At Vardö I left the boat as I had discovered that boats went to and fro to Russia therefrom. An important place this Vardö, and a sharp look-out on Germans should always be kept here. If a submarine campaign against the shipping of Archangel broke out, there would probably be some connivance on the part of Germans or neutrals resident hereabout, and possible bases on this desolate coast.
A most forlorn region subject to terrific gales, cold and snowy. It has a great number of grey wooden docks with grey fishing-boats; almost all the houses are of wood, and are of the same grey complexion as boats and quays, they are low and squat, and the dirty streets are wide. Innumerable gulls are diving and dipping and fluttering—and shrieking in chorus.
There are two hotels. One is called appropriately “The North Pole,” the other is “Vinnans Hotel.” I stayed at the latter, and this, astonishing to relate, is a first-class hotel with electric light and a telephone in every room, though there is no one in the town with whom you can communicate. There is an electric arrangement on the wall for lighting your cigarette—you press a button and a disc becomes red-hot, and at that you light up. I suppose some Christiania contractor had put this up, faithful to the specification quoted in his tender. My windows had scarlet blinds, and all night long the midnight sun poured crimson light on my white bed, the huge wind howled and bellowed, and innumerable gulls cried up and down, now this side, now that.
In the bleak and lonely cemetery are Russian graves with naïve carvings of the Virgin and Child on the orthodox wooden crosses. Many a Russian sailor and fisherman has perished on this side of his fatherland.
There are amusements in the town, two cinema shows packed every night, a shooting saloon, an Aunt Sallie shy called “Amerikanske Sport.” I hit down one ugly face and received as a reward a postcard picture of a pretty Norwegian girl about to give a kiss to her beau; there are band-of-hope meetings with the most excruciating music, and you see advertised—raffles.
One day fifteen negroes arrived on a boat from Russia. They were the crew of the American ship R—— which had brought ammunition to Archangel, but was in such a bad condition that the negroes refused to take it back, got their money and cleared off. At Vardö one of them had quarrelled with the rest and was now said to be mad. No one would take him in, all the girls being frightened, and the children aiming stones at him. He was accommodated in the gaol.
At Vardö there is a most able Russian Consul who is not only most useful to his own Government, but also to ours, affording him all the help he can. And a Russian knows more of this neighbourhood and its phenomena than an Englishman brought from Christiania or London. Through him I learned that a boat would soon be sailing for Alexandrovsk, the harbour of Ekaterina, and after a five-days’ stay at Vardö I got away.
Over the sea once more! In twelve hours I was at the Russian Monastery of Petschenga, and next day in a big snowstorm I came to the new harbour.
II
THE DARK HAVEN
From the end of November to the middle of January the sun does not rise in Russia’s new haven. All would be dark even at mid-day were it not for the snow. The stars never set. The lights in the little wooden dwellings are never put out. Great gales blow, rolling up mountainous waves on the Arctic. Or Polar mists swallow up everything. Snowstorms go on indefinitely and the frost may be forty degrees, fifty degrees. Here is no town, no civilisation. Alexandrovsk has no pavement, no high street, no cinema theatre, no hotel, not even a tavern. Its population is hard, gloomy, northern. No one has any intelligence of the great world far away to the south—the gaze is toward the North Pole.