XLVIII
The journey to Riga had not been too bad, except for examination of passports and luggage at odd times of the day and night, at unexpected frontiers. This happened each side of “the Polish corridor,” which had been made by the Treaty of Versailles like a wedge driven through Germany to Danzig. It happened again on the frontiers of Lithuania and Latvia.
An American in the train called it the “Get-in-and-get-out-express.” It stopped for six hours at Eydtkuhnen on the border of East Prussia, and there was time to walk about and see something of the devastation made by the great Russian drive in the early years of the war. Here were still the blackened ruins of farmhouses and barns and peasants’ cottages, but German industry had built up the villages again, very neat and pretty under their new red roofs, wonderful in contrast to the poor attempts at reconstruction in the war zone of France.
Bertram had to wait four days in Riga before he could get a train to Moscow. The Soviet agents there were unhelpful and rather insolent. The stamp of the Moscow Executive Committee on his special passport did not seem to inspire them with any zeal. They informed Bertram that he might have to wait three weeks for a train—or longer. The thought seemed to amuse them.
Three weeks in Riga! The idea was affrighting because of its boredom. In three days Bertram had exhausted the interests and amusements of a city that seemed dead all day and only wakened to life at one in the morning, when the night cafés and dancing-halls were filled with a company of Letts, Poles, Russians, Finns, and Germans, drinking large quantities of schnapps in quick gulps until their eyes watered and their noses reddened, and they became quarrelsome with their women and each other in a medley of languages.
In one of these cafés Bertram sat opposite an American who opened a friendly conversation.
“Staying long in this City of Departed Glory?”
“Not longer than I can help. I want to get to Moscow, but the trains don’t work.”
The American asked his business there, and raised his eyebrows with a smile when Bertram said, “Journalism. I want to find out the truth about the famine.”
“Well, there’s a famine, I’m told,” said the American. “You might call it a famine, without much exaggeration. About twenty-five million people starving to death, more or less. I’m pushing up some food. A relief train is going to-morrow with the first supplies. That’s my job. I’m A. R. A.”
He pronounced the letters as though they spelt a word—“Ara.” They conveyed nothing then to Bertram, though afterwards he came to know them as the greatest hope of life in Russia for the starving children from Petrograd to the Volga Valley, and the Russians spoke of “Ara” as though it were God. It meant the American Relief Administration.
“Any chance of a place on that train?” he asked.
The American smiled again.
“I expected that question. Is your passport all right for Moscow?”
Bertram showed it, and the American nodded.
“Any objection to lice?” he asked.
“I don’t invite them to dinner,” said Bertram, “but we were on speaking terms in the trenches. ‘Chatty,’ the men used to call it.”
“They’ll give you the glad hand in that train de luxe.”
“Then I can get a place?”
“I’ll fix you up. Better take supplies with you. Cheese. Biscuits. A kettle. Enamel mugs. Candles. Blankets. There’s not a restaurant car, nor a wagon lit.”
He smiled grimly, and Bertram knew why on the next night when he boarded the train to Moscow. It was nearly midnight, and the station was dimly lit, and after stumbling over grass-grown rails, Bertram found a train in darkness, except in one or two carriages where candles had been lighted and put on the window ledges. A number of Lettish porters staggered along under heavy bundles, and there were more of them in the corridor of the train from which a frightful smell met the open air. The carriages were wooden compartments, stripped of all upholstery, with plank beds, and they seemed to be entirely occupied by Americans and Russians who were quarrelling with each other for vacant possession. There was a jabber of both languages rising into violent oaths of the choicest brand from New York, Omaha, Kansas, and Kentucky. One voice rose higher than all the rest, with a bull-like bellow.
“For Christ’s sake! If all you Tavarishes don’t get out of this bug-box, I’ll get the Cheka on to you and have you minced by Chinese torturers!”
The owner of this voice, as Bertram saw in the candlelight of one carriage, was a young man of Herculean build, in a felt hat, Garibaldi shirt, riding-breeches, and top boots. To make clear the mystical meaning of his words, he seized one of the porters, lifted him up as though he were a sack of potatoes, and flung him at six others massed in the dark corridor. It had the effect of clearing a space and creating a moment’s quietude.
“Who the hell are you?” asked the genial giant, peering at Bertram and putting a flash-light close to his nose. “Do you belong to this outfit?”
Bertram mentioned the name of the American who had “fixed him up.” It was an ordinary name, but produced an immediate and softening effect.
“Good enough! You’re the young guy who’s going to the famine districts? Glad to meet you.”
Bertram found his hand in an enormous fist, and recovered it in a limp and boneless state.
“My name’s Cherry,” said the young giant. “I’m from Lynchburg, Virginia. I do the courier stunt for Ara, from Riga to Moscow. I also boss this train, and make it move. When it stops, I make it move again. Sometimes. If I get out and push. I inspire terror among Tavarishes. When they play tricks I treat ’em rough. When they play straight I’m full of loving-kindness. It’s the only way to get anything done by these lousy Tavarishes.”
