§ 2
This Russian trip had been precipitated by a sudden opportunity. Originally Oswald had planned a Russian tour for his wards on a more considerable scale. Among the unsolved difficulties of this scheme had been his ignorance of Russian. He had thought of employing a courier—but a courier can be a tiresome encumbrance. His friend Bailey, who was an enthusiast for Russia and spoke Russian remarkably well for an Englishman, wrote from Petrograd offering to guide Oswald and Peter about that city, suggesting a visit to a cousin who had married a Russian landowner in Novgorod, and a week or so in Moscow, where some friends of Bailey’s would keep a helpful eye on the travellers. It was too good a chance to lose. There was some hasty buying of fur-lined gloves, insertion of wadding under the fur of Oswald’s fur coat, and the purchase of a suitable outfit for Peter.
Bailey had his misogynic side, Oswald knew; he thought women troublesome millinery to handle; and he did not include Joan in the invitation. On the whole Oswald did not regret that omission, because it gave him so excellent a chance of being alone with Peter for long spells, and getting near his private thoughts.
It was an expedition that left a multitude of vivid impressions upon the young man’s memory; the still, cold, starry night of the departure from Harwich, the lit decks, the black waters, the foaming wake caught by the ship’s lights, the neat Dutch landscape with its black and white cows growing visible as day broke, shivering workers under a chill, red-nosed dawn pouring down by a path near the railway into the factories of some industrial town; the long flat journey across Germany; the Sieges-Allée and the war trophies and public buildings of Berlin; the Sunday morning crowd upon Unter den Linden; the large prosperity of the new suburbs of Berlin; north Germany under an iron frost, a crowd of children sliding and skating near Königsberg; the dingier, vaster effects of Russia, streets in Petrograd with the shops all black and gold and painted with shining pictures of the goods on sale to a population of illiterates, the night crowd in the People’s Palace; a sledge drive of ten miles along the ice of a frozen river, a wooden country house behind a great stone portico, and a merry house party that went scampering out after supper to lie on the crisp snow and see the stars between the tree boughs; the chanting service in a little green-cupolaed church and a pretty village schoolmistress in peasant costume; the great red walls of the Kremlin rising above the Moskva and the first glimpse of that barbaric caricature, the cathedral of St. Basil; the painted magnificence of the Troitzkaya monastery; a dirty, evil-smelling little tramp with his bundle and kettle, worshipping unabashed in the Uspenski cathedral; endless bearded priests, Tartar waiters with purple sashes, a whole population in furs and so looking absurdly wealthy to an English eye; a thousand such pictures, keen, bright and vivid against a background of white snow....
The romanticism of the late Victorians still prevailed in Oswald’s mind. The picturesqueness of Russia had a great effect upon him. From the passport office at Wirballen with its imposing green-uniformed guards and elaborate ceremonies onward into Moscow, he marked the contrast with the trim modernity of Germany. The wild wintry landscape of the land with its swamps and unkempt thickets of silver birch, the crouching timber villages with their cupolaed churches, the unmade roads, the unfamiliar lettering of the stations, contributed to his impression of barbaric greatness. After the plainly ugly, middle-class cathedral of Berlin he rejoiced at the dark splendours, the green serpentine and incense, of St. Isaac’s; he compared the frozen Neva to a greater Thames and stood upon the Troitzki Bridge rejoicing over the masses of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. In Petrograd he said, “away from here to the North Pole is Russia and the Outside, the famine-stricken north, the frozen fen and wilderness, the limits of mankind.” Moscow made him talk of the mingling of east and west, western and eastern costumes jostled in the streets. He was surprised at the frequency of Chinamen. “Away from here to Vladivostok,” he said, “is Russia and all Asia. North, west, east and south there is limitless land. We are an island people. But here one feels the land masses of the earth.”
Peter was preoccupied with a gallant attempt to master colloquial Russian in a fortnight by means of a Russian Self-Taught he had bought in London; he did not thrust his conversation between Bailey and Oswald, but sometimes when he was alone with his guardian and the mood took him he would talk freely and rather well. He had been reading abundantly and variously; it was evident that at Cambridge he belonged to a talking set. If he had no directive form in his mind he had at any rate something like a systematic philosophy.
