“What is student life like at Kief?” I asked. “Do you meet together much? Are there debates, literary discussions? What’s in the air?”
He could not tell me if there was anything in the air. Life was duller there than formerly. The students kept more to themselves; but they had a Semi-retchinsky club. All students from Seven Rivers lived together, and they had musical evenings and dances. It was pleasant; the Semi-retchenski were great patriots in their way.
At Pishpek I had a delightful meeting with a Government topographer—Nazimof, a man of thirty, of gentle birth, elegant, graceful, old-fashioned. I met him at an inn. I had been put into his room by a grasping landlady who would not confess she was full up and could take no more visitors. After somewhat of a “scandal,” raised by the topographer, it was agreed that I should share his room. Every corner was occupied with his professional equipment—long iron map cases with padlocks, chests of instruments, tent poles, carpet chairs, rolls of canvas, boxes of books, papers and clothes.
“Excuse all this,” said he. “I am taking it up into the mountains as soon as I get news that the snow has melted a little.”
He explained that he was on Government service, charting maps. He was going to live the whole summer up among the mountain passes and literally bathe in snow. He would rig up his tents by the aid of the Kirghiz, hunt, shoot, survey, chart, discover, without any other fellow-European with whom to share fellowship.
We spent two days together in Pishpek, and talked of many things. His brother had been sent to Jerusalem this year by the Orthodox Palestine Society to inquire into the conditions under which the peasants journeyed and the exploitation of the aged pilgrims by the steamship company and the Greek monks. He had brought back just such a tale of woe and of happiness as I had myself to tell after my pilgrimage. A good deal is going to be done to better the conditions of the pilgrims’ journey, and there is even a proposal that the Government take the pilgrims on their own boats. I wondered whether it was worth while interfering, and I told my own experiences on that journey and gave my impression; the telling introduced me.
My new friend told me how much he wanted to get away from Seven Rivers Land and see the world. Once, as a boy on a Russian training-ship, he had landed at Newcastle, and had seen something of England—had even slept in a sailors’ rest. He would like to see England, to come and live there, and understand the country and the nation, to see America, also Australia. He liked being up in the mountains, working by himself in the fresh mountain air, talking to chance-met Kirghiz, shooting wild goats and partridges. But by the end of the summer he would be terribly bored. He would come down from the mountains, rush into Verney, complete his maps, and then bolt for Petersburg. He thirsted for human society all the summer through.
He was always dressed in white, and wore a fez on his shaved head. He sat with me hours in a bamboo palatka in the one garden restaurant of Pishpek, and we talked over koumis, over roast chicken, over tea, over wine. At night, too, when he lay on a broken-down bedstead and I on a dusty divan, he prattled of his wife and children that he was sick to leave behind, and of the boy in himself which made him always seek loneliness and adventures, however much his heart bade him remain at home.
“I wouldn’t change my lot, but still it is wrong to marry at twenty, as I did. There are so many partings and it is a great pain. A young man has things to do in the world, and he is bound to put his wife and family in the background; his ties are his pains. Most happy marriages are made of men of middle years, when they have made a little fortune and can take things more easily. When a stout, old man marries a young girl, moreover, there is generally a happy, healthy family.”
“But surely you don’t mean to say that old men are better fathers than young men?” I urged.