Free Russia. Dixon William Hepworth
wait on a man of rank – and drive to my friend's abode, and finding him ready to go with me, gallop through a gust of freezing rain to the palace-door.
The archbishop is at home, though it is not yet twelve o'clock. It is said of him that he seldom goes abroad; affecting the airs of an exile and a martyr; but doing – in a sad, submissive way, as if the weapon were unworthy of its work – a great deal of good; watching over his church, admonishing his clergy, both white and black, and thinking, like a father, for the poor.
Leaving our wraps in an outer hall (the proper etiquette of guests), we send in our cards by an usher, and are received at once.
The Most Sacred Vladika, pale as a ghost, dressed in a black gown, on which hangs a sapphire cross, and wearing his hood of serge, rises to greet us; and coming forward with a sweet and vanishing smile, first blesses his penitent, and then shakes hands with his English guest.
This Most Sacred Father Nathaniel is now an aged, shadowy man, with long white beard, and a failing light in his meek blue eyes. But in his prime he is said to have been handsome in person, eager in gait, caressing in style. In his youth he was a village pastor – one of the White Clergy – married, and a family man; but his wife died early; and as a pastor in his church can not marry a second time, he followed a fashion long ago set by his aspiring brethren – he took the vows of chastity, became a monk, and began to rise. His fine face, his courtly wit, his graceful bearing, brought him hosts of fair penitents, and these fair penitents made for him high friends at court. He was appointed Vicar of St. Petersburg – a post not higher in actual rank than that of a Dean of St. Paul's, but one which a popular and ambitious man prefers to most of the Russian sees. Father Nathaniel was an idol of the city. Fine ladies sought his advice, and women of all classes came to confess to him their sins. Princes fell beneath his sway; princesses adored him; and no rank in the Church, however high, appeared to stand beyond his reach. But these court triumphs were his ruin. He was such a favorite with ladies that his brethren began to smile with malicious leer when his back was turned, and drop their poisonous hints about the ways in which he walked. They said he was too fond of power; they said he spent more time with his female penitents than became a monk. It is the misery of these vicars and bishops that they can not be married men, with wives of their own to turn the edges of such shafts. Men's tongues kept wagging against Nathaniel's fame; and even those who knew him to be earnest in his faith began to think it might be well for the Church if this fascinating father could be honorably sent to some distant see.
Whither was he to go?
While a place was being sought for him, he happened to give deep offense in high quarters; and as Father Alexander, Vladika of Archangel (hero of Solovetsk), was eager to go south and be near the court, Father Nathaniel was promoted to that hero's place.
He left St. Petersburg amidst the tears of fair women, who could not protect their idol against the malice of envious monks. Taking his promotion meekly as became his robe, he sighed to think that his day was come, and in the future he would count in his church as a fallen man. Arriving in Archangel, he shut himself up in his palace near the monastery of St. Michael; a house which he found too big for his simple wants. Soon after his coming he abandoned this palace for a smaller house; giving up his more princely pile to the monks of St. Michael for a public school.
A spirit of sacrifice is the pre-eminent virtue of the Russian Church.
The shadowy old man compels me to sit on the sofa by his side; talks of my voyage round the North Cape; shows me a copy in Russian of my book on the Holy Land; inquires whether I know the Pastor Xatli in London. Fancying that he means the Russian pope in Welbeck Street, I answer yes; on which we get into much confusion of tongues; until it flashes upon me that he is talking of Mr. Hatherley of Wolverhampton, the gentleman who has gone over from the English to the Russian rite, and is said to have carried some twenty souls of the Black Country with him. What little there is to tell of this Oriental Church in our Black Country is told; and in return for my scanty supply of facts, the Vladika is good enough to show me the pictures hanging on his wall. These pictures are of two classes, holy and loyal; first the sacred images – those heads of our Saviour and of the Virgin Mother which hang in the corners of every Russian room, the tutelary presence, to be adored with reverence at the dawn of day and the hour of rest; then the loyal and local pictures – portraits of the reigning house, and of former archbishops – which you would expect to find in such a house; a first Alexander, with flat and dreamy face; a Nicolas, with stiff and haughty figure; a second Alexander, hung in the place of honor, and wearing a pensive and benignant smile. More to my mind, as less familiar than these great ones of the hour, is the fading image of a lady, thoroughly Russ in garb and aspect – Marfa, boyarine of Novgorod and colonizer of the North.
Nathaniel marks with kindling eyes my interest in this grand old creature – builder alike of convents and of towns – who sent out from Novgorod two of her sons, and hundreds of her people, to the bleak north country, then inhabited by pagan Lapps and Karels, worshippers of the thunder-cloud, and children of the Golden Hag. Her story is the epic of these northern shores.
While Red and White Rose were wasting our English counties with sword and fire, this energetic princess sent her sons and her people down the Volkhoff, into Lake Ladoga, whence they crept up the Swir into Lake Onega; from the banks of which lake they marched upward, through the forests of birch and pine, into the frozen north. She sent them to explore the woods, to lay down rivers and lakes, to tell the natives of a living God. They came to Holmogory, on the Dvina, then a poor fishing-village occupied by Karels, a tribe not higher in type than the Samoyeds of the present day. They founded Suma, Soroka, and Kem. They took possession of the Frozen Sea and its clustering isles. In dropping down a main arm of the river, Marfa's two sons were pitched from their boat and drowned. Their bodies being washed on shore and buried in the sand, she caused a cloister to be raised on the spot, which she called the Monastery of St. Nicolas, after the patron of drowning men.
That cloister of St. Nicolas was the point first made by Challoner when he entered the Dvina from the Frozen Sea.
"You are going over to Solovetsk?" says the Vladika, coming back to his sofa. "We have no authority in the isles, although they lie within our See. It pleased the Emperor Peter, on his return from a stormy voyage, to raise the Convent of Savatie to independent rank, to give it the title of Lavra – making it the equal, in our ecclesiastical system, with Troitsa, Pechersk, and St. George. From that day Solovetsk became a separate province of the Church, dependent on the Holy Governing Synod and the Tsar. Still I can give you a line to Feofan, the Archimandrite."
Slipping into an inner room for five minutes, he composes a mandate in my favor, in the highest Oriental style.
CHAPTER IX.
A PILGRIM-BOAT
A lady, who knows the country, puts up in a crate such things as a pilgrim may chance to need in a monastic cell – good tea, calf's tongue, fresh butter, cheese, roast beef, and indispensable white bread. These dainties being piled on a drojki, propped on pillows and covered with quilts – my bedding in the convent and the boat – we rattle away to the Pilgrim's Wharf.
Yes, there it is, an actual wharf – the only wharf in Archangel along which boats can lie, and land their passengers by a common sea-side plank!
Moored to the capstan by a rope, lies the pretty craft; a gilt cross on her foremast, a saintly pennant on her main. Four large gold letters tell her name:
(pronounced Verra), and meaning Faith. Father John is standing on his bridge, giving orders in a low voice to his officers and crew, many of whom are monks – mate, steward, cook, and engineer – each and all arrayed in the cowl and frock.
On the Pilgrim's Wharf, which lies in a yard cut off by gates from the street, and paved with chips and shavings to form a dry approach, stands a new pile of monastic buildings; chapels, cells, store-rooms, offices, stalls, dormitories; in fact, a new Pilgrim's Court. A steamer can not reach the port in the upper town, where the original Pilgrim's Court was built; and the fathers, keeping pace with the times, have let their ancient lodgings in the town, and built a new house lower down the stream.
Crowds of men and women – pilgrims, tramps, and soldiers – strew the wharf with a litter of baskets,