I - HOSPITALITY

I

I imagine that whilst the prodigal son sat at meat with his father and their guests, there may have come to the door a weary tramp begging food and lodging. The elder brother would probably refuse hospitality, saying, “You are not even my sinning brother, and shall I harbour you?” The father in his wine might cry a welcome “Let him come in for the sake of my son found this day; he also was a tramp upon the road.” The prodigal would say to his steady-going, sober elder, “You say he is not your brother; but he is mine, he is my brother wanderer.” “Oh, come in then,” the elder brother would retort; “but you must do some work we can’t encourage laziness. You may have shelter and food, but to-morrow you must work with us in the fields till midday.”

This counsel of the elder brother has endured, and is accounted wise. But this type of hospitality is not of that sort that was rewarded, say, in Eager Heart. It is scarcely what the writer to the Hebrews intended when he said, “Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Of those who wander about the world there are many ordinary men who would be ready to do a morning’s work for their board, but there are also gods in disguise. There are mysterious spirits who cannot reveal the necessities of their fate; souls whom if we could recognise in their celestial guise we should worship, falling down at their feet with the humility of the cry, “I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof.”

There is another important objection to the complexion of the elder brother’s hospitality. Perhaps the tramp would of his own accord have volunteered to work with them next morning. If so, the tramp was deprived of his chance of giving in return. What would have been his gift has been made his price. He should not have been asked to pay. No one asks a brother to pay for food and shelter. And are we not all brothers? True hospitality is a sign of the brotherhood of man, and the open threshold symbolises the open heart. Inhospitality is the sign that man will not recognise the stranger as his brother.

There are two sorts of hospitality, that which gives all it has and that which gives what you want the former growing out of the latter. The one is prodigal and overflowing generosity, almost embarrassing in its lavishness, the other the simple and ordinary kindness that will always give what it has when there is need; the one the hospitality of Mary who poured out the precious ointment, the other the simple hospitality and homely kindness of Martha; the one is the glory of sacrifice and is of one day in a year or of one day in a life, the other is a sacred due and is of every day. The latter should at least be universal hospitality. It ought to be possible for man to wander where he will over this little world of ours and never fail to find free food and shelter and love. I know no greater shame in national development than the commercialisation of the meal and the night’s lodging. It has been our great disinheritance.

But, of course, it would be folly to demand hospitality or to attempt to enforce it. It is like the drunken cobbler who said to his wife, “You don’t love me, curse you, but by God you shall if I have to kill you first.” Even if a paternal government made a law that hospitality was obligatory and that whoever asked a night’s lodging must be given it, then at one blow the whole idea of hospitality would be annihilated. Hospitality must be something freely given, flowing genially outward from the heart. When in the Merchant of Venice the Duke says, “Then must the Jew be merciful!” and Shylock asks with true Jewish commercialism, “On what compulsion must I, tell me that?” then Portia gives the eternal answer

The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Need it be said mercy and hospitality are in many respects one and the same, and that when Portia says, “We do pray for mercy and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy,” it is like saying, “We pray for hospitality in heaven and that prayer teaches us to render hospitality here,” like “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” We shall never be homeless, either here or hereafter, if we love one another.

The shelter and food given one for the love of God are “sanctified creatures.” Sleeping in a home for the love of God is more refreshing than sleeping at an inn for a price. One has been blessed and one has also blessed in return; for again, hospitality, like mercy, blesses both those who give and those who take. Throughout a night one has helped to constitute a home, and the angels of the home have guarded one. One has lain not merely in a house but in a Christian home, not only in a home but in the temple of the heart.

It is sweet in a far-away land to be treated like a son or a brother, to be taken for granted, to be embraced by strange men and blessed by strange women. Sweet also is it for the far-away man to recognise a new son or a new brother in the wanderer whom he has received. I remember one night at the remote village of Seraphimo in Archangel Government, how a peasant put both hands on my shoulders and, looking into my eyes, exclaimed, “How like he is to us!”

II

Tramping across the Crimean moors I lost my way in the mist near the monastery of St. George, and was conducted by a peasant to the Greek village of Kalon, well known to old campaigners it is between Sebastopol and Balaklava. The village remains the same to-day as it was in the days of the Crimean War, and the same families as lived there then, or their descendants, live there now. I visited the starosta, and he indicated a home where I might sleep the night. I was taken in by an aged Greek woman and entertained among her family. They brought me bread and wine, and spread out the best couch for me. The sons told me of hunting exploits with the bear and the wild boar; they told me how at Christmas time the wild turkeys fly overhead in such numbers that it is the easiest thing in the world to shoot one’s Christmas dinner and I thought that very convenient. When the sons were silent, or talking among themselves, the old dame told me about her youth: how she was only seventeen years old at the time of the war; how the English were the most handsome of all the soldiers, how the Turks were the most lazy and the most brutal, how the French and the Italians simpered; how the English soldiers were loved by the Greek girls, how they were also more generous than the other troops and gave freely clothes and tea and sugar and whatever was needed in the cottages and asked no money for it whatever; how in these days the little children played with the cannon-balls, rolling them over the moors and up the village street all manner of gossip the good old lady told me, beguiling the hours and my ears till it was bedtime. Next day I offered to pay at least for my food, but the old lady, though poor, waved her hand and said, “Oh no, it is for the love of God!” How often have I had that said to me day after day in Russia, especially in the North!

Another day in Imeritia, when I passed at evening through a little Caucasian village and was beginning to wonder where I should have my supper and find a night’s lodging, a Georgian suddenly hailed me unexpectedly. He was sitting, not in his own house, but at a table in an inn. There were of course no windows to the inn, and all the company assembled could easily converse with the horsemen and pedestrians in the street below. He called out to me and I went up to him. A place was made for me at the table, and he ordered a chicken and a bottle of wine. I was just a little doubtful, for I had never seen the man before and his anticipation of my needs was surprising, but I accepted his invitation, drank his health, and ate my meal. He looked at me very pleasantly, and he was more sensible than a Russian, the sort of person who is marvellously interested in you, but who is so gentle that he will ask no questions lest you find some pain in answering him. But I told him about myself. After the meal he took me along to his house and gave me a spare bed. All was very disorderly and he apologised, saying, “It is untidy, but I am a bachelor. What is a bachelor to do? If I were married all would be different.” I spent a whole day with him, and in that short space he conceived for me as it seemed an eternal friendship.

“You are very good,” I said at parting. “You have been very hospitable. I don’t know how to thank you....” He stopped my words. “No, no,” he said, “it is only natural; it is no doubt what any one would do for me in your country were I a stranger there.”

“Would they?” I thought.

By the way, a curious example of inhospitality showed itself in this village where I met the Georgian. We were sitting round a pitcher of sweet rose-coloured wine, and one of us signalled to a rather morose Akhbasian prince who was passing, but he took no notice. “He will not drink wine with us,” said my friend. “His wife is so beautiful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“His wife is very beautiful and he is as jealous of her as she is beautiful. He is like a dog who growls when he has suddenly got something very good in his mouth: he fears any familiarity on the part of other dogs.”

As a tramp I have often felt how little I had to give materially for all the kindness I have received. But even such as myself have their opportunities of reciprocity, though they are of a humble kind. I call to mind a cold, wet day near Batoum, how I had a big bonfire by a stream under a bridge and I warmed myself, cooked food, and took shelter from the rain. A Caucasian man and woman, both tramps, came and sat by my fire a long while. The man took from his breast some green tobacco leaves, dried them by the fire, and put them in his pipe and smoked them. They spoke a language quite unintelligible to me and knew not a word of Russian. But they were nevertheless extremely demonstrative and told me all manner of things by signs and gestures. Very poor, even starving, and I gave them some bread and beef and some hot rice pudding from my pot. In return the man gave me five and a half walnuts! We seemed like children playing at being tramps, but I felt a very lively affection for these strange wanderers who had come so trustingly to my little home under the bridge.

One of the beautiful things about hospitality is that though we do not pay the giver of it directly, we do really pay him in the long run. A is hospitable to B, B to C, C to D, and so on, and at last Z is hospitable to A. It is largely a matter of “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.” It is significant that the Russian’s parting word equivalent to our “God be with you” is “Forgive!”

III

When St. Peter said to the beggar, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee,” it is not to be thought that he hadn’t a few coppers to spare. He meant, “Silver and gold are not my gifts; I have something other and more precious.” Thus the apostle indicated the deeper significance of charity.

There is hospitality of the mind as well as of the hand, though both spring from the heart. Hospitality of the hand is having a home with open doors, but that of the mind is having open the temple of the soul.

I once called upon a hermit and we talked of the significance of hospitality. At last he said to me: “You praise hospitality well, my brother, but there is another and a greater hospitality than you have yet mentioned. It is the will to take the wanderer not only into the house to feed but into the heart to comfort and love, the ability to listen when others are singing, to see when others are showing, to understand when others are suffering. It is what the writer to the Corinthians meant by charity.

“Thus ’Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,’ is like saying, ’Though I have all possible eloquence and yet do not understand mankind, do not take him to my heart, I am as sounding brass; unless my eloquence is music played upon the common chord I am but a tinkling cymbal.’

“’And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing,’ is like saying, ’Though I see into the future but misunderstand its significance; though I understand all mysteries, but not the mystery of the human heart; though I am able to remove obstacles by faith, I am simply like Napoleon, finishing up at St. Helena, I am nothing.’

“’And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing,’ is like saying, ’Organised philanthropy is not charity, neither is the will to be a martyr, unless these things spring from the will to feel how our brothers suffer.’

“’Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

“‘Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth,’ for the truth refutes all uncharitable judgment, the truth shows us all as brothers, shows us all needing the love which one man can give to another.

“’Charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth.’”

I understood the hermit though it seemed to me there was much that he left out. Had he been a tramp instead of a hermit he would probably have thought as I do. The world that he talked of was obviously one entirely of men and women, and he left out of account all that world which we call Nature.

It is well to receive men and shelter them and feed them, and well to understand their hearts, but when men are not near there is another beautiful world knocking at our doors and asking hospitality in our souls; it is the world of Nature. Oh ye young of all ages, be hospitable unto Nature, open your doors to her, take her to your hearts! She will rebuild your soul into a statelier mansion, making for herself a fitting habitation, she will make you all beautiful within. Then, when you extend the hospitality of your hearts, your temples, to man, they will be spacious temples and rich hearts. Nature comes first, for she heals hearts’ wounds; if you have not received her communion first you will not be so fit to receive man. The consumptive-bodied already go to the country, and we are nearly all of us, in this era of towns, consumptive-souled. We need whole hearts just as we need whole lungs. But what am I saying? I am bidding you bargain with Nature for a price, and that is wrong. You must love her, not for anything she can give you. What is more, you can never know what she will give you: she may even take away. When you see her you will love her as a bride. Be receptive to her beauty, be always Eager Heart. When any man receives her into himself there is born in his soul’s house the baby Christ, the most wonderful and transfiguring spirit that man has yet known upon a strange world.

II - THE STORY OF THE RICH MAN AND THE POOR MAN

On my way to Jerusalem I tramped through a rich residential region where wealthy Armenians, Turks, and Russians dwelt luxuriously in beautiful villas looking over the sea. I had been sleeping out, for the road was high and dry and healthy, but at last, entering a malarial region, I began to seek shelter more from man than from Nature.

One cold and cloudy night I came into the village of Ugba and sought hospitality. There were few houses and fewer lights, and some feeling of awkwardness, or perhaps simply a stray fancy, prompted me to do an unusual thing to beg hospitality at one of the luxurious villas. I had nearly always gone to the poor man’s cottage rather than to the rich man’s mansion, but this night, the opportunity offering, I appealed to the rich.

I came to the house of a rich man, and as I saw him standing in the light of a front window I called out to him from a distance. In the dusk he could not make out who I was, but judging by my voice he took me for an educated man, one of his own class.

