LV
He invited Nadia to dinner one night in the little restaurant in the Arbat, and she accepted with the permission of her mother and father, who saw no harm in it, but only a little danger from secret police.
Nadia laughed at that peril. She was under the protection of “Ara,” she said, and theChekacould not touch her. That was true. Bertram had taken Dr. Weekes to the gipsy-like room in which Prince Alexander lived with his family, and he had been shocked by their dire poverty. He knew their name in Russian history, and their former palace in Petrograd, now used as a soup-kitchen by the American Relief.
A cheery young American of the South, with a slow, drawling speech and quiet manners, he was a man of delicate physique who seemed to have worn himself out in service to a suffering world. He was chief medical officer of “Ara,” and had devoted himself to the hunger-stricken and diseased children of Austria, Germany, Poland, and Armenia since the ending of war. Nadia had lit his eyes with enthusiasm for her courage. “Some girl,” was his verdict, and his word was enough to secure her appointment as interpreter and woman secretary on the “Ara” staff.
“There’s a heap to do for a girl like that in Kazan,” he said. “Our boys there are clamouring for interpreters and secretaries. But I fancy I’ve got a special job for her, where her medical training will count. We’ll see about that later, when we get to Kazan.”
So that part of the programme was fixed. She was to travel with them to Kazan, with two other ladies selected by the Colonel for office duty in that city, and she was very happy at the thought, in spite of the tragic nature of the adventure ahead. She had the zeal of Dr. Weekes himself who was restless until he reached the famine district.
“My job is with typhus,” he said. “I’ve declared a Holy War against it. It’s my personal vendetta. Where typhus is worst, there I go. One day, of course, it’s going to get me! But that’s the fortune of war, and meanwhile it’s a good game.”
Nadia had the same kind of philosophy, it seemed.
“I want to help Russia. The best way I can help is to make use of my medical training where the people suffer most. There’s a dreadful dearth of doctors, and the poor peasants are hopelessly ignorant of the most primitive rules of health. I can teach them, wash them, help them to kill their lice.”
In the restaurant of the Arbat, Bertram was received with friendly greetings from the husband and wife, and Katia. They were amazed and delighted to find Nadia with him. The elderly man with white hair and a pointed beard kissed her hand respectfully, as the daughter of Prince Alexander Suvaroff, but Katia flung her arms round Nadia’s neck and kissed her on both cheeks.
“You know this English gentleman, then!” cried the lady of the restaurant. “Doubtless you were old friends in England before the war!”
“Not old friends,” said Nadia, “but good comrades now.”
“Do not use that word comrade!” said the lady. “It has been debased.Tavarish! tavarish! tavarish!I am sick of it!”
“In English it is better,” said Nadia. “It has its old meaning still.”
She and Bertram sat at a little table in the corner. Katia waited on them delightedly, kissing Nadia’s neck, or hair, or hand, every time she came to the table. And Nadia was joyful because a white cloth was spread on the table, and there were cut glasses for their cider, which was the only drink, and plates without a crack in them.
“It is like a fairy-tale,” she said. “Not for four years have I sat down with snow-white linen to the board.”
Bertram wondered that she could endure so long a time of squalor, after her life in great mansions, surrounded by luxury from childhood. Did she not sometimes crave to escape from it to Paris or London, like so many others?
She shook her head.
“I want to see this through,” she told him. “It has been a great adventure of the soul. Terrible, but educating. You have been a soldier. You know what our men called ‘the front line spirit?’ I have been in the front line, the danger zone, and have nothing but contempt for those who fled to safe places in the war. Except the old and feeble, and the very young.”
A great adventure of the soul? Yes, there was something in that. Life at its bleakest and barest like a Polar expedition to which men like Shackleton and Scott had gone so blithely. For him also, this Russian visit was to be a great adventure of the soul. Perhaps with this girl who offered him her love! Queer that! It wouldn’t be bad to “see it through” with her. He had no other call now, no kind of human tie elsewhere. Why not see it through in Russia as well as anywhere in the world? It was cut off from the rest of the world almost as completely as Robinson Crusoe’s island. A shipwrecked country of a hundred and fifty million people, with himself among them!
They talked of the Bolshevik régime. He denounced it as the greatest tyranny on earth, the most brutal type of Government ever devised by evil minds.
She shook her head at that.
“Not quite so bad. They have done some good. They have taught the people to read and write—millions of them. They have fed the children first—always.”
Bertram was amazed at her tolerance.
“Surely you don’t defend these people?”
“No,” she said, “but I understand them. They have been cruel, but through fear. They were afraid of counter-revolutions, plots of every kind. They stamped out their enemies lest the Revolution should be defeated and Czardom brought back. So it was in France, under Robespierre, was it not?”
“This Communism!” said Bertram. “It seems to me an outrage against human nature. It attempts to crush the individual instinct which is the strongest thing in life.”
“Yes,” she answered, “that is true, I am sure. But the individual must subordinate his instincts to the good of the Commonwealth. One must not forget that Communism was killed by the peasants—and alas, they too were greedy and cruel when they had the only source of wealth.”
“Is there any hope at all for human nature?” asked Bertram.
She looked at him with surprise in her dark eyes.
“Do you doubt it? Oh, surely not! Out of all our ignorance and agony some knowledge will come for the future race. You and I are learning. Others will know because of our endeavours, and our failure, and our love. I am glad to think that.”
“How wise you are!” he said, without irony. “I am bewildered by life, and without any certain faith. You seem so sure!”
“I am Russian,” she said, laughing. “We talk and talk on abstract ideas. We do nothing worth doing.Nichevo!”
Katia came up again, and sat beside Nadia. A party of young men came into the restaurant and sat talking quietly, and drinking coffee. The ex-painter to the Imperial Court was washing up dishes behind the counter.
“I must learn Russian!” said Bertram.
Katia clapped her hands.
“Nadia will teach you!”
England seemed a million miles away. Joyce was in another planet. Nadia’s black eyes were very kind to him.
LVI
It was a six days’ journey to Kazan, and seemed interminable. The “special train” was not so magnificent as its name, but exactly similar to the one from Riga—in discomfort, and in lice. The American Colonel arrived with a young man acting as a kind of A. D. C., and with Dr. Weekes, two other young men of the American Relief Administration, a Russian officer of the Red Army, detailed as interpreter, the two Russian ladies appointed as secretaries, and Nadia. Jemmy Hart, the newspaper correspondent, joined up with Bertram, and two officers of theChekaaccompanied the party, nominally as police protection, but really for political espionage.
Christy came down to the station to say farewell. He revealed a hint of anxiety about Bertram.
“Don’t take too many risks, Major.”
He had an idea that he might not stay much longer in Moscow. He would leave Russia to Bertram. Probably their next meeting-place would be Berlin or London.
In his casual way he mentioned an exciting item of news.
“Janet has come out to Berlin. I may go and see her there.”
Janet Welford in Berlin! What was she doing there?
“Having a look round,” said Christy. “Getting a background for a new novel. . . . There’s another reason.”
He mentioned the other reason in a “by the way” kind of tone.
“I asked her to meet me there. Now that my wife’s dead, there’s no reason of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual relationship why these two persons should not be joined in holy matrimony. If Janet’s willing, which is very doubtful.”
“Well, here’s luck!” said Bertram.
He spoke the words heartily, and gripped Christy’s hand, but, at the back of his brain, as it were, was a sense of envy. Envy of Christy, his best friend! Inconceivable, that—and yet there was the thought nagging at him. Janet had been very kind to him in her rooms at Battersea Park. She had once made his heart thump by a cry of regret that they had not met and married before Joyce came along. What were her words? He remembered them.
“A pity, Sir Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I understand you better. And you were my first Dream Knight, in the days when you kissed me in Kensington Gardens.”
He leaned out of the carriage window, and gripped Christy’s hand again.
“Give my love to Janet. Tell her that I’ve killed self-pity. She’ll understand!”
“Take care of yourself!” said Christy, and then sloped away from the Kazansky station, with his pipe in his mouth.
The journey began, and continued, day after day, with many halts in the middle of Russian forests and the open countryside. Snow lay heavily on the branches of fir-trees, and thick on the ground, so that a traveller’s eyes tired of the white monotony. Every twenty versts or so they reached a Russian village, with its low roofed wooden houses, surrounded by high stockades. Peasants were shovelling snow to make pathways to their village. They gathered in the station yards to stare at the train, kept back from too near approach by soldiers of the Red Army who looked half frozen and half starved. In many stations were refugee trains without engines, with snow up to the axle wheels of their closed trucks, in which families were densely crowded, lying together all hugger-mugger, for warmth’s sake. It seemed as though they had been there for months. There was no apparent prospect of these trains ever moving. Those who died were buried in pits by the railway track. Across the flat snow-fields there were here and there processions of men, women and children, crawling like ants on the march, black against the whiteness of their way. They, too, were refugees from Famine—without much hope ahead, thought Bertram, remembering The End of the Journey, in Petrograd. He wondered how many would lie down to die in the snow.
