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Title: Russia in 1916

Author: Stephen Graham

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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUSSIA IN 1916 ***





 RUSSIA IN 1916

 BY
 STEPHEN GRAHAM

 Author of “The Way of Martha and the Way
 of Mary,” “Russia and the World,” etc.

 New York
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
 1917




[Illustration: Russian War Picture, Soldier and Nurse]




  COPYRIGHT, 1917,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Set up and electrotyped. Published, February, 1917.




PREFACE


I RETURNED to Russia last summer, visited as many of my old
friends there as I could, arranged for the publication of some of my
books in the Russian language, and incidentally travelled a great deal
and saw a great many sides of Russian contemporary life, talked also
with all manner of Russians.

I travelled to Bergen in Norway, from Bergen obtained a passage round
the North Cape to Vardö, the last port of Norway, transhipped there to
a Russian boat and sailed for Ekaterina, the first port in Russia in
the North, the new Russian harbour which never freezes. From Ekaterina
I went on to Archangel, where I stayed a week, and from Archangel
went to Moscow. I visited some estates in Central Russia and stayed
with various acquaintances and friends, visited Rostof-on-the-Don,
the Caucasus, Orel, Petrograd, and finally came back to England on a
returning ammunition ship.

In going to Russia I certainly did not intend to publish my impressions
in book form, but I have been asked to do so, and I recognise the value
of keeping in contact with our Ally from day to day. The requirement
of the moment seems to be not so much books on Russia, of which there
are now a great many, but diaries or volumes of impressions, keeping
the peoples of the two countries in touch during the war. I returned
to London at the beginning of October, 1916, and I should be glad to
think that some one returning at the beginning of January, 1917, would
follow on with another small volume of this type. Again for April,
1917. We need such volumes of personal impressions, and there would not
be the need to apologise for them. They are letters between friends
both engaged in the same vital task. It is extremely difficult to
keep in touch with Russia by reading newspapers only. The newspapers
are, on the whole, difficult to follow. They are concerned with the
news-aspect of events and the scope for sensational appeals. Good quiet
correspondence tends to be lost in them. Hence my little book of the
hour.

I was in Russia when the war broke out in 1914. I spent 1915 in Egypt,
the Balkans, Russia and England, and again I spent the summer of 1916
in Russia. I have, therefore, been in touch with the Russians all the
time of the war. I hope, therefore, that in this time when deeds rather
than words are necessary, my report of the conditions prevailing in the
land of our ally Russia may be considered serviceable.

                                                  STEPHEN GRAHAM.

  LONDON,
    15 _January_ 1917.




CONTENTS


 CHAPTER                               PAGE

    I A JOURNEY TO EKATERINA              1
   II THE DARK HAVEN                     11
  III THE NEW ARCHANGEL                  25
   IV THE COST OF LIVING                 36
    V LIFE IN THE COUNTRY                49
   VI FATHER YEVGENY                     60
  VII A RUSSIAN COUNTESS                 72
 VIII RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN 1916         81
   IX RUSSIA IN 1916                    101
    X RUSSIAN MONEY                     110
   XI WITHOUT VODKA, BEER, OR WINE      118
  XII GAY LIFE                          133
 XIII OLD FRIENDS                       143
  XIV RUSSIA’S NEW WAR PICTURE          152
   XV IN THE HOSPITAL                   157
  XVI THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE           166
 XVII HOME                              181




RUSSIA IN 1916




I

A JOURNEY TO EKATERINA


I PROPOSED to go from Newcastle to Bergen, to go by Norwegian
steamer from Bergen to Vardö or Kirkenaes on the far north-eastern
limits of Norway, and then wait for some sort of boat to take me to
Ekaterina. In this I was successful, though it was not possible to book
any passage beforehand in England.

I left the night the first misleading news of the North Sea battle
was received. If that news had been correct it would have meant that
the German Fleet had broken through and was at large, and that each
war vessel had become a commerce trader. We stood a chance of being
revised by Germans and perhaps of all English of age being taken away.
A British captain said to me afterwards, “We received that first news
as we were leaving a South American port with a cargo of nitre. We
realised at once that the chances must now be considered against our
arriving safely at a home port.”

Because of the battle the mail boat which had been due in at Newcastle
in the morning, arrived only at nightfall, the revising officers were
late in coming from the examination of the one to the examination of
the other--the _Rhanvald Jarl_, due to go out from Newcastle that
night. I did not get to my cabin till half-past-one in the morning, and
had spent some hours among drunken sailors, one of whom was sick on the
stairs of the Aliens Officer’s room.

The journey to Bergen was not pleasant.

No one to breakfast, no one to lunch, no one to dinner. I doubt if any
one felt in the least anxious about German cruisers or stray mines.
There was other preoccupation.

At Bergen I stayed three days in a hotel. The news in the Norwegian
papers did not flatter the efforts of the Allies. Explanations of the
real significance of the North Sea battle began to appear, but they had
the suggestion of merely trying to give a better face to what was in
reality a very unpleasant happening. For the rest the Germans seemed
to be going ahead, and had captured the fort of Vaux. The only set-off
against these things was the first intelligence of the Russian advance
in Galicia.

I sailed northward in the _Vesteraalen_, the Norwegian mail boat
going to far Kirkenaes. Boats go four or five times a week the whole
distance of the Norwegian coast. They are slow, but, if time is no
object, it is a most interesting journey--the placid fiords and jolly
channels between mountains, the veritable gates in the rocks which
upon occasion you pass through, the many fishing villages and the
trawlers weighed down with herrings, the busy women with their knives
cleaning the fish and emptying barrelful after barrelful of entrails
into the sea, the thousands of gulls ever calling, dipping, screeching,
chasing one another, and then the Lofoten Islands with their mighty
heights, the increasingly stern more northern aspect of Nature, and the
dwellings of man, the passing of the Arctic line, the brilliant nights
with the sun still on the shoulder of the sky at midnight.

I fell in with an English Consul, a young man going to Vardö to
do special work in connection with the war. He was accompanied
by his wife, and she, for her part, had never been out of England
before. At every place the steamer stopped we got out and went for a
walk--sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour or so, according
to the extent of the cargo that had to be discharged or taken on.

At Hammerfest, the most northern town in Europe, dirty snow still lay
on the edges of the streets. A wild place this Hammerfest, apparently
all men and no women, the roadway thronged with hardy sailors. A whole
forest of masts in the harbour, an all-pervading smell of cod liver oil
in the town, a grey and ugly port in June, whatever it may be later on.

Many Norwegians spoke English, though with an American accent, and
they were very friendly to us. I was interested, too, to observe their
love of their own land, a real attachment to the rocks of Norway. It
is majestic scenery all the way from Bergen to the North Cape, and
it has somewhat of the characteristic melancholy of the North. If
Russians lived in this land they would love it for its sadness. But the
Norwegians love its ruggedness, and they say that the wild and rugged
nature of their land has made them what they are. And I suppose Scots
would find there grandeur and the sublimity of Nature.

After the North Cape we entered a region of utter desolation, the coast
a line of snow, the sea grey and dead with the occasional black back of
a porpoise showing. The wind was cold and wintry. We knew that at Vardö
we should find no flowers, no vegetation.

At Vardö I left the boat as I had discovered that boats went to and
fro to Russia therefrom. An important place this Vardö, and a sharp
look-out on Germans should always be kept here. If a submarine
campaign against the shipping of Archangel broke out, there would
probably be some connivance on the part of Germans or neutrals resident
hereabout, and possible bases on this desolate coast.

A most forlorn region subject to terrific gales, cold and snowy. It has
a great number of grey wooden docks with grey fishing-boats; almost all
the houses are of wood, and are of the same grey complexion as boats
and quays, they are low and squat, and the dirty streets are wide.
Innumerable gulls are diving and dipping and fluttering--and shrieking
in chorus.

