“The intonation with which the old servant said: ‘They’ve gone’—an intonation of peculiar cheerfulness with which servants love to underline what is melancholy—was marvellous. The lamp is brought in. Lastly the doctor goes. The old mother reads a magazine by the lamplight; the clatter of the horses’ hoofs and the jingling of bells are heard dying away in the distance; and Uncle Vania and his niece set to work at their accounts … you hear the abacus—always used in Russian banks—making a clicking noise … and the infinite monotony of their life begins once more.”
The first performances of The Cherry Orchard were equally impressive. I saw it acted many times later, but nothing touched the perfection of its original cast. The Cherry Orchard is the most symbolic play ever written. It summed up the whole of pre-revolutionary Russia. The charming, feckless class of landowners; the pushing, common, self-made man, who with his millions buys the estate with the cherry orchard that the owners have at last to sell, because they cannot consent to let it to cut their losses; the careless student; the grotesque governess; all of them dancing on the top of a volcano which is heaving and already rumbling with the faint noise of the coming convulsion. The Russo-Japanese War and its consequences were the beginning of these convulsions; and, as Count Benckendorff prophesied to me in 1903, as soon as war came to Russia, there was a revolution.
Pierre Benckendorff, Count Benckendorff’s second son, who was an officer in the Gardes-à-cheval, started for Manchuria soon after the war began. He exchanged into a Cossack regiment for the purpose, as the Guards did not go to the front. He looked so radiantly young and adventurous, when he started, that we were all of us afraid he would never come back. He passed through Moscow on his way to the front, and I spent the day with him. He asked me why I did not try to go to the war as a newspaper correspondent, as I could speak Russian, and his father would be able to give me letters of recommendation to the military authorities. His words sank deep, and I determined to try and do this. I at once wrote to his father.
Count Benckendorff thought the idea was an excellent one; and just before Easter I went to London to try and get a newspaper to send me out. I went to the Morning Post, where I knew Oliver Borthwick, the son of the proprietor, Lord Glenesk. At first the matter seemed to be fraught with every kind of difficulty, but in the end things were arranged, and towards the end of April I started for St. Petersburg, on my way to Manchuria, laden with a saddle, a bridle, a camp bed, and innumerable cooking utensils. I knew nothing about journalism, and still less about war, and I felt exactly as if I were going back to a private school again.
I stopped two nights in St. Petersburg, and engaged a Russian servant. He was a gigantic creature, who had served in a cavalry regiment of the Guards. At Moscow, I met Brooke, who was going out as correspondent for Reuter, and we settled to travel together.
The journey was not uneventful. As far as Irkutsk, we travelled in the ordinary express train, which had comfortable first-and second-class carriages, a dining-room, a pianoforte, a bathroom, and a small bookcase full of Russian books. The journey from Moscow to Irkutsk lasted nine nights and eight days. Guy Brooke and I shared a first-class compartment. I made friends with the official who looked after the train, and gave him my pocket-knife; and he undertook to post a letter for me when he got back to Moscow. He kept his promise, and my first dispatch to the Morning Post, the first dispatch from our batch of correspondents, got through without being censored. There was not much war news in it. In fact, it contained a long and detailed account of a performance of Tchekov’s Uncle Vania at the Art Theatre at Moscow.
On board the train, there was a French correspondent, M. Georges La Salle, and a Danish Naval Attaché, and another English correspondent, Hamilton; several Russian officers, and a Russian man of business, who lived at Vladivostok. This man gave us a good deal of trouble; he thought we were English spies, and told us we would never be allowed to reach our destination. He did his best to prevent our doing so. He told the officers we were spies, and their manner, which at first had been friendly, underwent a change, and became at first suspicious, and finally openly hostile. The passenger trains ran from Irkutsk to Baikal Station, and it was at Baikal that the real interest of the journey began. Lake Baikal was frozen, and was crossed daily by two large ice-breakers, which ploughed through three feet of half-melted ice. The passage lasted four hours. The spectacle when we started was marvellous. It had been a glorious day. The sun in the pure frozen sky was like a fiery, red, Arctic ball. Before us stretched an immense sheet of ice, powdered with snow and spotless, except for a long brown track which had been made by the sledges. On the far-off horizon a low range of mountains disappeared in a veil of snow made by the low-hanging clouds. The mountains were intensely blue; they glinted like gems in the cold air, and we seemed to be making for some mysterious island, some miraculous reef of sapphires. Towards the west there was another and more distant range, where the intense deep blue faded into a delicate and transparent sea-green—the colour of the seas round the Greek Islands—and these hills were like a phantom continuation of the larger range, as unearthly and filmy as a mirage.
As we moved, the steamer ploughed the ice into flakes, which leapt and were scattered into fantastic, spiral shapes, and flowers of ice and snow. As the sun sank lower, the strangeness and the beauty increased. A pink halo crept over the sky round the sun, which became more fiery and metallic. Some lines from Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” came into my head which exactly fitted the scene:
“And now there came both mist and snow
And it grew wondrous cold: