An event occurred which overwhelmed me with joy. My husband was quite unexpectedly sent to Italy to be present at the Grandes Manœuvres at Milan. What a splendid surprise it was! We packed up and started on our journey in the first days of June. As the manœuvres begin only in July, we shall have plenty of time to wander about sight-seeing. First we are going to the sea-side, and have decided upon proceeding straight on to Boulogne-sur-mer. That will be a treat indeed!
The country between St. Petersburg and the Prussian frontier is very uninteresting, nothing but flat corn-fields, woods and wide expanses of pasture-land stretching on both sides of the railway.
When we arrived at the frontier some Prussian officials rushed into our compartment, and having taken possession of our passports, they declared, to our profound stupefaction, that we had to go out and began to fling our hand-bags out of the window. We had scarcely time to jump out when the train began to move, carrying away our heavy baggage which had been more lucky than we were, and we were left to our own devices. It appeared that our passports had not been signed by the German Consul in Moscow, and although it was stated in my husband’s passport that he was going to Italy on a special mission, these horrid Germans tumbled us out of the train, finding sufficient ground for detaining us until permission be received by wire from their Consul in Moscow to let us proceed further. We stood for some time on the platform a picture of forlorn discomfort, looking at each other helplessly, and trying to collect our scattered wits. How perfectly dreadful it was! Our position can be better imagined than described. We had positively no notion where to go and what to do with ourselves. The day was closing rapidly, it would soon be night. What were we to do? Sleep in the open air perhaps, for except the station, there was not a house within sight, and to return to our frontier was impossible, there being no other train that night. Clutching our bags we mournfully entered a vast “Warte-Saal” where a party of bearded Teutons were loading themselves with beer out of huge pint-mugs, and were all talking at once amid clouds of tobacco smoke. The atmosphere making me feel faint and dizzy, we hastened back to the platform in search of the station-master to beg him to give us somewhere to lay our heads. He came up to us, a fiercely moustached man, awfully stiff and puffed up, and asked us what we wanted. We begged him, expressing ourselves somewhat lamely in German, to give us shelter for the night. He led us to his quarters and ushered us into a little slip of a room, low-roofed and white-washed, furnished with two huge feather-beds with eider-down quilts, where we felt ourselves as prisoners put under arrest. A bad night is soon passed after all! The first thing I did was to remove, with all haste, the obnoxious coverlet and lie down, but I could not sleep for the stifling air in the room; I tossed and turned in bed till morning.
We started back to Alexandrovo with the first train without taking any breakfast, not wishing to have anything to do with these detestable Prussians. On arriving at the station, whilst taking coffee, we received the longed-for telegram, and as we had to wait till evening for the North Express, we decided to drive to Tzekhotzinsk, a small Polish watering place, which is only a few miles distant from Alexandrovo. The journey was extremely trying on account of the excessive heat, and the flies which were pertinacious. We proceeded along a sandy road under a broiling sun. At last we arrived. The Casino, a red-brick house hidden among the trees, suggested repose and comfort. After having appeased our hunger and quenched our thirst in the restaurant, we took a room and locked ourselves up to have a good rest. After a refreshing nap, Sergy went to explore the place. He returned after his stroll rather dissatisfied with Tzekhotzinsk, and we decided to return to Alexandrovo at once. We were surely taken here for a pair of unlawful conjugators of the verb “to love,” for we merely came to perch like a bird for a couple of hours, then to fly away.
When the North Express drew up at Alexandrovo we went to have a try for a carriage to ourselves and had to give a good tip to the conductor who ushered us into an empty compartment, assuring us that we should have it to ourselves as far as Berlin; but at the first stopping another guard came to announce that we had been placed here by mistake, this car being bound for another direction. He proposed for us a compartment in the neighbouring carriage; but if he imagined that he was going to be as liberally recompensed as his cheat of a companion, he was very much mistaken, for he did not receive even one kreutzer. We got thoroughly punished for it, however, for when the train was going to start and we had just composed ourselves for deep slumber, a lady and gentleman were ushered into our compartment, an elderly Englishman on the wrong side of fifty, particularly nasty-looking, and his spouse, a young person of about nineteen, very nice to look at. Her husband called her “Baby,” and bestowed caresses upon her all the way; but she didn’t seem to care a cent about him and responded very phlegmatically to his advances. Well, to have married such an individual she must have had great courage, with not so much as a pair of tongs would I have touched him, and couldn’t have married him if he was the only man in the whole world.
CHAPTER XXI
BOULOGNE-SUR-MER
Here we are at Boulogne, comfortably settled at the Hôtel du Pavilion Impérial. From the window I can see the broad Atlantic and the sea-shore which is so extensive that in 1855 Napoleon III. made the review of an army of 40,000 men on it. The tides are very strong at Boulogne, the sea is very high in the afternoon, the water rising rapidly with a great splashing of waves, and towards evening it is quite low again. Bathing is allowed only after the arrival of the life-boats at their station. In bad weather, when the signals of stormy weather are hung out, bathing is forbidden. We spent most of our time out of doors, taking long walks by the sea-shore or wandering up and down the winding, sleepy, streets of old “Haute-Ville,” and climbing up the ramparts with their pleasant outlook on fields and ocean.
One day we visited the fish-market. The fisherwomen with their short skirts and large white flapping caps, holding their arms akimbo, reminded me of the traditional “Madame Angot.” We crossed over in a canoe to a small beach where the fishermen anchor their boats at spring-tide. We returned to Boulogne with a grey-haired boatman wearing a silver ear-ring in one ear. He was a desperate Royalist, as it appears, and fumed all the time during our crossing against the French Republic, thanks to which, to his belief, morals had visibly decayed at Boulogne. He said that we had no idea of the extent of corruption in this unhappy country, and how disloyal the population was to their household traditions which they had cherished for centuries. Wanting to prove to us that he had remained a good Christian, he began to search in the pockets of his jersey for a small silver cross, forgetting to row in the meanwhile; and just at that moment whilst I was going hot and cold all over, a steamer came towards us full speed and we narrowly escaped being upset.
On clear days the coasts of England are discernable; it gave us the desire to cross the Channel. We never remained long in one place, possessed with an insatiable appetite for novelty, and always wanted to be somewhere where we were not; and now also we thought of remaining here three weeks, but at the end of three days we decided to turn our backs on Boulogne. I suggested that we should leave for London without delay, with the mail-boat which started for Folkestone in the morning. All the boats leave Boulogne when the tide is at its highest and not at set hours. We packed up our things at once and asked for our hotel bill, which proved to be a very long-tailed comet, quite three feet in length. It took us some time to settle it, as we were short of change, having only Russian money which was not accepted at the hotel, and as it was Sunday all the exchange offices were shut. Our situation was very embarrassing. At length the hotel manager took pity on us and accepted our Russian coins.