It was a profoundly sceptical philosophy. There were moments when Oswald was reminded of Beresford’s “Hampdenshire Wonder,” who read through all human learning and literature before the age of five, and turned upon its instructor with “Is this all?” Peter looked at the world into which he had come, at the Kings and Kaisers demanding devotion to “our person,” at the gentlemen waving flags and talking of patriotism and service to empires and races and “nationality,” at the churches and priests pursuing their “policies,” and in effect he turned to Oswald with the same question. In the background of his imagination it was only too manifest that the nymphs—with a general family resemblance to Hetty Reinhart—danced, and he heard that music of the senses which the decadent young men of the fin de siècle period were wont to refer to as “the pipes of Pan.”
He and Oswald looked together at Moscow in the warm light of sunset. They were in the veranda of a hillside restaurant which commanded the huge bend of the river between the Borodinski and the Kruimski bridges. The city lay, wide and massive, along the line of the sky, with little fields and a small church or so in the foreground. The six glittering domes of the great Church of the Redeemer rose in the centre against the high red wall and the clustering palaces and church cupolas of the Kremlin. Left and right of the Kremlin the city spread, a purple sea of houses and walls, flecked with snowy spaces and gemmed with red reflecting windows, through which the river twisted like a silver eel. Moscow is a city of crosses, every church has its bulbous painted cupola and some have five or six, and every cupola carries its brightly gilded two-armed cross. The rays of the setting sun was now turning all these crosses to pale fire.
Oswald, in spite of his own sceptical opinions, was a little under the spell of the “Holy Russia” legend. He stood with his foot on a chair and rested his jaw on his hand, with the living side of his face turned as usual towards his ward, and tried to express the confused ideas that were stirring in his mind. “This isn’t a city like the cities of western Europe, Peter,” he said. “This is something different. Those western cities, they grow out of the soil on which they stand; they are there for ever like the woods and hills; there is no other place for London or Rouen or Rome except just where it stands; but this, Peter, is a Tartar camp, frozen. It might have been at Nijni-Novgorod or Yaroslav or Kazan. It might be anywhere upon the Russia plain; only it happens to be here. It’s a camp changed to wood and brick and plaster. That’s the headquarters camp there, the Tsar’s pavilions. And all these crosses everywhere are like the standards outside the tents of the captains.”
“And where is it going?” said Peter, looking at Moscow over his fur collar, with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.
“Asia advancing on Europe—with a new idea.... One understands Dostoevsky better when one sees this. One begins to realize this Holy Russia, as a sort of epileptic genius among nations—like his Idiot, insisting on moral truth, holding up the cross to mankind.”
“What truth?” asked Peter.
“They seem to have the Christian idea. In a way we Westerns don’t. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their endless schools of dissent have a character in common. Christianity to a Russian means Brotherhood.”
“If it means anything,” said Peter.
The youngster reflected.
“I wonder, is there really this Russian idea? I don’t believe very much in these national ideas.”
“Say national character then. This city with its endless crosses is so in harmony with Russian music, Russian art, Russian literature.”
“Any city that had to be built here would have to look more or less like this,” said Peter.
“If it were built by Americans?”
“If they’d lived here always,” said Peter. “But we’re arguing in a circle. If they’d lived here always the things that have made the Russians Russians, would have made them Russians. I’ve gone too far. Of course there is a Russian character. They’re wanderers, body and brain. Men of an endless land. But——”
“Well?”
“Not much of a Russian idea to it.... I don’t believe a bit in all these crosses.”
“You mean as symbols of an idea?”