“Can you put me up for the night?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied cheerfully. “Come round by the side of the house, otherwise the dogs may get in your way.”

But when the rich man saw me on his threshold a cloud passed over his eyes and the welcome faded from his face. For I was dressed simply as a tramp and had feet so tired that I had not troubled to take the signs of travel from my garments. I had a great sack on my back, and in my hand a long staff.

The head of the house, a portly old gentleman with a long beard, interrogated me; his son, a limp smiling officer in white duck, peered over his shoulder; two or three others of the establishment looked on from various distances.

“What do you want?” asked the old gentleman curtly, as if he had not heard already.

“A lodging for the night,” I said unhappily.

“You won’t find lodging here,” said the greybeard in a false stentorian voice. And the little officer in white giggled.

“You’ve made a mistake and come to the wrong house. We have no room.”

“A barn or outhouse would serve me nicely,” I put in.

The old man waved his hand.

“No, no. You are going southward? You have strayed somewhat out of your path coming up here. There is a short cut to the main road. There you’ll find a tavern.”

It was in my mind to say, “I am an Englishman, a traveller and writer, and I am on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. You misdoubt my appearance, and are afraid of sheltering an unknown wanderer, but I am one whom you would find it interesting and perhaps even profitable to harbour.” But my heart and lips were chilled.

I had taken off my pack, but put it on again humbly and, somewhat abashed, prepared to leave. The family stood by staring. It was a very unusual thing for a poor tramp to come and ask hospitality. Tramps as a rule knew better than to come to their doors. Indeed, no tramp had ever come there before. It rather touched them that I should have believed they would shelter me. Their refusal troubled them somewhat.

“There’s always plenty of room in the tavern,” said the rich man to his wife. “And they’ll be glad to have a customer.”

As I turned to go, some one brought a light, and a gleam fell on my face. The company expected to see the cringing, long-suffering face of a peasant in the presence of his master, but the light showed something different....

“He is perhaps one of our own class ... or ... God knows what ...” they thought, one and all. “It is hateful to have refused him. But no, if he is one of us, why does he come clothed like a common man? He has only himself to blame.”

The old man, feeling somewhat ashamed, offered to show me the way. He came out and pointed out the short cut to the tavern.

“It is quite clear. I shall find the way,” I said. “Thank you.”

The old man halted as if he wished to say something more.

“What now?” I asked myself. I said good-bye, and as I moved away he asked:

“You are going far, belike!”

“To Jerusalem,” I answered laconically. In Russia there is only one thing to say when a man tells you he is going to Jerusalem. It is, “Pray for me there!” But somehow that request stuck in the old man’s throat.

When I got outside the park gates I pulled down my pack and took out of it the only thing that had stood between me and a night’s lodging a grey tweed sportsman’s jacket and I put it on, and with it a collar and tie, and I walked along the road in real sadness. For I felt wounded.

I could forgive the man for doing so unto me, but it was hard to forgive him for doing so unto himself, unto us all. He had made life ugly for a moment, and made the world less beautiful. To-morrow the sun and the earth would be less glorious because of him.

But I had only walked a few steps down the road from the rich man’s house when I came to a poor peasant’s hut where there burned one little light at a little square window.

And I thought, “Please God, I will not go to the tavern, which is possibly kept by a Turk and is very dirty. I will try for a night’s lodging here.”

I knocked at the door with my staff.

There was a stirring inside.

“Who is there?”

“One who wants a lodging for the night. It is late to disturb you, but I fear there will be rain.”

A peasant woman came to the door and unbarred it, and let me in.

“Ah, little father,” she said, “you come late, and we have little space, as you see, only one room and a big family, but come in if you will.”

She turned up the little kerosene lamp and looked at me.

“Ai, aï,” she said, “a barin.” She looked at my coat and collar. “It will be but poor fare here.”

“Not a barin” I urged, “but a poor wanderer coming from far and going farther still. I generally sleep under the open sky with God as my host and the world as my home, but to-night promises storm, and I fear to take cold in the rain.”

The peasant girl, for she was no more, busied herself with the samovar. “You must have something hot to drink, and some milk and eggs perhaps. My husband is not yet home from market, but he will come belike very soon, and will be very glad to find a stranger. He will rejoice. He always rejoices to give hospitality to strangers upon the road.”

When she had brought me a meal she fetched fresh hay from a barn and spread a quilt over it and made a bed for me, and would have given me her own pillow but that I pointed out that my pack itself made a very good resting-place for my head.

Then her husband came home, a strong kindly man, full of life and happiness, and he did rejoice as his little wife had promised. He was sorry he had not wine with which to entertain me. Such people drink wine not more than twice in a year.

And with these humble, gentle folk I forgot the rich man’s coldness, and healed my heart’s wounds. Life was made beautiful again. To-morrow the sun would be as bright as ever.

I slept in the comfortable warm bed on the floor of the poor peasant’s hut, and the storm rolled overhead, the winds moaned and the rain fell.

“You are going to Jerusalem,” said the good man and woman next morning, “pray for us there. It is hard for us to leave our little hut and farm, or we would go to the Holy Land ourselves. We should like to go to the place where the Christ was born in Bethlehem and to the place where He died.”

“I shall pray,” I said; and I thought in my heart, “They are there in Jerusalem all the time, even though they remain here. For they show hospitality to strangers.”

But as I trudged along my way there seemed to be a pathos too deep for tears underlying my experiences at the hands of the rich man and of the poor man.

That it should occur so in real life, and not merely in a moral tale!

The position of the rich man is so defensible. Of course it would have been ridiculous of him to have sheltered me. Who was I? I had no introduction. What was I? I might have robbed him in the night ... or murdered. I was ill-dressed and poor, therefore no doubt covetous of his fine clothes and wealth. They would only have themselves to blame if they sheltered me and I did them harm. Besides, was there not the tavern close by? All reason pointed to the tavern.

But something troubled them, something in my face and demeanour!

Alas for such people! They forget that Christ comes into this world not clothed in purple. They forget that Christ is always walking on the road, and that he shows himself as one needing help. And always once in a man’s life the pilgrim Christ comes knocking at his door, with the pack of man’s sorrows on his back and in his hand the staff which may be a cross.

I met the young officer in white next morning. He looked at me with a certain amount of surprise. I hailed him.

“Did you sleep well at the tavern?” he asked.

“I found shelter at a peasant’s house,” I answered.

“Ah! That’s well. I didn’t think of that. You said you were going to Jerusalem. Why is that? Evidently you are not Russian.”

I told him somewhat of my plans. He seemed interested and somewhat vexed. “I said we ought to have taken you in,” he said apologetically. “But you came so late ’like a thief in the night,’ as the Scripture saith.”

I sat down on a stone and laughed and laughed. He stared at me in perplexity.

“‘Like a thief in the night,’” I cried out. “Oh, how came you to hit on that expression? Go on, please ’and I knew you not.’ Who is it who cometh as a thief in the night?”

The officer smiled faintly. He was dull of understanding, but evidently I had made a joke, or perhaps I was a little crazed.

He turned on his heel. “Sorry we turned you away,” he repeated, “but there are so many scoundrels about. If you’re passing our way again be sure and call in. Come whilst it’s light, however.”

III - A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

Dzhugba is an aggregation of cottages and villas round about the estuary of a little river flowing down from the Caucasus to the Black Sea. On the north a long cliff road leads to Novorossisk a hundred miles, and southward the same road goes on to Tuapse, some fifty miles from Maikop and the English oil-fields.

I arrived at the little town too late to be sure of finding lodging. The coffee-house was a wild den of Turks, and I would not enter it; most private people were in bed. I walked along the dark main street and wondered in what unusual and unexpected manner I should spend the night. When one has no purpose, there is always some real providence waiting for the tramp.

The quest of a night’s lodging is nearly always the origin of mysterious meetings. It nearly always means the meeting of utter strangers, and the recognition of the fact that, no matter how exteriorly men are unlike one another, they are all truly brothers, and have hearts that beat in unison. Thus did it happen that I met my strange host of Dzhugba.

A hatless but very hairy Russian met me at a turning of the road, and eyeing me with lacklustre eyes asked me gruffly as a rude shopman might, “What do you want?”

“A lodging for the night.”

The peasant reflected, as if mentally considering the resources of the little town. At last after a puzzling silence he put one fat hand on my shoulder, and staring into my face, pronounced his verdict

“The houses are all shut up and the people gone to bed. There is no place; even the coffee-house is full. But never mind, you can spend the night in a shed over here. I shall find you a place. No, don’t thank me; it comes from the heart, from the soul.”

He led me along to a lumber-room by the side of the plank pier. It contained two dozen barrels of “Portlandsky” cement. The floor was all grey-white and I looked around somewhat dubiously, seeing that cement is rather dirty stuff to sleep upon. But, nothing abashed, my new friend waved his hand as if showing me into a regal apartment.

“Be at your ease!” said he. “Take whatever place you like, make yourself comfortable. No, no thanks; it is all from God, it is what God gives to the stranger.”

He thereupon ran out on to the sand, for the shed was on the seashore, and he beckoned me to follow. To my astonishment, we found out there an old rickety bedstead with a much rent and rusted spring mattress apparently left for me providentially. It was so old and useless that it could not be considered property, even in Russia. It belonged to no one. Its nights were over. I gave it one night more.

The peasant was in high glee.

“Look what I’ve found for you,” said he. “Who could have expected that to be waiting outside for you? Several days I have looked at that bedstead and thought, ’What the devil is that skeleton? Whence? Whither?’ Now I understand it well. It is a bed, the bed of the Englishman on the long journey....”

The mattress was fixed to an ancient bed frame one could not call it bedstead with twisted legs that gave under weight and threatened to break down. We brought the “contrapshun” in.

“Splendid!” said my host.

“Impossible,” I thought, trying to press down the prickly wire where the mattress was torn.

“No doubt you are hungry,” my friend resumed. I assured him I was not in the least hungry, but despite my protestations he ran off to bring me something to eat. I felt sorry; for I thought he might be bringing me a substantial supper, and I had already made a good meal about an hour before. What was more, he lived at some distance, and I did not care to trouble the good man, or for him to waken up his wife who by that hour was probably sleeping.

However, he was gone, and there was nothing to be done. I laid some hay on the creaking sorrow of a bed, and endeavoured to bend to safety the wilderness of torn and rusty wire. I spread my blanket over the whole and gingerly committed my body to the comfortable-seeming couch. Imagine how the bed became an unsteady hammock of wire and how the contrivance creaked at each vibration of my body. I lay peacefully, however, looked at the array of cement barrels confronting me, and waited for my host. I expected a plate of chicken and a bottle of wine, and was gradually feeling myself converted to the idea that I wouldn’t mind a nice tasty supper even though I had made my evening meal.

What was my astonishment when the good man returned bearing a square-foot slice of black bread on which reposed a single yellow carrot! I looked curiously at the carrot, but my host said, “Nitchevo, nitchevo, vinograd” “Don’t worry, don’t worry, a grape, that’s all.”

He had also brought a kerosene lamp, which, however, lacked a glass. He stood it on one of the grey barrels and turned it monstrously high, just to show his largeness of heart, I suppose. I got up and turned it down because it was smoking, and he waved his hand once more deprecatingly, and turning the wick up and down several times, signified that I was to do with it exactly as I pleased. He left it smoking again, however.

I put the thought of a good supper out of my mind and looked at the black bread with some pathos, as who would not after conjuring before the eyes a plate of chicken and a bottle of wine? However, it was indeed nitchevo, to use the Russian phrase, a mere nothing. I averred I was not hungry and put the bread in my pack, of which I had made a pillow, and simulating comfort, said I thanked him and would now go to sleep. My host understood me, but was not less original in his parting greeting than in the rest. He shook hands with me effusively, and pointed to the roof.

