0194
0195
China left a curious impression upon my mind. The people are courteous and kindly, far more courteous than would be the same class of people in England, and yet I came back from the interior with a strong feeling that it is unsafe, not because of the general hostility of the people—they are not hostile—but because suffering and life count for so little. They themselves suffer and die by the thousand.
“What! Bring a daughter-in-law to see the doctor in the middle of the harvest! Impossible!” And yet they knew she was suffering agony, that seeing the doctor was her only chance of sight! But she did not get it. They were harvesting and no one could be spared!
What is the life then of a foreign barbarian more or less? These courteous, kindly, dirty folk who look upon one as a menagerie would look on with equal interest at one's death. They might stretch out a hand to help, just as a man in England might stop another from ill-treating a horse, though for one who would put himself out two would pass by with a shrug of the shoulders and a feeling that it wras no business of theirs. Every day of their lives the majority look upon the suffering of their women and think nothing of it. The desire of the average man is to have a wife who has so suffered. I do not know whether the keeping of the women in a state of subserviency has reacted upon the nation at large, but I should think it has hampered it beyond words. Nothing—nothing made me so ardent a believer in the rights of women as my visit to China.
“Women in England,” said a man to me the other day, a foreigner, one of our Allies, “deserve the vote, but the Continental women are babies. They cannot have it.” So are the Chinese women babies, very helpless babies indeed, and I feel, and feel very strongly indeed, that until China educates her women, makes them an efficient half of the nation, not merely man's toy and his slave, China will always lag behind in the world's progress.
Already China is split up into “spheres of influence.” Whether she likes it or not, she must realise that Russian misrule is paramount in the great steppes of the north; Japan rules to a great extent in the north-east, her railway from Mukden to Chang Ch'un is a model of efficiency; Britain counts her influence as the most important along the valley of the Yang Tze Kiang, and France has some say in Yunnan. I cannot help thinking that it would be a great day for China, for the welfare of her toiling millions, millions toiling without hope, if she were partitioned up among the stable nations of the earth—that is to say, between Japan, Britain and France. And having said so much, I refer my readers to Mr Farrer for the other point of view. It is diametrically opposed to mine.
At Tientsin I sweltered in the Astor House, and I put it on record that I found it hotter in Northern China than I did on the Guinea coast in West Africa. It was probably, of course, the conditions under which I lived, for the hotel had been so well arranged for the bitter winter it was impossible to get a thorough draught of air through any of the rooms. James Buchanan did not like it either, for in the British concessions in China dogs come under suspicion of hydrophobia and have always to be on the leash, wherefore, of course, I had to take the poor little chap out into the Chinese quarter before he could have a proper run, and he spent a great deal more time shut up in my bedroom than he or I liked.
But Tientsin was a place apart, not exactly Chinese as I know China—certainly not Europe; it remains in my mind as a place where Chinese art learns to accommodate itself to European needs. All the nations of the world East and West meet there: in the British quarter were the Sikhs and other Indian nationalities, and in the French the streets were kept by Anamites in quaint peaked straw hats. I loved those streets of Tientsin that made me feel so safe and yet gave me a delightful feeling of adventure—adventure that cost me nothing; and I always knew I could go and dine with a friend or come back and exchange ideas with somebody who spoke my own tongue. But Tientsin wasn't any good to me as a traveller. It has been written about for the last sixty years or more. I went on.
One night Buchanan and I, without a servant—we missed the servant we always had in China—wended our way down to the railway station and ensconced ourselves in a first-class carriage bound for Mukden. The train didn't start till some ungodly hour of the night, but as it was in the station I got permission to take my place early, and with rugs and cushions made myself comfortable and was sound asleep long before we started. When I wakened I was well on the way to my destination.
I made friends with a British officer of Marines who, with his sister, was coming back across Russia. He had been learning Japanese, and I corrected another wrong impression. The British do sometimes learn a language other than their own. At Mukden we dined and had a bath. I find henceforth that all my stopping-places are punctuated by baths, or by the fact that a bath was not procurable. A night and day in the train made one desirable at Mukden, and a hotel run by capable Japanese made it a delight. The Japanese, as far as I could see, run Manchuria; must be more powerful than ever now Russia is out of it; Kharbin is Russian, Mukden Japanese. The train from there to Chang Ch'un is Japanese, and we all travelled in a large open carriage, clean and, considering how packed it was, fairly airy. There was room for everybody to lie down, just room, and the efficient Japanese parted me from my treasured James Buchanan and put him, howling miserably, into a big box—rather a dirty box; I suppose they don't think much of animals—in another compartment. I climbed over much luggage and crawled under a good deal more to see that all was right with him, and the Japanese guards looked upon me as a mild sort of lunatic and smiled contemptuously. I don't like being looked upon with contempt by Orientals, so I was a little ruffled when I came back to my own seat. Then I was amused.
Naturally among such a crowd I made no attempt to undress for the night, merely contenting myself with taking off my boots. But the man next me, a Japanese naval officer, with whom I conversed in French, had quite different views. My French was rather bad and so was his in a different way, so we did not get on very fast. I fear I left him with the impression that I was an Austrian, for he never seemed to have heard of Australia. However, we showed each other our good will. Then he proceeded to undress. Never have I seen the process more nattily accomplished. How he slipped out of blue cloth and gold lace into a kimono I'm sure I don't know, though he did it under my very eyes, and then, with praiseworthy forethought, he took the links and studs out of his shirt and put them into a clean one ready for the morrow, stowed them both away in his little trunk, settled himself down on his couch and gave himself up to a cigarette and conversation. I smoked too—one of his cigarettes—and we both went to sleep amicably, and with the morning we arrived at Chang Ch'un, and poor little Buchanan made the welkin ring when he saw me and found himself caged in a barred box. However that was soon settled, and he told me how infinitely preferable from a dog's point of view are the free and easy trains of Russia and China to the well-managed ones of Japan.
