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 word Seichas—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 word Seichas, 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 the Cheka before 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 word seichas, 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.”
“And your name?” 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 the Cheka we 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 called unternährung—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 the Cheka examined 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.”