XLIX
Moscow—and old Christy! Bertram saw him on the platform amidst a group of Red soldiers, bearded porters, and droschke drivers in fur caps and long blue coats. He was wearing the same old grey suit in which Bertram had last seen him in London, with the addition of a sheepskin waistcoat. His lean, ugly face was twisted into a humorous smile as he saw Bertram.
“Welcome to our city!”
“God in Heaven!” said Bertram. “This is a grand meeting.”
For some reason, inexplicable to himself, the sight of Christy was like finding a solid raft after shipwreck.
“Follow me, and don’t rub shoulders with your fellow men,” said Christy.
He led the way from the platform into the station hall. It was a great place with white-washed walls and filled with such a stench of human filth that Bertram felt like vomiting. The great floor space was entirely covered with the heaped-up bodies of men, women, and children. They lay piled up on sacks and bags, and across each other’s legs and arms, in a tangled mass of sheepskins, rags, and mangy fur, all brown with mud and dirt as though they had been dipped in the slime of Flanders, as Bertram had known it in war-time winters. It was nightfall, and they were settling down to sleep, restlessly, so that there was a heaving of bodies, and a tossing of arms. Some slept with stertorous breathing. Children wailed. Girls who were almost women lay in the arms of bearded men. One man lay dead among the living, as Bertram saw at a glance, not unfamiliar with death. His head was thrown back on a bit of sacking, showing a thin, turkey-like neck with loose wrinkled skin. His eyes were wide open and glazed.
“What’s all this?” asked Bertram.
“Refugees from famine,” said Christy. “The end of the journey. To-morrow they go into camp. Apart from typhus, they’re all right now.”
Bertram breathed deeply of fresh air when they emerged from the station.
“Can I get into a hotel?” he asked presently.
“Can you do what?”
Christy laughed quietly at the question.
“This is Bolshevik Russia! The Carlton doesn’t function at the moment. There are no hotels. The Narcomindjel provides you with a billet, if they like the look of you.”
“Who may they be?”
“The Soviet Foreign Office. East side Jews from New York deal with us, mostly. Not bad fellows, if you’re civil.”
“Supposing they don’t like the look of me?”
Christy smiled grimly.
“You’ll get another kind of billet. With bars to the windows.”
“Any chance of that?”
“Not now. Bolshevism is busted. They want help from the outside world. That’s why they’ve let me stay and let you come. Things are changing pretty rapidly. I’ll tell you all about it presently. First the Foreign Office, and Mr. Weinstein.”
He hailed a droschke, spoke a few words of Russian—amazing fellow!—and Bertram found himself driving through Moscow at night, with Christy by his side. Moscow—or some fantastic city of a dream after a goblet of absinthe? The moon was up, and shone brightly down upon a vision of white palaces, red walls, turreted gateways, tall bell-towers, and clusters of pear-shaped domes, all golden and glistening in the white moonlight. Under the gateways were deep caverns of blackness, and high walls with fan-shaped battlements flung black shadows across broad squares all flooded with the moon’s milky radiance. The droschke, pulled by a lean and wiry horse, lurched over cobbled roads like a boat in a rough sea, and pitched into holes and pitfalls which more than once brought the horse to its knees. Under a gateway, very narrow, with a turret overhead, a red lamp was burning, and there seemed to be an altar in the little chamber at the side, glinting with gilt candlesticks. The driver pulled off his fur cap, and crossed himself.
“The shrine of the Iberian Virgin,” said Christy. “A thousand years old, and more powerful than Lenin in the peasant mind!”
There was a great open square on the other side of the gateway, below a steep wall of red brick. At one end of it was a fantastic church, with a twisted dome painted in all the colours of the rainbow. In the high wall were arched gateways, lit by hanging lanterns, guarded by Red soldiers whose bayonets flashed like quicksilver. At one angle of the wall was an open staircase of red brick, leading to a high turret. Each of its steps was clear-cut by a light behind, with strange theatrical effect. Beyond seemed an endless vista of golden cupolas, surmounted by shining crosses, above white walls, all glamorous and shadow-haunted.
“The Kremlin,” said Christy. “From that high tower—old Ivan Velike—Napoleon saw Moscow burning, and read his doom in its smoke and flame. We’re passing through the Red Square. Every stone of it has been wet with blood. Those walls have looked down on a thousand years of human cruelty—not ended yet. . . .”
“A cut-throat looking place,” said Bertram, and shivered a little. There were few people about. There was no sound in the city except the klip-clop of the lean horse, and the footsteps of sentries pacing under the Kremlin walls.
