Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/123

 Rh birth was a beast of burden, who might very well be left to the free exercise of her household duties, to carry the linen to the public washing-place, and labour in the fields. Even in the middle class, the terem admitted of some modifications. When the great festivals drew near, the women of the lesser nobility, and those of the merchant and poorer classes, crowded round the seesaws and roundabouts set up in the streets, the chief entertainment of the female public of that period. The great ladies had them in the inner courts of their houses. When the ladies got off their seesaws, they went to dance in some meadow. The dancing of that period seems to have been a simple and somewhat monotonous business. The dancers kept stamping their feet on the same spot of ground, twirling round and round, moving their shoulders, swaying their hips, nodding their heads about, raising and lowering their eyebrows, waving handkerchiefs—all to the accompaniment of their own singing and of the shrill music of a skomorokh. But Peerson noticed a less innocent aspect of these gambols, a dubious habit of standing back to back, and rubbing the more fleshy parts of their bodies against their partners', not to mention extempore songs on most improper subjects.

Here, again, we have to note the inevitable consequence of a too severe religious law. Dancing, however decent, was forbidden by the Church, with games and pastimes of every kind. This was shutting the door in the devil's face, so that he might climb in by the window. The public baths gave rise to much more serious disorders. In them the sexes were nominally separated, but men and women came out of their respective hot rooms, stripped, streaming with sweat, and their blood heated by smart rubbing, met at the entrance, fell without any embarrassment into eager conversation, and cast themselves pell-mell into the river, or rolled in the snow, amidst shouts and jests and jokes the nature of which will be easily divined.

This was the filthy outlet of the ascetic system. Only one woman almost entirely escaped this system—the widowed mother of sons. From the domestic and social, even from the political, point of view, she attained complete independence, and enjoyed rights equal to a man's. But if the widow had no son, she dropped into the class of orphans and infirm persons, of whom the Church had the care and trouble, for society would have none of them. Thus the exception was a confirmation of the rule. Unless, again, the Eve on whom the ascetic ideal had laid its curse lifted herself, whether mother or maid, above the malediction, and, rising, by some prodigy of virtue, to the level of that ideal, became a saint according to its canons. But such an elevation seems to have been particularly