Part 31

“This little one knows why her father abandoned her. It was because he loved her, and could not bear to hear her crying out for food when there was nothing in the house.”

“Why are these children naked?” asked Bertram. “They will perish of cold in this house. It’s an ice-well.”

Nadia spoke to a sad-eyed man in a linen coat.

“He says it is the only way of keeping down typhus. When the children come in their clothes are crawling with vermin. He takes off their clothes and burns them. But there are no means of replacing them.”

“Surely they could make fires in the house?”

Nadia shook her head.

“It is impossible to get fuel.”

“There are great woods around Kazan.”

“There is no means of transport for the timber.”

“Men could haul it.”

“The men are weak, he says, and despair makes them lazy. And anyhow, he could not pay for their labour.”

They walked through room after room, all crowded with children. Their heads had been shaved, and in their nakedness they lay huddled close together, so thin, with such deep-sunk eyes, that they were unlike children of the human race, but like a tribe of white monkeys, clinging to each other for warmth in a frozen world. They did not play, or chatter, or laugh. They were utterly silent, with drooping heads, and a terrible old sadness in their little sunken eyes. Because there was no fuel, there was no hot water, and because there was no hot water, there was no cleanliness. A frightful stench pervaded the rooms. Some of the children lay in filth. . . .

“To-morrow I shall come here and do some work,” said Nadia. “The good man means well, but he has no energy.”

Dr. Weekes made some notes in a little book.

“Blankets. Clothes. Soap.”

He whispered a warning to Bertram.

“Don’t brush against the door-posts as you pass. They’re alive with vermin.”

They passed into another room, where there was row after row of children lying on the bare boards, in a kind of feverish sleep, with their heads flopping from side to side.

“Typhus,” said Nadia.

Among the children was a girl of about twenty, in a cotton frock. She lay amidst a group of them, with one arm over their naked bodies, sleeping, with a flame of colour on her face.

Nadia spoke to the man in the linen coat, and then turned to Bertram and Dr. Weekes.

“It is the Countess Narishkin. She was a nurse here. Yesterday she developed the typhus fever. There is no kind of hope for the poor child.”

She knelt down on the bare boards, and put one arm under the girl’s head and raised it a little, smoothing her hair back.

“Princess,” said Dr. Weekes, sternly, “you know enough about typhus to avoid unnecessary risks.”

“That is true,” said Nadia. “For the sake of others.”

She rose from her kneeling position, laying the girl’s head very gently on the boards again.

“I have some medicine,” said the young doctor, “I will give her an injection this afternoon. But I’m afraid—”

He looked at Nadia, and she said “Yes,” understanding him.

That afternoon, using their sleigh, they went to twelve such homes for abandoned children, and in each of them were the same scenes of stricken childhood, and in each of them the same amount of fever, of vermin, of filth, and of stench.

“God!” said Bertram, at last, “It’s too awful. Can you bear to see any more, Nadia?”

She put her hand on his arm.

“It is only the beginning of the things we shall see. It makes you suffer, dear comrade! That is good. You will write such pictures that the world will be moved to tears and charity. They will forgive the sins of Russia because of all this agony. By your words of truth and pity you will help to save those little ones.”

“I’ll try,” said Bertram.

It was a dedication.

In the great hospital of Kazan, once famous in the history of medical science, they plunged deeper into human misery. It was crowded with men and women suffering from every kind of disease, but mostly from typhus and dysentery caused by vermin and hunger and weakness. Whatever their disease, the patients lay huddled together, not on beds, for they had been burnt for fuel, but on the bare boards. They had a few blankets, but not many, which covered four at a time, two lying one way and two the other. There was no heat in the stoves.

Dr. Weekes questioned the chief medical officer, who looked in a dying condition, utterly pallid, and with hardly the strength to walk about his wards.

“Have you any drugs?”

“Very few!”

“Any anæsthetics—chloroform—morphia?”

“None.”

“Any castor-oil?”

“A tiny drop.”

“And disinfectants?”

“No.”

“Any soap?”

“Not for two years.”

“Any bandages, cotton wool, surgical dressings?”

“None, sir.”

“My God!” said Dr. Weekes, and it was the first word of dismay that escaped his lips.