These towns on the great railway are weird little places, merely scattered houses and wide roads leading out into the great plain, and the railway comes out of the distance and goes away into the distance. And the people who inhabit them seem to be a conglomeration of nations, perhaps the residuum of all the nations. Here the marine officer and his sister and I fell into the hands of a strange-looking individual who might have been a cross between a Russian Pole and a Chinaman, with a dash of Korean thrown in, and he undertook to take us to a better hotel than that usually-frequented by visitors to Chang Ch'un. I confess I wonder what sort of people do visit Chang Ch'un, not the British tourist as a rule, and if the principal hotel is worse than the ramshackle place where we had breakfast, it must be bad. Still it was pleasant in the brilliant warm sunshine, even though it was lucky we had bathed the night before at Mukden, for the best they could do here was to show us into the most primitive of bedrooms, the very first effort in the way of a bedroom, I should think, after people had given upk'angs, and there I met a very small portion of water in a very small basin alongside an exceedingly frowsy bed and made an effort to wash away the stains of a night's travel. Now such a beginning to the day would effectually disgust me; then, fresh from the discomforts of Chinese travel, I found it all in the day's work.
I found too that I had made a mistake and not brought enough money with me. Before I had paid for Buchanan's ticket I had parted with every penny I possessed and could not possibly get any more till I arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank at Kharbin. I am rather given to a mistake of that sort; I always feel my money is so much safer in the bank's charge than in mine.
We went on through fertile Manchuria and I saw the rich fields that coming out I had passed over at night. This train was Russian, and presently there came along a soldier, a forerunner of an officer inspecting passengers and carriages. Promptly his eye fell on Buchanan, who was taking an intelligent interest in the scenery—he always insisted on looking out of the window—and I, seeing he, the soldier, was troubled, tried to tell him my intentions were good and I would pay at Kharbin; but I don't think I made myself understood, for he looked wildly round the compartment, seized the little dog, pushed him in a corner and threw a cushion over him. Both Buchanan and I were so surprised we kept quite still, and the Russian officer looked in, saw a solitary woman holding out her ticket and passed on, and not till he was well out of the way did James Buchanan, who was a jewel, poke up his pretty little head and make a few remarks upon the enormity of smuggling little dogs without paying their fares, which was evidently what I was doing.
We arrived at Kharbin about nine o'clock at night, and as I stepped out on to a platform, where all the nations of the earth, in dirty clothes, seemed yelling in chorus, a man came along and spoke to me in English. The soldier who had aided and abetted in the smuggling of Buchanan was standing beside me, evidently expecting some little remembrance, and I was meditating borrowing from the officer of Marines, though, as they were going on and I was not, I did not much like it. And the voice in English asked did I want a hotel. I did, of course. The man said he was the courier of the Grand Hotel, but he had a little place of his own which was much better and he could make me very comfortable. Then I explained I could not get any money till the bank opened next day and he spread out his hands as a Chinaman might have done. “No matter, no matter,” he would pay, his purse was mine.
Would I go to his house?
Could I do anything else under the circumstances? And I promptly took him at his word and asked for a rouble—Kharbin is China, but the rouble was the current coin—and paid off the soldier for his services. I bade farewell to my friends and in a ramshackle droshky went away through the streets of Kharbin, and we drove so far I wondered if I had done wisely. I had, as it turned out.
But I heard afterwards that even in those days anything might have happened in Kharbin, where the population consists of Japanese and Chinese and Russians and an evil combination of all three, to say nothing of a sprinkling of rascals from all the nations of the earth.
“There is not,” said a man who knew it well, “a decent Chinaman in the whole place.”
In fact to all intents and purposes it is Russian. There were Russian students all in uniform in the streets, and bearded, belted drivers drove the droshkies with their extra horse in a trace beside the shafts, just as they did in Russia. Anyhow it seems to me the sins of Kharbin would be the vigorous primal sins of Russia, not the decadent sins of old-world China.
Kharbin when I was there in 1914 had 60,000 inhabitants and 25,000 Russian soldiers guarding the railway in the district. The Russian police forbade me to take photographs, and you might take your choice: Chinesehung hu tzesor Russian brigands would rob and slay you on your very doorstep in the heart of the town. At least they would in 1914, and things are probably worse now. All the signs are in Russian and, after the Chinese, looked to me at first as if I should be able to understand them, but closer inspection convinced me that the letters, though I knew their shape, had been out all night and were coming home in not quite the condition we would wish them to be. There is a Chinese town without a wall a little way over the plain—like all other Chinese towns, a place of dirt and smells—and there is a great river, the Sungari, a tributary of the Amur, on which I first met the magnificent river steamers of these parts. Badly I wanted to photograph them, but the Russian police said “No, no,” I would have to get a permit from the colonel in command before that could be allowed, and the colonel in command was away and was not expected back till the middle of next week, by which time I expected to be in Vladivostok, if not in Kharbarosvk, for Kharbin was hardly inviting as a place of sojourn for a traveller. Mr Poland, as he called himself, did his best for me. He gave me a fairly large room with a bed in it, a chair, a table and a broken-down wardrobe that would not open. He had the family washing cleared out of the bath, so that I bathed amidst the fluttering damp garments of his numerous progeny, but still there was a bath and a bath heater that with a certain expenditure of wood could be made to produce hot water; and if it was rather a terrifying machine to be locked up with at close quarters, still it did aid me to arrive at a certain degree of cleanliness, and I had been long enough in China not to be carping.
But it is dull eating in your bedroom, and I knew I had not done wisely, for even if the principal hotel had been uncomfortable—I am not saying it was, because I never went there—it would have been more amusing to watch other folks than to be alone.
