VIIRUSSIAYesterday we had our first Russian experience in the shape of a troika ride. Russians, as a rule, do not troika except at night. In fact, from my experience, they reverse the established order of things and turn night into day.A troika is a superb affair. It makes the tiny sledges which take the place of cabs, and are used for all ordinary purposes, look even more like toys than usual. But the sledges are great fun, and so cheap that it is an extravagance to walk. A course costs only twenty kopecks—ten cents. The sledges are set so low that you can reach out and touch the snow with your hand, and they are so small that the horse is in your lap and the coachman in your pocket. He simply turns in his seat to hook the fur robe to the back of your seat—only it has no back. If you fall, you fall clear to the ground.The horse is far, far above you in your humble position, and there is so little room that two people can with difficulty stow themselves in the narrow seat. If a brother and sister or a husband and wife drive together, the man, in sheer self-defence, is obliged to put his arm around the woman, no matter how distasteful it may be. Not that she would ever be conscious of whether he did it or not, for the amount of clothes one is obliged to wear in Russia destroys any sense of touch.The idvosjik, or coachman, is so bulky from this same reason that you cannot see over him. You are obliged to crane your neck to one side. His head is covered with a Tartar cap. He wears his hair down to his collar, and then chopped off in a straight line. His pelisse is of a bluish gray, fits tightly to the waist, and comes to the feet. But the skirt of it is gathered on back and front, giving him an irresistibly comical pannier effect, like a Dolly Varden polonaise. The Russian idvosjik guides his horse curiously. He coaxes it forward by calling it all sorts of pet names—“doushka,” darling, etc. Then he beats it with a toy whip, which must feel like a fly on its woolly coat, for all the little fat pony does is to kick up its heels and fly along like the wind, missing the other sledges by a hair’s-breadth. It is ghostly to see the way they glide along without a sound, for the sledges wear no bells.One may drive with perfect safety at a breakneck pace, for they all drive down on one side of the street and up on the other. Nor will an idvosjik hesitate to use his whip about the head and face of another idvosjik who dares to turn without crossing the street.He stops his horse with a guttural trill, as if one should say “Tr-r-r-r-r” in the back of the throat. It sounds like a gargle.The horses are sharp-shod, but in a way quite different from ours. The spikes on their shoes are an inch long, and dig into the ice with perfect security, but it makes the horses look as if they wore French heels. Even over ice like sheer glass they go at a gallop and never slip. It is wonderful, and the exhilaration of it is like driving through an air charged with champagne, like the wine-caves of Rintz.Our troika was like a chariot in comparison with these sledges. It was gorgeously upholstered in red velvet, and held six—three on each seat. The robes also were red velvet, bordered and lined with black bear fur. There were three horses driven abreast. The middle horse was much larger than the other two, and wore a high white wooden collar, which stood up from the rest of the harness, and was hung with bells and painted with red flowers and birds.To my delight the horses were wild, and stood on their hind legs and bit each other, and backed us off the road, and otherwise acted like Tartar horses in books. It seemed almost too good to be true. It was like driving through the Black Forest and seeing the gnomes and the fairies one has read about. I told my friends very humbly that I had never done anything in my life to deserve the good fortune of having those beautiful horses act in such a satisfactory and historical manner. We had to get out twice and let the idvosjik calm them down. But even when ploughing my way out of snow up to my knees I breathed an ecstatic sigh of gratitude and joy. I could not understand the men’s annoyance. It was too ideal to complain about.We drove out to the Island for luncheon, and on the way we stopped and coasted in a curious Russian sledge from the top of a high place, something like our toboggan-slides, only this sledge was guided from behind by a peasant on skates.A Russian meal always begins with a side-table ofhors d’oeuvres, called “zakouska.” That may not be spelled right, but no Russian would correct me, because the language is phonetic, and they spell the same word in many different ways. Their alphabet has thirty-eight letters in it, besides the little marks to tell you whether to make a letter hard or soft.Even proper names take on curious oddities of spelling, and a husband and wife or two brothers will spell their name differently when using the Latin letters. If you complain about it, and ask which is correct, they make that famous Russian reply which Bismarck once had engraved in his ring, and which he believed brought