The Samovar Girl

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

The transport seemed reluctant to approach the shore of such an inhospitable land. Her gray war-painted sides were festooned with sea-grime from the Pacific. Her pace was slow, as if she mistrusted the hills overhanging Vladivostok. She was all for caution, though the tumbling destroyer drove ahead of her like a terrier leading the way for a suspicious mastiff.

Among the officers crowding the upper deck of the transport was a young man wearing single silver bars on the shoulders of his khaki tunic. On his collar were little circles of bronze enclosing eagles fashioned from the same metal. To those who understood such things, they proclaimed him to be a First Lieutenant of the Intelligence Division of the General Staff of the United States Army.

Lieutenant Gordon was a sturdy chap, of good height. His cleanly shaven face was inclined to ruddiness. His chin was generously molded, his jaw had a squat squareness to it which gave the lower half of his face a suggestion of grimness, but the good-natured twinkle of his blue eyes belied this grimness. Still, he was reserved—perhaps too serious for one of his age, too moodily self-contained.

He had kept to himself a good deal on the passage of the transport from San Francisco. While others of his age had been romping the decks and singing and making gay, he had clung to his cabin. He said that he was studying Russian.

When the transport began to draw near to the coast of Siberia, Gordon had stood nearly all day alone in a sheltered nook at the head of the upper deck where the shrouds came down to the rail and prevented more than one person’s getting into the corner. He seemed always to gravitate to spots in the ship which would insure his being alone or cut off in some way from the crowds. Then he would stand motionless, gazing out over the bows to the horizon ahead, busy with his own thoughts.

Yet for all his aloofness, Lieutenant Gordon was an affable chap. And he was keenly interested in all things Russian—showed a most laudable ambition to learn all he possibly could about the country in which he was to serve. There was a captain at Gordon’s table who had a cabin full of books about Russia, and Gordon listened most attentively to the informal lectures by the well-read captain.

And there was a major who had been military attaché in Petrograd. He spoke Russian well, and gave lessons in the language to the other officers. Gordon attended some of the lessons, but his progress in learning the language was distressingly slow. Still, Gordon did extremely well at times. One day the major had asked the class to repeat a Russian sentence. Gordon was the only one to repeat the words with anything approaching correctness.

“Splendid!” exclaimed the major enthusiastically.

“You are getting a good accent. That’s really excellent, Mr. Gordon. And somehow you resemble Russians—if it were not for your uniform, you might easily be taken for a Russian.”

The class laughed. Gordon reddened. When he was asked to repeat another sentence in Russian, he rather bungled it. And that day he quit the Russian class, saying that he could learn faster alone with his grammar. And he kept more to himself after that.