“They are wonderful in endurance,” said Nadia, to whom he put the question, as they stood together in the corridor, looking out of window. “In every village they pass they get a bit of bread from those who can ill spare it. So they live from place to place. Those who are strong.”
He had many talks like this with Nadia in the corridor, or in her compartment, with the two other ladies, belonging, like herself, to the old régime, once ladies in waiting of the Imperial Court. The Colonel of the A. R. A. had provided food for the party, mostly tinned stuff which Dr. Weekes and Bertram, appointing themselves cooks, heated up in enamel saucepans over tins of solid alcohol. It made the time pass, and was more comforting than cold food.
At night, in the darkness of the corridor, Nadia stood by his side, and sometimes they held hands, like children when the lights are out.
They talked of the mystery of life and death, the chances of world peace, the future of civilisation. Strange topics of conversation between a young man and woman! But travelling through Russia after war and revolution, they seemed the only subjects worth discussing.
Dr. Weekes joined them, and told stories of his experiences in Armenia and the Balkans—tragic tales of widespread famine, disease, death. He, too, balanced the possibilities of Western civilisation. Disease, unless checked by international effort, might wipe it out in Central Europe. It had already made deep tracks in fields of child life. Another war, anything like the last, would so weaken Europe, apart from its own massacres, that plague and pestilence might do more destruction than Attila and his Huns in the old days of the Roman Empire.
“You and I,” he said, turning to Nadia with his slow smile, “are two of the most important people in the world. We’re disease-killers, apostles of sanitation. But the odds against us are millions to one.”
“The fewer men, the greater share of honour,” said Nadia.
She had a surprising knowledge of literature, Russian, French, and English, and, better than such knowledge, a keen intelligence and candour of outlook which made her opinion astonishing for so young a woman.
But Bertram admired her, not for her cleverness of opinion, but for her spiritual quality and entire absence of self-consciousness. Delicate as she was, the daughter of an aristocracy to which physical labour had been abhorrent, she stooped to dirty work with a sense of beauty in its labour, and Bertram was horrified to find her swilling down the filthy lavatories before the rest of the travellers had stirred from their bunks.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “leave that to theprovodnik. It’s his job, not yours.”
“It’s a job he neglects,” she said, smiling. “As one of the medical staff of ‘Ara,’ cleanliness and sanitation are in my department. The smell from this place is terrible.”
“All the more reason for you to avoid it,” said Bertram.
She shook her head.
“In the Famine district there will be worse smells and worse dirt, and lice everywhere. If I wanted to avoid them, I should not be here.”
“You are wonderful!” he said.
“A simple Russian woman,” she answered. “Why do you think me wonderful?”
There were other people in the train who thought her wonderful when Bertram told them of that early morning act. The Colonel and Dr. Weekes were filled with admiration.
“By God,” said the Colonel, “if all the Russian people were like that young woman, this country wouldn’t be plague-stricken with Bolsheviks and bugs!”
At night, in their candle-lit carriage, the Colonel and the Doctor, and Jemmy Hart, the newspaper man, and the Colonel’s A. D. C., or “pup,” as Hart called him, played poker with Russian roubles. They gambled fiercely, raising the stakes by tens of thousands, with a limit of a hundred thousand, as though possessed of untold wealth. But at the end of the long evening’s play, no one had lost or gained more than a few dollars in American rates of exchange.
During these poker games Bertram went into the dusky corridor again to stand by Nadia. They were left alone, for the other two Russian ladies went early to their bunks. The train crawled slowly, or halted for hours while new fuel was stacked in the engine. The moon rose and flooded the white landscape and the snow-capped farmsteads and the laden boughs.
“Russia is like a dead body under its white shroud,” said Nadia.
“It seems as lonely as an undiscovered land,” said Bertram.