him such good luck, “Neechy voe,” “It is nothing,” or “Never mind.” You can spell with your eyes shut in Russian, and you simply cannot make a mistake, for the Russians spell with all the abandonment of French dancing.This zakouska is so delicious and so varied and so tempting that one not accustomed to it eats too much without realizing. At a dinner an American looked at my loaded plate and said, with delicious impertinence, “Confidentially, I don’t mind telling you that dinner iscoming.”As we came back, the full delight of troika-riding came over us, for driving in the country we could not tell how fast we were going. But in town, whizzing past other carriages, hearing the shouts of the idvosjik, “Troika!” and seeing the people scatter and the sledges turn out (for a troika has the right of way), we realized at what a pace we were going. We dashed across the frozen Neva, with its tramway built right on the ice; past the Winter Palace, along the quai, where all the embassies are, into the Grand Morskaia, and from there into the Nevski, with the snow flying and our bells ringing, and the middle horse trotting and the outer horses galloping, sending clouds of steam from their heaving flanks and palpitating nostrils, and the biting air making our blood tingle, and the reiterated shout of the idvosjik, “Troika! troika!” taking our breath away.We had one more excitement before we reached home, which was seeing a Russian fire-engine. We passed it in a run. The engine was on one sledge, and following it were five other sledges carrying hogsheads of water.I am glad we came to Russia in winter, for by so doing we have met the Russian people, the most fascinating that any country can boast, with the charm of the French, the courage of the English, the sentiment of the Germans, the sincerity and hospitality of the Americans. Their courtesy to each other is a never-ending pleasure to me. Poles and Russians treat their women more nearly the way our American men treat us than any nation we have encountered so far. They are the most marvellous linguists in the world. We have met no one in Russia who speaks fewer than three languages, and we have met several who speak twelve. They are not arrogant even concerning their military strength. They are quite modest about their learning and their not inconsiderable literary and artistic achievements, and they hold themselves, both nationally and individually, in the plastic state where they are willing to learn from any nation or any master who can teach what they wish to know. There is a marvellous future for Russia, for their riches and resources are as vast and inestimable as their possessions. They themselves do not realize how mighty they are.Here is France grovelling at their feet, spending millions of francs to entertain the Tzar—France, a nation which must see a prospect of double her money returned before she parts with a sou; with the cathedrals filled withcouronnessent by the French press; with no compliment to Russia too fulsome for French gallantry to invent finding space in the foremost French newspapers; hoping, praying, beseeching the help of Russia, when Germany makes up her mind to gobble France, yet dealing Russian achievement a backhanded slap by hinting what a compliment it is for a cultivated, accomplished, over-cultured race like the French to beg the assistance of a barbarous country like Russia.I believe that Russia is the only country in the world which feels nationally friendly and individually interested in America. I used to think France was, and I held Lafayette firmly and proudly in my memory to prove it. But I was promptly undeceived as to their individual interest, and when I still clung to Lafayette as a proof of the former I was laughed to scorn and told that France as a nation had nothing to do with that; that Lafayette went to America as a soldier of fortune. He would just as soon have gone to Madagascar or Timbuctoo, but America was accommodating enough to have a war on just in time to serve his ambition. If that is true, I wish they had not told me. I would like to come home with a few ideals left—if they will permit me.When I was in Berlin I asked our ambassador, Mr. White, what Germany thought of America. He replied, “Just what Thackeray thought of Tupper. When some one asked Thackeray what he thought of Tupper, he replied, ‘I don’t think of him at all.’”But in Russia I have a sore throat all the time from answering questions about America. I think I am not exaggerating when I say I have answered a million in a single evening. My companion at first was disgusted with my wearing myself out in such a manner, but I said, “I am so grateful to them forcaring, after the indifference of all these other self-sufficient countries, that I am willing to sacrifice myself at it if necessary.”We never realized how little we knew about America until we discovered the Russian capacity for asking unexpected questions. I bought an American history in Russia, and sat up nights trying to remember what my father had tried to instil into my sieve-like brain. After a week of witnessing