The writer will never forget the scene at Archangel when the American soldiers left for Economia where the ship was to take them to America. Genuine were the affectionate farewells of the people—men, women and children; and genuine were the responses of the soldiers to those pitiable people. Our Miss Dickerson, of the Y. W. C. A. Hostess House, was surrounded by a tearful group of Russian High School girls who had been receiving instruction in health, sanitation and other social betterments and catching the American Young Women’s Christian Association vision of usefulness to the sick, ignorant and unhappy ones of the community. Around her they gathered, a beautiful picture of feminine grief in its sweet purity of girlish tears, and at the same time a beautiful picture of promising hope for the future of Russia when all of that long-suffering people may be reached by our tactful Christian women.
In this connection now I think of the conversation with our Miss Taylor the last Sunday we were in Economia. She and Miss Dunham were staying on in Archangel hoping to get permission to go into the interior of the country again. And it is reported that they did. She said to me: “Wherever you can, back home among Christian people, tell them that these poor people here in Russia have had their religious life so torn up by this strife that now they long for teachers to come and help them to regain a religious expression.”
A prominent worker among the College Y. M. C. A.’s in America, “Ken” Hollinshead, who was a “Y” secretary far up on the Dvina River in the long, cold, desperate winter, also caught the vision of the needs of the Russian people who had been Rasputinized and Leninized out of the faith of their fathers and were pitifully like sheep without a shepherd. He remarked to the writer that when the Bolshevist nightmare is over in Russia, he would like to go back over there and help them to revive what was vital and essential in their old faith and to improve it by showing them the American way of combining cleanliness with godliness, education with creed-holding, work with piety.
Can the Russians be educated? The soldiers know that many a veteran comrade of theirs in the war was an Americanized citizen. He had in a very few years in America gained a fine education. The general reader of this page may look about him and discover examples for himself. Last winter in a little church in Michigan the writer found the people subscribing to the support of a citizen of the city who, a Russian by birth, came to this country to find work and opportunity. He was drawn into the so-called mission church in the foreign settlement of the city, learned to speak and read English, caught a desire for education, is well-educated and now with his American bride goes to Russia on a Christian mission, to labor for the improvement of his own nation. He is to be supported by that little congregation of American people who have a vision of the kind of help Russia needs from our people.
Another story may be told. When the writer saw her first in Russia, she was the centre of interest on the little community entertainment hall dance floor. She had the manner of a lady trying to make everyone at ease. American soldiers and Russian soldiers and civil populace had gathered at the hall for a long program—a Russian drama, soldier stunts, a raffle, a dance which consisted of simple ballet and folk dances. The proceeds of the entertainment were to go toward furnishing bed linen, etc., for the Red Cross Hospital being organized by the school superintendent and his friends for the service of many wounded men who were falling in the defense of their area.
She was trim of figure and animated of countenance. Her hair was dressed as American women attractively do theirs. Her costume was dainty and her feet shod in English or American shoes. We could not understand a word of her Russian tongue but were charmed by its friendly and well-mannered modulations. We made inquiries about her. She was the wife of a man who, till the Bolsheviki drove the “intelligenza” out, had been a professor in an agricultural school of a high order. Now they were far north, seeking safety in their old peasant city and she was doing stenographer duty in the county government office.
We often mused upon the transformation. Only a few years before she had been as one of the countless peasant girls of the dull-faced, ill-dressed, red-handed, coarse-voiced type which we had seen everywhere with tools and implements of drudgery, never with things of refinement, except, perhaps, when we had seen them spinning or weaving. And here before us was one who had come out from among them, a sight for weary eyes and a gladness to heavy ears. How had she accomplished the metamorphosis? The school had done it, or rather helped her to the opportunity to rise. She had come to the city-village high school and completed the course and then with her ability to patter the keys of a Russian typewriter’s thirty-six lettered keyboard, had travelled from Archangel to Moscow, to Petrograd, to Paris, to complete her education. And she told the writer one time that she regretted she had not gone to London and New York before she married the young Russian college professor.
The school,—the common school and the high school—therein lies the hope of Russia. What that woman has done, has been done by many another ambitious Russian girl and will be done by many girls of Russia. Russian boys and girls if given the advantages of the public school will develop the Russian nation.
XXXV
“DOBRA” CONVALESCENT HOSPITAL
Description Of Hospital Building—Grateful Memories—Summary Of Medical And Surgical Cases—Feeding The Convalescents—Care And Entertainment—Captain Greenleaf Fine Manager.