Part 8

“And the night after,” he answered, and added laughing, that he would rig the place up as a studio for me, and that I could do General Kameneff after I’d finished him. General Kameneff (who is no relation to Leo Kameneff) is the Commander-in-Chief, and was a very distinguished Tsarist officer. I hear that he strongly warned the War Ministry against advancing too far towards Warsaw, and foretold the débâcle that has since been fulfilled. But he was not listened to, perhaps because of his Tsarist tradition. Probably his opinion is more respected now. Trotsky asked me if I would like to do Tchicherin, and I explained that never before had I worked under such difficult conditions, and that although I had made efforts for Lenin and himself I did not feel like doing it again for anyone else. He was quite indignant and said: “What difficulty have you had in working here?” True it was a perfectly good room and excellent light, but Tchicherin would not move out of his Commissariat and that would mean new conditions to adapt oneself to, nor does anyone understand the difficulties of moving the finished work back to the Kremlin. Trotsky swept my excuses aside: “Of course you must do Tchicherin--it is almost a diplomatic obligation on his part to be done.”

It was a quarter to midnight when I prepared to stop work and looked desperately at the clock: “What about this order--how am I to be home

at midnight?” I asked. He said, “I will take you myself.” At about half after midnight we left. A man in uniform joined us and sat next to the driver. He had in his hands a very big leather holster. We started off by going in the opposite direction to the right one, and I had to try and describe the way to them. We turned back, and crossing the bridge we were stopped by five soldiers. The man with the holster had to show our papers by the light of the car lamp. It delayed us several minutes. I said to Trotsky: “Put your head out of the window and say who you are.” “_Taisez-vous_,” said Trotsky peremptorily. I sat rebuked and silent until we were able to pass on unrecognised. He explained afterwards that he did not want them to hear a woman’s voice in the car talking English. I was talking French as we always do together, and did not see that it mattered to anyone in this country whether there is a woman in a Government car or not--but I did not argue.

OCTOBER 21ST.

I did very little during the day, so as to be fresh for my night’s work, though I went to see my friend the plaster-moulder who is working for so many thousand roubles a day in my studio. He is making piece moulds of the busts, so that I can leave duplicates when I go. I asked Andrev why he had to be paid so much. Andrev explained that he is the only moulder in Moscow, so he can ask what he likes: “He says he will work for this and not for that,” and Andrev held a thousand rouble note in one hand and a hundred rouble note in the other. “But it is all the same really, only it is a different pattern,” and he laughed. Certainly money has no value here, and no meaning. At 8 o’clock I went back again to the War Commissariat in Trotsky’s car. On arrival I told him that I had got to get this work right to-night, and that he was not to be critical and look at it all the time and make me nervous.

He was surprised; said that he had no idea that he had that effect on me, that all he wanted was to help: “_Je veux travailler cela avec vous_.” His criticism, he said, was caused by intense interest, and that for nothing in the world would he be discouraging. He promised, however, to be good, and offer no opinion until asked. It was a better night for work; I felt calmer and it went pretty well.

The worst difficulties were surmounted. Trotsky stood for me in a good light and dictated to his stenographer. That was excellent. His face was animated and his attention occupied. I got all one side of his face done. Then came the question of the other side. He laughed, suggested another dictation, offered to stand in another position, and called back his stenographer. When we were alone again he came and stood close beside the clay and we talked while I went on working. We talked a little about myself.

He said I should remain in Russia awhile longer, and do some big work, something like my “Victory.” An emaciated and exhausted figure, but still fighting; that is the allegory of the Soviet.

I answered him that I could get no news of my children, and therefore must go back.

“I must return to my own world, to my own conventional people whose first thought is always for what the world will think. Russia with its absence of hypocrisy and pose, Russia with its big ideas, has spoilt me for my own world.”

“Ah! that is what you say now, but when you are away----” and he hesitated.

Then suddenly turning on me, with clenched teeth and fire in his eyes, he shook a threatening finger in my face: “If, when you get back to England, _vous nous calomniez_ as the rest have, I tell you that I will come to England _et je vous_----” He did not say what he would do, but there was murder in his face.

I smiled: “That is all right. Now I know how to get you to England.” Then (to fall in with his mood): “How can I go back and abuse the hospitality and the chivalrous treatment I have received?”

He said: “It is not abusing, but there are ways of criticising even without abuse. It is easy enough here to be blinded _par les saletés et les souffrances_ and to see no further than that, and people are apt to forget that there is no birth without suffering and horror, and Russia is in the throes of a great _accouchement_.”

He talks well, he is full of imagery and his voice is beautiful.

