“Tell me.”
Christy lowered his voice still further.
“Alliance with Germany. Red soldiers in exchange for railway engines. Arsenals in return for economic aid. A threat of war to France and Poland, with all the Continent afire, unless Europe comes to her aid. International blackmail.”
“That’s Hell,” said Bertram.
“If it happens,” answered Christy. “You’ve just come in time to see the transition from Communism to Capitalism. You’ll find it interesting before you get down to the Famine. This city is a melodrama, if you keep your eyes open.”
Bertram kept his eyes open, and his ears. Building on Christy’s outline of information, he was able to fill in the details of Russian life from personal observation, and plunged into it.
LI
He saw something of the melodrama of Moscow in the Trubnaya Market, which had been opened again, owing to Lenin’s new law allowing private trading. Until that time, all private barter had been forbidden under severe penalties, yet it had gone on secretly between city folk and peasants and, as Bertram found afterwards, there was hardly a man or woman in Moscow or Petrograd, outside the class of Soviet officials, who had not been imprisoned for this “crime.” Now it was done publicly, and legally.
Bertram walked through the market which covered a great square with dilapidated houses, pock-marked by bullet-holes, on each side. There were rows of wooden booths with room enough between them for three people to walk abreast, all crowded with peasant folk in their sheepskins. They were selling the produce of their little farmsteads, and the food made a brave show in the capital city of a famine-stricken land. Bertram saw plenty of meat, butter, cheese, and bread. For those who had paper money in big enough bundles, here was nourishment enough.
There were other people besides peasants. Standing on the outer edge of the wooden rows, were long lines of men and women—mostly women—who, he saw at a glance, were not peasants. Some of them were in peasant dress, but their faces could not disguise a heritage of education and gentility. Others wore the clothes of the old régime, of bourgeoisie and Western fashion—black dresses, frayed and worn and grease-stained, leather boots, down at heel, or broken at the toes, hats which had come originally, perhaps, from smart modistes in the Nevsky Prospekt, or even from Paris, a bit of lace at the throat and wrists.