LI
He saw something of the melodrama of Moscow in the Trubnaya Market, which had been opened again, owing to Lenin’s new law allowing private trading. Until that time, all private barter had been forbidden under severe penalties, yet it had gone on secretly between city folk and peasants and, as Bertram found afterwards, there was hardly a man or woman in Moscow or Petrograd, outside the class of Soviet officials, who had not been imprisoned for this “crime.” Now it was done publicly, and legally.
Bertram walked through the market which covered a great square with dilapidated houses, pock-marked by bullet-holes, on each side. There were rows of wooden booths with room enough between them for three people to walk abreast, all crowded with peasant folk in their sheepskins. They were selling the produce of their little farmsteads, and the food made a brave show in the capital city of a famine-stricken land. Bertram saw plenty of meat, butter, cheese, and bread. For those who had paper money in big enough bundles, here was nourishment enough.
There were other people besides peasants. Standing on the outer edge of the wooden rows, were long lines of men and women—mostly women—who, he saw at a glance, were not peasants. Some of them were in peasant dress, but their faces could not disguise a heritage of education and gentility. Others wore the clothes of the old régime, of bourgeoisie and Western fashion—black dresses, frayed and worn and grease-stained, leather boots, down at heel, or broken at the toes, hats which had come originally, perhaps, from smart modistes in the Nevsky Prospekt, or even from Paris, a bit of lace at the throat and wrists.
These ladies, for they were that, stood in the market-place holding out the last relics of their former state—ermine stoles, fur tippets, embroidered slippers, fine linen, old boots (less broken than those they wore), cloth jackets, silk petticoats, trinkets with glittering stones, gold lockets, rings, lace, embroidery, perfumes, combs, hair pins, brooches. Some of them seemed hardly able to stand, and were thin and weak and haggard. Bertram noticed their hands, delicate and finely shaped, but grimed with dirt of hard work and lack of soap. Gipsy hands of patrician women. They avoided his eyes when he looked at them. They seemed startled by his own appearance, knew him instantly as a man of the class that was once theirs, and shrank from his scrutiny.
One girl, younger than the others, flamed scarlet at his glance, and turned her head away with visible distress. He did not look at her again, in order to avoid this hurt to her pride, and indeed he had a sense of shame in walking down the lines of those women, scrutinising their faces, witnessing this public humiliation of their pride. Yet he had an intense wish to get into conversation with them, to find out their way of life. They were the last of the old régime within the frontiers of Russia, less lucky than the Countess Lydia and her sister, and all the crowds of émigrés who had escaped in time. What stories they would have to tell! What agonies they must have suffered before arriving at this market-place!
He stood in front of an elderly woman who was holding out a little tray on which was a gilt crucifix. She had a thin face, with grey hair almost white, beneath a little black bonnet. He asked the price of her crucifix, speaking in French, and at his question her hands trembled so that she could hardly hold the tray.
“Why do you speak to me in French?” she asked, replying in the same language.
“I guessed you spoke French. And I don’t know a word of Russian.”
“You are not French?” she said, looking timidly into his face.
“I’m English.”
She answered him in his own tongue.
“I thought so when I saw you before you spoke. How do you come to be in Russia? Few foreigners come here now.”
“I’m a newspaper correspondent. I’ve come to write about the Famine, when I can get as far as that.”
“There is misery to be found without going so far,” she said. “There are many who are hungry even in Moscow. I am one of them.”
“May I buy your crucifix?”
She glanced nervously on each side, and spoke to him in French again in a low voice.
“We are being watched. It is very dangerous for me to be in the market place. They do not like my name. Perhaps you would be good enough to go.”
He was aware of a young officer of the Red Army standing three paces away, watching and listening.
“Au revoir, madame.”
He turned away, stared into the face of the officer, and went further down the line.
The girl who had flamed scarlet at his glance was still there, and gave him a strange, wistful, lingering look which startled him. Then, as he drew near, she left her place in the line, and went to the lady with whom he had been speaking and whispered to her.
These people were frightened, in spite of the “New Economic Laws” which permitted private trading. They had come out into the open, but were not certain of this new liberty. Perhaps they had been trapped in some such way before.
After wandering about the streets and markets of Moscow for a long morning, Bertram became conscious suddenly of hunger, and he puzzled as to the way in which he could satisfy this desire. It was a long tramp back to his Guest House, across the river, and it would be more amusing to find an eating house of some kind. Christy had told him that two had just been opened in a street called the Arbat, the only two in Moscow—a city of two million people—which once was crowded with restaurants as luxurious as any in the world. He hailed adroschke, and by good luck made theisvostchikunderstand the name of the street, paying him a hundred thousand roubles from a wad of paper advanced by Christy, for the short drive.
The man seemed satisfied, touched his fur cap, and said, “Spaseeba, tavarish.”
A few shops were open down a long street of houses which had all been shops, by the look of them, but were now mostly empty and boarded up, and falling into ruin. The newly opened places had a few objects of merchandise in the windows. A pair of top boots, marked at a million roubles, adorned one window-front. In another were three fur caps, a guitar, a German pipe, and a wicker cradle. A motley collection of household goods—including a leather arm-chair, a broken bedstead, some rather good rugs, a cloisonné clock, and a rosewood piano—was the greatest display of “stock” which he could observe through any window. In most cases there was nothing but what could be seen at a glance. The “private trading” in Moscow was not yet magnificent. He discovered the restaurant by the sight of an uncooked leg of mutton, baldly displayed in one of the windows, and by the words, “Angliske Restaurant” written in Russian characters above it.
When he entered, he saw a bare room set out with wooden chairs and tables, with here and there a piece of furniture of the Louis XV. period, and on the walls some gilded mirrors of the same style. A woman, shabbily dressed, and wearing carpet slippers, but with an unmistakable air of elegance, was stirring something in a pot over a wood fire. At the back of the room was a long counter, on which stood some tall bottles, a samovar, and some coffee cups, and behind it, on a high stool, sat an elderly man with silver hair and a little white beard. He was peeling some potatoes, while behind him, with her hand on his shoulder, was a girl of sixteen or so, as poorly dressed as Cinderella, but as pretty, in a dark way, with large brown eyes.
