Part 28

There was a great silence in Petrograd. Heavy snow had fallen, and lay deep in the streets, except where gangs of men and women had shovelled a passage-way for sleighs which drove slowly with a tinkle of bells. The Neva was frozen over, and standing on one of the bridges, Bertram stared at the panorama of the city, magnificent with its vista of palaces, churches, vast galleries, and great blocks of stone buildings which had once been the offices of the Imperial Government and of world-wide trade, but grim and black under snow-covered roofs.

The silence of Petrograd was strange and fearful. There was no sound of labour in the great factories across the river. No smoke came from their chimneys. There was no throb of engines, or clang of iron. Nothing moved on the quaysides. The immense buildings with sculptured façades on the side of the city were deserted of all life. No man or woman went in. None came out.

Along the Nevski Prospekt once, as Bertram knew, the greatest highway of luxury in Europe, most of the shops were boarded up like those in Moscow, and nothing was being sold or bought. But there were people there, a sense of life, in contrast to the deadly quietude in other streets. With fur caps pulled down, and sheepskin coats tucked up about their ears, and with snow-shoes over their boots, they were dragging hand sledges over pavements covered with frozen snow so slippery that Bertram found it hard to walk without staggering or falling. The sledges were laden with sacks of potatoes, logs of wood, or frozen meat, and some of them were escorted by Red soldiers, as though this treasure might be attacked on its way.

Bertram was aware of some difference between these sledge-draggers and snow-shovellers of Petrograd and the population of Moscow. They were not peasants, but city folk of the old bourgeois class. Their clothes still showed traces of fashions that had passed. Some of these women, and young girls, dragging heavy loads, had frocks of a style that would have looked well in Paris, or Berlin, or London, before they had been torn, and grease-stained, and mud-splashed. Elderly men, clearing the roads, wore “bowler” hats, and coats with astrachan collars, and looked like bank managers, or clerks, once respected in merchants’ offices, who had come down in the world to the level of the doss house.

Some of the younger Russians wore their rags with a kind of swagger and cheerful unconcern, only intent on keeping warm, by bits of sacking used as shawls round the neck, or by wearing seamen’s jerseys under their black jackets. Even in Petrograd youth had not lost all its spirit of gaiety, and Bertram heard a laugh now and then from young folk who went hurrying by, arm in arm. But the general impression of the faces he passed was haggard, mournful, and anxious. Christy gave an explanation.

“This city is running short of food. Moscow, with its crowd of Soviet officials, has first call on supplies. These people we pass are wondering if their next meal will be their last.”

“I want to talk to them,” said Bertram. “If only I knew a bit of Russian! I want to see inside their lives.”

“Try them with French, or German, or English,” said Christy. “Some of these people shovelling snow used to spend the season in Paris, Berlin, London.”

It was a woman selling cigarettes outside the station whose life was revealed to Bertram.

She leaned against a wall, coughing, in a thin dress that was no proof against a temperature of forty degrees below zero. She was a middle-aged woman, with a thin face and sallow skin through which the cheekbones showed. Bertram asked her in French for ten of her cigarettes, and paid her ten times too much, in filthy paper.

“You’ve given me too much,” she said, in a weak voice, “and I have no change.”

Her French was more perfect than Bertram’s.

“Never mind the change,” he said. “It’s cold for you, standing here.”

“Soon I shall be dead,” she said. “Are you French?”

“No, English.”

She stared at him with a kind of wonderment.

“Once I was a governess in England.”

She mentioned the name of an English family, unknown to Bertram.

“You have been here during the Revolution?” he asked.

“Since the beginning of the war. My husband was shot when Kerensky went. He was an officer, and his men killed him, like so many others.”

“You are alone now?”

“I have a little son. He is dying of hunger. I cannot earn enough to feed him. Sometimes I have thought of killing him, but have not the courage.”

“That is terrible!” said Bertram. “How can I help you?”

“Why should you help me?” she asked, in a harsh voice. “What am I to you? I am only one of millions who starve in Russia.”