She asked him to tell her a little of his life, so that she might know him more. He told her only of the things that had happened, the war, his marriage, the death of the child, Digby’s murder in Ireland, his mother’s death, his separation from Joyce. He was not good at self-analysis, and too much of an Englishman to attempt it. Yet she seemed to understand more than he told her.
“Russia does not hold all the unhappiness of life,” she said. “You have crowded too much suffering into a few years. It has wounded your spirit. You feel broken, and perhaps a little resentful of Fate. So much bad luck after the strain of war!”
“I’m not whining,” said Bertram. “Your courage through more dreadful things rebukes my cowardice.”
“You are not cowardly,” she told him. “I think you will be very strong and brave when your wound is healed. You have the eyes of leadership. One day you will help to lead your country in thought or action.”
He laughed at her, but she was sure.
One thing she said in those night talks as the train went crawling through the white wilderness, gave him a glimpse of a spiritual passion in her soul.
“I hated ugliness, and pain, and dirt. As a child these things were all hidden from me. As a young girl I was surrounded with beauty and illusion. Now I want to get deeper and deeper into the misery of the people. I want to be with them in their pain and their filth. I want to share their worst agony. It is to pay back to them by the suffering of my body and spirit for all the cruelties of my ancestors. If you will read Russian history, you will find my father’s name—though not my father—attached to acts which kept the peasants enslaved, and brutalised them. The old régime is suffering now for the sins of its fathers. It is right that we should be punished.”
“I don’t believe in that doctrine,” said Bertram. “We should be punished for our own acts, perhaps—though we are the children of heredity—but not for the crimes of those who gave us life.”
“It is the Law,” she said. “The Greeks knew it. Fate pursues us. It is in the Christian faith. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.”
“It’s unfair,” said Bertram. “Damned unfair.”
“Alas, it is true,” she said. “We must do good for our children’s sake.”
“I had a child who died, as I have told you,” said Bertram. “Sometimes I’m glad. The world is too cruel.”
“Not too cruel for those who have courage,” she said.
She spoke of her desire to have a child.
“Perhaps, if we love each other, you and I may have a child, dear sir. That would give me great happiness.”
Bertram was profoundly moved by those words, spoken with such simplicity.
“I am a stranger to you,” he said. “You do not know my weakness and my character.”
“I knew you,” she said, “when you looked my way in the market place.”
That night they clasped hands in the darkness of the corridor.
“My Russian comrade!” he said to her.
“Dear friend of Russia and of me,” she answered.
LVII
The city of Kazan was buried in snow, frozen hard, and glittering on its surface as though strewn with myriads of diamonds. It was a little Moscow, more Oriental, less ruined by street fighting, strangely beautiful with its gilt-domed churches and Russian mansions, and wooden hovels, all canopied in snow. It had been a rich city before the Revolution. Many great nobles had had summer houses here. Its market received the wealth of the Volga and merchandise from the Far East. A third of its population was Tartar, and under the Soviet régime it had been made the capital of a new state called the Tartar Republic, subject to Moscow, but with a certain independence for local business.
The Tartar type was striking, in its contrast to the blue-eyed, yellow-bearded peasants amidst whom they dwelt, and Bertram, staring at the tall, lean men with Mongolian cheekbones, leathery skin, and straight black hair, thought of Ghengis Khan and his hordes of men like this, who had swept across Europe in the Middle Ages to the very gates of Vienna.
Kazan was now on the edge of the famine. Hunger was creeping about the city itself, though even here there was meat to be had in the market for those who had money to buy it. The peasants along the Volga valley were killing the last of their cows, for lack of fodder, and the flesh was sent up to Kazan by the last boats that could make the journey before the Volga froze. After that there would be no more meat, as now there was no grain, no milk, and but small stocks of bread and potatoes. Soviet officials were still getting rations direct from Moscow, but that system was to be abandoned, except for a favoured few, owing to the “New Economic Laws” which had been framed mainly because the means of rationing had broken down.
The Colonel of the A. R. A. and his party were met at the station with sleighs by four or five young Americans, in heavy fur coats and Tartar caps, remarkably cheery, in spite of the frightful picture they painted of the local conditions. They had established the first food kitchens in Kazan, and had pushed out the first relief to the villages beyond.
“What’s the situation?” asked the Colonel.
Cyrus Sims, a young man looking like a Bolshevik bandit, until he pulled off his shaggy cap with ear-flaps and revealed a good American head, typical of Harvard, gave a few preliminary facts to “put the Colonel wise,” as he called it, before an interview with the President of the Tartar Republic.
