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IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • IV
love sadness, as the friend who has been longest with us. In the
young days of our vigour we were merry. With Ulysses’ boatmen, we took alike the sunshine and the thunder with frolic
welcome. The red blood fl owed in our veins, and we laughed,
and our tales were of strength and hope. Now we sit like old
men, watching faces in the fi re; and the stories that we love are
sad stories – like the stories we ourselves have lived.
CREATURES THAT ONE DAY
SHALL BE MEN
I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of
the many good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians. A large square photograph I keep always on my mantel-piece; it helps me to maintain my head at that degree of
distention necessary for the performance of all literary work.
It presents in the centre a neatly-written address in excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading,
around which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite
unable to read, but which, in spite of their strange lettering,
I know to be the names of good Russian men and women to
whom, a year or two ago, occurred the kindly idea of sending
me as a Christmas card this message of encouragement. The
individual Russian is one of the most charming creatures living. If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know it; not
only by every action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as
useful in this grey old world, by generous, impulsive speech.
We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being
undemonstrative. Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy who was
sent out by his father to fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not show his face again
beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years. Then one
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IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • IV
evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old
couple, and announced himself as their long-lost child, returned at last.
“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” grumbled the old
man, “and blarm me if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”
I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant
one day. A man entered and took his seat at a table near by.
Glancing round, and meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and
nodded.
“Excuse me a minute,” said my friend, “I must just speak to
my brother – haven’t seen him for over fi ve years.”
He fi nished his soup and leisurely wiped his moustache
before strolling across and shaking hands. They talked for
a while. Then my friend returned to me.
“Never thought to see him again,” observed my friend, “he
was one of the garrison of that place in Africa – what’s the
name of it? – that the MahdI attacked. Only three of them
escaped. Always was a lucky beggar, Jim.”
“But wouldn’t you like to talk to him some more?” I suggested; “I can see you any time about this little business of
ours.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, “we have just fi xed it
up – shall be seeing him again to-morrow.”
I thought of this scene one evening while dining with some
Russian friends in a St. Petersburg Hotel. One of the party had
not seen his second cousin, a mining engineer, for nearly eighteen months. They sat opposite to one another, and a dozen
times at least during the course of the dinner one of them
would jump up from his chair, and run round to embrace the
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JEROME K. JEROME
other. They would throw their arms about one another, kissing one another on both cheeks, and then sit down again, with
moist eyes. Their behaviour among their fellow countrymen
excited no astonishment whatever.
But the Russians’s anger is as quick and vehement as his
love. On another occasion I was supping with friends in one
of the chief restaurants on the Nevsky. Two gentlemen at an
adjoining table, who up till the previous moment had been
engaged in amicable conversation, suddenly sprang to their
feet, and “went for” one another. One man secured the waterbottle, which he promptly broke over the other’s head. His
opponent chose for his weapon a heavy mahogany chair, and
leaping back for the purpose of securing a good swing, lurched
against my hostess.
“Do please be careful,” said the lady.
“A thousand pardons, madame,” returned the stranger,
from whom blood and water were streaming in equal copiousness; and taking the utmost care to avoid interfering with our
comfort, he succeeded adroitly in fl ooring his antagonist by
a well-directed blow.
A policeman appeared upon the scene. He did not attempt
to interfere, but running out into the street communicated the
glad tidings to another policeman.
“This is going to cost them a pretty penny,” observed my
host, who was calmly continuing his supper; “why couldn’t
they wait?”
It did cost them a pretty penny. Some half a dozen policemen were round about before as many minutes had elapsed,
and each one claimed his bribe. Then they wished both com-
94
IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • IV
batants good-night, and trooped out evidently in great good
humour and the two gentlemen, with wet napkins round their
heads, sat down again, and laughter and amicable conversation fl owed freely as before.
They strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you
are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath.
The workers – slaves it would be almost more correct to call
them – allow themselves to be exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated
Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is
coming.
But he talks to you about it with the door shut, for no man
in Russia can be sure that his own servants are not police spies.
I was discussing politics with a Russian offi cial one evening
in his study when his old housekeeper entered the room –
a soft-eyed grey-haired woman who had been in his service
over eight years, and whose position in the household was almost that of a friend. He stopped abruptly and changed the
conversation. So soon as the door was closed behind her again,
he explained himself.
“It is better to chat upon such matters when one is quite
alone,” he laughed.
“But surely you can trust her,” I said, “She appears to be
devoted to you all.”
“It is safer to trust no one,” he answered. And then he continued from the point where we had been interrupted.
“It is gathering,” he said; “there are times when I almost
smell blood in the air. I am an old man and may escape it, but
my children will have to suffer – suffer as children must for
95
JEROME K. JEROME
the sins of their fathers. We have made brute beasts of the
people, and as brute beasts they will come upon us, cruel, and
undiscriminating; right and wrong indifferently going down
before them. But it has to be. It is needed.”
It is a mistake to speak of the Russian classes opposing
to all progress a dead wall of selfi shness. The history of Russia will be the history of the French Revolution over again,
but with this difference: that the educated classes, the thinkers, who are pushing forward the dumb masses are doing so
with their eyes open. There will be no Maribeau, no Danton
to be appalled at a people’s ingratitude. The men who are today working for revolution in Russia number among their
ranks statesmen, soldiers, delicately-nurtured women, rich
landowners, prosperous tradesmen, students familiar with the
lessons of history. They have no misconceptions concerning
the blind Monster into which they are breathing life. He will
crush them, they know it; but with them he will crush the injustice and stupidity they have grown to hate more than they
love themselves.