Bertram was aware of three pairs of eyes upon him, studying him intently, with surprise and suspicion. The woman who had been stirring the pot, advanced with her ladle, pointed to a table, and spoke in Russian.
He answered in French, and asked politely whether he might have something to eat.
“You do not understand Russian?” she answered suspiciously, in French.
“No, not a word, alas! I’m English—just arrived in Moscow.”
“English!”
She spoke the word in his own tongue, with joyful intonation.
“Why do you leave happy old England to come to this miserable land?”
“To help the starving people of Russia, if I can,” he answered.
“That is brave of you,” she said. “There is much danger in Russia, and no kind of comfort.”
She called to the white-headed man behind the counter. “Nicholas, Katia, here is a gentleman just come from England!”
They came from behind the counter, and the elderly man clasped Bertram’s hand.
“I used to know England well, and love my memories of it. I was a painter in those days. We lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Katia was a baby then.”
The girl took Bertram’s hand, and dropped a curtsey like an English debutante.
“I remember England, just a little. It seems like a fairy-tale now!”
They served him with some soup called Bortsch, and afterwards cooked a piece of meat for him with some of the potatoes which the elderly man had peeled; and while he was eating, the lady talked to him rapidly, emotionally, as though relieving the pent-up thoughts of agonising years.
It was a tale of misery. Her husband, now peeling potatoes, had been a painter at the Imperial Court, and known to be a personal friend of the Empress. He had been arrested by theChekaand thrown into prison, where he was kept without trial for eighteen months, half-starved, in a foul cell crowded with men of good class. Many times he was examined at night by the Extraordinary Commission, mostly young lads who tried to bully him into admission of counter-revolutionary acts. Each time he believed he was being taken to execution, like others in the cell who were taken out and shot. For some reason they had spared him. Perhaps because he was an artist, and they pretended to reverence art, though they had no reverence for life. She and Katia had been turned into the kitchen of their beautiful house, which for a time had been used as a billet for Red soldiers—rough country lads who stabbed their knives into her husband’s canvases, used the tapestries to wipe the mud off their boots, and were unspeakably filthy in their habits. She had been very much afraid for little Katia. Those young soldiers had been rough with her, as they were with peasant girls. . . . She and the child had starved many days. They would have starved to death unless they had sold, secretly and at great risk, some of the jewels they had hidden. They sold them to peasant women for potatoes and cheese. Now the peasant women were hungry themselves because of the drought! She had worked at the hardest toil, chopping wood, shovelling snow, dragging sledges to Government stores.
“Look at my hands, monsieur!”
She showed her hands, coarsened and begrimed, like a gipsy’s.
Then she had been arrested for the crime of private trading, and imprisoned for six weeks. All that time she had thought only of Katia, left alone with the brutal soldier-boys. But God and His angels had guarded the child. Two months after coming out of prison her husband was liberated, without explanation or excuse. Just pushed out of prison with the words, “You can go, tavarish!” That was happiness beyond words, to be together again, in spite of poverty and starvation and coarse toil.
“We have suffered less than others,” said the lady. “We have been lucky. My friends have been worse treated by the cut-throats and robbers who rule our unhappy country.”
Her husband whispered to her.
“Hush, my dear. For the love of God—”
A look of terror came into his eyes, because two young men came into the restaurant and sat down at a table near the counter. The lady became as white as death for a moment, lest they had overheard her words. But they called for plates of Bortsch and talked together in low voices, paying no heed to those who served them. They were unshaven and dirty, with long over-coats and top boots, caked in mud, and the Red Star of the Soviet Republic in their caps showed them to be officials of some kind.
There was no more conversation from the lady. She went into a little back kitchen. Her husband, once painter to the Imperial Court, peeled more potatoes. Katia added up some figures on a slate, glancing over at Bertram with a little smile about her lips and in her timid eyes.
There seemed to be no sense of freedom, no respite from fear in Soviet Russia. Those women in the market place had been scared when he approached them. This little family dared not talk a word before unknown men of their own city.
LII
“I’m off to Petrograd for a couple of days,” said Christy one night in the Guest House. “You’d better come while you’re waiting for a train to the Volga district. I’ve fixed it with Weinstein. Here’s your pass.”
This visit to Petrograd gave Bertram another impression of Soviet Russia, broadened his outlook on the tragedy of a great people, killed something more of the petty selfishness of his own trouble.
He said something of the kind to Christy on the train journey through endless fields sowed with rye six months from another harvest time.
“I find Russia makes one forget one’s ego. It’s like seeing the end of the world—the death of civilisation. It’s absurd for the individual to whine about the loss of a collar-stud, or a pretty wife, in the midst of an Empire’s ruin.”
“A nice cheerful way of looking at things!” said Christy, with his usual irony. “Heaven knows how gay you’ll be by the time you get to the Volga Valley.”
“These people seem to be down to the bed-rock of primitive existence,” said Bertram. “Nothing matters except food and shelter, and escape from death. All the rest is so much ‘jam,’ as my batman used to say. It simplifies things, as war does.”
“An easy process of simplification,” said Christy. “Another war, or another drought in Russia, and a great part of Europe will be simplified off the map.”
There was a great silence in Petrograd. Heavy snow had fallen, and lay deep in the streets, except where gangs of men and women had shovelled a passage-way for sleighs which drove slowly with a tinkle of bells. The Neva was frozen over, and standing on one of the bridges, Bertram stared at the panorama of the city, magnificent with its vista of palaces, churches, vast galleries, and great blocks of stone buildings which had once been the offices of the Imperial Government and of world-wide trade, but grim and black under snow-covered roofs.
The silence of Petrograd was strange and fearful. There was no sound of labour in the great factories across the river. No smoke came from their chimneys. There was no throb of engines, or clang of iron. Nothing moved on the quaysides. The immense buildings with sculptured façades on the side of the city were deserted of all life. No man or woman went in. None came out.
Along the Nevski Prospekt once, as Bertram knew, the greatest highway of luxury in Europe, most of the shops were boarded up like those in Moscow, and nothing was being sold or bought. But there were people there, a sense of life, in contrast to the deadly quietude in other streets. With fur caps pulled down, and sheepskin coats tucked up about their ears, and with snow-shoes over their boots, they were dragging hand sledges over pavements covered with frozen snow so slippery that Bertram found it hard to walk without staggering or falling. The sledges were laden with sacks of potatoes, logs of wood, or frozen meat, and some of them were escorted by Red soldiers, as though this treasure might be attacked on its way.
