VI LET US GO INTO THE TAVERN MOSCOW, _March 1914_. In a sense the tavern is also a theatre or a church. It is a place of life. “I am glad you’ve come,” said a friend to me. “Keep your ears open; this is the very bottom; everything springs from here. This is the changing-house of the ideas of the common people.” There is no “bar,” in the English sense. On the long wooden counter are bottles and glasses, and plates of sausage and ham. But you do not lounge there and gossip over your glass. The Russian public-house is all tables and chairs, like the accommodation for a smoking concert. But such dirty chairs and tables! You sit down; you are attended by a waiter. There is an army of waiters serving for 30s. a month and no tips. They are in white blouses, white trousers, and white aprons, and they look as if they had strayed into the filthy hall in their night attire. On one wall is a square candle-lantern with the word TRAKTIR printed on it in decayed brown; on another wall is an immense gilt ikon. The doors creak heavily to and fro, admitting customers unreadily—how unlike the little swing doors of the American saloons, so easy to open that you may slip in as it were by accident. At almost all the tables are working-men and women drinking tea, vodka, or beer, talking loudly.[4] There are many cabmen in their round fur hats and voluminous blue cloaks; many market-women in their cottons, with soiled coloured kerchiefs on their heads. You see twenty people drinking tea to one drinking vodka—they pour the tea into the saucers, hold the saucers to their hairy mouths, and guzzle at the gratifying golden drink. But if you look about you will notice vodka-drinkers, some asleep, with their unkempt heads on the table (looking like tramps asleep in a free library); you see also men with red cheeks and fiery eyes not yet overcome by liquor, but ready to bawl and make a scandal at the least provocation. The atmosphere is heavy with the smoke of the vilest tobacco in the world (_makhorka_). A blind musician is playing the concertina, several people are singing, hawkers with pies, with Bibles, with shirts, with pencils, with old clothes, are going from table to table offering their wares. There is tremendous bargaining and long-drawn-out haggling on the part of people who, it would seem, do not really intend to buy, even at the last. There are beggars, cripples, blind men, dwarfs, asking for alms in the name of Christ. There are drunken hooligans trying to get drinks for nothing. There are antediluvian pilgrims hundreds of miles from home, not going to a shrine, but collecting coppers throughout all Russia for the building of a new church in their far-away native villages. You may even see upon occasion a peasant carrying a great church bell. You ask him why. He tells you the church of his village was by the will of God destroyed by a fire, and that only the bell remains, and he is