Valla’s maid and the housekeeper had come into the room. The maid – a serf girl – was kneeling by the card table, and the housekeeper was carefully shearing off her long red hair with a pair of scissors. Aunt Sara was watching idly; Valla wasn’t even noticing until the housekeeper handed her the tresses.
“Ah, how pretty!” says she, and shrugged, and tossed them over to Aunt Sara, who stroked them, and said:
“Shall I keep them for a wig, or sell them? Thirty roubles in Moscow or St Petersburg.” And she held them up in the light, considering.
“More than Vera is worth now, at any rate,” says Valla, carelessly. Then she jumped up, ran across to Pencherjevsky, and put her arms round his shaggy neck from behind, blowing in his ear. “Father, may I have fifty roubles for a new maid?”
“What’s that?” says he, deep in the game. “Wait, child, wait; I have this English rascal trapped, if only …”
“Just fifty roubles, father. See, I cannot keep Vera now.”
He looked up, saw the maid, who was still kneeling, cropped like a convict, and guffawed. “She doesn’t need hair to hang up your dresses and fetch your shoes, does she? Learn to count your aces, you silly girl.”
“Oh, father! You know she will not do now! Only fifty roubles – please – from my kind little batiushka!”d
“Ah, plague take you, can a man not have peace? Fifty roubles, then, to be let alone. And next time, bet something that I will not have to replace out of my purse.” He pinched her cheek. “Check, colonel.”
I’ve a strong stomach, as you know, but I’ll admit that turned it – not the disfigurement of a pretty girl, you understand, although I didn’t hold with that, much, but the cheerful unconcern with which they did it – those two cultured ladies, in that elegant room, as though they had been gaming for sweets or counters. And now Valla was leaning on her father’s shoulder, gaily urging him on to victory, and Sara was running the hair idly through her hands, while the kneeling girl bowed her pathetically shorn head to the floor and then followed the housekeeper from the room. Well, thinks I, they’d be a rage in London society, these two. You may have noticed, by the way, that the cost of a maid was fifty roubles, of which her hair was worth thirty.
Of course, they didn’t think of her as human. I’ve told you something of the serfs already, and most of that I learned first-hand on the Pencherjevsky estate, where they were treated as something worse than cattle. The more fortunate of them lived in the outbuildings and were employed about the house, but most of them were down in the village, a filthy, straggling place of log huts, called isbas, with entrances so low you had to stoop to go in. They were foul, verminous hovels, consisting of just one room, with a huge bed bearing many pillows, a big stove, and a “holy corner” in which there were poor, garish pictures of their saints.
Their food was truly fearful – rye bread for the most part, and cabbage soup with a lump of fat in it, salt cabbage, garlic stew, coarse porridge, and for delicacies, sometimes a little cucumber or beetroot. And those were the well-fed ones. Their drink was as bad – bread fermented in alcohol which they call qvass (“it’s black, it’s thick, and it makes you drunk,” as they said), and on special occasions vodka, which is just poison. They’ll sell their souls for brandy, but seldom get it.
Such conditions of squalor, half the year in stifling heat, half in unimaginable cold, and all spent in back-breaking labour, are probably enough to explain why they were such an oppressed, dirty, brutish, useless people – just like the Irish, really, but without the gaiety. Even the Mississippi niggers were happier – there was never a smile on the face of your serf, just patient, morose misery.
And yet that wasn’t the half of their trouble. I remember the court that Pencherjevsky used to hold in a barn at the back of the house, and those cringing creatures crawling on their bellies along the floor to kiss the edge of his coat, while he pronounced sentence on them for their offences. You may not believe them, but they’re true, and I noted them at the time.
There was the local dog-killer – every Russian village is plagued in winter by packs of wild dogs, who are a real danger to life, and this fellow had to chase and club them to death – he got a few kopecks for each pelt. But he had been shirking his job, it seemed.
“Forty strokes of the cudgel,” says Pencherjevsky. And then he added: “Siberia,” at which a great wail went up from the crowd trembling at the far end of the barn. One of the Cossacks just lashed at them with his nagaika,e and the wail died.
There was an iron collar for a woman whose son had run off, and floggings, either with the cudgel or the whip, for several who had neglected their labouring in Pencherjevsky’s fields. There was Siberia for a youth employed to clean windows at the house, who had started work too early and disturbed Valla, and for one of the maids who had dropped a dish. You will say, “Ah, here’s Flashy pulling the long bow”, but I’m not, and if you don’t believe me, ask any professor of Russian history.25
But here’s the point – if you’d suggested to Pencherjevsky or his ladies, or even to the serfs, that such punishments were cruel, they’d have thought you were mad. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to them – why, I’ve seen a man cudgelled by the Cossacks in Pencherjevsky’s courtyard – tied to a post half-naked in the freezing weather, and smashed with heavy rods until he was a moaning lump of bruised and broken flesh, with half his ribs cracked – and through it all Valla was standing not ten yards away, never even glancing in his direction, but discussing a new sledge-harness with one of the grooms.
Pencherjevsky absolutely believed that his moujiks were well off. “Have I hot given them a stone church, with a blue dome and gilt stars? How many villages can show the like, eh?” And when those he had condemned to years of exile in Siberia were driven off in a little coffle under the nagaikas of the Cossacks – they would be taken to the nearest town, to join other unfortunates, and they would all walk the whole way – he was there to give them his blessing, and they would embrace his knees, crying: “Izvenete, batiushka, veno vat,”f and he would nod and say “Horrosho,”g while the housekeeper gave them bundles of dainties from the “Sudariniah Valla”. God knows what they were – cucumber rinds, probably.
“From me they have strict justice, under the law,” says this amazing gorilla. “And they love me for it. Has anyone ever seen the knout, or the butuksi used on my estate? No, and never shall. If I correct them, it is because without correction they will become idle and shiftless, and ruin me – and themselves. For without me, where are they? These poor souls, they believe the world rests on three whales swimming in the Eternal Sea! What are you to do with such folk? I will meet with the best, the wisest of them, the spokesman of their gromada,j driving his droshky.k ‘Ha, Ivan,’ I will say, ‘your axles squeal; why do you not grease them?’ And he ponders, and replies, ‘Only a thief is afraid to make a noise, batiushka.’ So the axles remain ungreased – unless I cudgel his foolish head, or have the Cossacks whip and salt his back for him. And he respects me” – he would thump his great fist on his thigh as he said it – “because he knows I am a bread and salt man, and go with my neck open, as he does.26 And I am just – to the inch.”
And you may say he was: when he flogged his dvornikl for insolence, and the fellow collapsed before the prescribed punishment was finished, they sent him to the local quack – and when he was better, gave him the remaining strokes. “Who would trust me again, if I excused him a single blow?” says Pencherjevsky.
Now, I don’t recite all these barbarities to shock or excite your pity, or to pose as one of those holy hypocrites who pretend to be in a great sweat about man’s inhumanity to man. I’ve seen too much of it, and know it happens wherever strong folk have absolute