The day after I arrived I called upon Mr Sly, the British consul, and I was amused to hear the very dubious sounds that came from his room when I was announced.
I cleared the air by saying hastily: “I'm not a distressed British subject and I don't want any money,” though I'm bound to say he looked kind enough to provide me with the wherewithal had I wanted it. Then he shook his head and expressed his disapproval of my method of arrival.
“The last man who fell into Kharbin like that,” said he, “I hunted for a week, and two days later I attended his funeral,” so badly had he been man-handled. But that man, it seems, had plenty of money; it was wisdom he lacked. My trouble was the other way, certainly as far as money was concerned. It would never have been worth anyone's while to harm me for the sake of my possessions. I had fallen into the hands of a Polish Jew named Polonetzky, though he called himself Poland to me, feeling, I suppose, my English tongue was not equal to the more complicated word, and he dwelt in the Dome Stratkorskaya—remember Kharbin is China—and I promised if he dealt well by me that I would recommend his boarding-house to all my friends bound for Kharbin. He did deal well by me. So frightened was he about me that he would not let me out of his sight, or if he were not in attendance his wife or his brother was turned on to look after me.
“I am very good friends,” said he, “with Mr Sly at present. I do not want anything to happen.”
Mr Sly, we found, knew one of my brothers and he very kindly asked me to dinner. That introduced me to the élite of the place, and after dinner—Chinese cooks are still excellent on the borders—we drove in his private carriage and ended the evening in the public gardens. The coachmen here are quite gorgeous affairs; no matter what their nondescript nationality—they are generally Russians, I think, though I have seen Chinamen, Tartars, driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi—they wear for full livery grey beaver hats with curly brims like Johnny Walker or the Corinthians in the days of the Regent. It took my breath away when I found myself bowling along behind two of these curly brimmed hats that I thought had passed away in the days of my grandfather.
The gardens at Kharbin are a great institution. There in the summer's evening the paths were all lined with lamps; there were open-air restaurants; there were bands and fluttering flags; there were the most excellent ices and insidious drinks of all descriptions, and there were crowds of gaily dressed people—Monte Carlo in the heart of Central Asia! Kharbin in the summer is hot, very hot, and Kharbin in the winter is bitter cold. It is all ice and snow and has a temperature that ranges somewhere down to 40° Fahrenheit below zero, and this though the sun shines brilliantly. It is insidious cold that sneaks on you and takes you unawares, not like the bleak raw cold of England that makes the very most of itself. They told me a tale of a girl who had gone skating and when she came off the ice found that her feet were frozen, though she was unaware of her danger and had thought them all right. Dogs are often frozen in the streets and Chinamen too, for the Chinaman has a way of going to sleep in odd places, and many a one has slept his last sleep in the winter streets of Kharbin—the wide straggling streets with houses and gardens and vacant spaces just like the towns of Australia. A frontier town it is in effect. We have got beyond the teeming population of China.
And then I prepared to go first east to Vladivostok and then north to Siberia, and I asked advice of both the British consul and my self-appointed courier, Mr Poland.
Certainly he took care of me, and the day before I started east he handed me over to his wife and suggested she should take me to the market and buy necessaries for my journey. It was only a little over twenty-four hours so it did not seem to me a matter of much consequence, but I felt it would be interesting to walk through the market. It was.
This class of market, I find, is very much alike all over the world because they sell the necessaries of life to the people and it is only varied by the difference of the local products. Kharbin market was a series of great sheds, and though most of the stalls were kept by Chinamen, it differed from a market in a Chinese town in the fact that huge quantities of butter and cheese and cream were for sale. Your true Chinaman is shocked at the European taste for milk and butter and cream. He thinks it loathsome, and many a man is unable to sit at table and watch people eat these delicacies. Just as, of course, he is shocked at the taste that would put before a diner a huge joint of beef or mutton. These things Chinese refinement disguises. I suspect the proletariat with whom I came in contact in Shansi would gladly eat anything, but I speak of the refined Chinaman. Here in this market, whether he was refined or not, he had got over these fancies and there was much butter and delicious soured cream for sale. My Polish Jewess and I laboured under the usual difficulty of language, but she made me understand I had better buy a basket for my provisions, a plate, a knife, a fork—I had left these things behind in China, not thinking I should want them—a tumbler and a couple of kettles. No self-respecting person, according to her, would dream of travelling in Siberia without at least a couple of kettles. I laid in two of blue enamel ware and I am bound to say I blessed her forethought many and many a time.
Then we proceeded to buy provisions, and here I lost my way. She engaged a stray Chinaman, at least I think he was a Chinaman, with a dash of the gorilla in him, to carry the goods, and I thought she was provisioning her family against a siege or that perhaps there was only one market a month in Kharbin. Anyhow I did not feel called upon to interfere. It didn't seem any concern of mine and she had a large little family. We bought bread in large quantities, ten cucumbers, two pounds of butter, two pounds of cream—for these we bought earthenware jars—two dozen bananas, ten eggs and two pounds of tea. And then I discovered these were the provisions for my journey to Vladivostok, twenty-seven hours away! I never quite knew why I bought provisions at all, for the train stopped at stations where there were restaurants even though there was no restaurant car attached to it. Mr Sly warned me to travel first class and I had had no thought of doing aught else, for travelling is very cheap and very good in Russia, but Mr Poland thought differently.
“I arrange,” said he, “I arrange, and you see if you are not comfortable.”
I am bound to say I was, very comfortable, for Buchanan and I had a very nice second-class carriage all to ourselves. At every station a conductor appeared to know if I wanted boiling water, and we had any amount of good things to eat, for the ten eggs had been hard boiled by Mrs “Poland,” and the bread and butter and cream and cucumbers and bananas were as good as ever I have tasted. I also had two pounds of loaf sugar, German beet, I think, and some lemons.
