“An officious servant,” he said. He was extremely sorry the Commissioner of Customs and his friend had been put to so much inconvenience. The servant had already been dismissed. And so we bowed him out, face was saved, and all parties were satisfied. It was very Chinese. And yet we knew, and we knew that he must have known we knew, that it was really his wife who received the little dog that everyone concerned must have realised was valuable and must have been stolen.
Here in Sakai in I heard about the doings of the only wolves that came into my wanderings. In the little river harbour were many small steamers flying the Russian flag and loading great barrels with the ends painted bright red. These barrels, explained the Customs Commissioner, contained spirits which the Russians were desirous of smuggling into Russian territory. The Chinese had not the least objection to their leaving China after they had paid export duty. They were taken up and down the river and finally landed at some small port whence they were smuggled across. The trade was a very big one. The men engaged in it were known as the wolves of the Amur and were usually Caucasians and Jews. In 1913, the last year of which I have statistics, no less than twenty-five thousand pounds export was paid on these spirits, and in the years before it used to be greater. I wonder whether with the relaxing of discipline consequent on the war and the revolution the receipts for the export have not gone up.
The wide river was beautiful here, and Blagovesehensk, lying across the water, with its spires and domes, all the outlines softened, standing against the evening sky, might have been some town of pictured Italy. I am glad I have seen it. I dare not expiate on Mr Barentzen's kindness. My drastic critic, drastic and so invaluable, says that I have already overloaded this book with tales of people's kindness, so I can only say I stayed there a week and then took passage on the smaller steamer which was bound up the Amur and the Shilka to Stretensk and the railway.
I had, however, one regret. I had inadvertently taken my plates and films on which I had all my pictures of the Amur and Saghalien across the Sakalin and I could not take them back again. The Russian rule was very strict. No photographs were allowed. Everything crossing the river must be examined. Now to examine my undeveloped films and plates would be to ruin them. I interviewed a Japanese photographer on the Sakalin side, but he appeared to be a very tyro in the art of developing, and finally very reluctantly I decided to leave them for Mr Barentzen to send home when he got the chance. He did not get that chance till the middle of 1916, and I regret to state that when we came to develop them every single one of them was ruined.
The steamer that I embarked on now was considerably smaller, for the river was narrowing. The deck that ran round the cabins was only thirty inches wide and crowded with children; worse, when James Buchanan and I went for our daily promenades we found the way disputed by women, mothers, or nursemaids, I know not whieh, propelling the children who could not walk in wheeled chairs, and they thought Buchanan had been brought there for their special benefit, a view which the gentleman himself did not share. However, he was my only means of communication with them, for they had no English or French.
But I was lucky, for one of the mates, brass-bound and in spotless white, like so many Russians had served in British ships and spoke English very well with a slight Scots accent. With him I used to hold daily conversations and always we discussed the war. But he shook his head over it. It was not possible to get much news at the little wayside places at which we stopped. There were no papers—the Russian peasant under the beneficent rule of the Tsar was not encouraged to learn to read—and for his part he, the mate, put no faith in the telegrams. All would be well, of course, but we must wait till we came to some large and influential place for news upon which we could rely.
But that large and influential place was long in coming, in fact I may say it never materialised while I was on the river. There are at least eleven towns marked on the way between Blagoveschensk and Stretensk, but even the town at the junction where the Aigun and the Shilka merge into the Amur is but a tiny frontier village, and the rest as I know the river banks are only a few log huts inhabited by peasants who apparently keep guard over and supply the stacks of wood needed by the steamers.
It was a lovely river now going north, north and then west, or rather we went north, the river flowed the other way, it was narrower and wound between wooded hills and it was very lonely. There were occasional, very occasional, little settlements, on the Chinese side I do not remember even a hut, though it was a lovely green land and the river, clear as crystal, reflected on its breast the trees and rocks among which we made our way.
Once on the Russian side we landed from a boat a woman with two little children and innumerable bundles. They had been down, I suppose, to visit the centre of civilisation at Blagoveschensk and now were coming home. In the dusk of the evening we left her there looking down thoughtfully at her encumbrances, not a living creature in sight, not a sign of man's handiwork anywhere. I hoped there were no tigers about, but she has always lived in my memory as an unfinished story. I suppose we all of us have those unfinished stories in our lives, not stories left unfinished because they are so long drawn out we could not possibly wait for developments, but stories that must finish suddenly, only we are withdrawn. Once I looked from a railway carriage window in the Midlands and I saw a bull chasing a woman; she was running, screaming for all she was worth, for a fence, but whether she reached it or not I have no means of knowing. Another time I saw also from a railway carriage window two men, mother naked, chasing each other across the greensward and left them there because the train went on. Of course I have often enough seen men without clothes in the tropics, but in the heart of England they are out of the picture and want explaining. That explanation I shall never get. Nor is it likely I shall ever know whether that unknown woman and her little children ever reached their unknown home.
We were luxuriously fed upon that little steamer. The Russian tea with lemon and the bread and butter were delicious, and we had plenty of cream, though gone was the red caviare that farther east had been so common. But I was tired and at last feeling lonely. I began to count the days till I should reach home.