“One God,” he said. “And two men underneath. Two men, one soul.”

He looked at me benevolently and pointed to his heart.

“Two men, one soul,” he repeated, and crossed himself. “You understand?”

“I understand.”

Then he added finally, “Turn the lamp as high as you like,” and suited the action to the word by turning it so high that one saw a dense cloud of smoke beyond the lurid flame.

“Good-night!”

“Good-night!”

My queer guardian angel disappeared. I fastened the door so that it should not swing in the wind, and then climbed back into my wire hammock, stretched out my limbs, laid my cheek on my pack, and slept.

Nothing disturbed me, though I woke in the night, and looking round, missed the Ikon lamp which would have been burning had I been in a home. It was a saint’s day. The absence of the Ikon told me the difference between sleeping in a house and sleeping in a home. Perhaps it was because of this difference that my host blessed me so earnestly.

Next morning I sought my host in vain. He had apparently left the town before dawn with a waggon of produce that had to be carted to Tuapse. At breakfast in the Turkish coffee-house I looked with some amusement at the bread and carrot, discarded the latter, but munched the former to the accompaniment of a plate of chicken and a bottle of wine. My imagining, therefore, of the previous night was not altogether vain. All that was needed was that my comical host should look in. As it was, in his absence I drank his health with a Georgian.

IV - SOCRATES OF ZUGDIDA

I was travelling without a map, never knowing what I was coming to next, what long Caucasian settlement or rushing unbridged river, and I came quite unexpectedly to a town. I had not the remotest idea that a town was near, and when I learned the name of the town I realised that I had never heard of it before Zugdida.

This is no fairy story. Zugdida veritably exists, and may be found marked on large maps. I came into it on a Sunday evening, and found it one of the largest and most lively of all the Caucasian towns I had yet visited; the shops and the taverns all open, the wide streets crowded with gaily dressed horsemen, the footways thronged with peasants walking out in Sunday best. A remote town withal, not on the railways, and unvisited as yet by any motor-car unvisited, because the rivers in these parts are all bridgeless.

I was looking for a place where I might spend the night towns are inhospitable places, and one is timorous of sleeping in a tavern full of armed drunkards when I was hailed by a queer old man, who noticed that I was a stranger. He kept one of the two hundred wine-cellars of the town, and was able to give me a good supper and a glass of wine with it. He was an aged Mingrelian, bald on his crown, but lank-haired, dreamy-eyed, stooping; he had a Robinson Crusoe type of countenance. I had come to one of the oldest inhabitants of Zugdida, an extraordinary character.

I asked him how the town had grown in his memory.

“When I came here from the hills forty years ago,” said he, “long before the Russo-Turkish War, there were three houses here three only, two were wine-cellars. Now Zugdida is second only to Kutais. I remember how two more wine-cellars were built, and a small general shop, then a bread shop, then two more wine cellars, two little grocer’s shops, some farm-houses. We became a fair-sized village, and wondered how we had grown. The Russians came and built stone houses and a military barracks, a prison, a police-station, and a big church; then came the Hotel of Russia, the Universal Stores. We built the broad, flag-stoned market, and named a Fair day; saddlery and sword shops opened, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, coppersmiths, jewel workers, tailors; Singer’s sewing machines came, two more hotels, and we grew and grew. We have now over two hundred taverns. We have offered the Government to pay for all the necessary land, and defray all minor expenses, if they will connect us with Poti by railway, and if it were not that so many people want bribes we should be part of Europe. As it is, we’re just a bit of the old Caucasus.”

He pointed to a group of drunkards, all armed from head to foot, but now clinging to one another and raising their voices in Asiatic chanting.

After supper a stew of mutton and maize, with a bottle of very sweet rose-coloured wine the old man took me aside and made me a long harangue on life and death and the hereafter. Better sermon on a Sunday evening I never heard in church. He told me the whole course of the good man’s life and compared it with that of the bad man, weighed the two, and found the latter wanting on all counts, adding, however, that it was impossible to be good.

“How did you come to think so seriously of life?” I inquired.

“In this way,” he replied. “Once I was very ’flee-by-the-sky’ I didn’t care a rap, sinned much, and feared neither God nor the devil or, if anything, I feared the devil a little; for God I never had the least respect. But one day I picked up a book written by one Andrew, and I read some facts that astonished me. He said that in eight thousand years after the creation of the world the sun would go red and the moon grey, the sun would grow old and cease to warm the world just as you and I must inevitably grow old. In that day would be born together, one in the East and one in the West, Christ and the Anti-Christ, and they would fight for the dominion of the world. This story caused me to pause and think. Hitherto I had taken all for granted.

“It had never occurred to me that the sun might stop shining, that the stars might go out. I had scarcely thought that I myself might stop, might die.

“‘What happens to me when I die?’ I asked people. ’God will judge you,’ they said. ‘If good, you go to heaven; if evil, to hell.’ That did not satisfy me. How did people know? No one had ever come back to tell us how things were done after death.

“I had never thought at all before, but now I began to think so hard that I could not go about the ordinary things of life, I was so wrapped up in the mystery of my own ignorance.

“People said I was under the evil eye. But that again was nonsense. ‘Whence comes man?’ I asked. ’Where does he go? Where was I before I was born?’ I was part of my ancestors. Very well. ’But where shall I go when I die? What shall I be?’

“I nearly learned to disbelieve in religion. You must know I began to go to church every Saturday evening and on all festivals. I listened intently to all the services and the sermons, and I read all that I could find to read, and I asked questions of priests and of educated people all with the idea of solving this mystery of life. I tried to be good at the bidding of the Church, but I gave that up. I learned that it was impossible to avoid sin.

“You drink wine this is a sin; give short weight that is a sin; look on your neighbour’s wife that is a sin; everything you do is sin even if you do nothing, that is sin; there is no road of sinlessness.

“I went on living as I felt inclined, without care as to whether it were sin or no. But still I asked myself about man’s life.

“Some one said to me, ’You will never understand, because you think of yourself as a separate individual, and not as just a little part of the human race. You live on in all the people who come after you, just as before you were born you lived in those who were before you.’

“That was something new, but I understood him, and I asked him a new question: ’If what you say is true and very likely it is what, then, is the past of the whole human race, and what its future? What does the life of the human race mean?’

“That he could not answer. Can you answer it? No. No one can answer it.”

“You are like Socrates,” I said.

“Who was Socrates?”

“He was the man whom the Oracle indicated as the wisest man alive. All men knew nothing, but Socrates was found wiser than they, for he alone knew that he knew nought.”

A look of pleased vanity floated over the face of my Mingrelian host.
He was at least quite human.

Before going to bed we drank one another’s healths.

V - “HAVE YOU A LIGHT HAND?”

This is not simply a matter of making pastry, as you shall see.

I was tramping along a Black Sea road one night, and was wondering where I should find a shelter, when suddenly a little voice cried out to me from the darkness of the steppe. I stopped and looked and listened. In a minute a little boy in a red shirt and a grey sheepskin hat came careering towards me, and called out: “Do you want a place to sleep? My mother’s coffee-house is the best you’ll find. The coffee-house down the hill is nothing to it. There it is, that dark house you passed. I am out gathering wood for the fire, but I shall come in a minute.”

Sharp boy! He was only eight years old. How did he guess my need so well?

I retraced my footsteps very happily, and came to the dark inn I had missed. It stood fifty yards back from the road, and had no light except what glimmered from the embers of a wood fire. At the door was a parrot that cried out, “Choozhoi, choozhoi, choozhoi preeshhol” “A stranger, a stranger, a stranger has arrived.”

The mother, a pugnacious gossip with arms akimbo, looked at me with perturbed pleasure. “Are you a beggar or a customer?” she asked. “Because if you’re a beggar,” etc. I cut her short as soon as I could. I assured her I should be much pleased to be a customer.

I ordered tea. The boy came in and claimed me as his find, but was snubbed. My hostess proceeded to ask me every question known to her. To my replies, which were often not a little surprising, she invariably replied with one of these exclamations, “Say it again, if you please.” “Indeed!” “With what pleasure!”

That I was a tramp and earned my living by writing about my adventures pleased her immensely. I earned my living by having holidays, and gained money where other travellers never did anything but spend.

“With what pleasure” did she hear that literary men were paid so many roubles a thousand words for their writings. One could easily write an immense quantity, she thought.

The little boy looked at me with bright eyes, and listened. Presently, when his mother was dilating on the inferiority of painting as a profession, he broke in.

The mother was saying, “Not only does the painter catch cold standing still so long in marshy places, but when he has finished his pictures he has to hawk them in the fairs, and even then he may not be able to sell them.”

“What fairs?” asked the boy.

“The fairs of Moscow, Petersburg, Kiev, and the great towns. Some sell for fifty roubles, some for five hundred, some for five thousand and more. A little picture would go for five roubles perhaps.”

“What size pictures would one buy for fifty roubles?” asked the boy.

“Oh, about the same size as from the floor to the ceiling.”

“What size would one be that cost five thousand roubles?”

“Oh, an immense picture; one could build a country house out of it.”

The boy reflected.

“And five hundred thousand roubles?” he asked. But his mother remained profitably silent over the preparation of the family soup. The fire now blazed with the additional wood that had been heaped upon it. The little voice repeated the absurd question, and the mother shouted, “Silence! Don’t make yourself a nuisance.”

“But how big would it be?” whined the boy. “Tell me.”

“Oh, the same, but bigger, stupid!”

Thereupon my little friend was very happy, and he apparently ascribed his happiness to me.

A few minutes later he abruptly asked permission to take me up a mountain to show me a castle next morning, and his mother agreed, pointing out how extremely profitable it would be for me. The little boy rejoiced; he had apparently wanted to go up to that castle for a long while. How excited and happy he was!

His mother paid little attention to her child, however, and her interest lay in the bubbling cauldron where the soup was cooking. “You have a very clever boy,” I said, but she did not agree with me. His pranks and high spirits were to her evidence of stupidity. I must say I felt we were the stupid party, and the boy was a little wonder. We went on gossiping, and presently he proved us stupid.

He started up with one finger to his ear and then darted out, leaving the door open and letting the steppe air pour in.

The mother listened, and then said discontentedly after a pause, “That child is not usual.”

The boy came back with fifteen shaggy customers, however; fifteen red-faced waggoners, half-frozen in their sheepskins, and all clamoured for food and drink.

The boy, all excitement, danced up to me and said, “Have you a light hand? You must have a light hand!” I didn’t know what he meant, but he was off before I had time to ask.

He began serving tea and cutting bread and asking questions. Did any one want soup? Nobody wanted soup at first, but at the boy’s solicitations nine of them agreed to have portions at twopence a plateful. The mother persuaded others to have pickled herrings, cheese, wine.

The inn was of two rooms: one a bedroom and retiring-room without a door. The Ikon of this room served the economical hostess for both rooms.

The waggoners were all surly till they had fed. “Show me where we can bow to God,” said one of them very gruffly, not seeing the Ikon. The little boy led him and all his mates into the little bedroom, and they all bowed their hairy faces and crossed themselves before the Ikon of St. Nicholas.

Then they returned and consumed the soup and the herrings and bread and cheese and wine and tea. I looked on. My hostess was turning a pretty penny. I was looking on at a very pleasant and surprising interlude.

Every now and then one of the mouzhiks would stump out to see how the horses were, for they had a long train of waggons carrying building materials to the Tsar’s estate of Livadia. At length all had supped, and they came up to the counter one by one and thanked the hostess heartily, paying her the while.

Only one of the men was dissatisfied the last one to come up.

“Your soup is dear,” said he.

“Dear! What do you mean?” said the woman. “How much would you pay for such soup in Yalta, and with beef at fivepence a pound, too?”