There are two hotels. One is called appropriately “The North Pole,”
the other is “Vinnans Hotel.” I stayed at the latter, and this,
astonishing to relate, is a first-class hotel with electric light and a
telephone in every room, though there is no one in the town with whom
you can communicate. There is an electric arrangement on the wall for
lighting your cigarette--you press a button and a disc becomes red-hot,
and at that you light up. I suppose some Christiania contractor had
put this up, faithful to the specification quoted in his tender. My
windows had scarlet blinds, and all night long the midnight sun poured
crimson light on my white bed, the huge wind howled and bellowed, and
innumerable gulls cried up and down, now this side, now that.

In the bleak and lonely cemetery are Russian graves with naïve carvings
of the Virgin and Child on the orthodox wooden crosses. Many a Russian
sailor and fisherman has perished on this side of his fatherland.

There are amusements in the town, two cinema shows packed every night,
a shooting saloon, an Aunt Sallie shy called “Amerikanske Sport.” I
hit down one ugly face and received as a reward a postcard picture of
a pretty Norwegian girl about to give a kiss to her beau; there are
band-of-hope meetings with the most excruciating music, and you see
advertised--raffles.

One day fifteen negroes arrived on a boat from Russia. They were the
crew of the American ship _R_---- which had brought ammunition to
Archangel, but was in such a bad condition that the negroes refused to
take it back, got their money and cleared off. At Vardö one of them had
quarrelled with the rest and was now said to be mad. No one would take
him in, all the girls being frightened, and the children aiming stones
at him. He was accommodated in the gaol.

At Vardö there is a most able Russian Consul who is not only most
useful to his own Government, but also to ours, affording him all
the help he can. And a Russian knows more of this neighbourhood
and its phenomena than an Englishman brought from Christiania or
London. Through him I learned that a boat would soon be sailing for
Alexandrovsk, the harbour of Ekaterina, and after a five-days’ stay at
Vardö I got away.

Over the sea once more! In twelve hours I was at the Russian Monastery
of Petschenga, and next day in a big snowstorm I came to the new
harbour.




II

THE DARK HAVEN


FROM the end of November to the middle of January the sun does
not rise in Russia’s new haven. All would be dark even at mid-day were
it not for the snow. The stars never set. The lights in the little
wooden dwellings are never put out. Great gales blow, rolling up
mountainous waves on the Arctic. Or Polar mists swallow up everything.
Snowstorms go on indefinitely and the frost may be forty degrees,
fifty degrees. Here is no town, no civilisation. Alexandrovsk has
no pavement, no high street, no cinema theatre, no hotel, not even
a tavern. Its population is hard, gloomy, northern. No one has any
intelligence of the great world far away to the south--the gaze is
toward the North Pole.

They say it has a great future. ’Twill be a mighty city with roaring
traffic and skyscrapers, theatres, cafés, passion, and sin. It will be
the Odessa of the North. Valery Brussof anticipates such a city in one
of his fantastic stories--Zvezdny, the capital of the Southern Cross
Republic, and as we read we ask--“Could it be? Could such a place ever
come to be?”

In any case, in the midst of this great destructive war one piece of
constructive work is in hand, the fashioning of a new port for Russia
far within the Arctic circle. We hear little of the work in England, or
we hear laconic accounts, such as: “A branch of railways has been built
on from Archangel to an ice-free port farther north, kept open by the
Gulf Stream,” which is inaccurate as regards the route of the railway
and, moreover, gives the impression that such a railway is easily
built, might, in fact, be improvised. But in truth it is not so trivial
a matter. The nearer you get to the actual place the more astonished
you are to recollect the airy opinions you heard expressed in Fleet
Street at home.

The harbour of Ekaterina, on which stand the town of Alexandrovsk and
the barracks of Semionova, is a queen of harbours, a marvellous natural
refuge, certainly no makeshift place. And then, as a glance at the
map will convince, it is not near Archangel, least of all by land. No
railway could ever go direct from Alexandrovsk to Archangel, and no
railway of any kind could easily or rapidly be built over a thousand
miles of _tundra_.

Those Russians who live in the north are in raptures over their new
port. Russia shall face north, the whole of North Russia shall be
functionised in Alexandrovsk and Archangel. And, indeed, the longer the
war lasts the better for this northern region materially. If the war
lasts three years longer Russia will certainly finish up in possession
of a new port and a valuable railway.

An enormous undertaking this, of trying to plant a railway on the
_tundra_. Many have died at work on it; hundreds must inevitably die
before it is a _success_. It was difficult to engineer. Russians say
now that it was badly surveyed to start with and needs re-planning,
but in any case it was extremely difficult to find a way over the
mosses and morasses and along the shores of the almost continuous
lakes that lie between Kola and Kandalaksha. The map of the railway
is now published in Norway and Sweden. It might just as well be made
accessible to the English Press. When Lord Kitchener died, maps
showing his route were printed in our papers as if he had been going to
Alexandrovsk (which was not the case) to travel on a railway which was
not in existence to Archangel! This caused much amusement in Russia.

As a matter of fact, the railway runs from Semionova across the Kola
peninsula to the White Sea at Kandalaksha, and then becomes practically
a coast railway to the little port of Kem. Thence there is a good
railway to Petrozavodsk and Petrograd. It does not come near Archangel.
Indeed, if the formation of this new harbour and railway should be a
practical success, Archangel is almost bound to suffer and to relapse
from its present state of prosperity to its former somnolence.

The railway when completed will be a memorable and valuable
achievement. It has taken an enormous amount of labour to construct.
First, Russian gangs were set to work and then they were called to
fight for their country. A Canadian contractor or contracting company
was then successful in obtaining the work. But the workmen sent over
found themselves confronted by conditions that were necessarily
difficult to have realised in advance. They faced the problem in a
commercial rather than in a military spirit. And when they had gone
there was almost as much work in prospect as when they came.

Their place was largely taken by Austrian prisoners who had volunteered
from their internment camps to come out and work for a wage. The
estimate of the numbers thus employed ranges from 10,000 to 20,000
men. They were guarded by Cherkesses, troops from the Caucasus who
presumably had also volunteered, since military service was not
obligatory for them. The Austrians worked well and did some of the
best work on the railway. But there was considerable suffering. Now
10,000 Chinamen, Kirghiz, and Mongols of various kinds are at work.

In the summer, except for water under foot and mosquitoes in the air,
the conditions are good, but in the winter all the men are working with
torches in the darkness. Despite much forethought on the part of the
Government many of the men have proved to be yet too thinly clad to
withstand the great frosts. The food from a European point of view is
coarse. Yet the work must go on, must be done. This year, before the
spring, one engine covered the whole of the course of the railway--one
only--and then the thaw came and enormous stretches of the track fell
away, were washed off, disappeared.

The Austrians were reported to have laid the sleepers purposely on
lumps of ice. When the thaw came they floated off. But in truth there
was nothing much but ice to lay them on. The Canadians, working with
torches in the darkness, were said to have failed to fix the rails with
the right balance on the sleepers and the first engine that passed over
worked havoc with the embankment. So they say in Alexandrovsk, but,
probably, neither Austrians nor Canadians were to blame--but Nature
simply had not yet been conquered, though there was a semblance of
conquest at the end of the winter.

In the autumn of 1915 Archangel froze unexpectedly early, and vessels
that could not discharge there went to Alexandrovsk to wait for the
railway. Ekaterina was packed with ships--you could almost step from
one ship to another and thus get across from one side of the harbour
to another. And as there were no rings for the moorings of the ships
there was a certain amount of fear that a storm might arise and the
ships dash themselves to bits against one another. But, as it proved,
no matter how fierce the tempest raged outside, this virginal harbour
was always placid.

