"The Government? There, you'll never get a turn! It's necessary to stand three days. He's got to hurry for the train. See what a lot of people are coming in. He will be late, and have to wait a month in the open. The autumn rains will start. And cold. All his children will freeze. From Bobruisk another five hundred thousand are coming. Who are you, Mister? Are you someone from the Government or a Relief Committee?"
"Our little children are just freezing to death," says another fugitive.
And at this market where horses and people are crushed in one compact mass where from the heat of bodies and the smell of horses it is difficult to breathe, if any one is cheerful, it is only the purchaser.
The fugitives have not much to say for themselves, and that in a low voice—as if stunned. They sell their horses and stand as if in perplexity. They go away—horseless, peasants no longer, wordless. In appearance so calm and indifferent: as if nothing had happened. No expression of the grief, of the deadly melancholy which is in the soul.
V—STORY OF THE HOMELESS PEASANT WOMEN
A silent land. In the same street as the market-place, by the Petrograd Hotel, from dawn until late evening, the crowd is like stone. There's no getting through. The hotel is occupied by the Committee—of "Northern-Help." Here it is arranged for the fugitives where each has to go.
I attempt to pass through the crowd and get as far as the gateway. Farther is impossible. The stench is such that the head simply goes round. May God give strength to the Relief delegates working in this stench—to remain healthy!
"We've been waiting for days!"—complain the fugitives,—"and standing without a bite of food from morning."
"What's a day! You stand a day and at the end of it go away. To-morrow you come again and have had nothing to eat."