The evenings in our quarters were beautiful. The sky would have a faint pinky-mauve tinge, like a hydrangea, and a large misty moon hung over the delicate willow trees that were silvery and rustled faintly in the half light. From the yard would float the sounds of music, music played on a one-stringed instrument and accompanying a wailing song, an infinitely melancholy music, less Oriental than Chinese music, and more Eastern than Russian music.
I left this dreamy paradise on the 1st of October, and I arrived at Kharbin on the 7th of October.
At Jen-tsen-Tung I had consulted the magician who practised his arts in the street about my journey home. His answer was that I could go home by the west or by the east; west would be better, but I should meet with obstacles. His prophecy came true, but the obstacles did not begin till we arrived at Samara. I was in the Trans-Siberian express. There were on board the train some officers, a German savant, two German men of commerce, three Americans—who were on their way back from Siberia, where they had managed a mine—a Polish student, and some ladies. I shared a compartment with Alexander Dimitriev-Mamonov, whose acquaintance I had made at Kharbin. He was the landlord of a small property near Kirsanov. During the war he had been employed in the Russo-Chinese Bank at Port Arthur, where he had worked during the daytime. At night he had served in the trenches. He spoke English perfectly, although he had never been to England. The first part of the journey was uneventful, and nothing of interest happened till we arrived at Irkutsk, except that the German man of commerce had a violent quarrel with one of the officers because he did not take off his hat in the restaurant car, in which there was a portrait of the Emperor. Had the German been a little better versed in Russian law, he would have known that a recent decree had made this salutation unnecessary; as it was, he gave in and submitted to the incident being written down in a protocol.
While we were quietly travelling, the Russian revolution had begun. The first news of it came to me in the following manner. We had crossed the Urals, and we had been travelling thirteen days; we had arrived at Samara, when the attendant, who looked after the first-class carriages, came into my compartment and heaved a sigh. I asked him what was the matter. “We shan’t get farther than Toula,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Because of the unpleasantnesses” (niepriatnosti). I asked, “What unpleasantnesses?” “There is a mutiny,” he said, “on the line.” We passed the big station of Sisran and arrived at the small town of Kousnetsk, which was no bigger than a village. There we were told the train could not go any farther because of the strike.
We expected an ordinary railway strike, which would mean at the most a delay of a few hours. We got out and walked about the platform. By the evening the passengers began to show signs of restlessness. Most of them sent long telegrams to various authorities. They drew up a petition in the form of a round-robin, which was telegraphed to the Minister of Ways and Communications, saying that an express train full of passengers, extremely over-tired by a long and fatiguing journey, was waiting at Kousnetsk, and asking the Minister to be so good as to arrange for them to proceed farther. This telegram remained unanswered. The next day resignation seemed to come over the company, although innumerable complaints were voiced, such as, “Only in Russia could such a disgraceful thing happen,” and one of the passengers suggested that Prince Kilkov’s portrait, which was hanging in the dining-car, should be turned face to the wall. Prince Kilkov had built the railway, and was at that moment driving an engine himself from Moscow to St. Petersburg, as no trains were running. He was over seventy years old. The Polish student, who had made music for the Americans, playing by ear the accompaniment to any tune they whistled him, and many tunes from the repertory of current musical comedy, played the pianoforte with exaggerated facility and endless fioriture and runs. I asked an American mechanic who was travelling with the mining managers, whether he liked the music. He said he would like it if the “damned hell were knocked out of it,” which was exactly my feeling. On the second day after our arrival, my American friends left for Samara with the intention of proceeding thence by water to St. Petersburg. I have wondered ever since how long the journey took them, and whether they found a steamer. As it was, their departure was not without a comic element. This is what happened. They were talking frankly about the supine inertia of the Russians when faced with an emergency, and were pointing out how different were the ever-ready presence of mind and the instant translation of ideas into action that marked men of their own country. They added that they had lost no time in chartering the best horses in the town, and were starting for Samara in an hour’s time. They were not going to take things lying down. While they were telling us this in the restaurant car, a minor, very minor and rather shabby, Russian official was sitting in the corner of the car saying nothing and drinking tea. It turned out he had overheard and understood the conversation of the Americans, for, when they carried their luggage to where they expected their frisky Troika to be, it was there indeed, but they had the mortification of seeing the little official already inside it, galloping off and waving them a friendly farewell. They had to be content with an inferior equipage and a later start.