Bertram was aware of some difference between these sledge-draggers and snow-shovellers of Petrograd and the population of Moscow. They were not peasants, but city folk of the old bourgeois class. Their clothes still showed traces of fashions that had passed. Some of these women, and young girls, dragging heavy loads, had frocks of a style that would have looked well in Paris, or Berlin, or London, before they had been torn, and grease-stained, and mud-splashed. Elderly men, clearing the roads, wore “bowler” hats, and coats with astrachan collars, and looked like bank managers, or clerks, once respected in merchants’ offices, who had come down in the world to the level of the doss house.
Some of the younger Russians wore their rags with a kind of swagger and cheerful unconcern, only intent on keeping warm, by bits of sacking used as shawls round the neck, or by wearing seamen’s jerseys under their black jackets. Even in Petrograd youth had not lost all its spirit of gaiety, and Bertram heard a laugh now and then from young folk who went hurrying by, arm in arm. But the general impression of the faces he passed was haggard, mournful, and anxious. Christy gave an explanation.
“This city is running short of food. Moscow, with its crowd of Soviet officials, has first call on supplies. These people we pass are wondering if their next meal will be their last.”
“I want to talk to them,” said Bertram. “If only I knew a bit of Russian! I want to see inside their lives.”
“Try them with French, or German, or English,” said Christy. “Some of these people shovelling snow used to spend the season in Paris, Berlin, London.”
It was a woman selling cigarettes outside the station whose life was revealed to Bertram.
She leaned against a wall, coughing, in a thin dress that was no proof against a temperature of forty degrees below zero. She was a middle-aged woman, with a thin face and sallow skin through which the cheekbones showed. Bertram asked her in French for ten of her cigarettes, and paid her ten times too much, in filthy paper.
“You’ve given me too much,” she said, in a weak voice, “and I have no change.”
Her French was more perfect than Bertram’s.
“Never mind the change,” he said. “It’s cold for you, standing here.”
“Soon I shall be dead,” she said. “Are you French?”
“No, English.”
She stared at him with a kind of wonderment.
“Once I was a governess in England.”
She mentioned the name of an English family, unknown to Bertram.
“You have been here during the Revolution?” he asked.
“Since the beginning of the war. My husband was shot when Kerensky went. He was an officer, and his men killed him, like so many others.”
“You are alone now?”
“I have a little son. He is dying of hunger. I cannot earn enough to feed him. Sometimes I have thought of killing him, but have not the courage.”
“That is terrible!” said Bertram. “How can I help you?”
“Why should you help me?” she asked, in a harsh voice. “What am I to you? I am only one of millions who starve in Russia.”
He gave her a bundle of paper money, and she stared at it with dazed eyes, and gave a little cry, not of joy, but of anguish. Perhaps this charity from a stranger only sharpened her sense of misery, made more poignant her knowledge of inevitable death.
Bertram raised his hat, and moved away, joining Christy again.
“It’s useless, old man,” said Christy. “I began like that. But I’ve chucked it up. How much did you give her?”
“Five hundred thousand roubles. Surely that will help her a little?”
Christy shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.
“In this city one pays a hundred and twenty thousand roubles for a pound of tea. Eighty thousand roubles for a pound of bread. Sixty thousand roubles for ten cigarettes. What can you and I do in private charity? It’s merely pandering to one’s own sentiment.”
“One can’t leave a woman like that without giving her something. One’s coat, if one has nothing else.”
“Useless, Major. Useless. There are millions like her, as she said. We can do better than that. Our job is to tell the truth about the agony of these people, so that the outside world may help in a big way. Poke up the conscience of all our Pharisees who pass by on the other side, while Russia lies bleeding in the ditch.”
He took Bertram to a camp for refugees from the famine districts of the Volga.
“You saw some of these on their way in the cattle-truck trains. This is the end of the journey for some of them. I’m told it’s worth seeing.”
It was called a “camp,” but the refugees in the place to which Christy went—there were many others round Petrograd—were housed in the old Imperial Barracks—an immense white-washed building on four sides of a hollow square. It was worth seeing, as Christy said, but not pleasant to see. Outside the thermometer told forty degrees below zero. Inside there was no heat except that of human bodies lying huddled together on bare boards. There were thousands of peasants with straw-coloured beards and blue eyes from Samara, and Saratoff, and other places which soon to Bertram were to have a frightful significance. They had with them their women folk and children who squatted about in the barrack rooms or lay sleeping in tangled heaps like those in the station at Moscow. A meal was being served from the kitchen—thin potato soup, and a square hunk of black sour-smelling bread, provided by the Soviet Republic for these people of the sun-burnt valley, once the richest granary of Russia. The soup was ladled out to those who lined up in queue, with mugs and bowls, but Bertram saw that many did not take their place in the line. They lay on the bare boards, flopping their heads from side to side, or very still, with glazing eyes.
“Typhus—dysentery—weakness,” said Christy, after some words in German to a Russian doctor.
The doctor was a black-bearded man in a white surgical coat. He had grave, thoughtful eyes behind his glasses.
“We do what we can,” he said, in German. “But the food is hardly enough, and there are no medicines, no soap, no change of clothes, no fuel for heat. Disease is spreading. But we do our best.”
Passing through the courtyard with Bertram and Christy, he pushed back a wooden door, and beckoned them to look.
Inside was a great pile of dead bodies, thrown one on top of the other, men, women, and children, mixed up together in a huddle of death, with brown, claw-like hands protruding from the mass of corpses, and faces staring upwards, and here and there a bare limb revealed in its skin and bone. They had been tossed on top of each other, like rubbish for the muck-heap.
“Two days dead,” said the Russian doctor.
“The End of the Journey,” said Christy, in a low voice to Bertram.
Bertram was sick for a moment in the corner of the yard. This stench of death was worse than a battlefield.
LIII
By favour of a Soviet official with whom Christy was on terms of friendship—“a very mild type of Bolshevik, like so many of them,” he explained—they were allowed to visit the Port of Petrograd.