“It holds the biggest drama in the world,” answered Christy. “What’s happening here is going to alter history everywhere. Peace or war, perhaps civilisation itself, is going to be decided by the brain that is working at this hour of midnight, beyond those walls. The ruthless brain of a fanatic who is also a realist. He experiments with human nature like a vivisector with guinea-pigs, without compassion, in the interests of science. To prove or disprove a theory.”
“Lenin?”
“Lenin. . . . Genius or maniac? Damned if I know!”
The Foreign Office, which Christy called by its incomprehensible name, was in a big block of buildings at the corner of an open place beyond the Red Square. A young soldier in an overcoat made for a bigger man, so that the sleeves came below his hands, barred the way with his rifle at the foot of a staircase, until Christy said, “Tavarish Weinstein.”
At the top of the staircase, Christy plunged down a corridor, turned sharply to the left, knocked at a door, and opened it without waiting for an answer. It was well past midnight, but at a desk heaped with papers, a man sat working. He was a delicate-looking man, past middle age, with a pointed beard and moustache, like a French painter. Like such a type, also, he wore a jacket of brown velveteen. He looked up at Christy’s entrance, and Bertram saw that the pleasant aspect of his face was spoilt by “crossed” eyes.
“Good evening, Mr. Weinstein! This is my friend, Bertram Pollard of The New World.”
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Pollard. A tiring journey, I’m sure.”
He shook hands with Bertram, with a limp, soft touch, and spoke in a gentle, tired voice. As chief of the propaganda department of the Soviet Republic, he did not come up to Bertram’s expectations of a leading Bolshevik. He might have been the editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal, or one of the most respectable members of the Royal Academy. He did not even look like a Jew.
“You purpose to visit the Famine region of the Volga?” he asked Bertram, and then, in a melancholy voice, said something about the tragic conditions in that part of Russia. The Republic was doing its best to cope with them. But it was very difficult. They needed foreign help. From England and the United States.
“We have nothing to hide,” he said presently. “Go where you like, see what you like. Write what you like. We only ask you to tell the truth. So many lies have been told about us. Incredible! We welcome the truth. We wish the world to know.”
“My friend Pollard is a glutton for truth,” said Christy, with just the flicker of a wink at Bertram. “Where are you going to billet him, Mr. Weinstein? With me, I hope?”
“Certainly. You are comfortable?”
“Luxurious, even.”
“That is good. We like to treat our guests well.”
He rang up a number on the telephone, and spoke rapid Russian. Then he turned to Christy again.
“It is settled. Sophieskaya, 14. They have prepared a room for him. Good evening, Mr. Pollard. I shall read your articles with interest, I am sure.”
Christy led the way out of the building, and asked Bertram to get into the droschke again. They drove across a bridge, turned at right angles along the bank of the river. On the other side was an astonishing view of the Kremlin again in the white moonlight, with great blocks of darkness between its churches and palaces and towers.
“An ‘Arabian Nights’ Dream!” said Bertram, in a low voice.
Christy did not answer him directly.
“That fellow Weinstein is not a bad fellow. As gentle as an invalid lady at Bournemouth. As subtle as a Chinese mandarin. I don’t think he’d hurt a spider, willingly. But of course he’d vote for the death of any counter-revolutionary, man, woman, or child. That’s fear. Fear is the father of cruelty. Well, here we are.”
The droschke driver pulled up his horse with a clatter of hoofs. Two soldiers standing by a sentry-box came forward with a lantern, and held it up to Christy’s face, and Bertram’s.
“That’s all right, my children,” said Christy. “Now for a hundred thousand roubles.”
“In Heaven’s name, what for?” asked Bertram, still ignorant of Russian money.
“To pay the isvostchik—meaning the cabby. Hear him howl when I give it him.”
Christy was right. The man wailed and whined, raised his hands to heaven, called upon the moon as witness, flung his fur cap on the ground, spat on the mass of paper which Christy had given him.
“Skolka?” said Christy.
The man renewed his loud plaint, until one of the Red soldiers struck him on the chest with the butt-end of his rifle.
“I paid him forty thousand roubles too much,” said Christy. “He wanted fifty thousand more. Such is the greed and dishonesty of man!”
“What’s this house?” asked Bertram, staring up at a great mansion with a classical façade. “It looks like a palace.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” said Christy. “This is where I live. Nothing less than a palace for dear old Christy! An English aristocrat must have his four-poster bed and Louis Quinze suite.”
He went up a flight of steps and pulled a chain. There was the loud jangling of a bell, and presently a great rattling of bolts.
“They keep us under lock and key, so that we don’t escape without paying our bill,” said Christy. “You’ll find these Bolsheviks bleed the Western capitalist.”
