Then if Madame permits—— Of course Madame permitted.
She was most grateful. And we dined together at the same table outside the station restaurant—I like that fashion of dining outside—under the brilliant glare of the electric light. He arranged everything for me, even to getting some supper for Buchanan. And I forgot the exiles who had haunted me, forgot this was Siberia. Here in the restaurant, save for the Tartar waiters, it might almost have been France.
“Perhaps,” said my companion courteously as we were having coffee, “Madame would care to come to my hotel. I could interpret for her and here no one speaks anything but Russian.”
Again I could have hugged him. I intimated my dressing-bag was in the cloakroom, but he smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“For one night!”
He himself had nothing, so there and then we got into one of the usual decrepit landaus and went to the town, to Irkutsk on the Angara, in the heart of Siberia. If in my girlish days when I studied the atlas of the world so carefully I could have known that one day I should be driving into Irkutsk, that map would have been glorified for ever and a day; but I could never have realised, never, that it would be set in a summer land, warm as my own country, and that I should feel it a great step on towards the civilisation of the West.
It was night, and here and there clustering electric lights glittered like diamonds, making darker the spaces in between. In the morning I saw that the capital of Eastern Siberia, like all the other towns of that country, is a regular frontier town. There were the same wide streets grass-grown at the edges, great houses and small houses side by side, and empty spaces where as yet there were no houses. We went to the Central Hotel.
“I do not go to an expensive hotel,” my companion told me, “this is a moderate one.”
But if it were moderate it certainly was a very large and nice hotel. Russian hotels do not as a rule provide food, the restaurant is generally separate, but we had already dined. That naval officer made all arrangements for me. He even explained to an astonished chamber-maid with her hair done in two long plaits that I must have all the windows open and when I tried for a bath did his best for me. But again, he explained, Russians as a rule go to a bath-house, and there was only one bathroom in this hotel; it had been engaged for two hours by a gentleman, and he thought, seeing I should have to start early in the morning, it might be rather late for me to have a bath then, but if I liked in the morning it would be at my service.
If anyone had told me in the old days that going to Irkutsk I should be deeply interested in a bath!