To-day, two years later, it was just such a glorious winter morning as in those days of March, 1917. The sun laughed to scorn the silly ways of men. But the song of Hope was dead, and the people’s faces bore the imprint of starvation, distress, and terror—terror of those very same Tsarist police! For these others, who did not make the Revolution, but who were encouraged by Russia’s enemies to return to Russia to poison it—these others copied the Tsarist ways, and, restoring the Tsarist police, made them their own. The men and women who made the Revolution, they said, were the enemies of the Revolution! So they put them back in prison, and hung up other flags. Here, stretched across the Nevsky Prospect, on this winter morning there still fluttered in the breeze the tattered shreds of their washed-out red flags, besmirched with the catch-words with which the Russian workers and the Russian peasants had been duped. There still stood unremoved in the middle of the square the shabby, dilapidated, four-months-old remains of the tribunes and stages which had been erected to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevist revolution. The inscriptions everywhere spoke not of the “bourgeois prejudices” of Liberty and Justice, but of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (sometimes hypocritically called the “brotherhood of workers”), of class war, of the sword, of blood, hatred, and world-wide revolution.
Looking up from my bitter reverie I saw Uncle Egor, from whom I had got separated in the scramble at the railway station. I wanted to thank and recompense him for the food and shelter he had given me.
“Uncle Egor,” I asked him, “how much do I owe you?”
But Uncle Egor shook his head. He would take no recompense.
“Nothing, my little son,” he replied, “nothing. And come back again when you like.” He looked round, and lowering his voice, added cautiously, “And if ever you need ... to run away ... or hide ... or anything like that ... you know, little son, who will help you.”
A Daughter of the Soil
CHAPTER IX
METAMORPHOSIS
I never saw Uncle Egor again. I sometimes wonder what has become of him. I suppose he is still there, and he is the winner! The Russian peasant is the ultimate master of the Russian Revolution, as the Bolsheviks are learning to their pain. Once I did set out, several months later, to invoke his help in escaping pursuit, but had to turn back. Uncle Egor lived in a very inaccessible spot, the railway line that had to be traversed was later included in the war zone, travelling became difficult, and sometimes the trains were stopped altogether.