In the autumn of 1907 I went for the first time to South Russia. To Kharkov, and then to Gievko, a small village in the neighbourhood, where I stayed with Prince Mirski in his country house.
This was the first time I had visited Little Russia, that is to say, Southern Russia. The contrast between Central and Southern Russia is, I noted at the time, not unlike that between Cambridgeshire and South Devon.
The vegetation was more or less the same in both places, and in both places the season was marking the same hour, only the hour was being struck in a different manner. In Central Russia there was a bite in the morning air, a smell of smoke, of damp leaves, of moist brown earth, and a haze hanging on the tattered trees, which were generously splashed with crimson and gold. In the south of Russia, little green remained in the yellow and golden woods; the landscape was hot and dry; there was no sharpness in the air and no moisture in the earth; summer, instead of being conquered by the sharp wounds of the invading cold, was dying like a decadent Roman Emperor of excess of splendour, softness, and opulence. The contrast in the houses was sharper still. In Central Russia the peasant’s house is built of logs and roofed with straw or iron according to the means of the inhabitant. The villages are brown, colourless, and sullen; in the South the houses are white or pale green; they have orchards and fruit trees, and sometimes a glass verandah. There is something well-to-do and smiling about them—something which reminds one of the whitewashed cottages of South Devon or the farms in Normandy.
Prince Mirski lived in a long, low house, which gave one the impression of a dignified, comfortable, and slightly shabby Grand Trianon. The walls were grey, the windows went down to the[387] ground, and opened on to a delightful view. You looked down a broad avenue of golden trees, which framed a distant hill in front of you, sloping down to a silver sheet of water. In the middle of this brown hill there was a church painted white, with a cupola and a spire on one side of it, and flanked on both sides by two tall cypresses. There were many guests in the house: relations, friends, neighbours. We met at luncheon—a large, patriarchal meal—and after luncheon, Prince Mirski used to play Vindt in the room looking down on to the view I have described. Prince Mirski had been Minister of the Interior for a short period in the autumn of 1905, and during his period of office he had abolished all censorship of newspapers previous to their publication. This act, which would not seem at first sight to be momentous, had far-reaching effects. Never could this censorship be restored again, and its removal let in a flood of light to Russian life. It was the opening of a small skylight into a darkened room. After that nothing could ever be as it had been before. Prince Mirski was a warm-hearted, welcoming host, and spoke a beautiful easy Russian, and his great, saltlike good sense pervaded the light rippling waves, or the lambent shafts of an urbane wit, never heavy, never tedious, never lengthy, but always light, always amiable, and yet never divorced from a strong fundamental reasonableness. I was taken to see the little Russian farms, which were painted green, and were as clean outside as they were inside. Inside, the walls were painted red and blue, the furniture was neatly arranged, and no hens nor other live-stock shared the living-rooms. The inhabitants wore no gorgeously picturesque South Russian costumes. There were factories in the neighbourhood, and this was perhaps the reason an air of Manchester and Birmingham had invaded the fashions. The shirt and the collars of the intelligentsia had spread downwards to the peasant population, but every now and then one came across a picturesque figure.
One day I met a blind beggar. He was sitting on a hill in front of the church, and he was playing an instrument called a “lira,” that is to say, a lyre.
It was a wooden instrument shaped exactly like a violin. It had three strings, which were tuned with pegs, like those of a violin, but it was played by fingering wooden keys, like those of[388] a large concertina, and by, at the same time, turning a handle which protruded from the base of the instrument. The musician said he could play any kind of music—sad, joyous, and sacred, and he gave examples of all three of these styles; they were to my ear indistinguishable in kind; they seemed to me all tinged with the same quick and deliciously plaintive melody; and the sound made by the instrument instantly suggested the melody and the accompaniment of Schubert’s song: “Der Leiermann”; the plaintive, comfortable noise of the first hurdy-gurdy players. I found out afterwards this lyre was indeed the same instrument as Schubert must have had in his mind. It was the instrument that in Germany is called Leierkasten, in France vielle, and in England, hurdy-gurdy; and my blind beggar was just such a man as Schubert’s Leiermann.
After I had stayed some days at Gievko, I went farther south to Kiev, and stayed at Smielo with Count André Bobrinsky. Count Bobrinsky lived in a compound next to a large beet-sugar factory. In the same compound various members of the same family lived. Each member of the family had a house of his own, and the whole clan were presided over and ruled by an old Count Lev Bobrinsky.
Count Lev Bobrinsky was an old man of astonishing vigour and activity, both of body and mind. He knew every detail of all the affairs that were going on around him. He was afraid of nothing, and once when he was attacked by a huge hound he tackled and defeated the infuriated beast with his hands, and broke the animal’s jaw.
All his family held him in wholesome respect not unmixed with awe.
