Back in Moscow, Bertram made enquiries as to the means of transport to the famine-stricken districts. They lay two thousand miles east of Moscow, in the Volga Valley, and the chief railheads were Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara or Saratoff. If he could get as far as Kazan, he might, with luck, find a passage on a boat down the Volga to the other places. But he would have to look quick about it, as far as the river trip went, because the Volga would soon begin to freeze.
Mr. Weinstein of the Foreign Office was not hopeful of an early train.
“I think, perhaps, your best chance would be to link up with a party of gentlemen from the A. R. A. for whom a special train to Kazan is being provided this week or next.”
A special train! It sounded incredible! But Bertram knew already the mighty power of “Ara” in Russia. Had he not been fixed up by its influence from Riga to Moscow? Had he not seen the inspiring work of Mr. Cherry of Lynchburg, Virginia, with Bolshevik officials and railway porters?
The first food ship had arrived in Petrograd from New York. Groups of young Americans were already in far outposts organising committees of Russians for the administration of food relief. They had already started soup-kitchens for starving children in Petrograd and Moscow, and were pushing out supplies to Kazan and the Volga Valley with a rapidity that took away the breath of Russian officials to whom the word Seichas—immediately—meant the day after to-morrow, or the week after next.
The Director of “Ara,” the American Relief Administration, learnt that word first from his Russian dictionary, and used it with terrible persistence to the Soviet authorities of transport, to Russian station-masters, to foremen of gangs, to engine-drivers, and any other people he could find who had something to do with getting an engine to move and trucks to follow it. He taught the word and its meaning to young Americans from the Universities of Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Virginia, who, after a glimpse of war, had volunteered for Russian Relief as the next best chance of getting in touch with life—and death. They too used that word Seichas, with a Western meaning and added American interpretations such as, “For the love of Mike, why don’t you get a move on, you sons of bitches?”—even to high Soviet officials, and lesser authorities.
By some miracle, astounding to the Russians themselves, trains began to move from Riga to Moscow, from Moscow to the Volga, laden with food supplies for the starving children. Although in the whole of Russia there were only two thousand five hundred engines standing together, though mostly immovable, instead of seventeen thousand five hundred which moved before the war, the best of them began to get steam up, pulled out with long train-loads of trucks, did actually get somewhere, in spite of break-downs, lack of fuel. Oriental methods of delay. “Seichas, you Tavarishes!” said the Americans, at any kind of delay, and by that mingling of cajolery and terror which was the method of the genial Cherry, were getting some kind of efficiency into the utter chaos of Russian railways.
All these things Bertram learnt from Jemmy Hart, the American journalist, whom he had met on his first night in Moscow at the Guest House, when he appeared in his flannel shirt and pepper-and-salt trousers, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a wet sponge in the other. He had been imprisoned as a spy by the Cheka before the arrival of the A. R. A. Then he was let out, and treated as an honoured guest of the Soviet Republic. Hence his “billet” in the Guest House. He was on terms of familiarity with Lenin, Chicherin, Radek and other high powers, to whom he behaved as one old poker player to other experts of the artful game, with cheery cynicism, ready to call their bluff, or to double the stakes if they revealed a weak hand.
“These fellows cringe, if you treat ’em rough,” he told Bertram. “When they start their highfalutin about ‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ ask them why they look so well fed when twenty-five million people are starving to death. Mind you, I’m not a counter-Revolutionary! I’d rather back these Bolsheviks, crooks as most of them are, than see fellows like Koltchak and Denikin trying to get Czardom back on to the necks of these poor, lousy, simple people. . . . So you want to get to the Volga? Well, come along to the Colonel and I’ll fix you up. I’m going too.”
The Colonel was a West Point man, with a hard, handsome, masklike face, which became human and friendly when he smiled. He was not a waster of words or time, and after a few enquiries as to Bertram’s mission, agreed to give him a sleeping berth in the special train which was being provided for himself and his staff. It was due to start in a week’s time. Allowing for the Russian translation of the word seichas, that meant two weeks at least. He would raise Hell if it was longer than that.