After Christmas, the second Duma was convened and opened. Its doings were not interesting. It was not a representative body, as the elections had been carefully arranged; still it was better than nothing, and the very existence of a Duma of any kind exercised a negative effect on matters in general. The Government could be interpellated. Questions could be asked. The officials in the country knew that their doings could be discussed in the Duma, and this acted as a check. In April 1907, I had an interview with Count Witte. Witte was a large, tall, burly figure, with slightly ravaged features, intelligent eyes, the facile opportunism and the deep-seated scepticism of those who have had a long experience of affairs, of the ruling of men, and the vicissitudes of political life. He received me abruptly, and with a manner that, far from being ingratiating, seemed to express the unspoken thought, “Why have you come to bother me,” but as the conversation went on he melted and became charming.

The first question he asked me was why I stayed such a long time in Russia, I said it was because it interested me. I then said: “Things seem to be going better.” “Do you think so?” he asked, with a look of amused scepticism. I asked him what he thought of the doings of the Extreme Right, the reactionaries, who were now playing a noisy and important part in political and social life.

He said they were a great danger. The Government would never dare to touch them. He said both the Right and the Kadets had lost faith in him. The Kadets because he had not given them the key of the fortress, and the reactionaries because he had not hung all the Liberals. He talked of the Jewish question, and said that the Jews had begged him[368] not to give them full rights, as they dreaded the consequences of a sudden act of that kind. He said he had always thought it impossible to give the Jews full rights all at once. He said the Kadets were guilty of all that had happened in Russia in the last year, because they had refused to support him when he was Prime Minister, and had been unwilling to help him. Had they done so he might have done a great deal. He then talked of Stolypin. He said Stolypin was an honest man, with no foresight, and a fatalist. “You can’t govern if you are a fatalist,” he said, with a gesture of contempt. He said the present electoral law was a farce, and that the only alternative was to change it or to go back to the pre-Duma state of affairs; and that would not last long. He said that the Kadets recognised their mistakes now, and their failure, and he heard from all quarters they were willing to accept his leadership now, but it was too late. For a thousand reasons he would never take office again after what he had gone through. I asked him how the funds had been obtained for the great general strike. He said it had all been prepared when Plehve was Minister, and had been kept secret. He said he considered the situation in October to have been one of real revolution, as there were then no troops available to deal with the situation.

The impression he gave me was of disillusion, indifference, fatigue, and invincible pessimism. He evidently thought that whatever steps would be taken would be fatal, and he was perfectly right.

In May I went back to London and stayed there till the middle of July, when I came back to St. Petersburg.

I then started for a journey down the Volga. I went by train from St. Petersburg to Ribinsk. On the way to Ribinsk my carriage was occupied by a party of workmen, including a carpenter and a wheelwright, who were going to work on somebody’s property in the Government of Tver; they did not know whose property, and they did not know whither they were going. They were under the authority of an old man who came and talked to me, because, he said, the company of the youths who were with him was tedious. He told me a great many things, but as he was hoarse, and the train made a rattling noise, I could not hear a word he said. There were also in the carriage two Tartars and a small boy about thirteen years old, who had a domineering character and put[369] himself in charge of the carriage. The discomfort of travelling third-class in Russia was not the accommodation, but the frequent awakenings during the night caused by passengers coming in and by the guard asking for one’s ticket. The small boy with the domineering character—he wore an old military cap on the back of his head as a sign of strength of purpose—contributed in no small degree to the general discomfort. He apparently was in no need of sleep. He went from passenger to passenger telling them where they would have to change and where they would have to get out, and offering to open the window if needed. I had a primitive candlestick made of a candle stuck into a bottle; it fell on my head just as I went to sleep, so I put it on the floor and went to sleep again. But the small boy came and waked me, and told me that my bottle was on the floor, and that he had put it back again. I thanked him, but directly he was out of sight I put it back again on the floor, and before long he came back, waked me a second time—and told me that my candlestick had again fallen down. This time I told him, not without emphasis, to leave it alone, and I went to sleep again. But the little boy was not defeated; he waked me again with the information that a printed advertisement had fallen out of the book I had been reading on to the floor. This time I told him that if he waked me again I should throw him out of the window.

Later in the night a tidy-looking man of the middle-class entered the carriage with his wife. They began to chatter, and to complain of the length of the benches, the officious boy with the domineering character lending them his sympathy and advice. This went on till one of the Tartars could bear it no longer, and he called out in a loud voice that if they wanted beds six yards long they had better not travel in a train, and that they were making everybody else’s sleep impossible. I blessed that Tartar not unawares, and after that there was peace.