“In Yalta they give one soup.”

“And here!”

“Here ... as God wills ... something....” The mouzhik slammed the door.

“There’s a man,” said my hostess, but she wasn’t enraged. Had she not just sold the family’s soup for eighteenpence, and made tenpence profit on it, and wouldn’t her husband be pleasantly surprised when he saw there were three shillings more on the counter than usual? It was not often that such custom had come to her.

The boy explained the reason to her in a whisper: “He has a light hand.”

“Very like,” said she, looking at me with new interest.

“What do you mean?” I asked the boy.

“Why, don’t you know?” said he wonderingly. “Wherever you go you bring good fortune. After I met you on the road I immediately began to find wood much more plentifully. When I came in I learned how to buy pictures. Then mother said she would let me go with you to see the castle. Then, not only are you a good customer staying the night, but after you came all this crowd of customers. Generally we have nobody at all....”

“And I met this wonderful boy,” thought I. “I should like to carry him away. He is like something in myself. He also had the light hand, but what a testimony he gave the tramp! Wherever he goes he brings happiness.”

As once I wrote before, “tramps often bring blessings to men: they have given up the causes of quarrels. Sometimes they are a little divine. God’s grace comes down upon them.”

VI - ST. SPIRIDON OF TREMIFOND

The charge for driving on Caucasian roads is a penny per horse per mile, so if you ride ten miles and have two horses you pay the driver one shilling and eightpence. But if, as generally happens, the driver’s sense of cash has deprived him of a sense of humour, a conversation of this kind commonly arises.

“One and eightpence. What’s this?”

“Ten miles, and two horses at a penny per horse per mile; isn’t that correct?”

“To the devil with your one and eightpence. Give it to the horses; a penny a mile for a horse, and how about the man, the cart, the harness? I gave you hay to sit on. See what fine weather it has been! What beautiful scenery! Yonder is the church ... the wineshop, the....”

“Hold hard, my good man. The Universe, our salvation by Christ, why don’t you charge for these as well! Here’s sixpence to buy yourself a drink.”

The driver takes the sixpence and looks at it, makes a calculation, and then blurts out:

“What! Sixpence for a man and tenpence for a horse; aï, aï, what a barin I have found. Sixpence for a man and tenpence for a horse. Bad news, bad news! Cursed be the day....”

Here you give him another sixpence, and get out of earshot quickly.

A penny a mile a horse. It is good pay in the Caucasus, and I for my part charge myself only a halfpenny a mile. If I walk twenty-five miles, then I allow myself a shilling wages, and, of course, some of that I save for the occasion when I come into a town with a great desire for good things. Then a spending of savings and a feast!

“Good machines use little fuel,” said an emaciated tramp to me one day. But I have no ambition to be accounted a good machine on those terms. I eat and drink anything that comes in my way, and am ready at any moment to feast or to fast. I seldom pass a crab-apple tree without tasting its fruit, or allow myself to pass a mountain stream without drinking.

Along this Black Sea road in the autumn it would be impossible to starve, so lavish is Nature of her gifts. Here are many wild fruits, plums, pears, blackberries, walnuts, grapes, ripening in such superfluity that none value them. The peasant women pick what they need; the surplus is allowed to fall and rot into the soil.

I made my way to Ghilendzhik through miles of wild fruit-trees ranged in regular order. It is said that once upon a time when this territory belonged to Turkey, or even before then, the land was laid out in orchards and vineyards, and there was not a square foot uncultivated.

I ate of wild pears and kisil plums. The pears were more the concentrated idea of pears than that we take from gardens; the kisil plums, with which the bushes were flaming, are a cloudy, crimson fruit with blood-like juice, very tart, and consequently better cooked than raw. My dictionary tells me that the kisil is the burning bush of the Old Testament, but surely many shrubs claim that distinction.

It was a glorious walk over the waste from Kabardinka to Ghilendzhik, with all manner of beauty and interest along the way. I left the road and cut across country, following the telegraph poles. In front of me fat blue lizards scuttled away, looking like little lilac-coloured dachshunds; silent brown snakes shot out of reach at the sight of my shadow; and every now and then, poking and grubbing like a hedgehog, behold a large tortoise out for prey like his brother reptiles. This domiciled the tortoise for me; otherwise I had only associated him with suburban gardens and the “Zoo.” Now as he hissed at me angrily I knew him to be a lizard with a shell on his back. I picked up several of them and examined their faces they didn’t like that at all. They have a peculiar clerical appearance, something of the sternness and fixity of purpose which seems to express itself in the jaws and eyes of some learned divines.

With what eagerness the tortoises scrambled away when I disturbed them. They run almost speedily in their natural state. I was amused at the strength of their claws, and the rate at which they tore a passage into a thicket and disappeared.

Half-way to Ghilendzhik there is a stone quarry, and there one may see thousands of what are called in England “Cape gooseberries,” bright berries of the size and colour of big ripe strawberries. They peeped out shyly everywhere among the tall grasses and the ground-scrub. Above them were stretches of saffron-coloured hollyhocks, a flood of colour, and with these as sisters, evening primroses, a great abundance. Lilac and crimson grasshoppers rushed over them, jumping into the air and into vision, a puff of bright colour then subsiding into the greyness of the dust as they alighted and the sombre wing-cases closed over their little glory. On the ground when waiting to spring, these grasshoppers looked as if made of wood: they looked like displaced chessmen of ancient workmanship.

What a rush of insect life there was in the air, new-born fritillary butterflies like little flames, dragon-flies, bee-hawks, fat sun-beetles, gorgeous flies, the sinister green praying-mantis! The Athena of the air expressed herself in all her wonder.

Ghilendzhik is a collection of datchas (country-houses) and Caucasian dwelling-places. Its name signifies “The White Bride,” and it is a quiet, beautiful watering-place in a pure bay, beloved of all Russians who have ever visited it. It is the healthiest resort on the whole Black Sea shore, continually freshened by cool breezes from the steppes. It is yet but a village, utterly undeveloped, unpavemented, without shops or trams or bathing-coaches, or a railway station, and those who visit it in the season regard themselves rather as a family party. The beach is private, and a bathing costume is rather a rarity. It is an amazing testimony to the simplicity of the Russian that the upper classes behave at the seaside with little more self-consciousness than the peasant children by the village stream. When Ghilendzhik is commercialised to a Russian Brighton it will be difficult to imagine what an Eden it once was.

I had looked forward to my arrival, for I had a Russian friend there, living for the summer in her own datcha, and I had received a very warm invitation to stay there some days.

The welcome was no less warm than the invitation. I arrived one evening all covered with dust, my face a great flush of red from the sun, my limbs agreeably tired. The house was a little white one on the very edge of the sea. Part of the verandah had lately been washed away in a storm, so close was the datcha to the waves. I went in, washed, clad myself in fresh linen the road-stained clothes were taken away with a promise of return clean on the morrow borrowed some slippers, and sitting in an easy-chair on the verandah, lounged happily and chatted with my hostess.

Varvara Ilinitchna is a Russian of the old type you don’t find many of them nowadays, most of her friends would add simple, quickwitted, full of peasant lore, kind as one’s own mother, hospitable as those are hospitable who believe from their hearts that all men are brothers.

I was introduced to all the neighbours, to the visitors and the natives, and of course invested with much importance as one who wrote books, had no fear, who even intended pilgrimaging to Jerusalem.

“You sleep under the open sky that means you have outlived fear,” said Varvara Ilinitchna with some innocence.

Our next-door neighbour was a beautiful Greek girl, a veritable Helen, for the sake of whose beauty one might give up all things. Young, elegant, serpentine; clad in a single garment, a light cinnamon gown clasped at the waist; no stockings, her legs bare and brown; on her head a Persian scarf embroidered with red and gold tinsel; her face white, with a delicate pink flush over it; hair and eyes black as night, but also with a glitter of stars. Wherever she walked she was a picture, and whether she was working about the house, or idling with a cigarette on the verandah, or running over the sand to spank mischievous boys who had been trespassing, she was delicately graceful, something to watch and to remember. I shall remember her chiefly in the setting of the night when the moon cast her lemon-coloured beams over the sea.

“Very beautiful and very young,” said my hostess, “but already she has a history. She is only eighteen, but is married and has run away from her husband. She wanted to marry a Russian, but her family forced her to take for husband a Greek, an old man, and so jealous and so frightened of the effect of her beauty upon other men that he shut her up and made her wear a veil like a Turk. He would not let her out by herself, and he never brought any friends home; he took to beating her, and then she ran away. Her father received her and promised to protect her. The old Greek cannot get at her any more; he has given her up and gone away.”

“Good for her!” I hazarded.

“Not at all good,” was the answer. “She has a husband and yet has none. She is young, but she can’t marry again because she has a husband already.”

At Ghilendzhik all meals were served on the verandah, and one lived constantly in touch with the varying moods of the sea.

My hostess was a talker, ready to sit to any hour of the night chatting of her life and of Russia. It was very pleasant to listen to her. We sat together on the balcony after tea, with a big plate of grapes between us, and I heard all that the world had to say at Ghilendzhik.

A burning topic was the ruin that the sea had made of the verandah wall. “The sea has been gradually gaining on us,” said my friend. “When we came here, the village Council reckoned on that. They smiled when we bought the house, for they held that in quite a short time it would be washed away. The Council wishes to build a fine esplanade all along the sea-front our house stands in the way and they don’t wish to buy us out. ‘You’d better buy the datcha,’ said Alexander Fed’otch to them. ‘Oh no,’ said they, ’we leave that to God’ by ‘God’ meaning the sea. They bound us under a contract not to build anything in front of the house: they said they did not wish the view to be obstructed, but in reality they did not want us to put up any protection against the waves. They left the rest to Providence. The result was that the whole property was nearly washed away in a storm.

“It happened like this. We were away at Vladikavkaz, and Vassily, the watchman, was living in the house with his wife and family, looking after it in our absence. There came a storm one evening. No one paid any attention at first, but it became so bad in the night that even Atheists were at their prayers. At three o’clock in the morning all the villagers were up and dressed and watching it. They were afraid, not only for our house, but for the rest of the village: no one remembered such a storm. As for our datcha, being as it is the nearest to the sea, the waves were already washing stones and mortar away. Vassily worked as hard as man could, shifting the furniture, taking out his household things, and trying to save the house. The villagers helped him even the councillors who had hoped for the storm, they helped.

“The storm did not abate, so the priest was sent for, and he decided to hold a prayer service on the seashore and ask God to make peace on the water. They brought the Ikons and the banners from the church, took the Service in case of great storms or danger, and when they had sprinkled holy water on the waves, the storm drew to a lull and gradually died away. The datcha was saved; perhaps the whole village. Slava Tebye Gospody! Glory be to Thee, O God!

“They wrote to us at Vladikavkaz what had happened, and of course we came down quickly. Then what a to-do there was! We demanded the right to protect our property from the sea. The Council said, ’Yes, yes, yes, don’t alarm yourself; you’ll be quite safe, safe as the Kazbek mountain; we ourselves will protect you.’ The Government engineer came round and said once more, ’Don’t alarm yourself! We are going to build an embankment. Next year there will be a whole street in front of you, and electric trams going up and down perhaps.’”

“Did you believe him?” I asked.

“We didn’t know what to do, believe him or disbelieve, but we knew he had been granted power to make investigations and draw up plans. For months, now, they have been measuring the depth of the water and testing this place and that. For my part, I think the preparations are only a device for making money. The engineer will enrich himself: the embankment and the street will be in his bank, but not here. The money they have spent already on his reports is appalling. But of course, if they do build an esplanade, our house will be worth three times what it cost us. We will let it as a cafe or a restaurant, and it will bring us rent all the year round. God grant it may be so!

