Part 30

“Not old friends,” said Nadia, “but good comrades now.”

“Do not use that word comrade!” said the lady. “It has been debased. _Tavarish! tavarish! tavarish!_ I am sick of it!”

“In English it is better,” said Nadia. “It has its old meaning still.”

She and Bertram sat at a little table in the corner. Katia waited on them delightedly, kissing Nadia’s neck, or hair, or hand, every time she came to the table. And Nadia was joyful because a white cloth was spread on the table, and there were cut glasses for their cider, which was the only drink, and plates without a crack in them.

“It is like a fairy-tale,” she said. “Not for four years have I sat down with snow-white linen to the board.”

Bertram wondered that she could endure so long a time of squalor, after her life in great mansions, surrounded by luxury from childhood. Did she not sometimes crave to escape from it to Paris or London, like so many others?

She shook her head.

“I want to see this through,” she told him. “It has been a great adventure of the soul. Terrible, but educating. You have been a soldier. You know what our men called ‘the front line spirit?’ I have been in the front line, the danger zone, and have nothing but contempt for those who fled to safe places in the war. Except the old and feeble, and the very young.”

A great adventure of the soul? Yes, there was something in that. Life at its bleakest and barest like a Polar expedition to which men like Shackleton and Scott had gone so blithely. For him also, this Russian visit was to be a great adventure of the soul. Perhaps with this girl who offered him her love! Queer that! It wouldn’t be bad to “see it through” with her. He had no other call now, no kind of human tie elsewhere. Why not see it through in Russia as well as anywhere in the world? It was cut off from the rest of the world almost as completely as Robinson Crusoe’s island. A shipwrecked country of a hundred and fifty million people, with himself among them!

They talked of the Bolshevik régime. He denounced it as the greatest tyranny on earth, the most brutal type of Government ever devised by evil minds.

She shook her head at that.

“Not quite so bad. They have done some good. They have taught the people to read and write—millions of them. They have fed the children first—always.”

Bertram was amazed at her tolerance.

“Surely you don’t defend these people?”

“No,” she said, “but I understand them. They have been cruel, but through fear. They were afraid of counter-revolutions, plots of every kind. They stamped out their enemies lest the Revolution should be defeated and Czardom brought back. So it was in France, under Robespierre, was it not?”

“This Communism!” said Bertram. “It seems to me an outrage against human nature. It attempts to crush the individual instinct which is the strongest thing in life.”

“Yes,” she answered, “that is true, I am sure. But the individual must subordinate his instincts to the good of the Commonwealth. One must not forget that Communism was killed by the peasants—and alas, they too were greedy and cruel when they had the only source of wealth.”

“Is there any hope at all for human nature?” asked Bertram.

She looked at him with surprise in her dark eyes.

“Do you doubt it? Oh, surely not! Out of all our ignorance and agony some knowledge will come for the future race. You and I are learning. Others will know because of our endeavours, and our failure, and our love. I am glad to think that.”

“How wise you are!” he said, without irony. “I am bewildered by life, and without any certain faith. You seem so sure!”

“I am Russian,” she said, laughing. “We talk and talk on abstract ideas. We do nothing worth doing. _Nichevo!_”

Katia came up again, and sat beside Nadia. A party of young men came into the restaurant and sat talking quietly, and drinking coffee. The ex-painter to the Imperial Court was washing up dishes behind the counter.

“I must learn Russian!” said Bertram.

Katia clapped her hands.

“Nadia will teach you!”

England seemed a million miles away. Joyce was in another planet. Nadia’s black eyes were very kind to him.

LVI

It was a six days’ journey to Kazan, and seemed interminable. The “special train” was not so magnificent as its name, but exactly similar to the one from Riga—in discomfort, and in lice. The American Colonel arrived with a young man acting as a kind of A. D. C., and with Dr. Weekes, two other young men of the American Relief Administration, a Russian officer of the Red Army, detailed as interpreter, the two Russian ladies appointed as secretaries, and Nadia. Jemmy Hart, the newspaper correspondent, joined up with Bertram, and two officers of the _Cheka_ accompanied the party, nominally as police protection, but really for political espionage.

