Part 26

“_Dobra den, Tavarish!_ How goes it, old face-fungus? _Kraseeva_, eh? Fine and dandy, what? Well, _dos vidanya_, you darned old hypocrite, and don’t you come poking your nose into my car. _Niet! No pannamayo?_”

He fondled the head Bolshevik’s beard, patted him playfully on both cheeks, gave him a mighty dig in the ribs which took his breath away.

“That’s how I treat ’em,” he told Bertram. “A touch of good humour works wonders with them. Look at those two young murderers! Laughing like hell! It’s the first time they’ve laughed since I came this way before.”

The two young soldiers regarded him with eyes of wonder and admiration, between guffaws of laughter. When he stepped down on to the platform, a group of Russian porters and peasants gathered round him, listening to his oration in American and Russian, gazing at his mighty girth with astounded smiles. He towered above them, and occasionally pushed at a man’s chest, and pummelled a Russian boy with ogre-like playfulness.

Six hours at Sebesh.

“Come and see the flight from the Famine,” said Cherry. “It’ll take away your appetite for my bully beef. Cheap for me!”

He strode down the rails for five hundred yards and halted before a long stationary train without an engine. It was divided into a number of box-like cattletrucks, from which, as they drew near, came a pestilential stench through half-opened doors. In the dirty straw of each of the trucks squatted a group of human beings, men, women, and children. They were hunting vermin in their rags. Some of them lay curled up in the straw, sleeping, or dying. Perhaps dying, thought Bertram, for even those who were sitting up had a grey, haggard, deathly look, as they stared out at him with deep-sunk eyes, in which there was no interest, no life, no spirit.

“Letts,” said Cherry, “on their way home from the famine districts. They’ve been dying all the way. Hunger, weakness, typhus. Look at that girl. Typhus, beyond a doubt.”

The girl was lying on the grass by the side of the train. Her head turned from side to side. Her face was flushed and puffed.

“It’s the vermin that gets ’em,” said Cherry. “They’re eaten up with it.”

A tall, bearded peasant, clothed in rags tied about him with bits of string, came up to Bertram and spoke to him in English, with an American accent.

“Say, mister, can you change a hundred thousand roubles into German marks?”

Bertram laughed, and was astounded.

“A hundred thousand roubles! I’m not a millionaire.”

“No need to be,” said Cherry. “It’s worth about six shillings in English money.”

He took some dirty bits of paper from the bearded peasant, and gave him some German notes.

“There you are, Nunky. How do you come to speak the American lingo?”

“I worked in Detroit,” said the man. “Before the world went wrong.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Ufa.”

He turned and pointed eastward.

“Three thousand miles.”

“How long on the road, brother?”

“Five months. I am nearly at the journey’s end. Across the frontier.”

“How is it in Ufa?”

The man looked at Cherry with tragic eyes. He spoke in simple, Biblical words.

“In Ufa there is great death. The people have no food. The mothers are glad when their children die, because it is sad to hear their weeping. I am one who escaped in time. God has forsaken Russia.”

“I guess that’s a sure thing,” said Cherry.

Back in the train to Moscow the American boys were singing negro choruses in harmony, and queer rag-time songs from the Winter Garden, New York. Cherry went into their carriage, and led new choruses, and college yells, with his enormous hands. Spasmodically, hour after hour, until late at night, these songs broke out, while Bertram lay alone on the wooden plank above Cherry’s bunk, with his thoughts travelling faster than that slow-going train which every hour or so panted like an exhausted monster, reduced speed to a crawl, made one or two ineffective jerks and tugs, and then came to a dead halt. There was no more fuel. The provodnik and his comrades descended and searched around for logs of wood. Cherry stimulated their energy by shouts and curses, and roars of laughter, and back-thumpings, and general noises of encouragement to make them “get a move on.” One hour, two hours, three hours—once fourteen hours—passed before the train lurched forward again with an immense rattle of wheels and wood.