And so we went east through the wooded hills of Manchuria. They were covered with lush grass restfully green, and there were flowers, purple and white and yellow and red, lifting their starry faces to the cloudy sky, and a soft damp air blew in through the open window. Such a change it was after China, with its hard blue skies, brilliant sunshine and dry, invigorating air. But the Manchus were industrious as the Chinese themselves, and where there were fields the crops were tended as carefully as those in China proper, only in between were the pasture-lands and the flowers that were a delight to me, who had not seen a flower save those in pots since I came to China.
I spread out my rugs and cushions and, taking off my clothes and getting into a kimono—also bought in the Kharbin market; a man's kimono as the women's are too narrow—I slept peacefully, and in the morning I found we had climbed to the top of the ridge, the watershed, the pleasant rain was falling softly, all around was the riotous green, and peasants, Russian and Chinese, came selling sweet red raspberries in little baskets of green twigs.
And the flowers, the flowers of Siberia! After all I had heard about them, they were still something more beautiful than I could have hoped for; and then the rain passed, the life-giving rain, the rain that smoothed away all harshness and gave such a charm and a softness to the scenery. And it was vast. China was so crowded I never had a sense of vastness there; but this was like Australia, great stretches of land under the sky, green, rich lush green, and away in the distance was a dim line of blue hills. Then would come a little corrugated-iron-roofed town sprawled out over the mighty plain, a pathway to it across the surrounding green, and then the sun came out and the clouds threw great shadows and there was room to see the outline of their shapes on the green grass.
There were Chinese still on the stations, but they were becoming more and more Russianised. They still wore queues, but they had belted Russian blouses and top-boots, and they mixed on friendly terms with flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Russians similarly attired. And the evening shadows gathered again and in the new world we steamed into Vladivostok.
The Russians I came across did not appreciate fresh air. The porter of a hotel captured me and Buchanan, and when we arrived on a hot July night I was shown into a bedroom with double windows hermetically sealed and the cracks stopped up with cotton wool!
I protested vehemently and the hotel porter looked at me in astonishment. Tear down those carefully stopped-up cracks! Perish the thought. However, I persuaded him down that cotton wool must come, and he pulled it down regretfully. I called at the British consulate next day and asked them to recommend me to the best hotel, but they told me I was already there and could not better myself, so I gave myself up to exploring the town in the Far East where now the Czech Slovaks have established themselves.
It is a beautifully situated town set in the hills alongside a narrow arm of the sea, rather a grey sea with a grey sky overhead, and the hills around were covered with the luxuriant green of midsummer, midsummer in a land where it is winter almost to June. The principal buildings in Vladivostok are rather fine, but they are all along the shore, and once you go back you come into the hills where the wood-paved streets very often are mere flights of steps. It is because of that sheltered arm of the sea that here is a town at all.
Along the shore are all manner of craft. The British fleet had come on a visit, and grey and grim the ships lay there on the grey sea, like a Turner picture, with, for a dash of colour, the Union Jacks. The Russian fleet was there too, welcoming their guests, and I took a boat manned by a native of the country, Mongolian evidently, with, of course, an unknown tongue, but whether he was Gold or Gilyak I know not. He was a good boatman, for a nasty little sea got up and James Buchanan told me several times he did not like the new turn our voyaging had taken, and then, poor little dog, he was violently sick. I know the torments of sea-sickness are not lightly to be borne, so after sailing round the fleets I went ashore and studied the shipping from the firm land.
I was glad then that Mr Sly at Kharbin had insisted that I should see the Russian port. The whole picture was framed in green, soft tender green, edged with grey mist, and all the old forgotten ships of wood, the ships that perhaps were sailed by my grandfather in the old East India Company, seemed to have found a resting-place here. They were drawn up against the shore or they were going down the bay with all their sails set, and the sunlight breaking through the clouds touched the white sails and made them mountains of snow. There was shipbuilding going on too, naturally—for are there not great stores of timber in the forests behind?—and there were ships unloading all manner of things. Ships brought vegetables and fruit; ships brought meat; there were fishing-boats, hundreds of them close against each other along the shore, and on all the small ships, at the mast-heads, were little fluttering white butterflies of flags. What they were there for I do not know, or what they denoted. Oh, the general who commands the Czech Slovaks has a splendid base. I wish him all success. And here were the sealing-ships, the ships that presently would go up to the rookeries to bring away the pelts.
One of my brothers was once navigating lieutenant on the British ship that guarded the rookeries “north of 53°,” and I remembered, as Buchanan and I walked along the shore, the tales he had told me of life in these parts. His particular ship had acquired two sheep, rather an acquisition for men who had lived long off the Chinese coast, and had a surfeit of chickens; so while they were eating one, thinking to save the other a long sea voyage they landed him on an island, giving him in charge of the man, an Aleut Indian, my brother called him, who ruled the little place. Coming back they were reduced to salt and tinned food, but they cheered themselves with thoughts of the mutton chops that should regale them when they met again their sheep. Alas for those sailor-men! They found the Indian, but the sheep was not forthcoming.
His whilom guardian was most polite. He gave them to understand he was deeply grieved, but unfortunately he had been obliged to slay the sheep as he was killing the fowls!
The ward-room mess realised all too late that mutton was appreciated in other places than on board his Majesty's ships.
I thought all the races of the earth met in Kharbin, but I don't know that this port does not run it very close. There were Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Koreans in horsehair hats and white garments; there were the aboriginal natives of the country and there were numberless Germans. And then, in July, 1914, these people, I think, had no thought of the World's War.