Christy came down to the station to say farewell. He revealed a hint of anxiety about Bertram.

“Don’t take too many risks, Major.”

He had an idea that he might not stay much longer in Moscow. He would leave Russia to Bertram. Probably their next meeting-place would be Berlin or London.

In his casual way he mentioned an exciting item of news.

“Janet has come out to Berlin. I may go and see her there.”

Janet Welford in Berlin! What was she doing there?

“Having a look round,” said Christy. “Getting a background for a new novel. . . . There’s another reason.”

He mentioned the other reason in a “by the way” kind of tone.

“I asked her to meet me there. Now that my wife’s dead, there’s no reason of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual relationship why these two persons should not be joined in holy matrimony. If Janet’s willing, which is very doubtful.”

“Well, here’s luck!” said Bertram.

He spoke the words heartily, and gripped Christy’s hand, but, at the back of his brain, as it were, was a sense of envy. Envy of Christy, his best friend! Inconceivable, that—and yet there was the thought nagging at him. Janet had been very kind to him in her rooms at Battersea Park. She had once made his heart thump by a cry of regret that they had not met and married before Joyce came along. What were her words? He remembered them.

“A pity, Sir Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I understand you better. And you were my first Dream Knight, in the days when you kissed me in Kensington Gardens.”

He leaned out of the carriage window, and gripped Christy’s hand again.

“Give my love to Janet. Tell her that I’ve killed self-pity. She’ll understand!”

“Take care of yourself!” said Christy, and then sloped away from the Kazansky station, with his pipe in his mouth.

The journey began, and continued, day after day, with many halts in the middle of Russian forests and the open countryside. Snow lay heavily on the branches of fir-trees, and thick on the ground, so that a traveller’s eyes tired of the white monotony. Every twenty versts or so they reached a Russian village, with its low roofed wooden houses, surrounded by high stockades. Peasants were shovelling snow to make pathways to their village. They gathered in the station yards to stare at the train, kept back from too near approach by soldiers of the Red Army who looked half frozen and half starved. In many stations were refugee trains without engines, with snow up to the axle wheels of their closed trucks, in which families were densely crowded, lying together all hugger-mugger, for warmth’s sake. It seemed as though they had been there for months. There was no apparent prospect of these trains ever moving. Those who died were buried in pits by the railway track. Across the flat snow-fields there were here and there processions of men, women and children, crawling like ants on the march, black against the whiteness of their way. They, too, were refugees from Famine—without much hope ahead, thought Bertram, remembering The End of the Journey, in Petrograd. He wondered how many would lie down to die in the snow.

“They are wonderful in endurance,” said Nadia, to whom he put the question, as they stood together in the corridor, looking out of window. “In every village they pass they get a bit of bread from those who can ill spare it. So they live from place to place. Those who are strong.”

He had many talks like this with Nadia in the corridor, or in her compartment, with the two other ladies, belonging, like herself, to the old régime, once ladies in waiting of the Imperial Court. The Colonel of the A. R. A. had provided food for the party, mostly tinned stuff which Dr. Weekes and Bertram, appointing themselves cooks, heated up in enamel saucepans over tins of solid alcohol. It made the time pass, and was more comforting than cold food.

At night, in the darkness of the corridor, Nadia stood by his side, and sometimes they held hands, like children when the lights are out.

They talked of the mystery of life and death, the chances of world peace, the future of civilisation. Strange topics of conversation between a young man and woman! But travelling through Russia after war and revolution, they seemed the only subjects worth discussing.

Dr. Weekes joined them, and told stories of his experiences in Armenia and the Balkans—tragic tales of widespread famine, disease, death. He, too, balanced the possibilities of Western civilisation. Disease, unless checked by international effort, might wipe it out in Central Europe. It had already made deep tracks in fields of child life. Another war, anything like the last, would so weaken Europe, apart from its own massacres, that plague and pestilence might do more destruction than Attila and his Huns in the old days of the Roman Empire.

“You and I,” he said, turning to Nadia with his slow smile, “are two of the most important people in the world. We’re disease-killers, apostles of sanitation. But the odds against us are millions to one.”