The passengers spent the time in exploring the town, which was somnolent and melancholy. Half of it was built on a hill, a typical Russian village—a mass of squat brown huts; the other half in the plain was like a village in any other country. The idle guards and railway officials sat on the steps of the station room whistling. Two more trains arrived—a Red Cross train and a slow passenger train. Passengers from these trains wandered about the platform, mixing with the idlers from the town. A crowd of peasants, travellers, engineers and Red Cross attendants, sauntered up and down in loose shirts and big boots, munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks till the platform was thick with refuse. A doctor who was in our train, half a German, with an official training and an orthodox mind, talked to the railway servants like a father. It was wrong to strike, he said. They should have put down their grievances on paper and had them forwarded through the proper channels. The officials said that would have been waste of ink and penmanship. “I wonder they don’t kill him,” Mamonov said to me, and I agreed. Each passenger was given a rouble a day to buy food. The third-class passengers were given checks, in return for which they could receive meals. However, they deprecated the plan and said they wanted the amount in beer. They received it. They then looted the refreshment room, broke the windows, and took away the food. This put an end to the check system. The feeling among the first-class passengers rose. Something ought to be done, was the general verdict; but nobody quite knew what. They felt that the train ought to be placed in a safe position. The situation on the evening of the second day began to be like that described in Maupassant’s story, Boule de Suif. Nothing could be done except to explore the town of Kousnetsk. There was a feeling in the air that the normal conditions of life had been reversed. The railway officials and the workmen smiled ironically, as much as to say, “It is our turn now,” but the waiter in the restaurant car went on serving the aristocracy, which was represented by a lady in a tweed coat and skirt, and two old gentlemen, first. The social order might be overturned, but, though empires might crash and revolutions convulse the world, he was not going to forget his place.
It was warm autumn weather. The roads were soft and muddy, and there was a smell of rotting leaves in the air. It was damp and grey, with gleams of weak, pitiful sunshine. In the middle of the town there was a large market-place, where a brisk trade in geese was carried on. One man whom I watched failed to sell his geese during the day, and while driving them home at sunset talked to them as if they were dogs, saying: “Cheer up, we shall soon be home.” A party of convicts who belonged to the passenger train were working not far from the station, and asked the passers-by for cigarettes, which were freely given to the “unfortunates,” as convicts were called in Russia. I met them near the station, and they at once said: “Give the unfortunates something.” Towards evening, in one of the third-class carriages, a party of Little Russians, Red Cross orderlies, sang together in parts, and sometimes in rough counterpoint, melancholy, beautiful songs with a strange trotting rhythm with no end and no beginning, or rather ending on the dominant as if to begin again, and opposite their carriage on the platform a small crowd of muzhiks gathered together and listened and praised the singing.
On the morning of the fourth day after we had arrived, the impatience of the passengers increased to fever pitch. A Colonel, who was with us and who knew how to use the telegraph, communicated with Pensa, the next big station. Although the telegraph clerks were on strike, they remained in the offices talking to their friends on the wire all over Russia. The strikers were civil. They said they had no objection to the express going farther; that they would neither boycott nor beat anyone who took us, and that if we could find a friend to drive the engine, well and good. We found a friend, an amateur engine-driver, who was willing to take us, and on the 28th of October we started for Pensa. We had not gone far before the engine broke down. Directly this happened all the passengers offered advice about the mending of it. One man produced a piece of string for the purpose. But another engine was found, and we arrived at last at Pensa. There, I saw in the telegrams the words “rights of speech and assembly,” and I knew that the strike was a revolution. At Pensa the anger of the soldiers whose return home from the Far East had been delayed was indescribable. They were lurching about the station in a state of drunken frenzy, using unprintable language about strikes and strikers.
We spent the night at Pensa. The next morning we started for Moscow, but the train came to a dead stop at two o’clock the next morning at Riazhk, and when I woke up, the attendant came and said we should go no farther until the unpleasantnesses were over. But an hour later news came that we could go to Riazan in another train. Riazan Station was guarded by soldiers. A train was ready to start for Moscow, but one had to join in a fierce scrimmage to get a place in it. I found a place in a third-class carriage. Opposite me was an old man with a grey beard. He attracted my attention by his courtesy. He gently prevented a woman with many bundles being turned out of the train by another muzhik. I asked him where he had come from. “Eighty versts the other side of Irkutsk,” he said. “I was sent there, and now after thirteen years I am returning home at the Government’s expense. I was a convict.” “What were you sent there for?” I asked. “Murder!” he answered softly. The other passengers asked him to tell his story. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Tell it!” shouted the other passengers. His story was this. He had got drunk, set fire to a barn, and when the owner had interfered he killed him. He had served a sentence of two years’ hard labour and eleven years of exile. He was a gentle, humble creature, with a mild expression, and he looked like an apostle. He had no money, and lived on what the passengers gave him. I gave him a cigarette. He smoked a quarter of it, and said he would keep the rest for the journey, as he had still three hundred miles to travel. We arrived at Moscow at 11 o’clock in the evening and found the town in darkness, save for a glimmer of oil lamps. The next morning we woke up to find that Russia had been given a charter which contained not a Constitution, as many so rashly took for granted, but the promise of Constitutional Government.
I stayed at the Hôtel Dresden, which when I arrived was still without lamps or light of any kind, and the lift was not working.