ABSTRACT
THE day after a church festival is always the Feast of St Lombard. Outside all the pawnbrokers' establishments one sees crowds of poor people drawn up in line—men, women, children, but mostly women. It is a pitiable sight. Each person is carrying the article to be pledged, and whether it be a samovar or a chair, or a petticoat or a pair of trousers, it is never wrapped up. Russians are not ashamed. The queue which I saw near the Tverskaya a street long, the day after my return from Sergievo, would have been thought a disgrace to any English city, but the Russians looked on with equanimity. And to walk from end to end, from the pawnbroker's door to the last person who has just hurried up with a pledge, was like reading a chapter from the darkest pages of Gorky. One sees children of sad aspect, with bewildered eyes; young girls as yet honest and clean, but selling the last things of a home; raging women, weeping women and laughing women, drunkards and drudges; or besotted men of the sort who drink away their wives' and daughters' honour, hopeless home thieves who would steal away even the clothes from a bed and turn them into vodka. It is notable that in Russia, as yet, it is chiefly the men who drink; a drunken woman is very rare. The woman in Russia is the wisest and strongest person in the home. One poor woman, stout and rubicund, but of countenance preternaturally solemn, seemed to me weighed down with responsibility. She had a copper samovar under her arm, and I asked her what misfortune had overtaken her. It was the old story; her husband was a cabman, he ought to have taken no holiday yesterday, the streets were full of people and he might have had many fares, but he went to a tavern in the morning, and spent all his money and fought with a man and was arrested by a gendarme. I asked her how much she would get “on” the samovar. “Seventy-five copecks, barin,” she replied. “Have you got another samovar?” I asked. “No, barin, we shall have to borrow water; I don't know what the table will look like without the samovar, it won't be home without it, it has always been on the table; it was my mother's, and she gave it me when I was married. I am sure we shall never have good fortune after the samovar has gone.”