“The fewer men, the greater share of honour,” said Nadia.

She had a surprising knowledge of literature, Russian, French, and English, and, better than such knowledge, a keen intelligence and candour of outlook which made her opinion astonishing for so young a woman.

But Bertram admired her, not for her cleverness of opinion, but for her spiritual quality and entire absence of self-consciousness. Delicate as she was, the daughter of an aristocracy to which physical labour had been abhorrent, she stooped to dirty work with a sense of beauty in its labour, and Bertram was horrified to find her swilling down the filthy lavatories before the rest of the travellers had stirred from their bunks.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “leave that to the _provodnik_. It’s his job, not yours.”

“It’s a job he neglects,” she said, smiling. “As one of the medical staff of ‘Ara,’ cleanliness and sanitation are in my department. The smell from this place is terrible.”

“All the more reason for you to avoid it,” said Bertram.

She shook her head.

“In the Famine district there will be worse smells and worse dirt, and lice everywhere. If I wanted to avoid them, I should not be here.”

“You are wonderful!” he said.

“A simple Russian woman,” she answered. “Why do you think me wonderful?”

There were other people in the train who thought her wonderful when Bertram told them of that early morning act. The Colonel and Dr. Weekes were filled with admiration.

“By God,” said the Colonel, “if all the Russian people were like that young woman, this country wouldn’t be plague-stricken with Bolsheviks and bugs!”

At night, in their candle-lit carriage, the Colonel and the Doctor, and Jemmy Hart, the newspaper man, and the Colonel’s A. D. C., or “pup,” as Hart called him, played poker with Russian roubles. They gambled fiercely, raising the stakes by tens of thousands, with a limit of a hundred thousand, as though possessed of untold wealth. But at the end of the long evening’s play, no one had lost or gained more than a few dollars in American rates of exchange.

During these poker games Bertram went into the dusky corridor again to stand by Nadia. They were left alone, for the other two Russian ladies went early to their bunks. The train crawled slowly, or halted for hours while new fuel was stacked in the engine. The moon rose and flooded the white landscape and the snow-capped farmsteads and the laden boughs.

“Russia is like a dead body under its white shroud,” said Nadia.

“It seems as lonely as an undiscovered land,” said Bertram.

She asked him to tell her a little of his life, so that she might know him more. He told her only of the things that had happened, the war, his marriage, the death of the child, Digby’s murder in Ireland, his mother’s death, his separation from Joyce. He was not good at self-analysis, and too much of an Englishman to attempt it. Yet she seemed to understand more than he told her.

“Russia does not hold all the unhappiness of life,” she said. “You have crowded too much suffering into a few years. It has wounded your spirit. You feel broken, and perhaps a little resentful of Fate. So much bad luck after the strain of war!”

“I’m not whining,” said Bertram. “Your courage through more dreadful things rebukes my cowardice.”

“You are not cowardly,” she told him. “I think you will be very strong and brave when your wound is healed. You have the eyes of leadership. One day you will help to lead your country in thought or action.”

He laughed at her, but she was sure.

One thing she said in those night talks as the train went crawling through the white wilderness, gave him a glimpse of a spiritual passion in her soul.

“I hated ugliness, and pain, and dirt. As a child these things were all hidden from me. As a young girl I was surrounded with beauty and illusion. Now I want to get deeper and deeper into the misery of the people. I want to be with them in their pain and their filth. I want to share their worst agony. It is to pay back to them by the suffering of my body and spirit for all the cruelties of my ancestors. If you will read Russian history, you will find my father’s name—though not my father—attached to acts which kept the peasants enslaved, and brutalised them. The old régime is suffering now for the sins of its fathers. It is right that we should be punished.”

“I don’t believe in that doctrine,” said Bertram. “We should be punished for our own acts, perhaps—though we are the children of heredity—but not for the crimes of those who gave us life.”

“It is the Law,” she said. “The Greeks knew it. Fate pursues us. It is in the Christian faith. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.”

“It’s unfair,” said Bertram. “Damned unfair.”