And here I came across a new way of carrying, for all the porters had chairs strapped upon their backs and the load, whatever it was, was placed upon the chair. Of all ways I have seen, that way strikes me as being the best, for the weight is most evenly distributed. Most of the porters, I believe, were Koreans, though they did not wear white; nor did they wear a hat of any description; their long black, hair was twisted up like a woman's, but they were vigorous and stalwart. We left weakness behind us in China. Here the people looked as if they were meat-fed, and though they might be dirty—they generally were—they all looked as if they had enough.
Always the principal streets were thronged with people. At night the town all lighted up is like a crescent of sparkling diamonds flung against the hill-sides, and when I went to the railway station to take train for Kharbarosvk, thirty hours away, at the junction of the Ussuri and the Amur, that large and spacious building was a seething mass of people of apparently all classes and all nationalities, and they were giving voice to their feelings at the top of their lungs. Everybody, I should think, had a grievance and was makin the most of it. I had not my capable Mr Poland to arrange for me, so I went first class—the exact fare I have forgotten, but it was ridiculously low—and Buchanan and I had a compartment all to ourselves. Indeed I believe we were the only first-class passengers. I had my basket and my kettles and I had laid in store of provisions, and we went away back west for a couple of hours, and then north into the spacious green country where there was room and more than room for everybody.
All the afternoon we went back on our tracks along the main line, the sea on one side and the green country, riotous, lush, luxuriant, on the other, till at last we reached the head of the gulf and took our last look at the Northern Sea; grey like a silver shield it spread before us, and right down to the very water's edge came the vivid green. And then we turned inland, and presently we left the main line and went north. Above was the grey sky, and the air was soft and cool and delicious. I had had too much stimulation and I welcomed, as I had done the rains after the summer in my youth, the soft freshness of the Siberian summer.
There were soldiers everywhere, tall, strapping, virile Russians; there were peasants in belted, blouses, with collars all of needlework; and there were Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and the natives of the country, men with a strong Mongolian cast of countenance. The country itself was strangely empty after teeming China, but these all travelled by train or were to be found on the railway stations and at the fishing stations that we passed, but apparently I was the only bloated aristocrat who travelled first class. In normal times this made travelling fairly easy in Russia, for it was very cheap and you could generally get a carriage to yourself.
Oh! but it was lovely; the greenness of the country was a rest to eyes wearied with the dust and dirt of China. And there were trees—not trees denuded of all but enough timber to make a bare livelihood possible, but trees growing luxuriantly in abundant leaf after their own free will, oaks and firs and white-stemmed, graceful birches bending daintily before the soft breeze. At the stations the natives, exactly like Chinamen, dirty and in rags, brought strawberries for sale; and there were always flowers—purple vetches and gorgeous red poppies, tall foxgloves and blue spikes of larkspur. The very antithesis of China it was, for this was waste land and undeveloped. The very engines were run with wood, and there were stacks of wood by the wayside waiting to be burnt. I was sorry—I could not but be sorry. I have seen my own people cut down the great forests of Western Victoria, and here were people doing the same, with exactly the same wanton extravagance, and in this country, with its seven months of bitter winter, in all probability the trees take three times as long to come to maturity. But it is virgin land, this glorious fertile country, and was practically uninhabited till the Russian Government planted here and there bands of Cossacks who, they say, made no endeavour to develop the land. The Koreans and the Japanese and the Chinese came creeping in, but the Russians made an effort to keep them out. But still the population is scanty. Always, though it was before the war, there were soldiers—soldiers singly, soldiers in pairs, soldiers in little bands; a horseman appeared on a lonely road, he was a soldier; a man came along driving a cart, he was a soldier; but the people we saw were few, for the rigours of this lovely land in the winter are terrible, and this was the dreaded land where Russia sent her exiles a long, long way from home.
Farther we went into the hills; a cuckoo called in the cool and dewy morning; there were lonely little cottages with wooden roofs and log walls; there were flowering creepers round the windows, and once I saw a woman's wistful face peeping out at the passing train, the new train that at last was bringing her nearer the old home and that yet seemed to emphasise the distance. We went along by a river, the Ussuri, that wound its way among the wooded green hills and by still pools of water that reflected in their depths the blue sky, soft with snow-white clouds. A glorious land this land of exile! At the next station we stopped at the people were seated at a table having a meal under the shade of the trees. Then there was a lonely cross of new wood; someone had been laid in his long last home in the wilderness and would never go back to Holy Russia again; and again I thought of the woman's wistful face that peered out of the flower-bordered window.
This is a new line. Formerly the way to Kharbarosvk was down the Amur river from the west, and that, I suppose, is why all this country of the Amur Province south and east of the river is so lonely.
As we neared Kharbarosvk came signs of settlement, the signs of settlement I had been accustomed to in Australia. There were tree stumps, more and more, and anything more desolate than a forest of newly cut tree stumps I don't know. It always spells to me ruthless destruction. I am sure it did here, for they cut down recklessly, sweeping all before them. It seemed to cry out, as all newly settled land that ever I have seen, and I have seen a good deal, the distaste of the people who here mean to make their homes. These are not our trees, they say; they are not beautiful like the trees of our own old home; let us cut them down, there are plenty; by and by when we have time, when we are settled, we will plant trees that really are worth growing. We shall not see them, of course, our children will benefit little; but they will be nice for our grandchildren, if we hold on so long. But no one believes they will stay so long; they hope to make money and go back. Meanwhile they want the timber, but they neglect to plant fresh trees.
