58

p Nizhni-Novgorod,—Nizhni on the Volga. August, when everyone appears to be having a holiday,—except of course the paltry million estimated to have thronged the streets for the anti-war demonstrations,—August seemed a good time to go to Nizhni-Novgorod and the Fair. For this gathering from the ends of Russia and beyond, famous since the fourteenth century, and suspended during the years of war and revolution, was revived under the N. E. P. on a small scale, and is reopened this year again. And then of course, quite aside from the Fair, is Nizhni itself,—and the Volga, Mother Volga. A Russian friend, whose life has been passed in a small Siberian town, and who is as new, almost, to Russia proper, as myself, was as eager as I to visit Nizhni, and to see "Volga,” so here we are.

p To Nizhni from Moscow by train there are just two classes, designated as soft and hard, and because Nizhni was quite outside my financial program, and also for reasons of observation, we ventured hard, already having discovered that the trains are kept rather miraculously clean, considering the primitive conditions to be dealt with, and the primitive people who nevertheless are being so successfully educated up to the new hygienic standards. Our economy was rewarded by the uncrowded condition of the 59 train, and the agreeable fellow-passengers we found in hard. In a compartment arranged for six, open to the aisle, we occupied two shelves on one side, while the three opposite were taken by two young fellows, a worker and a student, and an older man, all more or less intellectuals in the individual sense, and all glitteringly clean and very considerate and sociable. One has the impulse to emphasize this unexpected trait of cleanliness in a country of traditional disorder and primitive customs.

p The student indicated a wish to interview me, which was a little disconcerting, for not only had I expected to do the interviewing, but I was woefully unprepared to be the victim of such a process. I have my own little mission over here, and it has not to do with statistics, but I was attacked at this, my weakest point. How many workers are there in America? What proportion are organized? What are wages and how do they keep pace with prices? Let the brightest child raise his hand. I sidled around the questions with some indirect information more or less related to the subject, and then turned the tables. The young man is student at the most important Technical High School in Russia. He gets 20 roubles a month maintenance from the Government, and supplements this by 80 roubles from an outside job. Divide by two for dollars and then remember that this sum goes about four times as far for a worker as it does at home. In addition, he gets housing and medical attendance free, and many privileges that with us only the “privileged” class can afford. For in this country, the workers form the privileged class. And a student ranks as worker.

p In this technical school of some 5,000 students, perhaps 60 500, the young man told me, were Communists, but of these 30% were dropped from membership at the last Party "purification,” having fallen below the standard required. During the last illness of Lenin and after his death, a great emotional sentiment developed, and there was a rush and rally to the Party standard. An enormous number of recruits were taken into the ranks, whose endurance was not equal to the Party demands of education in revolutionary doctrine, political economy and related practical subjects, and to the requirements of Party work and sacrifice. At present, the student told me, no new applications from intellectuals are considered. What is the difference in this technical-school classification, between “intellectuals” and just students? An intellectual is the son of an intellectual, a member of the bourgeois or educated class, as distinguished from the son of a proletarian, though both may now have the same aim in their nreparation. So careful must the party still be, so suspicious of the psychology of those outside of the working-class. We chatted late, and then, as going to bed was a mere change of position, luggage or a pillow under the head, a traveling coat under us, a blanket over, and as board shelves were not very conducive to relaxation, we continued to chat at intervals through the night with the occupants of the shelves opposite.

p We came to Nizhni-Novgorod in the morning, Nizhni on Volga, rising out of the river where the Oka flows in, and the swollen stream sweeps around the bluff. As on all Russian rivers, the fortified town crowns a height, while on the opposite side the low land stretches away from sandy beaches and flat riverside meadows, here scattered with 61 trees. Now the country-side is full of peaked hay-cocks, and great mows hardly distinguishable from the clustered thatched cabins of the little villages. The Nizhni station is on the low side of the river in the fork of the streams, and here too are the Fair-grounds, with an ugly modern Exposition structure flying red flags, and surrounded by innumerable long, low supplementary buildings now mostly in ruins. The main building was fairly well-filled with exhibits, and outside were open bazaars where we bought a variety of wonderful Russian sweets, and Tatar slippers, and peasant lace and towels. Even in "hard,” everyone who pretends to wash at all,—I didn’t,—in the trickle of water in the common wash-room carries a very long towel with lace insets, worked by hand in the threads of the linen. This is used rather indiscriminately for towel, for mop, and for smudging over the baby’s sticky hands and face.