“The situation, sir? Well, briefly, these people are waiting for death. They can’t see any escape, except by our help, which won’t amount to much for some time to come, as you know. We’ve undertaken to feed fifteen hundred children within three weeks from now. Sounds good. There’s a child population in this state of one million seven hundred thousand, all hungry, and mostly starving. Child population, you understand, sir! Of course we’re not going to feed adults. They’ll die. The Volga’s trying to freeze. Another week or two and no boats can pass. That’ll mean sleigh transport to the starving villages. We shall want three thousand five hundred horses to feed those fifteen hundred babes. And the horses are dropping dead along the roads. No fodder. Certain supplies have come down from Moscow by Soviet authority. Potatoes mostly. They’re rotting on the barges.”
“Why, in God’s name?” asked the Colonel.
“Same reason, sir. Dearth of horses for sleigh transport.”
“We shall have to get a move on,” said the Colonel. “Keep the horses alive. There’s lots of fodder to be had if we raise Hell. . . . Are you well billeted?”
“Sure,” said the young American, resuming his disguise as a Bolshevik bandit, and tying the ear-flaps of his Tartar cap under his chin. “Better come along, Colonel, and get warm.”
The whole party was crowded into sleighs, and set off in a procession, with a merry jingling of sleigh-bells. Dr. Weekes and Bertram had Nadia for their fellow traveller, and the doctor pulled the rug over her and packed the straw about her feet.
“It’s as cold as Calgary,” he said, “and that’s the coldest place I know.”
“In Russia,” said Nadia, “our blood is a mixture of fire and ice.”
“That’s a darned queer mixture,” said the doctor. “Unknown to chemical science.”
“It’s the secret of Russian history,” she answered.
Peasants halted on the foot-walks to stare at the passing sleighs. Their faces were haggard, and their eyes looked dead.
“There is hunger here,” said Nadia. “In Moscow we haven’t enough to eat, but here they starve.”
The sleighs halted outside a marble-fronted house with many windows, and Nadia gave a little cry of surprise.
“I know this house! It belonged to my father’s brother. I was here as a child, with my mother and Alexis. My uncle was the Governor of Kazan, and very kind to me. They shot him dead in the street one day.”
Bertram looked at her, and saw how she was stirred with the remembrance of old days before the agony of Russia had touched her life. For a moment her dark eyes filled with tears, but when she stepped down from the sledge, taking his hand to help her, she spoke brave words.
“How lucky I am to be with those who have come to rescue Russia!”
There were log fires burning in all the rooms of the house, and little camp beds in most of them.
“A good billet,” said the Colonel. “You boys know how to grab at luxury.”
“Not much luxury, sir, and plenty of bugs,” said the young man named Sims, who was in command of the “outfit” at Kazan. “This place was used for refugees, until we came. It’s still a menagerie.”
“Work for me,” said Dr. Weekes. “I’m the world’s light-weight vermin-killer.”
The Russian ladies were invited to lunch, but a special billet had been arranged for them in a house near by.
“A good scheme,” said the Colonel. “We don’t want any scandals for the Hearst Press. And I can see you boys have already fallen in love with my Princess.”
“She’s a peach,” said one of them. “But we’re too busy for amorous dalliance, Colonel.”
The Colonel winked at Bertram.
“You see the virtue of the A. R. A.? Marvellous, don’t you think? Almost incredible!”
Perhaps his cold clear eyes had perceived the comradeship of Bertram and “his” princess. If so, he was discreet, and made no personal remarks, and it was by his suggestion that Nadia was asked to go with Bertram and Dr. Weekes to inspect the hospitals and homes for abandoned children in Kazan.
“You’d better take the Princess with you, Doctor. I’ve faith in a woman’s eyes, and anyhow, I’m going to put her in charge of the local committee for child-feeding, so she must get about and see things. You’d like to join them, Pollard?”
It was Nadia who acted as interpreter, and it was by her side, getting courage from her, that Bertram went into places which made him cry out to God in his heart, and filled him with horror, and turned his stomach so that he could hardly prevent himself from vomiting, as he had done in the barrack yard at Petrograd.
The children’s homes seemed worst of all. In the first of them were fifteen hundred who had been abandoned by their parents.
“Why abandoned?” asked Bertram.
