Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/39

 Rh and his pleasures. I had forgotten the steward, but he was the most indispensable man of all. Even if he only held a few trifling acres, the pomiéshtchik could not do without this alter ego, nor himself cultivate the soil on which he was to live. Had he possessed the desire, he would not have had the time. His time belonged to his Sovereign, who, from infancy to extreme old age, disposed of it at will. Campaigning service, service at the desk—the sloojily is a man of all work. We see him called out to fight. He takes a small bag of millet, a few pounds of salted pork, a little salt and pepper mixed (if his means allow of his indulging in this last much-appreciated condiment, already regarded as a luxury). To these supplies he adds a hatchet, some tinder, and a cooking vessel, and therein consists his whole equipment. On campaign he will dispense with the services of a military commissariat, non-existent here. When he comes back to his property, to find it devastated, perhaps, and pillaged, certainly, by that same steward, he will pick up the orange-skins and scraps of pumpkin thrown from the passing traveller's vehicle—see Herberstein—but he will not even knock at his neighbour's door except on horseback and attended by a serving-man.

Such are his fortunes. And it not unfrequently happens that his desires tend towards quitting them, and losing himself in that other category of 'non-servers' who, not having the same burdens to bear, are often more comfortably circumstanced. The only thing that holds him back is the chain that binds him to his post. Of esprit de corps he has no trace. In fact, the line of demarcation between the two classes is marked by the official registers only. The son of a boïar, borne on them, has brothers who, having escaped enrolment by some chance, are plain peasants, and are glad of it. Another sloojily may have become a tailor in some boïar's house.

Even in the highest places the solidarity of this hierarchy—a legacy of ancient aristocratic affinities, or the product of a new community of functions and positions—is constantly weakened and destroyed by the perpetual despotism and never-ceasing changes which break up every position attained, and carry men of every grade from the foot of the ladder to the top, from the lowest rank to the highest, making a dog-boy, on the shortest notice, the equal of the proudest boïar. Feeling themselves thus swallowed up in the mob of low-born 'servants,' with no link of blood, tradition, nor even interest, between themselves and many of them, the descendants of Rurik and Guédymin soon lost, if not the memory of their own origin and their pride in it, their eagerness, at all events, to defend and establish and illustrate the new dignity they shared with comrades such as these.