p Content with our purchases, we sat out under some dusty trees, and watched the scant crowds of Tatars, Ukrainians, Persians, stunning Georgians in their lambswool caps of black, grey, or brown, with their fierce-looking equipment of cartridge-band across the breast, and silvertrimmed belt with long sheathed knife, and the other races, all in their characterized national costumes, who had brought their wares to Nizhni. Staying at the only Fair hotel, Government controlled, old and shabby, and bare and clean, and also cheap, $1 a night each, we found no breakfast until the only restaurant should bestir itself, and so instead, we ate apples under the trees with a group of Tatar hobos who showed off like children, and did casual prestidigitateur’s tricks for our benefit, not always of an elegant 62 drawing-[room]-variety. This was about all the Nizhni Fair amounted to, to our disappointment, except for a bandit dinner-bill at the unpromising-looking restaurant. Upstairs, this developed a glittering dining-hall, filled with flowers and white napery, and alluring glasses and bottles, a piano and a concert stage. This seemed to indicate week-end attractions which our schedule had not taken into account. The attractive setting, and the delicious salyanka of fish smothered in cabbage, and the daintily-served cutlets with all sorts of savory relishes, sweet and sour, reconciled us to the conscienceless Nep bill.

p But without the Fair and the salyanka, Nizhmi-Novgorod itself was more than worth the journey. With no especially fine or interesting architecture, except a muchdecorated church in an obscure place near the river-front, it rises so challengingly on its wooded hill, crowned by its mass of gilded domes, and guarded by its zigzag Kremlin walls, that one hesitates to cross the river and dispel the charm. We had the choice of the bridge or the ferry, and of course we chose the ferry, and mounted to the town on a steep little cable-road that did not seem to bid for our full confidence. Lunch and photograph-hunting were quickly disposed of, and also the polite offer of a very smart photographer in Russian boots and the popular and fashionable—and apparently quite irrelevant—riding breeches, to take my portrait "as the gift of a Russian man to an American woman.” I had admired his artistic portraiN photographs rather extravagantly, so I did not flatter myself that this was offered as a personal compliment or even in the implied disinterested spirit of internationalism, but this may be the unworthy suspicion of a Communist 63 sympathizer toward a Nepman. I had the excuse that it was absolutely necessary in our short time to walk all around the Kremlin on the top of the wall, for this we had promised ourselves, when we saw it climbing up and leaping down, and rambling round the hill, and dipping across the ravine that cuts down through.

p The Moscow Kremlin is flat, and filled with fine palaces and barracks and monasteries, and charmingly clustered churches, and is paved throughout. At Nizhni, there are palaces, too, and churches and barracks, but more scattered, and there are acres, besides, of the great enclosure that are woods and grassy steeps and hollows, with a fine boulevard swinging, with the river-bend, around the higher terrace of the Kremlin hill, from which you look down across the open green and over the lower wall, to the Fair town, and the stretch of meadow-land beyond, green meadows with browning hay-cocks, edged by the white river-beach. In the misty distance, as always in a Russian landscape,.green and gilded domes rise above an enclosing convent wall. At all strategic points of the Nizhni Kremlin, crowning the high angles of the wall, jutting up from the low ones, are the sturdy old towers, square and round, flat and pointed, and along its broad top, protected by the crenelations, is a space for many men abreast, with steps and levels all turfed with wild grass. Along the wall we strolled for an hour, or lazily lay on its turf in the sun, watching below the weaving market crowds at the wharves, and within, the children chasing up and down the green hills, and playing in the grass-grown fountain-basins. And dreaming there, we forgot the Revolution, forgot the Bolsheviki, and were back in the post-mediaeval days, with the helmeted 64 warriors, and the patriotic maiden who sacrificed herself that the walls might be impregnable. For the tradition ran that to make them safe, a girl must voluntarily be buried alive beneath them. Nizhni was never conquered.