They wanted the timber to build Kharbarosvk. This is a town of the outposts, a frontier town; there are no towns like it in the British Isles, where they value their land and build towns compactly, but I have seen its counterpart many a time in Australia, and I know there must be its like in America and Canada. It straggled all along the river bank, and its wide streets, streets paved, or rather floored, here and there with planks of wood, were sparsely planted with houses. In one respect Australian towns of the frontier are much wiser. When there is a train they do build their stations with some regard for the comfort and convenience of the inhabitants. In Russia wherever I have been the railway station is a long distance, sometimes half-an-hour's drive, from the town it serves. I suppose it is one of the evils of the last bad regime and that in the future, the future which is for the people, it will be remedied, but it is difficult to see what purpose it serves. I had to get a droshky to the hotel. We drove first along a country road, then through the wide grass-grown streets of the town, and I arrived at the principal hotel, kept by a German on Russian lines, for the restaurant was perfectly distinct from the living-rooms. I put it on record it was an excellent restaurant; I remember that cold soup—the day was hot—and that most fragrant coffee still.
From the windows of my bedroom I saw another of the world's great rivers. I looked away over a wide expanse of water sparkling in the sunshine: it was the junction of the Ussuri and the Amur, and it was like a great lake or the sea. It was very, very still, clear as glass, and the blue sky and white clouds were reflected in it, and there were green islands and low green banks. All was colour, but soft colour without outlines, like a Turner picture.
The Amur is hard frozen for about five months of the year and for about two more is neither good solid ice nor navigable water. It is made by the joining of the Shilka and the Aigun in about lat. 53° N. 121° E., and, counting in the Shilka, must be nearly three thousand miles in length, and close on two thousand miles have I now travelled. I don't know the Amur, of course, but at least I may claim to have been introduced to it, and that, I think, is more than the majority of Englishmen may do. And oh, it is a mighty river! At Kharbarosvk, over a thousand versts—about six hundred and forty miles—from the sea, it is at least a mile and a third wide, and towards the mouth, what with backwaters and swamps, it takes up sometimes about forty miles of country, while the main channel is often nearly three miles wide. It rises in the hills of Trans-Baikal—the Yablonoi Mountains we used to call them when I was at school. Really I think it is the watershed that runs up East Central Siberia and turns the waters to the shallow Sea of Okhotsk; and it cuts its way through wooded hills among rich land hardly as yet touched by agriculture, beautiful, lovely hills they are, steep and wooded. It climbs down into the flat country and then again, just before it reaches the sea, it is in the hills, colder hills this time, though the Amur falls into the sea on much the same parallel of latitude as that which sees it rise, only it seems to me that the farther you get east the colder and more extreme is the climate. For Nikolayeusk at the mouth is in the same latitude as London, but as a port it is closed for seven months of the year. True, the winter in Siberia is lovely, bright, clear cold, a hard, bright clearness, but the thermometer is often down below -40°
Fahrenheit, and when that happens life is difficult for both man and beast. No wonder it is an empty river. The wonder to me is that there should be so much life as there is. For in those five months that it is open fine large steamers run from Nikolayeusk by Ivharbarosvk to Blagovesehensk, and smaller ones, but still rather fine, to Stretensk, where river navigation, for steamers of any size at any rate, ceases. There are the two months, April-May, September-October, when the river cannot be used at all, and there are the winter months when it may be, and is to a certain extent, used as a road, but with the thermometer down far below zero no one is particularly keen on travelling. It has its disadvantages. So most of the travelling is done in the summer months and in 1914 the steamers were crowded. Now, I suppose, they are fighting there. It is a country well worth fighting for.
It was a curious contrast, the lonely empty river and the packed steamer. It was an event when we passed another; two made a crowd; and very, very seldom did we pass more than two in a day. But it was delightful moving along, the great crowded steamer but a puny thing on the wide river, the waters still and clear, reflecting the blue sky and the soft white clouds and the low banks far, far away. When there were hills they were generally closer, as if the river had had more trouble in cutting a passage and therefore had not had time to spread itself as it did in the plain country. The hills were densely wooded, mostly with dark firs, with an occasional deciduous tree showing up brightly among the dark foliage, and about Blagovesehensk there is a beautiful oak known as the velvet oak, the wood of which is much sought for making furniture. However dense the forest, every here and there would be a wide swath of green bare of trees—a fire brake; for these forests in the summer burn fiercely, and coming back I saw the valleys thick with the curling blue wood smoke, smelt the aromatic smell of the burning fir woods, and at night saw the hills outlined in flames. It was a gorgeous sight, but it is desperately destructive for the country, especially a country where the wood grows so slowly. But at first there were no fires, and what struck me was the vastness and the loneliness of the mighty river. I had the same feeling on the Congo in the tropics, a great and lonely river with empty banks, but that was for a distance under two hundred miles. Here in the north the great lonely river went wandering on for ten times as far, and still the feeling when one stood apart from the steamer was of loneliness and grandeur. Man was such a small thing here. At night a little wind sighed over the waters or swept down between the hills; round the bows the water rose white; there was a waste of tossing water all round, under a lowering sky, and the far-away banks were lost in the gloom. A light would appear, perhaps two lights shining out of the darkness, but they only emphasised the loneliness. A wonderful river!
The navigation of the river is a profession in itself. There is a school for the navigators at Blagoveschensk where they are properly trained. All along we came across the red beacons that mark the way, while beside them in the daytime we could see the cabins of the lonely men who tended them.
Truly a voyage down the Amur in summer is not to be easily forgotten, and yet, sitting here writing about it in my garden in Kent, I sometimes wonder did I dream it all, the vastness and the loneliness and the grandeur that is so very different from the orchard land wherein is set my home. You do not see orchards on the Amur, the climate is too rigorous, and I doubt if they grow much beyond berries, a blue berry in large quantities, raspberries, and coming back we bought cucumbers.
Oh, but it was lovely on that river. Dearly should I like to share its delights with a companion who could discuss it with me, but somehow it seems to be my lot to travel alone.