“Alas, it is true,” she said. “We must do good for our children’s sake.”

“I had a child who died, as I have told you,” said Bertram. “Sometimes I’m glad. The world is too cruel.”

“Not too cruel for those who have courage,” she said.

She spoke of her desire to have a child.

“Perhaps, if we love each other, you and I may have a child, dear sir. That would give me great happiness.”

Bertram was profoundly moved by those words, spoken with such simplicity.

“I am a stranger to you,” he said. “You do not know my weakness and my character.”

“I knew you,” she said, “when you looked my way in the market place.”

That night they clasped hands in the darkness of the corridor.

“My Russian comrade!” he said to her.

“Dear friend of Russia and of me,” she answered.

LVII

The city of Kazan was buried in snow, frozen hard, and glittering on its surface as though strewn with myriads of diamonds. It was a little Moscow, more Oriental, less ruined by street fighting, strangely beautiful with its gilt-domed churches and Russian mansions, and wooden hovels, all canopied in snow. It had been a rich city before the Revolution. Many great nobles had had summer houses here. Its market received the wealth of the Volga and merchandise from the Far East. A third of its population was Tartar, and under the Soviet régime it had been made the capital of a new state called the Tartar Republic, subject to Moscow, but with a certain independence for local business.

The Tartar type was striking, in its contrast to the blue-eyed, yellow-bearded peasants amidst whom they dwelt, and Bertram, staring at the tall, lean men with Mongolian cheekbones, leathery skin, and straight black hair, thought of Ghengis Khan and his hordes of men like this, who had swept across Europe in the Middle Ages to the very gates of Vienna.

Kazan was now on the edge of the famine. Hunger was creeping about the city itself, though even here there was meat to be had in the market for those who had money to buy it. The peasants along the Volga valley were killing the last of their cows, for lack of fodder, and the flesh was sent up to Kazan by the last boats that could make the journey before the Volga froze. After that there would be no more meat, as now there was no grain, no milk, and but small stocks of bread and potatoes. Soviet officials were still getting rations direct from Moscow, but that system was to be abandoned, except for a favoured few, owing to the “New Economic Laws” which had been framed mainly because the means of rationing had broken down.

The Colonel of the A. R. A. and his party were met at the station with sleighs by four or five young Americans, in heavy fur coats and Tartar caps, remarkably cheery, in spite of the frightful picture they painted of the local conditions. They had established the first food kitchens in Kazan, and had pushed out the first relief to the villages beyond.

“What’s the situation?” asked the Colonel.

Cyrus Sims, a young man looking like a Bolshevik bandit, until he pulled off his shaggy cap with ear-flaps and revealed a good American head, typical of Harvard, gave a few preliminary facts to “put the Colonel wise,” as he called it, before an interview with the President of the Tartar Republic.

“The situation, sir? Well, briefly, these people are waiting for death. They can’t see any escape, except by our help, which won’t amount to much for some time to come, as you know. We’ve undertaken to feed fifteen hundred children within three weeks from now. Sounds good. There’s a child population in this state of one million seven hundred thousand, all hungry, and mostly starving. Child population, you understand, sir! Of course we’re not going to feed adults. They’ll die. The Volga’s trying to freeze. Another week or two and no boats can pass. That’ll mean sleigh transport to the starving villages. We shall want three thousand five hundred horses to feed those fifteen hundred babes. And the horses are dropping dead along the roads. No fodder. Certain supplies have come down from Moscow by Soviet authority. Potatoes mostly. They’re rotting on the barges.”

“Why, in God’s name?” asked the Colonel.

“Same reason, sir. Dearth of horses for sleigh transport.”

“We shall have to get a move on,” said the Colonel. “Keep the horses alive. There’s lots of fodder to be had if we raise Hell. . . . Are you well billeted?”

“Sure,” said the young American, resuming his disguise as a Bolshevik bandit, and tying the ear-flaps of his Tartar cap under his chin. “Better come along, Colonel, and get warm.”

The whole party was crowded into sleighs, and set off in a procession, with a merry jingling of sleigh-bells. Dr. Weekes and Bertram had Nadia for their fellow traveller, and the doctor pulled the rug over her and packed the straw about her feet.