As we climbed to the top again up through the jungly ravine, and came to an open space in the angle of a palace and church, we sudednly returned to the present, on seeing a scattered group of Red soldiers loafing on the long stone steps and about the paved ploshchad. But after all, they were not so out of place in their peaked khaki helmets, for the uniform, it seems, was designed at the beginning of the war, after the ancient metal helmets. As there was too much distraction at the moment to bother with new uniforms, the design took shape only after the Revolution. Thus it was that the peaked caps of the Red soldiers looked to us quite in the picture of the ancient enclosure. The palaces have been smartened up to match the boulevard and the nature-made turf and woods, and are used for modern official purposes, though many of the barrack-buildings are still mediaeval in their shabbiness and dirty surroundings. But seeing the constant busy repairing and the everactive mop and broom, one feels here as everywhere the hopeful confidence that we have only to give the Sovyets time, and all will come up to standard.

p From Nizhni, of course, we had planned a little drift on Volga, but once aboard we grew more ambitious. Volga 65 —and the romantically exotic names of her mosqued and Kremlined cities—Kazan and Cimbirsk, Samara and Saratov, Astrakhan! Volga—and the Delta at the Caspian Sea. The river whose lovely shores have masked so recently the direst of all misery. We had enough money for tickets down the river, and surely somewhere we could draw on my Express Checks, to get back. So we gambled on it. We had left Nizhni in a grey and drizzling rain after the day of joyous sunshine on the Kremlin wall. A fortunate suspicion had warned us against “hard” on the boat, which carries four classes. As there were no rooms left, we were told to make ourselves at home in the second cabin, which also served as dining-room for continuous meals from tea at eight to supper at eleven. First come,—which happily included us,—first choice of leather-upholstered wall-seats for sleeping. Last come, what was left of floor-space. All accommodated themselves perfectly to the plan, collapsing with accustomed ease on the top of their luggage and bedding. The light-and-life of the cabin were two adorable and adored little bourgeois Jewish tots, freshly dressed every day, and alternately carressed and repressed by absorbed parents under the names of Mischa and Moula. It was hard to break into that closed family circle, but by persistence we occasionally lured the spoiled darlings into a moment’s coquetting with us. The third day, we passed on to single cabins where we have individual wash-basins which seem like sinful luxury, while new-comers from the river-stations occupy our places in the dining-dormitory and bid for the reluctant friendship of Mischa and Moula.

p Below, where we pass through alleys of sacked freight to get ashore at the village stations, lie and squat the thirds 66 and fourths, so thick in the semi-dark that we hardly dare step. "The iron heel,” "grinding the face of the poor,” these phrases threaten to become literal as we pick our way. But even here the new discipline holds sway, and the sweeping and floor-washing are constantly moving the mass around. This squalid crowd seems to make clear the terrible slowness of the task that confronts the Sovyets. From end to end of Russia, where is one to begin? In the organized centers, the building of model homes for industrial workers is well under way, but slowly, so very slowly the change must be made from the primitive life and the primitive psychology. My companion did not mind the contact as much as I. "We were all like that for a year and a half,” during the blockade,—worse than that, dirty and diseased from mouldy bread and no soap.

p And even in the old days, country life for all classes was primitive. "Often in the provinces, where my father held official positions under the Czar, the four of us, Father, Mother, Brother and myself, occupied one bedroom, and if a friend came to stay with me, why we just made her up another bed there.” "Did you ever,” I asked,—my idea of a wild adventure,—"sleep on the top of the stove?" "Oh often!" she laughed, "and there is a still lovelier place than that, a little shelf close up under the ceiling. We quarreled for that place.” She was quite at home in these conditions and among these people—her people. They did not look starved, even the children who slid aboard to beg, from the village-wharves. And further we could not investigate. While this is again a dry year, there is no anticipation of an acute famine, and Rykov has announced that the Government will be able to handle the situation.

67

p A good many joung soldiers are going down to Saratov, their headquarters. One fine tall one, seemingly full of vigor in spite of his sallow face, told us something of himself. He was a peasant and volunteered" in the Red Army at sixteen. Twice badly wounded and gassed, he is now only fit physically for the Military Commissariat. He has had no education, but does not show the lack of it, longs for the University but has not the necessary health, and is transferred South for the climate. His peasant father, stronger than he at sixty, has a good official position. These soldiers were given the first vacant cabin, a very large one, and can be seen playing cards by the open window, and heard constantly breaking into song. They all show contempt and some indignation toward the Neps traveling first, among them a private theater troupe going down to Astrakhan,—the men rather smart in Western clothes; the women, not so smart, make up for it by trequent changes of costume. Another fellow-passenger tells in smiling narration, as all these people seem to tell of the miseries they have passed through—when they tell them at all—of his exile in Siberia, where for eight years he lived in a village of half a dozen houses, mostly on raw fish; where there were three months of no day and three months of no night, and they traveled in the snow with dogs and reindeer. Must not such people feel after their long suffering and sacrifice for a distant ideal, that they are living now in an unreality?—that the sudden seeming realization of their hopes is only a figment of their exiled brooding?

