The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 1/Chapter 2
One of the first friends I visited in Kief was Little-Russian Katia, a typical Russian of to-day, with the problems and prospects of the new-formed middle class.
At the time of the Boer War Katia ran away from school and set off on foot for South Africa as a Russian pilgrim would set out for Jerusalem, with a bundle on her back and a stick in her hand. She would beg her way to the Transvaal and collect money to help the Boers! At the same school, in the time of the riots in Kief, the first class presented an ultimatum to the masters and directors, demanding among other things the right to hold meetings, the right to get books from the public libraries, and equal justice for all pupils irrespective of race, be they Russians, Poles, or Jews! A go-ahead school as far as the scholars were concerned. If a mistress in a fit of anger strikes one of her class, straight away a boycott of her lessons is arranged, and no one answers her questions, no one does any homework for her.
Katia learnt at school to adore above all things the works of Oscar Wilde. She professes to know his works almost by heart; she sleeps with The Happy Prince under her pillow. On a wall in her bedroom hangs a large portrait of Oscar Wilde; in a corner is the sacred ikon, before which on festival nights and for holy days she lights a little lamp. She was the last Russian I had seen when I left Kief some fifteen months before. She was then engaged to Sasha, a thinly-clad, stern, poverty-stricken student, who in order to travel thirty versts on the railway free would take a conductor's job and examine the tickets in the second class. If she married Sasha he would get drunk and beat her; they would live dogs' lives—so every one said. The father, a rich manufacturer, was opposed to Sasha, but then the father was a tyrant; the mother, not on speaking terms with the father, gave countenance to the engagement. Sasha was able to come to all meals and stay as long as he liked with Katia. When Katia was indisposed and thought fit to lie in bed, he might spend whole evenings sitting by her. That was all comme il faut, for in Russia a betrothed couple are already called bride and bridegroom and have such freedom.
The father, however, cut short Katia's pocket-money and cut short his wife's housekeeping money, and made coarse jokes at the expense of the house-hold. Though Katia was twenty-two years of age she had no passport of her own. Her father simply kept her name written on his own passport, and in that way cut off the chance of his daughter's running away from home. You cannot get far in Russia without a passport of your own. You certainly cannot get married without a passport and without many documents.
Katia's sweetheart was not at all abashed by his own poverty or by the rudeness of the father. He came to all parties and functions in his shabby clothes. He lectured the father and mother on their behaviour. He was even hard and brusque to Katia herself upon occasion. But he stood up for her dignity, and would have fought any one who insulted her.
•••••••
Returning to Kief this month I rather wondered how far Katia's romance had got. Perhaps she and Sasha were now man and wife. But I could not imagine it. One of the felicities of travelling is to pay surprise visits. I had heard nothing from Katia in the interim. So I rang at the door and gave my name to a strange servant and went in and . . .
Exclamations! "Oh, how fine! on the twenty-fifth of January is my wedding," says the same beautiful Katia.
"I congratulate you. I did not know whom to visit first," said I, "you or Sasha."
"Sasha is in Moscow," says Katia with a troubled expression.
"Will you live in Kief?" I ask.
"I in Kief," says she with meaning emphasis.
So it is not Sasha that she is marrying.
Presently in comes a bright-looking soldier of rather charming manners, and he is introduced as the bridegroom. He is a guest in the house and has been living there some weeks—Fedor Leonidovitch Smirnoff—who has completed his university course in law, and is now serving his term in the army.
"The date is absolutely settled?" I suppose.
"If papa will take out the papers in time," says Katia.
But the new young man is on good terms with the father. He has evidently plenty of money of his own, and he is a persona grata.
"What of Sasha?" I ask Katia aside.
"We quarrelled," says she. "God, how we quarrelled! We were rowing in a boat on the Dnieper, and when I told him it was no good, we could never be married, he shot at me with a revolver. I had to save myself by jumping into the water."
"You've chosen a nice young man this time. Perhaps you are more likely to be happy with him."
"Yes. Everybody likes him."
Fedor is certainly a relief after the sternness of Sasha. He is affable, he is interested in the prices of all things, and is bourgeois, but he says that success and money and luxury do not tempt him. He would like to give up everything and try and find out what life means. He would like to be a wanderer as I am, or to go into a monastery.
All the same, the career assigned to him seems to be that of a lawyer, and as a lawyer, not as a vagabond, will he win the hand of Katia. He will live with her as a wealthy bourgeois European, and not as a Russian.
This modern Kief is a mill where purely Russian types go in and Europeans come out.
"Once a European, always a European," says some one.
"A European may become an American," I hazard.
"But he can never become a Russian again."
"What am I?" asks Katia of me, "a Russian or a European?"
"I don't know. You are changing perhaps. But keep a Russian!"
One evening, on Katia's advice, I took a sledge across the snow-covered city to Solovtsof's theatre and saw Jealousy performed, a story that has had a vast vulgar success in Russia. It is by Artsibashef, the author of the most notorious books of the last ten years. He is the voice of the bourgeois, of the new commercial middle-class Europeans being turned out at such an astonishing rate by the modern industrialism of Russia. He concerns himself almost entirely with sexual problems, and the relation of woman to man. His outlook in life is something like that of Bernard Shaw, but his criterion in life is not racial progress so much as physical happiness. He mirrors the life of those whose aim is money, whose relaxation is feasting and flirtation. He reflects the growing non-Christian Russia, the increasing mass of Parisian types of men and women obscuring the real Russia.
A crowded theatre, nobody in evening dress, many women pretentiously dressed, many rich town-folk in the stalls, clerks and their sweethearts or their wives in other parts of the house. The play is very well staged, well upholstered, and is vociferously received. What they are cheering is nothing more or less than a series of opinions about women, a disparagement and uglification of the symbol "woman," of what is holiest.
But to quote the opinions gives the play.
In woman first of all it is necessary to awaken curiosity.
Women do not value those who pray to them.
Woman, of course, likes admiration, but only gives herself to the man who despises her a little.
Men are most interesting when they are angry.
Woman is only interesting, vivacious, clever, when she is bathed in the atmosphere of love. Man is interested in his business, in sport, in thought, but woman is only interested in herself, and if she seems to have interest in other things it is only feigned. Her sole object is to make herself more alluring, more interesting.
We seek Lauras and Beatrices, not knowing that such creatures are only the incarnation of male fancy, and do not and cannot exist.
Girls are charming, but when you marry one you find her to be a tedious baba like the rest. At the piano they tinkle, "I am a princess, I am a princess." All young girls are princesses, but you never come across a queen.
A woman lies in a way that a man would not wish to lie, and indeed cannot lie. She lies with her whole being. When a man deceives he grows cool, and in that betrays himself. But a woman returns from another man's love specially languorous, caressing, and tender. . . . Sin must surely set her soul ablaze. Even the most sinful man is ashamed of deceit, and that prevents him from lying effectively. A woman quite sincerely reckons she has a right to deceive. She thinks that to deceive not only does not humiliate her, but, on the contrary, makes her more interesting.
The action of the drama shows two women, one who may be dismissed as a wanton, the other is a flirt who loves her husband best of all. The latter coquettes in various ways with an officer, a student, and a savage Caucasian prince. She leads them on to the last limit of propriety, and evidently finds her sole zest of life in the vanity of having lovers always expecting rendezvous and secret kisses.
The only words spoken on behalf of woman come from an old fellow who has been three times married—and deceived and made foolish by three women in turn. He says:—
Woman is a magnificent, delicate instrument on which each can play all that he can and will. Of course, put some Beethoven at the piano, and he will find you a wonderful sonata; but put some giftless strummer there, and he rattles out a vulgar polka. We are just such giftless fools, and swear at the instrument because it produces no music. No, friends, you are wrong; woman is sensitive, hospitable, tender, poetic. God gave us woman as an adornment of our lives; we ourselves have spoiled her and complain.
The play Jealousy is a sort of public trial of woman, and when at the end the crazy husband of the woman who flirted but loved him best strangles her, it is a sort of verdict, sentence, and execution in one.
How serious the trial is may be judged from the fact that each of the audience is given a pencil and a piece of paper and asked to record his opinion as to whether the man was justified in committing the murder.
How repulsive the whole thing! A play that should put "Woman" adequately on the stage needs many women and the various kinds of men who need from women the things that women can give—faith, love, children. For setting or for evidence it needs the world. The powers of life and death must stalk across the stage. The stakes for which men bid must be there, and also the
Stars silent over us,
Graves under us silent.
Jealousy is the reflection of a shameful way of life. It is trivial, mean, parochial, the rage of talk for a day among the bourgeois of Russia, interesting now, as opposed to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, interesting for ever.
"And what do you think of woman?" asked a Kief friend.
