CHAPTER X

The Crown Prince at Vyatka—The Fall of Tufáyev—Transferred to Vladímir—The Inspector’s Enquiry.

THE Crown Prince[110]is coming to Vyatka! The Crown Prince is travelling through Russia, to see the country and to be seen himself! This news was of interest to everyone and of special interest, of course, to the Governor. In his haste and confusion, he issued a number of ridiculous and absurd orders—for instance, that the peasants along the road should wear their holidaykaftáns, and that all boardings in the towns should be repainted and all sidewalks mended. A poor widow who owned a smallish house in Orlóv informed the mayor that she had no money to repair her sidewalk; the mayor reported this to the Governor, and the Governor ordered the floors of her house to be pulled up—the sidewalks there were made of wood—and, if that was insufficient, the repairs were to be done at the public cost and the money to be refunded by the widow, even if she had to sell her house by auction for the purpose. Things didnot go to the length of an auction, but the widow’s floors were torn up.

110.Afterwards Alexander II.

Fiftyverstsfrom Vyatka is the spot where the wonder-workingikonof St. Nicholas was revealed to the people of Novgorod. When they moved to Vyatka, they took theikonwith them; but it disappeared and turned up again by the Big River, fiftyverstsaway. The people removed it again; but they took a vow that, if theikonwould stay with them, they would carry it in solemn procession once a year—on the twenty-third of May, I think,—to the Big River. This is the chief summer holiday in the Government of Vyatka. Theikonis despatched along the river on a richly decorated barge the day before, accompanied by the Bishop and all the clergy in their full robes. Hundreds of boats of every description, filled with peasants and their wives, native tribesmen and shopkeepers, make up a lively scene, as they sail in the wake of the Saint. In front of all sails the Governor’s barge, decorated with scarlet cloth. It is a remarkable sight. The people gather from far and near in tens of thousands, wait on the bank for the arrival of the Saint, and move about in noisy crowds round the little village by the river. It is remarkable that the native Votyaks and Cheremisses and even Tatars, though they are not Christians, come in crowds to pray to theikon. The festival, indeed, wears a purely pagan aspect. Natives and Russians alike bring calves and sheep as offerings up to the wall of the monastery; they slaughter them on the spot, and the Abbot repeats prayers and blesses and consecrates the meat, which is offered at a special window on the inner side of themonastery enclosure. The meat is then distributed to the people. In old times it was given away, but nowadays the monks receive a few pence for each piece. Thus the peasant who has presented an entire calf has to spend a trifle in order to get a bit of veal for his own eating. The court of the monastery is filled with beggars, cripples, blind men, and sufferers from all sorts of deformity; they sit on the ground and sing out in chorus for alms. The gravestones round the church are used as seats by boys, the sons of priests and shopmen; armed with an ink-bottle, each offers to write out names of the dead, that their souls may be prayed for. “Who wants names written?” they call out, and the women crowd round them and repeat the names. The boys scratch away with their pens with a professional air and repeat the names after them—“Marya, Marya, Akulina, Stepanida, Father Ioann, Matrona—no, no! auntie, half akopeckis all you gave me; but I can’t take less than fivekopecksfor such a lot—Ioann, Vasilissa, Iona, Marya, Yevpraxia, and the baby Katherine.”

The church is tightly packed, and the female worshippers differ oddly in their preferences: one hands a candle to her neighbour with precise directions that it is to be offered to “the guest,”i.e., the Saint who is there on a visit, while another woman prefers “the host,”i.e., the local Saint. During the ceremonies the monks and attendant acolytes from Vyatka are never sober; they stop at all the large villages along the way, and the peasants stand treat.

This ancient and popular festival was celebrated on the twenty-third of May. But the Prince was to arrive on May 19, and the Governor, wishing to please hisaugust visitor, changed the date of the festival; what harm could it do, if St. Nicholas paid his visit three days too soon? The Abbot’s consent was necessary; but he was fortunately a man of the world and raised no difficulty when the Governor proposed to keep the twenty-third of May on the nineteenth.