The door was opened by a pretty, sleepy girl, with a shawl round her head. She greeted Christy with a smile, a yawn, and a German “Güten Abend.”
“Don’t be frightened at anything you see,” said Christy. “What you don’t see is much more alarming.”
The first aspect of things was not frightening. Bertram found himself in a great and splendid hall, panelled in richly carved oak, with gilded decorations. Beyond was a wide flight of stairs, leading up to a corridor hung with tapestries. It was at the corner of the corridor that he had his first shock. From behind a curtain, or through some door which he had not seen, six figures appeared in single file, utterly silent. They looked like Chinese mandarins in wonderful robes of cloth of gold. Their pig-tails swung as they passed.
Christy turned round and winked at Bertram, and then led the way through a noble salon, all gilt and brocade, in the Louis Quinze style. Round the walls were portraits of men and women of the old régime, in white wigs and flowered silks. Immense candelabra, like those at Versailles, were suspended from a ceiling painted with cherubs and naked goddesses.
At the farthest door another unexpected figure stood motionless. It was a Turkish soldier in a red fez, and embroidered sash round blue baggy breeches. Christy passed through the salon, and led the way down another corridor where Bertram was startled again by a man suddenly opening a door, looking out, and shutting it with a bang. In that brief glimpse Bertram had seen an Indian prince, as he seemed, in a high white turban, and robe of cream-coloured silk.
Further down the corridor, another door opened, and a man came right out into the passage. He wore a flannel shirt and pepper-and-salt trousers, with his braces hanging down. His feet were bare, and he was carrying a wine-bottle in one hand and a wet sponge in the other. He looked like a respectable butler in a good English household, retiring for the night. As he passed Christy, he crossed himself with the wine bottle, and squeezed a drop of water out of the sponge on to the polished boards.
“Le diable est mort!” he said, with great joyfulness.
Christy passed into another room, which was an almost exact reproduction of the Louis Quinze salon. A grand piano was open, and a young man without a collar was playing “Three Blind Mice,” with one finger.
“This way,” said Christy.
He pulled back a heavy curtain, opened a door, and led Bertram into a room which might have been a king’s study. It was panelled with oak, and furnished with oak chairs and tables, elaborately carved with Gothic decoration. A marble Venus stood on a high pedestal in the corner of the room, and on one of the tables was a bust of Napoleon. A figure of St. George and the Dragon in coloured marble inlaid with gold, was in front of the window, which looked across the river to the Kremlin.
On an enormous hearth, with iron dogs, some big logs were burning.
Two candles were alight in beer bottles, next to the bust of Napoleon, and in the centre of the room was an iron bedstead and a tin bath.
“Here we are,” said Christy. “Home at last!”
Bertram was silent for a moment, looking unutterable things. Then he asked a series of questions, quietly but firmly.
“Tell me, have I gone raving mad? Or is this a real house in Bolshevik Russia? Who were all those strange people? Or did I only think I saw them?”
“It’s quite all right,” said Christy, soothingly. “I know how you feel, because I’d the jim-jams myself when I first came here. This is the Guest House of the Soviet Republic. It is also infested with the Cheka or secret police, who will take down anything you say as evidence against you, as the London Bobbies say, if you speak too loud, and unwisely of dangerous things. It used to be the palace of the Sugar King of Russia. It’s one of the few houses in Moscow which was left untouched by the Revolution.”
“Those Orientals?” asked Bertram.
“A mission from the Far Eastern Republic.”
“That fellow with the wine bottle and the wet sponge?”
“An American newspaper correspondent. Jemmy Hart. One of the best.”
“And the dreamy fellow playing ‘Three Blind Mice’?”
“Kravintzki—one of the bright spirits of the Cheka. His signature is necessary for all executions. That’s why he plays the piano with one finger.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“Not to tire his wrist.”
“Well, now I know!”
He took hold of Christy’s arms and squeezed him tight.
“It’s good to see you again, you ugly old chameleon. Let’s sit and talk. I’ve a thousand things to tell and to ask. Since you left me I’ve been through the Slough of Despond, and the Valley of Doubt. I’m carrying a dead heart in my body. I’m in darkness, and can’t see a ray of light ahead.”
“Well, you’re a cheerful kind of blighter to come to Moscow!” said Christy, with a grin. “You won’t find any rosy hope in the Volga Valley! Nor any blaze of light ’twixt Moscow and Petrograd. But let’s talk in front of the fire. God, how good it is to talk! How good and useless, except to one’s own soul!”
All through the night in a Guest House of Bolshevik Russia, they talked as only men can whose friendship is proved. Bertram spoke a little of Joyce, and learnt that Christy’s wife was dead. They were both lonely men, and glad of this comradeship.