Part 33

The fourth-class passengers were on the lower deck. Among them was a company of soldiers in very shabby uniforms, who had been far down the river earning a little money by working in the harvest fields, where hands are always too few, and who were returning to garrison at Kazan. Some enterprising passengers from Astrakhan had laid in a large stock of the delicious round watermelons and luscious cantaloupe melons. By the time we reached Kazan, there were not many melons left in that improvised shop on the lower deck, Russians are as fond of watermelons as are the American negroes.

At Samara we had seen enormous bales of camel's-hair, weighing upwards of eight hundred pounds, in picturesque mats of red, yellow, and brown, taken on board for the Fair. The porters seemed to find it easy to carry them on their backs, aided only by a sort of small chair-back, with a narrow, seat-like projection at the lower end, which was fastened by straps passing over the shoulders and under the arms. When we left Kazan, I noticed that a huge open barge was being towed upstream alongside us, that it was being filled with these bales, to lighten the steamer for the sand-bars and shallows of the upper river, and that a monotonous but very musical cadence was being repeated at intervals, in muffled tones, somewhere on board. I went down to the cargo department of the lower deck and found the singers,--the herculean porters. One after another they bent their backs, and two mates hoisted the huge bales, chanting a refrain which enabled them to move and lift in unison. The words were to the following effect: "If all don't grasp together, we cannot lift the weight." The music was sad, but irresistibly sweet and fascinating, and I stood listening and watching until the great barge was filled and dropped behind, for the company's tug to pick up and tow to Nizhni with a string of other barges.

It is probably a vulgar detail, but I must chronicle the fact that the cooking on these Volga steamers--on the line we patronized, at least --is among the very best to be found in Russia, in my experience. On the voyage upstream, when they are well supplied with sterlet and other fish, all alive, from Astrakhan, the dinners are treats for which one may sigh in vain in the capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow, with their mongrel German-French-Russian cookery. The dishes are very Russian, but they are very good.

I remember one particularly delicious concoction was composed of fresh sterlet and sour cabbage, with white grapes on top, baked to a brown crispness.

We arrived at our wharf on the Volga front of the old town of Nizhni Novgorod about five o'clock in the afternoon. Above us rose the steep green hills on whose crest stood the Kremlin, containing several ancient churches, the governor's house, and so forth. On a lower terrace, to right and left, stood monasteries and churches intermingled with shops and mediocre dwellings. The only noteworthy church was that in front of us, with its picturesque but un-Russian rococo plaster decoration on red brick, crowned by genuine Russian domes and crosses of elaborately beautiful patterns.

But we did not pause long to admire this part of the view, which was already familiar to us. What a change had come over the scene since we had bidden it farewell on our way downstream! Then everything was dead, or slumbering, except the old town, the city proper; and that had not seemed to be any too much awake or alive. The Fair town, situated on the sand-spit between the Volga and the mouth of the Oka, stood locked up and deserted, as it had stood since the close of last year's Fair. Now, as we gazed over the prow of the steamer, we could see the bridge across the Oka black with the swarming masses of pedestrians and equipages.

The steamer company allows its patrons to sleep (but not to eat) on board the night after arrival and the night before starting, and we availed ourselves of the privilege, having heard that it was often no easy matter to secure accommodations in the Fair, and having no intention of returning to our former hotel, miles from all the fun, in the upper town, if we could help it.

The only vacant rooms in the Fair seemed to be at the "best hotel," to which we had been recommended, with a smile of amusement which had puzzled us, by a Moscow friend, an officer in the army. Prices were very high at this hotel, which, like American summer hotels, is forced to make its hay for the year during the season of six weeks, after which it is locked up. Our room was small; the floor, of rough boards, was bare; the beds were not comfortable. For the same price, in Petersburg or Moscow, we should have had a spacious room on the bel etage, handsomely furnished, with rugs on an inlaid floor.

