CATHEDRAL OF THE ASSUMPTION, KREMLIN.
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ALONG THE GOSTINOI DVOR, MOSCOW.
XIX.
Our Arrival at Moscow—Splendor and Squalor—Enlightenment and Superstition—Russia Asiatic Rather Than European.
Moscow, Russia, September 20, 1902.
It was toward ten o’clock when we drew near the suburbs of Moscow, a city of more than a million inhabitants. We saw straggling wooden houses, mostly unpainted, rarely ever more than one story high, and unpaved streets filled with country wagons, not the great two-wheeled carts of France, but long, low, four-wheeled wagons with horses pulling singly, or hitched three and four abreast; and I noted that the thills and traces of these wagons were fastened to the projecting axles of the fore wheels, the pull being thus directly on the axle, so as to lift the wheel out of the ever present mud holes. So universal has become this method of hitching up a wagon that I observed it even used on the vehicles in the cities where the streets are paved. Men in high boots and sheepskin coats and felt caps were walking beside the wagons, cracking long whips. The roads appeared to be frightful sloughs of bottomless mire.
Our train drew into a long, low, brick station, the Nicholas Depot. The door of the car was unlocked, porters came in and seized our bags, and we followed them. Our military escort did not even deign to say good-bye. He was writing up his note book and seemingly preoccupied. The instant we emerged from the station portal we were surrounded by a mob of roaringizvostchiks; a pandemonium. We picked out two of the cleaner-looking droschkies; the porters who had taken our checks came with the trunks on their shoulders, and we started off for our hotel. Although a dozen izvostchiks will wrangle and war for your custom, until you fear for your very life, yet the instant you pick your man, the others retire and peace reigns. There is no attempt to make you change your mind.
The sky was overcast, drops of rain were falling, and there had been more rain earlier in the day. The cobble-paved streets were thickly overlaid with mud. Surely, they had never been cleaned in a century! Moscow is a city of low, one and two story buildings, generally of stone or stucco, but there are many of wood. It is a city full of reek and accumulated filth, and is apparently without sewers, or with sewers badly laid and long ago choked up. It is a city of narrow streets with many turns, and narrow sidewalks or none at all. It is an old city, the ways and alleys and streets of which have grown up as they would. The people we met were ill-clad, unwashed, unkempt, wild-eyed, shock-polled, dull-faced. They were a meaner multitude of men and women than I had ever before set eyes upon.
“Hotel Berlin” we said to our izvostchiks. The word “Berlin” they seemed to comprehend, and they brought us safely to our destination. It is a comfortable inn, on the Rojdestvensky way, kept by a Jew, and recommended to us by the Swiss Concierge of the St. Petersburg hotel. “It is the hotel where the drummers go,” he said. We had learned long ago that “where the drummers go,” is where the best table will be found, for the world over, the drummer loves a knowing cook. So we went to the Hotel Berlin. We were there received by a little weazen-faced, black-eyed, dried-up man, who spoke in voluble German and broken English. “The police had notified him that we would come!” he said. He told us that “He had once lived in London!”—and declared that his rooms were exactly what we wanted, and his table “the best in Moscow.” He also confided to us that he was “fortunate in having at hand, immediately at hand, and now at our service, the most skilled and intelligent guide in Moscow, who would be delighted to serve us, who was altogether at our disposal and whose charge would be ‘only ten rubles a day,’ and the guide ‘talked English.’” We thanked our host, took the rooms and accepted the guide. We have now been in Moscow several days, and the guide has been faithful. He vows he has been twice in Chicago. He says he is from Hungary and he talks excellent German, but Mr. C, who himself hails from Chicago, is quite unable to comprehend the English of his speech. Only my knowledge of German has saved the guide his rubles. Moreover, his remembrance of Chicago is indistinct, as well as of New York. Indeed, his knowledge of America we are fain to believe is altogether hearsay. The nighest he has been to Chicago, we surmise, was when a few years ago he “bought Astrakhan lamb skins at Nijni Novo Gorod for Marshall Field & Company,” whose agent we believe he may really then have been. He is now married to a Russian, and it is many years since he has been back to Hungary, nor does he have much occasion to talk German or English, except when he is acting as guide to Americans. Mr. C now and then forgets and attempts to use American speech in conversation with him, when there is entanglement. I am appealed to in German, the difficulty is cleared up, and so we get on.