CHAPTER XI—THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
Nikolayeusk seemed to me the ends of the earth. I hardly know why it should have done so, for I arrived there by way of a very comfortable steamer and I have made my way to very much more ungetatable places. I suppose the explanation is that all the other places I have visited I had looked up so long on the map that when I arrived I only felt I was attaining the goal I had set out to reach, whereas I must admit I had never heard of Nikolayeusk till Mr Sly, the British consul, sketched it out as the end of my itinerary on the Siberian rivers, and ten days later I found myself in the Far Eastern town. I remember one of my brothers writing to me once from Petropaulovski:
“I always said my address would some day be Kamseatkha and here I am!”
Well, I never said my address would be Nikolayeusk because I had never heard of it, but here I was nevertheless. The weather was warm, the sun poured down from a cloudless blue sky, and in the broad, grass-grown streets, such streets have I seen in Australian towns, when the faint breeze stirred the yellow dust rose on the air. And the town straggled all along the northern side of the river, a town of low, one-storeyed wooden houses for the most part, with an occasional two-storeyed house and heavy shutters to all the windows. There was a curious absence of stone, and the streets when they were paved at all were, as in Kharbarosvk, lines of planks, sometimes three, sometimes five planks wide, with a waste of dust or mud or grass, as the case might be, on either side.
The Russians I found kindness itself. In Vladivostok I had met a man who knew one of my brothers—I sometimes wonder if I could get to such a remote corner of the earth that I should not meet someone who knew one of these ubiquitous brothers of mine—and this good friend, having sampled the family, took me on trust and found someone else who would give me a letter to the manager of the Russo-Asiatic Bank at Nikolayeusk. This was a godsend, for Mr Pauloff spoke excellent English, and he and his corresponding clerk, a Russian lady of middle age who had spent a long time in France, took me in hand and showed me the sights. Madame Schulmann and I and Buchanan drove all over the town in one of the most ancient victorias I have ever seen—the most ancient are in Saghalien, which is beyond the ends of the earth—and she very kindly took me to a meal at the principal hotel. I was staying on board the steamer while I looked around me. The visit with this lady decided me not to go there. It wras about four o'clock in the afternoon, so I don't know whether our meal was dinner or tea or luncheon; we had good soup, I remember, and nice wine, to say nothing of excellent coffee, but the atmosphere left much to be desired. I don't suppose the windows ever had been opened since the place was built, and no one seemed to see any necessity for opening them. My hostess smiled at my distress. She said she liked fresh air herself but that for a whole year she had lodged in a room where the windows would not open. She had wanted to have one of the panes—not the window, just one of the panes—made to open to admit fresh air, and had offered to do it at her own expense, but her landlord refused. It would spoil the look of the room. She advised me strongly if I wanted fresh air to stay as long as I could on board the steamer at the wharf, and I decided to take her advice.
The Russo-Asiatic Bank was not unlike the banks I have seen in Australian townships, in that it was built of wood of one storey and the manager and his wife lived on the premises, but the roof was far more ornamental than Australia could stand and gave the touch of the East that made for romance. The manager was good enough to ask me to dinner and to include Buchanan in the invitation because I did not like to leave the poor little chap shut up in my cabin. This was really dinner, called so, and we had it at five o'clock of a hot summer's afternoon, a very excellent dinner, with delicious sour cream in the soup and excellent South Australian wine, not the stuff that passes for Australian wine in England and that so many people take medicinally, but really good wine, such as Australians themselves drink. The house was built with a curious lack of partitions that made for spaciousness, so that you wandered from one room to another, hardly knowing that you had gone from the sitting-room to the bedroom, and James Buchanan going on a voyage of discovery unfortunately found the cradle, to the dismay of his mistress. He stood and looked at it and barked.
“Gracious me! What's this funny thing! I've never seen anything like it before!”
Neither had I; but I was covered with shame when a wail proclaimed the presence of the son and heir.
Naturally I expressed myself—truly—charmed with the town, and Mr Pauloff smiled and nodded at his wife, who spoke no English.