p Approaching Kazan, we passed under the great bridge which the Red Army, under Trotzki, held against the Whites, saving the city. Kazan, we learned, would be our 68 first chance for funds, and we came out of the rain and saw it afar in hopeful morning sunshine,—too far alas, to reach. Level along the flat land lies Kazan, seven versts from the shore, but seeming to rest mistily like a dream city close to us on the cliffs. It is an old city, now capital of the Tatar Republic, and its inhabitants are chiefly Mohammedans. We wanted an hour ashore to see its Mosques and Kremlin, but there was not time to drive seven versts, and so Kazan remained to us a dream city, and we remained with only dream money. A verst? I don’t know. It’s so much more picturesque not to. Cimbirsk, the next important stop, is the birthplace of Lenin, and we planned surely to go ashore, but here the boat was late, and we were almost dragged back from the long gang plank which crossed the river sand when we attempted to rush over and at least set foot upon the sacred soil. And again we had no money and the necessity of eating until we reached Samara. At least it seemed to us a necessity. It is easy to guess that we reached Samara late for banks, and Saratov late, and Tzaritzin late. But meanwhile we have arranged a credit for meals on the boat, and have a rouble and 80 kopeks for melons to carry us through the thirsty days of heat along the desert shore. At every village station, the whole passenger list swarms over, and staggers back under the luscious fruit. Worse off than ourselves is a young girl going to her sister at Astrakhan, with nothing to eat, and having established the theory that this is necessary, we have put her also on our credit account.

p One of the great sights of the Volga is the watermelon crop. Boats and barges of them row and tow and chug up the stream. Below is a cargo of cotton or oil, but 69 always on top the pyramidal heaps of green and yellow melons. And heaps along the beaches, where the little row-boats take them off. From our easy-moving boat following the current, it looks like an impossible nightmare for the upstream row-boats to make headway. Two or three rowers they have, both men and women, each having apparently an alternate, resting on bulging sacks, while a standing figure trails a steering-oar behind. Volga is so wide and smooth and so heavy and slow. The great stream wriggles ponderously like a monster dinosaur through the flat land, making broad curves and sharp bends around hard jutting rock, and the steam-boat steers its course dexterously, from side to side, from sands to cliff, between the current buoys.

p Beyond Cimbirsk, we come to high wooded hills, far higher than they look, measured by the deceptive breadth of the river, with here and there rough rock-towers jutting out like Kremlin bastions. From Samara down are gleaming chalk-cliffs parted by narrow green ravines, and over these glimpses of yellow-flowered hillocks. These are perhaps the loveliest parts of the river, with sun-light and cloud-shadow giving the shifting light effects of our desert country on the sands and cliffs, and enameling with blue and green and purple the steep, bastioned hills. Often, looking back, the white chalk-cliffs, thrusting out in blunt points from the shore, stand like gleaming marble palaces commanding the reaches of the river. This SamarsKa Province is one of the regions that suffered most in the famine times.

p Rounding into the great "Samara Loop,” we see the Zhigouli Range come bluely into view over a dark green 70 bluff, and learn the romantic fact that here the best Russian beer is made, and takes its name from Zhigouli. We have some Zhigouli, of course, just as we celebrate the Volga at intervals with caviare. In the sinister light of the moon through storm-clouds we pass the cave of Stenka Razin, loved peasant-insurrectionist. Below, on the crowded afterdeck, in the full moonlight, every evening the peasants dance and sing to an accordian in a six-by-six cleared space in the midst of the crowd. Our young protegee is the star of the performance discarding with good-natured impatience partner after partner, who fails to stamp it according to her exacting fancy. From a group of young Tatars, balanced perilously outside the protecting rail, came up to us today the persistent higher notes of their monotonous singing. I had hoped to hear the "Song of the Volga Boatmen,” but like other folk, they have passed on to something else, while the old song is preserved by Shalyapin and the Victor records. Off the Volga it is said to be the most popular song in Russia.

p Below Saratov, on the river, lies the John Reed Colony of pioneer children, who have built their own Commune from beds to peasant ploughs, and raised many times as large a crop in their first dry year as the peasants about, because they got in their seed for the spring rains, while the peasants were celebrating their three Easter holidays. This is the Colony for which Anna Louise Strong is making her appeal for support. So few thousands would make them independent and able to carry on without further help. From here down, the stream constantly widens to the Delta.

