“Oh, good gracious!” And then I flew for my passports.
In vain that young man protested it was not necessary. He had felt sure from the moment he set eyes upon her that Madame was no German. He had told the captain—so the depressed corporal had been taking an interest in me—she might be French, or even from the north of Spain, but certainly not German. But I insisted on his looking at my passports and being in a position to swear that I was British, and from that moment we were friends and he constituted himself my champion.
“The people are bad,” he told me. “Madame, they are angry and they are bad. They may harm you. Here I go ashore with you; at Blagoveschensk you get a protection order from the Governor written in Russian so that somebody may read.”
Then he told me about the war. Russia and France were fighting Germany. He had come from Tsitsihar, on the Mongolian border, across Manchuria, and before that he had come from Kodbo, right in the heart of the great Western Mongolian mountains, and he was going as fast as he could to Chita, and thence he supposed to the front.
“C'est gai a la guerre, Madame, c'est gai!” I hope so. I earnestly hope he found it so, for he was a good fellow and awfully good to me.
He was a little disquieting too, for now it dawned upon me it would be impossible to go back through Germany with Germany at war with Russia, and my friend was equally sure it would be almost impossible to go by way of St Petersburg, as we called Petrograd then. Anyhow we were still in the Amur Province, in Eastern Siberia, so I did not worry much. Now that the people were friendly once more it all seemed so far away, and whenever we went ashore my Cossack friend explained matters.
But he was a little troubled.
“Madame, why does not England come in?” he asked again and again, and I, who had seen no papers since I left Tientsin, and only The North China Herald then, could not imagine what England had to do with it. The idea of a world war was out of the question.
It was more interesting now going up the beautiful river, narrowed till it really did look like a river. I could see both banks quite plainly. My friend had been stationed here a year or two before, and he told me that there were many tigers in the woods, and wild boar and bear, but not very many wolves. And the tigers were beautiful and fierce and dangerous, northern tigers that could stand the rigours of the winter, and they did not wait to be attacked, they attacked you. There was a German professor in Blagoveschensk a year or two ago who had gone out butterfly-hunting, which one would think was a harmless and safe enough pastime to satisfy even a conscientious objector, and a tiger had got on his tracks and eaten him incontinently. They found only his butterfly net and the buttons of his coat when they went in search of him.
The plague had broken out during this officer's stay on the river, and the authorities had drawn a cordon of Cossacks round to keep the terrified, plague-stricken people from fleeing and spreading the disease yet farther, and he pointed out to me the house in which he and two comrades had lived. It was merely a roof pitched at a steep angle, and the low walls were embedded in earth; only on the side facing the river was a little window—it did not open—and a door. A comfortless-looking place it was.