Across one corner of the dining-room was built a low platform, on which stood a piano. We soon discovered its use. Coming in about nine o'clock in the evening, we ordered our samovar for tea in the dining-room,-- a most unusual place. The proper place was our own room. But we had found a peculiar code of etiquette prevailing here, governed by excessive modesty and propriety, no doubt, but an obstructionist etiquette, nevertheless. The hall-waiter, whose business it is to serve the samovar and coffee, was not allowed to enter our room, though his fellows had served us throughout the country, after the fashion of the land. Here we were compelled to wait upon the leisure of the chambermaid, a busy and capricious person, who would certainly not be on hand in the evening if she was not in the morning. Accordingly, we ordered our tea in the dining-room, as I have said. Presently, a chorus of girls, dressed all alike, mounted the platform, and sang three songs to an accompaniment banged upon the piano by a man. Being violently applauded by a long table-full of young merchants who sat near, at whom they had been singing and staring, without any attempt at disguise, and with whom they had even been exchanging remarks, they sang two songs more. They were followed by another set of girls, also in a sort of uniform costume, who sang five songs at the young merchants. It appeared that one party was called "Russian singers," and the other "German singers." We found out afterwards, by watching operations on another evening, that these five songs formed the extent of their respective repertories.

A woman about forty-five years of age accompanied them into the room, then planted herself with her back against the wall near us, which was as far away from her charges as space permitted. She was the "sheep-dog," and we soon saw that, while discreetly oblivious of the smiles, glances, and behavior of her lambs,--as all well-trained society sheep-dogs are,--she kept darting sharp looks at us as though we were doing something quite out of the way and improper. By that time we had begun to suspect, for various reasons, that the Nizhni Fair is intended for men, not for--ladies. But we were determined quietly to convince ourselves of the state of affairs, so we stood our ground, dallied with our tea, drank an enormous quantity of it, and kept our eyes diligently in the direction where those of the sheep-dog should have been, but never were.

Their very bad singing over, the lambs disappeared to the adjoining veranda. The young merchants slipped out, one by one. The waiters began to carry great dishes of peaches, and other dainty fruits,--all worth their weight in gold in Russia, and especially at Nizhni,--together with bottles of champagne, out to the veranda. When we were satisfied, we went to bed, but not to sleep. The peaches kept that party on the veranda and in the rooms below exhilarated until nearly daylight. I suppose the duenna did her duty and sat out the revel in the distant security of the dining-room. Several of her charges added a number of points to our store of information the next day, at the noon breakfast hour, when the duenna was not present.

We began to think that we understood our Moscow friend's enigmatic smile, and to regret that we had not met him and his wife at the Fair, as we had originally arranged to do.

The far-famed Fair of Nizhni Novgorod--"Makary," the Russians call it, from the town and monastery of St. Makary, sixty miles farther down the Volga, where it was held from 1624 until the present location was adopted in 1824--was a disappointment to us. There is no denying that. Until railways and steamers were introduced into these parts, and facilitated the distribution of goods, and of commonplaceness and monotony, it probably merited all the extravagant praises of its picturesqueness and variety which have been lavished upon it. The traveler arrives there with indefinite but vast expectations. A fancy dress ball on an enormous scale, combined with an International Exposition, would seem to be the nearest approach possible to a description of his confused anticipations. That is, in a measure, what one sees; and, on the other hand, it is exactly the reverse of what he sees. I must confess that I think our disappointment was partly our own fault. Had we, like most travelers who have written extravagantly about the Fair, come to it fresh from a stay of (at most) three weeks in St. Petersburg and Moscow only, we should have been much impressed by the variety of types and goods, I have no doubt. But we had spent nearly two years in the land, and were familiar with the types and goods of the capitals and of other places, so that there was little that was new to us. Consequently, though we found the Fair very interesting, we were not able to excite ourselves to any extravagant degree of amazement or rapture.

The Fair proper consists of a mass of two-story "stone" (brick and cement) buildings, inclosed on three sides by a canal in the shape of a horseshoe. Through the centre runs a broad boulevard planted with trees, ending at the open point of the horseshoe in the residence occupied by the governor during the Fair (he usually lives in the Kremlin of the Upper Town), the post-office, and other public buildings. Across the other end of the boulevard and "rows" of the Gostinny Dvor, with their arcades full of benches occupied by fat merchants or indolent visitors, and serving as a chord to the arc of the horseshoe, run the "Chinese rows," which derive their name from the style of their curving iron roofs and their ornaments, not from the nationality of the merchants, or of the goods sold there. It is, probably, a mere accident that the wholesale shops for overland tea are situated in the Chinese rows. It is a good place to see the great bales of "Kiakhta tea," still in their wrappings of rawhides, with the hair inside and the hieroglyphical addresses, weights, and so forth, cut into the skins, instead of being painted on them, just as they have been brought overland from Kiakhta on the Chinese border of Siberia. Here, also, rises the great Makary Cathedral, which towers conspicuously above the low-roofed town. Inside the boundary formed by this Belt Canal, no smoking is allowed in the streets, under penalty of twenty-five rubles for each offense. The drainage system is flushed from the river every night; and from the ventilation towers, which are placed at short intervals, the blue smoke of purifying fires curls reassuringly. Great care is necessary in this department, and the sanitary conditions, though as good as possible, are never very secure. The whole low sandspit is often submerged during the spring floods, and the retreating waters leave a deposit of slime and debris behind them, which must be cleared away, besides doing much damage to the buildings.

