The park of Tsarskoe is eighteen miles in circumference, and every portion of it is thrown open freely to the public. In spite of being quite flat, it is very pretty with its lake and woods, and was most beautifully kept. To an English eye its trees seemed stunted, for in these far Northern regions no forest trees attain great size. Limes and oaks flourish moderately well, but the climate is too cold for beeches. At the latitude of Petrograd neither apples, pears, nor any kind of fruit tree can be grown; raspberries and strawberries are the only things that can be produced, and they are both superlatively good. The park at Tsarskoe was full of a jumble of the most extraordinarily incongruous buildings and monuments; it would have taken a fortnight to see them all properly. There was a Chinese village, a Chinese theatre, a Dutch dairy, an English Gothic castle, temples, hanging gardens, ruins, grottoes, fountains, and numbers of columns, triumphal arches, and statues. On the lake there was a collection of boats of all nations, varying from a Chinese sampan to an English light four-oar; from a Venetian gondola to a Brazilian catamaran. There was also a fleet of miniature men-of-war, and three of Catherine's great gilt state-barges on the lake. One arm of the lake was spanned by a bridge of an extremely rare blue Siberian marble. Anyone seeing the effect of this blue marble bridge must have congratulated himself on the fact that it was extremely improbable that any similar bridge would ever be erected elsewhere, so rare was the material of which it was constructed.
I never succeeded in finding the spot in Tsarskoe Park where a sentry stands on guard over a violet which Catherine the Great once found there. Catherine, finding the first violet of spring, ordered a sentry to be placed over it, to protect the flower from being plucked. She forgot to rescind the order, and the sentry continued to be posted there. It developed at last into a regular tradition of Tsarskoe, and so, day and night, winter and summer, a sentry stood in Tsarskoe Park over a spot where, 150 years before, a violet once grew.
The Russian name for a railway station is "Vauxhall," and the origin of this is rather curious. The first railway in Europe opened for passenger traffic was the Liverpool and Manchester, inaugurated in 1830. Five years later, Nicholas I, eager to show that Russia was well abreast of the times, determined to have a railway of his own, and ordered one to be built between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo, a distance of fourteen miles. The railway was opened in 1837, without any intermediate stations. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few Court officials, no one ever wanted to go to Tsarskoe, so the line could hardly be called a commercial success. Then someone had a brilliant idea! Vauxhall Gardens in South London were then at the height of their popularity. The Tsarskoe line should be extended two miles to a place called Pavlosk, where the railway company would be given fifty acres of ground on which to construct a "Vauxhall Gardens," outbidding its London prototype in attractions. No sooner said than done! The Pavlosk "Vauxhall" became enormously popular amongst Petrogradians in summer-time; the trains were crowded and the railway became a paying proposition. As the Tsarskoe station was the only one then in existence in Petrograd, the worthy citizens got into the habit of directing their own coachmen or cabdrivers simply to go "to Vauxhall." So the name got gradually applied to the actual station building in Petrograd. When the Nicholas railway to Moscow was completed, the station got to be known as the "Moscow Vauxhall." And so it spread, until it came about that every railway station in the Russian Empire, from the Baltic to the Pacific, derived its name from a long-vanished and half-forgotten pleasure-garden in South London, the memory of which is only commemorated to-day by a bridge and a railway station on its site. The name "Vauxhall" itself is, I believe, a corruption of "Folks-Hall," or of its Dutch variant "Volks-hall." Even in my day the Pavlosk Vauxhall was a most attractive spot, with an excellent orchestra, myriads of coloured lamps, and a great semicircle of restaurants and refreshment booths. When I knew it, the Tsarskoe railway still retained its original rolling-stock of 1837; little queer over-upholstered carriages, and quaint archaic-looking engines. It had, I think, been built to a different gauge to the standard Russian one; anyhow it had no physical connection with the other railways. It was subsequently modernised.
Peterhof is far more attractive than Tsarskoe as it stands on the Gulf of Finland, and the coast, rising a hundred feet from the sea, redeems the place from the uniform dead flat of the other environs of Petrograd. As its name implies, Peterhof is the creation of Peter himself, who did his best to eclipse Versailles. His fountains and waterworks certainly run Versailles very close. The Oriental in Peter peeped out when he constructed staircases of gilt copper, and of coloured marbles for the water to flow over, precisely as Shah Jehan did in his palaces at Delhi and Agra. As the temperature both at Delhi and Agra often touches 120° during the summer months, these decorative cascades would appear more appropriate there than at Peterhof, where the summer temperature seldom rises to 70°.
