Mrs. Kendal acted so well, when she and her husband and Sir John Hare used to appear regularly at the St. James’s Theatre, and people took the excellence of her acting so much for granted, that they tired of it. She left us. She toured in America, and then she came back and appeared in a play called The Greatest of These, at the Garrick Theatre, in June 1896; and Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his notice of the play, said: “Mrs. Kendal, forgetting that London playgoers have been starved for years in the matter of acting, inconsiderately gave them more in the first ten minutes than they have had in the last five years, with the result that the poor wretches became hysterical and vented their applause in sobs and shrieks. And yet in the old days at the St. James’s they would have taken it as a matter of course and perhaps grumbled at the play into the bargain.”
But of all my playgoing, I think what I enjoyed most of all was a summer troupe at the Arena Nazionale in Florence, in the summer of 1893. The troupe was an ordinary one; but they produced a different play every night; and I there saw nearly all the plays worth seeing in the European repertory, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dumas, Sardou, Maupassant, Sudermann—besides many Italian plays. The seats were cheap; smoking was allowed. The auditorium was open to the sky. The Italians acted so naturally, and so easily, that they were more like children improvising charades than professionals working for their bread; and among them was an actor who made a great name for himself later—Zacchoni. I remember that when I came back to London and went to a play for the first time, the diction of the English players seemed so stilted, laborious, and artificial, after these easy, babbling Italians, that I felt as if it was in London and not in Florence that I had been listening to a foreign language.
At the end of the summer of 1905 I went back to Manchuria. I spent a few days in St. Petersburg, and then I embarked once more in the Transbaikalian railway. The journey was pleasantly different from what it had been in 1904, and almost as interesting in another way. An officer of the German forestry, and a friend of a Hildesheim friend of mine—Erich Wippern—was in the train. He was reading the second part of Goethe’s Faust. I shared a compartment with an army doctor. We crossed Lake Baikal in a steamer. It was blue, and there was nothing of the ghostly unreal look about it that it wears in the winter. Kharbin was changed beyond recognition. The town was twice as big and seemed to be almost deserted. General Linevitch, the new Commander-in-Chief, did not allow officers to go there any more except on pressing errands and for good reasons. I spent a few days there, and I got to know some of the local officers, among others a charming General Zacharoff who was in charge of the demobilisation. I found myself suddenly plunged into a new society which was not unlike what Chekhov depicts in his plays. A small drama was progressing round the wife of a local engineer, who was the Circe of the place. She was not particularly beautiful, but she did what she liked with whomsoever she pleased. There were quarrels, duels arranged, suicides threatened, revolvers fired; the whole ending in conversation and cigarette smoke—just as in a Chekhov play, of which the motto might have been: “L’amour passe; la fumée reste.”
On 1st September peace was declared, and the soldiers in the place tore the telegram from one another’s hands.
I went to Gunchuling, which was the remoter G.H.Q. of the army, and I stayed with the Press censors. Although peace had been declared, an officer whom I knew got orders to go and fortify positions, and Kuropatkin’s army was said to have received orders to advance. At the time this seemed inexplicable. The reason of this was, I learnt a long time afterwards, that news had been received of a revolution in Japan.
From Gunchuling I went to Godziadan, which was the advanced G.H.Q. where the Commander-in-Chief lived in a train. I had telegraphed from Gunchuling to the 2nd Transbaikal battery, asking them to send horses to fetch me. The battery was in Mongolia, at a place called Jen-tsen-Tung, on the extreme right flank of the army and eighty miles from Godziadan. Two Cossacks arrived with a pony for me and my own saddle on it, and we started at eight o’clock in the morning on our long and exhausting ride.
We spent the first night at the Chinese town of Ushitai, and halted for our midday meal the next day at a Chinese village, a small tumble-down place near a large clump of trees. A Chinaman came out of the house and, seeing the red brassard of the correspondents on my arm, thought I was a doctor. In pidgin Russian he told me his child was ill; and leading me into his house he showed me a brown and naked infant with a fat stomach. The infant had a white tongue and had been feeding, so the Chinaman told me, on raw Indian corn. I prescribed cessation of diet, and the Chinaman seemed to be satisfied, and asked me whether I would like to hear a concert. I said: “Very much”; he then bade me sit down on the K’ang and said: “Smotri, smotri” (“Look, look”). Presently another Chinaman came into the room, and taking from the wall a large and twisted clarion made of brass, he blew on it one deafening blast and hung it up on the wall again. There was a short pause. I waited in expectation, and the Chinaman turned to me and said: “The concert is now over.” I then went to have luncheon with the Cossacks under the trees, the meal consisting of rusks as hard as bricks swimming in an earthen bowl of boiling water, on the surface of which tea was sprinkled. When we had finished our meal, and just as we were about to start, the Chinaman in whose house I had been entertained, rushed up to me and said: “In your country, when you go to a concert, do you not pay for it?” The concert was paid for, and we rode on. We rode through grassy and flowery steppes: this was the beginning of Mongolia. We met Mongols sitting sideways on their ponies and dressed in coats of many colours, and we arrived at Jen-tsen-Tung at eight o’clock. There I found my old friend Kislitski of the battery, who was living in an immaculately clean Chinese house, and there I dined and spent the night. The next morning I rode to a village two miles off, where the battery was quartered. There I stayed from the 15th of September until the 1st of October, living a life of ease and interest. The village where we were quartered was picturesque. It lay in a clump of willow trees, and near it there was a large wood which stretched down to a broad brown river. Next door to us lived a Chinaman who was preparing three young students for their examination in Pekin. He was an amiable and urbane scholar, and he used to put on large horn spectacles and chant the most celebrated stop-shorts in Chinese literature. Stop-shorts are Chinese poems in four lines. They are called stop-shorts because the sense goes on when the sound stops.
We spent the time in riding, reading, bathing, sleeping, and playing patience.
Jen-tsen-Tung was a large and picturesque town; a stream of Mongols flowed in and out of it, wearing the most picturesque clothes—silks and velvets of deep orange and sea-green that glowed like jewels. At one of the street corners a professional wizard, dressed in black silk, embroidered with silver moons and wearing a black conical hat, practised his trade. You asked a question, paid a small sum, and he told you the answer to the question; but he refused to prophesy for more than a hundred days ahead.