Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

It was an expedition that left a multitude of vivid impressions upon the young man’s memory; the still, cold, starry night of the departure from Harwich, the lit decks, the black waters, the foaming wake caught by the ship’s lights, the neat Dutch landscape with its black and white cows growing visible as day broke, shivering workers under a chill, red-nosed dawn pouring down by a path near the railway into the factories of some industrial town; the long flat journey across Germany; the Sieges-Allée and the war trophies and public buildings of Berlin; the Sunday morning crowd upon Unter den Linden; the large prosperity of the new suburbs of Berlin; north Germany under an iron frost, a crowd of children sliding and skating near Königsberg; the dingier, vaster effects of Russia, streets in Petrograd with the shops all black and gold and painted with shining pictures of the goods on sale to a population of illiterates, the night crowd in the People’s Palace; a sledge drive of ten miles along the ice of a frozen river, a wooden country house behind a great stone portico, and a merry house party that went scampering out after supper to lie on the crisp snow and see the stars between the tree boughs; the chanting service in a little green-cupolaed church and a pretty village schoolmistress in peasant costume; the great red walls of the Kremlin rising above the Moskva and the first glimpse of that barbaric caricature, the cathedral of St. Basil; the painted magnificence of the Troitzkaya monastery; a dirty, evil-smelling little tramp with his bundle and kettle, worshipping unabashed in the Uspenski cathedral; endless bearded priests, Tartar waiters with purple sashes, a whole population in furs and so looking absurdly wealthy to an English eye; a thousand such pictures, keen, bright and vivid against a background of white snow....

The romanticism of the late Victorians still prevailed in Oswald’s mind. The picturesqueness of Russia had a great effect upon him. From the passport office at Wirballen with its imposing green-uniformed guards and elaborate ceremonies onward into Moscow, he marked the contrast with the trim modernity of Germany. The wild wintry landscape of the land with its swamps and unkempt thickets of silver birch, the crouching timber villages with their cupolaed churches, the unmade roads, the unfamiliar lettering of the stations, contributed to his impression of barbaric greatness. After the plainly ugly, middle-class cathedral of Berlin he rejoiced at the dark splendours, the green serpentine and incense, of St. Isaac’s; he compared the frozen Neva to a greater Thames and stood upon the Troitzki Bridge rejoicing over the masses of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. In Petrograd he said, “away from here to the North Pole is Russia and the Outside, the famine-stricken north, the frozen fen and wilderness, the limits of mankind.” Moscow made him talk of the mingling of east and west, western and eastern costumes jostled in the streets. He was surprised at the frequency of Chinamen. “Away from here to Vladivostok,” he said, “is Russia and all Asia. North, west, east and south there is limitless land. We are an island people. But here one feels the land masses of the earth.”

Peter was preoccupied with a gallant attempt to master colloquial Russian in a fortnight by means of a Russian Self-Taught he had bought in London; he did not thrust his conversation between Bailey and Oswald, but sometimes when he was alone with his guardian and the mood took him he would talk freely and rather well. He had been reading abundantly and variously; it was evident that at Cambridge he belonged to a talking set. If he had no directive form in his mind he had at any rate something like a systematic philosophy.

It was a profoundly sceptical philosophy. There were moments when Oswald was reminded of Beresford’s “Hampdenshire Wonder,” who read through all human learning and literature before the age of five, and turned upon its instructor with “Is this all?” Peter looked at the world into which he had come, at the Kings and Kaisers demanding devotion to “our person,” at the gentlemen waving flags and talking of patriotism and service to empires and races and “nationality,” at the churches and priests pursuing their “policies,” and in effect he turned to Oswald with the same question. In the background of his imagination it was only too manifest that the nymphs—with a general family resemblance to Hetty Reinhart—danced, and he heard that music of the senses which the decadent young men of the fin de siècle period were wont to refer to as “the pipes of Pan.”

He and Oswald looked together at Moscow in the warm light of sunset. They were in the veranda of a hillside restaurant which commanded the huge bend of the river between the Borodinski and the Kruimski bridges. The city lay, wide and massive, along the line of the sky, with little fields and a small church or so in the foreground. The six glittering domes of the great Church of the Redeemer rose in the centre against the high red wall and the clustering palaces and church cupolas of the Kremlin. Left and right of the Kremlin the city spread, a purple sea of houses and walls, flecked with snowy spaces and gemmed with red reflecting windows, through which the river twisted like a silver eel. Moscow is a city of crosses, every church has its bulbous painted cupola and some have five or six, and every cupola carries its brightly gilded two-armed cross. The rays of the setting sun was now turning all these crosses to pale fire.

Oswald, in spite of his own sceptical opinions, was a little under the spell of the “Holy Russia” legend. He stood with his foot on a chair and rested his jaw on his hand, with the living side of his face turned as usual towards his ward, and tried to express the confused ideas that were stirring in his mind. “This isn’t a city like the cities of western Europe, Peter,” he said. “This is something different. Those western cities, they grow out of the soil on which they stand; they are there for ever like the woods and hills; there is no other place for London or Rouen or Rome except just where it stands; but this, Peter, is a Tartar camp, frozen. It might have been at Nijni-Novgorod or Yaroslav or Kazan. It might be anywhere upon the Russia plain; only it happens to be here. It’s a camp changed to wood and brick and plaster. That’s the headquarters camp there, the Tsar’s pavilions. And all these crosses everywhere are like the standards outside the tents of the captains.”

“And where is it going?” said Peter, looking at Moscow over his fur collar, with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.

“Asia advancing on Europe—with a new idea.... One understands Dostoevsky better when one sees this. One begins to realize this Holy Russia, as a sort of epileptic genius among nations—like his Idiot, insisting on moral truth, holding up the cross to mankind.”

“What truth?” asked Peter.

“They seem to have the Christian idea. In a way we Westerns don’t. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their endless schools of dissent have a character in common. Christianity to a Russian means Brotherhood.”