He gave her a bundle of paper money, and she stared at it with dazed eyes, and gave a little cry, not of joy, but of anguish. Perhaps this charity from a stranger only sharpened her sense of misery, made more poignant her knowledge of inevitable death.

Bertram raised his hat, and moved away, joining Christy again.

“It’s useless, old man,” said Christy. “I began like that. But I’ve chucked it up. How much did you give her?”

“Five hundred thousand roubles. Surely that will help her a little?”

Christy shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.

“In this city one pays a hundred and twenty thousand roubles for a pound of tea. Eighty thousand roubles for a pound of bread. Sixty thousand roubles for ten cigarettes. What can you and I do in private charity? It’s merely pandering to one’s own sentiment.”

“One can’t leave a woman like that without giving her something. One’s coat, if one has nothing else.”

“Useless, Major. Useless. There are millions like her, as she said. We can do better than that. Our job is to tell the truth about the agony of these people, so that the outside world may help in a big way. Poke up the conscience of all our Pharisees who pass by on the other side, while Russia lies bleeding in the ditch.”

He took Bertram to a camp for refugees from the famine districts of the Volga.

“You saw some of these on their way in the cattle-truck trains. This is the end of the journey for some of them. I’m told it’s worth seeing.”

It was called a “camp,” but the refugees in the place to which Christy went—there were many others round Petrograd—were housed in the old Imperial Barracks—an immense white-washed building on four sides of a hollow square. It was worth seeing, as Christy said, but not pleasant to see. Outside the thermometer told forty degrees below zero. Inside there was no heat except that of human bodies lying huddled together on bare boards. There were thousands of peasants with straw-coloured beards and blue eyes from Samara, and Saratoff, and other places which soon to Bertram were to have a frightful significance. They had with them their women folk and children who squatted about in the barrack rooms or lay sleeping in tangled heaps like those in the station at Moscow. A meal was being served from the kitchen—thin potato soup, and a square hunk of black sour-smelling bread, provided by the Soviet Republic for these people of the sun-burnt valley, once the richest granary of Russia. The soup was ladled out to those who lined up in queue, with mugs and bowls, but Bertram saw that many did not take their place in the line. They lay on the bare boards, flopping their heads from side to side, or very still, with glazing eyes.

“Typhus—dysentery—weakness,” said Christy, after some words in German to a Russian doctor.

The doctor was a black-bearded man in a white surgical coat. He had grave, thoughtful eyes behind his glasses.

“We do what we can,” he said, in German. “But the food is hardly enough, and there are no medicines, no soap, no change of clothes, no fuel for heat. Disease is spreading. But we do our best.”

Passing through the courtyard with Bertram and Christy, he pushed back a wooden door, and beckoned them to look.

Inside was a great pile of dead bodies, thrown one on top of the other, men, women, and children, mixed up together in a huddle of death, with brown, claw-like hands protruding from the mass of corpses, and faces staring upwards, and here and there a bare limb revealed in its skin and bone. They had been tossed on top of each other, like rubbish for the muck-heap.

“Two days dead,” said the Russian doctor.

“The End of the Journey,” said Christy, in a low voice to Bertram.

Bertram was sick for a moment in the corner of the yard. This stench of death was worse than a battlefield.

LIII

By favour of a Soviet official with whom Christy was on terms of friendship—“a very mild type of Bolshevik, like so many of them,” he explained—they were allowed to visit the Port of Petrograd.

“Is it worth while?” asked Bertram; “I want the human side of things. I want to know how people are living, and suffering in this frightful country.”

Christy answered with a touch of rebuke.

“We’re not here for melodrama. This Port will tell us why people are _not_ living in Russia. And why there’s unemployment in England. It was one of the gateways of the world’s trade.”

It was a mournful place. They stumbled over cables concealed beneath the snow, and wandered in solitude past docks and warehouses, empty of all shipping and merchandise. Out in the snow lay numbers of ploughs and reaping machines, brand-new in their crates.

Christy inspected them, and read a word.

“Düsseldorf. . . . That tells a tale. Do you remember what I said about a Russo-German alliance?”

“Why are they left rotting in the snow?” asked Bertram.

“No means of transport, and Oriental inefficiency,” said Christy.

