Chapter III: The Birth of the Bell

When I arrived at the village of A----, in the government of Tambov, after an endless journey in a train which went three miles an hour and stopped for an indeterminate period, never less than an hour and a half, at every station, I found a large crowd at the station gathered round a pillar of smoke and flame. One’s first impression was, of course, that a village fire was going on. Fires in Russian villages are common occurrences in the summer, and this is not surprising since the majority of the houses are thatched with straw. The houses are in close proximity one to another, and the ground is littered with straw. Moreover, to set fire to one’s neighbour’s house is a common form of paying off a score. But it was not a fire that was in progress. It was the casting of a bell which was to take place. The ceremony was fixed for four o’clock in the afternoon with due solemnity and with religious rites, and I was invited to be present.

“Heute muss die Glocke werden”

wrote Schiller in his famous poem, and here the words were appropriate. To-day the bell was to be. It was a blazing hot day. The air was dry, the ground was dry, everything was dry, and the great column of smoke mixed with flame issuing from the furnace added to the heat. The furnace had been made exactly opposite to the church. The church was a stone building with a Doric portico consisting of four red columns, a white pediment, a circular pale green roof, and a Byzantine minaret. The village consisted of wooden log-built cottages thatched with straw dotted over a rolling plain. The plain was variegated with woods--oak trees and birch being their principal trees--and stretched out infinitely into the blue distance. Before the bell was to be cast a Te Deum was to be sung.

It was Wednesday, the day of the bazaar. The bazaar in the village is the mart, where the buying and selling of meat, provisions, fruit, melons, fish, hardware, ironmongery, china, and books are conducted. This takes place once a week on Wednesdays, and peasants flock in from the neighbouring villages to buy their provisions. But this afternoon the bazaar was deserted. The whole population of the village was gathered together on the dry brown grassy square in front of the church to take part in the ceremony. At four o’clock two priests and a deacon, followed by a choir consisting of two men in their Sunday clothes, and by bearers of gilt banners, walked in procession out of the church. They were dressed in stiff robes of green and gold, and as they walked they intoned a plain song. An old card table with its stained green cloth was placed and opened on the ground opposite and not far from the church, and on this two lighted tapers were set together with a bowl of holy water. The peasants gathered round in a semicircle with bare heads and joined in the service, making countless genuflexions and signs of the cross, and joining in the song with their deep bass voices. When I said the peasants I should have said half of them. The other half were gathered in a dense crowd round the furnace, which was built of bricks and open on both sides to the east and to the west, and fed with wooden fuel. The men in charge of the proceeding stood on both sides of it and stirred the molten metal it contained with two enormous poles. On the southern side of the furnace was a channel through which the molten metal when released was to flow into the cast of the bell. The crowd which was assembled here was already struggling to have and to hold a good place for the spectacle of the release of the metal when the solemn moment should arrive. Three policemen were endeavouring to cope with the crowd; that is to say, one police officer, one police sergeant, and one common policeman. They were trying with all their might to keep back the crowd, so that when the metal was released a disaster should not happen; but their efforts were in vain, because the crowd was large, and when they pressed back a small portion of it they made a dent in it which caused the remaining part of it to bulge out; and it was the kind of crowd--so intensely typical of Russia--on which no words, whether of command, entreaty, or threat, made the smallest impression. The only way to keep it back was by pressing on it with the body and outstretched arms, and that only kept back a tiny portion of it. In the meantime the Te Deum went on and on; and many things and persons were prayed for besides the bell which was about to be born. At one moment I obtained a place from which I had a commanding view of the furnace, but I was soon oozed out of it by the ever-increasing crowd of men, women, and children.

The aspect of the whole thing was something between a sacred picture and a scene in a Wagner opera. The tall peasants with red shirts, long hair and beards, stirring the furnace with long poles, looked the persons in the epic of the Niebelungen as we see it performed on the stage to the strains of a complicated orchestration. There was Wotan in a blue shirt, with a spear; and Alberic, with a grimy face and a hammer, was meddling with the furnace, and Siegfried, in leather boots and sheepskin, was smoking a cigarette and waving an enormous hammer, while Mimi, whining and disagreeable as usual, was having his head smacked. On the other hand, the peasants who were listening and taking part in the Te Deum were like the figures of a sacred picture--women with red and white Eastern head-dresses, bearded men, listening as though a miracle were about to be performed, and barefooted children with straw-coloured hair and blue eyes running about everywhere. Towards six o’clock the Te Deum at last came to an end, and the whole crowd moved and swayed around the furnace. A Russian crowd is like a large tough sponge. Nothing seems to make any effect on it. It absorbs the newcomers who dive into it, and you can pull it this way and press it that way, but there it remains, indissoluble, passive, and obstinate. Perhaps the same is true of the Russian nation; I think it is certainly true of the Russian character, in which as fundamental qualities there are so much apparent weakness and softness, so much obvious elasticity and malleability, and so much hidden passive resistance.

I asked a peasant who was sitting by a railing under the church when the ceremony would begin. “Ask them,” he answered, “they will tell you, but they won’t tell us.” With the help of the policeman I managed to squeeze a way through the mass of struggling humanity to a place in the first row. I was told that the critical moment was approaching, and was asked to throw a piece of silver into the furnace, so that the bell might have a tuneful sound. I threw a silver rouble into the furnace, and then the men who were in charge of the casting said that the critical moment had come. On each side of the small channel they fixed metal screens and placed a large screen facing it. Then the man in charge said in a loud matter-of-fact tone: “Now, let us pray to God.” The peasants all uncovered themselves and made a sign of the cross, and a moment was spent in silent prayer. This prayer was especially for the success of the operation which was to take place immediately, namely, the release of the molten metal, since two hours had already been spent in praying for the bell. At this moment the excitement of the crowd reached such a pitch that they pushed themselves right up to the channel, and the efforts of the policemen, who were pouring down with perspiration and stretching out in vain, like the ghosts in Virgil, their futile arms, were pathetic. One man, however, not a policeman, waved a big stick and threatened to beat everybody back if they did not make way. Then at last the culminating moment arrived, the metal was released, and it poured down the narrow channel which had been prepared for it, and over which two logs placed crosswise formed an arch, surmounted by a yachting cap for ornament. It caused a huge yellow sheet of flame to flare up for a moment in front of the iron screen facing the channel. The women in the crowd shrieked. Those who were in front made a desperate effort to get back, and those who were at the back made a desperate effort to get forward, and I was carried right through and beyond the crowd in the struggle.

And the bell was born. I hope the silver rouble which I threw into it, and which now forms a part of it, will sweeten its utterance, and that it may never have to sound the alarm which signifies battle, murder, and sudden death.

CONVERSATIONS WITH DIMITRI NIKOLAIEVITCH