"Why," said I, "the beast was a beast until a woman loved him. Then he became a man, even a prince. So it is with all of us. When a woman kisses a man, even an ugly, wretched, despised creature, he knows that he has found grace and is precious in the sight of God. When a woman smiles on a man she bids him live.
"The world is kept fresh by women and children, by their faith and their influence and their prayers. It would have rotted away but for them.
"The love and the faith of women empower men to do things. No man who is out on the adventurous tracks of life but has women behind him, and their love even far away keeps him alive. A woman has cords from her soul to the far-off hands of man, and at her will can empower men to lift their hands and do things. She has spiritual nervous force."
"But if these cords get broken?" said my friend.
"Ah, then indeed she is in a different position. She finds herself stranded in destiny. She may become a man's plaything or worse. Or she may become a militant suffragist or a believer in secular education or a propagandist of eugenism and hygienics."
"In England," says my friend. "But in Russia we have no woman's movement. She becomes one of Artsibashef's women, no more; a man's plaything and fetish."
Even so.
•••••••
What has Artsibashef's play got to do with Russia? It has a good deal to do with her because of thousands such as Katia who are at the cross-roads. With her cross, hard, but loving student Sasha she might have been poor and unhappy, but, on the other hand, she would save her soul's health. Whereas with her new-found bourgeois Fedor she may easily enter the world and the atmosphere of Jealousy.
Among those I visited at Kief was a certain Vassia, a poverty-stricken doctor who worked from morning to night healing men and women, a specialist in internal diseases but practising in a poor district. He did not receive a fifth of his fees; he healed on trust.
"They come to me suffering: how can I refuse to help?" he would urge when people tried to harden his heart against those who couldn't pay.
An extraordinarily kind, impracticable fellow, with a flat in complete disorder, with an adopted child but no wife; lazy and thieving servants. Neighbours have stolen much of his furniture, even the ikons from some of the rooms; and the candles burn in the empty corners from which the ikons have been stolen! That is Russian.
Vassia and I were invited to an astonishing all-night feast given in honour of Katia on the occasion of her last name-day before marriage.
We sat down to dinner at six, we got up from dinner at half-past eleven; we went to the drawing-room and talked and sang till a quarter past twelve, then we returned to the dining-room for tea and coffee and dessert.
The funniest moments were when the bride's father sat on the floor pretending he was drunk, and when the bridegroom, to prove he was not tipsy, crawled under the table on all fours among the guests' feet and went from one end to the other, and then jumped up and gave a military salute.
They drank too much. They were near quarrelling at the end. One of the guests shouted in a loud voice that Katia's brother had played the piano like a bootmaker.
Then the toasts! They drank twice to everybody in the room, and the men kissed the hands of the women as well as clinking glasses with them. All the bridegroom said at dinner was, "So-and-so, for what reason do you not drink?" though So-and-so was often half-seas over. They drank to absent friends, to Freedom, to Truth, to English Literature—"Let us drink to English Literature, 'urrah!"—to Russian dancing, to Katia, to Katia's figure ("thank God she isn't like a telegraph pole"), to Katia's future happiness.
She changed her dress between dinner and dessert.
Some of the women present had a private view of the bride's linen—eight dozen chemises at a hundred and forty roubles the dozen, and all the rest on a similar scale.
"Fine batiste and lace," said an old lady present, rubbing her fingers together as if feeling the linen; "fine batiste that at the first wash goes into shreds from the chemicals the laundresses use. I wouldn't accept such garments as a gift. It is a sin to wear them. Nowadays, when you live in a city and the washerwoman won't wash naturally, the only thing to do is to wear cheap things and replace them continually."
What was interesting to me was the complete absence of attention on the part of the bridegroom. He could not have treated an enemy more negligently.
It even prompted the German governess, who had unfortunately got a little drunk with champagne, to cry out—
"The bridegroom has not kissed the bride once; why is it?"
Poor Katia! she did not seem to have one true friend amongst all these people, and was possibly marrying to escape from father and home. . . .
But away from these problems! Thousands of sleigh-horses flog the grey-white snow of the Kief streets, flocked with Christmas traffic. The sleighs are loaded with baskets of cakes and sweets. Men are driving, carrying in their arms huge Christmas trees. There are men struggling with little pigs and live geese and turkeys designed for the market or the Christmas dinner. On the slippery sidewalks urchins are crying with cheerful irrelevance:—
"Five copecks, aluminium wonder lights, cold fire without smoke, without smell."
"Five copecks, warm socks to put inside boots or goloshes."