my feverish enthusiasm, even my companion’s dormant national pride was roused. She, too, was ashamed to say, “I don’t know,” when they asked us these terrible questions. When we get into the clutches of a party of women we trust to luck that they cannot remember our statistics long enough to tell their husbands and brothers (I have a horror of men’s accuracy in figures), and we calmly guess at the answers when our exact knowledge gives out.One night they attacked my companion on the school question. Now, she does not know one solitary thing about the public-school system, but, to my utter amazement, I heard her giving the number of children between the ages of eight and ten who were in the public schools in the State of Illinois, and then running them off by counties. I was afraid she would soon begin to call the roll of their names from memory, so I rescued her and took her home. I suppose we must have an air of intelligence which successfully masks our colossal ignorance of occult facts and defunct dates, because they rely on us to inform them off-hand concerning everything social, political, historical, sacred and profane, spirituous and spiritual, from the protoplasm of the cliff-dwellers to the details of the Dingley bill, not skipping accurate information on the process of whiskey-making in Kentucky, a crocodile-hunt in Florida, suffrage in Wyoming, a lynching-bee in Texas, polygamy in Utah, prune-drying in California, divorces in Dakota, gold-mining in Colorado, cotton-spinning in Georgia, tobacco-raising in Alabama, marble-quarrying in Tennessee, the number of Quakers in Philadelphia, one’s sensations while being scalped by Sioux, how marriages are arranged, what a man says when he proposes, the details of a camp-meeting, a description of a negro baptism, and the main arguments on the silver question.They get some curious ideas in their heads concerning us, but they are so amazingly well informed about America that their specific misinformation never irritated me. The small use they have for their English sometimes accounts for the queer things they say.The official costume for men who have no particular uniform is regulation evening dress, which they are obliged to wear all day. They become so tired of it that this is the reason, they tell me, why so many men, even in smart society, go to the opera or even dinners in frock-coats. One one occasion a most intelligent man said to me, “I am told that in America the ladies always wear décolleté costumes at dinners, and the men are always in night-dress.”For one hysterical moment my mind’s eye pictured a dinner-table on Prairie Avenue with alternately a low-necked gown and a pair of pajamas, and I choked. Then I happened to think that he meant “evening dress,” and I recovered sufficiently to explain.The Tzarina has made English the Court language, and since her coronation no state balls take place on Sunday.Russian hospitality is delightful. We could remain a year in Russia and not exhaust our invitations to visit at their country-houses. Russia must be beautiful in summer, but if you wish to go into society, to know the best of the people, to see their sweet home life, and to understand how they live and enjoy themselves, you must go in the winter. I cannot think what any one would find of national life in summer in Russia, for everybody has a country-house and everybody goes to it and leaves the city to tourists.Russia, in spite of her vast riches, has not arrived at supercivilization, where there is corruption in the very atmosphere. She is an undeveloped and a young country, and while the Tzar is wise and kind and beneficent, and an excellent Tzar as Tzars go, still Russians, even the best and most enlightened of them, are slaves. I have met a number of the gentlest and cleverest men who had been exiled to Siberia, and pardoned. Their picture-galleries bear witness to this underlying sadness of knowing that in spite of everything they are notfree. All their actions are watched, their every word listened to, spies are everywhere, the police are omnipresent, and over all their gayety and vivacity and mirth and spontaneity there is the constant fear of the awful hand in whose complete power they are. His clemency, his fatherhood to his people, his tremendous responsibility for their welfare are all appreciated, but the thought is in every mind, “When will this kindness fail? Upon whose head will the lightning descend next?”Title and gentle birth and the long and faithful service of one’s ancestors to the Tzars are of small avail if the evidence should go against one in Russia. I have heard princes say less than I have said here, but say it in whispers and with furtive looks at the nearest man or woman. I have seen their starts of surprise at the frank impudence of our daring to criticise our administration in their midst, and I felt as if I were in danger of being bombarded from the back.In Russia you may spell as you please, but you must have a care how you criticise the government. In America you may criticise the government as you will, but you must have a care how you spell.