The palace stands on a lofty terrace facing the sea. A broad straight vista has been cut through the fir-woods opposite it, down to the waters of the Gulf. Down the middle of this avenue runs a canal flanked on either side by twelve fountains. When les grandes eaux are playing, the effect of this perspective of fountains and of Peter's gilded water-chutes is really very fine indeed. I think that the Oriental in Peter showed itself again here. There is a long single row of almost precisely similar fountains in front of the Taj at Agra.
As at Tsarskoe, the public have free access to every portion of the park, which stretches for four miles along the sea, with many gardens, countless fountains, temples and statues. There was in particular a beautiful Ionic colonnade of pink marble, from the summit of which cataracts of water spouted when the fountains played. The effect of this pink marble temple seen through the film of falling water was remarkably pretty. What pleased me were the two small Dutch châteaux in the grounds, "Marly" and "Monplaisir," where Peter had lived during the building of his great palace. These two houses had been built by imported Dutch craftsmen, and the sight of a severe seventeenth-century Dutch interior with its tiles and sober oak-panelling was so unexpected in Russia. It was almost as much of a surprise as is Groote Constantia, some sixteen miles south of Cape Town. To drive down a mile-long avenue of the finest oaks in the world, and to find at the end of it, amidst hedges of clipped pink oleander and blue plumbago, a most perfect Dutch château, exactly as Governor Van der Stell left it in 1667, is so utterly unexpected at the southern extremity of the African Continent! Groote Constantia, the property of the Cape Government, still contains all its original furniture and pictures of 1667. It is the typical seventeenth-century Continental château, the main building with its façade elaborately decorated in plaster, flanked by two wings at right angles to it, but the last place in the world where you would look for such a finished whole is South Africa. To add to the unexpectedness, the vines for which Constantia is famous are grown in fields enclosed with hedges, with huge oaks as hedgerow timber. This gives such a thoroughly English look to the landscape that I never could realise that the sea seen through the trees was the Indian Ocean, and that the Cape of Good Hope was only ten miles away. Macao, the ancient Portuguese colony forty-five miles from Hong-Kong, is another "surprise-town." It is as though Aladdin's Slave of the Lamp had dumped a seventeenth-century Southern European town down in the middle of China, with churches, plazas, and fountains complete.
There is really a plethora of palaces round Peterhof. They grow as thick as quills on a porcupine's back. One of them, I cannot recall which, had a really beautiful dining-room, built entirely of pink marble. In niches in the four angles of the room were solid silver fountains six feet high, where Naiads and Tritons spouted water fed by a running stream. I should have thought this room more appropriate to India than to Northern Russia, but one of the fondest illusions Russians cherish is that they dwell in a semi-tropical climate.
In Petrograd, as soon as the temperature reached 60°, old gentlemen would appear on the Nevsky dressed in white linen, with Panama hats, and white umbrellas, but still wearing the thickest of overcoats. Should the sun's rays become just perceptible, iced Kvass and lemonade were at once on sale in all the streets. On these occasions I made myself quite popular at the Yacht Club by observing, as I buttoned up my overcoat tightly before venturing into the open air, that this tropical heat was almost unendurable. This invariably provoked gratified smiles of assent.
Another point as to which Russians were for some reason touchy was the fact that the water of the Gulf of Finland is perfectly fresh. Ships can fill their tanks from the water alongside for ten miles below Kronstadt, and the catches of the fishing-boats that came in to Peterhof consisted entirely of pike, perch, eels, roach, and other fresh-water fish. Still Russians disliked intensely hearing their sea alluded to as fresh-water. I tactfully pretended to ignore the fringe of fresh-water reeds lining the shore at Peterhof, and after bathing in the Gulf would enlarge on the bracing effect a swim in real salt-water had on the human organism. This, and a few happy suggestions that after the intense brine of the Gulf the waters of the Dead Sea would appear insipidly brackish, conduced towards making me amazingly popular.
In my younger days I was never really happy without a daily swim during the summer months.