“Stephen Graham.”
XII
GAY LIFE
I was at Petrograd and also at Kislovodsk, which is a sort of Petrograd set in the midst of the Caucasus, Russia’s greatest watering-place, a resort of the rich. As is commonly said, you leave your children behind when you go to Kislovodsk; they would only be in the way. Here turn up in these war years many who would otherwise be at Nauheim and Carlsbad or on the Riviera. It is a place of few conveniences, but it has an army of doctors, it has the springs, and it has “society.” It was so crowded this summer of 1916 that people slept in passages, in outhouses, in ramshackle cupboards and bathhouse, and paid fancy prices for the privilege. Return seats in the trains were all booked for two months ahead, and but for “the loop-holes of escape” I should have been forced to stay in the Caucasus until the end of September.
Petrograd and Moscow being so desperately serious in tone, many pleasure-lovers decided to extend the summer season, and even to try Kislovodsk as a winter resort. There was lively speculation in rooms and datchas with a view to high prices reigning throughout the winter.
An unhealthy spot this Kislovodsk, the air of its little streets heavy with the odour of decay and dirt. It is in a valley and there are glorious moors and hills about it. But one never sees any visitor on the hills. The visitors keep to the leafy promenades in the park, within hearing of the music of the bandstands and in reach of the café and the ice-cream bar. The women are mostly in white, but more coarse of feature than in most places in Russia—the faces of women on a low level of intelligence, of the sort who pride themselves on being “interesting” to men. They wear their diamonds in the afternoon. A lady was robbed of her diamonds in broad daylight in Essentuki, a neighbouring resort, and on being reproached for wearing diamonds in wartime, replied, “Where else should I show them except at the waters?”
The people who have made fortunes out of the war are prominent at Kislovodsk, and the emptiness of their gay life is an unpleasant contrast to the realities of the time. Not the cultured of Russia, these, not the noble and the wise, not the people who really are the nation! Yet enter into conversation with one of these commercial parvenus and you find boundless vanity and self-importance. “We are the people who count in Russia,” they say. Go into a restaurant and your senses will be lacerated as you see them all around you eating with their knives. The books they are reading are Artsibashef, Fonvizin, Verbitskaya. Ask about the real artists of Russia and they raise their eyebrows or express contempt. They are nearest to the class in America that invented the word “high-brow” and for whom commercial talent must go on manufacturing huge quantities of loathsome “low-brow” literature, art, music and drama.
Many people asked me about England, but I was obliged to say the spirit of England would not tolerate a Kislovodsk; we have nothing quite so shameless during the war. We have people who are profiting by death and destruction and calamity and sorrow, but public opinion does not allow these venal gains to be flaunted in this way.
At Russian theatres, as indeed in English theatres at home, flippant and indecent farces, the theatres themselves going ahead of the people and leading downward. One thing we may generally surmise, comparing one side of the footlights with the other—the life of the people looking on is ten thousand times better than the life presented on the stage. The vulgar and cynical notions expressed by the actors and actresses are only regarded as curious or amusing or spicily outrageous by the people who have paid so much money for the doubtful privilege of listening.
I witnessed a three-act play, translated or adapted from the French, where there was the usual dressing and undressing on the stage and scampering about in undergarments. Suddenly the lady who had the most abominable part to play, in the midst of one of the most unpleasant parts clutched at her breast with her hand and fell with a loud thud on the stage. Then the curtain came down. We waited. Presently out came a weedy-looking pale-faced commercial and made the following statement:
As Mme. A. has had a heart seizure we cannot continue the performance. The management, however, hope that the audience will not on that account feel a grievance or that the money ought to be returned. To-night’s tickets will be available to-morrow night, when a substitute will be found for Mme. A.