Towards Christmas (one party on Christmas Eve) arrived our armoured-car
men, now fighting so gallantly with the Grand Duke in Transcaucasia,
telegraphists who erected the wireless stations, naval airmen, troops.
Men-of-war guarded the harbour. In that strange Arctic refuge, what
an assembly of British! They remained all the winter and thought this
Russia they had come to the most God-forsaken place in the world.
Nevertheless, they named the only street of Alexandrovsk “Pall Mall”
and at their concerts they sang incessantly some song about “Leicester
Square, Leicester Square.” One might think Leicester Square was really
an important place in the minds of Englishmen.

One obtains the idea that it is perhaps the Mecca to which the British
soldier turns, and some of the Russian soldiers who are fighting
“to put the Cross on Sancta Sophia” have a vague idea, hearing our
armoured-car men singing, that perhaps we are fighting to get back to
Leicester Square. Their marching songs are folk-lore airs with national
words. A contrast to our music-hall songs imported from America.

On English Old-Year’s night, which is a fortnight before the same date
in Russia, the men on the ships decided to celebrate the coming of
the New Year with festivity. The Russians ashore peacefully slept and
the great gloomy cliffs that close the harbour in were silent as the
grave. Suddenly from all the ships burst forth cries and fireworks
and rockets, songs, shoutings. The Russians ashore all wakened up and
thought the Germans had come.

This Ekaterina is a great sight, a most beautiful place, though
forbidding and austere, a symmetrical, flask-shaped exit from the
Arctic. In the storm of driving mist and snow it was difficult enough
finding the neck of the flask, the way in; but once in, all was peace,
though the storm raged in the heavens and in the air. There were no
ships to speak of in the harbour then, but a good deal of life on the
shore, especially at Semionova.

A tatterdemalion Russian population, some in sheepskins, some in
Caucasian _bourkas_, some in bowler hats, some in old khaki overcoats,
and smoking pipes--evidence of English influence. There were engineers
in leather jackets and with flannel bashleeks over their heads, workmen
in felt boots, many Circassian troops with their rifles and in
ragged uniforms, men with pale, severe faces--they make probably the
most terrible type of Russian troops, silent, faithful, relentlessly
severe and very powerful, speaking little or no Russian, Mohammedan by
religion--the guards of the Austrian prisoners.

When the railway is finished its terminus will be at Semionova, and
that will probably be the name of the new port. Semionova is all new,
unpainted wood. Here are hundreds of shanties and barracks, and an
indescribable chaos of workmen, materials, and mud. Engines puff along
the shore on the bit of railway which is in working order, and on these
engines the various agents and engineers clamber to go to the place of
action where the gangs are at work.

I fell in with various queer people; a speculator buying up land, a
one-eyed man with smoky glasses seeking a site on which to build a
cinema. Eight thousand roubles, would buy a cinema with all fixtures,
including an electric piano. It was bound to be a success, he argued,
for there would be no other place to go to in the long black winter.
Land has been bought up all round the harbour, and by people who
have never seen it--just for speculation, the curse of modern life
in Russia. And all the time whilst Russian peasants and workmen are
slaving and dying, comfortable commercial folk in the south are buying
and selling the prospective fruits of their labour and sufferings.

Still, that is the way of the world, and these people pass, whereas
the work remains. All the autumn and possibly through the winter the
work goes on again in the continuous darkness, with torches, under the
supervision of fur-clad engineers and grim Cherkesses. Many will be
the sufferings, though not greater than the sufferings on the field of
battle. Many have died and will die in the building and consummating
of the Murman railway. Still the railway will remain as a peaceful
memorial, the great new railway from Petrograd to the dark haven.




III

THE NEW ARCHANGEL


WHEN I last visited Archangel, six years ago, it was a dreamy,
lifeless, melancholy port. One felt that, like its sister city,
Kholmagora, it had once been great, but its greatness had finally set.
You could feel the melancholy of Russia there, the sadness of material
failure so characteristic of the Russian soul. But to-day! To-day the
vision has fled, the _tempo_ has changed. All the ships of the world
find anchorage in her harbour, and motley crowds throng her streets.
That the war has brought about. A year before the war fifty vessels
entered Archangel port. During the last twelve months something like
5000 have entered. Great liners and transports and weather-beaten
tramps and three-deck river boats stand in majestic pride. Their smoke
and steam make a dome over the city of Archangel when you approach it
from the north.

There are Norwegians and Yankees, with their colours flamboyantly
painted on their bows to warn the submarine off; Russians and French,
with their tricolours streaming; but most of all English ships, with
their proud rain-washed Union Jacks lolling in the wind. I was taken
through the whole harbour in a little, arrow-like steam launch--from
the Thames! How often it had shot under the arches of our little
bridges, and now it was puffing and panting on the vast brown Dvina,
be-dwarfed by huge ships, driven by a Lett from Riga, and constantly
going short of steam and getting becalmed far from either shore.[1]
Besides troops, the French are taking great quantities of alcohol used
in the manufacture of high explosives, and I saw many barges heaped
up with barrels of spirit and wondered if there were many leaks. The
Russian manufacture of alcohol has probably not diminished as a result
of the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquors in Russia,
but has proved to be a valuable war export. This fact is especially
important to take into consideration with regard to Russian temperance
reform. When the war is over and the market for this alcohol is
partially lost, will there not be another movement of resistance on the
part of the manufacturers?

[1] Thirteen lines excluded by British Censor. Not to be published.

I saw all manner of crates with machinery, parts of aeroplanes, and the
like, and British vessels discharging these things, and I saw grain and
flax and timber going on for us from Russia.

Go into the chief restaurant of Archangel, and as like as not all
the customers are English captains, and they are reading back numbers
of the _Daily Mail_ and talking “ship.” At the Café Paris there is a
“skippers’ table,” where they are also captains all, and the waitresses
quarrel as to who shall serve there, though none of them knows two
words of English. In the Alexandrovsky Gardens you see English sailors
with Russian girls, and neither can say a word to the other. Their only
language is that of looks. One of our men showed me a card with poetry
written and violets painted and asked me to translate the words for him
and write an answer. It ran something like this--

What need for words when without them you are so eloquent? Why should
the lips move When the eyes speak so well?

Sailors tell wonderful stories of feminine conquests, and it is
evident the Russian girls are partial to them. Even at the theatre,
in front of you are sitting such unlikely persons as a fireman and a
stoker, and one says to the other with disgust, “I can’t understand
a blooming word. Can you?” Some Englishmen have exercise books with
Russian words and phrases laboriously copied out--an impossible
language!

All is going well in Archangel. The Russians, in spite of their
inexperience, are handling the immense quantities of materials well,
and the “stuff” is all steadily proceeding to the places where it is
most needed. New quays have been built, and loops of railway run along
them, and some ships, carrying nothing weighing less than three tons,
yet discharge all their immense articles of cargo in considerably less
time than it took to put them on at Liverpool or Dundee or Newcastle
as the case may be.

The Russians earn unheard-of wages in the docks, and the rumour
attracts thousands of workers from all parts of Russia. A journalist
writing in the _Russkoe Slovo_ in July called it the Russian Klondike.
All Russians who go there are pleased with it. The port in its
present grandeur is a sort of promise for Russia, and it flatters her
commercial future.

I was warned I should not find a room anywhere in the city, and that
people paid five roubles a night for the privilege of sleeping in
a passage. But I obtained a clean room at the Troitsky Hotel for 2
roubles 75 copecks, which was not dear. Notices in the room were
printed both in English and Russian, indicating how many English
visitors they have now.

I called on my friend Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof, the hunter and
draper whom I described in “Undiscovered Russia.” He had now opened
a boot shop and was rich, selling his wares at three or four pounds
the pair. He was proud of his business success and rejoiced in the
independence which it gave him. He is now a member of the Gorodskaya
Duma, and when a representative of the city was wanted to carry an
emblem to the Archangel troops at the front, Beekof was thought to be
the best.[2] He shared the hardships of the common soldiers, and was
fain to stay at the front, but was mixed up in the great retreat from
Austria and felt very sick of everything before he got back to his
native city and the boot shop.

[2] Four lines excluded by Censor.

Since I was in Archangel last the young revolutionary exile Alexey
Sergeitch, now pardoned and married and teaching history in Moscow, has
brought out a little book on the Monastery of Ci. I saw him later when
I got to Moscow.

I was invited by the town council to partake of a glass of tea on the
occasion of the opening of the electric tramway. All the notables
of the town were accommodated on board a special steamer, and went
slowly along the Cathedral pier a mile or so to the new electric power
station. Here priests met us with banners and ikons and holy water. A
service was held in the power station, and the smell of burning incense
mingled strangely with the smell of new paint and oil and machinery.
Holy water was flung in all corners and over our heads, and then the
dynamos were set in motion and the whole place buzzed and groaned.
I think Repin, the engineer, proud of having constructed the most
northern tramway in the world, was a little anxious lest the holy water
should spoil his engines.

But all went well, and we took our seats in the virgin trams to
make the first journey, all the notables of the town and with them
every beggar and labourer and tatterdemalion dock-hand that could
get a footing. In Germany I can imagine how swiftly these gentlemen
would have been dealt with. But in Russia “all is permitted” and we
had a joy-ride. We went cheerfully along on our parade journey. The
conductresses in brand new uniforms and shining metal clips and punches
stood with their money bags and their full rolls of tickets. Directly
following our trip to the Town Hall the cars were open to the public,
and fares would be collected. Car after car drew up and we stepped out
and walked up the stone stairs to the long tables and the glasses of
tea and the proud speeches of the great men of Archangel.

Now the trams are in full operation, and bring in about £1,000 a week.
Archangel is united, and friends within the city have become nearer.
All day the trams carry passengers, and all night they carry goods, so
I am told.

As I write of this now in the winter after I have come back to London,
I imagine that probably now all is frozen over again. The brown river
became white, and within twenty-four hours you could drive a horse and
cart over it. It did not melt again till the spring. Captains and their
crews thinking of leaving in a few days and grumbling because of small
delays as they always do grumble, were suddenly condemned to remain
idle for months; their ships, dotted here, there, and everywhere in
the ice, had a processional aspect, and looked as if they were sailing
out and yet never getting forward. The men cut pine branches and made
avenues from their ships to the shores, well-trodden roads with names.
There was “Broadway” leading to a big American ship, and K---- Avenue
leading to the _K_----, and _R_---- Avenue leading to the _R_----. I
may not mention the name of any British ship, but the detail has a
picturesqueness which is worth noting. The Russian Government paid the
owners of these boats hundreds of thousands of roubles damages for
this unexpected incursion of Jack Frost. It was highly unprofitable to
Russia, but every one made the best of it and no one grumbled.

The happy co-operation of the Russians and the English shows to
advantage in Archangel. Russians and English like one another and get
on well together there, though the souls of the common people are so
different and Russian ways so different from our own.




IV

THE COST OF LIVING


EACH time returning to Moscow I notice change. Last year
after the riots it was a city of broken windows and more or less empty
streets. This summer I found the life patched up and the windows
more or less repaired. There were more people; there was an obvious
prosperity of a kind, among the shopkeeping class. Every one talked of
the dearness of living and yet every one had more money wherewith to
buy. And all shops were thriving. Many shops with German names have
now put up a notice to the effect that the owners are Russian. Not
that the German shops which were sacked in July, 1914 have recovered.
Einem, the great confectioner, with all his branches seems to have
sold his retail business. The first-rate art shop and publishing house
of Knebel & Grossman has had to obtain a Government loan in order to
make a start again and supply the schools, but most precious negatives
and blocks and originals perished, and it will be a long time before
the firm can make up for what was lost. Many new cafés and places
of amusement have been opened, testifying to the money in people’s
pockets. Rich fugitives from the districts conquered by the Germans and
Austrians seem to have started businesses in Moscow and have imparted
to it a tinge of the complexion of Warsaw--part of the extra gaiety of
Warsaw seems to have arrived; one notices such new names as that of the
Piccadilly Café opposite Phillipof’s.

Apart from that street gaiety, however, there is sufficient sadness
and anxiety in the background. As in England and France, every family
has its personal stake in the war, and for many that stake has become
the wooden cross over a grave. Young and splendid regiments are still
to be seen marching, however, and to look at them in their new uniforms
one might think for a moment that it was only the beginning, Russia was
entering the war, and no one had yet been lost.

There is engaging enthusiasm still, and withal the noted Slav patience
that does not ask for things to be done quickly. A slow war in many
respects suits the Russian temperament. The most characteristic
thing in Russia is the waiting: waiting hours for your ticket at
the booking-office, waiting hours for Chinovniks, waiting for one’s
money at the bank, waiting for a turn to buy a seat for next week’s
performance at the theatre, whole days if Shaliapin be going to sing.
And now they are waiting with their accustomed cheeriness and patience.

Certainly they have their hardships, those who dwell in the background.
They have plenty of subjects for grumbling and complaints. Their talk
is all of the terrible _dorogovizna_. The pretty word _dorogovizna_
means dearness of living, and it is the commonest in the townsman’s
vocabulary this season of the war. The price of nearly every commodity
in Russia has doubled or trebled since the outbreak of war. One
would expect the price of manufactured goods to rise there; but the
surprising phenomenon is that, despite the overwhelming abundance of
foodstuffs in Russia and Russia’s inability to export any of that
abundance, food has become, on the whole, dearer than in Berlin. The
_Russian Word_ has a long list of comparative prices, showing that out
of sixteen common articles of food ten have increased more in price
in Moscow than in Germany. The price of mutton has increased 180 per
cent. in Berlin, but it has increased 281 per cent. in Moscow; pork
114 per cent. in Berlin, 142 per cent. in Moscow; white bread 27 per
cent. in Berlin, 45 per cent. in Moscow; sugar, 27 per cent. in Berlin,
57 per cent. in Moscow, and so forth. Sugar has in many districts
disappeared entirely, and shop windows exhibit the notice “No sugar
whatever,” which means not even the dirty brown soft sugar which has
displaced the _rafinade_. At Archangel there is a fixed allowance of
1 lb. of sugar per person per month, and that is only accessible for
settled inhabitants. As a visitor I was lucky to purchase twenty-four
lumps at a halfpenny a lump. At the railway stations at many buffets
you are offered sugar candy or raspberry drops with your tea, or a
wrapped caramel with your coffee. In cases where they have sugar the
waiters have the audacity to put it in for you, lest you should secrete
what you did not want. Now cards have been introduced for sugar almost
everywhere, even in the villages. The possession of a card entitles
you to purchase the article specified on it. At first receiving the
food card the heart rejoices. But it is one thing to possess a card
and another to find a grocer who has anything to sell. If we introduce
cards in England we shall probably experience the same anomaly, though
we have certainly more gift for organisation than the Russians.
For food tickets to be a success an extraordinary thoroughness in
administration is necessary and also a good social conscientiousness on
the part of individuals.

When the blue food cards were distributed in one village a rumour
spread that the Anti-Christ had arrived in Russia and was giving these
out. It is said that one inhabitant of foreign origin bought up all the
cards from the peasants at a low price, and they now contentedly buy
their provisions from him when he has them.

Meat has so risen in price that throughout all Russia four meatless
days have been proclaimed, and on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and
Friday you must keep to vegetables, fish, or fowls. On these days no
meat may be sold and no cattle may be slaughtered. The meat may not be
sold in a smoked state nor as sausage. When this measure was introduced
the butchers wailed, if the cows and the calves rejoiced. The chickens
suffered for it. But ask a Russian, and he will tell you all suffer for
it. The price of vegetables has risen, the price of meat on the days
when you buy it has risen, the price of fish and fowl has risen. One
day at the National Hotel in Moscow I noticed cauliflowers standing at
the superb price of 3 roubles, 50 copecks, about 5_s._

From scores of districts in Russia petitions have been sent to
Petrograd--Cancel the regulations as to meatless days. But the
regulations are not likely to be cancelled. At the restaurants such
small portions are given that it is difficult to make a good meal even
at large expense. And the soups which are made without meat are the
same price as they used to be when meat was allowed. It seems that if
meatless days are to be introduced in Britain it will not be merely one
a week for it is always possible to buy meat for two days. They should
be for three or four days a week as in Russia. But phenomena similar to
those I noted will be repeated with us. Vegetables will rise rapidly
in price as a result of meatless days.

Sugar has disappeared because the Germans and Austrians are in
possession of some of the richest beetroot country of Russia, and also
of several sugar factories. Coffee is scarce because there is war with
Turkey; butter and eggs because the peasants, being unable to obtain
vodka, have no particular use for extra cash, and won’t sell their
products. Speculators are holding large quantities of provisions in
ice-houses and waiting till the prices are pushed higher and higher.
The banks are holding quantities of sugar. There are many explanations.

In one window in Moscow is exhibited a notice, “Soap is received daily
and is sold in lumps of not less than 10 lb. up to 10 A. M.”;
in other windows is the notice, “No soap,” and one involuntarily
recalls that piece of nonsense--

  A great she-bear passing down the street. What, no soap; and so she
  married the barber,

in which some Mrs. Gallop might read an occult reference to the Russia
of these days.

Boots have become difficult to buy. Existing supplies are nearly
exhausted. In a boot-shop window in Moscow one pair of boots
exhibited--the last. Second-hand boots are valuable. Boot thieves have
appeared in the hotels, and a new notice has appeared in your room,
“You are requested not to put your boots out at night.” My friend
Beekof, of Archangel, made a huge pile of money selling boots. I met
him lately in Moscow where he has been purchasing expensive works of
art, and even thinks of buying an original Levitan. Boots are too
expensive to buy. They say plaited birchbark or lime-bark boots,
which used to be sold for 2_d._ a pair in the country, now fetch
5_s._ Peasants are sitting plaiting boots on suburban stations and
selling them as fast as they make them. Repairs are so expensive that a
parlourmaid spent a month’s wages on having her boots mended. Happily
the town councils have fixed a tariff in Moscow and Petrograd at last,
both for boots and for repairs.

Russian houses are heated with wood, and strange to say, in the midst
of her enormous forests she is short of wood. Wood has doubled and
trebled in price. The poor people must freeze. There are not working
hands to cut wood--so many having been taken for more profitable
occupations. I have been asked a shilling for a packet of rubbishy
envelopes. Paper is very dear--some of the best Russian paper mills are
in the hands of the enemy. All metal articles are expensive. A decent
samovar costs 50 to 60 roubles. There is said to be famine in medicine,
and the chemists’ supplies are short. Certainly the Russians seem to
be enjoying better health on the whole.

They say all is going to be regulated. The Government is going to take
charge of the whole business of supply and there will be cards for
everything, and you must call at the grocer and present your card. Once
more calls and cards, and cards and calls. But our Russian friends
are the most unpractical people. You see every day in Moscow queues
a street long, waiting hours with cards in their hands, waiting for
a pound or so of sugar. Such queues turned up at the butchers’ shops
on the mornings of the meat days that the butchers decided to issue
tickets the day beforehand--on each ticket a number designating your
turn to buy meat on the morrow. Thus recently 2,000 waited on Arbat
from 4 P. M. to midnight for a ticket for a turn next day. The
vegetarian propagandist turns up to look at their solemn faces. “Is it
worth it?” he asks. Happy vegetarians!

“But you know if I don’t get meat my stomach will go wrong,” says a
Russian plaintively.

“What is tea without sugar?” says another. “And what is life without
tea?”

Another comes to the doctor and says, “Prescribe, if you please. I’ve
lost my appetite. I can’t eat.”

And the doctor replies, like that friend of Carlyle--

“My dear fellow, it isn’t of the slightest consequence.”

“The Army has meat, tea, sugar, white bread?”

“Yes, the Army has all these in plenty.”

“Slava Tebye Gospody! That’s all right.”




V

LIFE IN THE COUNTRY


FROM Moscow I journeyed to see some friends of the artist
Pereplotchikof, the E. family, on a small estate in the Government of
Voronezh. At the small wayside station an unfamiliar figure greeted
me--this was an Austrian prisoner, a Hungarian who could not speak a
word of Russian. He was the new coachman, and would drive me the ten
miles to the farm. The former coachman has gone to the war, and so now
an Austrian prisoner, in the same uniform in which he surrendered and
wearing the familiar high military hat, is doing his work. He carried
my bags from the station, for there was no porter, and put them in the
carriage, and then drove me on through verdant forest and along the
terrible road deep in liquid mud and water.

A great feature of the new country life in Russia is the Austrian
prisoners at work. One seldom comes across any Germans. But of
Austrians there are great numbers. They volunteer to go out to work,
rather than remain in the internment camps. In order to obtain Austrian
prisoners to work on an estate you apply to the government town, and
they are hired out to you at eight roubles a month, four roubles of
which are allowed to be deducted for keep. It turns out that on the
whole the prisoners work merely for board and lodging and what would
keep an ordinary smoker in tobacco. Prisoner labour is altogether
cheaper than that of ordinary Russian labourers. So if you can get
a strong detachment of prisoners on your estate you are somewhat
advantageously circumstanced. No guards, however, are supplied with
the prisoners, and you are held responsible for them in case they
attempt to escape. The prisoners on the land are generally those
who were agriculturists in their native Austria and they are highly
serviceable. They do not take their new duties too seriously, but all
the same do more work than the average hired Russian labourer would do.
To work is more pleasant to them than to sit together and talk or sing,
and their industrious habits are a matter of pleasant surprise for
their employers.

On Mme. E.’s estate the prisoners were Hungarians. She knew no
Hungarian, they no Russian, and no grammars or dictionaries of the
Hungarian language were obtainable in Moscow or Petrograd--the only
aid to learning the language which Mme. E. was able to obtain was an
officer’s war guide containing maps, geographical details, and five or
six pages of military phrases with translations. Even so, good progress
was being rapidly made in mutual understanding. These Hungarians will
carry back to their own country many funny-sounding Russian words, and
on the other hand some Hungarian expressions may remain locally.

Certainly the prisoners are of great economic aid to Russia. Each
Austrian captured is not only one Austrian less in the enemy ranks, but
one harvester more to take in the precious grain. The Russian women,
the old men and the children, seem to be insufficient to keep up the
present extent of cultivation and to reap the harvest--the labour of
the prisoners makes up the deficiency.

In many respects the prisoner of this foreign element in the midst of
Russian country life is sufficiently objectionable from the Russian
point of view. There are said to have been a number of marriages,
though the difference in religion must have precluded the possibility
of legal marriage in most cases where it may have been desired.

There is a cloud over the village, and it cannot be said that the war
is popular among the women. They want the men back; the wives want
their husbands, the girls want their sweethearts. Girls of sixteen,
seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are persistently gloomy. They feel
that time is slipping past without bringing the necessary bridegroom.
They should have been betrothed and married by now. Nineteen is a
dreadful age for an unmarried girl--she feels herself already an old
maid, and is disinclined to tell her age. Pretty Tania the serving-maid
does not look so pretty this year; she has let the fact that she is
eighteen prey upon her mind. She knows that when the boys come back
they will not look at any one so old as she, and she will be left.