The peculiarity of this Makary Fair is that nothing is sold by sample, in modern fashion; the whole stock of goods is on hand, and is delivered at once to purchasers. The taciturn, easy-going merchants in those insignificant-looking shops of the Gostinny Dvor "rows," and, to a small extent, in the supplementary town which has sprung up outside the canal, set the prices for tea and goods of all sorts all over Russia and Siberia for the ensuing year. Contracts for the future are dated, and last year's bills fall due, at "Makary." It is hard to realize.

All the firms with whose shops we had been familiar in Petersburg and Moscow had establishments here, and, at first, it seemed not worth while to inspect their stocks, with which we felt perfectly acquainted. But we soon discovered that our previous familiarity enabled us to distinguish certain articles which are manufactured for the "Fair" trade exclusively, and which are never even shown in the capitals. For example, the great porcelain houses of St. Petersburg manufacture large pipe-bowls, ewers (with basins to match) of the Oriental shape familiar to the world in silver and brass, and other things, all decorated with a deep crimson bordering on magenta, and with gold. The great silk houses of Moscow prepare very rich and very costly brocades of this same deep crimson hue, besprinkled with gold and with tiny bouquets of bright flowers, or in which the crimson is prominent. They even copy the large, elaborate patterns from the robes of ancient Doges of Venice. All these, like the pipes and ewers, are made to suit the taste of customers in Bokhara and other Eastern countries, where a man's rank is, to a certain degree, to be recognized by the number and richness of the khalati which he can afford to wear at one time. This is one of the points in which the civilization of the East coincides very nearly with the civilization of the West. The khalat is a sort of dressing-gown, with wide sleeves, which is girt about the waist with a handsome shawl; but it would strike a European that eight or ten of these, worn one on top of the other, might conduce to the preservation of vanity, but not to comfort, in the hot countries where the custom prevails. The Bokhariots bring to the Fair khalati of their own thin, strong silk, in hues more gaudy than those of the rainbow and the peacock combined, which are always lined with pretty green and white chintz, and can be bought for a very reasonable price in the Oriental shops, together with jeweled arms and ornaments, rugs, and a great variety of fascinating wares.

The choicest "overland" tea--the true name is "Kiakhta tea"--can be had only by wholesale, alas! and it is the same with very many things. There are shops full of rolls of sarpinka, a fine, changeable gingham in pink and blue, green and yellow, and a score of other combinations, which washes perfectly, and is made by the peasants far down the Volga, in the season when agricultural labor is impossible. There are furs of more sorts than the foreign visitor is likely ever to have seen before; iron from the Ural mines by the ton, on a detached sand-spit in the Oka River; dried and salted fish by the cord, in a distant, too odorous spot; goldsmiths' shops; old-clothes shops, where quaint and beautiful old costumes of Russia abound; Tatar shops, filled with fine, multi-colored leather work and other Tatar goods, presided over by the stately Tatars from whom we had bought at Kazan; shops piled with every variety of dried fruit, where prime Sultana raisins cost forty cents for a box of one hundred and twenty pounds. Altogether, it is a varied and instructive medley.

We learned several trade tricks. For example, we came upon the agency of a Moscow factory, which makes a woolen imitation of an Oriental silken fabric, known as termalama. The agent acknowledged that it was an imitation, and said that the price by the piece was twenty-five cents a yard. In the Moscow Oriental shops the dealers sell it for eight times that price, and swear that it is genuine from the East. A Russian friend of ours had been cheated in this way, and the dealers attempted to cheat us also,--in vain, after our Nizhni investigations.

