I wrote lectures in which my style was so infected by the rhetoric of the sage that listeners grumbled that they could not tell when I was quoting and when I was using my own language. That was their defect; they should have known Carlyle better! One lecture I specially remember. It was given to some Essex folk. It related to Hero-worship. All the artillery of Carlyle was in play. It was a subject supremely Carlylean. Work, I praised, and heroic valour. But my message was: “In each of you there is a Hero, let him out; in each man there is a Hero, see one there,” which is not what Carlyle meant when he said: “Recognise the Hero when you see him and obey.” This was, perhaps, a first divergency. Carlyle was looking for a means to govern a nation wisely. I was moving towards my tramp destiny.
That was in the year of the Russian Revolution and I had been learning Russian very sedulously for some time. A literary ambition had possession of me. I had said to myself—one must specialise to get on in the world of literature. Carlyle specialised German. German things did not interest me. I had long since learned to enjoy Turgeniev and Gorky and Gogol in English translations, and Russia had become to me the most interesting country in Europe. I determined to specialise on Russia.
Yes, and when, according to the newspapers, the bombs were flying thick and fast, I took a return ticket for Moscow and went out. For luggage I took a camera and a small hand-bag. The tramp has the soberest conscience about luggage. He feels he can always do without. But, of course, I wasn’t a tramp then. I may remark in passing that I lost none of that luggage and had no trouble whatever with it. Few travellers manage their first trip to Russia without vexatious misadventures. On one occasion, however, when I was taking a snap-shot of a prison, a soldier rushed up to me in terror and rage. He thought my Kodak was a bomb.
What an excitement this journey was! I had never even been abroad before. Now I went through Holland and across the whole of Germany and into Poland. Two days after I had left England I was in Russia. I arrived at Warsaw on the day the Governor was shot. I saw at once there were more soldiers than people in the streets. I took a droshky to a hotel, put down my things and strolled out to see the city. I was arrested at once. Fifty yards down Marzalkovsky, the Piccadilly of Warsaw, a soldier stopped me, searched me and handed me over to an officer and six armed guards. I was put in the middle and marched off; on each side of me a soldier held a drawn sword and was ready to slash at me if I should attempt to bolt. I am sure the angels wept. Internally I collapsed with laughter and at the same time I felt very rich. I was having an experience.
I was released and was arrested again, and a Circassian guard punched me in the stomach very hard, “for luck,” I think he said. They gave an account of my arrest in the Russ and said I had been nearly beaten to death, but they didn’t know who I was. Somehow it came to England as the arrest and flogging of Mr Foster Fraser, the well-known correspondent. Poor Mr Fraser, it must have been awkward explaining to his friends that it was not really he who was flogged.
HARBOUR, NIZHNI NOVGOROD
OUTSIDE A SLUM BEERHOUSE, MOSCOW
I was not a correspondent, but I wrote of my adventures, and it was very pleasant to see my words printed in London newspapers. It was very amusing to see myself styled “Our own Special Correspondent,” when, in truth, I was only a free lance and had not even seen the face of a London editor. Journalism is a cheap trade! At Warsaw I met correspondents of many papers and had surprising glimpses behind the scenes. There was a little American Jew there who knew almost every language in Europe, who had an eye for every nationality, and who knew the private history of all the women of the city. At one time he had been hotel tout, interpreter, guide, but now was correspondent, reporter, supplier of information. He was always hanging about the chief hotel and watching for journalists hard up for copy. There were crowds of English newspaper men who could not speak intelligibly in French, far less in Russian. To such the American was a god-send. And Lord, what stories they wrote home to England!