“What’s a Tavarish?” asked Bertram.
“A Comrade,” said Cherry of Lynch, Virginia. “It’s a nice way of saying Bolshevik. Call them Tavarish all the time. It makes them feel good. Human equality and all that punk. Have you brought any bug-powder?”
“No.”
“I’ll lend you some. Otherwise you’ll be eaten alive.”
But for Cherry, Bertram would have reached Moscow even more of a wreck than he did. In spite of the powder, he was attacked by many different species of insect as he lay on an upper plank, with Cherry beneath. He saw them crawling in legions up the wooden walls. They ambushed him beneath his blanket, sent out scouts and advance guards and then attacked in mass formation. The nights were torture. In the day time the enemy retired to their hiding places.
The train was crowded with Russian and Lettish couriers, all in charge of heavy packing-cases and sacks. Next to them, four to a carriage, was a contingent of young Americans, going out as clerks to the headquarters staff of the A. R. A., in Moscow. Certain mysterious young men who talked to each other in low voices, were pointed out by Cherry as Russian Soviet officials belonging to the secret police of the Extraordinary Commission, known as “the Cheka,” because each letter of that dreaded word formed the initial of the full Russian title for this organisation.
There was no heat in the train, and it was cold after crossing the Russian frontier in the rainy season of early autumn.
Bertram’s cheese and biscuits, which he had bought in Riga, became utterly distasteful to him after two days, and he yielded to Cherry’s insistent invitation to share his bully beef, pork and beans, tinned butter, and fresh bread. It was Cherry, also, who taught him how to get the one source of comfort available on Russian journeys—a plentiful supply of hot water at every wayside station. The pass-word was “kipyitok,” and this was yelled by Cherry to the provodnik, or guard, of the train, who filled the passengers’ kettles so that they could make tea in their carriages.
The Russian frontier was at a place called Sebesh, the other side of a long stretch of flat, barren, abandoned country which seemed to be a kind of No-Man’s Land. The train was immediately boarded by a number of hairy men in sheepskin coats and fur caps, accompanied by two soldiers of the Red Army. Bertram felt a thrill at his first sight of Bolsheviks and Red Soldiers. His mind went back to the atrocity tales of Countess Lydia and her sister, and other refugees from the Russian Terror. These men who pushed their way down the corridor were agents of that terrible new social code and faith which had declared war upon all civilisation based upon individualism and private property, and proclaimed Communism as the new gospel which mankind must accept, whether they liked it or not. Those soldiers represented the power by which that code was enforced upon one hundred and fifty million people. It was their Army which had defeated Koltchak, Denikin, Judenitch, Wrangel, and all the counter-revolutionary forces—financed, armed and equipped by the Allied Powers—which had invaded Russia, laid great districts in ruin and flame, hanged many peasants to the branches of trees, and retreated in disorderly masses from the relentless pursuit of “the Reds.”
The two soldiers escorting the hairy Bolsheviks were not formidable in appearance. They were both about eighteen, with puffy, pale faces, and a hang-dog, under-fed look. They wore long grey overcoats, reaching to their heels, and curious cloth caps, shaped like Assyrian helmets, with stiff peaks behind, and in front the Red Star, five-pointed, of the Soviet Republic.
“See how these Tavarishes love me!” said Cherry.
Certainly the small group of Bolshevik officials who came to examine passports and baggage, greeted Cherry with a kind of forced amusement, in which, as it seemed to Bertram, there was a hint of fear. Perhaps it was due to the vice-like grip with which he insisted upon shaking hands with them; and the bear-like way in which he thumped them on the back.
“Dobra den, Tavarish! How goes it, old face-fungus? Kraseeva, eh? Fine and dandy, what? Well, dos vidanya, you darned old hypocrite, and don’t you come poking your nose into my car. Niet! No pannamayo?”
He fondled the head Bolshevik’s beard, patted him playfully on both cheeks, gave him a mighty dig in the ribs which took his breath away.
“That’s how I treat ’em,” he told Bertram. “A touch of good humour works wonders with them. Look at those two young murderers! Laughing like hell! It’s the first time they’ve laughed since I came this way before.”
The two young soldiers regarded him with eyes of wonder and admiration, between guffaws of laughter. When he stepped down on to the platform, a group of Russian porters and peasants gathered round him, listening to his oration in American and Russian, gazing at his mighty girth with astounded smiles. He towered above them, and occasionally pushed at a man’s chest, and pummelled a Russian boy with ogre-like playfulness.
Six hours at Sebesh.
“Come and see the flight from the Famine,” said Cherry. “It’ll take away your appetite for my bully beef. Cheap for me!”
He strode down the rails for five hundred yards and halted before a long stationary train without an engine. It was divided into a number of box-like cattletrucks, from which, as they drew near, came a pestilential stench through half-opened doors. In the dirty straw of each of the trucks squatted a group of human beings, men, women, and children. They were hunting vermin in their rags. Some of them lay curled up in the straw, sleeping, or dying. Perhaps dying, thought Bertram, for even those who were sitting up had a grey, haggard, deathly look, as they stared out at him with deep-sunk eyes, in which there was no interest, no life, no spirit.
