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Moscow, February 1914.

I went to Moscow to see my old friend Vassily Vassilievitch Pereplotchikof, the painter. He received me in his house in the Sadovia, in that mysterious sitting-room of his where scores of his paintings are always standing with their faces to the wall, like very shy young maidens who wait till it is their turn to be shown to society and to their prospective suitors.

During the summer in America which I had tramped, he had been seeking impressions on the barren Arctic island of Nova Zemlia. What a contrast in our fields of action! He in the silent snow-swept island; I on the luxurious mainland of the New World. Vassily Vassilitch prefers places like Nova Zemlia, where, as it were, candles are burning in corners from which ikons have been taken away. We exchanged our impressions.

Nova Zemlia has only a hundred inhabitants, one steamer calls there in the year. There is only one post. In winter there is three months darkness without light; in summer two months light without darkness. The ice and snow do not melt away even in July, and the colonists—trappers and hunters—live a stark life in opposition to the storm and stress of nature. They are dead to the world—the world all dead to them until the prow of their one annual steamer comes into view on the ocean in July. The day of its arrival they call their Easter, and they do not hold Easter according to the calendar in the dark and terrible spring, but postpone their holiday till life is born again with the coming of the ship. Their resurrection day is when their brother-man comes again to them. In the arriving of the ship they see Jesus walking towards them on the sea.

Vassily Vassilitch told me this with a subtle emphasis. I felt rich in having Vassily Vassilitch as a friend, for I realised he was able to tell me sacred things. This evening of our seeing one another again he read me many poems which he had written “not to print, but for his own pleasure.” All that he says has a deep human interest, a significant emphasis and luminous suggestiveness that may be recognised in his paintings also.

Vassily Vassilitch left Archangel for Nova Zemlia one morning in July. The boat steamed placidly and peacefully out of the vast and enlarged Dwina into the White Sea, and then out of the White Sea into the cold and buffeting Arctic. On board were two Government officials going to consider “Colonisation,” an English artillery officer, an astronomer, a journalist from Archangel, a monk going to relieve another monk and spend the winter on the island, peasant fur-buyers, carpenters, and workmen.

The monk was one of the most interesting characters, and told how a Samoyede once in a storm dug a hole in the snow and lay there three or four days, and slept till it was over. When the blizzard ceased he broke out of his white grave and went home. He told how there was once such a storm on Easter Eve that he and the villagers had to crawl to church on hands and knees. Coming home they were all blown about half a mile out of their course.

From the hunting expeditions the islanders nearly always brought home young bears taken alive, and they fed them and reared them and eventually sold them into menageries and circuses. The monk had two young bears one season and they were very much attached to him. They followed him everywhere and would take food from his hands alone. If by any chance he escaped them and got away by himself to do something they raised a scandal. However, on the return journey to Archangel the monk lost one of them. When they were some 250 miles out at sea one of the bears broke her fastenings, jumped into the ocean and swam away. And she swam all the way back to the harbour and was recaptured by the Samoyedes there. The other bear gave a lot of trouble at Archangel by absolutely refusing to be tended by any one else but the monk who had brought him. But at last the monk exchanged his cassock with some one else, and it was found that the bear at once transferred his obedience, and that he could be managed by any one who wore the monk’s garments. The monk therefore sold the cassock with the bear, and both are now part of the stock-in-trade of a circus. In this case the habit did make the monk.

The boat had an open hatchway, and the captain was for ever crying out:—

“More careful, people! Don’t fall down the hole. Once the Governor of Archangel fell down there; he didn’t get hurt because he fell on a chambermaid who was passing. Once an official fell through and broke twelve bottles of various drinks; he didn’t get hurt either, but was much upset when we gave him the bill for the drinks. Another official was reading a bit of paper and stepped over and fell on some baskets—he also didn’t get hurt; but be careful all the same. And various ordinary passengers fell....”

But, as it happened, some tremendous weather overtook the ship, and not many dare move from their places in the cabins. So the hatchway remained open without misadventure.

It was touching—Vassily Vassilitch’s account of their coming into view of the shore, and the whole population of the little colony standing staring at the ship with greedy eyes, the first visitors to them from the great family of mankind on the rest of the world, their Easter. Poor lonely ones! With what thirst they exchanged the first greetings and questions!

“How have you got on?”

“Any sick?”

“Any dead?”

“Have you shot many bears?”

“How’s trade?”