“Is it worth while?” asked Bertram; “I want the human side of things. I want to know how people are living, and suffering in this frightful country.”
Christy answered with a touch of rebuke.
“We’re not here for melodrama. This Port will tell us why people arenotliving in Russia. And why there’s unemployment in England. It was one of the gateways of the world’s trade.”
It was a mournful place. They stumbled over cables concealed beneath the snow, and wandered in solitude past docks and warehouses, empty of all shipping and merchandise. Out in the snow lay numbers of ploughs and reaping machines, brand-new in their crates.
Christy inspected them, and read a word.
“Düsseldorf. . . . That tells a tale. Do you remember what I said about a Russo-German alliance?”
“Why are they left rotting in the snow?” asked Bertram.
“No means of transport, and Oriental inefficiency,” said Christy.
Further in the Port were three tramps flying the Swedish and Danish flags, and one wide-decked vessel with one funnel calledTyneside Lass, from Newcastle.
Christy was excited by that.
“From little old England! What’s she doing? Let’s go and see the Old Man!”
At the top of the gangway was a young skipper, who looked surprised when Christy hailed him in his own tongue.
“Glad to see you, gentlemen,” he said, with cheery greeting. “Come into my cabin and have a spot. It’s biting cold.”
He mixed a stiff dose for each of them, and raised his own glass.
“Cheery oh!”
“What are you carrying to Petrograd?” asked Christy.
“Railway engines. All German. From Hamburg. My owners have a contract to carry eight hundred. Four at a time. It looks as if I’ll get frozen in, this trip.”
Christy looked over to Bertram, and raised his eyebrows, before asking another question.
“How do the Bolshies pay for German engines, skipper?”
“Some gold. Mostly diamonds and furs.”
“Sound business for Germany,” said Christy. “How do you get on with the Bolshies?”
The young skipper shrugged his shoulders.
“The officials keep civil tongues. They’d better. The stevedores are poor lousy bastards. Can hardly lift a cable without breaking theirselves. Half-fed, and no guts. Start work at eleven, and take two hours to get the cranes working. Well-meaning enough. Some of ’em speak a bit of English. There’s one that was Professor of Biology, or some such thing, before the war. I gave him a slab of cheese, and he wept tears and kissed my hand. I’ve no use for this Bolshevism. It don’t seem to do a country any good, though there’s some that think so in Newcastle.”
He wished them good health, and waved his hand to them from the top of the gangway as they went back through the snow.
“Major,” said Christy, using the old title as though they were still in Flanders’ fields, “those railway-engines from Hamburg give me furiously to think. Here’s the key to Russia’s way of escape. Perhaps Germany’s also, if France puts the screw on too hard. What about the Treaty of Versailles—German indemnities—a French invasion of the Ruhr—if Germany allies herself with Russia? Russia and Germanycontra mundum! A formidable combination, by the Lord!”
“Don’t you jump a bit too far ahead?” asked Bertram. “Four railway engines in a Tyneside tug don’t seem to justify a prophecy of world war.”
“Remember Owen,” said Christy calmly. “Reconstructed a Megatherium out of one tooth. These four railway engines, with seven hundred and ninety-six to follow—and those ploughs lying in the snow—mean that Germany is getting her foot into Russia, doing business, preparing to do more. For Russia’s sake I’m mighty glad, but it mustn’t be left to Germany alone. If that happens, there’s going to be Hell to pay.”
Bertram was silent on the way back. Christy had the gift of seeing far ahead, and his prophecies were rare, and never rash. The individual did not interest him very much. He thought more of the actions and reactions of peoples, of mass movements, economic laws, world balances, the ebb and flow of trade, the undertow of passions, and political chances.
That night they went to the Marinsky Theatre, and lost their way in the snow. With his few phrases of Russian, Christy asked the way of a young lad in the uniform of a Red soldier, and was answered in very good English.
“If you come with me, gentlemen, I shall be very glad to show you.”
“Are you English?” asked Bertram.
The boy laughed, and said his father was English, but now dead. His mother was a Russian lady. She taught languages, especially English, to students who came to her at night after their day’s work. She received three thousand roubles a lesson, and was never home till past midnight, and then very tired. He chattered cheerfully as he strode over the snow in heavy boots, a little fellow, with bright eyes and a lively sense of humour. Yet it was not a merry tale he told, though fantastic.
“I was an important person for a time. They made me President of Arts and Sciences. I gave lectures to working men at night, on the origin of art, evolution, and elementary biology.”
“How old were you then?” asked Bertram.
“Sixteen,” said the boy. “Now I am eighteen.”
He looked no more than fourteen.
One day he was arrested for counter-revolutionary opinions. Some working-man had discovered that his father was an “aristocrat,” or objected to his discipline in class. Anyhow, he was denounced, and kept in prison for nine months. His poor mother had nearly died of grief. Then he was liberated, luckier than others who had been shot in batches for the same suspicion. Now he was an office-boy in a Government department.
“It’s been perfectly rotten,” he said, using English slang with a foreign accent.
He halted outside the Marinsky Theatre, and saluted, and then shook hands.
Bertram tried to slip some money into his hand, but he shook his head.
“My father was an English gentleman,” he said simply.
There were tickets for sale in the theatre, according to the “New Economic Laws,” but it was plain that most of the people had passes, and it was explained to Christy by a young Jew who spoke French, that it was a “Trade Union” night.
It was a performance of “Carmen,” magnificently staged, and well played, but to Bertram and Christy the audience was of more interest than the performance. The immense and splendid theatre was packed with “the proletariat.” Nearly all of them wore the Russian blouse, belted round the waist, or the Red Army tunic. The women were dressed very much like an audience in one of the poorer suburbs of London, but here and there a few had ventured to put on a bit of “finery”—a little lace round the neck and wrists, a trinket or two. In the Imperial box sat a group of men with black hair over their foreheads, like women’s “fringes,” and grimy hands. Above their heads the Imperial Eagle had been covered with the Red Flag of Revolution.
Bertram thought of the pale-faced Czar sitting there with the Empress and their beautiful daughters, with high officers and ladies of the Court.