One day we went out shooting. Count Lev no longer shot himself, but he organised every detail of the day’s sport, and would come out to luncheon. We drove in a four-in-hand harnessed to a light vehicle to the woods, which were most beautiful. The trees had huge red stems. We were to shoot roebuck with rifles. I was specially told not to shoot a doe. While I was waiting there was a rustle in the undergrowth and a shout from someone, which meant don’t shoot, but which I interpreted to mean shoot, and I let off my rifle. It was a doe. The whole party were agreed that Count Lev was not to be told. In the evening I was taken to his office to see him. It was a little pitch-pine house full of rifles, boots and ledgers, and[389] walking-sticks. He seemed to have about a hundred walking-sticks and two hundred pairs of boots. He went over the events of the day. With me was one of the neighbours, who had also been one of the guns, a Prince Yashville.
Count Lev went through the bag and the number of shots fired, and just when he was going to ask me if I had fired, Prince Yashville intervened, and said that I had not had a shot, and I by my silence gave consent to this statement. The next day I left for the north, but on the following Sunday, the whole clan of Bobrinsky family met as usual at tea, and when Count Lev came in the first thing he said was: “It is an odd thing that people can’t tell the truth. Mr. Baring said he had not had a shot out shooting, and one of the barrels of his gun was dirty.” Then it was explained to him that I had shot at a doe.
I felt I could never go back there again.
Near Smielo there was a village which was almost entirely inhabited by Jews.
It was from this village, one day, that two Jews came to Countess Bobrinsky and asked if they might store their furniture and their books in her stables … they would not take up much room. When Countess Bobrinsky asked them why, they said a pogrom had been arranged for the next day. Countess Bobrinsky was bewildered, and asked them what they meant, and who was going to make this pogrom. The two Jews said: They were coming from Kiev by train, and from another town. The pogrom would take place in the morning and they would go back in the evening.
When she asked: “Who are they?” she could get no answer, except that some said it was the Tsar’s orders, some that it was the Governor’s orders, but they had been sent to make a pogrom.
Countess Bobrinsky told them to go to the police, but the Jews said it could not be prevented, and that all had been arranged for the morrow. Both Count and Countess Bobrinsky then made inquiries, but all the answer that they could get was that a pogrom had been arranged for the next day. It was not the people of the place who would make it; these lived in peace with the Jews. They would come by the night train from two neighbouring towns; they would arrive in the morning; there would be a pogrom, and then they would go away, and all the next morning carts would arrive from the neighbouring[390] villages, just as when there was a fair, to take away what was left after the pogrom. When they asked who was sending the pogrom-makers they could get no answer. Count Bobrinsky interviewed the local police sergeant, but all he did was to shrug his shoulders and wring his hands, and ask what could two policemen do against a multitude? if there was to be a pogrom, there would be a pogrom. He could do nothing; nothing could be done; nobody could do anything.
The next morning the peasant cook, a woman, came into Countess Bobrinsky’s room, and said: “There will be no pogrom after all. It has been put off.”
I stayed in Russia all that autumn and winter, and I saw the opening of the third Duma, and arrived in London in the middle of December. I was no longer correspondent in St. Petersburg, but I worked in London at journalism, and in the summer of 1908, together with Hilary Belloc, I edited and printed a newspaper, which had only one number, called The North Street Gazette. The newspaper was printed at a press which we had bought and established in my house, No. 6 North Street—a picturesque house behind the other houses in North Street, which possessed a courtyard, a fig-tree, and an underground passage leading to Westminster Abbey.
The newspaper was written entirely by Belloc, myself, and Raymond Asquith, who wrote the correspondence.
It was to be supported by subscribers. We received quite a number of subscriptions, but we never brought out a second number, and we returned the cheques to the subscribers.
The North Street Gazette had the following epigraph: “Out, out, brief scandal!” and opened with the following statement of aims and policy:
“The North Street Gazette is a journal written for the rich by the poor.
“The North Street Gazette will be printed and published by the proprietors at and from 6 North Street, Smith Square, Westminster, London, S.W. This, the first number, appears upon the date which it bears; subsequent numbers will appear whenever the proprietors are in possession of sufficient matter, literary and artistic, or even advertisement, to fill its columns. No price is attached to the sheet, but a subscription of one guinea will entitle a subscriber to receive no less than twenty copies, each differing from the last. These twenty copies[391] delivered, none will be sent to any subscriber until his next subscription is paid.
“The North Street Gazette will fearlessly expose all public scandals save those which happen to be lucrative to the proprietors, or whose exposure might in some way damage them or their more intimate friends.
“The services of a competent artist have been provisionally acquired, a staff of prose writers, limited but efficient, is at the service of the paper; three poets of fecundity and skill have ............