Part 13

Emigration to Siberia might have lessened the pressure of the growing population upon the land if it had been resorted to in time; but the government repeatedly put restrictions upon it, through fear that, if unchecked, it might result in depriving the landed proprietors of cheap labor. Count Dmitri Tolstoi, while Minister of the Interior, openly opposed it, and at one time the Russian periodical press was not allowed even to discuss it. When at last it was permitted, the bureaucracy managed it so badly, and paid so little attention to the distribution and proper settlement of the emigrants in Siberia, that nearly nineteen per cent. of them returned, practically ruined, to their old homes in European Russia. In the ten years from 1894 to 1903, 52,000 out of 304,000 emigrants came back from the crown lands in the Altai, one of the best parts of Siberia; and in the years 1901 and 1902 the percentages of returning emigrants were 53.9 and 68.1. In other words, more than half of the peasants who made a journey of fifteen hundred miles to the Altai came back simply because they could not satisfactorily establish themselves in the country where they had hoped to find more land and better conditions of life.[40]

If the government fails to relieve the land famine by selling its own land reserves, by making loans to the people through the Peasants' Bank, or by promoting emigration to Siberia, it will find itself threatened by two very serious dangers. On the one hand, the diminishing power of the peasants to pay taxes will ultimately affect the national revenue and impair the revenue of the state; and, on the other hand, the discontent and exasperation of the great class from which soldiers are drawn will sooner or later infect the army and lessen the power of the autocracy to enforce its authority. The government is now drafting about 460,000 recruits a year, and these conscripts not only share the feelings of the peasantry as a whole, but belong largely to the very class that has recently been in revolt. Tens of thousands of them either participated in or sympathized with the agrarian riots of 1905-6; and not a few of them, remembering how the troops were then sent against them, solemnly promised their fellow-villagers, when they joined the colors, that they would never fire upon their brothers, even if ordered to do so by the Czar himself. An army of this temper is a weapon that may become very dangerous to its wielders; and if the discontent and hostility of the peasants continue to increase with increasing impoverishment, and if the hundreds of thousands of fresh recruits carry their discontent and hostility into their barracks, the government may have to deal with mutinies and revolts much more serious than those of Cronstadt, Sveaborg, and the Crimea. Certain it is that an army is not likely to remain loyal when there is wide-spread disaffection in the population from which it is drawn; and in the present condition, temper, and attitude of the peasants we may find reasons enough for the "trouble to come" that Mr. Milyukov predicts.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Otherwise known as the "Black Hundreds." This reactionary and terroristic organization impudently pretended to represent the "true Russian people"; but in the election for the third Duma, when it had all the encouragement and help that the bureaucracy could give, it was able to send to the electoral colleges only 72 electors out of a total number of 5,160. It was composed mainly of the worst elements of the population, and derived all the power that it had from the support given to it by the bureaucracy and the police. Without such support it would have been stamped out of existence in a week by the liberals, revolutionists, and Jews, who were the chief objects of its attacks.

[28] This was the reply of the Czar to a telegram from the Union of True Russians thanking him for dissolving the second Duma and arresting fifty-five of its members on a charge of treason. Eight of these representatives of the people were afterward sentenced to five years of penal servitude, nine to four years of penal servitude, and ten to exile in Siberia as forced colonists. (_Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 216.)

When Mr. Milyukov returned to St. Petersburg after the delivery of his temperate and dispassionate address in New York, the handful of "true Russians" in the third Duma attacked him with violent and insulting abuse, and Mr. Vladimir Purishkevich, one of their most influential leaders, said to him in open session: "You are a poltroon and traitor, in whose face I would willingly spit!" Such is the spirit of the "true Russians" whom the Czar has asked to help him in bringing about "the peaceful regeneration of our great and holy Russia."

[29] The freedom manifesto of October 30, 1905, begins with the words: "We lay upon Our Government the duty of executing Our inflexible will by giving to the people the foundations of civil liberty in the form of real inviolability of personal rights, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of public assembly, and freedom of organized association."

[30] Stenographic report of the proceedings of the first Russian Duma, St. Petersburg, July 17, 1906. A large part of the Russian Empire has been under martial law ever since the assassination of Alexander II. In 1906 it was in force in sixty-four of the eighty-seven Russian provinces.

[31] Upon the shoulders of the peasants the whole framework of the Russian state rests. When the latest census was taken, in 1897, the peasants numbered 97,000,000 in a total population of 126,000,000. Since that time the population has increased to 141,000,000, and the relative proportion of peasants to other classes has grown larger rather than smaller. (Report of the Russian Statistical Department. St. Petersburg, August, 1905.)

