“Dobra den, Tavarish! How goes it, old face-fungus? Kraseeva, eh? Fine and dandy, what? Well, dos vidanya, you darned old hypocrite, and don’t you come poking your nose into my car. Niet! No pannamayo?”
He fondled the head Bolshevik’s beard, patted him playfully on both cheeks, gave him a mighty dig in the ribs which took his breath away.
“That’s how I treat ’em,” he told Bertram. “A touch of good humour works wonders with them. Look at those two young murderers! Laughing like hell! It’s the first time they’ve laughed since I came this way before.”
The two young soldiers regarded him with eyes of wonder and admiration, between guffaws of laughter. When he stepped down on to the platform, a group of Russian porters and peasants gathered round him, listening to his oration in American and Russian, gazing at his mighty girth with astounded smiles. He towered above them, and occasionally pushed at a man’s chest, and pummelled a Russian boy with ogre-like playfulness.
Six hours at Sebesh.
“Come and see the flight from the Famine,” said Cherry. “It’ll take away your appetite for my bully beef. Cheap for me!”
He strode down the rails for five hundred yards and halted before a long stationary train without an engine. It was divided into a number of box-like cattletrucks, from which, as they drew near, came a pestilential stench through half-opened doors. In the dirty straw of each of the trucks squatted a group of human beings, men, women, and children. They were hunting vermin in their rags. Some of them lay curled up in the straw, sleeping, or dying. Perhaps dying, thought Bertram, for even those who were sitting up had a grey, haggard, deathly look, as they stared out at him with deep-sunk eyes, in which there was no interest, no life, no spirit.
“Letts,” said Cherry, “on their way home from the famine districts. They’ve been dying all the way. Hunger, weakness, typhus. Look at that girl. Typhus, beyond a doubt.”
The girl was lying on the grass by the side of the train. Her head turned from side to side. Her face was flushed and puffed.
“It’s the vermin that gets ’em,” said Cherry. “They’re eaten up with it.”