Nadia bent down to one child, a girl of twelve or so, stark naked, and so emaciated that all her ribs were visible beneath the tight-drawn skin. Word by word she translated the child’s monologue, told with the gravity of an old woman.
“She says her father belonged to Lubimovka. Once his barns were filled with grain and he had twenty cows. When the drought came, the standing wheat was burnt black in the fields. Red soldiers came and took the grain from the barn, all but a very little. Then the cows died, one by one. There was no food in the house. This little one had six brothers and sisters. Three of them died, because they had no food. The mother wept very much when they died. The father did not weep, until one day he took his children for a long, long walk away from Lubimovka to the town of Tetiushi. Then he said, ‘Wait here a little while, my children. Perhaps God will send his angels with food for you.’ And then he wept, and walked away. They waited a long while, and he did not come back. And God did not come with His angels. So they lay down to die. It was little Anna that died. The two others were fed by the market people in Tetiushi, and then put on a train that came to Kazan. So they were brought to this house, with many other children who were like themselves. They had bread once a day, and potato soup. They would be glad to have some clothes, because it is very cold.”
Nadia turned to Bertram, and her eyes were shining with tears.
“This little one knows why her father abandoned her. It was because he loved her, and could not bear to hear her crying out for food when there was nothing in the house.”
“Why are these children naked?” asked Bertram. “They will perish of cold in this house. It’s an ice-well.”
Nadia spoke to a sad-eyed man in a linen coat.
“He says it is the only way of keeping down typhus. When the children come in their clothes are crawling with vermin. He takes off their clothes and burns them. But there are no means of replacing them.”
“Surely they could make fires in the house?”
Nadia shook her head.
“It is impossible to get fuel.”
“There are great woods around Kazan.”
“There is no means of transport for the timber.”
“Men could haul it.”
“The men are weak, he says, and despair makes them lazy. And anyhow, he could not pay for their labour.”
They walked through room after room, all crowded with children. Their heads had been shaved, and in their nakedness they lay huddled close together, so thin, with such deep-sunk eyes, that they were unlike children of the human race, but like a tribe of white monkeys, clinging to each other for warmth in a frozen world. They did not play, or chatter, or laugh. They were utterly silent, with drooping heads, and a terrible old sadness in their little sunken eyes. Because there was no fuel, there was no hot water, and because there was no hot water, there was no cleanliness. A frightful stench pervaded the rooms. Some of the children lay in filth. . . .
“To-morrow I shall come here and do some work,” said Nadia. “The good man means well, but he has no energy.”
Dr. Weekes made some notes in a little book.
“Blankets. Clothes. Soap.”
He whispered a warning to Bertram.
“Don’t brush against the door-posts as you pass. They’re alive with vermin.”
They passed into another room, where there was row after row of children lying on the bare boards, in a kind of feverish sleep, with their heads flopping from side to side.
“Typhus,” said Nadia.
Among the children was a girl of about twenty, in a cotton frock. She lay amidst a group of them, with one arm over their naked bodies, sleeping, with a flame of colour on her face.
Nadia spoke to the man in the linen coat, and then turned to Bertram and Dr. Weekes.
“It is the Countess Narishkin. She was a nurse here. Yesterday she developed the typhus fever. There is no kind of hope for the poor child.”
She knelt down on the bare boards, and put one arm under the girl’s head and raised it a little, smoothing her hair back.
“Princess,” said Dr. Weekes, sternly, “you know enough about typhus to avoid unnecessary risks.”
“That is true,” said Nadia. “For the sake of others.”
She rose from her kneeling position, laying the girl’s head very gently on the boards again.
“I have some medicine,” said the young doctor, “I will give her an injection this afternoon. But I’m afraid—”
He looked at Nadia, and she said “Yes,” understanding him.
That afternoon, using their sleigh, they went to twelve such homes for abandoned children, and in each of them were the same scenes of stricken childhood, and in each of them the same amount of fever, of vermin, of filth, and of stench.
“God!” said Bertram, at last, “It’s too awful. Can you bear to see any more, Nadia?”
She put her hand on his arm.
“It is only the beginning of the things we shall see. It makes you suffer, dear comrade! That is good. You will write such pictures that the world will be moved to tears and charity. They will forgive the sins of Russia because of all this agony. By your words of truth and pity you will help to save those little ones.”