In ward after ward they saw the huddled victims of pestilence and famine. Their clothes had not been burnt, like those in the children’s homes, and they were hunting vermin ceaselessly in their sheepskins and rags. It was difficult to give a guess at the age or class of these people. Young girls looked like old women. Young men had the worn, wrinkled look of extreme age. They were all reduced to a dead level of misery and squalor, and dirt; though among them, said Nadia, who spoke with many, were women of education and even of learning. She went about among the beds. Some of the women lying on the boards, raised themselves a little and kissed her hands.

A strange scene happened downstairs, as they were leaving. The news had gone round among the nurses that an officer of “Ara” had come to inspect the hospital, with means of help. Twenty of them suddenly came clamouring round Dr. Weekes, all crying together, all stretching out their hands to him, like a Greek chorus, with burning eyes in white faces. It was almost dark in the passage there, and Bertram was alarmed by those women’s eyes and by the almost savage anguish of their voices.

“What do they say?” asked Dr. Weekes, turning to Nadia. “What’s their trouble, anyhow?”

“They say they are starving. They implore you to send them bread. How can they nurse the sick, they say, when they are so weak and famished? Only last week two of them died of dysentery, caused by hunger. Soon they will all be dead, they say, unless they get some food.”

“Tell them,” said Dr. Weekes, “that the A. R. A. will send them food, though we are here only to feed the children of Russia.”

He turned to Bertram with troubled eyes.

“I think the Colonel will stand for that pledge. We can’t let these women starve.”

It was Nadia who translated the promise to them, and as though she were the Lady Bountiful who had been the means of rescue, they pressed round her, kissing her hands and her dress, until she laughed and protested, and pointed to the doctor as their champion. He hurried out with deep embarrassment, because one of them seized his hands and tried to kiss them.

That night, as a strange contrast to those scenes, Bertram went to the opera of Kazan with the Colonel and his little crowd. They were playing Boris Goudonoff to a crowded house of young Russians, who were warmly clad, and, in appearance, well fed.

“How is it possible that these people have enough to eat, and enjoy themselves,” asked the Colonel, “while millions are starving all around?”

“They enjoy themselves,” said Cyrus Sims, “but they’re all hungry. There’s not a single man or woman here that’s had enough to eat to-day. But they come to the opera as the one little gleam of light and joy and colour in the monotony of misery.”

“I cannot believe it,” said the Colonel. “Those people aren’t hungry. I guess they’re Soviet officials who have hoarded up secret stores.”

“Some of them, perhaps. But there’s not much chance of that. They’ve been rationed as Soviet workers until a week ago. Now the rations are cut off, and they’re tightening their belts.”

“It’s a new _bourgeoisie_,” said the Colonel. “The Bolsheviks declared war on the old _bourgeoisie_, and then set up a new one of their own. There’s no more equality in Soviet Russia than there is in the United States.”

Bertram agreed with him, but that night he had to admit, after an amazing invasion of the A. R. A., that the glamour and glitter of the opera only concealed the sharp tooth of hunger. It showed itself naked and unashamed when the door was opened to a ringing of bells and a party of opera singers desired to know if they might invite themselves to supper with _Messieurs les Américains_?

How could a party of young Americans, six thousand miles from home, refuse to share their bully beef with art in distress?

“Come right in!” said Sims, in command of “the bunch.”

They came right in, six ladies and three men, including the Prima Donna, who was a Persian lady, with a wonderful voice, enormous black eyes, and a ferocious appetite. The American boys brought out their tinned beef and biscuits, their cheese and butter, and made a picnic meal with hot cocoa. The Russian ladies of the opera, speaking but a few words of French and German, which was their only conversational link with their American hosts who had picked up a smattering of those languages, after two years in Europe, made no concealment of their delight in the presence of this food. They fell upon it like harpies, and it was the beautiful Persian girl who devoured the last of a Dutch cheese with her big black eyes raised in ecstasy.

One of the Americans produced a gramophone, and turned on a jazz tune, and initiated the Persian lady into the mysteries of the fox-trot, while she screamed with laughter. The others, still roving round for stray biscuits, laughed up and down the scale.

