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 a droschke, and by good luck made the isvostchik understand 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 the Cheka and 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.