On festival nights there is the same singing in the village street, the
parade of village fashions, but somehow it is rather meaningless since
there are no male partners and no weddings can be arranged. Letters of
course go to and fro between the Army and the village, but the soldier
does not write to “his sweetheart,” or if he does it is because his
sweetheart is his wife. For long engagements do not take place in the
country. Queer letters the soldiers send back, full of greetings to
neighbours and relatives, and containing little or nothing about the
war. There is never any need to censor them. The peasant wives bring
their letters to Mme. E. and she reads them aloud. Or they come to her
when they want to write their letters, for though most of the men can
read and write, the women seldom are able.

My hostess was delightful with the peasants. She has taught among them,
nursed them, cared for them, and understands their souls. She sits
with pen and paper on the sunny verandah of the big sunny house and
writes at dictation whilst the peasant wife, with her hands dangling at
her side, maunders on about the cow, the hole in the roof which needs
mending, the state of the crops, little Willie’s health, the amount of
work these Austrian prisoners do, and so on. She puts down literally
what the _baba_ says, as if she were doing an exercise in phonetics,
and never corrects a word or a wrong expression or a grammatical error.
The consequence is that the soldiers at the other end actually hear
their wives speaking to them, and highly appreciate it. The letters
which Mme. E. writes for the wives are the best.

Still, letters are makeshift ways of talking to one’s nearest, and
it is a great day in the village when a soldier actually returns, a
wounded man invalided back or a man with some sort of message. Alas,
Russian troops get very little “leave” whilst they are well. It often
happens that from the day of mobilisation to the peace day when the men
come home, nothing is seen or heard of the common soldier--especially
when he cannot write. Lists of casualties in the ranks are not
published, and the village has to wait patiently to know whom it has
lost and who are saved. More attention is paid to officers, even to
ensigns, and I met down here in Voronezh Province a private who had
been sent from the front to convey to the home people the decorations
and last tidings of a young ensign who had perished leading his men.
This officer had been greatly beloved by the soldiers--they rushed to
him when he fell, and he seemed merely to be asleep. But one bullet
had gone through his mouth and two through his skull. He was given
the Cross of St. George after his death, and a soldier was detached
to carry the last honours home and tell the tale of his death.
Incidentally the soldier brought to the village his story of the war.

A rainy summer in the village. In many places the priests prayed for
the rain to stop. The hay rotted where it lay, and could not be taken
in, but the wheat and the rye were good everywhere. And the fruit
harvest was good. Some one made a handsome profit on apples, since the
common price in Moscow was threepence or fourpence apiece. Despite the
dearth of sugar, jam-making was carried on in the country to an even
greater extent than usual. People felt that it was a good way to save
sugar for the winter, to put it into jam. Russian jam is much sweeter
than ours, and is often put in tea as a syrup. It is never spread on
bread and butter. Mme. E. obtained several sacks of soft sugar, about
three hundredweight in all, and the half of that she used for making
jam.

The orchard’s fruit, however, had been sold in advance in the spring.
An Armenian had come, considered the blossom, and offered a price which
was accepted. He had made a good speculation as it turned out, and
he put a watchman in among the trees with a dog to see that nothing
was stolen. The watchman was one of the unfortunate refugees from the
territory now occupied by the Germans. Two years ago he had been a
prosperous farmer with his own land and horses and cows and what not,
now he is a miserable half-savage in sheepskins lying in a rain-soaked
straw shelter in the orchard--sans land, sans wife, sans everything. A
Roman Catholic he, but he went to the Orthodox Church on Sunday, as did
also the Hungarian prisoners, for they said in their halting way what
it is difficult for the more prosperous to understand, that _Bog odin_,
God is One, and that if there be no Catholic church by, it is as easy
to pray to God in the church that there is.




VI

FATHER YEVGENY


THE faces in the passing crowd are always somewhat of an
enigma. There are so many that we do not know, each with his own wide
story, which, however, does not touch our story. One is tempted to go
up and place the hand in the slightly unwilling and doubtful hand of
the stranger and say, “I know you, do I not?” And it is always somewhat
of a miracle if in the midst of the sea of faces there suddenly turns
up the familiar face. There happened to me when I returned to Moscow
after my stay at Mme. E.’s a miracle of this kind. I met one of my
pilgrims again, one of those I accompanied to Jerusalem five years ago,
whom I did not expect to see again--the aged hermit Yevgeny.

I passed and repassed him twice, and he for his part stopped and seemed
to be vaguely wondering what he should do next. ’Twas outside the
Yaroslavsky station, and I was hurrying to catch a suburban train to
visit some friends. There was a great swirl of traffic, and many trams
were circling and groaning, emptying and receiving passengers.

“Father Yevgeny,” said I. “Do you not recognise me?”

He seemed taken aback, and shrank rather as if the devil had taken a
new form to tempt him. I recalled that he was considerably troubled by
the devil.

“We met at Jerusalem, did we not?” said I. “Don’t you remember, we used
to read the Bible together in the mornings?”

Then he recognised me, and a bright and happy smile transfigured his
pallid, wrinkled cheeks and sunken eyes.

He lifted up his bent shoulders and kissed me, first on one cheek, then
on the other, and proclaimed in a loud voice, “God has done this. It is
a miracle. He meant that we should meet again. But how changed you are!
You have grown taller. Yes, it is you. But it is a miracle. God has
done it.”

We were a strange contrast. I in a light summer suit and wearing a
straw hat; he, in any case a remarkable figure, tall though drooping,
with yellowish-white ancient locks and toothless gums. Several people
stopped to look at us, and some approached more closely to hear what we
were talking about. The representatives of two contrary worlds seemed
to have met, for I clearly belonged to that gay, worldly, commercial
Moscow which is so out of touch with Holy Russia, and the monk was
one of those forbidding figures one would not expect to smile and be
demonstrative in the public street.

I wrote him my address, and he promised to come to me on the morrow.
I then sped on to catch the train, my heart full of delight at this
surprising meeting, this true miracle to which the bright Sunday had
given birth.

Next day Yevgeny came to the hotel at which I was staying and asked
for me. He had put on for the occasion an old straw hat and over it a
surprisingly old and dirty Egyptian sun-helmet. In his hand he bore a
tall cypress staff with a cross on the top, a true palmer’s staff, but
a rare enough sight in Moscow.

The porter of the hotel is artificially made fat like a swell coachman,
and he wears in his hat a circle of tips of peacock-feathers which
make him look very grand. It is his business to know every one who
goes in and out of the great hotel. Probably for the first time in his
experience a monk made to enter the establishment. Father Yevgeny and
he--again two worlds confronting one another.

“No. 214 on the second floor,” said the respectful man in charge of
keys and correspondence.

“This way!” said a small boy, pointing to the lift.

But old Yevgeny had never been on a lift in his life.

“My sinful old legs will carry me up,” said he--he mounted the many
stretches of broad carpeted stairway to the second floor, which is
really the third. There was a timid knock at my door, and my visitor
had arrived.

“Father Yevgeny!” I cried.

I showed him his portrait in my book, and translated aloud the
chapter written there about him. He seemed to be extremely pleased.
We considered the portraits of the other pilgrims in turn. Abraham,
who had been twenty times to Jerusalem, was of a Cossack family. The
man carrying the lantern designed for the holy fire was now dead. The
priest standing beside the dead pilgrim in the picture was now at
Troitskaya Lavra. I made Father Yevgeny a present of the volume, and he
bade me write in it in Russian, “To the hermit Yevgeny of Mount Athos.”

“How is it you come to be in Moscow and not at Mount Athos?” I asked.

“The war prevented me. I had come back to Russia to visit my native
village before I died, and whilst I was here the war broke out. I was
hastening back, but our Moscow Metropolite put his hand on my head one
Sunday after morning service and said, ‘Thou art thinking of going to
Afon--wait, do not go.’ Then war with Turkey commenced, and the way was
stopped. Good Father Philaret of the Bogoyavlensky Monastery gave me
shelter, and that is where I am living now.”

He recounted how, when the war broke out, he had a vision. He looked
up into the sky, and it was filled with little white clouds hurrying
southward. He was mistaken in thinking them clouds; he saw later that
they were in fact the hosts of the angels ranging themselves on the
side of Serbia to save her from the Austrians.

Yevgeny and I spent the whole day together. In the evening I had to
leave Moscow, and he saw me off at the station. He talked a great deal
about his visions. For instance, he had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. One
sunny afternoon in the monastery yard he fell into a trance, and in
the trance he saw what he had wanted to see all his life--a vision of
the Kingdom. “There are really four heavens,” said he. “The first is
so splendid, so full of light, that it is almost impossible to look at
it; and in the midst of the light sit the Holy Trinity. Round and round
them all the while and for ever the cherubs keep moving and they sing
oi-oi-oi-ei-ei-ei-ai-ai-ai ... and never cease for a moment. In the
second heaven I saw the apostles and the prophets. In the third heaven
were the holy _ugodniki_, and in the fourth were a great crowd of all
sorts and conditions of men and women all in white. There were many,
many of our Russians there--I was so glad, so full of joy that I went.
And then suddenly it all vanished, and I found myself in the monastery
yard and on my knees, and my hands were on the white head of an old,
old pilgrim woman. I asked her if she had seen anything, but she had
seen nothing.”

I asked Father Yevgeny about the Mount Athos heresy, and the
Name-of-Godites, as the heretics were irreverently called. I had a
faint suspicion that Yevgeny might be one of them. But he was very
robustly against them. “It all sprang from one man who was himself
illiterate,” said he. “He held that as the Three were One, therefore
Jesus and God were one and the same, and that in the beginning Jesus
made the heavens and the earth. And he got a great following among the
Russian monks. But he was altogether in the wrong, and if he had read
he would have understood that Jesus the Son of God was born in the
fulness of time, and the Name of God must therefore have priority. Ah!
now they have all confessed they were wrong, and have been pardoned.”

We walked out into the Moscow streets, and all the while the old monk
talked most energetically, and made astonishing gestures. One moment
he saw a large triangle on a poster and spat to one side as he passed.
“The symbol of the masons,” said he. “To-day the Cross is fighting
the triangle, that is one meaning of the war. Do you know, many of
the stewards of the old vodka shops were secretly masons, and it was
found that they cut out on the floor underneath the shop counters, a
cross--so that the drunkards might trample it under foot.” Yevgeny’s
large intellectual face with wizened white eyebrows, and fine eyes at
the bottom of caverns of wrinkled flesh, was full of animation, his
gap-toothed mouth blurted the long torrent of words which it could
hardly control, his long black gown from neck to ankles flapped in the
wind.

I was sorry to have to part with him again so soon. But I promised to
re-find him when I returned to Moscow. He came with me to the Kursky
station. “God meant that we should meet again,” said he. “It was a
miracle. All my life is full of miracles.” He told me the miracles of
his birth. His mother was one of the serfs. She married, but was eight
years childless. This caused her great grief, and she did not cease to
pray to God that she might bear a child. “If it be a boy, he shall be
either a soldier or a monk,” she promised God. Interesting that she
should feel that to be a soldier was also to be consecrated to God.
Yevgeny was born, and when he grew up he volunteered to be a soldier,
and went to fight the Turks. He was wounded, and as he lay on the
battlefield in great pain, and facing death, he promised his life to
God. He then rapidly recovered, and, fulfilling his promise, entered a
monastery. Since then all his life he has allowed himself to be guided
by visions and inspirations rather than by reason.

In the vague light in the train, all the passengers were quarrelling
over places, and the porters were struggling with baskets and bundles.
The old monk stood on the grey platform and embraced me very warmly,
and then I stepped up, and the third bell tinkled and the whistle
blew, and the train slowly ran out--leaving Yevgeny at the far end
of the platform and the space of unoccupied rails behind the train,
momentarily increasing.




VII

A RUSSIAN COUNTESS


I MADE a journey into the depths of one of the central provinces
and visited Countess X. She had been in England when the war broke
out, and before she could get back to Russia her husband had
volunteered and had already been taken prisoner by the Germans. In her
it was possible to visualise something of the personal tragedy of the
war. A charming and rather beautiful woman, the war commenced when she
was on the threshold of life, when, as she said, life seemed to promise
so much. She is only thirty-four, and is yet white-haired and deaf and
feels herself becoming older every month. “When my husband comes back
he will find me an old woman.”

Both she and her husband belong to the old nobility of Russia; in the
library face themselves old paintings of her ancestor and his, both
conspirators in the plot to murder Paul I, both expelled from St.
Petersburg of that day and ordered to live on their estates, where it
is said they did not behave too sweetly to their serfs. The present
Count is an idealist, an admirer of the great idealistic classics of
Russian literature, a man who loves the peasants, and ordinarily spends
most of his time on his estates. The Countess deplored the sort of
men he would bring into dinner, knowing not the usage of the knife,
drinking the water of the finger-bowls, and what-not, but country
manners never touched him--he simply did not see what was being done.

When war broke out he was in such a hurry to get to the front that
he accepted a commission in some town regiment where, as a rule, the
nobility do not figure, and he went forward on the great wave of
Russian enthusiasm which led to Tannenberg. There he was taken prisoner
with many thousand others, and was removed into the depths of Germany.
As a prisoner he made an attempt to escape, but was arrested before
he reached the frontier. For this offence he was put in a fortress in
Saxony and confined for a long time solitarily. But he was not treated
too badly by the Germans and was given pens and paper and books. He
wrote to the Countess for one of my books, of which there had been
considerable talk before the war. That was my “Russian Pilgrims.” The
Countess had bought a copy, lent it to Mme. S., who had passed it on
to the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, and they had all found it interesting.
It was sent to Count X. in Germany and he translated it. It was rather
touching from my point of view to know that a Russian prisoner had
spent so many solitary hours with me, working at a book I wrote. When
my “Martha and Mary” was published he had that book also sent to him
and he translated it, and wrote so much about the consolation that the
Countess averred she felt jealous of my name occurring so often in his
letters. Unfortunately, “Martha and Mary” had already been translated.

The Countess disapproved of her husband’s idealism and would rather
have had him of a more careless worldly type. She craved life, not
merely ideas, and was afraid that the sedentary life of her husband in
the fortress would so tell on his mind that when he came back he would
be less practical than ever.

“Life is going to be good,” he wrote. “I have not known till now what
possibilities it held, what wisdom there was in men, what beauty.
All will begin again when I come back to Mother-of-God village” (the
place where his land is situated). “I want to re-read all our poets.
Their voices are going to sound again. Do you know Solovyof? He is
wise and tender and beautiful. When I come back I will not stray from
Mother-of-God village, not to Petrograd or to Moscow. But we will sit
together and read Solovyof; you shall read him aloud to me and I will
be content....”

“Ah, but I dread that,” said the Countess. “I should not want to sit
and read Solovyof. I want to live for my boy at least. We cannot go
on living here if my boy is to be educated properly. But then--you
know what Tolstoy said to women, ‘Never use your influence with your
husbands to make them act contrary to their convictions.’ Do you agree
to that? I do not. I use all the influence I have.

“Life has been a great disillusion for me. It promised so much. Once
I used to think there was nothing more wonderful than what life was
going to bring. Now I see it is empty. There is nothing coming. Then
the war goes on from week to week and month to month, interminably and
without any gleam of hope of an end. It is very well to say the war
will end by Christmas, next Christmas next again. I do not believe it.
My boy is thirteen, delicate, enthusiastic, excitable, and already he
is experiencing the emotion of love. He lost his heart lately to one
of his cousins. She is twenty and is somewhat amused. The other day
he picked up my hand and kissed it, which was somewhat unusual, and I
turned to him. There were tears in his eyes and he looked up at me and
said, ‘Ah, mother, how sorry I am it is not Vera’s hand.’ Galling, was
it not?”

