CHAPTER XVI
SYMPATHY
I
Snow began covering Siberia east of Baikal. It seemed as though winter arrived in a night. Still there were many mornings when the high, cold sunshine glinted in a trillion jewels across thin snows of early November and the nipping air was like wine, piercing a world suddenly frozen hard as wood. It was such a morning when the great white train finally moved in off the eastern steppes and began that all-day crawl around the southern and western shores of Baikal, up toward Irkutsk. Sunshine, sunshine! Cobalt blue and sunshine! If Nathan remembered Japan as a land of laughter, he remembered Siberia as a land of Sunlight Glorious. The night in black fog was only a dream, a nightmare, which had slipped in between some flaming sunset and a singing sunrise. And the sunshine glinted now on the far-rolling whitecaps of Baikal as though the water reached up and scooped nets of it from the air and rolled it over into liquid sacks of shimmering green until that imprisoned sunshine burst and made evanescent foam and swashing water laughter, icy cold.
The train was headed for far Western Siberia, in toward the Ural Mountains—Ufa, Samara and the Volga—where a thin line of valiant, ragged Czechs were stemming the Bolshevik tide eastward. Yet it dropped hospital and medical supplies and occasionally a surgeon, as it went along. It would stay a week in Irkutsk. The only patients it contained to date were unfortunates who had been picked up en route, like Nathan, pro-Ally soldat who had escaped from Bolshevik camps or with eyes blinded and tongues pulled out had been turned loose in great Siberia to perish in agony for daring to question the political acumen and sociological sagacity of an ex-anarchist and a Bronx dish-washer.
Crowds gathered quickly at stations where the train stopped,—stolid, smoothly boarded, wooden stations resembling American freight houses in towns of ten thousand inhabitants, stations with queer, Tartar filigree and scroll work decorating the side gables, and all painted a militant mustard yellow. Madelaine beheld what Nathan had been familiar with for over a year. Flat-faced, gray-whiskered peasants in lambskin hats, green blouses, knee-length boots, who might have stepped from the pages of Tolstoi; tall, burly, chinless young men with long sandy mustaches, childlike blue eyes, massive hands, in dark green military caps, ragged civilian coats, calves protected from winter cold by spirals of coarse juting; big-bellied, deep-chested officials who seemed all the same age—around fifty years—in drum-major hats of black lambskin dented at rakish angles, dressed in great overcoats that forever required brushing, and possessing hands that always needed warming; youths with big legs and small ears, wearing cadet caps, blouses buttoned at the left shoulder, belts with big front buckles resembling closed nickel cigarette cases, long trousers like cotton overalls that bagged at the knees and flopped about each ankle like a sailor’s; women with dough-like faces, no breasts, prominent abdomens and raw hands, who wore mannish coats and swathed their heads in brilliant shawls until their features could hardly be discerned; Khirgese desert folk in suits made from undressed skins; shivering Chinese in black cambric, old felt hats and pigtails who tried to eke out a living selling corky cabbages piled in baskets swung at opposite ends of a five-foot pole; ponderous Mongolian Tartars in mountainous ulsters of goatskin and no hats, with their cues wound atop their heads and most of them forever accompanied by a long cattle whip; little children in over-size hats and caps, braving the killing wind in cotton clothing,—strange indeed was the aggregation which gathered miraculously when news of the great “Americanski” train permeated each railroad settlement. And all around and about were dogs, hundreds of dogs—half-starved, ravenous, snapping, snarling, wolfish, with wild, greenish eyes—who watched for scraps of garbage and fought over them, the stronger driving off the weaker and leaving them animated creatures of mere skin and bone, to perish of slow starvation.
They reached Irkutsk in the night. Next morning Nathan went off to find the Consul and Hartshorn and report his abortive attempt to get through to Harbin. He was absent all day. It began to snow about four o’clock. Hartshorn entered the office car with a scowl.
“They’re holding a dance over-town to-night because of the arrival of all the Red Cross girls,” he announced; “a last bust before they go in-country.”
“Well,” demanded Nathan, “what of it?”
“I’d like to go and I can’t. Somebody’s got to look after these cars and be here in case the Czechs want anything.”
About six o’clock Madelaine accidentally encountered Nathan up the platform of the great marble station.