This visit to Petrograd gave Bertram another impression of Soviet Russia, broadened his outlook on the tragedy of a great people, killed something more of the petty selfishness of his own trouble.
He said something of the kind to Christy on the train journey through endless fields sowed with rye six months from another harvest time.
“I find Russia makes one forget one’s ego. It’s like seeing the end of the world—the death of civilisation. It’s absurd for the individual to whine about the loss of a collar-stud, or a pretty wife, in the midst of an Empire’s ruin.”
“A nice cheerful way of looking at things!” said Christy, with his usual irony. “Heaven knows how gay you’ll be by the time you get to the Volga Valley.”
“These people seem to be down to the bed-rock of primitive existence,” said Bertram. “Nothing matters except food and shelter, and escape from death. All the rest is so much ‘jam,’ as my batman used to say. It simplifies things, as war does.”
“An easy process of simplification,” said Christy. “Another war, or another drought in Russia, and a great part of Europe will be simplified off the map.”
There was a great silence in Petrograd. Heavy snow had fallen, and lay deep in the streets, except where gangs of men and women had shovelled a passage-way for sleighs which drove slowly with a tinkle of bells. The Neva was frozen over, and standing on one of the bridges, Bertram stared at the panorama of the city, magnificent with its vista of palaces, churches, vast galleries, and great blocks of stone buildings which had once been the offices of the Imperial Government and of world-wide trade, but grim and black under snow-covered roofs.
The silence of Petrograd was strange and fearful. There was no sound of labour in the great factories across the river. No smoke came from their chimneys. There was no throb of engines, or clang of iron. Nothing moved on the quaysides. The immense buildings with sculptured façades on the side of the city were deserted of all life. No man or woman went in. None came out.
Along the Nevski Prospekt once, as Bertram knew, the greatest highway of luxury in Europe, most of the shops were boarded up like those in Moscow, and nothing was being sold or bought. But there were people there, a sense of life, in contrast to the deadly quietude in other streets. With fur caps pulled down, and sheepskin coats tucked up about their ears, and with snow-shoes over their boots, they were dragging hand sledges over pavements covered with frozen snow so slippery that Bertram found it hard to walk without staggering or falling. The sledges were laden with sacks of potatoes, logs of wood, or frozen meat, and some of them were escorted by Red soldiers, as though this treasure might be attacked on its way.
Bertram was aware of some difference between these sledge-draggers and snow-shovellers of Petrograd and the population of Moscow. They were not peasants, but city folk of the old bourgeois class. Their clothes still showed traces of fashions that had passed. Some of these women, and young girls, dragging heavy loads, had frocks of a style that would have looked well in Paris, or Berlin, or London, before they had been torn, and grease-stained, and mud-splashed. Elderly men, clearing the roads, wore “bowler” hats, and coats with astrachan collars, and looked like bank managers, or clerks, once respected in merchants’ offices, who had come down in the world to the level of the doss house.