XIIIOLD FRIENDS
I metAlexander Alexandrovitch Beekof, the hunter of Archangel at Moscow. He had purchased three fine pictures by our friend Pereplotchikof, and they stood in his room in the Gostinny Dvor in wooden packing cases. Alexander Alexandrovitch stood me a lunch at Martianitch’s in the Red Square on a meatless day—a merchant’s restaurant where you may see many antique Russian types of merchants wearing knee boots and blouses and longish hair. We had a nice dish of fish-pie (rastegai) with our soup, and though no wine was available, the bill, as I saw, for the two of us was twenty roubles, and three roubles more wentfor the tip. In that way war prosperity expressed itself. My friend had to spend many days in Moscow collecting boots in small parcels. As the Government allows no packing-cases with goods to be taken by train from Moscow to Archangel (I imagine fine art is exempted from this regulation), Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof had to buy some twenty portmanteaus to take his purchases of boots back to his native city.
Pereplotchikof the painter is not very well. Heart weakness deprived him of the use of his legs this summer. He was confined to his bed and felt very wretched. I spent many mornings and evenings sitting and talking to him. The doctors say that vegetarianism has been too much for his constitution. One evening I brought him a quantity of rich honey I had come across in a little shop in Moscow. He was delightedas a child, and honey he said was ideal food for him. In exchange for this gift he gave me an old cross which he had once picked up on a market stall.
Alexey Sergeitch came with me to visit Pereplotchikof one evening and was much touched to see the change in him. But we had a very lively talk of old days on the Dwina. Alexey Sergeitch is now a teacher of history in several secondary schools in Moscow. He has just published his first book, the fruit of some historical research, and he looks forward to writing other books of like character, so making a career in history. He has the directly opposite view to mine regarding Russia and we had many long and inconclusive debates on Church and State. His sister, Varvara Sergevna, is nurse in an immense military hospital on the Volhonka. I spent an evening up till midnight with her, helping to cut rolls oflinen for bandages with atrociously blunt scissors. Russia has few machines for this work. Every night thousands of Russian girls are arduously cutting linen as we did with Varvara.
Nicholas, my first Russian friend, whom I met in London ten years ago and tried to learn Russian from, the boy who invited me to spend my first Christmas in Russia at his father the deacon’s in Lisitchansk, is now settled down and married, and has a family at Kishtim in the Urals, where his knowledge of English has found him a place in the office of an Anglo-Russian mining company.
Nicholas and I lived with another poor student, three in a room, in Moscow—that was after the Christmas in the country. Our most intimate friend was a certain Sasha, a gaunt but happy student of philology. He used to bring stories and readthem aloud to our weekly student parties on Saturday evening. From him I heard first some of the stories of Kuprin and also Chekhof’s Dushetchka or “Little Soul,” which Mrs. Garnett has lately translated under the title of “The Darling”[6]—a famous story. Sasha has grown cold to Nicholas now, and I had lost sight of him, but the many references to my work in the Russian Press brought to his mind the idea that the Englishman he once knew was the same as the one now so well known. So he wrote to me, and I tried to see him this summer—married now and in good circumstances, working in the Russian Foreign Office.
Julia, of whom I wrote in “The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary,” as a type of a Martha, has had a year of pain, caught erysipelas from a servant, and this developedinto a sort of blood-poisoning. Sores appeared all over her body, and then one big sore threatening her with death; she has been, as it were, vivisected through the open wound all the summer, and felt that she herself must have cut up live animals for science’s sake in some previous existence, and is now living through the animals’ experience that her soul may really know what it means. She has been in terror lest her sisters should be infected from her and she has been afraid lest she should die and they be left without her motherly protection. Poor Julia! But I left her on a fair way to recovery. Little Lena is very well. The old lady, the Queen of Spades, is more frail and is suffering from the effects of a bad fall.
Varvara Ilyinitchna is much older, has lost a son, has had heart attacks, and is bound to take things more easily. Alexander Fedotch looks extremely well. Thedaughter is matron of a small hospital, and has a wonderful time with her men.
Amelia Vasschevina, the old grandmother, has sold the white house, has paid her debts and has a large margin over. I fear, however, high prices will whittle her little fortune of ready money away. Her daughter Masha, the despair of all doctors, suffering from an incurable internal complaint which has been diagnosed as cancer, appendicitis, neuritis, inflammation of the solar plexus and what not, and for which she has had all manner of treatment and swallowed all sorts of medicine, has recommenced her work as a dentist. And though suffering agonies of pain she has the nerve to doctor teeth and smile at the lugubrious and fearful faces of her patients. Poor Masha, she has been cut open and examined and sewn up again, mesmerised, prayed into, and this last spring a miracle worker wasbrought to consider her. He always carried about with him an Indian sword.
He said: “Don’t tell me what you think is the matter with her or what the symptoms are. That would only make it more difficult for me.” He came into her room took out a bit of glass from a waistcoat pocket, and looked at her face through it.
“You will live,” said he, and he dropped his glass and went away. “But I charge you nothing,” he added, and he brandished his sword as he went out at the door.
Loosha, of whom I have sometimes written, feels more happy than she has ever done before. What the secret is I do not know. But she has begun to write poetry.
Katia of Kief married the young lawyer. He was taken for the war, but the family used influence to bring him back to a safe job in the rear. I do not know what happened to discarded Boris.
Mme. Odintsefa is still keen on her evangelicals, and reads Spurgeon’s sermons with the same enthusiasm as in old days she read Mrs. Besant.