“Any limbs broken?” said he.
“No.”
“Then, praise the Lord! There’s your box.”
Two days after this there was an immense thaw and the sledges gave way to wheeled carriages. On the Wednesday it had been a white city; on Thursday it was black and there was not a sledge to be seen. The sun had been getting hotter and winning its way each day, just a little, against the snow, and then suddenly one night a west wind swept in from Europe and the Atlantic, and with it a flood of rain. Winter was drowned. No one was sorry; for winter by all accounts had stayed too long. The Sunday was Palm Sunday, the day of branches. The Russians call it Verba, and it is a great festival in Moscow. Shura and Nicholas and I went to the Kremlin to enjoy the sights.
It was a day of ecstasy. The sun shone as it had not done since I came to Moscow. It was suddenly full of promise, and one felt the promise in one’s blood. One’s fingers tingled with the desire to live, the eyes rested with envy upon the green branches that the people carried. In the Kremlin there was a din as of a carnival. Ten thousand silly squeakers and hooters 110sounded in the air. Inflated pigs were expiring, ridiculous sausages were deflating and collapsing, toy geese were quacking, boys and girls were blowing whistles and trumpets, and students also were blowing, and even staid old gentlemen. This day commemorated the triumphal entry into Jerusalem; it was also the triumphal entry of spring into Moscow, of life into death. The crowd huzzaing was delirious with the news that the winter was over. Even the rich people in their carriages, passing in solemn state into the Kremlin, seemed part of the new life. They were all in spring dresses—the women in purples and soft greens, and the men in light tweeds.
It seemed to me, however, that those on foot were having the gayer time. We were crushed as tightly as I have ever been in a London crowd. Everyone was laughing and chaffing, especially the girl students from the University, and the confetti was flying thick and fast.
Verba week was my last in Moscow. On Easter Sunday I left for the South.
Easter Eve came at last, the greatest night in the Russian holy year. At midnight we were all in the Kremlin, that is, I was there, and Nicholas and Shura, and everyone else in Moscow surely. Phrosia, the servant whom I had accompanied to the shrine at Sergievo, had taken a large sweet Easter loaf and a cake of sugar-cream, paskha, to be consecrated at church. 111I saw her in a yard outside the little monastery in the Petrovka. There were two or three hundred cakes waiting with hers, all set out on informal tables on trestles. In the centre of each cake a wax candle was burning. Each table was a little forest of candles, some long, some short, some just lit, and some burning out. Every now and then a priest came and took a cake into the church just as the candle was expiring. Phrosia had evidently just come, for the candle on her pashka was newly lit. The church was a casket, a precious case of gems. The priests moving to and fro, the pale faces of the Ikons lit up by many candles seemed the glamour of a fairy tale. The cakes being brought in, the priest sprinkling holy water, seemed rites which I, a mortal, only saw by accident. Indeed, any Englishman would have found Easter Night strange and wonderful. It is one of the two occasions in the year when one can see again what is below the surface of Moscow life of to-day. One can see what Moscow was before it became so commercialised. At six o’clock on Easter Eve the electric trams cease to run; from that moment Moscow becomes the holy city of old time. The strange mystery and sacredness which must have enwrapped it in ancient days is again felt in the streets. The shops are all shut and dark, the churches are all open and bright. The thousand-and-one street temples are decorated with coloured lamps, the doors stand wide open, the sacred faces of the Ikons look out into the roads. Even the 112air is infected with church odours, and the multitudinous domes of purple and gold rest above the houses in enigmatical solemnity—they might be tents and pavilions of spirits from another world.
In the streets men and women are carrying lighted candles hither and thither, and every now and then one sees a person carrying his paskha cake to church. Outside the Cathedral of the Annunciation a regiment of guards is drawn up and an officer is giving them instructions as to the duties for the night. Presently the rich and aristocratic families of Moscow will drive up one by one to do homage to the Ikons in the cathedral. At midnight the Kremlin is so thronged that it is difficult to move. All are waiting for the Resurrection, all are waiting for the booming forth of the great bell of St John’s Church, the largest bell of Moscow and of Russia, rung only once a year. That will signify that “Christ has risen.” The priests are praying before the Ikons and searching their hearts. Shortly after midnight they will rise from their knees and announce to the people, “We have found him. He is risen. Christos Voskrece.”
