I was speaking to a somewhat famous Russian senator about the deportation of superfluous population from Petrograd and he said: “The decentralisation of our cities’ populations is one of the things which are coming. Why should Moscow and Petrograd increase in size? They only do so at the expense of Russia as a whole. We have plenty of room for all——”
I strayed into various cafés in strange towns this summer and ordered my coffee and settled down to write parts of a long book on religion and life with which I was preoccupied all these months in Russia. I was generally intent to sit down and write out some idea which had occurred to me whilst I had been walking. One evening I found myself in a typical den—the long alley of a café with women on each side, painted, powdered, striking, their legs crossed or spread about the table legs, cigarettes in their hands, half-finished glasses of coffee in front of them.
Down the alley came young men with flickering eyes and lips, now and then a leer, a sickly smile, a cynical or satirical grin. “This is the world,” think the young men, “this is the gay wicked world where what should never be sold can be bought.”
But they are wrong—it is only a wee wicked corner. The great wide world is sweeter, healthier.
XIII
OLD FRIENDS
I met Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof, the hunter of Archangel at Moscow. He had purchased three fine pictures by our friend Pereplotchikof, and they stood in his room in the Gostinny Dvor in wooden packing cases. Alexander Alexandrovitch stood me a lunch at Martianitch’s in the Red Square on a meatless day—a merchant’s restaurant where you may see many antique Russian types of merchants wearing knee boots and blouses and longish hair. We had a nice dish of fish-pie (rastegai) with our soup, and though no wine was available, the bill, as I saw, for the two of us was twenty roubles, and three roubles more went for the tip. In that way war prosperity expressed itself. My friend had to spend many days in Moscow collecting boots in small parcels. As the Government allows no packing-cases with goods to be taken by train from Moscow to Archangel (I imagine fine art is exempted from this regulation), Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof had to buy some twenty portmanteaus to take his purchases of boots back to his native city.
Pereplotchikof the painter is not very well. Heart weakness deprived him of the use of his legs this summer. He was confined to his bed and felt very wretched. I spent many mornings and evenings sitting and talking to him. The doctors say that vegetarianism has been too much for his constitution. One evening I brought him a quantity of rich honey I had come across in a little shop in Moscow. He was delighted as a child, and honey he said was ideal food for him. In exchange for this gift he gave me an old cross which he had once picked up on a market stall.
Alexey Sergeitch came with me to visit Pereplotchikof one evening and was much touched to see the change in him. But we had a very lively talk of old days on the Dwina. Alexey Sergeitch is now a teacher of history in several secondary schools in Moscow. He has just published his first book, the fruit of some historical research, and he looks forward to writing other books of like character, so making a career in history. He has the directly opposite view to mine regarding Russia and we had many long and inconclusive debates on Church and State. His sister, Varvara Sergevna, is nurse in an immense military hospital on the Volhonka. I spent an evening up till midnight with her, helping to cut rolls of linen for bandages with atrociously blunt scissors. Russia has few machines for this work. Every night thousands of Russian girls are arduously cutting linen as we did with Varvara.
Nicholas, my first Russian friend, whom I met in London ten years ago and tried to learn Russian from, the boy who invited me to spend my first Christmas in Russia at his father the deacon’s in Lisitchansk, is now settled down and married, and has a family at Kishtim in the Urals, where his knowledge of English has found him a place in the office of an Anglo-Russian mining company.
Nicholas and I lived with another poor student, three in a room, in Moscow—that was after the Christmas in the country. Our most intimate friend was a certain Sasha, a gaunt but happy student of philology. He used to bring stories and read them aloud to our weekly student parties on Saturday evening. From him I heard first some of the stories of Kuprin and also Chekhof’s Dushetchka or “Little Soul,” which Mrs. Garnett has lately translated under the title of “The Darling”[6]—a famous story. Sasha has grown cold to Nicholas now, and I had lost sight of him, but the many references to my work in the Russian Press brought to his mind the idea that the Englishman he once knew was the same as the one now so well known. So he wrote to me, and I tried to see him this summer—married now and in good circumstances, working in the Russian Foreign Office.