Politely but firmly I insisted. Again I was told there were so many other interesting things it would be a pity to waste my time going to see it. I found it difficult to say anything further without giving offense. Then Grant encountered a young American nurse from the Presbyterian Hospital in New York who spoke Russian; she also wanted to visit hospitals. We engaged a car of our own and drove a good fifteen miles out of the city over horrible roads, winding and dusty and badly paved, and even pushing on as rapidly as we could we did not get there until late in the afternoon. To our dismay we discovered not a patient, doctor, or nurse in the place, only plasterers, painters, carpenters, and cleaners, pulling down and refurbishing. We had lost half a day and were a little ashamed of our lack of faith.
The night came to take the train for Moscow. Nobody called “All aboard!” in Russia. Trains went right off underneath you when you had one foot on the platform and one on the step. They just moved and moved fast. But we clambered on and soon the leather seats were made into our beds; they were so slippery that we kept falling out.
Once at Moscow, we who were coming second-class, according to Marxian procedure, received the worst rooms at the hotel; those who traveled third had the best. I could not applaud the one selected for me. It was directly over the laundry, and the smells of cooking and suds floated through the window. I refused to stay and was accommodated on the top floor where the servants had once lived.
Moscow was as different from Leningrad as New York City from a sleepy Pennsylvania town. The people walked more quickly and seemed to be going somewhere, not simply wandering listlessly. Bedlam existed at the hotels, but by now we were beginning to learn that the Russians were so concerned with their own efficiency that they had no time to do anything. To be in a hurry merely complicated matters. I could wait, but for energetic Rose it was torture. To all specific requests they replied, “It cannot be. It cannot be.” She had her own methods of coping with this, saying she did not wish to hear the word, “impossible”; she had no intention of asking the impossible. Then when they procrastinated with, “a little later,” she countered, “In America we say, ‘now!’”
Her triumph over dilatoriness came on Health Day. Since health was almost a god in Russia, all activities ceased on that occasion and the populace of Moscow came together on Red Square. The spectacle was to start at two in the afternoon, but before it was light you could hear the songs of men, women, and children moving towards their appointed stations.
Out of our party only thirty were privileged to receive tickets, and their names were posted. Mrs. Clyde and I were on the list, but not Grant or Rose. The previous day the numbers were cut to twenty; that morning there were but sixteen, and feeling ran high. “Why haven’t I a ticket?”
Fortunately for me I had been invited to lunch by Ambassador William C. Bullitt, who entertained lavishly and was helpful to traveling Americans. When I had met him back in New England, I had never thought of him as an ambassador, nor as a man skilled in dealing with the great problems that required strategy, diplomacy, political sagacity, and a prime knowledge of economics and history. I considered him rather as amusing, an excellent dinner host, and one to whom you could go when in difficulty, sure that he would get you out. Perhaps this was what Russia wanted at that time more than anything else. No doubt he was then somewhat disappointed at the turn relations between Russia and the United States had taken. Russians on the whole admired him; they had not forgotten that, although he was not counted a proletarian or in the category of Jack Reed, he had lifted the cudgels for them in the early days when friends were needed.
The Ambassador’s little daughter Ann, aged ten, officiated at the head of the table, apparently enjoying herself. The house in which they were living while the new Embassy was being built had an architecture quite befitting what I imagined the style of Russia should be—a bit of the Kremlin, a bit of a mosque, and a bit of an Indian palace.
On the way to the Square after luncheon a wave of people surged between the rest of the diplomatic party and myself, but I kept saying “diplomatique,” and was bowed through to the grandstand.
Meanwhile Rose had been devoting her whole attention to tickets—and there were no tickets. The lucky holders lined up and filed off under a leader. Rose, the ever resourceful, donned a red bandanna and said to the “forgotten men” in the party, “We’ll make our own battalion.” She handed out slips of paper about the size of the tickets and then started, Grant and the Harvard professors following her through the blare of music and the tramping troops and the pageantry of blue trunks and white shirts, orange trunks and cerise shirts.