In the Jewish old-clothes market of the Podol there are tremendous crowds, and much business is being done. The mood of Jewry is happy in the Christmas orgy of trade. All is calm after the ritual trial, and the fear of persecution is all gone in the reality of good business. All Kief seems to be in the streets buying; and the tram-cars tinkling their alarm bells are crowded to the last inch of the step-boards.
But somewhere there is another Kief, a quiet radiant city, silent but for the footfalls of monks or pilgrims on the snow—the sanctuaries, monasteries, ruins, shops, hostelries of the Petcherskaya Lavra. This Kief stands high on those cliffs of the Dnieper whence the Russians sent tumbling down their old god Peroun; it looks upon the river to which King Vladimir at the dawning of Russian faith stepped down with his whole army to be baptized. Yellow walls, half a mile long, twenty feet high, go down, alongside steep, snowy, rutty, over-drifted roads, from church to church. Peasant men and women in chestnut-coloured sheepskins, fur-edged and embroidered, are plodding up and down with bundles on their shoulders. Bright gilded domes of churches glitter above white walls, and from many kolokolnyas come antique-sounding chimes. As you look down from a tower you see beyond the thirty-five churches of the beautiful Lavra the blue and white Dnieper, half frozen and snowed over, half free as yet from winter's grip—you see beyond all the far snowy steppes and forests of Little Russia.
Here, in a historical sense, is Holy Russia, for the whole cliff on which the monasteries are built is holy ground. The foundations are honeycombed with cells of the primeval hermits and saints of Russia. You enter dark and narrow passages in the rock, places in which you cannot stand erect, and you wander candle in hand from shrine to shrine in the depths of the earth. An old monk with black cloak, grey hair, and yellow five-times broken twisted candle, leads you from skeleton to skeleton wrapped in purple pall; shows you now and then a skull, a dried-up hand; points out the picture of the likeness of the saint whose remains you salute, indicating the nickname the hermit bore in the days when he was upon the world, thus: the industrious, the silent, the bookless, the faster, the healer, the herbalist, and so on; thrusting the glimmer of his torch into the intense darkness of the cell which the father had occupied when alive. All day long the peasants wander from sepulchre to sepulchre in this unlocked cemetery or dungeon of the dead, kissing the coffins, laying personal ikons upon the relics in order that they may receive special sanctification, dropping their farthings on the palls, listening to services in remote underground churches, gathering unusual impressions of death, tasting the sweet emotions of religion.
In the hostelries, where are accommodated upon occasion as many as 20,000 pilgrims, you may wander at will and see peasant Russia sprawling on sheepskins and reading holy books, or making tea. You may go into the refectories and see 500 pilgrims sit down together to a free monastery dinner of cabbage soup and porridge and kvass, or you may sit with them yourself and eat. On this Christmas Eve just past I sat with such a party in the twilight waiting for the first star to come out, the signal to make the holy meal of Sotchelnik. It was a different Russia from Katia's, this of the 500 uncouth, shaggy-headed men and women at long dark tables, waiting in front of huge Russian basins full of soup, as the shades of night came down, and the lamp before the Virgin and Child grew brighter and brighter.
You tread with gentle steps across the giving snow and enter one of the churches, and find yourself in an irregularly grouped crowd of antique, hairy, patriarchal-looking men in sheepskins and birch-bark boots. There are no pews or seats, there is no electric light, but there is the gloom and effulgence of much gold and of many half-illuminated paintings and frescoes. You stand with peasant Russia on a stone floor in the glimmer and shadow of an immense candle-lit temple. You pass through with a candle to the front, to the altar-rail lit by scores of steady silver flames, the votive tapers of the pilgrims; you find yourself in the presence of a radiant line of calm, attentive, singing faces. This is Holy Russia independent of historical association. The music you hear in Russian churches robs you of the sense of time. On Christmas Eve in Russia you hear the music of the herald-angels, and see at the same time, in the likeness of the listening Russian peasants, the shepherds who heard the angels sing. You veritably escape from "the world" and from "to-day," and are so potently reminded of the beauty and mystery of man's life that you shake off all dull cares and the reproach of failure or success, the soil and stain of circumstance, and know that what is you is something utterly beautiful before God.
Kief has been called many names—the Canterbury of Russia, the Russian Jerusalem, the Font of Russia—but it may most truly be called the Russian Bethlehem, the place where Christ was born in Russia, adored by rude shepherds, sought by the noble and the wise.