Part 20

I handed him a recommendation I had from the Governor of Archangel. He returned it with such deference that all the other customers stared. Archangel was three thousand miles away. Russian governors have long arms.

It is unpleasant, however, to be scrutinised and thought suspicious. I finished my tea and then returned to the crowd. There was yet more of the fair to see--the stalls of Caucasian wares, the silks, the guns, the knives, Armenian and Persian carpets, Turkish slippers, sandals, yards of brown pottery, where at each turn one sees huge pitchers and water-jugs and jars that might have held the forty thieves. At one booth harness is sold and high Turkish saddles, at another pannier baskets for mules. A flood of colour on the pavement of a covered way--a great disarray of little shrivelled lemons, with stalks in many cases, for they have been gathered hard by. In the centre of the market-place are all the meat and fish shops, and there one may see huge sturgeon and salmon brought from the fisheries of the Caspian. Garish notices inform in five languages that fresh caviare is received each day. Round about the butchers are sodden wooden stalls, labelled

SNOW MERCHANTS,

and there, wrapped in old rags, is much grey muddy snow melting and freezing itself. It has been brought on rickety lorries down the rutty tracks of the mountains, down, down into the lowland of Batum, where even October suns are hot.

Near the snow stalls behold veiled Turkish women just showing their noses out of bright rags, and tending the baking of chestnuts and maize cobs, sausages, pies, fish, and chickens. Here for eightpence one may buy a hot roast chicken in half a sheet of exercise-paper. The purchasers of hot chicken are many, and they take them away to open tables, where stand huge bottles of red wine and tubs of tomato-sauce. The fowl is pulled to bits limb by limb, and the customer dips, before each bite, his bone in the common sauce-bowl.

Those who are poorer buy hot maize cobs and cabbage pies; those who feel hot already themselves are fain to go to the ice and lemonade stall, and spend odd farthings there. I bought myself matsoni, Metchnikof's sour milk and sugar, at a halfpenny a mug.

The market square is vast. It is wonderful the number of scenes enacting themselves at the same time. All the morning in another quarter men were trying on old hats and overcoats, and having the most amazing haggling over articles which are sold in London streets for a pot of ferns or a china butter-dish. In another part popular pictures are spread out, oleographs showing the Garden of Eden, or the terror of the Flood, or the Last Judgment, and such like; in another is a wilderness of home-made bamboo furniture, a speciality of Batum. And for all no lack of customers.

What a place of mystery is a Russian Fair, be it in the capital or at the outposts of the Empire! There is nothing that may not be found there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular secondhand books, hand-painted missals of the earliest Russian times.

Nothing is ever thrown away; even rusty nails find their way to the bazar. The miscellanies of a stall might upon occasion be what is left behind after a house removal. On one table at Batum I observed two moth-eaten rusty fezes, a battered but unopened tin of herrings in tomato-sauce, another tin half-emptied, a guitar with one string, a good hammer, a door-mat worn to holes, the clearing of a book-case, an old saucepan, an old kerosene stove, a broken coffee-grinder, and a rusty spring mattress. Under the stall were two Persian greyhounds, also for sale. The shopmen ask outrageous prices, but do not expect to be paid them.

"How much the kerosinka?" I asked in sport.

"Ten shillings," said an old, sorrowful-looking Persian.

I laughed sarcastically, and was about to move away. The Persian was taking the oil-stove to bits to show me its inward perfection.

"Name your price," said he.

I did not want a kerosene stove, but for fun I tried him on a low figure--

"Sixpence," I said.

"Whew!" The Persian looked about him dreamily. Did he sleep, did he dream?

"You don't buy a machine for sixpence," said he. "I bought this second-hand for eight-and-sixpence. I can offer it to you for nine shillings as a favour."

"Oh no, sixpence; not a farthing more."

I walked away.

"Five shillings," cried the Persian--"four shillings."

"Ninepence," I replied, and moved farther away.

"Two shillings." He bawled something more, inaudibly, but I was already out of hearing. I happened to repass his stall accidentally later in the morning.

"That kerosinka," said the Persian--"take it; it is yours at one shilling and sixpence."

I felt so sorry for the unhappy hawker, but I could not possibly buy an oil-stove. I could not take one as a gift; but I looked through his old books and there found, in a tattered condition, The Red Laughter, by Leonid Andreef, a drama by Gorky, a long poem by Skitaletz, and a most interesting account of Chekhof's life by Kouprin, all of which I bought after a short haggle for fivepence, twenty copecks. I was the richer by my visit to his stall, for I found good reading for at least a week. And the old Persian accepted the silver coin and dropped it into an old wooden box, looking the while with melancholy upon the unsold kerosinka.

VIII

A TURKISH COFFEE-HOUSE

It sometimes happens that, entering a house, one enters not simply into the presence of a family but into that of a nation. So it was when I was received in a Little-Russian deacon's cottage in a village, on the Christmas Eve on which I first came to Russia. I came not to the deacon but to Russia itself, and when the Christmas musicians came and played before me it was not only Christmas music, or village music, that I heard, but the voice of a whole countryside and the song of a whole national soul. It sometimes happens that, looking at a picture, one sees not only its local and obvious beauty, but its eternal significance and message--that is a similar experience.

It happened to me whilst on a tramp in Trans-Caucasia to enter a coffee-house that was at once a Turkish coffee-house and Turkey itself. I lived for a whole night veritably in Turkey. In this way--