Then, by some curious association of ideas, he thought of Joyce, as he had sat with her in the boxes of London theatres, so beautiful, so exquisite in her evening frocks. The Emperor and Empress and all their family had been murdered. Joyce had disappeared from his life, by some act of revolution which had murderedhim, killed his spirit, stone dead.
The body of Bertram Pollard sat in the stall of the Marinsky Theatre at Petrograd, but it was not the Bertram Pollard of Holland Street, Kensington, or “Somewhere in France.” He had changed. He was a different man. This visit to Russia was changing him still further. It made all other things seem trivial and insignificant—the things he had made such a fuss about. Ireland! It did not mean much to the world in progress or reaction. That guerrilla warfare was a Chinese cracker compared with the frightful things that had happened here in Petrograd. The Social Revolution in England—Holme Ottery up for sale! How laughable, how negligible, compared with the utter extinction of the Russian gentry!
Petrograd and Moscow put things in a different proportion. The agony of these people made private troubles, heart-breaks, love affairs, strangely small. Those dead bodies in the barracks—they too put things in a different proportion, made life itself of but little account, individually. What was this new sense of proportion going to mean to him?
Perhaps he would find the meaning at last for which his mind had been groping, like a man in a dark room. Perhaps he would get outside himself in service to these people who were so immensely stricken.
“A hundred thousand roubles for your thoughts,” said Christy.
“I’m wondering what I’m here for,” said Bertram.
Christy glanced at him sideways.
“To learn a bit of life. Perhaps to light a little lamp in the darkness of a human heart. Anyhow to see ‘Carmen’ jolly well played!”
The young Jew who had spoken to them before, came up during the entr’acte, when they joined the crowd in thefoyer, a strange, shaggy-haired, pale-faced crowd, very cheerful on the whole, and enjoying their evening.
“What do you think of it?” he asked.
“Magnificent,” said Christy. “Who are all these people in the audience?”
“Soviet workers of one kind or another.”
“Communists?” asked Christy.
The young Jew smiled, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Are we still Communists under the New Economic Laws? We’ve gone back to private trading, private property, money instead of rations, foreign capital, if it can be got.”
“Do the people like the new way?”
“It’s like a weight lifted off their shoulders! They’re beginning to breathe again.”
He lowered his voice.
“I’m in a Soviet office. But like most Jews I believe in trade, barter, property. All the same, the Revolution did some good. The workers didn’t get free seats at the Opera in the time of the Romanoffs.”
He looked at them with shifty eyes, afraid that he was talking dangerously, yet wanting to talk.
“Bread and circuses are all right,” said Christy, “but circuses without bread are poor fare.”
The young Jew couldn’t follow this allusion, and looked mystified.
“Was the Revolution very terrible in England?” he asked.
“What Revolution?”
“The English Revolution.”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” said Christy. “It won’t happen.”
The young Jew was incredulous.
“We have read a lot about it inPrahvda. That’s our Soviet paper. All your people are starving, are they not?”
“They were pretty well fed when I left them,” said Christy, laughing.
The young Jew did not believe him, by the look in his eyes, but the curtain was rung up again, and they left him.
“They all think there’s been a bloody revolution in England,” said Christy. “They get no news except the stuff published for propaganda purposes. The outside world is a mystery to them.”
“It will soon be to us,” said Bertram. “I’ve heard nothing since I left Riga. For all I know England may have been sunk beneath the sea. Or Ireland.”
“No such luck,” said Christy, making the obvious gibe.
They went back through the snow with the audience of the Marinsky Theatre, to the music of sleigh-bells. That night they slept at a place called the International Hostel, which was another kind of “Guest-house,” mostly inhabited by Soviet officials of high rank, and by German traders. Most of the night was spent in catching bugs.
LIV
Back in Moscow, Bertram made enquiries as to the means of transport to the famine-stricken districts. They lay two thousand miles east of Moscow, in the Volga Valley, and the chief railheads were Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara or Saratoff. If he could get as far as Kazan, he might, with luck, find a passage on a boat down the Volga to the other places. But he would have to look quick about it, as far as the river trip went, because the Volga would soon begin to freeze.
Mr. Weinstein of the Foreign Office was not hopeful of an early train.
“I think, perhaps, your best chance would be to link up with a party of gentlemen from the A. R. A. for whom a special train to Kazan is being provided this week or next.”
A special train! It sounded incredible! But Bertram knew already the mighty power of “Ara” in Russia. Had he not been fixed up by its influence from Riga to Moscow? Had he not seen the inspiring work of Mr. Cherry of Lynchburg, Virginia, with Bolshevik officials and railway porters?
The first food ship had arrived in Petrograd from New York. Groups of young Americans were already in far outposts organising committees of Russians for the administration of food relief. They had already started soup-kitchens for starving children in Petrograd and Moscow, and were pushing out supplies to Kazan and the Volga Valley with a rapidity that took away the breath of Russian officials to whom the wordSeichas—immediately—meant the day after to-morrow, or the week after next.
The Director of “Ara,” the American Relief Administration, learnt that word first from his Russian dictionary, and used it with terrible persistence to the Soviet authorities of transport, to Russian station-masters, to foremen of gangs, to engine-drivers, and any other people he could find who had something to do with getting an engine to move and trucks to follow it. He taught the word and its meaning to young Americans from the Universities of Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Virginia, who, after a glimpse of war, had volunteered for Russian Relief as the next best chance of getting in touch with life—and death. They too used that wordSeichas, with a Western meaning and added American interpretations such as, “For the love of Mike, why don’t you get a move on, you sons of bitches?”—even to high Soviet officials, and lesser authorities.
By some miracle, astounding to the Russians themselves, trains began to move from Riga to Moscow, from Moscow to the Volga, laden with food supplies for the starving children. Although in the whole of Russia there were only two thousand five hundred engines standing together, though mostly immovable, instead of seventeen thousand five hundred which moved before the war, the best of them began to get steam up, pulled out with long train-loads of trucks, did actually get somewhere, in spite of break-downs, lack of fuel. Oriental methods of delay. “Seichas, you Tavarishes!” said the Americans, at any kind of delay, and by that mingling of cajolery and terror which was the method of the genial Cherry, were getting some kind of efficiency into the utter chaos of Russian railways.
