“I cannot believe it,” said the Colonel. “Those people aren’t hungry. I guess they’re Soviet officials who have hoarded up secret stores.”
“Some of them, perhaps. But there’s not much chance of that. They’ve been rationed as Soviet workers until a week ago. Now the rations are cut off, and they’re tightening their belts.”
“It’s a new bourgeoisie,” said the Colonel. “The Bolsheviks declared war on the old bourgeoisie, and then set up a new one of their own. There’s no more equality in Soviet Russia than there is in the United States.”
Bertram agreed with him, but that night he had to admit, after an amazing invasion of the A. R. A., that the glamour and glitter of the opera only concealed the sharp tooth of hunger. It showed itself naked and unashamed when the door was opened to a ringing of bells and a party of opera singers desired to know if they might invite themselves to supper with Messieurs les Américains?
How could a party of young Americans, six thousand miles from home, refuse to share their bully beef with art in distress?
“Come right in!” said Sims, in command of “the bunch.”
They came right in, six ladies and three men, including the Prima Donna, who was a Persian lady, with a wonderful voice, enormous black eyes, and a ferocious appetite. The American boys brought out their tinned beef and biscuits, their cheese and butter, and made a picnic meal with hot cocoa. The Russian ladies of the opera, speaking but a few words of French and German, which was their only conversational link with their American hosts who had picked up a smattering of those languages, after two years in Europe, made no concealment of their delight in the presence of this food. They fell upon it like harpies, and it was the beautiful Persian girl who devoured the last of a Dutch cheese with her big black eyes raised in ecstasy.
One of the Americans produced a gramophone, and turned on a jazz tune, and initiated the Persian lady into the mysteries of the fox-trot, while she screamed with laughter. The others, still roving round for stray biscuits, laughed up and down the scale.
Bertram slipped away to his camp bed in a little salon which had once been the writing-room of Nadia’s uncle, Governor of Kazan in Imperial Russia. Those dancers in the next room were like the merry ladies of the Decameron, surrounded by plague.
He looked out of his window to the white night, with a moon above the snow. It was very quiet in Kazan, with its houses filled with naked children, and starving people, where typhus prevailed.