[32] It is this part of the population that begins to suffer from lack of food when, for any reason, there is complete or partial failure of the crops. Twenty million people, in twenty-two provinces, were reduced to absolute starvation by the famine of 1906, and were kept alive only by governmental relief on a colossal scale. Famine is predicted again this year in the provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambof, Samara, Saratof, Viatka, Poltava, and Chernigof. In the province last named the peasants were already mixing weeds with their rye flour in November, 1907. (_Nasha Zhizn_, St. Petersburg, May 23. 1906; _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, December, 1907, p. 217.)

[33] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, Stuttgart, 1903. This report was published in pamphlet form abroad, because the censor would not allow it to be printed in Russia.

[34] Report of the Zemstvo Committee on Agricultural Needs in the District of Voronezh, pp. 33, 34, Stuttgart, 1903.

[35] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg. June, 1907, p. 169.

[36] _Russian Thought_, St. Petersburg, June, 1907, p. 124.

[37] Report of the Russian Statistical Department, 1905; and Report to the Council of Ministers on the state of schools, _Strana_, St. Petersburg, August 23, 1906.

[38] _Strana_, edited by Professor Maxim Kovalefski, St. Petersburg, October 7 and 10, 1906.

[39] _Tovarishch_, St. Petersburg, August 26, 1906.

[40] V. Polozof, in _Strana_, St. Petersburg, October 18, 1906.

[Illustration]

"THE HEART KNOWETH"

BY CHARLOTTE WILSON

Sometimes my little woe is lulled to rest, Its clamor shamed by some old poet's page-- Tumult of hurrying hoof, and battle-rage, And dying knight, and trampled warrior-crest. Stern faces, old heroic souls unblest, Eye me with scorn, as they my grief would gage, A mere child, schooled to weep upon the stage, Tricked for a part of woe and somber-drest. "Lo, who art thou," they ask, "that thou shouldst fret To find, forsooth, one single heart undone? The page thou turnest there is purple-wet With blood that gushed from Caesar overthrown! Lo, who art thou to prate of sorrow?" Yet, This little woe, it is my own, my own!

IN THE DARK HOUR

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

The house overlooked the starlit bay, nearly ringed with a sparse fence of palms, and on its roof, a little scarlet figure on the white rugs, Incarnacion sat waiting till Scott should come. Below her, the reeking city was hushed to a murmur, through which there sounded from the Praca a far throb of drums and pipe-music; and overhead the sky was a dome of velvet, spangled with a glory of bold stars. Save to the east, where the blank white walls of the house overlooked the water, there was on all sides a shadowy prospect of parapets, for in Superban the houses are close together and folk live intimately upon their roofs. As she sat, Incarnacion could hear a voice that quavered and choked as some stricken man labored with his prayers against the plague that was laying the city waste. Through all Superban such petitions went up, while daily and nightly the tale of deaths mounted and the corpses multiplied faster than the graves.

Incarnacion lit herself a cigarette, tucked her feet under her, and wondered why Scott did not come. But her chief quality was serenity; she did not give herself over to worry, content to let all problems solve themselves, as most problems will. She was a wee girl, preserving on the threshold of sun-ripened womanhood the soft and pathetic graces of a docile child. Her scarlet dress left her warm arms bare and did not trespass on the slender throat; she had all the charm of intrinsic femininity which comes to fruit so early in the climate of Mozambique and fades so soon. It was this, no doubt, that had taken Scott and held him; gaunt, harsh, direct in his purposes as he was quick in his strength, with Incarnacion he found scope for the tenderness that lurked beneath his rude forcefulness.

He came at last. She heard his step on the stair, cast her cigarette from her, and sprang to meet him with a little laugh of delight. He took her in his arms, lifting her from her little bare feet to kiss her.

"O-oh, Jock, you break me," she gasped, as he set her down. "You are strong like a bull. What you bin away so long?"

He smiled at her gravely as he let himself down on her rugs and put a long arm round her. "Did you want me, 'Carnacion?" he asked.

"Me? No," she answered, laughing; "I don' want you, Jock. You go away twenty--thirty--days; I don' care. Ah, Jock!"

He pressed her close and kissed the crown of her dark head gently. His strong, keen-featured face was very tender, for this small woman of the old tropics was all but all the world to him. "You're a little rip," he said, as he released her. "Make me a cigarette, 'Carnacion. I've found the boat."

She looked up quickly, while her deft fingers fluttered about the dry tobacco and the paper. "You find him, Jock?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yes, I've found it," he answered. "She's in a creek, about six miles down the bay. A big boat, too, with a pretty little cabin for you to twiddle your thumbs in, 'Carnacion. She's pretty clean, too; I reckon the old chap must have been getting ready to clear out in her when he dropped. It's a wonder nobody found her before."