Somewhere on the lower river, we saw dromedaries 71 sharing the work of the horses. "My compatriots,” my companion said, and I felt transported to the East. We are lost in space and time, with no map or news or calendar, and have learned only now that we are due tonight in Astrakhan. It is Sunday, and between us we have 31 kopeks. But we’ve seen Volga and we’ve come to Astrakhan.

p Arrived at Astrakhan in the early morning, having thriftily slept on the boat, we made our way up through the elbowing market crowds,—for Astrakhan is a bazaar every day, and in its lack of consciousness more interesting than a set exposition,—and learned that the infrequent train would leave the next morning at ten. We established ourselves confidently at the typical shabby, bare and clean hotel and went out to draw our money. But at three banks, including the Government establishment, we found it was their money and we couldn’t have it. No one had ever seen American Express checks. But they did cash a few American dollars I fortunately had, enough to pay our boat debt. Just here I will interpolate that the safest thing in Russia and the border countries,—if you don’t lose it—is simple American paper money. It seems also the only thing you don’t lose 4% on to the banks. But I think every sympathetic visitor feels as I do, a willingness to contribute that 4% to building up the Sovyet gold reserve.

p However, we could get no money at any percent, but 72 they agreed that possibly our thought was a bright one to ask help at Communist headquarters. To the local Party office we went and told our tale. With great confidence I produced my American credentials, telling of the constructive mission on which I had come. They looked impressed, but could not read even the Roman letters, and had never heard of an Express check, nor yet of a certified traveler who could not show his credentials in Russian. I should have had translations made, it seems, in Moscow. But they courteously accompanied us to the office of the Provincial Committee, where we were received by the very dignified and intellectual-looking Jewish Comrade in charge, who took himself and us and the situation very seriously. A black and handsome Tatar, and another Comrade, just Russian, and as simple-looking as an American collegeboy in contrast with his exotic companions, took us with extreme risibility. They had all heard of the Shtati, and wondered humorously or seriously that I should have come so far from there with untranslated credentials and no money. My passport did not interest them,—the proof of constructive purpose only. But they were good sports and lent a small sum, refusing the checks as security, but taking my written receipt. Thirty-five roubles, that is all we had the courage to ask, to come back "hard,” and provide bread and apples and cheese for the three days’ journey, and one square dinner of borshch and one square supper of caviare, with black bread, cheese and Zhigouli, before we started.

p Then we were free to ramble around the central town, very much in ruins from the civil war, and to encircle the great cathedral within the unguarded Kremlin, on its 73 high balcony, and to wander perilously over the upper floors of the shattered monastery, with its window-views out over the Delta lands. Our drive next day to the station was no less perilous, in one of the little droschkis suggesting perambulators, in which at best you keep your balance by clutching, with a half-fledged izvoschik who took no account of mud-holes in the sun-cracked flood-lands, but drove with terrifying directness, straight for his goal. In the evening, we had strolled along a tree-planted canalside, to a mosque, where the priest—if he is called that—came out and summoned to worship from the doorway. Within, a single line of worshipers went through their prostrations to the intoning of the priest on a monotonous falling third, with the perfect unison of a Walter Camp squad doing their daily dozen. It was really remarkable, considering that not one of them was young, how supple and alert they were, in kneeling, and unkneeling, prostrating and sitting on their heels. As in many religious observances probably the physical benefit is the real object of such flexions. We had been told that women now are allowed in the main church, instead of being segregated in a curtained gallery, so we went in and sat by a pillar on one of the beautiful rugs with which the spacious floor was covered. We soon found we could not vie with them in their rhythmic suppleness. Afterwards, at the door, they gathered around us cordially, and showed a child-like pleasure that we had slipped off our sandals to enter. Some of them accompanied us along the street until our ways parted. Here as in Moscow, it was noticeable that the Moslem youth like the Christian youth were not well represented in the places of worship.