Instructions of various kinds came from Petersburg; for instance, it was ordered that each provincial capital should organise an exhibition of the local products and manufactures; and the animal, vegetable, and mineral products were to be kept separate. This division into kingdoms perplexed our office not a little, and puzzled even the Governor himself. Wishing not to make mistakes, he decided, in spite of the bad relations between us, to seek my advice. “Now, honey, for example,” he said, “where would you put honey? And that gilt frame—how can we settle where that belongs?” My replies showed that I had surprisingly exact information concerning the three natural kingdoms, and he proposed that I should undertake the arrangement of the exhibition.

I was still putting in order wooden spoons and native costumes, honey and iron trellis-work, when an awful rumour spread through the town that the Mayor of Orlóv had been arrested. The Governor’s face turned yellow, and he even seemed unsteady in his gait.

A week before the Prince arrived, the Mayor of Orlóv wrote to the Governor that the widow whose floors hadbeen torn up was making a disturbance, and that a rich and well-known merchant of the town declared his intention of telling the whole story to the Prince on his arrival. The Governor dealt very ingeniously with this firebrand; he recalled with satisfaction the precedent of Petrovski, and ordered that the merchant, being suspected of insanity, should be sent to Vyatka for examination. Thus the matter would drag on till the Prince left the province; and that would be the end of it. The mayor did what he was told, and the merchant was placed in the hospital at Vyatka.

At last the Prince arrived. He greeted the Governor coldly and took no further notice of him, and he sent his own physician at once to examine the merchant. He knew all about it by this time. For the widow had presented her petition at Orlóv, and then the merchants and shop people had told the whole story. The Governor grew more and more crest-fallen. The affair looked bad. The mayor had said plainly that he acted throughout on the written orders of the Governor.

When the physician came back, he reported that the merchant was perfectly sane. That was a finishing stroke for the Governor.

At eight in the evening the Prince visited the exhibition with his suite. The Governor conducted him; but he made a terrible hash of his explanations, till two of the suite, Zhukovski[111]and Arsenyev, seeing that things were not going well, invited me to do the honours; and I took the party round.

111.The famous man of letters (1783-1852) who acted as tutor to Alexander. Arsenyev undertook the scientific side of the Prince’s education.

The young Prince had not the stern expression of his father; his features suggested rather good nature and indolence. Though he was only about twenty, he was beginning to grow stout. The few words he addressed to me were friendly, and he had not the hoarse abrupt utterance of his uncle Constantine.

When the Prince left the exhibition, Zhukovski asked me what had brought me to Vyatka; he was surprised to find in such a place an official who could speak like a gentleman. He offered at once to speak to the Prince about me; and he actually did all that he could. The Prince suggested to his father that I should be allowed to return to Petersburg; the Emperor said that this would be unfair to the other exiles, but, owing to the Prince’s intercession, he ordered that I should be transferred to Vladímir. This was an improvement in point of position, as Vladímir is 700verstsnearer Moscow. But of this I shall speak later.

In the evening there was a ball at the assembly-rooms. The musicians, who had been summoned for the occasion from one of the factories of the province, arrived in the town helplessly drunk. The Governor rose to the emergency: the performers were all shut up in prison twenty-four hours before the ball, marched straight from prison to the orchestra, and kept there till the ball was over.

The ball was a dull, ill-arranged affair, both mean and motley, as balls always are in small towns on great occasions. The police-officers bustled up and down; the officials, in full uniform, squeezed up against the walls; the ladies crowded round the Prince, just as savages mob a traveller from Europe.

Apropos of the ladies, I may tell a story. One of the towns offered a “collation” after their exhibition. The Prince partook of nothing but a single peach; when he had eaten it, he threw the stone out of the window. Suddenly a tall figure emerged from the crowd of officials standing outside the building; it was a certain rural judge, well known for his irregular habits; he walked deliberately up to the window, picked up the stone, and put it in his pocket. When the collation was over, he went up to one of the important ladies and offered her the stone; she was charmed to get such a treasure. Then he went to several other ladies and made them happy in the same way. He had bought five peaches and cut out the stones. Not one of the six ladies could ever be sure of the authenticity of her prize.

When the Prince had gone, the Governor prepared with a heavy heart to exchange his satrapy for a place on the bench of the Supreme Court at home; but he was not so fortunate as that.

Three weeks later the post brought documents from Petersburg addressed to “The Acting Governor of the Province.” Our office was a scene of confusion; officials came and went; we heard that an edict had been received, but the Governor pretended illness and kept his house.

