On the way to Chita, August 20th.
We arrived at Irkutsk on the morning of the 17th and took the train for Baikal. At Irkutsk station there was a train of sick soldiers returning from the war. They begged for newspapers. The tedium of their long journey is, they say, intolerable. They say there has been a good deal of typhus in Manchuria.
We crossed the lake in the steamer. Its summer aspect is far less striking than the strange glory which it wears when it is frozen, and the distant mountains seem like “a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.” In summer the waters are blue, the nearer hills grey and the distant mountains blue, but with nothing strange or unreal about them. Yet when the sunset silvered the grey tints and spread a ragged golden banner in the sky, the lake was extremely beautiful in another way. At Baikal station there was the usual struggle for places in the train. How well I remembered the desperate struggle I had gone through to get a seat in a third-class carriage at this same place last year! This time it was in the first-class carriage that the conflict took place. An engineer got into the same carriage as I did. He occupied one of the lower berths and I the other. Presently a lady arrived, bound for Chita, and looking for a place. She came into our carriage and asked to be allowed to have one of the lower berths. The engineer flatly refused and said that he had occupied his seat and had a right to keep it. I told her I would let her have mine with pleasure. She occupied it and went out. I moved my things into the upper berth. “Why on earth did you give up your seat?” the engineer asked. “You had a right to keep it.” When the lady came back she said to me: “Ah! you are evidently not a Russian; no Russian would have given up his place.” The engineer turned out to be quite a good-natured sort of person, but there is something about trains which makes people who are by nature mild and good-natured turn into savages, and instils into them a passionate determination to cleave to their rights. The next morning another man arrived in our carriage, with a large basket and a second-class ticket. This upset the engineer, who complained to the “Controller” of the train, and the poor man was turned out. The engineer snorted and said: “There’s an insolent fellow for you.” The lady was the wife of an engineer who was employed at Chita; and she told me much about life in Chita: how hard times were, owing to the war, how scarce food was getting—
“Und wie so teuer der Kaffee,
Und wie so rar das Geld!”
The “Controller” of the train, an official in plain clothes, whose exact duties I was not able to determine, except that he was able to turn the second-class passenger out of our carriage, spent a day and a night with us. He and the engineer talked without ceasing of the meetings of the Zemstva all over the country; of the discontent of the public servants and of the imminence of a strike. They told me there would be a big railway strike, but I did not pay much attention to this, nor did I in the least realise the importance of what they were discussing. In one of the second-class carriages I made friends with two young officers who were going out to the war as volunteers, and two ladies, one the wife of an officer already out there, and the other a hospital nurse. With them also was the son of the officer’s wife, a student from Odessa, who told me many interesting things. He described to me in great detail the mutiny of the Black Sea Fleet, and he prophesied, if not a revolution, at least a great change in Russia in the immediate future. One of the carriages of the train was barred, and in it sat a political prisoner, a schoolmaster from Irkutsk. Some of my friends went to speak to him, but they came back in melancholy and disappointment, since they said this prisoner was hissing hatred and rage through the bars in an undignified and painful manner.
Soon after we left Baikal a young man joined us who said he was employed in a firm at Chita. He had brought with him some flowers from Irkutsk. These he carried in a large basket full of wet sand. They were a kind of pathetic stock but not “in fragrant blow”; poor, feeble, starved and rather dirty flowers they were. But in Transbaikalia flowers were rare, and he had paid 18 roubles, he said (£1 8s.), for this nosegay, and he was bringing them to Chita as a gift to the girl to whom he was engaged to be married. He looked after these flowers with the utmost care; the basket was put in my berth and, as it was full of water, a constant stream trickled down from it and made a small pond on the floor of the carriage.
August 20th. Later.
We are nearing Chita; the husband of the lady to whom I gave my place has arrived to meet her and take her home. He is an engineer. They are deeply engaged in discussing local politics. The husband talks of a coming strike, and tells me that if I wish to see political meetings I had better stay in Chita. There are meetings every evening; some of them are dispersed by the police. I now realise the importance of flowers in this country; it is “a land of sand and ruin and gold.” The young clerk has produced two perforated bouquetholders (is there such a word?) and has carefully placed the flowers in them, with a sigh of relief. They have not quite faded, although they droop sadly. At Chita the lady and her husband get out. The engineer also. I am now alone in my carriage. Beyond Chita the country is mountainous and fledged with fir-trees.
August 21st.