After all, bar that little difficulty about the air—and certainly if right goes with the majority I have no cause of complaint, I was in a minority of one—those steamers made the most comfortable and cheapest form of travelling I have ever undertaken. From Kharbarosvk to Nikolayeusk for over three days' voyage my fare with a first-class cabin to myself was twelve roubles—about one pound four shillings. I came back by the mail steamer and it was fifteen roubles—about one pound ten shillings. This, of course, does not include food. Food on a Russian steamer you buy as you would on a railway train. You may make arrangements with the restaurant and have breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner for so much a day; or you may have each meal separate and pay for it as you have it; or you may buy your food at the various stopping-places, get your kettles filled with hot water for a trifling tip, and feed yourself in the privacy of your own cabin. I found the simplest way, having no servant, was to pay so much a day—five shillings on the big steamers, four shillings on the smaller one—and live as I would do at a hotel. The food was excellent on the Amur Company's ships. We had chicken and salmon—not much salmon, it was too cheap—and sturgeon. Sturgeon, that prince of fish, was a treat, and caviare was as common as marmalade used to be on a British breakfast-table. It was generally of the red variety that we do not see here and looked not unlike clusters of red currants, only I don't know that I have ever seen currants in such quantities. I enjoyed it very much till one day, looking over the railing into the stern of the boat, where much of the food was roughly prepared—an unwise thing to do—I saw an extremely dirty woman of the country, a Gilyak, in an extremely dirty garment, with her dirty bare arms plunged to the elbow in the red caviare she was preparing for the table. Then I discovered for a little while that I didn't much fancy caviare. But I wish I had some of that nice red caviare now.
The second class differed but little from the first. There was not so much decoration about the saloons, and on the John Cockerill, where the first class had two rooms, they had only one; and the food was much the same, only not so many courses. There was plenty, and they only paid three shillings a day for the four meals. The people were much the same as we in the first class, and I met a girl from Samara, in Central Russia, who spoke a little French. She was a teacher and was going to Nikolayeusk for a holiday exactly as I have seen teachers here in England go to Switzerland.
But between the first and second and the third and fourth class was a great gulf fixed. They were both on the lower deck, the third under the first and the fourth under the second, while amidships between them were the kitchens and the engines and the store of wood for fuel. The third had no cabins, but the people went to bed and apparently spent their days in places like old-fashioned dinner-wagons; and they bought their own food, either from the steamer or at the various stopping-places, and ate it on their beds, for they had no saloon. The fourth class was still more primitive. The passengers, men, women and children, were packed away upon shelves rising in three tiers, one above the other, and the place of each man and woman was marked out by posts. There was no effort made to provide separate accommodation for men and women. As far as I could see, they all herded together like cattle.
The ship was crowded. The Russian colonel's wife and I used to walk up and down the long decks for exercise, with Buchanan in attendance, she improving her English and I learning no Russian. It is evidently quite the custom for the people of the great towns of the Amur to make every summer an excursion up the river, and the poorer people, the third and fourth class, go up to Nikolayeusk for the fishing. Hence those shelves crowded with dirty folk. There were troughs for washing outside the fourth class, I discovered, minor editions of our luxurious bathrooms in the first class, but I am bound to say they did not have much use. Washing even in this hot weather, and it certainly was pleasantly warm, was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The only drawback to the bathrooms in the first class, from my point of view, was their want of air. They were built so that apparently there was no means of getting fresh air into them, and I always regarded myself as a very plucky woman when in the interests of cleanliness I had a bath. The hot water and the airlessness always brought me to such a condition of faintness that I generally had to rush out and lie on the couch in my cabin to recover, and then if somebody outside took it upon them to bang to the window I was reduced to the last gasp.
The John Cockerill was run like a man-of-war. The bells struck the hours and half-hours, the captain and officers were clad in white and brass-bound, and the men were in orthodox sailor's rig. One man came and explained to me—he spoke no tongue that I could understand, but his meaning was obvious—that Buchanan was not allowed on the first-class deck, the rules and regulations, so said the colonel's wife, said he was not; but no one seemed to object, so I thought to smooth matters by paying half-a-rouble; then I found that every sailor I came across apparently made the same statement, and having listened to one or two, at last I decided to part with no more cash, and it was, I suppose, agreed that Buchanan had paid his footing, for they troubled me no more about him.
Three or four times a day we pulled up at some little wayside place, generally only two or three log-houses with painted doors or windows, an occasional potato patch and huge stacks of wood to replenish the fuel of the steamer, and with much yelling they put out a long gangway, and while the wood was brought on board we all went ashore to see the country. The country was always exactly alike, vast and green and lonely, the sparse human habitations emphasising that vastness and loneliness. The people were few. The men wore belted blouses and high boots and very often, though it was summer, fur caps, and the women very voluminous and very dirty skirts with unbelted blouses, a shawl across their shoulders and a kerchief on their unkempt hair. They were dirty; they were untidy; they were uneducated; they belonged to the very poorest classes; and I think I can safely say that all the way from Kharbarosvk to Nikolayeusk the only attempt at farming I saw was in a few scattered places where the grass had been cut and tossed up into haycocks. And yet those people impressed upon me a sense of their virility and strength, a feeling that I had never had when moving among the Chinese, where every inch of land—bar the graves—is turned to good account. Was it the condition of the women? I wonder. I know I never saw one of those stalwart women pounding along on her big flat feet without a feeling of gladness and thankfulness. Here at least was good material. It was crude and rough, of course, but it was there waiting for the wheel of the potter. Shall we find the potter in the turmoil of the revolution and the war?
We went on, north, north with a little of east, and it grew cooler and the twilight grew longer. I do not know how other people do, but I count my miles and realise distances from some distance I knew well in my youth. So I know that from Kharbarosvk to Nikolaycusk is a little farther away than is Melbourne from Sydney; and always we went by way of the great empty land, by way of the great empty river. Sometimes far in the distance we could see the blue hills; sometimes the hills were close; but always it was empty, because the few inhabitants, the house or two at the little stopping-places where were the piles of wood for the steamer, but emphasised the loneliness and emptiness. You could have put all the people we saw in a street of a suburb of London and lost them, and I suppose the distance traversed was as far as from London to Aberdeen. It was a beautiful land, a land with a wondrous charm, but it is waiting for the colonist who will dare the rigours of the winter and populate it.
At last we steamed up to the port of Nikolayeusk, set at the entrance of the shallow Sea of Okhotsk, right away in the east of the world. When I set foot upon the wharf among all the barrels with which it was packed I could hardly believe I had come so far east, so far away from my regular beat. One of my brothers always declares I sent him to sea because my sex prevented me from going, and yet here I was, in spite of that grave disadvantage, in as remote a corner of the earth as even he might have hoped to attain.
It was a July day, sunny and warm. They had slain an Austrian archduke in Serbia and the world was on the verge of the war of the ages, but I knew nothing of all that. I stepped off the steamer and proceeded to investigate Nikolayeusk, well satisfied with the point at which I had arrived.