The people seemed nondescript. The upper class were certainly Russians, and all the men wore military caps and had their hair clipped so close it looked shaven, but it would be utterly impossible to say to what nationality the peasant belonged. There were flaxen-haired Russians certainly, but then there were dark-bearded men, a Mongolian type, and there were many thrifty Chinese with queues, in belted blouses and high boots, generally keeping little eating-shops. There may have been Japanese, probably there were, seeing they hold the lower half of the island, but I did not notice them, and there is, I am afraid, in that place which is so full of possibilities absolutely nothing for that go-ahead nation to do.
My pretty girls complained dreadfully. They looked after the shop and then there was nothing. In the winter they said they had skating and they liked the winter best, but the really bad time in places like Saghalien and Nikolayeusk were the two months when it was neither winter nor summer. Then their only means of communication with the outside world, the river and the sea, was too full of ice to admit of navigation and yet was not solid enough for dog-sled, so that if the telegraph broke down, and it very often did, they are entirely cut off from the world. Saghalien, of course, is worse off than the town, for on the mainland presumably there are roads of sorts that can be negotiated in case of necessity, but the island is entirely isolated. In the winter the mails take five days coming across the frozen sea from the mainland, and often when there are storms they take much longer. Fancy living on an island that stretches over nearly ten degrees of latitude, which for five months in the year gets its mails by dog-sled and for two goes without them altogether! On the whole, there may be drawbacks to living in Saghalien!
I left it at nine o'clock in the evening, after the darkness had fallen, and the police officer and the pretty girls saw me on board the steamer which was to take me back to Nikolayeusk.
They loaded me with flowers and they were full of regrets.
“Oh, Madame, Madame, how lucky you are to get away from Saghalien!”
But I said truly enough that I felt my luck lay in getting there. And now that I sit in my garden in Kent and watch the beans coming into blossom and the roses into bloom, look at the beds gay with red poppies and violas, cream and purple, or wander round and calculate the prospects of fruit on the cherry and the pear trees, I am still more glad to think that I know what manner of island that is that lies so far away in the Eastern world that it is almost West.
CHAPTER XII—FACING WEST
On the 25th July 1914, at nine o'clock in the evening, I left Saghalien, and as the ship steamed away from the loom of the land into the night I knew that at last, after eighteen months of voyaging in the East, I had turned my face homeward. I had enjoyed it, but I wanted to go home, and in my notebook I see evidences of this longing. At last I was counting the days—one day to Nikolayeusk, three days to Kharbarosvk, three days more to Blagoveschensk—and I was out in my calculations in the very beginning. The ships of the Volunteer fleet take their time, and we took three days wandering along the island of Saghalien and calling at ports I should think mail steamer had never before called at before we turned again towards the mainland.