I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians. A large square photograph I keep always on my mantel-piece; it helps me to maintain my head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all literary work. It presents in the centre a neatly-written address in excellent English that I confess I am never tired of reading, around which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read, but which, in spite of their strange lettering, I know to be the names of good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of encouragement. The individual Russian is one of the most charming creatures living. If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know it; not only by every action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as useful in this grey old world, by generous, speech.
We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative. Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy who was sent out by his father to fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not show his face again beneath the roof for over twenty years. Then one evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old couple, and announced himself as their long-lost child, returned at last.
“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” the old man, “and blarm me if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”
I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man entered and took his seat at a table near by. Glancing round, and meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and nodded.
“Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must just speak to my brother—haven’t seen him for over five years.”
He finished his soup and wiped his moustache before strolling across and shaking hands. They talked for a while. Then my friend returned to me.
“Never thought to see him again,” observed my friend, “he was one of the of that place in Africa—what’s the name of it?—that the Mahdi attacked. Only three of them escaped. Always was a lucky beggar, Jim.”
“But wouldn’t you like to talk to him some more?” I suggested; “I can see you any time about this little business of ours.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, “we have just it up—shall be seeing him again to-morrow.”
I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some Russian friends in a St. Petersburg Hotel. One of the party had not seen his second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly eighteen months. They sat opposite to one another, and a dozen times at least during the course of the dinner one of them would jump up from his chair, and run round to embrace the other. They would throw their arms about one another, kissing one another on both cheeks, and then sit down again, with moist eyes. Their behaviour among their fellow countrymen excited no whatever.
But the Russians’s anger is as quick and as his love. On another occasion I was supping with friends in one of the chief restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an adjoining table, who up till the previous moment had been engaged in conversation, suddenly sprang to their feet, and “went for” one another. One man secured the water-bottle, which he broke over the other’s head. His opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and leaping back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched against my hostess.
“Do please be careful,” said the lady.
“A thousand pardons, madame,” returned the stranger, from whom blood and water were streaming in equal ; and taking the utmost care to avoid with our comfort, he succeeded in flooring his by a well-directed blow.
A policeman appeared upon the scene. He did not attempt to , but running out into the street communicated the glad tidings to another policeman.
“This is going to cost them a pretty penny,” observed my host, who was calmly continuing his supper; “why couldn’t they wait?”
It did cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round about before as many minutes had elapsed, and each one claimed his . Then they wished both combatants good-night, and trooped out evidently in great good humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation flowed freely as before.
They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath. The workers—slaves it would be almost more correct to call them—allow themselves to be exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is coming.
But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man in Russia can be sure that his own servants are not police spies. I was discussing politics with a Russian official one evening in his study when his old entered the room—a soft-eyed grey-haired woman who had been in his service over eight years, and whose position in the household was almost that of a friend. He stopped and changed the conversation. So soon as the door was closed behind her again, he explained himself.
“It is better to chat upon such matters when one is quite alone,” he laughed.
“But surely you can trust her,” I said, “She appears to be to you all.”
“It is safer to trust no one,” he answered. And then he continued from the point where we had been interrupted.
“It is gathering,” he said; “there are times when I almost smell blood in the air. I am an old man and may escape it, but my children will have to suffer—suffer as children must for the sins of their fathers. We have made beasts of the people, and as brute beasts they will come upon us, cruel, and undiscriminating; right and wrong indifferently going down before them. But it has to be. It is needed.”
It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing to all progress a dead wall of selfishness. The history of Russia will be the history of the French Revolution over again, but with this difference: that the educated classes, the thinkers, who are pushing forward the dumb masses are doing so with their eyes open. There will be no Maribeau, no Danton to be at a people’s . The men who are to-day working for revolution in Russia number among their ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicately-nurtured women, rich landowners, prosperous tradesmen, students familiar with the lessons of history. They have no misconceptions concerning the blind Monster into which they are breathing life. He will crush them, they know it; but with them he will crush the and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they love themselves.
The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more pitiless than were the men of 1790. He is less intelligent, more . They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian cattle, the while they work. They sing it in chorus on the while hauling the , they sing it in the factory, they chant on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the corn they may not eat. It is of the good time their masters are having, of the feastings and the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children, of the kisses of the lovers.
But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask a Russian to translate it for you he his shoulders.
“Oh, it means,” he says, “that their time will also come—some day.”
It is a pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing-rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and somehow the light talk and laughter die away, and a , like a chill breath, enters by the closed door and passes through. It is a curious song, like the of a tired wind, and one day it will sweep over the land terror.
A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he first came out to act as manager of a large factory in St. Petersburg, ............