An hour later we heard that Tufáyev had been dismissed from his office; and that was all that the edict said about him.

The whole town rejoiced over his fall. While he ruled, the atmosphere was impure, stale, and stifling; now onecould breathe more freely. And yet it was hateful to see the triumph of his subordinates. Asses in plenty raised their heels against this stricken wild-boar. To compare small things with great, the meanness of mankind was shown as clearly then as when Napoleon fell. Between Tufáyev and me there had been an open breach for a long time; and if he had not been turned out himself, he would certainly have sent me to some frontier town like Kai. I had therefore no reason to change my behaviour towards him; but others, who only the day before had pulled off their hats at the sight of his carriage and run at his nod, who had smiled at his spaniel and offered their snuffboxes to his valet—these same men now would hardly salute him and made the whole town ring with their protests against the irregularities which he had committed and they had shared in. All this is an old story and repeats itself so regularly from age to age, in all places, that we must accept this form of baseness as a universal trait of human nature, and, at all events, not be surprised by it.

His successor, Kornilov, soon made his appearance. He was a very different sort of person—a man of about fifty, tall and stout, rather flabby in appearance, but with an agreeable smile and gentlemanly manners. He formed all his sentences with strict grammatical accuracy and used a great number of words; in fact, he spoke with a clearness which was capable, by its copiousness, of obscuring the simplest topic. He had been at school with Púshkin and had served in the Guards; he bought all the new French books, liked to talk on serious topics, andgave me a copy of Tocqueville’s[112]Democracy in Americathe day after he arrived at Vyatka.

112.Alexis de Tocqueville, a French statesman and publicist (1805-1859).

It was a startling change. The same rooms, the same furniture, but, instead of the Tatar tax-collector with the face of an Esquimo and the habits of a Siberian, a theorist with a tincture of pedantry but a gentleman none the less. Our new Governor had intelligence, but his intellect seemed to give light only and no warmth, like a bright day in winter which ripens no fruit though it is pleasant enough. He was a terrible formalist too, though not of the red-tape variety; it is not easy to describe the type, but it was just as tiresome as all varieties of formalism are.

As the new Governor had a real wife, the official residence lost its ultra-bachelor characteristics; it became monogamous. As a consequence of this, the members of the Council became quite domestic characters: these bald old gentlemen, instead of boasting over their conquests, now spoke with tender affection of their lawful wives, although these ladies were past their prime and either angular and bony, or so fat that it was impossible for a surgeon to draw blood from them.

Some years before he came to us, Kornilov, being then a colonel in the Guards, was appointed Civil Governor of a provincial town, and entered at once upon business of which he knew nothing. Like all new brooms, he began by reading every official paper that was submitted to him. He came across a certain document from another Governmentwhich he could not understand, though he read it through several times.

He rang for his secretary and gave it to him to read. But the secretary also was unable to explain the matter clearly.

“What will you do with this document,” asked Kornilov, “if I pass it on to the office?”

“I shall hand it to Desk III—it is in their department.”

“So the chief of Desk III will know what to do?”

“Certainly, Your Excellency; he has been in charge of that desk for six years.”

“Please summon him to me.”

The chief came, and Kornilov handed him the paper and asked what should be done. The clerk ran through it hastily, and then said a question must be asked of the Crown Court and instructions given to the inspector of rural police.

“What instructions?”

The clerk seemed puzzled; at last he said that, though it was difficult to state them on the spot, it was easy to write them down.

“There is a chair; will you be good enough to write now?”

The clerk took a pen, wrote rapidly and confidently, and soon produced the two documents.

The Governor took them and read them through; he read them through again; he could make nothing of them. “Well,” he used to say afterwards, “I saw that it really was in the form of an answer to the original document; so I plucked up courage and signed it. The answer gave entire satisfaction; I never heard another word about it.”

§9

The announcement of my transference to Vladímir arrived before Christmas. My preparations were quickly made, and I started off.

I said a cordial good-bye to society at Vyatka; in that distant town I had made two or three real friends among the young merchants. They vied with one another in showing sympathy and friendship for the outcast. Several sledges accompanied me to the first stopping-place, and, in spite of my protests, a whole cargo of eatables and drinkables was placed on my conveyance. Next day I reached Yaransk.

