“In the Famine district there will be worse smells and worse dirt, and lice everywhere. If I wanted to avoid them, I should not be here.”
“You are wonderful!” he said.
“A simple Russian woman,” she answered. “Why do you think me wonderful?”
There were other people in the train who thought her wonderful when Bertram told them of that early morning act. The Colonel and Dr. Weekes were filled with admiration.
“By God,” said the Colonel, “if all the Russian people were like that young woman, this country wouldn’t be plague-stricken with Bolsheviks and bugs!”
At night, in their candle-lit carriage, the Colonel and the Doctor, and Jemmy Hart, the newspaper man, and the Colonel’s A. D. C., or “pup,” as Hart called him, played poker with Russian roubles. They gambled fiercely, raising the stakes by tens of thousands, with a limit of a hundred thousand, as though possessed of untold wealth. But at the end of the long evening’s play, no one had lost or gained more than a few dollars in American rates of exchange.
During these poker games Bertram went into the dusky corridor again to stand by Nadia. They were left alone, for the other two Russian ladies went early to their bunks. The train crawled slowly, or halted for hours while new fuel was stacked in the engine. The moon rose and flooded the white landscape and the snow-capped farmsteads and the laden boughs.
“Russia is like a dead body under its white shroud,” said Nadia.
“It seems as lonely as an undiscovered land,” said Bertram.
She asked him to tell her a little of his life, so that she might know him more. He told her only of the things that had happened, the war, his marriage, the death of the child, Digby’s murder in Ireland, his mother’s death, his separation from Joyce. He was not good at self-analysis, and too much of an Englishman to attempt it. Yet she seemed to understand more than he told her.