Poor Buchanan! Despair seized me. Having been to the British Consulate, I knew it was no use seeking advice there. I suppose I was too tired or I should have remembered that Americans are always kind and helpful and gone there or even dared the British Embassy. But these ideas occurred to me too late.
You may travel the world over and the places you visit will often remain in your mind as pleasant or otherwise not because of any of their own attributes, but because of the emotions you have suffered in them. Here was I in St Petrograd, and instead of exploring streets and canals and cathedrals and palaces my whole thoughts were occupied with the fate of my little dog. I “had given my heart to a dog to tear” and I was suffering in consequence. All the while I was in Petrograd—and I stayed there three days looking for a way out—my thoughts were given to James Buchanan. I discussed the matter with the authorities in the hotel who could speak English, and finally Buchanan and I made a peregrination to the Swedish Consulate. And though the Swedish Consulate was a deal more civil and more interested in me and my doings than the English, in the matter of a dog, even a nice little dog like Buchanan, they were firm—through Sweden he could not go.
I read in the paper the other day that the world might be divided into men and women and people-who-hate-dogs, and these last will wonder what I was making such a fuss about, but the men and women will understand. My dear little companion and friend had made the lonely places pleasant for me and I could not get him out of the country save by turning round and going back across Europe, Asia and America!
I went back to the place where I had bought my ticket. They also were sympathetic. Everyone in the office was interested in the tribulations of the cheerful little black and white dog who sat on the counter and wagged a friendly tail. I had many offers to take care of him for me, and the consensus of opinion was that he might be smuggled! And many tales were told me of dogs taken across the borders in overcoats and muffs, or drugged in baskets.
That last appealed to me. Buchanan was just too big to cany hidden easily, but he might be drugged and covered up in a basket. I went back to the Astoria and sent for a vet. Also I bought a highly ornamental basket. The porter thought I was cruel. He thought I might leave the dog with him till after the war, but he translated the vet's opinion for me, and the vet gave me some sulphonal. He assured me the little dog would be all right, and I tried to put worrying thoughts away from me and to see Petrograd, the capital of the Tsars.
But I had seen too much. There comes a moment, however keen you are on seeing the world, when you want to see no new thing, when you want only to close your eyes and rest, and I had arrived at that moment. The wide and busy streets intersected with canals, the broad expanse of the Neva, the cathedral and the Winter Palace were nothing to me; even the wrecked German Embassy did not stir me.
I was glad then when the fourth morning found me on the Finland station. The Finland station was crowded and the Finland train, with only second and third class carnages and bound for Raumo, was crowded also, and it appeared it did not know its way very well as the line had only just been opened to meet the traffic west diverted from Germany. A fortnight before no one had ever heard of Raumo.
And now for me the whole outlook was changed. This was no military train, packed as it was, but a train of men, women and children struggling to get out of the country, the flotsam and jetsam that come to the surface at the beginning of a war. And I heard again for the first time since I left Tientsin, worlds away, English spoken that was not addressed to me. To be sure it was English with an accent, the very peculiar accent that belongs to Russians, Lithuanians, Poles and Letts Americanised, and with it mingled the nasal tones of a young musician from Central Russia who spoke the language of his adopted land with a most exaggerated accent and the leisurely, cultivated tones of Oxford.
I had come from the East to the West!
The carriage was open from end to end and they would not allow Buchanan to enter it. He, poor little man, in the gorgeous basket that he objected to strongly, was banished to the luggage-van, and because the carriage was hot, and also because I felt he would be lonely separated from me, I went there and kept him company.