Bertram stared out of the window for hundreds of versts, at the flat, dreary, monotonous panorama of Russia. It seemed lifeless and abandoned, except at wayside stations where groups of peasants stood about the wooden sheds, staring at the train as though it were a miraculous advent. Away from these stations there was but little sign of human life. Now and then Bertram saw a _droschke_ driving along a road which led to some distant village of wooden houses with a white-washed church rising above them. A woman gathering faggots with one hand while she carried a baby in her shawl, raised her head and looked at Bertram as the train halted near her bundle of sticks. It seemed to him that she had some message for him in her eyes. She drew her shawl on one side, and showed her child, a little wizened thing, monkey-like.

At another place a peasant was kneeling before a wayside _ikon_. He knelt with his head bent and his beard on his chest, and crossed himself again and again.

An immense melancholy came out of this Russian landscape, and darkened Bertram’s spirit. In imagination, without knowledge, by instinct only, he was stirred by the sense of travelling through a country of despair and immeasurable misery. The silence of the countryside was intense and brooding. No sound of laughter, of human gossip, even of human toil, came from its woodlands or open fields. There was no clink of hammer on anvil, no rhythm of an axe at work, no shout of ploughman to his team. The peasants in the wayside stations seemed to have no work to do, no object in life, except to stand and stare with gloomy eyes. “God has forsaken Russia,” said the man from Ufa. The vital energy of life itself seemed to have burned low in these people.

Away back in the train an American chorus rang out.

“Just hear that whistle blow! I want you all to know That train is taking my sweet man away From me to-day! Don’t know the reason why, I must just sit and cry—”

Nigger melodies, Russian forests, the chug-chug of the train, Cherry’s boisterous voice, the sad eyes of a peasant woman with a sick child, a line of bugs crawling up the carriage wall, the smell of a Latvian cheese, the melancholy of life, the isolation of the human soul, the death of Kenneth Murless, the mystery of Joyce, the typhus-stricken girl lying by the railway line, the endless monotone of this Russian landscape, the puzzle of his own life, made up the incoherence of Bertram’s thoughts on the way to Moscow.

Kenneth’s death would make no difference, except to Joyce. No difference to Bertram. He had left Joyce forever. She had finished with him, and he with her. Perhaps she would go back to Holme Ottery for a time, until the American took possession. What did it matter where she went? He must cut her out of his mind. It was only a year’s habit, and weak sentiment, that made him think of her so much, with a dull ache of pain. . . . How long to Moscow, on this abominable journey? Damn those bugs!

XLIX

Moscow—and old Christy! Bertram saw him on the platform amidst a group of Red soldiers, bearded porters, and _droschke_ drivers in fur caps and long blue coats. He was wearing the same old grey suit in which Bertram had last seen him in London, with the addition of a sheepskin waistcoat. His lean, ugly face was twisted into a humorous smile as he saw Bertram.

“Welcome to our city!”

“God in Heaven!” said Bertram. “This is a grand meeting.”

For some reason, inexplicable to himself, the sight of Christy was like finding a solid raft after shipwreck.

“Follow me, and don’t rub shoulders with your fellow men,” said Christy.

He led the way from the platform into the station hall. It was a great place with white-washed walls and filled with such a stench of human filth that Bertram felt like vomiting. The great floor space was entirely covered with the heaped-up bodies of men, women, and children. They lay piled up on sacks and bags, and across each other’s legs and arms, in a tangled mass of sheepskins, rags, and mangy fur, all brown with mud and dirt as though they had been dipped in the slime of Flanders, as Bertram had known it in war-time winters. It was nightfall, and they were settling down to sleep, restlessly, so that there was a heaving of bodies, and a tossing of arms. Some slept with stertorous breathing. Children wailed. Girls who were almost women lay in the arms of bearded men. One man lay dead among the living, as Bertram saw at a glance, not unfamiliar with death. His head was thrown back on a bit of sacking, showing a thin, turkey-like neck with loose wrinkled skin. His eyes were wide open and glazed.

“What’s all this?” asked Bertram.

“Refugees from famine,” said Christy. “The end of the journey. To-morrow they go into camp. Apart from typhus, they’re all right now.”

Bertram breathed deeply of fresh air when they emerged from the station.

“Can I get into a hotel?” he asked presently.

“Can you do what?”

Christy laughed quietly at the question.

“This is Bolshevik Russia! The Carlton doesn’t function at the moment. There are no hotels. The _Narcomindjel_ provides you with a billet, if they like the look of you.”