All these things Bertram learnt from Jemmy Hart, the American journalist, whom he had met on his first night in Moscow at the Guest House, when he appeared in his flannel shirt and pepper-and-salt trousers, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a wet sponge in the other. He had been imprisoned as a spy by theChekabefore the arrival of the A. R. A. Then he was let out, and treated as an honoured guest of the Soviet Republic. Hence his “billet” in the Guest House. He was on terms of familiarity with Lenin, Chicherin, Radek and other high powers, to whom he behaved as one old poker player to other experts of the artful game, with cheery cynicism, ready to call their bluff, or to double the stakes if they revealed a weak hand.
“These fellows cringe, if you treat ’em rough,” he told Bertram. “When they start their highfalutin about ‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ ask them why they look so well fed when twenty-five million people are starving to death. Mind you, I’m not a counter-Revolutionary! I’d rather back these Bolsheviks, crooks as most of them are, than see fellows like Koltchak and Denikin trying to get Czardom back on to the necks of these poor, lousy, simple people. . . . So you want to get to the Volga? Well, come along to the Colonel and I’ll fix you up. I’m going too.”
The Colonel was a West Point man, with a hard, handsome, masklike face, which became human and friendly when he smiled. He was not a waster of words or time, and after a few enquiries as to Bertram’s mission, agreed to give him a sleeping berth in the special train which was being provided for himself and his staff. It was due to start in a week’s time. Allowing for the Russian translation of the wordseichas, that meant two weeks at least. He would raise Hell if it was longer than that.
“You’d better have a yarn with our Doctor Weekes,” he said. “What he doesn’t know about bugs, typhus, dysentery, plague, and dirt, needn’t worry you in this country. He’ll tell you how to skip between the bad bacilli. It’s worth while.”
He shook hands with Bertram, and closed the interview. It was good enough. Bertram need no longer worry about Mr. Weinstein and the Soviet Foreign Office. Under the wings of “Ara” he would be carried to the Volga and find out the truth about the Famine.
In the Trubnaya market a Russian girl spoke to him in English. He recognised her as the girl who had flamed scarlet when he looked at her in the line of barterers, and afterwards looked into his eyes.
“You spoke to my mother the other day,” she said. “She was afraid because a man was watching. Now she is a little ill, but would be most glad if you would have the kindness to call on her. It is long since she has spoken to an English gentleman.”
Bertram said he would be glad to call. This girl’s face, with her dark eyes and looped hair, would make it interesting. In any case, he was in Russia to learn the inside of life, if he could get so close. Here was a chance of knowledge.
“How shall I find your mother?” he asked.
“It is difficult,” she said, smiling in a friendly way. “We do not live in the big house that was ours. But if you will meet me at any time you say, at the corner of the Arbat, where the houses were burnt down, I will take you to our home. Perhaps after dusk would be safest.”
“At seven o’clock, or eight, if you like,” said Bertram.
“At seven, then. My mother used to be Princess Alexandra, in the old days. My father was Prince Alexander Suvaroff. Perhaps you remember him at the Embassy in Paris? Now he is very old and weak, and broken.”
“Andyourname?” asked Bertram.
“Nadia.”
“Mine is Bertram Pollard.”
She asked him to repeat it, and said, “I shall remember. It is very English.”
“You were angry with me when I looked at you in the market-place,” said Bertram.
“No, not angry. Ashamed. That was foolish. There should be no pride left in Russia. We are all on the same level now.”
He wanted to talk with her, but she seemed uneasy lest they should be seen together, and slipped away from him among the crowds of peasants in the market-place.
That evening, before seven o’clock, he stood at the corner of the Arbat, by the burnt ruins of some houses. His feet were deep in snow, and heavy flakes were falling. He stamped up and down to keep his feet warm, until presently a woman’s figure, snow-covered, with a fur cap tied under the chin, stood beside him.
“Good evening,” she said in English. “You are a little early, I think.”
“And you also, mademoiselle.
“I was so afraid of keeping you waiting in the snow.”
“That was my idea too.”
“Come!” she said.
They walked together up the Arbat, and then the girl touched his sleeve, and turned down a narrow sidestreet, and again out of that.
“It is not far now.”
Presently she stopped in front of a dilapidated building standing back in a courtyard filled with bricks and rubbish. She opened an iron gate, and crossed the courtyard.
“You will see that we do not live in luxury, sir. You must excuse our gipsy way of life. Now we are here.”
She went down a narrow corridor smelling of bad drains, and pulled a heavy curtain aside from a doorway which had lost its door. Inside was a square room with uncarpeted boards, dimly lit by an oil lamp, and barely furnished. . . . An elderly man with a white beard and moustache sat in a low chair made out of packing-cases, and lying on a truckle bed, covered with a patchwork rug, was the lady to whom Bertram had spoken in the market-place.
“Here is Mr. Pollard, mother,” said the girl, as she held the curtain for Bertram to enter.
“How kind and good of you to come!” said the lady. “I so wished to speak to you the other day, and yet I was afraid! We have been through so many terrors that now we tremble at any unexpected thing.”
Bertram bent over the truckle bed and kissed the delicate hand that was held up to him. Some instinct of chivalry or sentiment made him pay this homage to a lady of the old régime, lying in this dirty little room, without a relic of her former state.
“Father,” said the girl, “this is the English gentleman.”
He did not look like a prince, as he rose from his packing-case chair. He looked at first glance like a dirty and dissipated old fellow who had been sleeping on the Thames Embankment. His trousers and frock coat were all baggy, and patched, and grease-stained. His hands were encrusted with dirt. But he greeted Bertram with a dignity that no poverty could take away.
“It is a pleasure to meet an English gentleman again. I knew England well before the war. You will excuse our poor apartment. We are reduced to ruin, and but for my dear wife and daughter, I should have no courage left.”
He held Bertram’s hand with a lingering grasp, and then glanced at his own with a sardonic smile.
“We have no soap at all, and it is hard even to get water for washing purposes. We can, however, make you a little tea, if you will give us the pleasure of drinking it with us. Nadia, there is enough tea for us all?”
“Yes, father. I will make it.”
“For four years,” said the old man, “we have lived on bread and tea, bread and tea, bread and tea. It is hard to keep one’s courage on such a diet!”
