“We have not much bread,” said the old man, significantly, as he put a small piece in front of me.
While we were at table my companion of the night adventure came in, after having searched for me all through the village. I wished to warn him to be prudent in speech and repeat the same tale as I had told, but he merely motioned reassuringly with his hand. “You need fear nothing here,” he said, smiling.
It appeared that he knew my old muzhik well. Taking him aside, he whispered something in his ear. What was he saying? The old man turned and looked at me intensely with an interest he had not shown before. His eyes glistened brightly, as if with unexpected satisfaction. He returned to where I sat.
“Would you like some more milk?” he asked, kindly, and fetched it for me himself.
I asked who played the harmonium. With amusing modesty the old man let his eyes fall and said nothing. But the little girl, pointing her finger at the peasant, put in quickly that “Diedushka [grandpa] did.”
“I like music,” I said. “Will you please play something afterwards?”
Ah! Why was everything different all at once—suspicions evaporated, fears dissipated? I felt the change intuitively. The Finn had somehow aroused the crude old man’s interest in me (had he told him who I was?), but by my passing question I had touched his tenderest spot—music!
So Uncle Egor (as I called him), producing an old and much be-fingered volume of German hymn tunes which he had picked up in a market at Petrograd, seated himself nervously and with touching modesty at the old harmonium. His thick, horny fingers, with black fingernails, stumbled clumsily over the keys, playing only the top notes coupled in octaves with one finger of his left hand. He blew the pedals as if he were beating time, and while he played his face twitched and his breath caught. You could see that in music he forgot everything else. The rotten old harmonium was the possession he prized above all else in the world—in fact, for him it was not of this world. Crude old peasant as he was, he was a true Russian.
“Would you like me to play you something?” I asked when he had finished.
Uncle Egor rose awkwardly from the harmonium, smiling confusedly when I complimented him on his achievement. I sat down and played him some of his hymns and a few other simple tunes. When I variegated the harmonies, he followed, fascinated. He leant over the instrument, his eyes rooted on mine. All the rough harshness had gone from his face, and the shadow of a faint smile flickered round his lips. I saw in his eyes a great depth of blue.
“Sit down again, my little son,” he said to me several times later, “and play me more.”
At midday I lay down on Uncle Egor’s bed and fell fast asleep. At three o’clock they roused me for dinner, consisting of a large bowl of sour cabbage soup, which we all ate with brown polished wooden spoons, dipping in turn into the bowl. Uncle Egor went to a corner of the room, produced from a sack a huge loaf, and cutting off a big square chunk, placed it before me.
“Eat as much bread as you like, my son,” he said.
He told me all his woes—how he was branded as a village “grabber, bourgeois, and capitalist,” because he had possessed three horses and five cows; how four cows and two horses had been “requisitioned”; and how half his land had been taken by the Committee of the Village Poor to start a Commune on.
Committees of the Village Poor were bodies from which were excluded all such as, by enterprise, industry, and thrift, had raised themselves to positions of independence. Composed of the lowest elements of stupid, illiterate, and idle peasants, beggars and tramps, these committees, endowed with supreme power, were authorized to seize the property of the prosperous and divide it amongst themselves, a portion going to the Government.
The class of “middle” peasants, that is, those who were halfway to prosperity, incited by agitators, sided at first with the poor in despoiling the rich, until it was their turn to be despoiled, when they not unnaturally became enemies of the Bolshevist system. The imposition of a war tax, however, finally alienated the sympathies of the entire peasantry, for the enriched “poor” would not pay because they were technically poor, while the impoverished “rich” could not pay because they had nothing left. This was the end of Communism throughout nine-tenths of the Russian provinces, and it occurred when the Bolsheviks had ruled for only a year.
“Uncle Egor,” I said, “you say your district still has a Committee of the Poor. I thought the committees were abolished. There was a decree about it last December.”
“What matters it what they write?” he exclaimed, bitterly. “Our ‘comrades’—whatever they want to do, they do. They held a Soviet election not long ago and the voters were ordered to put in the Soviet all the men from the Poor Committee. Now they say the village must start what they call a ‘Commune,’ where the lazy will profit by the labour of the industrious. They say they will take my last cow for the Commune. But they will not let me join, even if I wanted to, because I am a ‘grabber.’ Ugh!”
“When they held the election,” I asked, “did you vote?”
Uncle Egor laughed. “I? How should they let me vote? I have worked all my life to make myself independent. I once had nothing, but I worked till I had this little farm, which I thought would be my own. Vasia here is my helper. But the Soviet says I am a ‘grabber’ and so I have no vote!”
“Who works in the Commune?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he replied. “They are not from these parts. They thought the poor peasants would join