I wandered among the merry crowds to the tower of St John’s, and as I was passing the great cannon, the Tsar of cannons, I overheard someone speaking English. I directed my steps in that direction and found the people, two clean-shaven young men, in English clothes, high English collars and bowler hats—immaculately 113English. They were talking loudly, evidently taking it for granted that no one could understand them. I took up my stand quite close and listened. This is what I overheard. It was very small talk, but it sounded very strange to hear it in this Russian crowd.
“The Moscow people are very rough, they’ve no manners at all. They don’t care who they jostle or push as long as they get along.”
“Yes, I was going through one of the Kremlin gates yesterday and a fellow knocked my hat off. Of course it was very nice of him, but he didn’t stop to tell me why he did it. I thought he was mad, but they told me afterwards it was a sacred gate. I saw several people take off their hats as they went through. They say the sentry has orders to fire on anyone who does not lift his hat. I felt I wanted to apologise to someone. It’s a beautiful custom, and I hadn’t any intention of infringing the law. I believe in doing as Rome does in Rome. I wonder if the sentry would shoot. Nice row there’d be if they shot a British subject.”
“You’re right, but what’d they care. They’re a rotten lot. I’d like to pole-axe the Governor. By-the-bye, have you heard anything of White recently? He said he thought his firm was sending him out.”
“No.”
“Did you know him at all? He was a thorough gentleman.”
114“No, not much; he didn’t live my way, you know. I met him several times down the county ground.”
“Yes, he was fairly mad over Surrey, wasn’t he? We played many games together, he and I; he bowled an awfully tricky ball, a gentle lob-dob, nearly full pitch. You thought you were going to put it out of the ground for six, and then suddenly you found your wicket down.”
At this point a disreputable beggar interrupted them.
“What d’you make of him—a drunken monk, eh?” said the cricketer. Both the Englishmen put on a look suggesting the principles of Political Economy, and signified by a frown that they did not encourage beggars. The “drunken monk,” however, did not budge for five minutes, he looked up at them and grinned. The people all round grinned also and turned to watch the scene. Then, suddenly, the beggar, after churning his mouth for some time, spat on the Harris overcoat of the cricketer’s companion and exclaimed:
“German pigs.”
“Beast,” said the Englishman, looking at his coat.
“They ought to be coming out soon. It’s only a short procession, they say—out of the church round the wall and back again; then the bells will begin. It’s after midnight now.”
I moved away at this point and left the cricketer putting his watch to his ear to see if it was going. I had promised to meet Shura and Nicholas and go up into the steeple with them. I found them on one of the 115stone galleries where the little bells of the church nestle together. They had a collection of squibs and crackers and coloured lights which they were letting off so as to allow girl students below to pretend to be terrified.
“The priests have come out,” said Nicholas, all at once pointing to a little procession just proceeding from the Uspensky. “Christos Voskrece, Christos Voskrece,” we heard all around us, and everyone was kissing one another. Then all the little bells of the churches began to tinkle, first a few and then more and more in confused ecstatic jangling. Moscow bells do not sound in the least like English bells, the chime is not musical or solemn. Our bells chant, their bells cheer. On Easter Night it is ten thousand bells, the voice of a thousand churches praising God. A wild, astonishing clamour, and then suddenly came one sound greater in itself than all the little sounds put together, the appalling boom of the great bell of St John Veleeky:
“Ting a ling, ling, ling, ling,
Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong,
Ding, ding, dong a dong, ding,
Dang, dang, dang,
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,
DOOM . . m . m m!”
Suddenly Katia passed me—the girl I took to the theatre.
“Christos Voskrece,” said I, “Christ is risen.”
“Yes,” said she, “He is risen,” and threw a handful of confetti in my eyes.
116We all ate paskha cake together in the Kislovka room at three in the morning, and drank students’ champagne, purchased by Shura at two shillings a bottle. so Easter Day dawned, my last at Moscow, the day of my parting with Nicholas, the day of my departure to the Caucasus.