Every one seemed to be absorbed in business, to the exclusion of every other thought. But sometimes, as we wandered along the boulevard, and among the rows, we found the ground of the Gostinny Dvor strewn with fresh sprays of fragrant fir, which we took at first to be a token that a funeral had occurred among some of the merchants' clerks who lived over the shops. However, it appeared that a holy picture had been carried along the rows, and into the shops of those who desired its blessing on their trade, and a short service had been held. The "zeal" of these numerous devout persons must have enriched the church where the ikona dwelt, judging from the number, of times during our five days' stay that we came upon these freshly strewn paths.

The part of the Fair which is most interesting to foreigners in general, I think, is the great glass gallery filled with retail booths, where Russians sell embroidery and laces and the handiwork of the peasants in general; where Caucasians deal in the beautiful gold and silver work of their native mountains; where swarthy Bokhariots sit cross-legged, with imperturbable dignity, among their gay wares, while the band plays, and the motley crowd bargains and gazes even in the evening when all the other shops are closed.

I learned here an extra lesson in the small value attached by Russians to titles in themselves. It was at the Ekaterinburg booth, where precious and semi-precious stones from the Ural and Siberia, in great variety and beauty, were for sale. A Russian of the higher classes, and, evidently, not poor, inquired the price of a rosary of amethysts, with a cross of assorted gems fit for a bishop. The attendant mentioned the price. It did not seem excessive, but the bargainer exclaimed, in a bantering tone,--

"Come now, prince, that's the fancy price. Tell me the real price."

But the "prince" would not make any reduction, and his customer walked away. I thought I would try the effect of the title on the Caucasians and Bokhariots. I had already dropped into the habit of addressing Tatars as "prince," except in the case of hotel waiters,--and I might as well have included them. I found to my amusement that, instead of resenting it as an impertinence, they reduced the price of the article for which I was bargaining by five kopeks (about two and a half cents) every time I used the title, though no sign of gratification disturbed the serene gravity of their countenances any more than if they had been Americans and I had addressed them as "colonel" or "judge," at haphazard. Truly, human nature varies little under different skies! But I know now, authoritatively, that the market value of the title of "prince" is exactly two and a half cents.

One evening we drove across the bridge to take tea at a garden on the "Atkos," or slope,--the crest of the green hill on which stands the Kremlin. In this Atkos quarter of the town there are some really fine houses of wealthy merchants, mingled with the curious old dwellings of the merely well-to-do and the poor. In the garden the tea was not very good, and the weedy-looking chorus of women, the inevitable adjunct to every eating establishment at the Fair, as we had learned, sang wretchedly, and were rewarded accordingly when one of their number came round to take up a collection. But the view! Far below, at our feet, swept broad "Matushka Volga." The wharves were crowded with vessels. Steamers and great barges lay anchored in the stream in battalions. Though the activity of the day was practically over, tugs and small boats were darting about and lending life to the scene. We were on the "Hills" side of the river. Far away, in dreamy dimness, lay the flat, blue-green line of the "Forests" shore. On our left was the mouth of the Oka, and the Fair beyond, which seemed to be swarming with ants, lay flat on the water level. The setting sun tinged the scene with pale rose and amber in a mild glow for a while, and then the myriad lights shone out from the city and river with even more charming effect.

Our next visit to the old town was in search of a writer who had published a couple of volumes of agreeable sketches. It was raining hard, so we engaged an izvostchik who was the fortunate possessor of an antiquated covered carriage, with a queer little drapery of scarlet cotton curtains hanging from the front of the hood, as though to screen the modesty of "the young person" from the manners, customs, and sights of the Fair,--about which, to tell the truth, the less that is said in detail the better. Certainly, more queer, old-fashioned carriages and cabmen's costumes are to be seen at the Fair than anywhere else in the country. As we were about to enter our antique conveyance, my mother's foot caught in the braid on the bottom of her dress, and a long strip gave way.

"I must go upstairs and sew this on before we start," said she, reentering the hotel.

The izvostchik ran after us. "Let me sew it on, Your High Well-born," he cried. Seeing our surprise, he added, "God is my witness,--yay Bogu! I am a tailor by trade."

His rent and faded coat did not seem to indicate anything of the sort, but I thought I would try him, as I happened to have a needleful of silk and a thimble in my pocket. I gave them to him accordingly. He knelt down and sewed on the braid very neatly and strongly in no time. His simple, friendly manner was irresistibly charming. I cannot imagine accepting such an offer from a New York cabby,--or his offering to do such a job.