“We resolved, however, to protect it, and we obtained permission to build a Chinese wall in front of it. But Bozhe moi, what that wall is costing us already fifteen hundred roubles, and on the original estimate we thought five hundred.

“Even as it is we don’t know how we stand. The engineer may claim that wall as belonging to the town. The town may have it knocked down, for it is built just outside our boundary line. We go down to the sand, and we have built upon the sand.”

Obviously she hadn’t built upon a rock.

“Now that they think of making a street in front of us, they will call part of the seashore land, and it will be surveyed. Someone will remark that we have encroached, and then down will go our wall and with it our fifteen hundred roubles.”

I agreed with her and sympathised. The chances were certainly against the money having been profitably invested. But what an example of Russian ways!

We sat in silence and looked out over the placid waves on whose future kindliness so much of my hostess’s happiness seemed to depend. It was a beautiful night. The sun had sunk through a cloud into the sea, and, as he disappeared, the waves all seemed to grow stiller and paler; they seemed full of anxious terror, as the faces of women whose husbands are just gone from their arms to the war. Dark curtains came down over their grief: the waves disappeared. The long bay was unruffled and grey to the horizon, like a sheet of unscored ice. Even the boats in the harbour seemed to be resting on something solid. The one felucca in front of us, with its five lines of rope and mast, grew darker and darker, till at last the moon rose and gleamed on her bows and cordage.

My hostess continued to talk to me of the fortunes of her property. “Twenty years ago,” she said, “I was sitting on a log in a field one summer afternoon, when up comes an old peasant woman leaning on a stick and speaks to me in an ancient, squeaky voice:

“‘Good-day, barinya!’

“‘Good-day!’ I said.

“‘Would you like to buy a little wooden hut and some land?’

“‘Eh, Gospody! What should I want with a little wooden hut?’ said I. ‘What do you ask for it?’

“‘Fifty roubles,’ she squeaked. ’My son has written to me from Poltava. He says, “Sell the hut and come and live with me,” so I’m just looking for a buyer.’

“‘What did you say?’ I asked. ‘Fifty roubles?’

“‘Fifty roubles, barinya. Is it too much?’

“I was astonished. A house and land for fifty roubles. Such a matter had to be inquired into. I felt I must go and look at the hut. I went and saw it. It was all right, a nice little white cottage and thirty or forty yards of garden to it.’ Here’s your fifty roubles,’ I said. And I bought it on the spot.

“We did nothing with it.

“Next summer, when I came down to Ghilendzhik, I said to my husband, ‘Let us go and see our house and land.’ Accordingly we went along to look. What was our astonishment to find it occupied by another old crone. I went up to the door and said:

“‘Good-day!’

“‘Good-day!’ said a cracked old voice. ‘And who might you be?’

“‘I might be the landlady,’ I said. ‘How is it you’re here?’

“‘Oh, you’re the khosaika, the hostess,’ replied the old crone. ’Eh, dear! Eh, deary, deary! My respects to you. I didn’t know you were the khosaika. I saw an empty cottage here one day; it didn’t seem to belong to any one, so, as I hadn’t one myself, I just came in.’

“The old dame bustled about apologetically.

“‘Never mind,’ said I. ‘Live on, live on.’

“‘Live on,’ said Alexander Fed’otch.

“We went away and didn’t come back to it or ask about it for seventeen years. Then one day I received a letter offering me twenty pounds (two hundred roubles) for the property, but as I had no need of money I paid no attention. A month later some one offered me thirty pounds. Obviously there was something in the air; there was some reason for the sudden lively interest in our property. Alexander Fed’otch went down, and he discovered that the site was wanted by the Government for a new vodka-shop. If we didn’t sell, we should at last be forced to give up the property to the Government, and perhaps find ourselves involved in litigation over it. Alexander Fed’otch made negotiations, and sold it for ninety pounds nine hundred roubles think of it. And it only cost us five pounds to start with! Ah, here is a place where you can get rich if you only have a little capital.”

“The old woman?” I queried. “Was she evicted?”

“Oh no, she had disappeared died, I suppose.”

“You made a handsome profit!”

“Yes, yes. But that’s quite another history. You think we made eighty-five pounds profit. No, no. We ought to have invested the money quietly, but unfortunately Alexander Fed’otch, when he was selling the house, met another man who persuaded him to buy a plot of land higher up, and to build a grandiose villa upon it. They thought it a splendid idea, and Alexander Fed’otch paid the nine hundred roubles as part of the money down for the contractor. It was a great sorrow for no profit ever came of it. It happened in the revolutionary time. We paid the contractor two thousand roubles, and then suddenly all his workmen went on strike. He was an honest man, and it was not his fault. His name was Gretchkin. He went to Novorossisk to try to get together a new band of men, and there he met with a calamity. He arrived on the day when the mutinous sailors were hanged, and the sight so upset him that he lost his head he plunged into a barracks and began shooting at the officers with his revolver. He was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. The sentence, however, was commuted to penal servitude that was when we got our Duma and there was the general pardon. Two thousand roubles were lost to us right away. The half-dug foundations of our house remained a melancholy sight.

“The datcha is finished now; to-morrow you must go and see it. But it has cost us in all ten thousand roubles. I should be thankful to sell it for five thousand. Ai, aï, and we are growing old now and living through everything.”

My hostess went out to fetch another plate of grapes.

“We wanted to put a vineyard round the datcha, but what with the children and the pigs mauling and biting at everything, it couldn’t be managed. We had, however, a pood of grapes from one of our gardens this year.”

The moon now bathed her yellow reflection in the mysterious sea, and we sat and looked at it together.

“Vasia, my son, who has taken his musical degree, will stay up all night to look at this sight,” said my hostess. “It moves something in his soul.”

It moved something in mine, and yet seemed strangely alien to the tale I was hearing. That moon had flung its mystery over an Eastern world, and it seemed an irrelevance beside the fortunes of a modern watering-place.

Varvara Ilinitchna went on to tell me of her early days, and how she and her husband had been poor. Alexander Fed’otch had taught in schools and received little money. Their two sons were never well. They had often wept over burdens too hard to bear.

One season, however, there came a change in their life and they became prosperous. They prayed to be rich, and God heard their prayer.

“We owe the change in our fortunes to a famous Ikon,” said Varvara Ilinitchna. “It happened in this way. Alexander Fed’otch had an old friend who, after serving thirty years as a clerk in an office, suddenly gave up and took to the mountains. He was a wise man and knew much of life, and it was through his wisdom that we sent for the Ikon. We sheltered him all through the winters because he had no home, and he came to love us and enter into our life. He rejoiced with us on festivals when we were gay; when we were sad he sympathised. When we shed tears he shed tears also. One evening when we were more than ordinarily desperate he said to me, ’Take my advice; send for an Ikon of St. Spiridon of Tremifond.’ The Ikon costs ten shillings, and ten shillings was much to us in those days. I told Alexander Fed’otch what our friend had said, and he, being a religious man, agreed. We sent ten shillings to Moscow and had the Ikon sent to us, and we took it to church and had it blessed.

“That happened in the autumn. Those were the days when the Vladikavkaz Railway was a novelty. The children, and even the grown-up people, did nothing but play at trains all day. We used to take in the children of the employees and look after them while their fathers and mothers were away. Well, in the following May a director of the railway called on Alexander Fed’otch and said he had a post to offer him.

“’We are thinking of taking all the children of the railway employees, and establishing a school and pension for them where they can get good meals and be taught. We will provide you with a house and appointments, and you will get a good salary into the bargain. Your wife will be mother to our railway children, and you will be general manager of the establishment. Will you take the post?’

“‘With pleasure!’ answered Alexander Fed’otch. But I for my part took some time to consider. It was hard enough to be mother to three children of my own. How could I be mother to fifty?

“However, we agreed to take the offer, and then suddenly we found ourselves rich and important people, and we remembered the Ikon of St. Spiridon of Tremifond and thanked God. If you are ever poor, if ever you want money, send for the Ikon of St. Spiridon. I advise you. Its virtues are famous.”

“An evil Ikon, nevertheless, that Spiridon of Tremifond,” I thought, but I wouldn’t say so to my hostess.

“And you’ve been happy ever since?” I asked.

“Not happy. Who even hopes to be happy? But we did well. The railway company opened new establishments, and the directors have loved my husband, and one of them even said at a public meeting, ’Would to God there were more men in the world like Alexander Fed’otch!’ We took larger charges and higher posts. We were even thanked publicly in the press for our services.”

Varvara Ilinitchna sighed. Then she resumed her talking in a different tone.

“But we live through our fortune. Well, I understand it. It is our Karma after the Revolution. Property shall avail us nothing. Everything we have shall be taken from us. Look at this Chinese wall taking away all our money. Think of that foolish contractor Gretchkin and our costly datcha. Behold our sickly children. How much money have we not spent trying to heal our children, eh, eh! Doctors have all failed. Even a magic healer in the country failed.”

“Tell me of him,” I urged.

Varvara Ilinitchna went on only too gladly. She had found a listener.

“It was a peasant woman. She healed so many people that, though she was quite illiterate, the medical faculty gave her a certificate to the effect that she could cure. I know for a fact that when specialists gave their patients up as hopeless cases, they recommended her as a last resort. She was a miracle worker: she almost raised the dead. You must know, however, that she could only cure rheumatism cases. For other diseases there are other peasant women in various parts of Russia. We went to this one and lived a whole summer with her on a very dirty, dismal countryside. We were all bored to death, and we came away worse than we went. And all such things cost much, I assure you.”

My hostess verily believed in the effect of the holy water on the stormy waves, in the gracious influence of St. Spiridon, and in the magical faculties of certain peasants. Yet observe she uses the word Karma: she calls herself a Theosophist. My long vagabondage she calls my Karma.

“My happiness,” I corrected her.

“Happiness or unhappiness, it is all the same, your Karma.”

She went on to talk of the great powers of Mme. Blavatsky, and she told me that Alexander Fed’otch had just ordered The Secret Doctrine to read. Good simple man, he will never get through a page of that abstruse work; and my hostess will understand nothing. Is it not strange these people were peasants a generation ago; they are peasants now by their goodness, hospitality, religion, superstition, and yet they aspire to be eclectic philosophers? Varvara Ilinitchna has life itself to read, and she turns away to look at books. Life does not satisfy her there are great empty places in it, and she would be bored often but that she has books to open in these places. She was very interesting to me as an example of the simple peasant mind under the influence of modern culture. Perhaps it is rather a shame to have put down all her old wife’s talk in this way, for she is lovable as one’s own mother.

VII - AT A FAIR

One misty morning in late October I arrived at Batum, pack on back, staff in hand, to all appearances a pilgrim or a tramp, and I drank tea at a farthing a glass in the fair.

“Pour it out full and running over,” said a chance companion to the owner of the stall. “That’s how we workmen like it; not half-full as for gentlefolk.” The shopman, a silent and very dirty Turk, filled my glass and the saucer as well. And sipping tea and munching bubliki, we looked out upon all the sights of the bazar.

There lay around, in all the squalor that Turks love, the marvellous superabundance of a southern harvest spread on sacks in the mud grapes purple and silver-green, pomegranates in rusty thousands, large dew-fed yellow apples, luscious dirt-bespattered pears, such fruits that in London even the rich might look at and sigh for, but pass by reflecting that with the taxes so high they could not afford them, but here sold by ragamuffins to ragamuffins for greasy coppers; and not only these fruits, but quinces and peaches, the large yellow Caucasian khurma, the little blood-red kizil, and many unnamed rarities. They all surged up out of the waste of over-trodden mire, as if the pageantry of some fairy world had been arrested as it was disappearing into the earth.

Then, beside these gorgeous fruits, in multitudinous attendance, a confused array of scarlet runners, tomatoes, cabbages, out-tumbled sacks of glazy purple aubergines, mysterious-looking gigantic pumpkins, buckets full of pyramidal maize-cobs, yellow, white-sheathed.