Further in the Port were three tramps flying the Swedish and Danish flags, and one wide-decked vessel with one funnel called _Tyneside Lass_, from Newcastle.

Christy was excited by that.

“From little old England! What’s she doing? Let’s go and see the Old Man!”

At the top of the gangway was a young skipper, who looked surprised when Christy hailed him in his own tongue.

“Glad to see you, gentlemen,” he said, with cheery greeting. “Come into my cabin and have a spot. It’s biting cold.”

He mixed a stiff dose for each of them, and raised his own glass.

“Cheery oh!”

“What are you carrying to Petrograd?” asked Christy.

“Railway engines. All German. From Hamburg. My owners have a contract to carry eight hundred. Four at a time. It looks as if I’ll get frozen in, this trip.”

Christy looked over to Bertram, and raised his eyebrows, before asking another question.

“How do the Bolshies pay for German engines, skipper?”

“Some gold. Mostly diamonds and furs.”

“Sound business for Germany,” said Christy. “How do you get on with the Bolshies?”

The young skipper shrugged his shoulders.

“The officials keep civil tongues. They’d better. The stevedores are poor lousy bastards. Can hardly lift a cable without breaking theirselves. Half-fed, and no guts. Start work at eleven, and take two hours to get the cranes working. Well-meaning enough. Some of ’em speak a bit of English. There’s one that was Professor of Biology, or some such thing, before the war. I gave him a slab of cheese, and he wept tears and kissed my hand. I’ve no use for this Bolshevism. It don’t seem to do a country any good, though there’s some that think so in Newcastle.”

He wished them good health, and waved his hand to them from the top of the gangway as they went back through the snow.

“Major,” said Christy, using the old title as though they were still in Flanders’ fields, “those railway-engines from Hamburg give me furiously to think. Here’s the key to Russia’s way of escape. Perhaps Germany’s also, if France puts the screw on too hard. What about the Treaty of Versailles—German indemnities—a French invasion of the Ruhr—if Germany allies herself with Russia? Russia and Germany _contra mundum_! A formidable combination, by the Lord!”

“Don’t you jump a bit too far ahead?” asked Bertram. “Four railway engines in a Tyneside tug don’t seem to justify a prophecy of world war.”

“Remember Owen,” said Christy calmly. “Reconstructed a Megatherium out of one tooth. These four railway engines, with seven hundred and ninety-six to follow—and those ploughs lying in the snow—mean that Germany is getting her foot into Russia, doing business, preparing to do more. For Russia’s sake I’m mighty glad, but it mustn’t be left to Germany alone. If that happens, there’s going to be Hell to pay.”

Bertram was silent on the way back. Christy had the gift of seeing far ahead, and his prophecies were rare, and never rash. The individual did not interest him very much. He thought more of the actions and reactions of peoples, of mass movements, economic laws, world balances, the ebb and flow of trade, the undertow of passions, and political chances.

That night they went to the Marinsky Theatre, and lost their way in the snow. With his few phrases of Russian, Christy asked the way of a young lad in the uniform of a Red soldier, and was answered in very good English.

“If you come with me, gentlemen, I shall be very glad to show you.”

“Are you English?” asked Bertram.

The boy laughed, and said his father was English, but now dead. His mother was a Russian lady. She taught languages, especially English, to students who came to her at night after their day’s work. She received three thousand roubles a lesson, and was never home till past midnight, and then very tired. He chattered cheerfully as he strode over the snow in heavy boots, a little fellow, with bright eyes and a lively sense of humour. Yet it was not a merry tale he told, though fantastic.

“I was an important person for a time. They made me President of Arts and Sciences. I gave lectures to working men at night, on the origin of art, evolution, and elementary biology.”

“How old were you then?” asked Bertram.

“Sixteen,” said the boy. “Now I am eighteen.”

He looked no more than fourteen.

One day he was arrested for counter-revolutionary opinions. Some working-man had discovered that his father was an “aristocrat,” or objected to his discipline in class. Anyhow, he was denounced, and kept in prison for nine months. His poor mother had nearly died of grief. Then he was liberated, luckier than others who had been shot in batches for the same suspicion. Now he was an office-boy in a Government department.