Bertram slipped away to his camp bed in a little salon which had once been the writing-room of Nadia’s uncle, Governor of Kazan in Imperial Russia. Those dancers in the next room were like the merry ladies of the Decameron, surrounded by plague.

He looked out of his window to the white night, with a moon above the snow. It was very quiet in Kazan, with its houses filled with naked children, and starving people, where typhus prevailed.

LVIII

In the house where Nadia was lodged with the two other Russian ladies, Bertram was able to have some private talk with her before taking the boat next morning down the Volga.

“I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said. “For a few weeks at least. Afterwards—”

She looked up at him with a smile, as she sat sewing at a table. She was making herself a linen coat such as doctors wear in the wards.

“Afterwards, my friend—?”

He was silent for a little while, thinking deeply of many things—of all his life, and the meaning of it, and the hope of it.

“Perhaps it’s too soon to talk of afterwards. When I come back we will arrange something.”

“What kind of thing?” she asked.

“Our life together,” he said simply.

She rose, and let her linen drop, and took his hands.

“I will be your good comrade,” she said. “For a little while, if you like. For ever, if you like.”

“I want comradeship,” he told her. “I’m lonely, and I hate loneliness. I think we could do good work together, for children, for peace, for ourselves. I’ll be a faithful servant to you, Princess!”

“Not mine,” she said, smiling. “I’m no Princess, but a serving wench. I’m Communist enough to believe in equality between a man and his woman. We will serve God together!”

“I don’t know much about God,” said Bertram. “I’m a hopeless infidel. But I’m spiritual enough to adore the goodness in you. Your courage! Your self-forgetfulness.”

“Where love is, there God is also,” said Nadia. “That’s Tolstoy, but it’s true, I think. We will find God together, in love for each other and the world.”

“I’ve made a hopeless failure of love once,” said Bertram. “I’d be glad to get a second chance.”

“You shall have the chance, dear sir,” said Nadia. “You are one of the great lovers of the world. How proud I am to be your handmaid! I will help you to do your work for poor humanity. Every word you write shall be a light to my love for you. You will make the world know the truth, and I shall have a share in it by keeping you well, giving you comfort in spirit and body, making for you that little private paradise of which once you spoke to me.”

“You promise me good things,” said Bertram. “Better than most men get, and more than I deserve.”

“I promise myself better things,” she answered. “I am selfish in thinking of so many sweet gifts that will come to me with you. Happiness in Russia! I think I shall be the only happy woman.”

“You make me a little afraid,” said Bertram. “You will find me out as a poor fellow.”

“No, I have found you out as a kind, brave gentleman.”

“Something happened to us in the market-place at Moscow!” said Bertram.

“It was God’s hand that turned your head my way and let me look into your eyes.”

“It was luck,” he said. “God, if you like!”

“Love, anyhow,” she answered.

He stood looking into her eyes, and his were thoughtful.

“My love,” he said, “is not a boy’s first flame of passion, body and soul on fire. That was given to my wife, Joyce. In a way it’s hers now, because it belongs to the past which was hers and mine. I shall come to you in a different way, Princess. Not as an ardent boy, but as a man who’s seen the brutality of life, and come through agony, and perhaps has a better understanding of himself and of human nature. But what love I have in my heart, and a comradeship of utter loyalty, devotion, and humility, shall be yours until I die, if you’ll let me live with you so long.”

“We shall arrange our life together,” she said, using the words he had spoken. “Our loving comradeship has no ignorance. We have both seen life’s misery and been touched by it. We shall have the wisdom of love, so that it is more precious.”

LIX

The boat was the last to leave Kazan to go down the Volga. There was already ice in the river, and the wooden piers were being pulled in. The Russian skipper was anxious to get back on the return journey, lest the boat should be ice-bound.

It was not a bad boat. There was room on board for three hundred passengers, and many little cabins in the first class. In the old days it had been a pleasure-steamer for Russian gentry, and the well-to-do _bourgeoisie_, when the summer shone upon the broad waters of the Volga. There had been wine parties on summer nights in the panelled saloon, and under the awnings on the promenade decks. Gipsies had sung the Volga song and their own weird melodies to Russian aristocrats with their pretty mistresses, in this ship of pleasure. Now all its paint had gone, and its decks were dirty, and its cabins foul.