Towards ten o’clock in the morning we arrived at Ribinsk, and there I embarked on a steamer to go down the Volga, as far as Nijni-Novgorod. I took a first-class ticket and received a clean deck cabin, containing a leather sofa (with no blankets or sheets) and a washing-stand with a fountain tap. We started at two o’clock in the afternoon. There were few[370] passengers on board. The Volga was not what I had expected it would be like—what place is? I had imagined a vast expanse of water in an illimitable plain, instead of which there was a broad, brown river, with green, shelving though not steep banks, wooded with birch trees and fir trees and many kinds of shrubs; sometimes the banks consisted of sloping pastures and sometimes of cornfields. In the evening we arrived at Yaroslav, a picturesque little city on the top of a steep bank. All day long the sky had been grey and heavy, with long, piled-up clouds, but the sun, as it set, made for itself a thin strip of gold beneath the grey masses, and when it had sunk, the masses themselves glinted like armour, and the strip beneath became a stretch of pure and luminous twilight. In the twilight the town was seen at its best. I went ashore and walked about the streets of the quiet city; a sleepy town, with trees and grass everywhere (the trees dark in the twilight); the houses low, two-storied, and painted white, with pale green roofs, ghostlike in the dusk, ornamented with pilasters, eighteenth-century and Empire arches and arcades. Every now and then one came across a church with gilt minarets glistening in what remained of the sunset. The whole was a symphony in dark green, white, and lilac (the sky was lilac by now). The shops were shut, the houses shuttered, the passers-by few. The grass grew thick on the cobble-stones. I wandered about thinking how well Vernon Lee would seize on the genius loci of this sleepy city, dreaming in the lilac July twilight, with its alternate vistas of luminous white houses and dark glooms of trees. How she would extract the spirit of the place, and find the exact note in other places which it corresponded with, whether in Gascony, or Tuscany, or Bavaria; and I reflected that all I could do would be to say I had seen Yaroslav—I had walked about in it—and that it was a picturesque city.

We left Yaroslav at eleven at night. In the dining-room of the steamer I had left a Tauchnitz volume called Fr?ulein Schmidt und Mr. Anstruther, by the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden. I was looking forward to reading this before going to sleep; but this was not to be. The volume had disappeared. The next morning the matter was explained. There was a family travelling in the steamer, consisting of a mother, a daughter, and a son. The mother was young[371] looking, although both the daughter and son were grown up; they had found the book, and thought (I suppose) it had been left behind, or that it belonged to the public library. The book occupied them for the rest of the journey. They talked of nothing else. The mother had read it before. The daughter must have sat up late reading it, because she handed it over to the son early in the morning. They all thought it interesting, but they evidently disagreed about it. These are the things which ought to please an author.

We reached Nijni-Novgorod the next morning at eight. I took a cab. “Drive,” I said, “to the best hotel.” “There is the H?tel Rossia at the top of the town, and the H?tel Petersburg at the bottom,” the cabman answered. “Which is the best?” I asked. “The H?tel Rossia is the best at the top of the town,” he answered, “and the H?tel Petersburg is the best at the bottom.” “Which is the most central?” I asked. “The Rossia is the most central at the top, and the Petersburg is the most central at the bottom.” “Which is nearest the Fair?” “They are neither near the Fair.” “Are there no hotels near the Fair?” “There are no hotels near the Fair in the town.”

We drove to the Rossia, a long way up a very steep hill, past the Kremlin—a hill like Windsor Hill, only twice as long. The Kremlin is like Windsor, supposing the outside walls of Windsor had never been restored and the castle were taken away. When we got to the hotel the cabman said: “This part of the town is deserted in summer; nobody lives here; everybody lives near the Fair.” “But I said I wanted to be in the Fair,” I answered. “Oh!” he answered; “of course if you want to be in the Fair there are plenty of hotels in the Fair.” So we drove down again, right into the lower part of the town, and thence across a large wooden bridge into the Fair.

