The Samovar Girl

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

In contrast with the smoking city below, the place of the stockade seemed to be deserted. The scant snow all about it was unbroken by any path, showing that if there was a road leading to the stockade, it was not in use. The yellow color of the walls suggested an unhealthiness—a place shut away from the population of the city. The lines of the place were clearly etched upon the slope like the skeleton of some monstrous animal which had died upon the dreary and deserted hillside. And it was a dead thing—the wreck of the old prison of the Valley of Despair.

The train puffed into the station. The platform was thronged with a surging mob of people making a mad clamor to get into the cars filled with soldiers. They pleaded to be allowed to ride to any place, but there was no room for them in the stifling train and the Czechs refused to allow the refugees aboard. So they gathered up their pitiful belongings and swarmed back into the station out of the cold to wait for other trains which might take them away.

Peter gathered up his blanket-roll and his bag and slipped out of the car. He got a porter at the station, a big moujik in a dirty white apron, to take the things to a droshky in the square.

Once free of the mob, and with the station between him and the train, Peter looked across the square. Some soldiers were drilling in the open place—short chaps, of heavy build and awkward movements, learning to march and countermarch under the commands of Cossack officers.

There were many brick buildings of three and four stories. But between them were the low, squat log houses of old times, battered and unkempt, run-down pioneers now relegated to the position of poor relations and long neglected.

Peasant women trotted round and round their crude carts, selling blocks of frozen soup and loaves of black bread to refugees from the station. The cold air was laden with sour odors. There was a great gabbling between buyers and sellers. The women and men kept running round in circles for warmth, their breath bearding them with steam from their nostrils. To the half-clad and hungry, merely keeping alive in such cold was an agony.

A group of boys with tattered newspapers gathered about Peter, noting his furs and his brown field-boots with curious eyes. These boys were wrapped with long woolen scarfs, and wore uncouth clothes and men’s boots long since thrown away by the original owners—boots lacking soles except for rags bound round the feet. If the lads stood still for but a minute, it was to shiver violently, so they kept jumping up and down like marionettes moved by a string. Peter’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of them, and he threw them a handful of paper rubles and kopecks that they might have hot cabbage soup.

“Poor little chaps!” he said, and, getting into a droshky, told the iswostchik to drive to the best hotel. The horses broke into a gallop at once, straight across the square, and it was then that Peter noticed an ancient building in the line of the street ahead. It was built of logs in the old style.

“Is that the old post-house?” he shouted to the driver.

“Yes, that is it,” said the driver.