Not, of course, that I was really alone. Though the steamers were few, perhaps because they were few, they were crowded. There were two companies on the river, the Sormovo or quick-sailing company, and the Amur Company; and I hereby put it on record that the Amur Company is much the best. TheJohn Cockerill, named after some long-dead English engineer who was once on the Amur, is one of the best and most comfortable.
At Kharbarosvk, finding the steamer did not leave till the evening of the next day, I had naturally gone to a hotel. It seemed the obvious thing to do. But I was wrong. The great Russian steamship companies, with a laudable desire to keep passengers and make them comfortable, always allow a would-be traveller to spend at least two days on board in the ports, paying, of course, for his food. And I, who had only come about thirty-six hours too soon, had actually put up at a hotel, with theJohn Cockerilllying at the wharf. The Russo-Asiatic Bank, as represented by a woman clerk, the only one there who could speak English, was shocked at my extravagance and said so. These women clerks were a little surprise for me, for in 1914 I was not accustomed to seeing women in banks, but here in Eastern Siberia—in Vladivostok, Kharbarosvk, and all the towns of the Amur—they were as usual as the men.
TheJohn Cockerillsurprised me as much as I surprised the bank clerk. To begin with, I didn't realise it was theJohn Cockerill, for I could not read the Russian letters, and at first I did not recognise the name as pronounced by the Russians. She was a very gorgeous, comfortable ship, with a dining saloon and a lounge gorgeous in green velvet. And yet she was not a post steamer, but spent most of her time drawing barges laden with cargo, and stopped to discharge and take in at all manner of lonely little ports on the great river. She was a big steamer, divided into four classes, and was packed with passengers: Russians in the first, second and third class, with an occasional German or Japanese, and in the fourth an extraordinary medley of poorer Russians, Chinese and Gilyaks and Golds, the aboriginals of the country, men with a Mongolian east of countenance, long coarse blaek hair, very often beards, and dirty—the ordinary poor Chinaman is clean and tidy beside them.
But the first class was luxurious. We had electric light and hot and cold water. The cabins were not to hold more than two, and you brought your own bedding. I dare say it could have been hired on the steamer, but the difficulty of language always stood in my way, and once away from the seaboard in North-Eastern Asia the only other European language beside Russian that is likely to be understood is German, and I have no German. I was lucky enough on theJohn Cockerillto find the wife of a Russian colonel who spoke a little English. She, with her husband, was taking a summer holiday by journeying up to Nikolayeusk, and she very kindly took Buchanan and me under her wing and interpreted for us. It was very nice for me, and the only thing I had to complain of on that steamer was the way in which the night watch promenading the deek shut my window and slammed to the shutters. They did it every night, with a care for my welfare I could have done without. In a river steamer the cabins are all in the centre with the deck round, and the watch evidently could not understand how any woman could really desire to sleep under an open window. I used to get up early in the morning and walk round the decks, and I found that first and second class invariably shut their windows tight, though the nights were always just pleasantly cool, and consequently those passages between the cabins smelt like a menagerie, and an ill-kept menagerie at that. They say Russians age early and invariably they are of a pallid complexion. I do not wonder, now that I have seen their dread of fresh air. Again and again I was told: “Draughts are not good!” Draughts! I'd rather sleep in a hurricane than in the hermetically sealed boxes in which those passengers stowed themselves on board the river steamers. On theJohn Cockerillthe windows of the dining saloon and the lounge did open, but on the steamer on which I went up the river, theKanovina, one of the “Sormovo” Company, and the mail steamer, there was only one saloon in the first class. We had our meals and we lived there. It was a fine large room placed for'ard in the ship's bows, with beautiful large windows of glass through which we could see excellently the scenery; but those windows were fast; they would not open; they were not made to open. The atmosphere was always thick when I went in for breakfast in the morning, and I used to make desperate efforts to get the little windows that ran round the top opened. I could not do it myself, as you had to get on the roof of the saloon, the deck where the look-out stood, and anyhow they were only little things, a foot high by two feet broad. But such an innovation was evidently regarded as dangerous. Besides the fact that draughts were bad, I have been assured that perhaps it was going to rain—the rain couldn't come in both sides—and at night I was assured they couldn't be opened because the lights would be confusing to other steamers!
Nobody seemed to mind an atmosphere you could have cut with a knife. I am sure if the walls had been taken away it would have stood there in a solid block—a dark-coloured, high-smelling block, I should think. I gave up trying to do good to a community against its will and used to carry my meals outside and have them on the little tables that were dotted about the deck.
After all, bar that little difficulty about the air—and certainly if right goes with the majority I have no cause of complaint, I was in a minority of one—those steamers made the most comfortable and cheapest form of travelling I have ever undertaken. From Kharbarosvk to Nikolayeusk for over three days' voyage my fare with a first-class cabin to myself was twelve roubles—about one pound four shillings. I came back by the mail steamer and it was fifteen roubles—about one pound ten shillings. This, of course, does not include food. Food on a Russian steamer you buy as you would on a railway train. You may make arrangements with the restaurant and have breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner for so much a day; or you may have each meal separate and pay for it as you have it; or you may buy your food at the various stopping-places, get your kettles filled with hot water for a trifling tip, and feed yourself in the privacy of your own cabin. I found the simplest way, having no servant, was to pay so much a day—five shillings on the big steamers, four shillings on the smaller one—and live as I would do at a hotel. The food was excellent on the Amur Company's ships. We had chicken and salmon—not much salmon, it was too cheap—and sturgeon. Sturgeon, that prince of fish, was a treat, and caviare was as common as marmalade used to be on a British breakfast-table. It was generally of the red variety that we do not see here and looked not unlike clusters of red currants, only I don't know that I have ever seen currants in such quantities. I enjoyed it very much till one day, looking over the railing into the stern of the boat, where much of the food was roughly prepared—an unwise thing to do—I saw an extremely dirty woman of the country, a Gilyak, in an extremely dirty garment, with her dirty bare arms plunged to the elbow in the red caviare she was preparing for the table. Then I discovered for a little while that I didn't much fancy caviare. But I wish I had some of that nice red caviare now.
