Part 21 (1/2)
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 s.p.a.ce 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 quant.i.ty 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 antic.i.p.ations. 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 ma.s.s of two-story ”stone” (brick and cement) buildings, inclosed on three sides by a ca.n.a.l 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 rea.s.suringly. 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 fas.h.i.+on; 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 bra.s.s, 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 peac.o.c.k 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 gla.s.s 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 t.i.tles 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 cla.s.ses, and, evidently, not poor, inquired the price of a rosary of amethysts, with a cross of a.s.sorted 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 t.i.tle 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 t.i.tle, 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 t.i.tle 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 anch.o.r.ed 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” sh.o.r.e. 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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, ”G.o.d 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.
When we reached the old town, I asked a policeman where to find my author. I thought he might be able to tell me at once, as the town is not densely populated, especially with authors;--and for other reasons. He did not know.
”Then where is the police office or the address office?” I asked. (There is no such thing as a directory in Russian cities, even in St.