“Who may they be?”

“The Soviet Foreign Office. East side Jews from New York deal with us, mostly. Not bad fellows, if you’re civil.”

“Supposing they don’t like the look of me?”

Christy smiled grimly.

“You’ll get another kind of billet. With bars to the windows.”

“Any chance of that?”

“Not now. Bolshevism is busted. They want help from the outside world. That’s why they’ve let me stay and let you come. Things are changing pretty rapidly. I’ll tell you all about it presently. First the Foreign Office, and Mr. Weinstein.”

He hailed a _droschke_, spoke a few words of Russian—amazing fellow!—and Bertram found himself driving through Moscow at night, with Christy by his side. Moscow—or some fantastic city of a dream after a goblet of absinthe? The moon was up, and shone brightly down upon a vision of white palaces, red walls, turreted gateways, tall bell-towers, and clusters of pear-shaped domes, all golden and glistening in the white moonlight. Under the gateways were deep caverns of blackness, and high walls with fan-shaped battlements flung black shadows across broad squares all flooded with the moon’s milky radiance. The _droschke_, pulled by a lean and wiry horse, lurched over cobbled roads like a boat in a rough sea, and pitched into holes and pitfalls which more than once brought the horse to its knees. Under a gateway, very narrow, with a turret overhead, a red lamp was burning, and there seemed to be an altar in the little chamber at the side, glinting with gilt candlesticks. The driver pulled off his fur cap, and crossed himself.

“The shrine of the Iberian Virgin,” said Christy. “A thousand years old, and more powerful than Lenin in the peasant mind!”

There was a great open square on the other side of the gateway, below a steep wall of red brick. At one end of it was a fantastic church, with a twisted dome painted in all the colours of the rainbow. In the high wall were arched gateways, lit by hanging lanterns, guarded by Red soldiers whose bayonets flashed like quicksilver. At one angle of the wall was an open staircase of red brick, leading to a high turret. Each of its steps was clear-cut by a light behind, with strange theatrical effect. Beyond seemed an endless vista of golden cupolas, surmounted by shining crosses, above white walls, all glamorous and shadow-haunted.

“The Kremlin,” said Christy. “From that high tower—old Ivan Velike—Napoleon saw Moscow burning, and read his doom in its smoke and flame. We’re passing through the Red Square. Every stone of it has been wet with blood. Those walls have looked down on a thousand years of human cruelty—not ended yet. . . .”

“A cut-throat looking place,” said Bertram, and shivered a little. There were few people about. There was no sound in the city except the klip-clop of the lean horse, and the footsteps of sentries pacing under the Kremlin walls.

“It holds the biggest drama in the world,” answered Christy. “What’s happening here is going to alter history everywhere. Peace or war, perhaps civilisation itself, is going to be decided by the brain that is working at this hour of midnight, beyond those walls. The ruthless brain of a fanatic who is also a realist. He experiments with human nature like a vivisector with guinea-pigs, without compassion, in the interests of science. To prove or disprove a theory.”

“Lenin?”

“Lenin. . . . Genius or maniac? Damned if I know!”

The Foreign Office, which Christy called by its incomprehensible name, was in a big block of buildings at the corner of an open place beyond the Red Square. A young soldier in an overcoat made for a bigger man, so that the sleeves came below his hands, barred the way with his rifle at the foot of a staircase, until Christy said, “Tavarish Weinstein.”

At the top of the staircase, Christy plunged down a corridor, turned sharply to the left, knocked at a door, and opened it without waiting for an answer. It was well past midnight, but at a desk heaped with papers, a man sat working. He was a delicate-looking man, past middle age, with a pointed beard and moustache, like a French painter. Like such a type, also, he wore a jacket of brown velveteen. He looked up at Christy’s entrance, and Bertram saw that the pleasant aspect of his face was spoilt by “crossed” eyes.

“Good evening, Mr. Weinstein! This is my friend, Bertram Pollard of _The New World_.”

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Pollard. A tiring journey, I’m sure.”

He shook hands with Bertram, with a limp, soft touch, and spoke in a gentle, tired voice. As chief of the propaganda department of the Soviet Republic, he did not come up to Bertram’s expectations of a leading Bolshevik. He might have been the editor of _The Ladies’ Home Journal_, or one of the most respectable members of the Royal Academy. He did not even look like a Jew.

