When we hear of a man losing or squandering ten or twenty thousand rubles, we immediately think, ‘What a foolish and good-for-nothing fellow he is to squander so much money uselessly, and how well I could have used that money for a building I have long wanted, or to improve my farm,’ and so forth; and the poor reason just in the same way when they see wealth senselessly wasted, and they do it the more insistently since they need the money not to satisfy some caprice but to supply things they urgently need. We are much mistaken when we think that the poor c fail to see this, and can calmly look at the luxury surrounding them.
They never have admitted and never will admit that it is right for some to have a continual holiday while others must always fast and work. At first it astonishes and angers them to see it. Then they grow accustomed to it; and seeing that such arrangements are considered legitimate, they themselves try to avoid work and to share in the perpetual holiday. Some succeed and become such ever-feasting folk, others gradually insinuate themselves into an approach to that position, others again break down without having attained their aim, and having lost the habit of working, fill the brothels and doss-houses.
Two years ago we took a peasant lad from the village as a manservant. He did not get on with the footman and was dismissed. He found a place with a merchant, satisfied his master, and now goes about in showy boots and wearing a chain across his waistcoat. In his place we engaged a married peasant. He took to drink and lost some money. We
engaged a third man. He was intemperate, and having drunk all his clothes, loafed for a long time about the doss-houses. An old man-cook took to drink in town and fell ill. A footman who used to drink desperately, but who in the country had avoided vodka for five years, took to drink again last year while living in Moscow without his wife who used to restrain him, and he ruined his whole life.
A lad from our village is living with my brother as manservant. His grandfather, a blind old man, came to me while I was staying in the country and asked me to shame his grandson into sending ten rubles towards the payment of the taxes, as otherwise he would have to sell his cow. ‘He always says: one has to dress properly,’ said the old man; ‘well he has got himself boots and that is enough, or else what is it he wants?
Does he want to have a watch?’ said the grandfather, expressing by those words the insanest proposition he could think of. The proposition was indeed senseless if one knew that the old man had gone through the whole of Lent without being able to afford any oil with his food, and that he was losing the wood he had cut because he was unable to pay a ruble and twenty kopeks he owed; but it turned out that the old man’s insane jest was an actual fact.
The lad came to me in a black overcoat of good cloth and wearing boots for which he had paid eight rubles. A few days earlier he had taken ten rubles in advance from my brother and had bought the boots. And my children, who have known the lad since childhood, tell me that he really considers it necessary to provide himself with a watch. He. is a very good-natured lad, but he thinks he will be laughed at till he has a watch. So a watch is necessary. This year in our house a housemaid, a girl of eighteen, had an affair with the coachman.
She was dismissed. Our old nurse, with whom I spoke about it, reminded me of another poor girl whom I had forgotten. She too during our short stay in Moscow ten years ago had an affair with a footman. She also was dismissed, and ended in a brothel, dying of syphilis in the hospital before she was twenty. We only need look around us to be horrified at the infection which-not to speak of the factories and workshops that serve our luxury-we by our luxury directly and immediately diffuse among the very people we afterwards wish to help.
And so looking into the nature of the town poverty I was unable to help, I saw that its first cause was that I collect what the country folk need and take it to town. The second cause was that here in town, by means of what I have collected in the country, I by my insensate luxury tempt and corrupt those country folk who follow me to town in order to get back somehow or other what was taken from them in the village.
CHAPTE’R XIV
FROM quite an opposite side I came to the same conclusion. Remembering all my relations with the city poor during that period, I saw that one reason I was unable to help them was that they were insincere and untruthful with me. They all regarded me not as a man but as a means. I could not get into touch with them: perhaps, thought I, I do not know how to; but without sincerity it was impossible to help them. How can one help a man who does not tell one his whole position? At first I blamed them for this (it is so natural to blame others), but a single word from a remarkable man-namely, Sutaev,1 who was staying with me at the time, explained the case to me and showed me where the
1 Sutaev (previously alluded to) was a peasant sectarian whom Tolstoy held in high esteem.-A. M.
cause of my failure lay. I remember that Sutaev’s remark struck me forcibly even then, but I only understood its full significance later. It was at the time when my self-delusion was at its height. I was sitting at my sister’s; Sutaev also was there and my sister was asking me about my enterprise. I began telling her and, as always happens when one is not sure of what one is doing, I told her with great enthusiasm, warmth, and verbosity, both what I was doing and what might come of it.
I told her how we were going to look after the orphans and old folk, to send back to their villages peasants who could not get on in town; how we should make the path of reform easy for the vicious, and how, if only this affair succeeded, not a single man in Moscow would be left without help. My sister sympathized with me and we talked about it. During this conversation I glanced at Sutaev. Knowing his Christian life and the importance he attaches to charity, I expected his approval and spoke so that he should understand me. I addressed my sister, but what I said was meant rather for him. He sat immovable in his black tanned sheepskin coat which, peasant-fashion, he wore indoors as well as out of doors, but he seemed not to hear us and to be absorbed in his own thoughts. His small eyes were dim as though directed inwards. Having said my say, I turned to him and asked what he thought of it.
‘It’s all useless,’ said he.
‘Why?’
‘The whole Society you’re starting will be no use, and no good will come of it,’ repeated he with conviction.
‘Why not? Why will it be no use to help thousands, or even hundreds, of unfortunates? Is it wrong to clothe the naked and feed the hungry as the Gospel tells us to?’
‘I know, I know! But you’re not doing the right thing. Is that the way to help? You go out walking and a man asks you for twenty kopeks. You give it. Is that charity? Give him spiritual charity, teach him! But what have you done? Merely got rid of him!’
‘No, that’s not what we are talking about. We want to find out the need that exists, and to help with money and work and find employment for those who require it.’
‘You won’t do anything with those people that way.’
‘What do you mean? Are they to be left to die of cold and hunger?’
‘Why should they die? Are there so many of them?’
‘Many of them !’ said I, thinking he treated the matter so lightly because he did not know what an immense number there were. ‘Do you know that in Moscow alone there are, I suppose, some twenty thousand cold and hungry people? And in Petersburg, and in other towns…!’
He smiled.
‘Twenty thousand! And how many homes are there in Russia alone? A million?’ ‘Well, what of it?’
‘What of it!’ His eyes gleamed, and he became animated. ‘Why, let us divide them among us. I am not rich, but I will at once take two. There is that lad you had in your kitchen. I have asked him, but he won’t come. If there were ten times as many we could place them
all. You take one, I’ll take another. We could go to work together. He would see how I work, and would learn how to live. We would sit at one table and he would hear a word now from me and now from you. That is