Nijni-Novgorod occupies both sides of the Volga. On one side there is a steep hill, a Kremlin, and a town covering the hill till it reaches the quays and extending along them;—on the other side a huge plain and the Fair. The hill part of the town is wooded and green; the Fair was a town in itself, and during the Fair period the whole business of life—shops, including hotels, theatres, banks, baths, post, exchange, restaurants—was transferred thither. The shops were one-storied and occupied square blocks, which they intersected in parallel lines. They[372] were of every description and quality, ranging from the supply of the needs of the extremely rich to those of the extremely poor. I found a room in an hotel. The hotels were crowded, although I was told that the Fair had never been so empty. It had not been open long, and merchants were still arriving daily with their goods. The centre of the Fair was a house called the “Glavnii Dom,” the principal house; here the post and the police were concentrated, and the most important shops—Fabergé, for instance. There were many dealers in furs and skins; I bought nothing, in spite of great temptation, except a blanket and a clothes-brush. The blankets were dear. Star sapphires, on the other hand, seemed to be as cheap as dirt. I never quite understood when the people had their meals at the Fair. The restaurants, and there were many, seemed to be empty all day; they were certainly full all night. Perhaps the people did not eat during the daytime. In every restaurant there was a theatrical performance, which began at nine o’clock in the evening and went on until four o’clock the next morning, with few interruptions; it consisted mostly of singing and dancing.

What surprised and struck me most about the Fair was the great size of it. I had not guessed that the Fair was a large town consisting entirely of shops, hotels, and restaurants. The most important merchandise that passed hands at the Fair was furs. But there were goods of every variety: second-hand books, tea, and silks from China, gems from the Urals, and art nouveau furniture. There were also old curiosity shops rich in church vestments, stiff copes and jewelled chasubles, which would be found most useful by those people who like to furnish their drawing-rooms entirely with objects diverted from their proper use; that is to say, teapots made out of musical instruments and old book bindings. Nijni, during the Fair, was almost entirely inhabited by merchants—merchants of every kind and description. The majority of them wore loose Russian shirts and top-boots. I noticed that at Nijni it did not in the least signify how untidily one was dressed; however untidy one looked, one was sure of being treated with respect, because slovenliness at Nijni did not necessarily imply poverty, and the people of the place justly reasoned that however sordid our exterior appearance might be, there was no knowing but it might clothe a millionaire.[373] Another thing which struck me here, a thing which has struck me in several other places, was the way in which people determined your nationality by your clothes. While they paid no attention to degree in the matter of clothes at Nijni, as to whether they were shabby or new, they paid a great deal of attention to kind. For instance, the day I arrived I was wearing an ordinary English straw hat. This headgear caused quite a sensation amongst the sellers of Astrakan fur. They crowded round me, crying out: “Vairy nice, vairy cheap, Engleesh.” I bought a different kind of hat, a white yachting cap, and loose silk Russian shirt, such as the merchants wore.

That evening I went to a restaurant at which there was a musical performance. I fell into conversation with a young merchant sitting at the next table, and he said to me after we had had some conversation: “You are, I suppose, from the Caucasus.” I said “No.” We talked of other things, the Far East among other topics. He then exclaimed: “You are, I suppose, from the Far East.” I again said “No,” and we again talked of other things. He had some friends with him who joined in the conversation, and they were consumed with curiosity as to whence I had come, and I told them they could guess. They guessed various places, such as Archangel, Irkutsk, Warsaw, and Saghalien, and at last one of them cried out with joy: “I know what place you belong to; you are a native of Nijni.” They went away triumphant. Their place was taken by a very old merchant, a rugged, grey-haired, bearded peasant. He looked on at the singing and dancing which was taking place on the stage for some time, and then he said to me: “Don’t you wish you were twenty years younger?” I said I did, but I did not think that I should in that case be better equipped for this particular kind of entertainment, as I should be only twelve years old. “Impossible!” said the old man indignantly. “You are quite bald, and bear every sign of old age.”

I left Nijni on the wrong steamer—that is to say, by a line I did not mean to patronise, because I knew it was the worst. There was no help for it, because my passport was not ready in time. I took a first-class cabin on a big steamer full of children with their nurses and parents. The children ran about the cabin all day long without stopping. Children, I noticed, are the same all over the world: they play the same games,[374] they make the same noise. In this case there were five sisters and a small brother. What reminded me much of all children in general, and of my own experience as a child in particular, was that the boy suddenly began to howl because his sisters wouldn’t let him play with them, and he cried out: “I want to play too”; and the sisters, when the matter was finally brought before an arbitration court of parents, who were playing cards, said that the boy made all games impossible. Also there were three nurses in the cabin, who, whatever the children did, told them not to do it; and every now and then one heard familiar phrases such as “Don’t sit on the oilcloth with your bare legs.” “Don’t lean out of the window with that cold of yours.” The passengers on the boat were uninteresting.

