‘They have,’ I replied. The cabman shook his head disapprovingly.
‘How is it that it is forbidden, in this Moscow of yours, to ask alms in Christ’s name?’ I inquired.
‘Who knows?’ said the cabman.
‘How is it?’ I said. ‘The destitute are Christ’s folk, yet they take this man to a police-station.’ ‘Nowadays that is the law. Begging is not allowed.’
After that I several times saw how the police took beggars to a police-station and afterwards to the Usupov workhouse. Once, on the Myasnitski street, I met a crowd of these beggars, some thirty of them. In front and behind went policemen. I asked: ‘What is it for?’ ‘For asking alms.’
It turned out that in Moscow, by law, all the beggars (of whom one meets several in every street, and rows of whom stand outside every church when service is on, and who regularly attend every funeral) are forbidden to beg.
But why some are caught and shut up and others not, I was never able to understand. Either there are among them some legal and some illegal beggars, or there are so many that they cannot all be caught, or else as quickly as some are captured others appear.
There are in Moscow beggars of all sorts.
There are some who live by it, and there are genuine beggars who have come to Moscow for some reason or other and are really destitute.
Among these latter there are many simple peasants, both men and women, wearing peasant clothes. I often meet them. Some of them have fallen ill here and have come out of hospital and can neither support themselves nor get away from Moscow. Some of them have also taken to drink (as no doubt had the man who was ill with dropsy); some are not ill but have lost their all in a fire, or are old, or-are women with children; while some are quite healthy and capable of working.
These quite healthy peasants, asking alms, interested me particularly; for since I came to Moscow I had for the sake of exercise formed the habit of going to work at the Sparrow Hills with two peasants who sawed wood there. These two men were just like those I met in the streets. One was Peter, a soldier from Kaluga; the other was Semen, a peasant from Vladimir. They owned nothing but the clothes on their backs and their own hands. With those hands by working very hard they earned 40 to 45 kopeks (10d. to 11d.) a day, of which they both put something by: Peter, to buy a sheepskin coat, and Semen, for the journey back to his village. For this reason I was particularly interested in such people when I met them in the streets.
Why do these work and those beg?
On meeting such a peasant I generally asked how he came to be in such a state. I once met a healthy peasant whose beard was beginning to go grey. He begged. I asked who he was and where he was from. He said he had come from Kaluga to find work. At first he had found some work cutting up old timber for firewood. He and his mate cut up all the wood at one place. Then he looked for another job but found none. His mate left him, and now he had been knocking about for a fortnight having eaten all he possessed, and he had nothing with which to buy either a saw or an axe. I gave him money for a saw and told him where he could come and work. (I had arranged beforehand with Peter and Semen to take on another man and to find him a mate.)
‘Well then, be sure and come. There is plenty of work there,’ said I.
‘I’ll come of course I’ll come. Does one like to go begging?’ said he. ‘I can work.’
He swore he would come, and it seemed to me he was in earnest and meant to.
Next day I joined my acquaintances the peasants and asked if the man had turned up. He had not. And several others deceived me in the same way. I was also cheated by men who
said they only needed money to buy a railway ticket home, but whom I met on the street again a week later. Many such I recognized and they recognized me; but sometimes, having forgotten me, they told me the same story again. Some of them turned away on seeing me. So I learned that among this class too there are many cheats; but I was very sorry for these cheats; they were a half-clad, poor, thin, sickly folk: the kind of people who really freeze to death or hang themselves, as we learn from the papers.
CHAPTER II
WHEN I spoke to Moscovites of this destitution in the city I was always told, ‘Oh, what you have seen is nothing! Go to Khitrov market and see the dosshouses there. That’s where you’ll see the real “Golden Company”!’
One jester told me it was no longer a ‘Company’, but had become a ‘Golden Regiment’-there are now so many of them. The jester was right; but he would have been still more so had he said that in Moscow these people are now neither a company nor a regiment but a whole army numbering, I suppose, about 50,000. Old inhabitants when telling me of town poverty always spoke of it with a kind of pleasure-as if proud of knowing about it.
I remember also that when I was in London, people there spoke boastfully of London pauperism: ‘Just look what it is like here!’ .
I wanted to see this destitution about which I had been told, and several times I set out towards Khitrov market, but each time I felt uncomfortable and ashamed. ‘Why go to look at the sufferings of people I cannot help?’ said one voice within me: ‘If you live here and see all the allurements of town-life, go and see that also,’ said another voice; and so one frosty windy day in December 1881, I went to the heart of the town destitution-Khitrov market.
It was a week-day, towards four o’clock. In Solyanka Street I already noticed more and more people wearing strange clothes not made for them, and yet stranger footgear; people with a peculiar, unhealthy complexion, and especially with an air, common to them all, of indifference to everything around them. A man went along. quite at his ease dressed in most strange, impossible clothes and evidently quite regardless of what he looked like to others. All these people were going in one direction. Without asking the way (which I did not know) I went with them, and came to Khitrov market.
There were women of a similar type, in all sorts of capes, cloaks, jackets, boots and goloshes, equally at ease in spite of the hideousness of their garb; old and young they sat trading in goods of some sort, walking about, scolding and swearing. There were few people in the market. It was evidently over, and most of the people were ascending the hill, going through and past the market all in one direction. I followed them. The farther I went the more people of that sort there seemed to be, all going one way. Passing the market and going up the street I overtook two women: one old, the other young. Both wore tattered, drab clothes. They went along talking about some affair.
After each necessary word one or two unnecessary and most indecent words were uttered. Neither of them was drunk, they were preoccupied with something, and the men who met them and those who were behind and in front of them paid no attention to their way of speaking which seemed to me so strange. It was evident that here people always talked like that. To the left were private dosshouses, and some turned into them while others went farther.
Ascending the hill we came to a large corner house. Most of those among whom I had been walking stopped there. All along the pavement and on the snow in the street people of the same type stood and sat. To the right of the entrance door were the women, to the left the men. I passed both the women and the men (there were some hundreds of them), and stopped where the line ended. The house outside which they were waiting was the Lyapin Free Night-Lodging-House. The crowd were lodgers awaiting admission. At 5 p.m. the doors open and people are let in. Nearly all those I had overtaken were on their way here.
I stopped where the line of men ended. Those nearest began to look at me and drew me to them by their glances. The tatters covering their bodies were very various, but the expression in all the eyes directed towards me was just the same. They all seemed to ask: ‘Why have you, a man from a different world, stopped near us? Who are you? A self-satisfied rich man who wishes to enjoy our misery to relieve his dullness and to torture us or are you what does not and cannot exist-a man who pities us?’ This question was on every face. They joked, caught my eye, and turned away. I wanted to speak to some one of them, but could not make up my mind to do so for a long time.
But while we were yet silent our glances already drew us together. Widely as life had divided us, after our glances had met twice or thrice, we felt that we were akin and we ceased to tear