Incarnacion sealed the cigarette carefully, pinched the loose ends away, kissed it, and put it in his mouth. "Then," she said thoughtfully, "you take me away to-morrow, Jock?"

He frowned; he was shielding the lighted match in both hands, and it showed up his drawn brows as he bent to light the cigarette. "I don't know," he said. "You see, 'Carnacion, there's a good many things I can't do, and sail a boat is one of 'em. I haven't got a notion how to set about it, even. I don't know the top end of a sail from the bottom."

"You make a Kafir do it?" suggested Incarnacion.

He smiled, a brief smile of friendship. "That would do first-rate," he explained; "only, you see, there's no Kafirs, kiddy. Every nigger that had ever seen a boat was snapped up a week ago, when the big flit was happening. That dead-scared crowd that cleared out then took every single sailorman to ferry 'em down the coast--white, black, and piebald. And the plain truth of it is, 'Carnacion, I've been up and down this old rabbit-warren of a city since sun-down, looking for a sailor, an' the only one I could hear of I found--in the dead-house."

He spat at the parapet upon the memory of that face, where the plague had done its worst.

"So," remarked Incarnacion gaily. "Then we stop, Jock; we stop here, eh?"

"There'll be something broken first," retorted Scott. "It's all bloomin' rot, Incarnacion; you can't have a town this size without a man in it that can handle a boat--a seaport, too. It isn't sense. It don't stand to reason."

"There was the Capitan Smeeth," suggested Incarnacion helpfully.

"Just so," said Scott; "there was. He's dead."

Incarnacion crossed herself in silence, and they sat for a while without speaking. From the Praca the music was still to be heard; some procession to the great church was in progress, to pray for a remission of the scourge. Over the line of roofs there was a dull glow of the watch-fires in the streets; where they sat, Scott and the girl could smell the pitch that fed them. And, over all, an unseen sick man gabbled his prayers in a halting monotone. A quick heat of wrath lit in Scott as his thoughts traveled around the situation; for Incarnacion sat with her head bowed, playing with her toes, and the ever-ready terror lest the plague should reach her moved in his heart. He had been away from Superban when the plague arrived, and though he had come in on the first word of the news, he had been too late to find a place for her on the ships that fled down the coast from the pest. And now that he had found a boat, there was no one to sail her; in all that terror-ridden city, he could find no man to hold the tiller and tend the sheet.

"You're feeling all right, eh, 'Carnacion?" he asked sharply.

She turned to him, smiling at once. "All right," she assured him. "An' you, Jock--you all right, too?"

"Fit as can be," he answered, fingering her hair where it was smooth and short behind her ear.

"You see," she said. "It is the plague, but the plague don't come for us, Jock."

"That's right," he said. "You keep your courage up, little girl, an' we'll be married in Delagoa Bay."

He rose to his feet. "Kiss me good night, 'Carnacion," he said. "I'm busy these days, an' I can't stop any longer."

She kissed him obediently, giving her fresh lips frankly and eagerly; and Scott came out to the narrow lane below with the flavor of them yet on his mouth and new resolution to pursue his quest for a sailor.

He moved on to the Praca, where the stridency of the music still persisted. Great fires burned at every entrance to the square, so that between them a man walked in the midst of leaping shadows, as though his feet were dogged by ghosts. The tall houses around the place were blind with shuttered windows; from their balconies none watched the crowd before the great doors of the church. Here a priest stood in a cart, with a great cross in his hand. His high voice, toneless and flat, echoed vainly over the heads of the throng, where some knelt in a passion of prayer, but most stood talking aloud. Through the doors the lights on the altar were to be seen in the inner gloom, sparkling from the brass and golden accouterments of the church. Scott shouldered a road through the crowd, scanning faces expertly. To a big brown man with empty blue eyes he put the question:

"Can you sail a boat?"

The man stared at him. "Have you got one?" he asked.

"Can you?" repeated Scott. "Do you know anything about sailing a boat?"

"No," said the other; "but----"

Scott pushed on and left him. In the church, his heart leaped at sight of a man in the clothes of a Portuguese man-o'-war's-man, asleep by a pillar--a little swarthy weed of a man. He woke him with a kick, only to learn, after further kicks, that the man was a stoker and knew as little about boats as himself. At the door of a confessional lay another man in the same uniform. A kick failed to wake him, and Scott bent to shake him. But the hand he stretched out recoiled; the plague had been before him.

In that time men knew no difference between day and night, for death knew none, and the traffic of the close, twisted streets never lulled. The blatant cafés were ablaze with lamps, and in them the tables were crowded and the fiddles raved and jeered. In one Scott found a chair to rest in, and sat awhile with liquor before him. He had carried his search from the shore to the bush, through all the town, and to no end. Now, mingled with his resolution there was something of desperation. He sat heavily in thought, his glass in his hand; and while he brooded, unheeding, the café roared and clattered about him. To his right, a group of white-clad officers chatted over a languid game of cards; at his left, a forlorn man sang dolorously to himself. Others were behind. From these last, as he sat, a word reached him which woke him from his preoccupation like a thrust of a knife. He sat without moving, straining his ears.

