By favour of a Soviet official with whom Christy was on terms of friendship—“a very mild type of Bolshevik, like so many of them,” he explained—they were allowed to visit the Port of Petrograd.
“Is it worth while?” asked Bertram; “I want the human side of things. I want to know how people are living, and suffering in this frightful country.”
Christy answered with a touch of rebuke.
“We’re not here for melodrama. This Port will tell us why people are not living in Russia. And why there’s unemployment in England. It was one of the gateways of the world’s trade.”
It was a mournful place. They stumbled over cables concealed beneath the snow, and wandered in solitude past docks and warehouses, empty of all shipping and merchandise. Out in the snow lay numbers of ploughs and reaping machines, brand-new in their crates.
Christy inspected them, and read a word.
“Düsseldorf. . . . That tells a tale. Do you remember what I said about a Russo-German alliance?”
“Why are they left rotting in the snow?” asked Bertram.
“No means of transport, and Oriental inefficiency,” said Christy.
Further in the Port were three tramps flying the Swedish and Danish flags, and one wide-decked vessel with one funnel called Tyneside Lass, from Newcastle.