After Yaransk the road passes through endless pine-forests. There was moonlight and hard frost as my small sledge slid along the narrow track. I have never since seen such continuous forests. They stretch all the way to Archangelsk, and reindeer occasionally find their way through them to the Government of Vyatka. Most of the wood is suitable for building purposes. The fir-trees seemed to file past my sledge like soldiers; they were remarkably straight and high, and covered with snow, under which their black needles stuck out like bristles. I fell asleep and woke again—and there were the armies of the pines still marching past at a great rate, and sometimes shaking off the snow. There are small clearings where the horses are changed; you see a small house half-hidden in the trees and the horses tethered to a tree-trunk, and hear their bells jingling; a couple of native boys in embroidered shirts run out, still rubbing their eyes; the driver has a dispute with the other driver in a hoarse alto voice; then he calls out “All right!” and strikes up a monotonous song—andthe endless procession of pine-trees and snow-drifts begins again.

Just as I got out of the Government of Vyatka, I came in contact for the last time with the officials, and this final appearance was quite in their best manner.

We stopped at a post-house, and the driver began to unharness the horses. A tall peasant appeared at the door and asked who I was.

“What business is that of yours?”

“I am the inspector’s messenger, and he told me to ask.”

“Very well: go to the office and you will find my passport there.”

The peasant disappeared but returned in a moment and told the driver that he could not have fresh horses.

This was too much. I jumped out of the sledge and entered the house. The inspector was sitting on a bench and dictating to a clerk; both were half-seas over. On another bench in a corner a man was sitting, or rather lying, with fetters on his feet and hands. There were several bottles in the room, glasses, and a litter of papers and tobacco ash on the table.

“Where is the inspector?” I called out loudly, as I went in.

“I am the inspector,” was the reply. I had seen the man before in Vyatka; his name was Lazarev. While speaking he stared very rudely at me—and then rushed towards me with open arms.

It must be remembered that, after Tufáyev’s fall, the officials, seeing that his successor and I were on fairly good terms, were a little afraid of me.

I kept him off with my hand, and asked in a very serious voice: “How could you order that I was to have no horses? What an absurdity to detain travellers on the high road!”

“It was only a joke; I hope you won’t be angry about it.” Then he shouted at his messenger: “Horses! horses at once! What are you standing there for, you idiot?”

“I hope you will have a cup of tea with some rum in it,” he said to me.

“No, thank you.”

“Perhaps we have some champagne”; he rushed to the bottles, but they were all empty.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Holding an enquiry; this fine fellow took an axe and killed his father and sister. There was a quarrel and he was jealous.”

“And so you celebrate the occasion with champagne?” I said.

The man looked confused. I glanced at the murderer. He was a Cheremiss of about twenty; there was nothing savage about his face; it was of purely Oriental type with narrow flashing eyes and black hair.

I was so disgusted by the whole scene that I went out again into the yard. The inspector ran out after me, with a bottle of rum in one hand and a glass in the other, and pressed me to have a drink.

In order to get rid of him, I accepted. He caught me by the arm and said: “I am to blame, I admit; but I hope you will not mention the facts to His Excellency and so ruin an honest man.” As he spoke, he caught hold of my hand and actually kissed it, repeating a dozen times over, “In God’s name, don’t ruin an honest man!” I pulled away my hand in disgust and said:

“You needn’t be afraid; what need have I to tell tales?”

“But can’t I do you some service?”

“Yes; you can make them harness the horses quicker.”

“Look alive there!” he shouted out, and soon began tugging at the straps himself.

I never forgot this incident. Nine years later I was in Petersburg for the last time; I had to visit the Home Office to arrange about a passport. While I was talking to the secretary in charge, a gentleman walked through the room, distributing friendly handshakes to the magnates of the office and condescending bows to the lesser lights. “Hang it! it can’t surely be him!” I thought. “Who is that?” I asked.

“His name is Lazarev; he is specially employed by the Minister and is a great man here.”

“Did he serve once as inspector in the Government of Vyatka?”

“He did.”

“I congratulate you, gentlemen! Nine years ago that man kissed my hand!”

It must be allowed that the Minister knew how to choose his subordinates.

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