“It’s been perfectly rotten,” he said, using English slang with a foreign accent.

He halted outside the Marinsky Theatre, and saluted, and then shook hands.

Bertram tried to slip some money into his hand, but he shook his head.

“My father was an English gentleman,” he said simply.

There were tickets for sale in the theatre, according to the “New Economic Laws,” but it was plain that most of the people had passes, and it was explained to Christy by a young Jew who spoke French, that it was a “Trade Union” night.

It was a performance of “Carmen,” magnificently staged, and well played, but to Bertram and Christy the audience was of more interest than the performance. The immense and splendid theatre was packed with “the proletariat.” Nearly all of them wore the Russian blouse, belted round the waist, or the Red Army tunic. The women were dressed very much like an audience in one of the poorer suburbs of London, but here and there a few had ventured to put on a bit of “finery”—a little lace round the neck and wrists, a trinket or two. In the Imperial box sat a group of men with black hair over their foreheads, like women’s “fringes,” and grimy hands. Above their heads the Imperial Eagle had been covered with the Red Flag of Revolution.

Bertram thought of the pale-faced Czar sitting there with the Empress and their beautiful daughters, with high officers and ladies of the Court.

Then, by some curious association of ideas, he thought of Joyce, as he had sat with her in the boxes of London theatres, so beautiful, so exquisite in her evening frocks. The Emperor and Empress and all their family had been murdered. Joyce had disappeared from his life, by some act of revolution which had murdered _him_, killed his spirit, stone dead.

The body of Bertram Pollard sat in the stall of the Marinsky Theatre at Petrograd, but it was not the Bertram Pollard of Holland Street, Kensington, or “Somewhere in France.” He had changed. He was a different man. This visit to Russia was changing him still further. It made all other things seem trivial and insignificant—the things he had made such a fuss about. Ireland! It did not mean much to the world in progress or reaction. That guerrilla warfare was a Chinese cracker compared with the frightful things that had happened here in Petrograd. The Social Revolution in England—Holme Ottery up for sale! How laughable, how negligible, compared with the utter extinction of the Russian gentry!

Petrograd and Moscow put things in a different proportion. The agony of these people made private troubles, heart-breaks, love affairs, strangely small. Those dead bodies in the barracks—they too put things in a different proportion, made life itself of but little account, individually. What was this new sense of proportion going to mean to him?

Perhaps he would find the meaning at last for which his mind had been groping, like a man in a dark room. Perhaps he would get outside himself in service to these people who were so immensely stricken.

“A hundred thousand roubles for your thoughts,” said Christy.

“I’m wondering what I’m here for,” said Bertram.

Christy glanced at him sideways.

“To learn a bit of life. Perhaps to light a little lamp in the darkness of a human heart. Anyhow to see ‘Carmen’ jolly well played!”

The young Jew who had spoken to them before, came up during the entr’acte, when they joined the crowd in the _foyer_, a strange, shaggy-haired, pale-faced crowd, very cheerful on the whole, and enjoying their evening.

“What do you think of it?” he asked.

“Magnificent,” said Christy. “Who are all these people in the audience?”

“Soviet workers of one kind or another.”

“Communists?” asked Christy.

The young Jew smiled, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Are we still Communists under the New Economic Laws? We’ve gone back to private trading, private property, money instead of rations, foreign capital, if it can be got.”

“Do the people like the new way?”

“It’s like a weight lifted off their shoulders! They’re beginning to breathe again.”

He lowered his voice.

“I’m in a Soviet office. But like most Jews I believe in trade, barter, property. All the same, the Revolution did some good. The workers didn’t get free seats at the Opera in the time of the Romanoffs.”

He looked at them with shifty eyes, afraid that he was talking dangerously, yet wanting to talk.

“Bread and circuses are all right,” said Christy, “but circuses without bread are poor fare.”

The young Jew couldn’t follow this allusion, and looked mystified.

“Was the Revolution very terrible in England?” he asked.

“What Revolution?”

“The English Revolution.”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” said Christy. “It won’t happen.”