The islanders had suffered very much from scurvy during the year. The day before the vessel arrived a man had died of it and Vassily Vassilitch saw the funeral. It took place about midnight. From one of the huts came the klak, klak, klak, of the nailing up of the coffin. The coffin issued from the little village borne on a dog-drawn hearse, then followed the priest in his gilded raiment, the frantic widow, the mourners. “Holy God,” they sang, “Holy Strong One, Holy Immortal,” and the dogs all whined and howled. In the bitter shadowy night they bore the corpse away, over grey earth and rags of snow, far away to the side of a black tumbling river, and the midnight sunshine gleamed on all the snowy mountain peaks, catching the light from the horizon where the sun seemed poised.

Vassily Vassilitch showed me a copy he had made of a diary kept by a Russian peasant who had died of scurvy. Two Russian peasants settled on a desolate part of the island to spend the winter and hunt. It was somewhat pathetic that the man doomed to die should have had the idea of keeping a log-book. The story tells much of Russian patience, simplicity, tenderness, pluck. I only quote a few entries from the diary:—

November 30.—Bear came to door of hut and began to gnaw the carcase that was there. Snatched my gun, but he saw me and was off and I dare not follow in the dark.

December 5.—Daylight was short. Hardly got a shot before it was dark. Eve of the day of my angel. In the evening drank tea. Washed my body at a basin for want of a bath. Changed my linen. Lighted lamp before the ikon.

February 1.—Cloudy and windy. Shot some seals. Had great difficulty in bringing them home. We have colds. Northern lights.

February 28.—Heavy weather. Both seriously ill. Extraordinary pain. First the toes ache as if frozen, then it goes into the legs, into the knees and muscles. Man must lie down. Over his whole body and arms a rash breaks out.

In March the scurvy was too much for him; the diary is continued by the hand of his mate, who writes on April 16:—

To-day Kulebakin (the former writer of the diary) was in pain and delirium, but afterwards calmly and peacefully gave back his soul to God. Weather cloudy to clear. No water. Dug the grave. All by myself now. No one to talk to now. It is sad.

April 21.—Lighted a candle and burnt incense over Kulebakin, and then carried him to the grave. Bright and sunny day. No water.

April 23.—The ice has cleared. Hung a torn shirt on the mountain instead of a flag. I still wait on the chance of some one coming from the settlement. It is very dreary. Pain in the legs. Walk with difficulty. Need to gather strength against illness. Nothing to eat but bread.

At this point the diary comes entirely to an end, and it might have seemed the writer was dead, but a peasant came from the settlement, rescued him, and carried him back, and he returned to Russia and recovered. The astonishing thing is he came back again to Nova Zemlia, and wintered and hunted, repeating the experiment. A tough fellow!

One of the sights of Nova Zemlia is the cemetery, with its tumbled and broken crosses. The dead sleep there in the Russian faith even as they sleep far away in tropical Turkestan and the pleasant borders of Persia. Not only a nation stretching from West to East, these Russians, but diving four or five thousand miles from North to South. How do they support life in the Far North? They have to have their vodka there.^[2] There is a big supply of it on the ship for them. It will not, however, be sold to them till all the business of fur-selling is accomplished and the cargo brought on board, and the ship is ready to steam away. The sale of vodka begins only after the second blast of the hooter. The day after the boat leaves the island there is an orgy of drinking, and in a short while all the vodka disappears and there ensue months of enforced sobriety.

The island has a loving and striving priest who wrestles with the people for their souls.

Vassily Vassilitch came upon him sobbing. There had been a case of cheating on the island.

“I try to make them good men and women,” said the priest; “I pray for them. I pray with them, and yet see how they cheat and drink and forget all that they learn!”

Vassily Vassilitch went right round the island calling at the various points where there were inhabitants, painting a little, talking to the people. It is a wonderful island, a continuation of the Urals, very rich in metals, very mountainous. There were no trees, however, and though there were bright and beautiful flowers and birds and butterflies it was ever bleak and wind-swept. There was not a mosquito or hornfly in the island even in July.

Coming home the ship passed through a field of icebergs. Vassily Vassilitch for the first time in his life saw a mirage. It gave him the idea that all that he had seen on the island was really a mirage, a dream, an insubstantial pageant; that life itself was such.

When he heard the last of the growling and snapping of the twelve or fifteen bears tied up on deck and stepped off on to the pier and sat once more in an Archangel droshky, clattering over the cobbles of the muddy town, he felt indeed that all that he had seen and heard was something folded and hidden away in the everyday, a wonderful, fantastic, even absurd and improbable dream.

“Some time, perhaps, after we die and awake elsewhere, we shall look back on life and say the same of it,” said he.