We paused for tea, and I talked to him of things I had heard about the schools. In reply he said he had heard no adverse reports of the co-education scheme for boys and girls. There might be an individual case of failure, though even of such a case he had not heard. He then compared the present system with that of boy colleges of his own day, and he said that his own boy of fourteen had nicer ideas about girls, and far less cynicism, than he had at the same age. The boy apparently confides in his mother, so he knows something about it.

To-night he sent me home alone in his car; he excused himself, saying it was the only time it was possible for him to walk. He kissed my dirty hand and said that he would always preserve a memory of “_une femme avec une auréole de cheveux et des mains très sales_.”

OCTOBER 22ND.

Finished!

I worked until half after midnight. I think it is a success. He said so; but it has been such a struggle.

About half way through the evening, the electric lights went out. A secretary lit four candles. On the telephone Trotsky learnt that the lights had gone out all over the town.

I asked him hopefully if it could possibly be the outburst of a counter-Revolution.

He laughed and asked if that was what I wanted.

I said that I thought it would break the monotony.

Until the lights went on I read the leading article on Bolshevism in _The Times_ of, I think, October 4th. He had several English papers on his desk and we read together with much amusement that he (Trotsky) had been wounded, and that General Budienny had been court-martialled. There were even descriptions of barricades in the streets of Moscow: someone must have mistaken the stacks of fuel that the tramcars are bringing in and unloading every day. When the lights went on I worked hectically until half after midnight, with the desperation of knowing it was the last sitting.

At midnight he was standing by the side of the work, rather tired and very still and patient, when suddenly I had the thought of asking him to undo his collar for me. He unbuttoned his tunic and the shirt underneath, and laid bare a splendid neck and chest. I worked like a fury for half an hour which was all too short. I tried to convey into my clay some of his energy and vitality. I worked with the desperation that always accompanies last moments. When I left he said to me: “_Eh bien! on ira ensemble au front?_” But something tells me that we shall never meet again. I feel that it is almost worth while to preserve the impression of our hours of individual work, collaboration and quietude, silently guarded by a sentry with fixed bayonet outside the door. To let in the light of day would be to spoil it.

There is a French saying: “_On n’est pas toujours né dans son pays_.” It equally follows that all are not born in their rightful sphere. Trotsky is one of these. At one time, in his youth, what was he? A Russian exile in a journalist’s office. Even then I am told he was witty, but with the wit of bitterness. Now he has come into his own and has unconsciously developed a new individuality. He has the manner and ease of a man born to a great position; he has become a statesman, a ruler, a leader. But if Trotsky were not Trotsky, and the world had never heard of him, one would still appreciate his very brilliant mind. The reason I have found him so much more difficult to do than I expected, is on account of his triple personality. He is the cultured, well-read man, he is the vituperative fiery politician, and he can be the mischievous laughing school-boy with a dimple in his cheek. All these three I have seen in turn, and have had to converge them into clay interpretation.

OCTOBER 23RD.

I went in the morning to fetch away the bust and take it to my room in the Kremlin. I went at 11, before Trotsky had got there. His motor was at my disposal and three men to convey the precious work away. These are the moments that take years off my life! It arrived, however, undamaged, which was little short of a triumph. When my plaster-moulder saw it he exclaimed with pleasure. Apparently it is very like, and everyone is pleased. As Trotsky is adored, I take it as a great compliment to my work that it is considered good enough.

The relief of having accomplished him as well as Lenin is indescribable. I wake up in the night and wonder if it is true or a dream. Now I am completely happy. I have achieved my purpose. I have proved myself to these people, and they in return have proved their belief in me by their trouble and courteousness. I am no longer harassed by anxieties and fears. Those who discouraged me in the early days treat me now with respect, consideration and even admiration. I am happy, I am happy! I sing when I wake in the morning, I sing when I wash in cold water, I come down to my breakfast of black bread with a lighter step!

I breakfast every morning with Litvinoff. By coming down at 11 the others have finished, so we can talk. If Rothstein is present the conversation becomes Russian. If Vanderlip is there he talks all the time about America (he usually leaves the room with boredom if conversation is on any other subject). It is the fashion in Europe to vilify Litvinoff and to regard him as a terribly dangerous man. I suppose that he is an astute diplomatist. Whatever he is, he is better than he pretends, and though he gets no credit for it, he has done a good deal for the British prisoners here. He has unfortunately an abrupt manner, and a way of refusing to do things by pretending that they are no concern of his, but straightway he will go off and do a kindness to the very people who are damning him for having refused. To me he is charming, frank, outspoken, and always ready to help.

OCTOBER 24TH.

We have all been very much saddened by the death from typhus of John Reed, the American Communist. Everyone liked him and his wife, Louise Bryant, the War Correspondent. She is quite young and had only recently joined him. He had been here two years, and Mrs. Reed, unable to obtain a passport, finally came in through Murmansk. Everything possible was done for him, but of course there are no medicaments here: the hospitals are cruelly short of necessities. He should not have died, but he was one of those young, strong men, impatient of illness, and in the early stages he would not take care of himself.

