IN February Moscow was overrun by an epidemic of typhus. It did not spring from the frozen drains so much as from the indigestible black bread which is sold in the poorer parts of the city. On 10th February I gave up black bread for ever; I have not eaten it since—at least not Moscow black bread; Caucasian black bread is another matter. The bread diet had become too much for me. I lay in bed all one day feeling more dead than alive, and the prospect of typhus seemed very real. I recovered, and then substituted porridge and milk for the old diet. I showed Shura and Nicholas how to make this in the Scotch way, and they got very keen on it and showed other students. So I might almost claim to have introduced Scotch porridge to Moscow University. The Russian peasants and poor people in general make a porridge of buck-wheat, Kasha they call it, but I am quite sure it is less cheap, less wholesome, and less tasty than oatmeal porridge.
Moscow in winter is remarkable for its poor people, 74its labourers, its beggars, its students. Cab-drivers in Moscow take twopence-halfpenny a mile, and I have frequently taken a sledge from Sukareva Tower to the Vindavsky Station for fifteen copecks—4d., a distance of two miles. At the Khitry market one may often see men and women with only one cotton garment between their bodies and the cruel cold. How they live is incomprehensible; they are certainly a different order of being from anything in England. And the beggars! They say there are 50,000 of them. The city belongs to them; if the city rats own the drains, they own the streets. They are, moreover, an essential part of the city; they are in perfect harmony with it; take away the beggars and you would destroy something vital. Some are so old and weather-battered that they make the Kremlin itself look older, and those who lie at the monastery doors are so fearfully pitiable in their decrepitude that they lend power to the churches. Moscow would be a different place without the gaunt giants who hang down upon one and moan for bread; without the little cripples who squirm upon the pavement and scream their wants at the passer-by. To me, though I found them a plague at first, they were a perpetual interest. There were among them some of the strangest people one could expect to meet anywhere: worn-out, yellow-whiskered men with icicles in their beards, limbless trunks of men, abortions of men and women. I saw many nationalities; Letts, Poles, Jews, 75Tartars, Tatars, Bohemians, Caucasians, Chinese, Bokharese, specimens of all the peoples who exist under the Russian Eagle. Rich Russians allege that they collect five shillings a day, which is on a par with the tales of wealth amassed by organ-grinders in London. The daily task of each is to obtain twopence—a penny for a pound of black bread, a penny for a bed in a night house. They just about manage this, sometimes getting a little more, sometimes a little less. The surplus goes in vodka.
The question has to be faced by the traveller—What are you going to do with the beggars? I felt the need of a definite policy. At first, when we ourselves were near starving, I said “No” consistently, for I hadn’t any money. Then when money came I hardened my heart and said, “It is better to be a thief than a beggar: it is more manly. If I give to beggars I make it more profitable to be a beggar; I attract other people to beggary. If I withhold my money I drive some beggars to robbery, and then the police have to deal with them.” If the people were properly looked after there would be no need to rob or beg. This was a clear decision, and I held by it rigorously for a long time, till at last I came to the conclusion that it was more unpleasant to refuse some beggars than to give alms. Truly, whether an Englishman gives or gives not he feels he does wrong. Eventually I abandoned my principle and gave when I felt inclined. The Russian has no mental scruples. 76He is generally, providentially, ignorant of the science of economics. One fact is evident to him: the beggar is cold and hungry and it is Christian to help him. And the Socialists are too busy over bigger things to define their attitude to the poor wretch whom they deem to be a victim of tyranny. It is a common happening to see a crowd of unfortunate creatures being driven to the police-station by a couple of soldiers. To the democrat that is sufficient evidence of tyranny. Still, I have been told the beggars have nothing to fear from the authorities. The beggar is a holy institution; he keeps down the rate of wages in the factories; he is the pillar of the church, for he continually suggests charity; he is necessary to the Secret Police; where else could they hide their spies?
The beggars have the most extraordinary licence and think nothing of walking in at a back-door and staring at you for a quarter of an hour. It is this licensed insolence that makes him a terror to the nervous Russian, who always considers himself watched by spies. Nicholas appeared to be continually suspecting and dreading spies. On the second day after we arrived at the Samarkand lodging-house he discovered a spy on the same floor, so he said. Often when I was walking with him in the town he would say to me in a whisper, “Slow down and let the man behind us get past.” Once we slowed down in vain, and then put on speed in vain; we could not rid ourselves of a beggar 77who persisted in following us. Nicholas suddenly turned round in terror at a dark corner and clutched hold of the beggar with both hands and shook him. Then it was the beggar’s turn to have a fright, but he only asked meekly:
“Why did you do that to me, barin?”
The word “barin,” “bar,” means a master; it is interesting that the word spelt backwards, rab, means a slave. Russians say this is not merely a coincidence.
The different way in which beggars address one would make an interesting study. I remember one night a dreadful amorphous remnant of a man, lying in a currant box outside the Cathedral of St Saviour, addressed me in this fashion:
“Imagine that I am God!”
One seldom, however, hears such a dramatic utterance. Much commoner is lighter banter. I remember a cheeky boy came up to me smiling and certain.
“A copeck, dear count!”