"De ole captain, he die," said some one; "but hees boat, she lie on de mud now."

"An' ye know where she is?" demanded another voice, a deeper one.

"Yais," the first speaker replied. He had a voice that purred in undertones, the true voice of a conspirator.

There was a sound of a fist on the table. "Good for you," said the deeper voice. "We'll get away by noon, then."

Scott carried his glass to his lips and drained it; then he rose deliberately in his place and commenced to thread his way out between the tables. He had to pause to pay the waiter for his drink when he was a yard or two away; he gave the man an English sovereign, and thus, while change was procured, he could stand and look at the owners of the voices. They paid him no attention; he was unsuspected. One of the men he knew, a tall Italian with a heavy, brutal face, a knife-fighter of notoriety and a bully. The other was a square, humpy man, half of whose face was jaw. Not men to put in the company of little Incarnacion, either of them; Scott's experience of the Coast spared him any doubts about that. It would be easy, of course, to settle the matter at once--simply to step up and let his knife into the Italian, under the neck, where he sat. At that season and in that place it was an almost obvious remedy; but it would not be less than a week before he could get clear of the jail, and in that time any one might find the boat.

He grasped his change and went out. There was only one thing to do: he must go to the creek where the boat was, and lie in wait for them there. "Nobody'll miss 'em," he said to himself; "and there's crocodiles in that creek, all handy."

He struck across the Praca again, between the fires, and down an alley that would lead him to the beach. The voice of the priest in the cart seemed to pursue him till he outdistanced it, and he pressed on briskly. His way was between tall, dark houses; the path lay at their feet, narrow and tortuous, like some remote cañon. Here was no light, save when, at the turn of the way, a star swam into view overhead, pale and cold, and bright as a lantern. Indistinct figures passed him sometimes; when one came into sight, he would move close to the wall with a hand on his knife, and the two would edge by one another watchfully and in silence.

He was almost clear and could smell the sea, when he came round a corner and met some four or five white figures in the middle of the way, sheeted like ghosts and walking in silence. There was not a space to avoid them, and he stopped dead for them to approach and speak--or, if that was the way of it, to attack. Some of the others stopped too, but one came on. Scott marked that he walked with a shuffle of his feet, and made out, by the starlight, that his sheet clung about him as though it were wet. And, at the same time, he noticed some faint odor, too vague to put a name to, but sickly and suggestive of hospitals.

"Go with God," said the figure, when it was close to him. The words were Portuguese, but the inflection was foreign.

"Are you English?" demanded Scott sharply.

The other had halted a man's length from him. "Ay," he said, "I'm English."

"Well," said Scott, making to move on, but pointing to where the other white figures were waiting in a group near by, "what are those chaps waiting for?"

"They'll not hurt you," answered the other. He mumbled a little when he spoke, like a man with a full mouth.

"Anyhow," said Scott, "they'd better pass on; I prefer it that way. Superban's not London, you know."

There came a laugh from the sheet that covered the man's head, short and harsh. "If it was," he said, "you'd not be meeting us, me lad."

"Who are you?" demanded Scott. Some quality in the man--his manner of speech, the tone of his laugh, or that faint, unidentifiable taint--made him uneasy.

"Me?" said the man. "Well, I'll tell you. I'm Captain John Crowder, I am--what's left of me, and that's a sick soul inside a dead body. And them"--he made a motion toward the waiting ghosts--"them's my crew these days. We're the chaps that fetches the dead, we are."

Scott peered at him eagerly, and stepped forward.

The other avoided him by stepping back. "Not too near," he said. "It ain't sense."

"Captain, you said?" asked Scott. "Er--not a ship-captain, you mean?"

"Ay, I'm a ship-captain right enough," was the answer; "and in my day----"

Scott interrupted excitedly. "See here," he said. "I've got a boat, and I want a man to sail her to Delagoa Bay. I'll pay; I'll pay you a level hundred to start by nine in the morning, cash down on the deck the minute you're outside the bar. What d'you say to it?"

The sheeted man seemed to stare at him before he answered. "You're on the run, then?" he mumbled at last. "You're dodging the plague, eh?"

"Yes," said Scott. "A level hundred, an' you can have the boat as well."

"Man, you must be badly scared," said the other. "What's frightened you? Are you feared you'll die?"

"Go to blazes," retorted Scott. "Will you come or won't you?"

The man laughed again, the same short cackle of mirth.