The Russian peasant, when he rises, will prove more terrible, more pitiless than were the men of 1790. He is less intelligent, more brutal. They sing a wild, sad song, these Russian
cattle, the while they work. They sing it in chorus on the quays
while hauling the cargo, they sing it in the factory, they chant
on the weary, endless steppes, reaping the corn they may not
eat. It is of the good time their masters are having, of the feastings and the merrymakings, of the laughter of the children, of
the kisses of the lovers.
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IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • IV
But the last line of every verse is the same. When you ask
a Russian to translate it for you he shrugs his shoulders.
“Oh, it means,” he says, “that their time will also come –
some day.”
It is a pathetic, haunting refrain. They sing it in the drawing-rooms of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and somehow the
light talk and laughter die away, and a hush, like a chill breath,
enters by the closed door and passes through. It is a curious
song, like the wailing of a tired wind, and one day it will sweep
over the land heralding terror.
A Scotsman I met in Russia told me that when he fi rst came
out to act as manager of a large factory in St. Petersburg, belonging to his Scottish employers, he unwittingly made a mistake the fi rst week when paying his workpeople. By a miscalculation of the Russian money he paid the men, each one, nearly
a rouble short. He discovered his error before the following
Saturday, and then put the matter right. The men accepted his
explanation with perfect composure and without any comment whatever. The thing astonished him.
“But you must have known I was paying you short,” he said
to one of them. “Why didn’t you tell me of it?”
“Oh,” answered the man, “we thought you were putting it
in your own pocket and then if we had complained it would
have meant dismissal for us. No one would have taken our
word against yours.”
Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole
of Russia that all classes have come to accept it as part of the
established order of things. A friend gave me a little dog to
bring away with me. It was a valuable animal, and I wished to
97
JEROME K. JEROME
keep it with me. It is strictly forbidden to take dogs into railway carriages. The list of the pains and penalties for doing so
frightened me considerably.
“Oh, that will be all right,” my friend assured me; “have
a few roubles loose in your pocket.”
I tipped the station master and I tipped the guard, and
started pleased with myself. But I had not anticipated what
was in store for me. The news that an Englishman with a dog
in a basket and roubles in his pocket was coming must have
been telegraphed all down the line. At almost every stoppingplace some enormous offi cial, wearing generally a sword and
a helmet, boarded the train. At fi rst these fellows terrifi ed me.
I took them for fi eld-marshals at least.
Visions of Siberia crossed my mind. Anxious and trembling, I gave the fi rst one a gold piece. He shook me warmly by
the hand – I thought he was going to kiss me. If I had offered
him my cheek I am sure he would have done so. With the next
one I felt less apprehensive. For a couple of roubles he blessed
me, so I gathered; and, commending me to the care of the Almighty, departed. Before I had reached the German frontier,
I was giving away the equivalent of English sixpences to men
with the dress and carriage of major-generals; and to see their
faces brighten up and to receive their heartfelt benediction
was well worth the money.
But to the man without roubles in his pocket, Russian offi cialdom is not so gracious. By the expenditure of a few more
coins I got my dog through the Customs without trouble, and
had leisure to look about me. A miserable object was being
badgered by half a dozen men in uniform, and he – his lean
98
IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • IV
face puckered up into a snarl – was returning them snappish answers; the whole scene suggested some half-starved
mongrel being worried by school-boys. A slight informality
had been discovered in his passport, so a fellow traveller with
whom I had made friends informed me. He had no roubles in
his pocket, and in consequence they were sending him back
to St. Petersburg – some eighteen hours’ journey – in a wagon that in England would not be employed for the transport
of oxen.
It seemed a good joke to Russian offi cialdom; they would
drop in every now and then, look at him as he sat crouched
in a corner of the waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing.
The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference
had taken its place – the look one sees on the face of a beaten
dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great
eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders whether it is
thinking.
The Russian worker reads no newspaper, has no club, yet
all things seem to be known to him. There is a prison on the
banks of the Neva, in St. Petersburg. They say such things are
done with now, but up till very recently there existed a small
cell therein, below the level of the ice, and prisoners placed
there would be found missing a day or two afterwards, nothing ever again known of them, except, perhaps, to the fi shes
of the Baltic. They talk of such like things among themselves:
the sleigh-drivers round their charcoal fi re, the fi eld-workers
going and coming in the grey dawn, the factory workers, their
whispers deadened by the rattle of the looms.
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JEROME K. JEROME
I was searching for a house in Brussels some winters ago,
and there was one I was sent to in a small street leading out
of the Avenue Louise. It was poorly furnished, but rich in pictures, large and small. They covered the walls of every room.
“These pictures,” explained to me the landlady, an old,
haggard-looking woman, “will not be left, I am taking them
with me to London. They are all the work of my husband. He
is arranging an exhibition.”
The friend who had sent me had told me the woman was
a widow, who had been living in Brussels eking out a precarious existence as a lodging-house keeper for the last ten years.
“You have married again?” I questioned her.
The woman smiled.
“Not again. I was married eighteen years ago in Russia. My
husband was transported to Siberia a few days after we were
married, and I have never seen him since.”
“I should have followed him,” she added, “only every year
we thought he was going to be set free.”
“He is really free now?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “They set him free last week. He will
join me in London. We shall be able to fi nish our honeymoon.”
She smiled, revealing to me that once she had been a girl.
I read in the English papers of the exhibition in London. It
was said the artist showed much promise. So possibly a career
may at last be opening out for him.
Nature has made life hard to Russian rich and poor alike.
To the banks of the Neva, with its ague and infl uenza-bestowing fogs and mists, one imagines that the Devil himself must
have guided Peter the Great.
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