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 the Cheka accompanied 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 the provodnik. 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.