“Russia does not hold all the unhappiness of life,” she said. “You have crowded too much suffering into a few years. It has wounded your spirit. You feel broken, and perhaps a little resentful of Fate. So much bad luck after the strain of war!”
“I’m not whining,” said Bertram. “Your courage through more dreadful things rebukes my cowardice.”
“You are not cowardly,” she told him. “I think you will be very strong and brave when your wound is healed. You have the eyes of leadership. One day you will help to lead your country in thought or action.”
He laughed at her, but she was sure.
One thing she said in those night talks as the train went crawling through the white wilderness, gave him a glimpse of a spiritual passion in her soul.
“I hated ugliness, and pain, and dirt. As a child these things were all hidden from me. As a young girl I was surrounded with beauty and illusion. Now I want to get deeper and deeper into the misery of the people. I want to be with them in their pain and their filth. I want to share their worst agony. It is to pay back to them by the suffering of my body and spirit for all the cruelties of my ancestors. If you will read Russian history, you will find my father’s name—though not my father—attached to acts which kept the peasants enslaved, and brutalised them. The old régime is suffering now for the sins of its fathers. It is right that we should be punished.”
“I don’t believe in that doctrine,” said Bertram. “We should be punished for our own acts, perhaps—though we are the children of heredity—but not for the crimes of those who gave us life.”
“It is the Law,” she said. “The Greeks knew it. Fate pursues us. It is in the Christian faith. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.”
“It’s unfair,” said Bertram. “Damned unfair.”
“Alas, it is true,” she said. “We must do good for our children’s sake.”