The winter is splendid at Khabarovsk; the sky always clear of clouds and no wind whatever, and for that reason one does not feel the cold so much, though the thermometer shows over twenty degrees of frost every day. The snow falls only once, in the beginning of winter, and keeps white until spring. But the weather has no effect whatever upon me, and very often when the sky is of azure blue, black thoughts overwhelm me; and vice versa. The air in the apartments is excessively dry. I am often awakened at night by the creaking of the furniture. We have to suspend wet blankets in our bedroom as it is impossible to sleep otherwise.
We have learned by a newspaper-telegram from St. Petersburg that an earthquake, preceded by a formidable underground noise, had shaken Khabarovsk. It is very strange that nobody had felt it here. It comes out that it is from a writing in a local paper, describing an earthquake at the distance of 800 miles from Khabarovsk, but the correspondent of St. Petersburg had omitted the 800 miles, and it is thus that the false report spread out.
Every Sunday we give a grand dinner with a military band playing during the meal. Our head-gardener is a veritable artist in the arrangement of the dinner-table. There were always pretty bunches of flowers before each plate. At the sound of a drum the gentlemen offered their arms to their respective ladies and marched to the dining-room. One Sunday my cavalier was a Chinese General, who had just arrived from Pekin. He watched the way his neighbours were eating but made, nevertheless, fearful blunders, and did everything wrong with his knife and fork. The French proverb that “Nul n’est prophete dans son pays,” has no hold over that important personage of the Celestial Empire, who is reckoned as an oracle in Pekin. He has learnt thoroughly the mystic sciences from Indian fakirs. When drinking my health he congratulated me, through his interpreter, at the forthcoming birth of a son. He said he could read it in my eyes. Foolish man! The mandarin gave me his visiting-card printed on a piece of red paper on which was stated, in Chinese hieroglyphics, that he was the bravest man in the army, and his wife, the most important lady in the land. He was not very modest, the maggot.
Another day we had to dinner Mr. De Windt, an English writer, who came for a few days to Khabarovsk, after having visited the Island of Saghalien. In remembrance of our short acquaintance, he sent me his last work from London, a very interesting novel.
A great Charity Bazaar was planned for Christmas. The biggest prizes were to be a horse, a cow, a baby-bear, twelve suckling pigs and a couple of rabbits. We made a great deal of money at the bazaar. I was doing splendidly, and in about an hour or two there were no more tickets in my wheel.
On the third day of the Christmas week, the Goldes organised dogs’ races on the ice. Five pairs of dogs dragged the sledges. The fancy took me to experience that mode of polar locomotion. I established myself sideways on the shaft with my legs projecting over the sledge, and was afraid all the time of the dogs who ran behind me biting at my heels; they really looked as if they contemplated making their lunch off my legs.
I have been starved of music for long, and was enchanted when Kostia Doumtcheff, a boy violinist, gave a concert at Khabarovsk. He is only thirteen years old and has already toured the world as a “Wunderkind.” His execution is quite extraordinary for so young a performer.
With the Chinese every month begins with the new moon. This year the 14th January was their New Year’s day. The Chinese quarter of the town was brilliantly illuminated, and a procession of monsters made of paste-board, marched through the streets. An enormous dragon made of paper, a nightmare beast, was carried by Chinamen hidden from view, giving the complete illusion that it was creeping along. The monster is so long that a score of men is required to carry it. Behind the dragon came Chinamen oddly arrayed, carrying garlands of coloured paper-flowers and chains of fantastical form hanging on long poles, bearing huge banners with different religious devices. All this was accompanied by a loud flourish of trumpets, and the gongs made all the time an infernal noise.
Towards the middle of April, when the weather became milder, a military band played three times a week in the square. I listened to it lying back on a rocking-chair on the veranda, feeling quite safe from observation.
We have a veritable menagerie in our garden. General Kopanski sent me a pair of beautiful white swans from Nikolskoe; Tifountai presented me with a deer; and a Golde brought me two sables, very wicked little animals, who watched for every opportunity to snap at the legs of the passers-by through the bars of the cage.