Yesterday we had our first Russian experience in the shape of a troika ride. Russians, as a rule, do not troika except at night. In fact, from my experience, they reverse the established order of things and turn night into day.
A troika is a superb affair. It makes the tiny sledges which take the place of cabs, and are used for all ordinary purposes, look even more like toys than usual. But the sledges are great fun, and so cheap that it is an extravagance to walk. A course costs only twenty kopecks—ten cents. The sledges are set so low that you can reach out and touch the snow with your hand, and they are so small that the horse is in your lap and the coachman in your pocket. He simply turns in his seat to hook the fur robe to the back of your seat—only it has no back. If you fall, you fall clear to the ground.
The horse is far, far above you in your humble position, and there is so little room that two people can with difficulty stow themselves in the narrow seat. If a brother and sister or a husband and wife drive together, the man, in sheer self-defence, is obliged to put his arm around the woman, no matter how distasteful it may be. Not that she would ever be conscious of whether he did it or not, for the amount of clothes one is obliged to wear in Russia destroys any sense of touch.
The idvosjik, or coachman, is so bulky from this same reason that you cannot see over him. You are obliged to crane your neck to one side. His head is covered with a Tartar cap. He wears his hair down to his collar, and then chopped off in a straight line. His pelisse is of a bluish gray, fits tightly to the waist, and comes to the feet. But the skirt of it is gathered on back and front, giving him an irresistibly comical pannier effect, like a Dolly Varden polonaise. The Russian idvosjik guides his horse curiously. He coaxes it forward by calling it all sorts of pet names—“doushka,” darling, etc. Then he beats it with a toy whip, which must feel like a fly on its woolly coat, for all the little fat pony does is to kick up its heels and fly along like the wind, missing the other sledges by a hair’s-breadth. It is ghostly to see the way they glide along without a sound, for the sledges wear no bells.
One may drive with perfect safety at a breakneck pace, for they all drive down on one side of the street and up on the other. Nor will an idvosjik hesitate to use his whip about the head and face of another idvosjik who dares to turn without crossing the street.
He stops his horse with a guttural trill, as if one should say “Tr-r-r-r-r” in the back of the throat. It sounds like a gargle.
The horses are sharp-shod, but in a way quite different from ours. The spikes on their shoes are an inch long, and dig into the ice with perfect security, but it makes the horses look as if they wore French heels. Even over ice like sheer glass they go at a gallop and never slip. It is wonderful, and the exhilaration of it is like driving through an air charged with champagne, like the wine-caves of Rintz.
Our troika was like a chariot in comparison with these sledges. It was gorgeously upholstered in red velvet, and held six—three on each seat. The robes also were red velvet, bordered and lined with black bear fur. There were three horses driven abreast. The middle horse was much larger than the other two, and wore a high white wooden collar, which stood up from the rest of the harness, and was hung with bells and painted with red flowers and birds.
To my delight the horses were wild, and stood on their hind legs and bit each other, and backed us off the road, and otherwise acted like Tartar horses in books. It seemed almost too good to be true. It was like driving through the Black Forest and seeing the gnomes and the fairies one has read about. I told my friends very humbly that I had never done anything in my life to deserve the good fortune of having those beautiful horses act in such a satisfactory and historical manner. We had to get out twice and let the idvosjik calm them down. But even when ploughing my way out of snow up to my knees I breathed an ecstatic sigh of gratitude and joy. I could not understand the men’s annoyance. It was too ideal to complain about.
We drove out to the Island for luncheon, and on the way we stopped and coasted in a curious Russian sledge from the top of a high place, something like our toboggan-slides, only this sledge was guided from behind by a peasant on skates.
A Russian meal always begins with a side-table ofhors d’oeuvres, called “zakouska.” That may not be spelled right, but no Russian would correct me, because the language is phonetic, and they spell the same word in many different ways. Their alphabet has thirty-eight letters in it, besides the little marks to tell you whether to make a letter hard or soft.
