'The peasant recovers a little.
' "I don't want anything - I'm sorry for your family ; but it's no use offering them less than 400 roubles."
' "Four hundred roubles ! How on earth can I get such a mint of money as that, in these times ? It's quite beyond me, I swear."
' "It's not easy, I agree. We can lessen the flogging ; the man's sorry, we shall say, and he was not sober at the time. People do live in Siberia, after all ; and it's not so very far from here. Of course, you might manage it by selling a pair of horses and one of the cows and the sheep. But you would have to work many years to replace all that stock ; and if you don't pay up, your horses will be left all right but you'll be off on the long tramp yourself. Think it over, Grigoryevich ; no hurry ; we'll do nothing till tomorrow; but I must be going now.'' And the Judge pockets
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the coins he had refused, saying, "It's quite unnecessary - I only take it to spare your feelings ! "
'Next day, an old Jew turns up at the Judge's house, lugging a bag that contains 3 50 roubles in coinage of all dates.
'The Judge promises his assistance. The peasant is tried, and tried over again, and well frightened ; then he gets off with a light sentence, or a caution to be more prudent in future, or a note against his name as a suspicious character. And the peasant for the rest of his life prays that God will reward the Judge for his kindness.
'Well, that's a specimen of the neat way they used to do it' so the retired inspector used to wind up his story.
9
In Vyatka the Russian tillers of the soil are fairly independent, and get a bad name in consequence from the officials, as unruly and discontented. But the Finnish natives, poor, timid, stupid people, are a regular gold mine to the rural police. The inspectors pay the governors twice the usual sum when they are appointed to districts where the Finns live.
The tricks which the authorities play on these poor wretches are beyond belief.
If the land-surveyor is travelling on business and passes a native village, he never fails to stop there. He takes the theodolite off his cart, drives in a post and pulls out his chain. In an hour the whole village is in a ferment. 'The land-measurer ! the landmeasurer ! ' they cry, just as they used to cry, 'The French ! the French ! ' in the year 1812. The elders come to pay their respects : the surveyor goes on measuring and making notes. They ask him not to cheat them out of their land, and he demands twenty or thirty roubles. They are glad to give it and collect the money : and he drives on to the next village of natives.
Again, if the police find a dead body, they drag it about for a fortnight - the frost makes this possible - through the Finnish villages. In each village they declare that they have just found the corpse and mean to start an inquest ; and the people pay blackmail.
Some years before I went to Vyatka, a rural inspector, a famous blackmailer, brought a dead body in a cart into a large
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village o f Russian settlers, and demanded, I think, 200 roubles.
The village elder consulted the community ; but they would not go beyond one hundred. The inspector would not lower his price.
The peasants got angry : they shut him up with his two clerks in the police-office and threatened, in their turn, to bum them alive. The inspector did not take them seriously. The peasants piled straw around the house ; then, by way of ultimatum, they held up a hundred-rouble note on a pole in front of the window.
The hero inside asked for a hundred more. Thereupon the peasants fired the straw at all four comers, and all the three Mucius Scaevolas of the rural police were burnt to death. At a later time this matter came before the Supreme Court.
These native settlements are in general much less thriving than the Russian villages.
'You don't seem well off, friend,' I said to the native owner of a hut where I was waiting for fresh horses ; it was a wretched, smoky, lop-sided cabin, with windows looking over the yard at the back.
'What can we do, batyushka ? We are poor, and keep our money for a rainy day.'
'A rainy day ? It looks to me as if you'd got it already. But drink that for comfort' - and I filled a glass with rum.
'We don't drink,' said the Finn, with a greedy look at the glass and a suspicious look at me.
'Come, come, you'd better take it.'
'Well, drink first yourself.'
I drank, and then he followed my example. 'What are you doing ? ' he asked. 'Have you come on business from Vyatka ? '
'No,' I answered ; 'I'm a traveller o n m y way there.' He was considerably relieved to hear this ; he looked all round, and added by way of explanation, 'The rainy day is when the inspector or the priest comes here.'
I should like to say something here about the latter of these personages.
10
Of the Finnish population some accepted Christianity before Peter's reign, others were baptised in the time of Elizabeth,5 and others have remained heathen. Most of those who changed their 5· Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, reigned from 1741 to 1762.
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religion under Elizabeth are still secretly attached to their own dismal and savage faith.
Every two or three years the police-inspector and the priest make a tour of the villages, to find out which of the natives have not fasted in Lent, and to enquire the reasons. The recusants are harried and imprisoned, flogged and fined. But the visitors search especially for some proof that the old heathen rites are still kept up. In that case, there is a real 'rainy day' - the detective and the missionary raise a storm and exact heavy blackmail ; then they go away, leaving all as it was before, to repeat their visit in a year or two.
In the year 183 5 the Holy Synod thought it necessary to convert the heathen Cheremises to Orthodoxy. Archbishop Filaret nominated an active priest named Kurbanovsky as missionary.
Kurbanovsky, a man eaten up by the Russian disease of ambition, set to work with fiery zeal. He tried preaching at first, but soon grew tired of it ; and, in point of fact, not much is to be done by that ancient method.
The Cheremises, when they heard of this, sent their own priests to meet the missionary. These fanatics were ingenious savages : after long discussions, they said to him : 'The forest contains not only silver birches and tall pines but also the little juniper. God permits them all to grow and does not bid the juniper be a pine tree. We men are like the trees of the forest.
Be you the silver birches, and let us remain the juniper. We don't interfere with you, we pray for the Tsar, pay our dues, and provide recruits for the Army ; but we are not willing to be false to our religion.'
· Kurbanovsky saw that they could not agree, and th at he was not fated to play the part of Cyril and Methodius.6 He had recourse to the secular arm ; and the local police-inspector was delighted - he had long wished to show his zeal for the church ; he was himself an unbaptised Tatar, a true believer in the Koran, and his name was Devlet Kildeyev.