“Haven’t got one, your Majesty,” I replied.
Many of the beggars have a selection of tales of woe carefully worked up to suit the susceptibilities of different passers-by. Of this kind was an old stalwart whom we, of the Kislovka room, used to patronise. His usual style was:
“I was a soldier at the Turkish War and astonished three generals by my bravery, but now devil a penny will my country give me to keep my old bones together.”
78But the two girl students who occupied the room next to ours always averred that he told them a yarn about his daughter dying from want of food and his wife in consumption, but never said a word about his exploits.
Nicholas and I dressed ourselves in our worst and went to a night-house one night. At five o’clock in the evening there was a queue like a first night pit-crowd at His Majesty’s Theatre in London, a street full of beggars pushing, jostling, shouting and singing. Next door to the doss-house was a tavern, to which every now and then someone unable to oppose temptation would dash to get a glass of vodka. Admission to this house cost one penny. It was rather a fearsome den to go into, and I wonder at ourselves now. I thought we should be too far down the line to get in, but I was mistaken. Everyone was admitted. We passed through a turnstile, and, strange to say, showed no passports. I fancy most of the beggars are passport-less. A policeman stood at the door and scrutinised the face of each who passed in. He had had too much vodka to do this to any great effect, and he let us through without demur, probably taking us for famished students, if he thought about us at all. Directly we got in we were confronted by a huge bar stocked with basins. A boy was serving out cabbage soup at a farthing a basinful. Another boy was serving out kasha, also at a farthing a basin. On a green noticeboard, 79among an array of vodka bottles, I read the following queer price-list:
The doss-house was owned by a merchant who made a handsome profit out of it, I am told. So well he might! The accommodation was nil. Straw to sleep upon. No chairs beyond three park seats. Two rooms lit by two jets of gas each. A small lavatory that might even make a beggar faint. Men and women slept in the same room, though they were, for the most part, so degraded that it scarcely occurred to one that they were of different sex.
We went upstairs; the air seemed a trifle less odorous there. Even there we agreed it was impossible to stay. About a hundred beggars were already asleep, and most of the rest were making themselves comfortable.
It was a large dark room, unventilated, and having all the windows sealed with putty, so that not the slightest draught of air came through. There were, of 80course, no fires in the room; it was heated by hot-water pipes. One would say the floor had not been cleaned since the day it was first used. It was rotten and broken and covered with black slime. The snow from the beggars’ boots melted in the warm room, as it had done every night this winter. Huge gnawn holes in the cornice showed where the rats had been. Yet in this den, on such a floor, human beings lay and slept! Pigs would have been housed better.
Yet in a gloomy corner opposite the entrance a little lamp burned before the sacred picture of Jesus. The Ikon stood there and looked upon the scene. It seemed to say, “God is here also, He does not disclaim even this; and in His sight even these are men and have souls.”
A Socialist government would make a difference in a place like this. The walls would be of white tiles and would shine like a station on the electric railway. There would be couches and mattresses, parqueted floors, electric light, baths, a reading-room next door, a free restaurant below. And there would be no Ikon. They would feel they didn’t need the sanction of God for what the reason approved.
I said this to Nicholas. He had bought a bottle of vodka, and was treating a man who said he was an ex-student and literary man.
“Shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves!” said the man.
“Nice mess they’d make of it,” said Nicholas. 81“They’d have to clean the beggars and dress them, and then shut up the pawnshops and the vodka shops, and then give them some work.”
“None of the beggars will do any work in the winter,” said the man; “there are workhouses already, but they won’t go there. There’s more fun on the streets, and then our work is more acceptable to God; we keep the people charitable. We stand outside taverns and theatres and tobacconists, and by our poverty remind the customers of God’s blessings. We restrain their self-indulgence.”
This was evidently an impossible line of argument. I asked him how the people came to be beggars. In his case it was vodka, and he had met scores of students reduced to the same plight. Most of the beggars were just tramp labourers, in the summer they would go to the country again; the women were the off-scourings of the streets. There were many more women beggars than men, but they died off more quickly. “The intelligentia of Moscow lead such a life,” said he. “The very Socialists, who want to make the place clean, lead dirty lives themselves. Look at the hundreds of girls shouting themselves deaf on the Tverskoe Boulevard, look at the students arm-in-arm with them, think of the average middle-class Russian’s life. He gorges himself with food, rots his mind with French novels, and openly confesses what women are to him.”
82“We shall have to get rid of the reformers before we shall reform Russia,” said Nicholas, solemnly.
“Oh, I don’t blame them,” said the beggar; “it’s all part of life; we beggars are all manure, that’s what we are; they plaster us about the roots of Society and make the little red blossoms grow—and the white blossoms.”
“It’s all very dirty,” I remarked.
“One learns to understand dirt, to love it even. God made the dirt; see how the picture looks down, the eyes don’t blink.” He pointed to the Ikon.
“Dirt is part of the Russian harmony,” I suggested with a smile.
“Yes,” said the beggar, “perhaps one day it will all be different, and we shall have a vote and pay taxes and have jobs as well as wives and families. But, you know, ‘you must love us whilst we are dirty, for everyone will love us when we are clean.’”