74

p Traveling “hard” from Astrakhan to Saratov with no reserved place, was a very different experience from traveling hard in the North. Across the aisle from our open compartment for six, were two more shelves across the window, and in this eight-place division we had generally a dozen. All day long they ate melons and dried or fried fish, and enormous loaves of bread carried in sacks, a continuous performance. Their only implement was a pocketknife. The bread, clawed out from the loaf served as napkin after the fish had been torn with fingers and teeth. Everything was then neatly and deftly collected and disposed of, to the last bone and melon-seed, the seats mopped up with their luggage and polished off with their trousers-seats, then two or three passes of their hands into the depths of their trousers-pockets, and everything looked innocent and serene until the next station stop, when the merry round began again. We were crossing the Astrakhan desert in heat and dust and thirst, dromedaries slumped disdainfully across the tufted sand and at every station the melons were heaped up in long rows, at a few kopeks apiece, and everyone dashed for them. We thought we were doing well with a large one for two, but these people averaged two melons for one.

p All night there was a changing group who swung themselves up and down from shelf to shelf with the agility of monkeys, even as they ate with monkey deftness; or sat at the end of our lower bunks carefully off our feet, and all night long the coming and going of cigarette sparks in the dark bunks gave the compartment the aspect of an opium den. Most of them—they were all men—wore patched trousers, more patch than original, most of them 75 were young or middle-aged, workers on the railway on short jobs. Only two or three betrayed any knowledge of what the Government was at, or any interest, so little have they yet begun to think, but they were all gentle and considerate, and were just as decent as was humanly possible under the conditions, which are not their fault nor the fault of the present government. All this sordid poverty, inherited from the old regime, can be abolished only step by step as the industrial and agricultural life slowly develops. At intervals, the guard, man or woman, came through and roused us, to peer at the tickets with a candle-lantern, which supplemented one hanging at the end of the car.

p At Saratov—we had followed the Volga up again—we were ferried across to another train, and one dollar for place-cards for another night, gave us access to a first-class hard, with women and babies. My companion announced this maneuvre with triumph, my own feeling was tempered with doubts, not unfounded. Neither the babies nor the mothers left us in such immaculate isolation as the railway workers, for the baby in our compartment fed on fried chicken, and the mother was inertly oblivious of what happened after it had grasped the greasy bone. She was a pretty Kasak woman, whose husband, formerly officer in the army of the Czar, now holds an important position in the Red Army. Even in military positions, some use must be made of the old trained personnel for the present. Arrived at the Moscow station, the little Kasak woman’s peasant-maid took their luggage on her back, and when it was to be inspected for weight, they naively made use of us to divide the luggage and evade the tax. Shortly before 76 arrival, we glimpsed through the trees, large white patches of the datcha where Lenin passed the last year of his life.

p With us also for the last part of the journey was a young fellow from the Urals, whose acquaintance we had made at Saratov station, where I had acted as watchdog for his luggage, at his friendly confident request. He had served in the White, or Counter-revolutionary, army—poor child—for what could he know of the struggle and its purpose of liberation? After the "civil war,” he had been assigned as chauffeur to the American Relief. He was now on his way to Moscow, hoping to get into the University, not, I should judge because of any special intellectual qualifications, but because it had been the custom of his class. Now, arrived here, he finds there is very little chance for him. It is filled with the pick of the proletarian youth, struggling to fit themselves to serve the proletarian state. Our young man has charming, old-fashioned, provincial manners, says quaintly "Gramercy,” and formally kisses my hand. He seems like a chivalrous anachronism here in Red Moscow, in spite of the popular military breeches and boots he wears. His gentle "May I have the honor to call ?" sounds almost theatrical in contrast to the patronizing "Say, praps I’ll come round tomorrow,—or some day,” that I am so humbly grateful to hear from a favorite American Comrade. But to use a worn but fitting figure, the graceful moss that hangs on the old tree must come down to make way for the vigorous new growth. In maintaining a Revolution and feeding a country, one hasn’t time for Gramercy.

But gramercy for the Revolution and gramercy for the new hope ahead for all these gentle pathetic folk, whether or not in their unenlightenment they share the hope and the knowledge of the happier future.