There was a couple who spoke bad French to each other out of refinement, but who relapsed into Russian when they had really something interesting to say. There was a student who played the pianoforte with astonishing facility and amazing execution; there were the elder sisters of the small children, who also played the pianoforte in exactly the same way as young people play it in England—that is to say, with convulsive jerks over the difficult passages, and uninterrupted insistence on the loud pedal, and a foolish bass. The grown-up members of the party played “Vindt” all day.

When we arrived at Kazan I got out to look at the town. It also possesses a Kremlin with white walls and crenellated towers and old churches, a museum of uninteresting objects, and a large monastery. It was the most stagnant-looking city.

The Volga beyond Nijni is considerably broader. It is never less than 1200 yards in breadth, and from Nijni onwards, on the right bank of the river, there is a range of lofty hills, mostly wooded, but sometimes rocky and grassy, which go sheer down into the river. The left bank is flat, and consists of green meadows. Below Kazan it is joined by the river Kama, and becomes a mighty river, never less than three-quarters of a mile in breadth. In various parts of its course the Volga reminded me of almost every river I had ever seen, from the Dart to the Liao-he, and from the Neckar to the Nile. Below Kazan its aspect was gloomy and sombre, a great stretch of broad brown waters, a wooded mountainous bank on one side, a monotonous plain on the other. But when the weather was fine—and it was gloriously fine after we reached[375] Kazan—the effects of light on the great expanse of water were miraculous. It is at dawn that you feel the magic of these waters; at dawn and at sunset when the great broad expanse, turning to gold or to silver, according as the sky is crimson, mauve, or rosy and grey, has a mystery and majesty of its own. We met other steamers on the way, but during the whole voyage from Nijni to Astrakan we only passed two small sailing boats.

I got out at Samara and spent the night at an hotel. The next day I embarked again for Astrakan, after having explored the town, in which I failed to find an object of interest. From Samara to Saratov the hills on the right bank of the river diminish in size, and instead of descending sheer into the river, they slope away from it; and as the hills diminish, the vegetation grows more scanty. The left bank is flat and monotonous as before. From Samara to Saratov I travelled third-class, to see what it was like on board the steamer. There are on the steamer four official classes and an unofficial fifth-class. The third-class have a general cabin on the lower deck with two tiers of bunks. The fourth-class have a kind of enclosure, which contains one large broad board on which they encamp. The fourth-class contains the “steerage” passengers. It is indescribably dirty. The fifth-class is composed of still dirtier and still poorer people, who lie about on boxes, bales, or on whatever vacant space they can find on the lower deck. They lie, for the most part, like corpses, in a profound slumber, generally face downwards, flat upon the floor. The third-class is respectable and decently clean; it has, moreover, one immense advantage—some permanently open windows. In the first-class there was among the company a great aversion to draughts. They had not what someone once called “La passion des Anglais pour les courants d’air.” In the third-class there was no such prejudice. The passengers were various. There were two students, some merchants, twenty Cossacks going home on leave, a policeman, a public servant, several peasants, and a priest.

On the bunk just over mine sprawled a large bearded Cossack, who at once asked me where I was going, my occupation, my country, and my name. I told him that I was a newspaper correspondent and an Englishman. I then lay down on my bunk. Another Cossack from the other side of the cabin called out at the top of his voice to the man who was[376] over me: “Who is that man?” “He is a foreigner.” “Is he travelling with goods?” “No; he is just travelling, nothing more.” “Where does he come from?” “I don’t know.” Then, looking down at me from his bunk, the Cossack who was above me said: “Thou art quite bald, little father. Is it illness that did it, or nature?” “Nature,” I answered. “Shouldst try an ointment,” he said. “I have tried many and strong ointments,” I said, “including onion, tar, and paraffin, none of which were of any avail. There is nothing to be done.” “No,” said the Cossack, with a sigh. “There is nothing to be done. It is God’s business.”

There was no particular discomfort in travelling third-class in the steamer. The bunks, with the aid of blankets, were as comfortable as those in the first-class. One could obtain the same food, and there was plenty of fresh air. Nevertheless, if one only travelled thus for a day and a night, it was indescribably fatiguing, because one had to change and re............