The second class differed but little from the first. There was not so much decoration about the saloons, and on theJohn Cockerill, where the first class had two rooms, they had only one; and the food was much the same, only not so many courses. There was plenty, and they only paid three shillings a day for the four meals. The people were much the same as we in the first class, and I met a girl from Samara, in Central Russia, who spoke a little French. She was a teacher and was going to Nikolayeusk for a holiday exactly as I have seen teachers here in England go to Switzerland.
But between the first and second and the third and fourth class was a great gulf fixed. They were both on the lower deck, the third under the first and the fourth under the second, while amidships between them were the kitchens and the engines and the store of wood for fuel. The third had no cabins, but the people went to bed and apparently spent their days in places like old-fashioned dinner-wagons; and they bought their own food, either from the steamer or at the various stopping-places, and ate it on their beds, for they had no saloon. The fourth class was still more primitive. The passengers, men, women and children, were packed away upon shelves rising in three tiers, one above the other, and the place of each man and woman was marked out by posts. There was no effort made to provide separate accommodation for men and women. As far as I could see, they all herded together like cattle.
The ship was crowded. The Russian colonel's wife and I used to walk up and down the long decks for exercise, with Buchanan in attendance, she improving her English and I learning no Russian. It is evidently quite the custom for the people of the great towns of the Amur to make every summer an excursion up the river, and the poorer people, the third and fourth class, go up to Nikolayeusk for the fishing. Hence those shelves crowded with dirty folk. There were troughs for washing outside the fourth class, I discovered, minor editions of our luxurious bathrooms in the first class, but I am bound to say they did not have much use. Washing even in this hot weather, and it certainly was pleasantly warm, was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The only drawback to the bathrooms in the first class, from my point of view, was their want of air. They were built so that apparently there was no means of getting fresh air into them, and I always regarded myself as a very plucky woman when in the interests of cleanliness I had a bath. The hot water and the airlessness always brought me to such a condition of faintness that I generally had to rush out and lie on the couch in my cabin to recover, and then if somebody outside took it upon them to bang to the window I was reduced to the last gasp.
TheJohn Cockerillwas run like a man-of-war. The bells struck the hours and half-hours, the captain and officers were clad in white and brass-bound, and the men were in orthodox sailor's rig. One man came and explained to me—he spoke no tongue that I could understand, but his meaning was obvious—that Buchanan was not allowed on the first-class deck, the rules and regulations, so said the colonel's wife, said he was not; but no one seemed to object, so I thought to smooth matters by paying half-a-rouble; then I found that every sailor I came across apparently made the same statement, and having listened to one or two, at last I decided to part with no more cash, and it was, I suppose, agreed that Buchanan had paid his footing, for they troubled me no more about him.
Three or four times a day we pulled up at some little wayside place, generally only two or three log-houses with painted doors or windows, an occasional potato patch and huge stacks of wood to replenish the fuel of the steamer, and with much yelling they put out a long gangway, and while the wood was brought on board we all went ashore to see the country. The country was always exactly alike, vast and green and lonely, the sparse human habitations emphasising that vastness and loneliness. The people were few. The men wore belted blouses and high boots and very often, though it was summer, fur caps, and the women very voluminous and very dirty skirts with unbelted blouses, a shawl across their shoulders and a kerchief on their unkempt hair. They were dirty; they were untidy; they were uneducated; they belonged to the very poorest classes; and I think I can safely say that all the way from Kharbarosvk to Nikolayeusk the only attempt at farming I saw was in a few scattered places where the grass had been cut and tossed up into haycocks. And yet those people impressed upon me a sense of their virility and strength, a feeling that I had never had when moving among the Chinese, where every inch of land—bar the graves—is turned to good account. Was it the condition of the women? I wonder. I know I never saw one of those stalwart women pounding along on her big flat feet without a feeling of gladness and thankfulness. Here at least was good material. It was crude and rough, of course, but it was there waiting for the wheel of the potter. Shall we find the potter in the turmoil of the revolution and the war?
We went on, north, north with a little of east, and it grew cooler and the twilight grew longer. I do not know how other people do, but I count my miles and realise distances from some distance I knew well in my youth. So I know that from Kharbarosvk to Nikolaycusk is a little farther away than is Melbourne from Sydney; and always we went by way of the great empty land, by way of the great empty river. Sometimes far in the distance we could see the blue hills; sometimes the hills were close; but always it was empty, because the few inhabitants, the house or two at the little stopping-places where were the piles of wood for the steamer, but emphasised the loneliness and emptiness. You could have put all the people we saw in a street of a suburb of London and lost them, and I suppose the distance traversed was as far as from London to Aberdeen. It was a beautiful land, a land with a wondrous charm, but it is waiting for the colonist who will dare the rigours of the winter and populate it.
At last we steamed up to the port of Nikolayeusk, set at the entrance of the shallow Sea of Okhotsk, right away in the east of the world. When I set foot upon the wharf among all the barrels with which it was packed I could hardly believe I had come so far east, so far away from my regular beat. One of my brothers always declares I sent him to sea because my sex prevented me from going, and yet here I was, in spite of that grave disadvantage, in as remote a corner of the earth as even he might have hoped to attain.
It was a July day, sunny and warm. They had slain an Austrian archduke in Serbia and the world was on the verge of the war of the ages, but I knew nothing of all that. I stepped off the steamer and proceeded to investigate Nikolayeusk, well satisfied with the point at which I had arrived.