“I’ll try,” said Bertram.
It was a dedication.
In the great hospital of Kazan, once famous in the history of medical science, they plunged deeper into human misery. It was crowded with men and women suffering from every kind of disease, but mostly from typhus and dysentery caused by vermin and hunger and weakness. Whatever their disease, the patients lay huddled together, not on beds, for they had been burnt for fuel, but on the bare boards. They had a few blankets, but not many, which covered four at a time, two lying one way and two the other. There was no heat in the stoves.
Dr. Weekes questioned the chief medical officer, who looked in a dying condition, utterly pallid, and with hardly the strength to walk about his wards.
“Have you any drugs?”
“Very few!”
“Any anæsthetics—chloroform—morphia?”
“None.”
“Any castor-oil?”
“A tiny drop.”
“And disinfectants?”
“No.”
“Any soap?”
“Not for two years.”
“Any bandages, cotton wool, surgical dressings?”
“None, sir.”
“My God!” said Dr. Weekes, and it was the first word of dismay that escaped his lips.
In ward after ward they saw the huddled victims of pestilence and famine. Their clothes had not been burnt, like those in the children’s homes, and they were hunting vermin ceaselessly in their sheepskins and rags. It was difficult to give a guess at the age or class of these people. Young girls looked like old women. Young men had the worn, wrinkled look of extreme age. They were all reduced to a dead level of misery and squalor, and dirt; though among them, said Nadia, who spoke with many, were women of education and even of learning. She went about among the beds. Some of the women lying on the boards, raised themselves a little and kissed her hands.
A strange scene happened downstairs, as they were leaving. The news had gone round among the nurses that an officer of “Ara” had come to inspect the hospital, with means of help. Twenty of them suddenly came clamouring round Dr. Weekes, all crying together, all stretching out their hands to him, like a Greek chorus, with burning eyes in white faces. It was almost dark in the passage there, and Bertram was alarmed by those women’s eyes and by the almost savage anguish of their voices.
“What do they say?” asked Dr. Weekes, turning to Nadia. “What’s their trouble, anyhow?”
“They say they are starving. They implore you to send them bread. How can they nurse the sick, they say, when they are so weak and famished? Only last week two of them died of dysentery, caused by hunger. Soon they will all be dead, they say, unless they get some food.”
“Tell them,” said Dr. Weekes, “that the A. R. A. will send them food, though we are here only to feed the children of Russia.”
He turned to Bertram with troubled eyes.
“I think the Colonel will stand for that pledge. We can’t let these women starve.”
It was Nadia who translated the promise to them, and as though she were the Lady Bountiful who had been the means of rescue, they pressed round her, kissing her hands and her dress, until she laughed and protested, and pointed to the doctor as their champion. He hurried out with deep embarrassment, because one of them seized his hands and tried to kiss them.
That night, as a strange contrast to those scenes, Bertram went to the opera of Kazan with the Colonel and his little crowd. They were playing Boris Goudonoff to a crowded house of young Russians, who were warmly clad, and, in appearance, well fed.
“How is it possible that these people have enough to eat, and enjoy themselves,” asked the Colonel, “while millions are starving all around?”
“They enjoy themselves,” said Cyrus Sims, “but they’re all hungry. There’s not a single man or woman here that’s had enough to eat to-day. But they come to the opera as the one little gleam of light and joy and colour in the monotony of misery.”
“I cannot believe it,” said the Colonel. “Those people aren’t hungry. I guess they’re Soviet officials who have hoarded up secret stores.”
“Some of them, perhaps. But there’s not much chance of that. They’ve been rationed as Soviet workers until a week ago. Now the rations are cut off, and they’re tightening their belts.”
“It’s a newbourgeoisie,” said the Colonel. “The Bolsheviks declared war on the oldbourgeoisie, and then set up a new one of their own. There’s no more equality in Soviet Russia than there is in the United States.”
Bertram agreed with him, but that night he had to admit, after an amazing invasion of the A. R. A., that the glamour and glitter of the opera only concealed the sharp tooth of hunger. It showed itself naked and unashamed when the door was opened to a ringing of bells and a party of opera singers desired to know if they might invite themselves to supper withMessieurs les Américains?
How could a party of young Americans, six thousand miles from home, refuse to share their bully beef with art in distress?
“Come right in!” said Sims, in command of “the bunch.”