The motley crowd of vendors, clamouring, gesticulating, are chiefly distinguished by their hats the Arabs in white turbans, the Turks in dingy fezes jauntily cocked over dark, unshaven faces, some fezes swathed in bright silk scarves; the Caucasians in golden fleece hats, bright yellow sheepskin busbies; the few Russians in battered peak caps, like porters’ discarded head-gear; Persians in skull-caps; Armenians in shabby felts, astrakhans, or mud-coloured bashliks. The trousers of the Christians all very tight, the trousers of the Mahometans baggy, rainbow-coloured it is a jealous point of difference in these parts that the Turk keeps four or five yards of spare material in the seat of his trousers.

What a din! what a clamour!

“Kopeika, kopeika, kopeika.”

“Oko tre kopek, oko tre kopek, oko tre kopek.”

Thus Christians shout against Mussulmans over the grape-heaps one farthing, one farthing, one farthing; oko (three pounds) three farthings, oko three farthings, oko three farthings. Fancy shouting oneself hoarse to persuade passers-by to buy grapes at a farthing a pound!

My companion at the tea-stall, a tramp-workman from Central Russia, was astonished at the price of the grapes.

“It is possible to say that that is cheap,” said he. “When I return to Russia I will take forty pounds of them and sell them in the train at twopence-halfpenny (ten copecks); that will pay for my ticket, I think, in the fourth class.”

I watched the Turks trafficking, jingling their ancient rusty balances, manipulating their Turkish weights the oko is not Russian and giving what was probably the most marvellous short weight in Europe. The three-pound oko was often little more than a pound.

A native of Trebizond came and sat at our table. He wore carpet socks, and over them slippers with long toes curled upperward like certain specimens one may see in Bethnal Green Museum; on his head a straw-plaited, rusty fez swathed with green silk of the colour of a sun-beetle.

“The Italians have taken Tripoli,” said the Russian, with a grin; “fancy letting those little people thump you so!”

“And the Japanese?” said a Caucasian quickly.

The Turk looked sulky.

“Italia will fall,” said he. “She will fall yet, dishonourable country. They have stolen Tripoli. All you others look on and smile. But it is an injustice. We shall cut the throats of all the Italians in Turkey. Will you look on then and smile?”

A Greek sniggered. There were many Greeks at the fair they all wear blue as the Turks all wear red.

When the Turk had gone, the Greek exclaimed:

“There’s a people, these Turks, stupid, stupid as sheep; all they need are horns ... and illiterate! When will that people wake up, eh?”

The Turks and the Greeks never cease to spit at one another, though the former can afford to feel dignified, victors of their wars with Greece. For the Italian the ordinary Turk has almost as much contempt as for the Greek. One said to me, as I thought, quite cleverly:

“A Greek is half an Italian, and the Italian is half a Frenchman, the Frenchman is half an Englishman, and you, my friend, are half a German. We have some respect for a German, for he is equal to a score of Greeks, a dozen Italians, or six Frenchmen, but we have no respect at all for the rest.”

Twenty Arabs passed us at the stall all pashas, a Georgian informed me. They had arrived the night before from Trebizond and the desert beyond. Their procession through the ragged market was something to wonder at a long file of warriors all over six feet high, broad, erect, with full flowing cloaks from their shoulders to their ankles, under the cloaks rich embroidered garments. Their faces were white and wrinkled, proud with all the assurance of men who have never known what it is to stoop before the law and trade.

“They have come to make a journey through Russia,” said the Georgian, “but their consul has turned them back. They will pray in the mosque and then return. It is inconvenient that they should go to Europe while there is the war.”

A prowling gendarme in official blue and red came up to the stall and sniffed at the company. He pounced on me.

“Your letters of identification?” he asked.

I handed him a recommendation I had from the Governor of Archangel. He returned it with such deference that all the other customers stared. Archangel was three thousand miles away. Russian governors have long arms.

It is unpleasant, however, to be scrutinised and thought suspicious. I finished my tea and then returned to the crowd. There was yet more of the fair to see the stalls of Caucasian wares, the silks, the guns, the knives, Armenian and Persian carpets, Turkish slippers, sandals, yards of brown pottery, where at each turn one sees huge pitchers and water-jugs and jars that might have held the forty thieves. At one booth harness is sold and high Turkish saddles, at another pannier baskets for mules. A flood of colour on the pavement of a covered way a great disarray of little shrivelled lemons, with stalks in many cases, for they have been gathered hard by. In the centre of the market-place are all the meat and fish shops, and there one may see huge sturgeon and salmon brought from the fisheries of the Caspian. Garish notices inform in five languages that fresh caviare is received each day. Round about the butchers are sodden wooden stalls, labelled

SNOW MERCHANTS,

and there, wrapped in old rags, is much grey muddy snow melting and freezing itself. It has been brought on rickety lorries down the rutty tracks of the mountains, down, down into the lowland of Batum, where even October suns are hot.

Near the snow stalls behold veiled Turkish women just showing their noses out of bright rags, and tending the baking of chestnuts and maize cobs, sausages, pies, fish, and chickens. Here for eightpence one may buy a hot roast chicken in half a sheet of exercise-paper. The purchasers of hot chicken are many, and they take them away to open tables, where stand huge bottles of red wine and tubs of tomato-sauce. The fowl is pulled to bits limb by limb, and the customer dips, before each bite, his bone in the common sauce-bowl.

Those who are poorer buy hot maize cobs and cabbage pies; those who feel hot already themselves are fain to go to the ice and lemonade stall, and spend odd farthings there. I bought myself matsoni, Metchnikof’s sour milk and sugar, at a halfpenny a mug.

The market square is vast. It is wonderful the number of scenes enacting themselves at the same time. All the morning in another quarter men were trying on old hats and overcoats, and having the most amazing haggling over articles which are sold in London streets for a pot of ferns or a china butter-dish. In another part popular pictures are spread out, oleographs showing the Garden of Eden, or the terror of the Flood, or the Last Judgment, and such like; in another is a wilderness of home-made bamboo furniture, a speciality of Batum. And for all no lack of customers.

What a place of mystery is a Russian Fair, be it in the capital or at the outposts of the Empire! There is nothing that may not be found there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular secondhand books, hand-painted missals of the earliest Russian times.

Nothing is ever thrown away; even rusty nails find their way to the bazar. The miscellanies of a stall might upon occasion be what is left behind after a house removal. On one table at Batum I observed two moth-eaten rusty fezes, a battered but unopened tin of herrings in tomato-sauce, another tin half-emptied, a guitar with one string, a good hammer, a door-mat worn to holes, the clearing of a book-case, an old saucepan, an old kerosene stove, a broken coffee-grinder, and a rusty spring mattress. Under the stall were two Persian greyhounds, also for sale. The shopmen ask outrageous prices, but do not expect to be paid them.

“How much the kerosinka?” I asked in sport.

“Ten shillings,” said an old, sorrowful-looking Persian.

I laughed sarcastically, and was about to move away. The Persian was taking the oil-stove to bits to show me its inward perfection.

“Name your price,” said he.

I did not want a kerosene stove, but for fun I tried him on a low figure

“Sixpence,” I said.

“Whew!” The Persian looked about him dreamily. Did he sleep, did he dream?

“You don’t buy a machine for sixpence,” said he. “I bought this second-hand for eight-and-sixpence. I can offer it to you for nine shillings as a favour.”

“Oh no, sixpence; not a farthing more.”

I walked away.

“Five shillings,” cried the Persian “four shillings.”

“Ninepence,” I replied, and moved farther away.

“Two shillings.” He bawled something more, inaudibly, but I was already out of hearing. I happened to repass his stall accidentally later in the morning.

“That kerosinka,” said the Persian “take it; it is yours at one shilling and sixpence.”

I felt so sorry for the unhappy hawker, but I could not possibly buy an oil-stove. I could not take one as a gift; but I looked through his old books and there found, in a tattered condition, The Red Laughter, by Leonid Andreef, a drama by Gorky, a long poem by Skitaletz, and a most interesting account of Chekhof’s life by Kouprin, all of which I bought after a short haggle for fivepence, twenty copecks. I was the richer by my visit to his stall, for I found good reading for at least a week. And the old Persian accepted the silver coin and dropped it into an old wooden box, looking the while with melancholy upon the unsold kerosinka.

VIII - A TURKISH COFFEE-HOUSE

It sometimes happens that, entering a house, one enters not simply into the presence of a family but into that of a nation. So it was when I was received in a Little-Russian deacon’s cottage in a village, on the Christmas Eve on which I first came to Russia. I came not to the deacon but to Russia itself, and when the Christmas musicians came and played before me it was not only Christmas music, or village music, that I heard, but the voice of a whole countryside and the song of a whole national soul. It sometimes happens that, looking at a picture, one sees not only its local and obvious beauty, but its eternal significance and message that is a similar experience.

It happened to me whilst on a tramp in Trans-Caucasia to enter a coffee-house that was at once a Turkish coffee-house and Turkey itself. I lived for a whole night veritably in Turkey. In this way

I came into a little town; it was a cold night and I wanted shelter. I entered a noisy Turkish coffee-house there were at least a hundred such in the town and asked if I might spend the night there. The owner, a young man in shirt-sleeves, very dirty and unshaven, and with an old fez on the side of his head, intimated that I might stay if I liked.

The cafe was a room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners of the low dark cafe solitary persons with hook-nosed, ruminative faces. All about me was the din of the strange language, the clatter of dice and dominoes. All night long the doors of the cafe slammed and customers passed in and out, games were begun and played away, animated groups formed at certain tables and then broke up and gave way to new groups, loud discussions broke out over Turkish newspapers and politics and the war, in the course of which discussions the newspaper, a wilderness of Arabic, was often torn to bits a series of scenes of tremendous animation and noise; but no one laughed.

In the clamour of tongues sounded again and again the name “Italia.” The Turks were angry over the war, full of a restrained resentment and a profound need for revenge. It was a relief to me when one of them came to my table and talked to me in Russian.

“How goes the war?” I asked. “Is Italy losing?”

“Of course she is losing,” he replied, lying sullenly; “and she must lose.”

“But she has taken Tripoli and guards it with her navy. How can she lose?”

“The other Powers will make her disgorge it, or we will commence an endless hostility, not only against Italy and Italian trade, but against all whom we tolerate the Western Christians.”

A Caucasian, overhearing us, drew his forefinger along his throat from ear to ear, and smiled.

“There are more Mahometans than Christians,” the Turk went on, “and they are strong men, heroes. The Italians are the worn-out scum of ancient Rome, getting the better of us ignobly. But they shall not spoil the Mahometan world. Not even the English, most powerful of the machine nations, shall overwhelm the true faith.”

The keeper of the coffee-house came and stared at me. Two new customers came up, and I was pointed out as an Englishman. They talked about me in Turkish; other Turks came, they talked about England’s rôle in the war, they scolded, gesticulated, poured forth endlessly, forgot me. Once more, though in a crowd, I was alone.

At this time a great diversion was caused. A blind musician came in. At midnight one would have thought no new development in the life of the cafe was likely to take place, but the musician brought into the room such a crush of people that on all sides I felt packed and crammed. A tall, gaunt man, hatless, shaggy-headed, his black locks falling over a strange yellow brow; eyes that saw not, looking through deep purple spectacles; and in his arms, like a baby, a long Armenian guitar the musician was somewhat to wonder at. Hemmed in by the crowd, he yet found a little space in the body of the coffee-house, and danced to and fro with his songs like some strange being in a frenzy. He played with fire on his guitar, every minute breaking from his sparkling, thrilling accompaniment into a wild human chant, his face the while triumphant and passionate, but blind with such utter blindness that he seemed like the symbol of Man’s life rather than a man; a great song of heart-yearning sung to the stars and to the Infinite rather than the singer of that song.

