The President was a dark, liquid-eyed man, with shaggy black hair. Sitting behind him, in his office, were three or four other men of the Soviet Committee, with moody, melancholy eyes. They looked like respectable mechanics at a Baptist meeting, and not like “the bloody Bolsheviks,” as Jemmy Hart called them in their presence, relying on their ignorance of English with an American accent.
Jemmy asked for sleighs and horses—seichas! Immediately. He spoke in the name of the A. R. A., to which they bowed their heads, as at the name of God. Certainly. They would have a sleigh and two horses—seichas. It was four hours before they arrived, and during that time, between Jemmy’s explosions of impotent wrath, the President of Tetuishi imparted information regarding his district.
It had been a rich granary before the droughts of 1920 and 1921. It had exported a surplus of two million poods of grain. Now the last harvest had only given sixteen hundred poods of grain. The people had very little to eat. In some villages nothing to eat. They were dying in great numbers at Spassk, and in other places to which he pointed on a map which hung behind his desk. The Soviet Government had sent down some barge-loads of potatoes. Owing to the lack of horses it was difficult to transport them to distant villages. It was a great tragedy. Many poor people were doomed.
He spoke in a quiet, kind, melancholy voice, not agonising, not pleading for help, but accepting on behalf of his people an inevitability of death.
The horses came at last, and with Dr. Weekes and Jemmy Hart, Bertram drove across the snow-fields to the nearest villages. The Tartar driver shouted to his lean nags and they went at a great pace over the hard snow, through a frosty wind which slashed Bertram’s face like a whip.
They halted outside the high stockade which surrounds all Russian villages, to keep in the cattle and keep out the wolves.
“Let’s walk in and see the best and the worst,” said Dr. Weekes.
A broad roadway divided the village into two. On each side were neat houses of unplaned logs, squarely built, under sloping roofs, heavily laden with snow. Steeply the snow was banked up all round them.
Not a soul stirred in the village. From one end to the other, there was no sign of life. No dog barked. No cattle stood in the yards or sheds. There was no crowing of cocks or clucking of chickens.
“Is everybody dead?” asked Dr. Weekes, and his voice was startling in the melancholy silence of the place.