It was not a bad boat. There was room on board for three hundred passengers, and many little cabins in the first class. In the old days it had been a pleasure-steamer for Russian gentry, and the well-to-do bourgeoisie, when the summer shone upon the broad waters of the Volga. There had been wine parties on summer nights in the panelled saloon, and under the awnings on the promenade decks. Gipsies had sung the Volga song and their own weird melodies to Russian aristocrats with their pretty mistresses, in this ship of pleasure. Now all its paint had gone, and its decks were dirty, and its cabins foul.
Incredible filth was in the cabins. Bertram and Dr. Weekes made a brief inspection of them and then beat a hasty retreat. Insects of every species crawled up the panels, swarmed in disgusting orgies under the mattresses, made dwelling-places in the very wash-basins. For months, according to the skipper, this had been a refugee ship, transporting thousands of people escaping from the famine. On every voyage dozens of dead bodies had been thrown overboard. Typhus had raged in the ship. Specimens of all the vermin of Southern Russia had mingled in this floating menagerie, and bred and multiplied.
Dr. Weekes was frankly scared.
“A death-ship!” he said.
Yet, with generous courage, he gave Bertram the only clean place for a sleeping berth. It was the table in the dining saloon, which seemed to be free from vermin. Bertram refused the privilege, and would not accept until the young doctor shared its table space. Jemmy Hart, the newspaper correspondent, was with them. He cursed Russia, Bolshevism, and bugs with untiring eloquence, and with rich imaginative efforts. They brought with them sufficient tinned food, it seemed to Bertram, to provide a battalion with two months’ rations, but before the return journey they were on half rations and hungry.
Hungry, though for a time Bertram lost his appetite and never wanted to eat another mouthful of food again until he died. How could he sit down to a meal of pork and beans, good white bread, and American cheese, after days among people who had but a handful of grass between them and death, who watched their children die, one by one, and lay down themselves to die, with nothing of any kind to eat, though they had garnered filth and eaten that until it was gone.
For a day and a night the boat steamed slowly down stream, between the low-lying banks of the Volga, rising steeper as they travelled south. On each side of them was a white desolation, immense, monotonous, unbroken, except now and then where distant villages lay buried in snow. No smoke came from them. No peasants came down to the landing-stages. No sign of human life appeared.
“It’s a great white death,” said Dr. Weekes in a low voice. His fur cap and heavy astrachan collar were covered with snow as he stared from the bridge across the countryside.
“Better dead than alive in this country,” said Jemmy Hart. “That Bolshevik vermin made a merry game of me last night.”
They tied up at Tetuishi, and went across the landing-stage, up steep snow banks to a little town perched on a hill. A few Tartars wandered about the market place, gaunt and shaggy. There were lines of booths, like those in Kazan and Moscow, but there were no soldiers and no buyers, and no merchandise. From a Red soldier sitting inside a sentry-box, with his rifle between his knees, blue-lipped and blue-nosed, and as starved-looking as a stray dog, they found out the whereabouts of the President of the Tetuishi Commune. It was Jemmy Hart who acted as interpreter, having learnt Russian in its prisons.