Even proper names take on curious oddities of spelling, and a husband and wife or two brothers will spell their name differently when using the Latin letters. If you complain about it, and ask which is correct, they make that famous Russian reply which Bismarck once had engraved in his ring, and which he believed brought him such good luck, “Neechy voe,” “It is nothing,” or “Never mind.” You can spell with your eyes shut in Russian, and you simply cannot make a mistake, for the Russians spell with all the abandonment of French dancing.
This zakouska is so delicious and so varied and so tempting that one not accustomed to it eats too much without realizing. At a dinner an American looked at my loaded plate and said, with delicious impertinence, “Confidentially, I don’t mind telling you that dinner iscoming.”
As we came back, the full delight of troika-riding came over us, for driving in the country we could not tell how fast we were going. But in town, whizzing past other carriages, hearing the shouts of the idvosjik, “Troika!” and seeing the people scatter and the sledges turn out (for a troika has the right of way), we realized at what a pace we were going. We dashed across the frozen Neva, with its tramway built right on the ice; past the Winter Palace, along the quai, where all the embassies are, into the Grand Morskaia, and from there into the Nevski, with the snow flying and our bells ringing, and the middle horse trotting and the outer horses galloping, sending clouds of steam from their heaving flanks and palpitating nostrils, and the biting air making our blood tingle, and the reiterated shout of the idvosjik, “Troika! troika!” taking our breath away.
We had one more excitement before we reached home, which was seeing a Russian fire-engine. We passed it in a run. The engine was on one sledge, and following it were five other sledges carrying hogsheads of water.
I am glad we came to Russia in winter, for by so doing we have met the Russian people, the most fascinating that any country can boast, with the charm of the French, the courage of the English, the sentiment of the Germans, the sincerity and hospitality of the Americans. Their courtesy to each other is a never-ending pleasure to me. Poles and Russians treat their women more nearly the way our American men treat us than any nation we have encountered so far. They are the most marvellous linguists in the world. We have met no one in Russia who speaks fewer than three languages, and we have met several who speak twelve. They are not arrogant even concerning their military strength. They are quite modest about their learning and their not inconsiderable literary and artistic achievements, and they hold themselves, both nationally and individually, in the plastic state where they are willing to learn from any nation or any master who can teach what they wish to know. There is a marvellous future for Russia, for their riches and resources are as vast and inestimable as their possessions. They themselves do not realize how mighty they are.
Here is France grovelling at their feet, spending millions of francs to entertain the Tzar—France, a nation which must see a prospect of double her money returned before she parts with a sou; with the cathedrals filled withcouronnessent by the French press; with no compliment to Russia too fulsome for French gallantry to invent finding space in the foremost French newspapers; hoping, praying, beseeching the help of Russia, when Germany makes up her mind to gobble France, yet dealing Russian achievement a backhanded slap by hinting what a compliment it is for a cultivated, accomplished, over-cultured race like the French to beg the assistance of a barbarous country like Russia.
I believe that Russia is the only country in the world which feels nationally friendly and individually interested in America. I used to think France was, and I held Lafayette firmly and proudly in my memory to prove it. But I was promptly undeceived as to their individual interest, and when I still clung to Lafayette as a proof of the former I was laughed to scorn and told that France as a nation had nothing to do with that; that Lafayette went to America as a soldier of fortune. He would just as soon have gone to Madagascar or Timbuctoo, but America was accommodating enough to have a war on just in time to serve his ambition. If that is true, I wish they had not told me. I would like to come home with a few ideals left—if they will permit me.
When I was in Berlin I asked our ambassador, Mr. White, what Germany thought of America. He replied, “Just what Thackeray thought of Tupper. When some one asked Thackeray what he thought of Tupper, he replied, ‘I don’t think of him at all.’”
But in Russia I have a sore throat all the time from answering questions about America. I think I am not exaggerating when I say I have answered a million in a single evening. My companion at first was disgusted with my wearing myself out in such a manner, but I said, “I am so grateful to them forcaring, after the indifference of all these other self-sufficient countries, that I am willing to sacrifice myself at it if necessary.”
