I left Warsaw for Moscow and Nizhni. When I left the American was a lonely bachelor. When I returned his wife had found him. She told me her story. She lost her man in New York and had chased him through the States, and through Europe. He was always giving her the slip. I think my trembling puritanism rose to the defence of my innocent soul. Life is of all colours, but there are some terrible reds and scarlets one doesn’t see in England. Warsaw to me was a wicked city. The wonderful beauty of Polish girls I had then no eyes for.
I returned to England and was a local lion.
The trip brought me pleasant glory, but it had given me powerful hopes and longings. I had been in the Kremlin and in the churches. I had been a vagabond at the Fair of Nizhni Novgorod. I had seen the peasants and their faces and eyes and lives. I learned many things from these peasant faces. I said to myself at Moscow: “These people are like what English people were when Edward the Third was king.” Of a face passing I would say to myself: “There are three or four hundred years behind that nose and mouth and eyes and chin.” The irresistible question came: “Are these peasants not better off than the English clerk or labourer?” As a question I left it.
England again! I returned, for I had an appointment there, comfortable though not literary. Life had good things in store for me there—more reading, new acquaintances, a new Friend even. I took up Russian more seriously and commenced a translation of a novel of Dostoievsky. I was learning to know others of that Great Society, and one day the Fates brought me to Zarathustra. I was an unruly candidate for a place in the society of the “free, very free spirits,” but a true candidate.
Puritanism and intolerance were now to be attacked. A thawing wind began to blow upon the winter of my discontent. “Convictions are prisons,” I read. And surely I was imprisoned behind many prison walls. I was in the centre of a labyrinth of convictions and principles. I believed in work and, at the same time, I believed in myself. Neitzsche reinforced the belief in myself. I was doing work that was not congenial. I was in work that imprisoned me and that prevented development. I was longing for the new. Still in my heart lived the sentences: “Do the impossible, pay for the New with all the Old.”
I wanted new life, broader horizons, deeper depths, higher heights. I knew these might be purchased by giving up my appointment in London and throwing myself into Russia. Yes, to go to Russia and live there, that was my next step. I came to that conclusion one Sunday in June. In one little moment I made that big decision. The tiniest seed was sown in Time. The Fates stood by, the seed lived. To-day that seed is bearing the finest blossoms. May each chapter here be a garland of its flowers exhaling their life perfume.
I shaped my plans to the end.
“‘A Yea, a Nay
A straight line
A Goal’—saith Zarathustra.”