“Letts,” said Cherry, “on their way home from the famine districts. They’ve been dying all the way. Hunger, weakness, typhus. Look at that girl. Typhus, beyond a doubt.”
The girl was lying on the grass by the side of the train. Her head turned from side to side. Her face was flushed and puffed.
“It’s the vermin that gets ’em,” said Cherry. “They’re eaten up with it.”
A tall, bearded peasant, clothed in rags tied about him with bits of string, came up to Bertram and spoke to him in English, with an American accent.
“Say, mister, can you change a hundred thousand roubles into German marks?”
Bertram laughed, and was astounded.
“A hundred thousand roubles! I’m not a millionaire.”
“No need to be,” said Cherry. “It’s worth about six shillings in English money.”
He took some dirty bits of paper from the bearded peasant, and gave him some German notes.
“There you are, Nunky. How do you come to speak the American lingo?”
“I worked in Detroit,” said the man. “Before the world went wrong.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Ufa.”
He turned and pointed eastward.
“Three thousand miles.”
“How long on the road, brother?”
“Five months. I am nearly at the journey’s end. Across the frontier.”
“How is it in Ufa?”
The man looked at Cherry with tragic eyes. He spoke in simple, Biblical words.
“In Ufa there is great death. The people have no food. The mothers are glad when their children die, because it is sad to hear their weeping. I am one who escaped in time. God has forsaken Russia.”
“I guess that’s a sure thing,” said Cherry.
Back in the train to Moscow the American boys were singing negro choruses in harmony, and queer rag-time songs from the Winter Garden, New York. Cherry went into their carriage, and led new choruses, and college yells, with his enormous hands. Spasmodically, hour after hour, until late at night, these songs broke out, while Bertram lay alone on the wooden plank above Cherry’s bunk, with his thoughts travelling faster than that slow-going train which every hour or so panted like an exhausted monster, reduced speed to a crawl, made one or two ineffective jerks and tugs, and then came to a dead halt. There was no more fuel. The provodnik and his comrades descended and searched around for logs of wood. Cherry stimulated their energy by shouts and curses, and roars of laughter, and back-thumpings, and general noises of encouragement to make them “get a move on.” One hour, two hours, three hours—once fourteen hours—passed before the train lurched forward again with an immense rattle of wheels and wood.
Bertram stared out of the window for hundreds of versts, at the flat, dreary, monotonous panorama of Russia. It seemed lifeless and abandoned, except at wayside stations where groups of peasants stood about the wooden sheds, staring at the train as though it were a miraculous advent. Away from these stations there was but little sign of human life. Now and then Bertram saw a droschke driving along a road which led to some distant village of wooden houses with a white-washed church rising above them. A woman gathering faggots with one hand while she carried a baby in her shawl, raised her head and looked at Bertram as the train halted near her bundle of sticks. It seemed to him that she had some message for him in her eyes. She drew her shawl on one side, and showed her child, a little wizened thing, monkey-like.
At another place a peasant was kneeling before a wayside ikon. He knelt with his head bent and his beard on his chest, and crossed himself again and again.
An immense melancholy came out of this Russian landscape, and darkened Bertram’s spirit. In imagination, without knowledge, by instinct only, he was stirred by the sense of travelling through a country of despair and immeasurable misery. The silence of the countryside was intense and brooding. No sound of laughter, of human gossip, even of human toil, came from its woodlands or open fields. There was no clink of hammer on anvil, no rhythm of an axe at work, no shout of ploughman to his team. The peasants in the wayside stations seemed to have no work to do, no object in life, except to stand and stare with gloomy eyes. “God has forsaken Russia,” said the man from Ufa. The vital energy of life itself seemed to have burned low in these people.
Away back in the train an American chorus rang out.
“Just hear that whistle blow!
I want you all to know
That train is taking my sweet man away
From me to-day!
Don’t know the reason why,
I must just sit and cry—”
Nigger melodies, Russian forests, the chug-chug of the train, Cherry’s boisterous voice, the sad eyes of a peasant woman with a sick child, a line of bugs crawling up the carriage wall, the smell of a Latvian cheese, the melancholy of life, the isolation of the human soul, the death of Kenneth Murless, the mystery of Joyce, the typhus-stricken girl lying by the railway line, the endless monotone of this Russian landscape, the puzzle of his own life, made up the incoherence of Bertram’s thoughts on the way to Moscow.
Kenneth’s death would make no difference, except to Joyce. No difference to Bertram. He had left Joyce forever. She had finished with him, and he with her. Perhaps she would go back to Holme Ottery for a time, until the American took possession. What did it matter where she went? He must cut her out of his mind. It was only a year’s habit, and weak sentiment, that made him think of her so much, with a dull ache of pain. . . . How long to Moscow, on this abominable journey? Damn those bugs!