They came right in, six ladies and three men, including the Prima Donna, who was a Persian lady, with a wonderful voice, enormous black eyes, and a ferocious appetite. The American boys brought out their tinned beef and biscuits, their cheese and butter, and made a picnic meal with hot cocoa. The Russian ladies of the opera, speaking but a few words of French and German, which was their only conversational link with their American hosts who had picked up a smattering of those languages, after two years in Europe, made no concealment of their delight in the presence of this food. They fell upon it like harpies, and it was the beautiful Persian girl who devoured the last of a Dutch cheese with her big black eyes raised in ecstasy.
One of the Americans produced a gramophone, and turned on a jazz tune, and initiated the Persian lady into the mysteries of the fox-trot, while she screamed with laughter. The others, still roving round for stray biscuits, laughed up and down the scale.
Bertram slipped away to his camp bed in a little salon which had once been the writing-room of Nadia’s uncle, Governor of Kazan in Imperial Russia. Those dancers in the next room were like the merry ladies of the Decameron, surrounded by plague.
He looked out of his window to the white night, with a moon above the snow. It was very quiet in Kazan, with its houses filled with naked children, and starving people, where typhus prevailed.
LVIII
In the house where Nadia was lodged with the two other Russian ladies, Bertram was able to have some private talk with her before taking the boat next morning down the Volga.
“I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said. “For a few weeks at least. Afterwards—”
She looked up at him with a smile, as she sat sewing at a table. She was making herself a linen coat such as doctors wear in the wards.
“Afterwards, my friend—?”
He was silent for a little while, thinking deeply of many things—of all his life, and the meaning of it, and the hope of it.
“Perhaps it’s too soon to talk of afterwards. When I come back we will arrange something.”
“What kind of thing?” she asked.
“Our life together,” he said simply.
She rose, and let her linen drop, and took his hands.
“I will be your good comrade,” she said. “For a little while, if you like. For ever, if you like.”
“I want comradeship,” he told her. “I’m lonely, and I hate loneliness. I think we could do good work together, for children, for peace, for ourselves. I’ll be a faithful servant to you, Princess!”
“Not mine,” she said, smiling. “I’m no Princess, but a serving wench. I’m Communist enough to believe in equality between a man and his woman. We will serve God together!”
“I don’t know much about God,” said Bertram. “I’m a hopeless infidel. But I’m spiritual enough to adore the goodness in you. Your courage! Your self-forgetfulness.”
“Where love is, there God is also,” said Nadia. “That’s Tolstoy, but it’s true, I think. We will find God together, in love for each other and the world.”
“I’ve made a hopeless failure of love once,” said Bertram. “I’d be glad to get a second chance.”
“You shall have the chance, dear sir,” said Nadia. “You are one of the great lovers of the world. How proud I am to be your handmaid! I will help you to do your work for poor humanity. Every word you write shall be a light to my love for you. You will make the world know the truth, and I shall have a share in it by keeping you well, giving you comfort in spirit and body, making for you that little private paradise of which once you spoke to me.”
“You promise me good things,” said Bertram. “Better than most men get, and more than I deserve.”
“I promise myself better things,” she answered. “I am selfish in thinking of so many sweet gifts that will come to me with you. Happiness in Russia! I think I shall be the only happy woman.”
“You make me a little afraid,” said Bertram. “You will find me out as a poor fellow.”
“No, I have found you out as a kind, brave gentleman.”
“Something happened to us in the market-place at Moscow!” said Bertram.
“It was God’s hand that turned your head my way and let me look into your eyes.”
“It was luck,” he said. “God, if you like!”
“Love, anyhow,” she answered.
He stood looking into her eyes, and his were thoughtful.
“My love,” he said, “is not a boy’s first flame of passion, body and soul on fire. That was given to my wife, Joyce. In a way it’s hers now, because it belongs to the past which was hers and mine. I shall come to you in a different way, Princess. Not as an ardent boy, but as a man who’s seen the brutality of life, and come through agony, and perhaps has a better understanding of himself and of human nature. But what love I have in my heart, and a comradeship of utter loyalty, devotion, and humility, shall be yours until I die, if you’ll let me live with you so long.”
“We shall arrange our life together,” she said, using the words he had spoken. “Our loving comradeship has no ignorance. We have both seen life’s misery and been touched by it. We shall have the wisdom of love, so that it is more precious.”