Leaving the prim and starched orderliness of Gibraltar, with its thick coating of British veneer, its tidy streets and buildings enlivened with the scarlet tunics of Mr. Thomas Atkins and his brethren, you traverse the "Neutral Ground" to an iron railing, and literally pass into Spain through an iron gate. The contrast is extraordinary. It would be unfair to select Linea as a typical Spanish village; it is ugly, and lacks the picturesque features of the ordinary Andalusian village; it is also unquestionably very dirty, and very tumble-down. Between Eydkuhnen and Wirballen the contrast is just as marked. As the German train stopped, hosts of bearded, shaggy-headed individuals in high boots and long white aprons (surely a curious article of equipment for a railway porter) swooped down upon the hand-baggage; I handed my passport to a gendarme (a term confined in Russia to frontier and railway police) and passed through an iron gate into Russia.
Russia in this case was represented by a gigantic whitewashed hall, ambitious originally in design and decoration, but, like most things in Russia, showing traces of neglect and lack of cleanliness. The first exotic note was struck by a full-length, life-size ikon of the Saviour, in a solid silver frame, at the end of the hall. All my Russian fellow-travellers devoutly crossed themselves before this ikon, purchased candles at an adjoining stall, and fixed them in the silver holders before the ikon.
Behind the line of tables serving for the Customs examinations was a railed-off space, containing many desks under green-shaded lamps. Here some fifteen green-coated men whispered mysteriously to each other, referring continually to huge registers. I felt a thrill creep down my back; here I found myself at last face to face with the omnipotent Russian police. The bespectacled green-coated men scrutinised passports intently, conferred amongst themselves in whispers under the green-shaded lamps, and hunted ominously through the big registers. For the first time I became unpleasantly conscious of the existence of such places as the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and of a country called Siberia. I speculated as to whether the drawbacks of the Siberian climate had not been exaggerated, should one be compelled to make a possibly prolonged sojourn in that genial land. Above all, I was immensely impressed with the lynx-eyed vigilance and feverish activity of these green-coated guardians of the Russian frontier. From my subsequent knowledge of the ways of Russian officials, I should gather that all this feverish activity began one minute after the whistle announced the approach of the Berlin train, and ceased precisely one minute after the Petrograd train had pulled out, and that never, by any chance, did the frontier police succeed in stopping the entry of any really dangerous conspirator.
Diplomats with official passports are exempt from Customs formalities, so I passed on to the platform, thick with pungent wood-smoke, where the huge blue-painted Russian carriages smoked like volcanoes from their heating apparatus, and the gigantic wood-burning engine (built in Germany) vomited dense clouds from its funnel, crowned with a spark-arrester shaped like a mammoth tea urn, or a giant's soup tureen. Everything in this country seemed on a large scale.
In the gaunt, bare, whitewashed restaurant (these three epithets are applicable to almost every public room in Russia) with its great porcelain stove, and red lamps burning before gilded ikons, I first made the acquaintance of fresh caviar and raw herrings, of the national cabbage soup, or "shtchee," of roast ryabehiks and salted cucumbers, all destined to become very familiar. Railway restaurants in Russia are almost invariably quite excellent.
And so the train clanked out through the night, into the depths of this mysterious glamour-land.
The railway from the frontier to Petrograd runs for 550 miles through an unbroken stretch of interminable dreary swamp and forest, such as would in Canada be termed "muskag," with here and there a poor attempt at cultivation in some clearing, set about with wretched little wooden huts. After a twenty-four hours' run, without any preliminary warning whatever in the shape of suburbs, the train emerges from the forest into a huge city, with tramcars rolling in all directions, and the great golden dome of St. Isaac's blazing like a sun against the murky sky.
I had pictured Petrograd to myself as a second Paris; a city glittering with light and colour, but conceived on an infinitely more grandiose scale than the French capital.
We emerged from the station into an immensely broad street bordered by shabbily-pretentious buildings all showing signs of neglect. The atrociously uneven pavements, the general untidiness, the broad thoroughfare empty except for a lumbering cart or two, the absence of foot-passengers, and the low cotton-wool sky, all gave an effect of unutterable dreariness. And this was the golden city of my dreams! this place of leprous-fronted houses, of vast open spaces full of drifting snowflakes, and of an immense emptiness. I never was so disappointed in my life. The gilt and coloured domes of the Orthodox churches, the sheepskin-clad, red-shirted moujiks, the occasional swift-trotting Russian carriages, with their bearded and padded coachmen, were the only local touches that redeemed the streets from the absolute commonplace. The Russian lettering over the shops, which then conveyed nothing whatever to me, suggested that the alphabet, having followed the national custom and got drunk, had hastily re-affixed itself to the houses upside down. Although as the years went on I grew quite attached to Petrograd, I could never rid myself of this impression of its immense dreariness. This was due to several causes. There are hardly any stone buildings in the city, everything is of brick plastered over. Owing to climatic reasons the houses are not painted, but are daubed with colour-wash. The successive coats of colour-wash clog all the architectural features, and give the buildings a shabby look, added to which the wash flakes off under the winter snows. There is a natural craving in human nature for colour, and in a country wrapped in snow for at least four months in the year this craving finds expression in painting the roofs red, and in besmearing the houses with crude shades of red, blue, green, and yellow. The result is not a happy one. Again, owing to the intense cold, the shop-windows are all very small, and there is but little display in them. Streets and shops were alike very dimly lighted in my day, and as there is an entire absence of cafés in Petrograd, there is none of the usual glitter and glare of these places to brighten up the streets. The theatres make no display of lights, so it is not surprising that the general effect of the city is one of intense gloom. The very low, murky winter sky added to this effect of depression. Peter the Great had planned his new capital on such a gigantic scale that there were not enough inhabitants to fill its vast spaces. The conceptions were magnificent; the results disappointing. Nothing grander could be imagined than the design of the immense place opposite the Winter Palace, with Alexander I's great granite monolith towering in the midst of it, and the imposing semicircular sweep of Government Offices of uniform design enclosing it, pierced in the centre by a monumental triumphal arch crowned with a bronze quadriga. The whole effect of this was spoilt by the hideous crude shade of red with which the buildings were daubed, by the general untidiness, and by the broken, uneven pavement; added to which this huge area was usually untenanted, except by a lumbering cart or two, by a solitary stray "istvoschik," and an occasional muffled-up pedestrian. The Petrograd of reality was indeed very different from the sumptuous city of my dreams.
For the second time I was extraordinarily lucky in my Chief. Our relations with Russia had, during the "'seventies," been strained almost to the breaking point. War had on several occasions seemed almost inevitable between the two countries.