His fingers flowed over the long guitar; the wild words broke out; he flung himself in little zigzag steps to right, to left; the wild chant stopped; once more spoke only the strings. I looked at him and listened, and could not give myself enough to him.

At nearly two he made a collection and received many piastres and copecks, and the crowd who had listened to him began to disperse. At three o’clock the host signified that he wished to close the shop. To all the remaining customers Turkish delight was served out as a sort of parting gift. A dozen Turks, those who had homes, slunk away; the remainder, those who had no homes of their own, stayed to sleep.

The host now came to me and we did some business. I wanted to change some Turkish silver, as I was short of Russian money. As no bank would take this small coin I was obliged to try the coffee-house. Accordingly, I had asked my coffee-house keeper to buy a hundred or so piastres. After half an hour’s haggling we struck a very bad bargain. I find the Turk more of a sharp than the Jew.

The long day was over. The shutters were pulled along in front of the shop and padlocked. A form was accorded me on which to sleep. Another form was drawn out into the middle of the room and placed at a certain angle, pointing to the East, I suppose. Then during half an hour the Turks ascended this form in turn, stood, bowed, knelt, prostrated themselves in silent prayer, reiteratedly. They prayed very differently from Russian peasants. Their movements were abrupt and mechanical, like steps in a military drill. They were nearer to spiritual death and praying-boxes than any I had ever watched pray before. I felt myself in the presence of a new form of piety. I had crossed the great broad line that separates Europe from Asia, and come to a place where Europe is not understood and therefore hated.

At six next morning the sleepers awoke and performed the same rites on the improvised praying-stool; the shutters were rolled back; the Turks who had homes returned; in came the Arabic newspaper; once more Turkish delight, coffee, the clatter of dice and dominoes, the gathering of animated groups, loud, unpleasant voices and mirthless vivacity so the life of the coffee-house went on; so I imagine it goes on for ever.

As I think of this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. He made the coffee-house worth living in, worth sketching, worth being re-seen in the reflection of words. He was what I should call the glory of the coffee-house.

Thus the garden of Eden was beautiful, but Adam and Eve in the garden were the glory of the garden, the highest significance of its beauty, the voice by which relatively dumb beauty got a step farther in expressing itself. The garden would never have been described but for the episode of Adam and Eve. It would not have been worth while to describe it.... The forest is beautiful, but the bird singing in the forest is the glory of the forest. The morning is beautiful, but the tramp walking in the morning is the glory of the morning; he also, in his youth and morning of life, is a voice by which beauty endeavours to reveal itself.

Each scene, each picture, has a highest significance if we could but find it. Thus the blind musician was a revelation of the very soul of the Turks. The tramp wandering through life and exploring it tries always to find what is particularly his in the scenes that come before his eyes. It is what he means by living a daily life in the presence of the Infinite.

IX - AT A GREAT MONASTERY

I

In the Middle Ages, when Christianity was still young, there was much more hospitality than to-day. The crusader and the palmer needed no introduction to obtain entertainment at a strange man’s house. The doors of castle or cottage, of monastery or cell, were always on the latch to the wanderer, and not only to those performing sacred dues but to the vagabond, the minstrel, the messenger, the tradesman, even to crabbed Isaac of York.

Since those days it has become clear that the thirty pieces of silver not only sold the author of Christianity but Christianity itself. As my Little-Russian deacon said, “Money has come between us and made us work more and love less. We are gathered together, not for love but for mutual profit. It is all the difference between conviviality and gregariousness.” The deacon was right, and when one comes upon the Middle Ages, as yet untouched, in Russia, one reflects with a sigh “The whole of Europe, even England, was like this once.” One says with Arnold

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Day by day, as we live, we see the disintegration of that which Christianity means, the shattering of that brotherly love that makes men nations and nations the children of God. Not without truth did Shylock say of his money that he made it breed. The pieces of silver have bred well; they jingle to-day in the pockets of millions of betrayers.

These thirty pieces did not pass out of currency, though the land that they bought was left desolate. They passed from hand to hand among the covetous throughout the first centuries of Christianity. The Jews clung to them as if they were life itself; but the early Christians, having something very much better than money to live for, coveted them not. And as long as the money remained with the Jews Christianity flourished. The two symbols opposed one another, and there was no question but that the Cross triumphed. Only when the Christians turned their backs on the Cross and hankered after the silver did the eternal nature of the betrayal manifest itself. When the Saracens began to be fought, not only by swords and faith but by the aid of Jewish money, and with the pomp and circumstance of war, then already Judas had been to the priests. When the knight or baron bequeathed the thirty Jewish pieces to the monastery Judas was already kissing the Master. When the hand that held the Cross loosened to take the silver, when the monks took the treasure of Earth and relinquished the treasure of Heaven, Jesus was already taken. It was but a short way to the crucifixion. The silver profiteth no man.

Where are the thirty pieces of silver now? Where are they not? When the rich holiday-maker comes scattering money in peaceful mountain valleys; when the peasant’s son, infected by the idea of money, comes to town for his thirty shillings a week; when for the want of another thirty shillings he refuses to marry; when to save his mind some evangelical society so called accepts thirty shillings “charity”; when the millionaire leaves thirty thousand pounds to the hospitals to save his body; when a minister is paid three hundred pounds a year to save his soul; when a member of Parliament receives thirty pounds a month to remedy his social wrongs; when the love of the country girl he should have married is won by some rich man who thinks he can pay for it on all these occasions and yet more, to examples innumerable, the curse of Judas shows itself, till every brick of our evil industrial cities is shown mortared round in bright silver hate.

As I write these lines one question is very urgent in the minds of Englishmen, that of the disestablishment and partial disendowment of a church. Once more the thirty pieces appear to be in the coffers of the church and they are attracting the curse. There is only one way for that church; it is to give up to the spoiler not only that which is demanded of it but all the material wealth it possesses, its endowments, estates, houses, palaces, sacred edifices; to lay down everything and be simply, for the moment, a church in the hand of God. As for disestablishment, the sooner Christians dissociate themselves from secular names and titles the better. The Christian church is one established for ever, upon a rock, and those who compose that church are they who love their neighbour as a brother.

We have hope of new life, otherwise it were folly to write at all. The great distress which the modern commercial life causes the individual soul is perhaps a blessing in disguise; it causes the individual to pause and think, causes him to rebel, to try and imagine a way to true salvation. For, despite Progress and the benefit our posterity is supposed to be going to derive from it, it is an undisguisable fact that life, the wonderful and strange gift given to the individual perhaps once in an eternity, is being used without profit, without pause, without wonder. We are like people who have lost their memories on the way to a feast, and our steps, in which is only dimly felt the remembrance of a purpose, take us nowhither. We loiter in musty waiting-rooms, are frustrated by mobs, and foiled by an eternal clamour. We have forgotten the feast and occupy ourselves in all manner of foolish and irrelevant ways. Only now and again, struck by the absurdity of our occupations, we grope after our lost consciousness and feel somehow that somewhere out beyond is our real destination, that somewhere out there a feast is proceeding, that a cover is laid for us and dishes served, that though we are absent the master calls a toast to us and sends messengers to find us.

The somewhere-out-beyond has for me been Russia. I do not suggest that it is Russia for every one. There are many tables at the feast, and the messenger sent after the absent must tell of those who sit at his own table. I think there is the same wine and the same fare at all tables. I tell of the hospitality of Russia, the hospitality of mind and of hand found amongst a simple people.

In October 1911 I arrived as a pilgrim at the monastery of Novy Afon, or, to translate the Russian into more recognisable terms, New Athos, and I obtained the hospitality of the monks.

There are three sorts of monasteries in Russia, one where there is great store of gold and precious stones as in Troitsky Lavra near Moscow, another where there are ancient relics and ikons of miraculous power as at Solovetz, and a third where there is neither the distinction of gold nor of relics, where the power of the monks lies in their living actual work and prayer. To the last-named category belongs Novy Afon.

It is very likely that the immense wealth of the other monasteries may invite the hand of the spoiler. Even now the monks are notorious for drunkenness and corruptibility: the institutions are moribund, and there is no doubt that if revolution had overturned the Tsardom the rich monasteries like the Troitsky would have been sacked. Perhaps even Novy Afon and many another spiritual mother would have shared a common fate with their depraved sisters. That is as may be. The Revolution did not succeed and could not, because the common peasantry still prayed in the temples which the Revolutionaries would have destroyed. The living church of Russia required its buildings even though the caretakers of these buildings were in some cases false stewards.

But there is no question of false stewards at Novy Afon. It is a place where a Luther might serve and feel no discontent, a place of new life. It looks into the future with eyes that see visions, and stretches forward to that future with hands that are creative; an institution with no past but only a present and an idea, not acting by precedent or tradition but taking its inspiration straight from life’s sources.

II

It will be profitable to describe the monastery just as I saw it and felt it to be, on the occasion of my arrival there after five hundred miles tramping in the autumn of 1911. I had overtaken many pilgrims journeying thither, and the nearer I approached the more became their numbers. There were many on foot and many in carts and coaches. Multi-coloured diligences were packed with people and luggage the people often more miscellaneously packed than the luggage, clinging on behind, squashed in the middle, sprawling on the top. The drivers looked superb though dressed in thousand-times-mended black coats, the post-boys tootled on their horns, and the passengers sang or shouted to the music of accordions. Of course not all those in the coaches were pilgrims religiously inclined; many were holiday seekers out for the day. The gates of Novy Afon are open to all, even to the Mahometan or the Pagan. It was a beautiful cloudless morning when I arrived at this most wonderful monastery in the Russian world a cluster of white churches on a hill, a swarm of factories and workshops, cedar avenues, orchards, vineyards, and, above all, tree-covered mountains crowned by grey towers and ancient ruins, the whole looking out on the far sea.

At the monastery gates were a cluster of empty coaches waiting for passengers, the drivers sitting in the dusty roadway meanwhile, playing cards or eating chunks of red melon. Pilgrims with great bundles on their backs stood staring vacantly at the walls or at the sea; monks in long grey cloaks, square hats, and long hair, passed in and out like bees about a hive, and from a distance came a musical drone, the chanting of church services.

Pack on back, staff in hand, no one took me for other than a Russian pilgrim till I showed my passport. I entered the monastery, asked one of the monks where to go, and was at once shown to a room, a little square whitewashed apartment with four hard couches; the room looked upon the hostelry yard, and was lit within by electric light the monks’ own manufacture. No one asked me any questions they were too hospitable to do that. I was at once taken for granted as one might be by one’s own family after returning home from a week-end in the country. When I had disposed my clothes, brushed away some of the dust, changed boots, and washed, the novice who had shown me my room tapped at the door and, looking in with a smile, told me I had come just in time for dinner. All along the many corridors I heard the tinkling of a dinner-bell and a scuttling of many feet.

The dinner was served in three halls: two of them were more exclusive apartments where those might go who did not care to rub shoulders with the common people; but the other was a large barn where any one who liked to come took the chances of his fellow-man, be he peasant or pilgrim. It was in the barn that I took my seat among a great crowd of folk at two long, narrow tables. Round about us on the walls were a multiplicity of brightly coloured ikons, pictures of the abbot, of Tsars, of miraculous happenings and last judgments. On the tables at regular intervals were large iron saucepans full of soup, platters of black bread, and flagons of red wine.

A notice on the wall informed that without prayer eating or drinking was forbidden, and I wondered what was going to happen; for although we had all helped ourselves in Russian fashion, no one had as yet said grace, and there was an air of waiting among the party. Suddenly a voice of command cried “Stand!” and we all stood like soldiers on drill. We all faced round to the ikons, and to a monk standing in front of them. A long prayer was said in a very military fashion, and then we all crossed ourselves and took our places at the tables once more. Five of the brethren were in attendance, and fluttered up and down, shifting the bread or refilling the wine bowls.