We never realized how little we knew about America until we discovered the Russian capacity for asking unexpected questions. I bought an American history in Russia, and sat up nights trying to remember what my father had tried to instil into my sieve-like brain. After a week of witnessing my feverish enthusiasm, even my companion’s dormant national pride was roused. She, too, was ashamed to say, “I don’t know,” when they asked us these terrible questions. When we get into the clutches of a party of women we trust to luck that they cannot remember our statistics long enough to tell their husbands and brothers (I have a horror of men’s accuracy in figures), and we calmly guess at the answers when our exact knowledge gives out.
One night they attacked my companion on the school question. Now, she does not know one solitary thing about the public-school system, but, to my utter amazement, I heard her giving the number of children between the ages of eight and ten who were in the public schools in the State of Illinois, and then running them off by counties. I was afraid she would soon begin to call the roll of their names from memory, so I rescued her and took her home. I suppose we must have an air of intelligence which successfully masks our colossal ignorance of occult facts and defunct dates, because they rely on us to inform them off-hand concerning everything social, political, historical, sacred and profane, spirituous and spiritual, from the protoplasm of the cliff-dwellers to the details of the Dingley bill, not skipping accurate information on the process of whiskey-making in Kentucky, a crocodile-hunt in Florida, suffrage in Wyoming, a lynching-bee in Texas, polygamy in Utah, prune-drying in California, divorces in Dakota, gold-mining in Colorado, cotton-spinning in Georgia, tobacco-raising in Alabama, marble-quarrying in Tennessee, the number of Quakers in Philadelphia, one’s sensations while being scalped by Sioux, how marriages are arranged, what a man says when he proposes, the details of a camp-meeting, a description of a negro baptism, and the main arguments on the silver question.
They get some curious ideas in their heads concerning us, but they are so amazingly well informed about America that their specific misinformation never irritated me. The small use they have for their English sometimes accounts for the queer things they say.
The official costume for men who have no particular uniform is regulation evening dress, which they are obliged to wear all day. They become so tired of it that this is the reason, they tell me, why so many men, even in smart society, go to the opera or even dinners in frock-coats. One one occasion a most intelligent man said to me, “I am told that in America the ladies always wear décolleté costumes at dinners, and the men are always in night-dress.”
For one hysterical moment my mind’s eye pictured a dinner-table on Prairie Avenue with alternately a low-necked gown and a pair of pajamas, and I choked. Then I happened to think that he meant “evening dress,” and I recovered sufficiently to explain.
The Tzarina has made English the Court language, and since her coronation no state balls take place on Sunday.
Russian hospitality is delightful. We could remain a year in Russia and not exhaust our invitations to visit at their country-houses. Russia must be beautiful in summer, but if you wish to go into society, to know the best of the people, to see their sweet home life, and to understand how they live and enjoy themselves, you must go in the winter. I cannot think what any one would find of national life in summer in Russia, for everybody has a country-house and everybody goes to it and leaves the city to tourists.
Russia, in spite of her vast riches, has not arrived at supercivilization, where there is corruption in the very atmosphere. She is an undeveloped and a young country, and while the Tzar is wise and kind and beneficent, and an excellent Tzar as Tzars go, still Russians, even the best and most enlightened of them, are slaves. I have met a number of the gentlest and cleverest men who had been exiled to Siberia, and pardoned. Their picture-galleries bear witness to this underlying sadness of knowing that in spite of everything they are notfree. All their actions are watched, their every word listened to, spies are everywhere, the police are omnipresent, and over all their gayety and vivacity and mirth and spontaneity there is the constant fear of the awful hand in whose complete power they are. His clemency, his fatherhood to his people, his tremendous responsibility for their welfare are all appreciated, but the thought is in every mind, “When will this kindness fail? Upon whose head will the lightning descend next?”
Title and gentle birth and the long and faithful service of one’s ancestors to the Tzars are of small avail if the evidence should go against one in Russia. I have heard princes say less than I have said here, but say it in whispers and with furtive looks at the nearest man or woman. I have seen their starts of surprise at the frank impudence of our daring to criticise our administration in their midst, and I felt as if I were in danger of being bombarded from the back.
In Russia you may spell as you please, but you must have a care how you criticise the government. In America you may criticise the government as you will, but you must have a care how you spell.