“Yes. Of course the cross has meant something to people. It must have meant tremendous things to some people. But men imitate. One sticks up a cross because it means all sorts of deep things to him. Then the man down the road thinks he will have a cross too. And the man up the road doesn’t quite see what it’s all about but doesn’t like to be out of it. So they go on, until sticking up crosses becomes a habit. It becomes a necessity. They’d be shocked to see a new church without four or five crosses on it. They organize a business in golden crosses. Everybody says, ’You must have a cross.’ Long ago every one has forgotten that deep meaning....”
“H’m,” said Oswald, “you think that?”
“It’s just a crowd,” said Peter, thinking aloud. “Underneath the crosses it’s just a swarming and breeding of men.... Like any other men.”
“But don’t you think that all that million odd down there is held together by a distinctive idea? Don’t you feel sometimes the Russian idea about you—like the smell of burnt wood on the breeze?”
“Well, call it a breeze,” said Peter. “It’s like a breeze blowing over mud. It blows now and then. It’s forgotten before it is past. What does it signify?”
He was thinking as he talked. Oswald did not want to interrupt him, and just smiled slightly and looked at Peter for more.
“I don’t think there’s any great essential differences between cities,” said Peter. “It’s easy to exaggerate that. Mostly the differences are differences of scenery. Beneath the differences it’s the same story everywhere; men shoving about and eating and squabbling and multiplying. We might just as well be looking at London from Hampstead bridge so far as the human facts go. Here things are done in red and black and gold against a background of white snow; there they are done in drab and grey and green. This is a land of dull tragedy instead of dull comedy, gold crosses on green onions instead of church spires, extremes instead of means, but it’s all the same old human thing. Even the King and Tsar look alike, there’s a state church here, dissenters, landowners....”
“I suppose there is a sort of parallelism,” Oswald conceded....
“We’re not big enough yet for big ideas, the Russian idea, or the Christian idea or any such idea,” said Peter. “Why pretend we have them?”
“Now that’s just it,” said Oswald, coming round upon him with an extended finger. “Because we want them so badly.”
“Does every one?”
“Yes. Consciously or not. That’s where you and I are at issue, Peter.”
“Oh, I don’t see the ideas at work!” cried Peter. “Except as a sort of flourish of the mind. But look at the everyday life. Wherever we have been—in London, Paris, Italy, Berlin, here, we see every man who can afford it making for the restaurants and going where there are women to be got. Hunger, indulgence, and sex, sex, sex, sex.” His voice was suddenly bitter. He turned his face to Oswald for a moment. “We’re too little. These blind impulses——I suppose there’s a sort of impulse to Beauty in it. Some day perhaps these forces will do something—drive man up the scale of being. But as far as we’ve got——!”
He stared at Moscow again.
He seemed to have done.
“You think we’re oversexed?” said Oswald after a pause.
The youngster glanced at his guardian.
“I’m not blind,” he fenced.
Then he laughed with a refreshing cheerfulness. “It’s youthful pessimism, Nobby. My mind runs like this because it’s the fashion. We get so dosed with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—usually at second hand. We all try to talk like this. Don’t mind me.”
Oswald smiled back.
“Peter, you drive my spirit back to the Victorians,” he said. “I want to begin quoting Longfellow to you. ’Life is real, life is earnest——’”
“No!” Peter countered. “But it ought to be.”
“Well, it becomes so. We have Science, and out of Science comes a light. We shall see the Will plainer and plainer.”
“The Will?” said Peter, turning it over in his mind.
“Our own will then,” said Oswald. “Yours, mine, and every right sort of man’s.”
Peter seemed to consider it.
“It won’t be a national will, anyhow,” he said, coming back to Moscow. “It won’t be one of these national ideas. No Holy Russia—or Old England for the matter of that. They’re just—human accumulations. No. I don’t know of this Will at all—any will, Nobby. I can’t see or feel this Will. I wish I could....”
He had said his say. Oswald turned again to the great spectacle of the city. Did all those heavenward crosses now sinking into the dusk amount to no more than a glittering emanation out of the fen of life, an unmeaning ignis fatuus, born of a morass of festering desires that had already forgotten it? Or were these crosses indeed an appeal and a promise? Out of these millions of men would Man at last arise?...
Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm....