BIG BELL, KREMLIN.
COLONNADES OF THE ALEXANDER MEMORIAL.
guest-house. We were delayed in starting by John Reed, the American Communist, who came to see him on some business. He is a well-built good-looking young man, who has given up everything at home to throw his heart and life into work here. I understand the Russian spirit, but what strange force impels an apparently normal young man from the United States? There also arrived to waylay us a painter called Rosenfeld, who wore canvas shoes like a peasant, and kissed Kameneff on his arrival. He offered to show me museums and things, but our only medium was German, and his was a good deal worse than mine, which was a great drawback. At midday, however, we broke free, and started off with my luggage. I bade farewell to the Kremlin, and we drove across the river to a guest-house on the opposite bank facing the Tsar’s Palace. The guest house is the requisitioned house of a sugar king. It is inhabited by various Foreign Office officials, also by Mr. Rothstein and an American financier, Mr. W. B. Vanderlip. A beautiful bedroom and dressing-room are mine, with walls of green damask. It looks more like a drawing-room than a bedroom. The house is more or less exactly as the sugar king left it, full of a mixture of good and bad things. It is partly modern Gothic and partly German Louis XVI. The ceiling of one of the big rooms is painted by Flameng, but the best pictures (there were some Corots) have been taken to a museum. One is extremely grateful for its comfort and hospitality, even if its taste in decoration is not of the best.
Moreover, one can enjoy it lightheartedly, for the exiled sugar king, it is rumoured, had other palaces abroad, and never came to Moscow except for a few weeks in the year. He also has money invested abroad and is not in want, and can well spare his Moscow palace for so good a purpose. His old manservant waits upon us, and takes the tenderest care of the house in the belief that the old régime will return, bringing the owners of the house with it. He says openly that he is not a Bolshevik, and takes much pride in changing our plates a great many times, and making the most of our humble fare. He insists that so far as it depends upon him we shall behave like perfect ladies and gentlemen and be treated as such.
I stayed at home all day unpacking at last, and settling down into my temporary home. Kameneff promised to come back in the course of the day, but he didn’t. He telephoned however, and arranged that I should be taken to the Ballet with the party from this house. We sat in the Foreign Office box. The ballet was “Coppelia,” beautifully produced, and the orchestra one of the finest that I ever heard. The theatre is the size of Covent Garden, and is decorated with crimson and gold. There are boxes all round the first tier, and the house was packed throughout.