A commoner form of punishment was compulsory enlistment in the Army, which was intensely dreaded by all the young men·
servants. They preferred to remain serfs, without family or kin, rather than carry the knapsack for twenty years. I was strongly affected by those horrible scenes : at the summons of the landowner, a file of military police would appear like thieves in the night and seize their victim without warning ; the bailiff would explain that the master had given orders the night before for the man to be sent to the recruiting office; and then the victim, through his tears, tried to strike an attitude, while the women wept, and all the people gave him presents, and I too gave what I could, very likely a sixpenny necktie.
I remember too an occasion when a village elder spent some money due from peasants to their master, and my father ordered his beard to be shaved off, by way of punishment. This form of penalty puzzled me, but I was impressed by the man's appearance : he was sixty years old, and he wept profusely, bowing to the ground and offering to repay the money and a hundred roubles more, if only he might escape the shame of losing his beard.
While my uncle lived with us, there were regularly about sixty
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servants belonging to the house, of whom nearly half were women; but the married women might give all their time to their own families ; there were five or six house-maids always employed, and laundry-maids, but the latter never came upstairs. To these must be added the boys and girls who were being taught housework, which meant that they were learning to be lazy and tell lies and drink spirits.
As a feature of those times, it will not, I think, be superfluous to say something of the wages paid to servants. They got five roubles a month, afterwards raised to six, for board-wages ; women got a rouble less, and children over ten half that amount. The servants clubbed together for their food, and made no complaint of insufficiency, which proves that food cost wonderfully little. The highest wages paid were 100 roubles a year ; others got fifty, and some thirty. Boys under eighteen got no wages. Then our servants were supplied with clothes, overcoats, shirts, sheets, coverlets, towels, and mattresses of sail-cloth ; the boys who got no wages received a sum of money for the bath-house and to pay the priest in Lent -
purification of body and soul was thus provided for. Taking every·
thing into account, a servant cost about 300 roubles a year ; if we add his share of medical attendance and drugs and the articles of consumption which came in carts from the landlord's estates in embarrassing amount, even then the figure will not be higher than 350 roubles. In Paris or London a servant costs four times as much.
Slave-owners generally reckon 'insurance' among the privileges of their slaves, i.e., the wife and children are maintained by the master, and the slave himself, in old age, will get a bare pittance in some comer of the estate. Certainly this should be taken into account, but the value of it is considerably lessened by the constant fear of corporal punishment and the impossibility of rising higher in the social scale.
My own eyes have shown me beyond all doubt, how the horrible consciousness of their enslaved condition torments and poisons the existence of servants in Russia, how it oppresses and stupefies their minds. The peasants, especially those who pay obrok,5 are less con·
scious of personal want of freedom ; it is possible for them not to believe, to some extent, in their complete slavery. But in the other 5· Obrok is money paid by a serf to his master in lieu of personal service ; such a serf might carry on a trade or business of his own and was liable to no other burdens than the obrok.
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case, when a man sits all day on a dirty bench in the pantry, or stands at a table holding a plate, there is no possible room for doubt.
There are, of course, people who enjoy this life as if it were their native element ; people whose mind has never been aroused from slumber, who have acquired a taste for their occupation, and perform its duties with a kind of artistic satisfaction.
6
Our old footman, Bakay, an exceedingly interesting character, was an instance of this kind. A tall man of athletic build, with large and dignified features, and an air of the profoundest reflection, he lived to old age in the belief that a footman's place is one of singular dignity.
This respectable old man was constantly out of temper or halfdrunk, or both together. He idealised the duties of his office and attributed to them a solemn importance. He could lower the steps of a carriage with a peculiarly loud rattle; when he banged a carriage-door he made more noise than the report of a gun. He stood on the rumble surly and straight, and, every time that a hole in the road gave him a jolt, he called out to the coachman,
'Easy there I ' in a deep voice of displeasure, though the hole was by that time five yards behind the carriage.
His chief occupation, other than going out with the carriage, was self-imposed. It consisted in training the pantry-boys in the standard of manners demanded by the servants' hall. As long as he was sober, this went well enough ; but when he was affected by liquor, he was severe and exacting beyond belief. I sometimes tried to protect my young friends, but my authority had little weight with the Roman firmness of Bakay : he would open the door that led to the drawing-room, with the words : 'This is not your place. I beg you to go, or I shall carry you out.' Not a movement, not a word, on the part of the boys, did he let pass unrebuked; and he often accompanied his words with a smack on the head, or a painful fillip, which he inflicted by an ingenious and spring-like manipulation of his finger and thumb.
When he had at last driven the boys from the room and was left alone, he transferred his attentions to his only friend, a large Newfoundland dog called Macbeth, whom he fed and brushed and petted and loved. After sitting alone for a few minutes, he would
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g o down t o the courtyard and invite Macbeth t o join him in the pantry. Then he began to talk to his friend : 'Fo9lish brute ! What makes you sit outside in the frost, when there's warmth in here ?
Well, what are you staring at ? Can't you answer ? ' and the questtions were generally followed by a smack on the head. Macbeth occasionally growled at his benefactor ; and then Bakay reproved him, with no weak fondness : 'Do what you like for a dog, a dog it still remains : it shows its teeth at you, with never a thought of who you are. But for me, the fleas would eat you up ! ' And then, hurt by his friend's ingratitude, he would take snuff angrily and throw what was left on his fingers at Macbeth's nose. The dog would sneeze, make incredibly awkward attempts to get the snuff out of his eyes with his paw, rise in high dudgeon from the bench, and begin scratching at the door. Bakay opened the door and dismissed the dog with a kick and a final word of reproach. At this point the pantry-boys generally came back, and the sound of his knuckles on their heads began again.