“It’s as cold as Calgary,” he said, “and that’s the coldest place I know.”

“In Russia,” said Nadia, “our blood is a mixture of fire and ice.”

“That’s a darned queer mixture,” said the doctor. “Unknown to chemical science.”

“It’s the secret of Russian history,” she answered.

Peasants halted on the foot-walks to stare at the passing sleighs. Their faces were haggard, and their eyes looked dead.

“There is hunger here,” said Nadia. “In Moscow we haven’t enough to eat, but here they starve.”

The sleighs halted outside a marble-fronted house with many windows, and Nadia gave a little cry of surprise.

“I know this house! It belonged to my father’s brother. I was here as a child, with my mother and Alexis. My uncle was the Governor of Kazan, and very kind to me. They shot him dead in the street one day.”

Bertram looked at her, and saw how she was stirred with the remembrance of old days before the agony of Russia had touched her life. For a moment her dark eyes filled with tears, but when she stepped down from the sledge, taking his hand to help her, she spoke brave words.

“How lucky I am to be with those who have come to rescue Russia!”

There were log fires burning in all the rooms of the house, and little camp beds in most of them.

“A good billet,” said the Colonel. “You boys know how to grab at luxury.”

“Not much luxury, sir, and plenty of bugs,” said the young man named Sims, who was in command of the “outfit” at Kazan. “This place was used for refugees, until we came. It’s still a menagerie.”

“Work for me,” said Dr. Weekes. “I’m the world’s light-weight vermin-killer.”

The Russian ladies were invited to lunch, but a special billet had been arranged for them in a house near by.

“A good scheme,” said the Colonel. “We don’t want any scandals for the Hearst Press. And I can see you boys have already fallen in love with my Princess.”

“She’s a peach,” said one of them. “But we’re too busy for amorous dalliance, Colonel.”

The Colonel winked at Bertram.

“You see the virtue of the A. R. A.? Marvellous, don’t you think? Almost incredible!”

Perhaps his cold clear eyes had perceived the comradeship of Bertram and “his” princess. If so, he was discreet, and made no personal remarks, and it was by his suggestion that Nadia was asked to go with Bertram and Dr. Weekes to inspect the hospitals and homes for abandoned children in Kazan.

“You’d better take the Princess with you, Doctor. I’ve faith in a woman’s eyes, and anyhow, I’m going to put her in charge of the local committee for child-feeding, so she must get about and see things. You’d like to join them, Pollard?”

It was Nadia who acted as interpreter, and it was by her side, getting courage from her, that Bertram went into places which made him cry out to God in his heart, and filled him with horror, and turned his stomach so that he could hardly prevent himself from vomiting, as he had done in the barrack yard at Petrograd.

The children’s homes seemed worst of all. In the first of them were fifteen hundred who had been abandoned by their parents.

“Why abandoned?” asked Bertram.

Nadia bent down to one child, a girl of twelve or so, stark naked, and so emaciated that all her ribs were visible beneath the tight-drawn skin. Word by word she translated the child’s monologue, told with the gravity of an old woman.

“She says her father belonged to Lubimovka. Once his barns were filled with grain and he had twenty cows. When the drought came, the standing wheat was burnt black in the fields. Red soldiers came and took the grain from the barn, all but a very little. Then the cows died, one by one. There was no food in the house. This little one had six brothers and sisters. Three of them died, because they had no food. The mother wept very much when they died. The father did not weep, until one day he took his children for a long, long walk away from Lubimovka to the town of Tetiushi. Then he said, ‘Wait here a little while, my children. Perhaps God will send his angels with food for you.’ And then he wept, and walked away. They waited a long while, and he did not come back. And God did not come with His angels. So they lay down to die. It was little Anna that died. The two others were fed by the market people in Tetiushi, and then put on a train that came to Kazan. So they were brought to this house, with many other children who were like themselves. They had bread once a day, and potato soup. They would be glad to have some clothes, because it is very cold.”

Nadia turned to Bertram, and her eyes were shining with tears.