“It is better now that we can sell a few little things in the market place,” said the lady. “Is it not so, Alexander? In spite of theChekawe managed to hide a few treasures!”
“My dear,” said the old man, “one never knows who may be listening.”
He glanced nervously towards the curtain.
“It is safe to speak in English,” said his wife.
“You must have suffered terribly,” said Bertram.
“It is not to be put in words,” said the old man. “I marvel that I have not gone mad.”
They tried to put into words the story of their suffering, and told Bertram enough to let him imagine the rest. They had been turned out of their palace, like all the others, and the Prince had been put into prison before he had a chance of escape. Nadia had escaped. She was in Paris when the Revolution burst out, and very rashly, said her father, made her way back into Russia at a time when thousands were in flight from the Red Terror.
Dressed as a peasant girl, she had come back to Moscow on a troop train crowded with Red soldiers.
“It was for love of us,” said her mother, stretching out her hand and touching the girl’s arm. “God will reward her. We should have died without her.”
“It was my duty, little mother,” said Nadia, bending down and kissing her mother’s forehead. “Not for a second have I regretted coming back.”
“In spite of all our misery!” said the old gentleman.
Nadia turned to Bertram with a smile.
“My father and mother make too much of my coming back. Even without them I should have returned. I am a Russian. This is my country. With the Russian people I suffer, and if need be, die. I am sure all English people would do the same.”
Bertram thought of the Countess Lydia and her sister, and of all the Russian émigrés in London and Paris, living in luxury, dancing, gambling. Not doing much on behalf of their own folk, except in support of counter-revolutions and invasions, plots and intrigues for the overthrow of the Bolshevik régime, which had only increased the ruin and agony of the Russian people, and intensified the Terror. He marvelled at this girl who had come back into the midst of that Terror when the others had all been escaping across the frontiers.
He looked at her now, as she heated the samovar, in a shabby frock, in boots that would have been slung over a garden wall by any English tramp, yet moving with elegance and a natural grace. She had taken off her fur cap and jacket. Her black hair, falling in a loop about her ears, framed her white face like a Helleu etching. She had very “liquid” eyes, with long dark lashes, and a broad forehead, like most Russian women, but with sharper cheekbones than the Slav type, and thin red lips. About twenty-five, he guessed, and delicate from what the Germans calledunternährung—semi-starvation. She was aware of his eyes upon her, perhaps read the admiration in them, and a faint blush crept under her skin.
“How long did you remain a prisoner, sir?” asked Bertram.
The old man raised his hands.
“Two terrible years. I did not wash all that time or get a change of linen. It was worse than death. I used to smile when theChekaexamined me, and other prisoners wept before I left the cell, because they thought I was to be taken out and shot. ‘In the next world,’ I used to say, ‘I shall not need a change of linen.’ ”
“I think they pitied my husband,” said Princess Alexandra. “He had been a Liberal always, and very generous to the poor.”
“I was a friend of Tolstoy,” said the old man. “I corresponded with Kropotkin. I was even a little of a revolutionary, believing in the need of liberty in Russia. Alas, the Revolution has killed all the liberty we had, and the tyranny of Lenin is worse than that of Ivan the Terrible.”
He spoke the words in a whisper, leaning towards Bertram, with his hand to his mouth.
Nadia handed Bertram a cup of tea, and then sat on a stool by his side.
“My father has abandoned all hope for Russia,” she said. “That is natural, after so much suffering. But because I am young, I still believe that out of all this agony some good will come. Russia has been purged by fire. There was great corruption in the time of the Emperor. The Court was very vicious—you have said so many times, father!—and young people of the rich class were lazy and luxurious. Not one of them did any kind of work. From babyhood they were petted and spoilt. They thought of nothing but gaiety and sensuality. Now we younger people who stayed in Russia have learnt to work, and to weep. We have been hungry with the people. We have made our hands as coarse as theirs. We shall be all the better for it, perhaps, and help to build a New Russia on nobler lines, some day. Do you not think so, darling mother?”
The old lady’s eyes filled with tears.
“I belong to the Past. All my memories are there. I dare not look forward to the future—My poor Russia!”
“Our poor Russia!” echoed her husband. “In the hands of those who are murdering the very souls of our people by their evil propaganda.”
Nadia spoke again, very gently, to avoid any hurt to her father and mother.
“The soul of our people will never die. It is a great, simple, and generous soul, as I know now by working among the peasants. Presently this régime will change. It is already changing. It will become moderate. Russia will get new liberties. There will be a greater happiness than before.”
Suvaroff shook his head.
“Russia is famine-stricken and diseased. For the sins of those who rule us, and for our own sins in the past, we shall perish as a civilisation.”
“Never!” said Nadia, bravely. “Russia will live with greater glory, more enlightened, with a people worthy of great liberties. It is my faith. Without that I should die.”
There was a moment’s silence, as heavy footsteps strode down the stone corridor, and suddenly the curtain was drawn back. A young man stood there, in the uniform of the Red Army.
For a second or two Bertram was startled and afraid. There flashed into his mind the thought that perhaps his visit here had led to trouble for this little family of the old régime. He was relieved when the old lady smiled and said:
“My son! . . . Come in, Alexis. We have an English visitor.”
The young man saluted, and then shook hands with Bertram, and spoke in perfectly accurate English.
“Delighted to meet you, sir. My father and mother told me they had asked for the honour of a visit from you.”
He sat on the edge of his sister’s stool and put his arm round her waist affectionately.
“Well, Nadia!”
The old lady seemed to read the thought passing through Bertram’s mind.
“You are surprised that we have a son in the Red Army? It is either that or death for our young men.”
The boy, Alexis—he seemed a year or two younger than Nadia—looked down at his uniform with a smile.
“It’s not only fear of death that makes me wear these clothes. I’m a Russian. I help to defend my soil from all invaders. Does not honour and a decent code of patriotism require that, sir?”
He asked the question of Bertram, who did not answer.
“We think,” said Prince Alexander Suvaroff slowly, and with a touch of embarrassment, “that England, and other countries, made a mistake in supporting the attacks of men like Wrangel and Denikin. Bad as the Bolsheviks are, as God knows, the leaders of the White Armies were, perhaps, equally corrupt. My son expresses the thought of the younger generation.”