“You purpose to visit the Famine region of the Volga?” he asked Bertram, and then, in a melancholy voice, said something about the tragic conditions in that part of Russia. The Republic was doing its best to cope with them. But it was very difficult. They needed foreign help. From England and the United States.

“We have nothing to hide,” he said presently. “Go where you like, see what you like. Write what you like. We only ask you to tell the truth. So many lies have been told about us. Incredible! We welcome the truth. We wish the world to know.”

“My friend Pollard is a glutton for truth,” said Christy, with just the flicker of a wink at Bertram. “Where are you going to billet him, Mr. Weinstein? With me, I hope?”

“Certainly. You are comfortable?”

“Luxurious, even.”

“That is good. We like to treat our guests well.”

He rang up a number on the telephone, and spoke rapid Russian. Then he turned to Christy again.

“It is settled. Sophieskaya, 14. They have prepared a room for him. Good evening, Mr. Pollard. I shall read your articles with interest, I am sure.”

Christy led the way out of the building, and asked Bertram to get into the _droschke_ again. They drove across a bridge, turned at right angles along the bank of the river. On the other side was an astonishing view of the Kremlin again in the white moonlight, with great blocks of darkness between its churches and palaces and towers.

“An ‘Arabian Nights’ Dream!” said Bertram, in a low voice.

Christy did not answer him directly.

“That fellow Weinstein is not a bad fellow. As gentle as an invalid lady at Bournemouth. As subtle as a Chinese mandarin. I don’t think he’d hurt a spider, willingly. But of course he’d vote for the death of any counter-revolutionary, man, woman, or child. That’s fear. Fear is the father of cruelty. Well, here we are.”

The _droschke_ driver pulled up his horse with a clatter of hoofs. Two soldiers standing by a sentry-box came forward with a lantern, and held it up to Christy’s face, and Bertram’s.

“That’s all right, my children,” said Christy. “Now for a hundred thousand roubles.”

“In Heaven’s name, what for?” asked Bertram, still ignorant of Russian money.

“To pay the _isvostchik_—meaning the cabby. Hear him howl when I give it him.”

Christy was right. The man wailed and whined, raised his hands to heaven, called upon the moon as witness, flung his fur cap on the ground, spat on the mass of paper which Christy had given him.

“_Skolka?_” said Christy.

The man renewed his loud plaint, until one of the Red soldiers struck him on the chest with the butt-end of his rifle.

“I paid him forty thousand roubles too much,” said Christy. “He wanted fifty thousand more. Such is the greed and dishonesty of man!”

“What’s this house?” asked Bertram, staring up at a great mansion with a classical façade. “It looks like a palace.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” said Christy. “This is where I live. Nothing less than a palace for dear old Christy! An English aristocrat must have his four-poster bed and Louis Quinze suite.”

He went up a flight of steps and pulled a chain. There was the loud jangling of a bell, and presently a great rattling of bolts.

“They keep us under lock and key, so that we don’t escape without paying our bill,” said Christy. “You’ll find these Bolsheviks bleed the Western capitalist.”

The door was opened by a pretty, sleepy girl, with a shawl round her head. She greeted Christy with a smile, a yawn, and a German “_Güten Abend_.”

“Don’t be frightened at anything you see,” said Christy. “What you don’t see is much more alarming.”

The first aspect of things was not frightening. Bertram found himself in a great and splendid hall, panelled in richly carved oak, with gilded decorations. Beyond was a wide flight of stairs, leading up to a corridor hung with tapestries. It was at the corner of the corridor that he had his first shock. From behind a curtain, or through some door which he had not seen, six figures appeared in single file, utterly silent. They looked like Chinese mandarins in wonderful robes of cloth of gold. Their pig-tails swung as they passed.

Christy turned round and winked at Bertram, and then led the way through a noble salon, all gilt and brocade, in the Louis Quinze style. Round the walls were portraits of men and women of the old régime, in white wigs and flowered silks. Immense candelabra, like those at Versailles, were suspended from a ceiling painted with cherubs and naked goddesses.

