Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/395

 Rh a knot of employés, some of whom were knocked down by the infuriated creature’s paws. After this exhibition of prowess, the beast and its owner were deemed fair game for the Tsar's entertainment, and were at once sent off to Alexandrov with a troop of skomorokhy.

Bears, whether wild or tame, played a leading part in the life of the suburb. They were made to perform grotesque pantomimes. They were used to startle and mystify visitors. Often, too, they were set to fight pitched battles, not with dogs only, but with human beings. Horsey's story of the terrible experience of six fat monks who were accused of rebellion and forced to fight for their lives with six huge bears, which ate up five of them, though the sixth beast's adversary was strong enough to overcome him, may not be worthy of credence. Guagnino declares that in winter, as soon as the ice-bound river became, as usual, the common haunt of the whole population, which crowded to amuse itself by staring at the shops, the Tsar habitually let some of his domestic plantigrades loose on the peaceable inhabitants. One isolated fact of this nature may have taken place, but its habitual recurrence would no doubt have prevented people from coming back to the river. On this point, as on so many others, the chronicle has probably exaggerated features belonging to some extent, as we have seen, to the history of the general habits of a country and a period in which bear-baiting constituted one of the favourite and most ordinary entertainments of every class of society.

All legends apart, the Sloboda of Alexandrov has left memories most offensive both to morality and decency. The banquets that followed on the pious exercises already referred to were absolute orgies. Women played an important part in the life of Ivan the Terrible, and the Opritchniki, it may be, did what they could to ensure the satisfaction of tastes and needs which neither age nor sickness seem ever to have diminished, in this passionate and most immoderate nature. It is quite probable that this daily debauch may have been marked by odious and occasionally cruel refinements of detail, even if we conclude the chroniclers to have been drawing on their imaginations when they describe Skouratov and Basmanov and their peers as indulging in a delirium of monstrous wickedness with the young peasant women they had stripped and forced to run naked after flying poultry, while they shot at them with arrows. … At a time when genuine monasteries only too often took on the appearance of houses of ill fame, we may easily guess what went on in this one, which was a mere imitation. Adultery throned it there, with the Tsar-Prior,