Incredible filth was in the cabins. Bertram and Dr. Weekes made a brief inspection of them and then beat a hasty retreat. Insects of every species crawled up the panels, swarmed in disgusting orgies under the mattresses, made dwelling-places in the very wash-basins. For months, according to the skipper, this had been a refugee ship, transporting thousands of people escaping from the famine. On every voyage dozens of dead bodies had been thrown overboard. Typhus had raged in the ship. Specimens of all the vermin of Southern Russia had mingled in this floating menagerie, and bred and multiplied.

Dr. Weekes was frankly scared.

“A death-ship!” he said.

Yet, with generous courage, he gave Bertram the only clean place for a sleeping berth. It was the table in the dining saloon, which seemed to be free from vermin. Bertram refused the privilege, and would not accept until the young doctor shared its table space. Jemmy Hart, the newspaper correspondent, was with them. He cursed Russia, Bolshevism, and bugs with untiring eloquence, and with rich imaginative efforts. They brought with them sufficient tinned food, it seemed to Bertram, to provide a battalion with two months’ rations, but before the return journey they were on half rations and hungry.

Hungry, though for a time Bertram lost his appetite and never wanted to eat another mouthful of food again until he died. How could he sit down to a meal of pork and beans, good white bread, and American cheese, after days among people who had but a handful of grass between them and death, who watched their children die, one by one, and lay down themselves to die, with nothing of any kind to eat, though they had garnered filth and eaten that until it was gone.

For a day and a night the boat steamed slowly down stream, between the low-lying banks of the Volga, rising steeper as they travelled south. On each side of them was a white desolation, immense, monotonous, unbroken, except now and then where distant villages lay buried in snow. No smoke came from them. No peasants came down to the landing-stages. No sign of human life appeared.

“It’s a great white death,” said Dr. Weekes in a low voice. His fur cap and heavy astrachan collar were covered with snow as he stared from the bridge across the countryside.

“Better dead than alive in this country,” said Jemmy Hart. “That Bolshevik vermin made a merry game of me last night.”

They tied up at Tetuishi, and went across the landing-stage, up steep snow banks to a little town perched on a hill. A few Tartars wandered about the market place, gaunt and shaggy. There were lines of booths, like those in Kazan and Moscow, but there were no soldiers and no buyers, and no merchandise. From a Red soldier sitting inside a sentry-box, with his rifle between his knees, blue-lipped and blue-nosed, and as starved-looking as a stray dog, they found out the whereabouts of the President of the Tetuishi Commune. It was Jemmy Hart who acted as interpreter, having learnt Russian in its prisons.

The President was a dark, liquid-eyed man, with shaggy black hair. Sitting behind him, in his office, were three or four other men of the Soviet Committee, with moody, melancholy eyes. They looked like respectable mechanics at a Baptist meeting, and not like “the bloody Bolsheviks,” as Jemmy Hart called them in their presence, relying on their ignorance of English with an American accent.

Jemmy asked for sleighs and horses—_seichas_! Immediately. He spoke in the name of the A. R. A., to which they bowed their heads, as at the name of God. Certainly. They would have a sleigh and two horses—_seichas_. It was four hours before they arrived, and during that time, between Jemmy’s explosions of impotent wrath, the President of Tetuishi imparted information regarding his district.

It had been a rich granary before the droughts of 1920 and 1921. It had exported a surplus of two million poods of grain. Now the last harvest had only given sixteen hundred poods of grain. The people had very little to eat. In some villages nothing to eat. They were dying in great numbers at Spassk, and in other places to which he pointed on a map which hung behind his desk. The Soviet Government had sent down some barge-loads of potatoes. Owing to the lack of horses it was difficult to transport them to distant villages. It was a great tragedy. Many poor people were doomed.

He spoke in a quiet, kind, melancholy voice, not agonising, not pleading for help, but accepting on behalf of his people an inevitability of death.

The horses came at last, and with Dr. Weekes and Jemmy Hart, Bertram drove across the snow-fields to the nearest villages. The Tartar driver shouted to his lean nags and they went at a great pace over the hard snow, through a frosty wind which slashed Bertram’s face like a whip.