“It is mine, certainly,” said Nadia.
The son only stayed a few minutes. He had just called in to have the pleasure of meeting the Englishman, and to kiss his father and mother. Soon after his going, Bertram rose to take his leave.
“But you will never find your way back!” cried Princess Alexandra.
“I will guide him to the Arbat,” said her daughter.
In spite of Bertram’s protests, she put on her fur cap and coat again, and waited while he said good night to her father and mother. The old man rose again from his packing-case.
“If you would call upon us now and then, it would be a charity, sir. We know nothing of the outer world.”
“With pleasure!” said Bertram.
He kissed the old lady’s hand again, and at this sign of regard and sympathy her eyes moistened.
“You have seen the old régime in their poor hovels,” she said. “The others are like us or worse.”
“I have seen their courage,” said Bertram.
“Many of my friends have starved to death,” said the Princess. “It is Nadia and Alexis who have saved us. My daughter is a medical student. They still get rations, and she brings home most of them to us. Without that we should not be alive. . . . Come again, dear sir!”
“But not in the daylight,” said the old man, with a hint of fear. “My name is still a cause of suspicion and dislike.”
Out into the snow again Bertram walked with Nadia. Once she stumbled over a snow-drift in the courtyard, and Bertram said, “Take my arm, won’t you? It’s safer.”
She laid her hand on his arm, and said, “You are very kind.”
“I marvel at your courage,” he said, presently.
She answered with a kind of surprise.
“Without courage, what is life? I am young. It is only the old who are afraid of new adventures.”
She told him about her medical studies at the University of Moscow. All the classes were at night, because the students worked during the day to supplement their rations.
“You take yours home,” he said. “How do you manage to get enough to eat?”
“A very little does for me,” she said. “I am strong.”
She had finished her studies now, and was fully qualified. Her ambition was to go to the famine district and join the medical staff at Kazan who were fighting the typhus. They had asked for her, but it was difficult to travel.
“How will your father and mother manage without you?” he asked, and she told him that Alexis had just been promoted to the Red Army Staff. He would be able to get better food for them, and protect them, because of his service to the state.
“I am going to Kazan,” said Bertram. “Why not come in the same train, if I can help you? The Americans are running it, and they would welcome your help.”
She was excited by the possibility, and begged him to speak a word for her; and then, believing she had asked too much of him, pleaded for forgiveness for putting him to so much trouble.
“It is my eagerness to do some work for Russia which makes me forget my manners,” she said.
He put aside the idea of trouble, and had only one doubt in trying to get her a place in the train to Kazan.
“They tell me typhus is a scourge there, and very dangerous.”
“Of course,” said the girl. “But you are going, are you not? You are not afraid, because you also want to be of service to our poor people. Why, then, should I who am a Russian, be afraid to go?”
He found no answer to that, but thought only of her devotion to her people and her unselfishness.
He said something about “self-sacrifice,” and she answered by words that he afterwards remembered.
“It is the only way of happiness, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’m an egoist.”
She refused to believe that.
“You have come out here to help poor Russia. Even at the risk of your life. That is not egoism.”
“Mixed with egoism,” he said. “To acquire knowledge for myself. To kill boredom. To heal what I’m pleased to call a broken heart! Infernal selfishness—all that!”
“You have a broken heart?” she asked, with great surprise.
The snow was falling on them at the corner of the Arbat where they stood, and they both wore white crowns and mantles, but paid no heed to it, because of this talk.
“I call it that in a romantic, sentimentalising way. My wife ran away from me not long ago. It hurt damnably. Wounded pride, perhaps. One never knows.”
“I am sorry,” she said gravely. “You loved her very much?”
“Enormously, for a time. I was very young.”
He laughed uneasily. The old wound still hurt.
“Love is difficult,” she said. “So it seems, from novels I have read, and people I have met. I have had no experience myself. . . .”
“How is that?”
“Hunger, poverty, and terror do not seem to encourage the love instinct, except in a brutal way. Anyhow, it has left me alone. It is no doubt a pleasant thing. Something one ought not to miss in life.”
She spoke without any embarrassment or self-consciousness, but as a child, simply, before the mysteries of life. Yet she was not a child, but a woman who had lived through bloody Revolution and great brutalities. Her simplicity in regard to love was not through ignorance, but inexperience.
“I should be glad to love you,” she said, “if it would help your broken heart at all. It would be very nice for me.”
She made this astonishing offer with the same simplicity and sincerity. It was as though she offered to bind up some wound.
The snow was heavy upon them, and in whirling flakes around them. He could hardly see her face or figure. They were alone in a world of whiteness in the ruin of Moscow.
“It’s good of you,” he said. “I shall be glad of your comradeship.”
“It is the same thing,” she said. “Comradeship—love—service together—understanding. That would be good to have.”
“The best things in life,” said Bertram. “The only things worth living for.”
“You think so too? Well, then it is a promise between us?”
“A hope,” he said.
She told him she must be going back, and held out her gloved hand. It was wet with the snow, when he put it to his lips.
“You are very kind,” she said.
She turned from him, and in a moment was lost to him in the whirl of snowflakes.
“Extraordinary!” said Bertram to himself, aloud, as he groped his way across the Arbat Square in the direction of the Kremlin’s great walls. He felt less lonely, though he was alone in Moscow.
“It is the same thing,” she had said, “comradeship—love—service together—understanding.”
Comradeship. Well, even without love, it would be good. He needed it enormously, from a woman, as well as from Christy. Why from a woman? Why had Janet Welford’s comradeship been so much better than any man’s? Perhaps women understood better, with more tenderness for the weakness of men. Or was it just the lure of sex? Impossible to tell. Why bother to find out? Why not accept life without analysis, as simply as Nadia’s offer of love? It was the second time he had been offered woman’s love since Joyce had gone from him. The pretty German girl had wanted to go with him, and he had laughed at her, and played the prig. Was he always to refuse the chance of human affection, woman’s tenderness, his spiritual and physical hunger for such companionship? A voice whispered in his ear, “Loyalty to Joyce! . . . Loyalty! . . . Loyalty!”
“No,” he said, answering this call of conscience, “I’ve been loyal long enough, by God! And now I’m absolved.”