We were a mixed company aged road-worn pilgrims, bright boys come from a local watering-place by coach, red-kerchiefed peasant women, pleasant citizens’ wives in town-made blouses, Caucasians, a Turk, a Jew, an Austrian waiter, and many others that I took no stock of.

The diet is a fast one, just as the hard beds are penance beds, and no one can procure anything different at Novy Afon for any amount of money. Even in the hall reserved for dignitaries and officials the fare was the same as for us in the tiers état. The soup was of vegetables only, and much inferior to what the tramp makes for himself by the roadside. The second course was cold salt fish or boiled beans and mushrooms, and the third was dry maize-meal porridge. As each plate was put on the table the brother told us it came from God, and whispered a blessing.

There was not much talking; every one was busy eating and drinking. The wine was drunk plentifully, though without any toasts. One felt that more generosity was expressed in the provision of wine than in the other victuals. But for the meal only ten minutes and then once more the peremptory voice “Stand!” and we all listened to a long thank-offering and bowed before the ikons. Dinner was over.

Dinner was at eleven in the morning; tea with black bread and no butter at three; supper, a repetition of the dinner menu, at seven; and all doors closed and the people in their beds by eight-thirty. After many nights in the open I slept once more with a roof over my head, and looking up in the night, missed the stars and wondered where they were.

III

The monastery bells in pleasant liquid tones struck every quarter of an hour, and at two o’clock in the morning I was awakened by a great jangling, and the sound of steps along the stone corridors. I asked my companions I was sharing my room with an Armenian and a Russian what was the reason of the bell, and I learned that it was the call to early prayers. We none of us got up, but I resolved to go next night if it were possible.

Next day was one of relaxation after tramping. The Armenian went off ten miles to a celebrated cave and a point of view, “the swallows’ nest”; he wished me to accompany him, but I had not come to Novy Afon to find points of view or the picturesque moreover he had come by steamboat and was fresh, I had come on foot five hundred miles and wanted a rest.

In the morning I looked through the workshops, chatted with a master in the little monastery school, lounged in the orange groves and cedar avenues. After dinner, as I sat near the pier, a monk pointed out to me some artificial water where willows drooped, and white swans rode gracefully under them. “You ought to come here at Kreschenie Twelfth-Night. We make of that water a little Jordan in memory of the Jordan where the Son of God was baptized. The ponds are all decorated with fresh-cut grass, laurel leaves, and cypress branches, myrtle and oleander, many roses and wild flowers. Scarcely anywhere in all Russia could there be found such flowers at that time of the year.”

“Have you pilgrims then?” I asked.

“Oh yes, many. They come from all the district round about, to dip themselves in the water after it has been made holy. We keep the festival very solemnly. The Archimandrite comes down from the monastery, and after him the priests, the monks, the lay brethren, the labourers, the banners and their bearers, and the sacred Ikons. There is a long service. Though the month is January, the weather is often bright and warm as early summer, and the mountains look very beautiful.”

As we were thus talking, the Archimandrite, Ieronym himself, came out of the hostelry yard and passed us, a benign old man, devout and ancient of aspect, but kindly and wise. He is accounted a living saint, and it may well be that after his death he will be canonised. Novy Afon has only been in existence thirty years, and he has been abbot all the time. The monastery has been his own idea, it has grown with him. If Novy Afon is a fountain of life, he is the rock out of which the fountain springs. The whole monastery and all its ways are under his guidance, and as he wishes them to be. They are as a good book that he has written, and better than that.

He went to a gorgeous little chapel at the base of the landing-stage, there to hold a service in memory of the visit to New Athos of their highnesses the late Tsar, Alexander the Third, and his queen, on that day 1888. Presently behold the worthy abbot in his glorious robes, cloth of gold from head to foot, and on his head, instead of the sombre black hat of ordinary wear, a great golden crown sparkling with diamonds and rubies. The many clergy stood about him in the little temple, or beyond the door, for there was not room for all, with them some hundred monks, and the multifarious populace. The service was read in hollow, oracular tones, and every now and then a storm of glorious bass voices broke forth in response. Evidently the Ikon of the Virgin named Izbavelnitsa was being thanked for her protection of the Tsar in a storm. So much I could make out; and every now and then the crowd sang thanks to the Virgin. At the end of the service the Archimandrite, who had had his back to the people all the time or rather, to put it more truly, had all the time looked the same way, with the people turned, and lifting and lowering the gold cross which he held in his hands, gave blessing. The heads and bodies of the worshippers bowed as the Cross pointed toward them.

The service was over. As the abbot Ieronym resumed his ordinary attire, and left the temple, the hundred or so peasant men and women pressed around him, and fervently kissed his little old fingers, white and delicate. I watched the old man give his hand to them I watched their eagerness. Religion was proved to be Love.

IV

What struck me particularly on entering Novy Afon was the new tone in the every day. There was less of the barin and servant, officer and soldier feeling, less noisy commandings and scoldings, even less beating of the patient horses that have to carry such heavy loads in Russia. Instead of these, a gentleness and graciousness, something of that which one finds in artistic and mystic communities in Russia, in art and in pictures, but which one seldom meets with in public life. Here at New Athos breathes a true Christianity. It was strange how even the undying curiosity of the Russian had been conquered; for here I was not asked the thousand and one impertinent questions that it is usually my lot to smile over and answer. There was even a restraint in asking me necessary questions lest they should be difficult to answer.

Then not one of the monks possesses any property of his own, even of a purely transitory kind, such as a bed or a suit of clothes. They have all in common, and they have not that nicety or necessity of privacy which would compel an Englishman to claim the right to wear the same coat and trousers two days running. But the monks are even less diffident of claiming their own separate mugs and plates at table, and are unoffended by miscellaneous eating and drinking from one another’s dishes.

Every one is the servant of all and without hypocrisy not only in act but in sentiment and prayer. Wherever I went I found the tone ring true.

This fair exterior glory seems to spring from a strong inner life. Religious life in the Holy Orthodox Church, with its many ordinances and its extraordinary proximity to everyday life, is not allowed to be monotonous and humdrum. Each day at New Athos is beautiful in itself, and if a monk’s life were made into a book of such days one would not turn over two pages at once.

The day begins at midnight, when, to the occasional melancholy chime of the cathedral bell, the brothers move to the first service of the morning. On my second night at Afon I wakened at the prayer-bell and joined the monks at their service. In the sky was a faint glimmer of stars behind veiling clouds. The monastery, resplendent with marble and silver by day, was now meek and white in the dark bosom of the mountain, and shining like a candle. In the church which I entered there was but one dim light. The clergy, the monks, the faces in the ikon frames all were shadows, and from a distance came hollow shadow music, gul-l-l, the murmur of the sea upon the shore. It was the still night of the heart where the Dove yet broods over the waters and life is only just begun. At that service a day began, a small life.

When the service was over and we returned to our rooms, morning had advanced a small step; the stars were paler, one just made out the contours of the shadowy crags above us.

Just a little sleep and then time to rise and wash and breakfast. The monks in charge of the kitchen must be up some time before the rest of us. At 8 A.M. the morning service commences, and every monk must attend.

Then each man goes to his work, some to the carpentry sheds, others to the unfinished buildings, to the brickworks, the basket works, the cattle yards, the orchards and gardens, the cornfields, the laundries, leather works, forges, etc., etc., etc.; the teachers to the schools where the little Caucasian children are taught; the abbot to his cell, where he receives the brothers in turn, hears any confession they may wish to make, and gives advice in any sorrow that may have come upon any of them. The old abbot is greatly beloved, and the monks have children’s hearts. Again in the evening the day is concluded in song and prayer. Such is the monastery day.

No doubt the upkeep of this great establishment costs much; it does not “pay” the kingdom of God doesn’t really “pay.” Much money has to be sent yearly to Novy Afon ... and yet probably not so very much. In any case, it is all purely administered, for there are no bribe takers at the monastery. For the rest, it must be remembered that they make their own clothes and tools, grow their own corn and fruits, and manufacture their own electric light. They have the means of independence.

Such monasteries as Novy Afon are true institutions of Christianity; they do more for the real welfare of a people than much else on which immense sums of money are spent. It is a matter of real charity and real hospitality both of hand and mind combined. The great monastery sits there among the hills like some immense mother for all the rude, rough-handed tribes that live about. In her love she sets an example. By her open-handedness she makes her guests her own children; they learn of her. Not only does she say with Christ her Master, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” but she makes of all those who come to her, be they fierce of aspect or bearded like the pard, her own children. When the night-bell has rung and all are in their beds the five hundred brethren, the many lay workers, the hundreds of guests gathered from all parts of Russia the spirit of the monastery spreads itself out over all of them and keeps them all warm. The whole monastery is a home, and all those who are within are brothers and sisters.

V

Though Novy Afon is new, it is built upon an old site. There was a Christian church there in the second and third centuries, but it was destroyed by the Persian fire-worshippers; it was restored by the Emperor Justinian, but destroyed once more by the Turks. So completely did the Moslem take possession of the country that Christianity entirely lapsed till the Russian monks sailed down there two years before the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. Novy Afon is without Christian traditions. It takes its stand completely in the new, and is part of that Russian faith which has no past, but only a future. The third century ruins of the cathedral and the Roman battlements are indeed of great interest, and many people climb the two thousand feet high crag to look out from the ancient watch-tower. But the attitude of the monastery is well explained in the words of a monk:

“People come here to worship God, and we stand here as a witness of God, to pray continually for the coming of the Kingdom, and to succour those who come to us. It would be a sign of disrespect to our church if people came here merely to see the ancient remains.”

I for my part, being of the old though also of the new, was eager to climb the steep stone way along which in ancient days had ridden crusaders and mediaeval warriors. Great trees now grew through the rent wall of the cathedral, and slender birches grew straight up in the nave to the eternal roof which had supplanted that of time to heaven itself....

But alas for romance, the Russians are restoring the church, clearing away the old stones, chopping down the trees. An ikon has been set up within the old building, and the latter is already a place of worship. Once more: to the eye of a monk a ruined temple is somewhat of an insult to God. There is no fond antiquarianism; all the old Latin inscriptions and bas-reliefs that have been found have been mortared together at random into one wall; all the human bones that have been unearthed, and they are many, have been thrown unceremoniously into an open box. Even on the bare white ribs and ancient crumbling skulls, bourgeois visitors have written their twentieth-century names. Some ancient skeletons have been preserved in a case from pre-Mahometan times, and under them is written:

With love, we ask you, look upon us.
We were like you; you will be like us.

The recommendation is unavailing. The bones have been picked up, passed from hand to hand, scrawled upon, joked over. They are probably the remains of strong warriors and early Christians, and one can imagine with what peculiar sensations they, in their day, would have regarded this irreverence to their bones could they but have looked forward a thousand years or so.

It seemed to me, looking out from the watch-tower of Iver over the diminished monastery buildings and the vast and glorious sea, on that which must change and on that which in all ages remains ever the same, some reverence might have been begotten for that in the past which shows what we shall be in the future. The monks might have spared the bones and buried them; they might have left the ruins as they were.

I am told that in a few years the work of restoration will be completely achieved, services will be held regularly on the mountain top, and peasant pilgrims will gladly, if patiently, climb morning and evening up the stone way to the church, having no thoughts of any time but that in which they are worshipping. The Russian is racially young. He is in the morning and full of prophecy; only in the evening will his eye linger here in the emotions of romance.

Life at the monastery is new life; it is morning there it is indeed only a little after the dawn. The day is as yet cool and sweet, and it gives many promises. We can see what the morning is like if we will journey thither.