They halted outside the high stockade which surrounds all Russian villages, to keep in the cattle and keep out the wolves.

“Let’s walk in and see the best and the worst,” said Dr. Weekes.

A broad roadway divided the village into two. On each side were neat houses of unplaned logs, squarely built, under sloping roofs, heavily laden with snow. Steeply the snow was banked up all round them.

Not a soul stirred in the village. From one end to the other, there was no sign of life. No dog barked. No cattle stood in the yards or sheds. There was no crowing of cocks or clucking of chickens.

“Is everybody dead?” asked Dr. Weekes, and his voice was startling in the melancholy silence of the place.

“No,” said Bertram, “I have seen faces at the windows, but hardly human.”

He glanced at the window of a cottage close by, and Dr. Weekes looked in that direction. Three little faces were staring out at them, gravely. They were like monkey faces. They were like the faces of the abandoned children in Kazan.

“Let’s go in,” said Dr. Weekes.

He knocked at a cottage door, and after a moment or two it was opened, and on the threshold stood a tall peasant, with a flaxen beard and blue eyes.

Jemmy Hart spoke to him in Russian, and he bowed, and made a gesture, with simple dignity, inviting them to go in.

The room into which they went was spotlessly clean, and newly scrubbed by a woman who stood shyly on one side and then crossed herself, in the Russian fashion when strangers pass the threshold. The three children who had stared out of the window came and clung to her skirts.

Jemmy Hart talked to the man, and then turned to the others.

“He says they are starving, like all the others.”

“Ask them if they have any food at all,” said Dr. Weekes.

“The man says ‘some dried leaves.’”

“Let us see.”

The woman went to a cupboard, and brought out a small wooden bowl, in which was some fine, brownish powder.

She showed it to Bertram, and then began to weep very quietly.

“That is all they have,” said Jemmy Hart.

“What will happen when that is gone?” asked Dr. Weekes. “Have they any hope of getting food from the local Soviet?”

“He says there is no hope, because there is no food. They are waiting, he says, for death.”

Dr. Weekes took one of the children in his arms, and felt its body.

“It won’t be long, I guess,” he said very quietly.

“The man says he will take us to see some of his neighbours,” said Jemmy Hart.

They went with him into another cottage.

An old woman was there, with a child in her arms. She lifted up a cloth around its body, and showed a little skeleton figure, with a strangely distended stomach.

“Starvation,” said Dr. Weekes. “They swell out like that in the last stage.”

The old woman talked with passionate grief, to which Jemmy Hart listened with his head bent.

“She says this child belongs to her son. His wife died a week ago, of dysentery. There was no more food in the house. He walked away into the snow, and has not come back.”

A group of women gathered in the farm-yard next to this old woman’s cottages. In some way they had learnt that strangers had come—perhaps with rescue. They pressed round Bertram, plucking at his coat, crying out to him, weeping, yet with a kind of anger, as though fierce with despair.

One of them brought out a bowl filled with bits of black stone, as it seemed, or lead. She took out a bit of it, and flung it on the ground, and then raised both arms to heaven and gave a loud wailing cry. The other women spoke to Jemmy Hart, and seemed to explain.

“It’s clay,” said Jemmy. “They dig it out of a hill called Bitarjisk. It’s sold for five hundred roubles a pood. They powder it up and mix it with water and swallow it. It has some nutritive quality, I guess, but these women say it bursts the bowels of their little ones.”

The tall peasant who was their guide, elbowed his way through the women who clung to Bertram and his companions with shrill cries. He led them to another cottage, and bade the women stay outside.

Inside it was very quiet and cold. For a moment there was no sign of any life here. But from a pile of rags on a wooden bench against one of the walls, a man rose to a half-sitting posture. He was nearly naked, with but a tattered shirt over his body. His chest was bare, and showed deep hollows below the bones of the neck, and his arms were like withered sticks, and his legs had no flesh on their bones, but only a scabby skin. He was bleeding from the mouth, and there were bloody rims round his eyes. He seemed to Bertram like Lazarus risen from the tomb.