The young Jew was incredulous.

“We have read a lot about it in _Prahvda_. That’s our Soviet paper. All your people are starving, are they not?”

“They were pretty well fed when I left them,” said Christy, laughing.

The young Jew did not believe him, by the look in his eyes, but the curtain was rung up again, and they left him.

“They all think there’s been a bloody revolution in England,” said Christy. “They get no news except the stuff published for propaganda purposes. The outside world is a mystery to them.”

“It will soon be to us,” said Bertram. “I’ve heard nothing since I left Riga. For all I know England may have been sunk beneath the sea. Or Ireland.”

“No such luck,” said Christy, making the obvious gibe.

They went back through the snow with the audience of the Marinsky Theatre, to the music of sleigh-bells. That night they slept at a place called the International Hostel, which was another kind of “Guest-house,” mostly inhabited by Soviet officials of high rank, and by German traders. Most of the night was spent in catching bugs.

LIV

Back in Moscow, Bertram made enquiries as to the means of transport to the famine-stricken districts. They lay two thousand miles east of Moscow, in the Volga Valley, and the chief railheads were Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara or Saratoff. If he could get as far as Kazan, he might, with luck, find a passage on a boat down the Volga to the other places. But he would have to look quick about it, as far as the river trip went, because the Volga would soon begin to freeze.

Mr. Weinstein of the Foreign Office was not hopeful of an early train.

“I think, perhaps, your best chance would be to link up with a party of gentlemen from the A. R. A. for whom a special train to Kazan is being provided this week or next.”

A special train! It sounded incredible! But Bertram knew already the mighty power of “Ara” in Russia. Had he not been fixed up by its influence from Riga to Moscow? Had he not seen the inspiring work of Mr. Cherry of Lynchburg, Virginia, with Bolshevik officials and railway porters?

The first food ship had arrived in Petrograd from New York. Groups of young Americans were already in far outposts organising committees of Russians for the administration of food relief. They had already started soup-kitchens for starving children in Petrograd and Moscow, and were pushing out supplies to Kazan and the Volga Valley with a rapidity that took away the breath of Russian officials to whom the word _Seichas_—immediately—meant the day after to-morrow, or the week after next.

The Director of “Ara,” the American Relief Administration, learnt that word first from his Russian dictionary, and used it with terrible persistence to the Soviet authorities of transport, to Russian station-masters, to foremen of gangs, to engine-drivers, and any other people he could find who had something to do with getting an engine to move and trucks to follow it. He taught the word and its meaning to young Americans from the Universities of Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Virginia, who, after a glimpse of war, had volunteered for Russian Relief as the next best chance of getting in touch with life—and death. They too used that word _Seichas_, with a Western meaning and added American interpretations such as, “For the love of Mike, why don’t you get a move on, you sons of bitches?”—even to high Soviet officials, and lesser authorities.

By some miracle, astounding to the Russians themselves, trains began to move from Riga to Moscow, from Moscow to the Volga, laden with food supplies for the starving children. Although in the whole of Russia there were only two thousand five hundred engines standing together, though mostly immovable, instead of seventeen thousand five hundred which moved before the war, the best of them began to get steam up, pulled out with long train-loads of trucks, did actually get somewhere, in spite of break-downs, lack of fuel. Oriental methods of delay. “_Seichas, you Tavarishes!_” said the Americans, at any kind of delay, and by that mingling of cajolery and terror which was the method of the genial Cherry, were getting some kind of efficiency into the utter chaos of Russian railways.

All these things Bertram learnt from Jemmy Hart, the American journalist, whom he had met on his first night in Moscow at the Guest House, when he appeared in his flannel shirt and pepper-and-salt trousers, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a wet sponge in the other. He had been imprisoned as a spy by the _Cheka_ before the arrival of the A. R. A. Then he was let out, and treated as an honoured guest of the Soviet Republic. Hence his “billet” in the Guest House. He was on terms of familiarity with Lenin, Chicherin, Radek and other high powers, to whom he behaved as one old poker player to other experts of the artful game, with cheery cynicism, ready to call their bluff, or to double the stakes if they revealed a weak hand.