money to show to the inspectors at Ellis Island; they have trunks full of clothes. They could not carry their burdens on their shoulders; they have come to the port in trains. They are not melancholy and dusty and bearded like the tramps, but bright-eyed, well dressed, so as to pass muster at the inspection. They are making a bold bid for new life; they have had the courage to pay for the new life with all the old; to take a jump in the dark, and trust God. They do not belong eternally to the road; and they are not carrying the cross on their backs, as are those melancholy tramps of Siberia.
The Siberian emigrants stop at many factories and mines and do a few days’ work, and are perchance shot down like dogs, at a place like the Lena gold-washings, or they settle in a fever-stricken swamp and are swept away by pestilence. But for the most part they come to no harm, dying eventually of old age, full of memories, poverty-stricken all their lives, and yet in a spiritual sense rich, confessing always that they were strangers, seeking something better than that they were leaving behind.
But they who go out at the western gate take their chance of strange destiny. They are cast off from Russia and from that understanding of life that Russia breathes. They go to be the most unfortunate class in America, the simplest and therefore the most exploited; they go to do work fitted better to black slaves; their young women, though they do not know it, are often already sold into infamy whilst they breathe the “air of freedom” on the steamer; and often the men, contracted in gangs to the Argentine and Brazil to work on railways and plantations, are simply living merchandise for which the labour agent who engages them receives a substantial premium. They go to work as Russians never worked before, and to receive double the wages they would get in Russia, and then to realise that money buys little or no extra happiness. Or they go to settle on the land and form a Russian community, as the Dukhobors have done in Canada, the Molokans in California, the Adventists in the Dakotas and in the backwoods of America, to forget that they are not in Russia, to be as much in debt to the agricultural machine manufacturers as they were in arrears in the payment of rent and taxes in the old country, to perish of starvation in lean years, to be persecuted by educational and sanitary officials, and to be spurred on once more to seek a happier country. Others are destined to enter the choir-dance of the races with Jew and German and English and Irish, marrying the foreigner and merging the European in the new type—the coming American.
At Odessa, the southern gate of Russia, the pilgrims are embarking for Mount Athos and Palestine a thousand at a time, an unexpected delivery of bowed and aged men and women out of the depths of Russia. There you may see another of the continual movements of the people of Russia, an astonishing procession this to those who are absorbed in the commercial life of Russia, to those Jews and exiled Russians who write to the English papers that the outward signs of Russian religion are “the mummery of the Holy Synod.” At Odessa, and indeed on all the roads of Russia, there are many thousands of pious Russians, pack on back, staff in hand, on their way to the monasteries and holy places, to the sepulchre, to Kief, to the Hermitage of Father Seraphim, to New Athos, to many a little wayside shrine and monastery that only has its ten pilgrims where the great ones have their hundreds and their housefuls.
It has been said that with an Englishman the conversation always, sooner or later, turns to sport, with a Frenchman to woman, and with a Russian to the subject of Russia.
This is true of the educated classes of society; but the peasants do not talk of these things so much—the peasants’ talk nearly always turns to God and religion. The Russians are always en route for some place where they may find out something about God, and if there is a particularly animated conversation in the hostelry of a monastery, a third-class carriage, or a tea-shop or Russian public-house (traktir), it is almost always sure to be about religion.
The modern evangelical movement may almost be said to have had its birth in the famous but filthy public house, “Yama,” where originally over vodka and beer, and later more commonly over tea, the question of salvation was continually mooted. In the third-class carriage you will occasionally come across an old man who reads an antique Bible through iron-rimmed spectacles. He has heard that a new sect has been formed by some peasants in some remote village, and is off to discover “whether they have found anything.”
Then what of those who march in chains from prison to prison on the road? Often I have stopped my writing on a bright summer morning to listen to an appalling sound—the clank, clank, clank of fifty or sixty men in fetters—and I have looked out at a procession of unfortunate Russians, dust from head to foot, the sun flashing on the bright steel links on their legs and their bodies. They also belonged to the road. They move us to the depths of sorrow or to hoarse anarchy; but they are of the road. Their vague shuffled footmarks are the writing of the finger in the dust. They are symbolical. We also walk as they. Listen with “the third ear,” and you will hear the clangour of our chains as we tramp—
having unearthly souls,
Yet fettered and forged to the earth!