“No,” said Bertram, “I have seen faces at the windows, but hardly human.”
He glanced at the window of a cottage close by, and Dr. Weekes looked in that direction. Three little faces were staring out at them, gravely. They were like monkey faces. They were like the faces of the abandoned children in Kazan.
“Let’s go in,” said Dr. Weekes.
He knocked at a cottage door, and after a moment or two it was opened, and on the threshold stood a tall peasant, with a flaxen beard and blue eyes.
Jemmy Hart spoke to him in Russian, and he bowed, and made a gesture, with simple dignity, inviting them to go in.
The room into which they went was spotlessly clean, and newly scrubbed by a woman who stood shyly on one side and then crossed herself, in the Russian fashion when strangers pass the threshold. The three children who had stared out of the window came and clung to her skirts.
Jemmy Hart talked to the man, and then turned to the others.
“He says they are starving, like all the others.”
“Ask them if they have any food at all,” said Dr. Weekes.
“The man says ‘some dried leaves.’ ”