I attended his funeral. It is the first funeral without a religious service that I have ever seen. It did not seem to strike anyone else as peculiar, but it was to me. His coffin stood for some days in the Trades’ Union Hall, the walls of which are covered with huge revolutionary cartoons in marvellously bright decorative colouring. We all assembled in that hall. The coffin stood on a daïs and was covered with flowers. As a bit of staging it was very effective, but I saw, when they were being carried out, that most of the wreaths were made of tin flowers painted. I suppose they do service for each Revolutionary burial.

There was a great crowd, but people talked very low. I noticed a Christ-like man with long, fair curly hair, and a fair beard and clear blue eyes; he was quite young. I asked who he was. No one seemed to know. “An artist of sorts,” someone suggested. Not all the people with wonderful heads are wonderful people. Mr. Rothstein and I followed the procession to the grave, accompanied by a band playing a Funeral March that I had never heard before. Whenever that Funeral March struck up (and it had a tedious refrain), everyone uncovered; it seemed to be the only thing they uncovered for. We passed across the Place de la Révolution, and through the sacred gate to the Red Square. He was buried under the Kremlin wall next to all the Revolutionaries his Comrades. As a background to his grave was a large Red banner nailed upon the wall with the letters in gold: “The leaders die, but the cause lives on.”

When I was first told that this was the burying ground of the Revolutionaries I looked in vain for graves, and I saw only a quarter of a mile or so of green grassy bank. There was not a memorial, a headstone or a sign, not even an individual mound. The Communist ideal seemed to have been realised at last: the Equality, unattainable in life, the Equality for which Christ died, had been realisable only in death.

A large crowd assembled for John Reed’s burial and the occasion was one for speeches. Bucharin and Madame Kolontai both spoke. There were speeches in English, French, German and Russian. It took a very long time, and a mixture of rain and snow was falling. Although the poor widow fainted, her friends did not take her away. It was extremely painful to see this white-faced, unconscious woman lying back on the supporting arm of a Foreign Office official, more interested in the speeches than in the human agony.

The faces of the crowd around betrayed neither sympathy nor interest, they looked on unmoved. I could not get to her, as I was outside the ring of soldiers who stood guard nearly shoulder to shoulder. I marvel continuously at the blank faces of the Russian people. In France or Italy one knows that in moments of sorrow the people are deeply moved, their arms go round one, and their sympathy is overwhelming. They cry with our sorrows, they laugh with our joys. But Russia seems numb. I wonder if it has always been so or whether the people have lived through years of such horror that they have become insensible to pain.

Happily no salute was fired. The last time the machine guns rattled at a burial I heard them in my studio, which is just the other side of the wall. On that occasion the old porter who takes care of me at the Kremlin told me that his wife nearly died of heart failure--she thought the “Whites” had come. Probably it affects other jumpy people in the same way.

Here the terror of the Whites is as great as is, on the other side, the terror of the Reds! The poor people do not want any more fighting. I think they are quite indifferent as to who rules them, they want only Peace.

When I got back I found Maxim Litvinoff, who also had been at the funeral and had looked for me in the crowd in vain. He says that he has arranged with Tchicherin that I am to begin him to-morrow. I have not asked to do him, but if it is all arranged for me I am only too delighted. But I do not look forward to working at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. It is the Hotel Metropole, in the Place de la Révolution, and although it will not be necessary to have a pass, and there will be none of the sentry difficulties as with Lenin and Trotsky, the drain-smells are such that one climbs the stairs two at a time holding one’s breath! There are bits of the Kremlin that are enough to kill the healthiest person, but the Metropole baffles all description. Inside the offices it is all right, but the double windows everywhere are hermetically sealed for the winter, and I wonder that people do not die like flies. Litvinoff tells me that a new building is almost ready and that the next time I come to Moscow there will be a beautiful Commissariat. It is curious that in Moscow, which was one of the richest cities in the world and contained more rich merchants than almost any other, something more was not done for sanitation. Last year owing to lack of fuel most of the pipes in the town burst. No wonder there was an epidemic of typhus. This year things are better organised, and if there is Peace on the two fronts, conditions may be enormously improved.

