There were then about five thousand people there, one thousand in Alexandrosvk itself, but they were going daily, for the blight of the convict was over the beautiful land. The best coal mine is closed down on fire and the one whose manager I met was leased to a company by the year and worked by Chinese on most primitive lines. There is gold, he told me, this business man who surprised me by his lavish use of perfume, but he did not know whether it would pay for working—gold and coal as well would be almost too much good luck for one island—and there is naphtha everywhere on the east coast, but as it has never been struck they think that the main vein must come up somewhere under the sea. Still it is there waiting for the enterprising man who shall work it.
Saghalien used to be as bad as Nikolayeusk, they told me, after the Japanese had evacuated the northern part; but now the most enterprising section of the convicts had betaken themselves to the mainland, and though the free settlers were few and far between, and the most of the people I saw were convicts, they were the harmless ones with all the devilment gone out of them.
Alexandrosvk is a place of empty houses. When the Japanese came the people fled, leaving everything exactly as it was; and though the Japanese behaved with admirable restraint, considering they came as an invading army, many of these people never came back again, and the alertness in a bad cause which had sent many of the convicts there against their will sent them away again as soon as they were free. All down by the long wooden pier which stretches out into the sea are great wooden storehouses and barracks, empty, and a monument, if they needed it, to the courteous manner in which the Japanese make war. They had burnt the museum, they told me, and opened the prison doors and burnt the prison, but the other houses they had spared. And so there were many, many empty houses in Alexandrosvk.
All the oldest carriages in the world have drifted to Saghalien.
They are decrepit in Western Siberia, they are worse, if possible, in the East, but in the island of Saghalien I really don't know how they hold together. Perhaps they are not wanted very often. I hired the most archaic victoria I have ever seen and the two girls came for a drive with me all round the town and its neighbourhood. It was a drive to be remembered. The early summer was in all its full freshness, the red and white cows stood knee-deep in grass that was green and lush everywhere. There were fir-trees on the hills and on every spur of the hills, and there were hedges with dog-roses blossoming all over them; there were fields of dark blue iris; there were little red tiger lilies and a spiked heliotrope flower like veronica, only each bloom grew on a single stalk of its own; there were purple vetches and white spiræa growing in marshy places, and the land was thick with sweet-scented clover among which the bees were humming, and in a little village there was a Greek church that, set in its emerald-green field, was a very riot of colour. There were balls on the roof of royal blue, the roof itself was of pale green, the walls were of brown logs untouched by paint and the window edges were picked out in white. I photographed that picturesque little church, as I did the peasant women standing at the doors of their log huts and the queer old shandrydan in which we drove, but alas! all my photographs perished miserably in Russia. The girls wondered that I liked town and country so much, that I saw so much beauty in everything.
“Ah! Madame,” they sighed, “but you can go away tomorrow! If only we could go!”
They had been educated at a convent and they produced the English books they had read. They were very apologetic but they had found them rather tame. Had I read them? I smiled, for they all turned out to be the immortal works of Charles Garvice!
And we had tea in the dining-room, where father slept because they were rather crowded, the store took up so much room; and it was a very nice tea too, with raspberry jam in saucers, which we ate Russian fashion with a spoon, and the roses in the garden tapped against the window-panes, asking to come in and join us, and Buchanan got what his soul loved, plenty of cake. They apologised because there was no fruit. No fruit save berries ripen in Saghalien and the strawberries would not be ready till well on in August. No words of mine can tell how kind they were to the stranger.
I went back in the long twilight that was so cool and restful and sat outside the leafy shaded police station and killed mosquitoes, for the mate had heard aright, there were “skeeters” and to spare, the sort to which Mark Twain took a gun. I watched the grey mist creeping slowly down, down the beautiful mountains, and when it had enveloped them the night was come and it was time to go in and have dinner and go to bed.
Perhaps it would not do to stay long in Saghalien. There is nothing to do. She lies a Sleeping Beauty waiting the kiss of the Prince. Will this war awaken her? The short time I was there I enjoyed every moment.