At the farthest door another unexpected figure stood motionless. It was a Turkish soldier in a red fez, and embroidered sash round blue baggy breeches. Christy passed through the salon, and led the way down another corridor where Bertram was startled again by a man suddenly opening a door, looking out, and shutting it with a bang. In that brief glimpse Bertram had seen an Indian prince, as he seemed, in a high white turban, and robe of cream-coloured silk.

Further down the corridor, another door opened, and a man came right out into the passage. He wore a flannel shirt and pepper-and-salt trousers, with his braces hanging down. His feet were bare, and he was carrying a wine-bottle in one hand and a wet sponge in the other. He looked like a respectable butler in a good English household, retiring for the night. As he passed Christy, he crossed himself with the wine bottle, and squeezed a drop of water out of the sponge on to the polished boards.

“_Le diable est mort!_” he said, with great joyfulness.

Christy passed into another room, which was an almost exact reproduction of the Louis Quinze salon. A grand piano was open, and a young man without a collar was playing “Three Blind Mice,” with one finger.

“This way,” said Christy.

He pulled back a heavy curtain, opened a door, and led Bertram into a room which might have been a king’s study. It was panelled with oak, and furnished with oak chairs and tables, elaborately carved with Gothic decoration. A marble Venus stood on a high pedestal in the corner of the room, and on one of the tables was a bust of Napoleon. A figure of St. George and the Dragon in coloured marble inlaid with gold, was in front of the window, which looked across the river to the Kremlin.

On an enormous hearth, with iron dogs, some big logs were burning.

Two candles were alight in beer bottles, next to the bust of Napoleon, and in the centre of the room was an iron bedstead and a tin bath.

“Here we are,” said Christy. “Home at last!”

Bertram was silent for a moment, looking unutterable things. Then he asked a series of questions, quietly but firmly.

“Tell me, have I gone raving mad? Or is this a real house in Bolshevik Russia? Who were all those strange people? Or did I only think I saw them?”

“It’s quite all right,” said Christy, soothingly. “I know how you feel, because I’d the jim-jams myself when I first came here. This is the Guest House of the Soviet Republic. It is also infested with the _Cheka_ or secret police, who will take down anything you say as evidence against you, as the London Bobbies say, if you speak too loud, and unwisely of dangerous things. It used to be the palace of the Sugar King of Russia. It’s one of the few houses in Moscow which was left untouched by the Revolution.”

“Those Orientals?” asked Bertram.

“A mission from the Far Eastern Republic.”

“That fellow with the wine bottle and the wet sponge?”

“An American newspaper correspondent. Jemmy Hart. One of the best.”

“And the dreamy fellow playing ‘Three Blind Mice’?”

“Kravintzki—one of the bright spirits of the Cheka. His signature is necessary for all executions. That’s why he plays the piano with one finger.”

“I don’t follow that.”

“Not to tire his wrist.”

“Well, now I know!”

He took hold of Christy’s arms and squeezed him tight.

“It’s good to see you again, you ugly old chameleon. Let’s sit and talk. I’ve a thousand things to tell and to ask. Since you left me I’ve been through the Slough of Despond, and the Valley of Doubt. I’m carrying a dead heart in my body. I’m in darkness, and can’t see a ray of light ahead.”

“Well, you’re a cheerful kind of blighter to come to Moscow!” said Christy, with a grin. “You won’t find any rosy hope in the Volga Valley! Nor any blaze of light ’twixt Moscow and Petrograd. But let’s talk in front of the fire. God, how good it is to talk! How good and useless, except to one’s own soul!”

All through the night in a Guest House of Bolshevik Russia, they talked as only men can whose friendship is proved. Bertram spoke a little of Joyce, and learnt that Christy’s wife was dead. They were both lonely men, and glad of this comradeship.

L

Moscow by day was more squalid, but more cheerful, than Moscow by night.

The Kremlin as seen from Bertram’s “billet” in the Sugar King’s palace was still magnificent and glittering under the sun’s rays, but lost some of its mystery and fantasy as he had seen it under moonlight. The streets were no longer deserted, but crowded with every type of Russian life, with Asiatics among them, as they existed after a revolution which had destroyed one of the richest, most luxurious, and most corrupt aristocracies in Europe.