This evening Comrade Alexandre took me to a play. He gave me my choice, and I decided that “La Fille de Madame Angot,” being an Operetta, would be more amusing that “Twelfth Night” in Russian. It was at the Théâtre des Arts, where Tchekov’s plays used to be produced. Tchekov is no longer acted; he wrote for a class that is temporarily extinct; the workers and peasants would not understand it. Afterwards, coming home in the motor, I noticed a tremendous glare in the sky, it obviously meant a fire, and I insisted on going to look for it. If the fire, when found, was disappointing, at least the search for it was interesting, and revealed to me the unsuspected size of Moscow. We drove through miles of deserted streets, where we met only a few soldiers wearily trudging through the mud. We shouted to them: “Tovarischi, where is the fire?” There is something very pleasant in hailing a complete stranger as a Comrade--one feels at once a link of friendship. The Tovarischi, however, only waved vaguely onwards, which is the only instruction one ever gets in Moscow when one asks the way. On we bumped and jolted and skidded. There was an icy wind blowing and we had no rug. We seemed to cross two rivers, or they may have been river branches. Everything looked very beautiful in the twilight. There was no parapet to the river edge, only some tortuous tree-stems.

Finally we arrived upon the scene to find that some building in a big clearing had burnt to the foundations, and was still burning brightly. Having got out of the car and waded through the mud, I could not get anywhere near, and abandoned the quest. A party of men returning from the fire, surprised at our having a motor, asked Alexandre for his identification papers. Happily he is a member of the Communist party. On the way home he was anxious lest the bad road should cause some damage to the car. If it broke down, he explained cheerfully, there was no other car to be had in these parts, and no telephone to call one up, and it was too far to walk home. It was snowing and we got back at 1 a.m. after losing the way many times.

In the hall I was met by Litvinoff, who, while I was having supper, told me that he had had a message from Trotsky who asked if I would be ready to go off to the front on the morrow at 4 p.m. I had to make up my mind. We discussed the plan in all its aspects. Litvinoff was splendid, he advised me neither way, he merely said he would make all arrangements if I decided to go. I knew that going would involve cold and discomfort and I guessed that I should not really see much of the front, and as the only woman I should be most conspicuous. Yet--what a temptation. Finally about 3 a.m. for various reasons I decided to preserve Trotsky as a memory. Then for the first time Litvinoff said: “I am so glad.”

OCTOBER 25TH.

Litvinoff was most kind and helped me to move my clay and stand from the Kremlin to the Foreign Office. I would have liked a snapshot of our procession--the moulder carrying the clay block, Litvinoff, in his fur-lined coat and sealskin cap armed with the modelling stand, and I following with the bucket of clay and cloths.

On arrival at the Foreign Office we were greeted by the Chinese General in uniform and all his staff. Litvinoff, who is likely to be the Soviet representative in China, was rather taken aback by this _rencontre_ but the Chinese were enormously amused.

Later, at 9 p.m. I returned with Litvinoff to Tchicherin’s office to begin work. While Litvinoff went inside I waited in the secretary’s room, and while I was waiting a man hurried through the office. He was a little man in brown trousers and a coat which did not match. With small steps he shuffled hastily along. It might have been a night watchman; it was Tchicherin.

Still I waited, and the length of my wait began to annoy me, and then I began to feel that

something was wrong. Presently Litvinoff called me, but I got no further than the doorway.

There Tchicherin confronted me, and in hurried and confused tones said: “To-night it is impossible, quite, quite impossible,” and disappeared. He had not even allowed me to cross his threshold.

Litvinoff and I looked at each other and walked out. We went upstairs to Litvinoff’s office. He was obviously upset and at a perfect loss to explain or excuse. I sat and talked until the car arrived to take me home, and from what Litvinoff said and from what I had seen in that flash, I have learned something of the personality of Tchicherin.

He is an abnormal man, living month after month in that Foreign Office with closed windows and never going out. He insists on having a bedroom there, as he says he has not time to go home to sleep. He works all night, and if a telegram comes in the day he has to be awakened. His nights are days and his days are not entirely nights. He has no idea of time and does not realise that other people live differently. He will ring up a Comrade on the telephone at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning for the most trivial information. He does all his own work, and will not ring for a secretary or messenger, but runs himself with papers to other departments. He lives on his nerves and the slightest thing throws him off his pivot.

I had been told he was an angel and a saint. What I found was a fluttering and agitated bird. The joke is that he is looked upon as the “gentleman” of the party. He is by origin well-born and propertied. His property he gave away to the people. To-day was a particularly unfortunate one for me. It happened to be the first day for months that Tchicherin had gone out. He went to the dentist. Someone watching him from an office window described to me the phenomenon of Tchicherin in the street. He did not go in a car, but on foot. He stood at the corner of the kerb, looked at the street hesitatingly, much as one might look into a river on a cold day before plunging in. When he did finally decide to get across, he got half way and then ran back. What with the traffic, the fresh air, and the dentist, it must have been a thoroughly unnerving day for him, and no wonder he received me so ill!

OCTOBER 26TH.

Tchicherin sent me a message through Litvinoff, inviting me to start at 4 o’clock in the morning, as that is his quietest time, but it is unfortunately my quietest time too.

OCTOBER 29TH.