The Countess, for all her inward sadness and her deafness, was
extremely vivacious, and when she did not hear she imagined what you
said and was very often right. “I am sorry if sometimes I do not hear,”
she said. “Teach me to speak to you so that you will hear,” said I,
which is a simple sentence but a suggestive thought.

An interesting and sad time I spent with the Countess. Her quiet
tragedy, that of being robbed of a husband and robbed of precious time,
is part of the great universal tragedy of war, which touches rich and
poor alike, simple and noble. The war has come athwart many promising
lives in this generation and robbed the whole of the past and of the
future of all mortal significance. Still, it has also given spiritual
treasure in the heart, in the soul, hidden treasure--that is what we
must not overlook.

A letter which I have just received from the poor prisoner gives the
following thoughts:

“Your book has changed much in my conception of life. I was too Martha.
These last two years of captivity have been a pilgrimage for me though
I have stayed in one place. Still I console myself by thinking that
if I am suffering others also are, when I should, on the contrary,
remember that what happens to me happens to no one else.

“I have just been told that my translations may not be sent out of
Germany, but I hear that one book will soon appear in Russia. It will
be good for Russians to read it now.

“You are right saying that we shall be mad with joy at our relief. I
cannot yet feel myself free spiritually in prison, and for me the
body’s freedom is still the greatest thing on earth, but I think of
the day of deliverance as something so remote and so beautiful that I
compare it with our resurrection from death.”




VIII

RUSSIAN LITERATURE IN 1916


I READ, as ever, a great number of contemporary Russian books,
spent many hours in bookshops, and it may not be out of place to give
my impression of the literature of the hour.

Undoubtedly the great emotional impulse of the opening of the war
in Russia has passed. This is reflected very clearly in current
literature. The flood of printed lectures, war-pamphlets, and poems has
ceased. Volumes of war stories are no longer printed, and indeed the
war as a literary topic has become of minor interest. In the clearance
it is now possible to observe the great desolation which the war has
wrought. There is a strange silence in Russia. What was before the war
has passed; what shall be after has not begun to be. There is as yet no
promise of the future anywhere.

Not that books have not been published in 1916. They have been
published thickly, despite the absence of genius, the scarcity of
paper, and the supposed dearth of readers. Fonvisin gets into her
eighteenth thousand with “Innocent and Yet to Blame,” and “The Keys of
Happiness” goes into the sixth sequel. “The End of the War,” a novel
by Lef Zhdanof, runs through several editions. “Russian Master,” an
enthralling yellow-back of 470 pages by Lappo-Danilevsky, is reprinted
many times. The translation of the novels of W. J. Locke flood over
every bookseller’s counter and railway station book-stall. New books
are certainly as plentiful as ever. But they are mostly interim
volumes whose object is to pass the time away till the clamour of the
war be over.

Gorky, who appears more and more as an editor and essayist, has issued
a volume of translated Armenian literature, but he is putting forth
no creative artistic work, and perhaps finds little time for it. As a
reward, however, politically-minded Radical Russia certainly looks to
him for light and leading. Andreef goes on writing, but seems to have
fallen into minor importance. Viacheslaf Ivanof has just written an
excellent book of essays on Dostoevsky, Solovyof, Tolstoy, etc., which
ought to be translated into English together with his former book “From
Star to Star.” Artsibashef continues to write salacious stories for the
Russian middle-class, and seems to reflect their life and mind. Igor
Severanin is quiescent, but his latest volume of poems, printed on bad
paper, is dedicated to his “Thirteenth,” by which he apparently means
his thirteenth “lady friend.” A curious volume lately confiscated by
the police is “Father Leontius and his Lady Admirers,” an account of
Rasputin, written in the form of a fictitious narrative by a serious
student of sectarianism and religious phenomena--Prugavin. The society
ladies circle round Leontius and cry out “Alleluia!” “Sabaoth!” “Three
in One and One in Three!” which seems very shocking and novel to
Russians, though it only reminds the English reader of the Agapemonites
at Clapton and similar phenomena. Greater than the problem of the
psychology of Leontius seems to be the problem of the psychology of the
refined and normal women who can hail him as God. Lef Zhdanof’s popular
novel on the war is very friendly to the German people and gives
them a new chance after a political revolution. Balmont, the popular
poet, has written an essay in one volume entitled “Poetry as Magic,”
and parts are highly reminiscent of Stevenson’s “Art of Writing.” He
analyses the functions of the letters of the alphabet: _L_ is a caress;
_o_ is space triumphant; _u_ is the music of noise, the cry of terror;
_m_ is man shutting his lips, it is all the dumb can say in their
anguish, etc.

Walter Pater is being translated, and seems to be appreciated by
cultured Russians, though it is a pity that only fragments and not
the whole of his masterpiece “Marius the Epicurean” are appearing in
the collection of his works. There is certainly a great demand for
English books, and our literature remains in vogue. And books about
England have been appearing, the latest being Nabokof’s account of his
visit with the journalists. It is somewhat inadequate as an account of
England, but then it pretends to reflect only the impressions of this
officially guided tour. Nabokof seems to have been greatly impressed
by Sir Edward Grey as a new type of diplomatist, a man whose strength
lies in the fact that he is always a gentleman and tells the simple
truth. Chukovsky’s book, “The Silent Ones have Spoken,” on the British
Tommy is popular. Incidentally it may be remarked that Chukovsky, who
made such an impression in England, is a journalistic critic of a
penetrative quality. His “From Chekhof to our Days,” though containing
some things impossible to print in English, is yet a very clever book.
A new correspondent of some ability is now representing the _Russkoe
Slovo_ in England and giving a more representative account of our life
than the old school of academic Radicals who usually represent Russian
newspapers abroad.

Rozanof’s book on the war, “The War and the Popular Awakening,” has
been out of print for some time, and presumably his publisher has no
paper. Novikof’s popular novel on the present point of view with regard
to the Revolution is also unobtainable. Many good books of previous
years have not been reprinted through the dearness or scarcity of
paper. On the other hand, certain more obscure publishers who have
managed to hoard up paper can carry on their business in full swing.
The chief commercial event of the year in the literary world has been
the purchase by Seetin of the _Niva_, the extremely popular weekly. As
Seetin already owns the _Russkoe Slovo_ and several other papers and
literary enterprises, he is becoming somewhat of a literary king, an
interesting figure in modern Russia, for he started life as a peasant,
became an itinerant hawker of penny books for the people, and is now a
man of great power in Russia.

M. Protopopof, now Minister of the Interior, a man of large commercial
interests, is now, backed by certain banks (previously of a strong
German complexion but now said to be decently metamorphosed), starting
a large new Petrograd newspaper (name not yet decided). There were
many blunders in the advertisement of this newspaper enterprise. It
was stated that Korolinko would be editor and that Léonid Andreef and
many other popular writers would contribute. But Korolinko fought shy
of it and the other writers one by one disclaimed interest in the
publication. Maxim Gorky was asked to edit it but found out apparently
that it was not revolutionary in tendency, was capitalist rather than
labour, and that the object was international trade prosperity, and he
withdrew entirely. Now A. V. Amphiteatrof, the Italian correspondent
of the _Russkoe Slovo_ and author of a great number of curiously
interesting historical studies, is to be the editor. He is an
Italophile and favours much more friendly relationship between Italy
and Russia; in politics he may be said to be Radical and has got into
trouble with the Government upon occasion. It will be interesting to
see whether the enormous capital behind this paper will give it the
chance of success that the same amount of capital behind a new paper in
England would give. In Russia large capital is considered fair prey by
all who can get itching fingers near it.

These notes give an indication of literary currents and tendencies in
the autumn of 1916, in the midst of the war. It should be added that,
despite the great rise in prices of all things in Russia, the price of
books remains almost as cheap as ever. Reading certainly increases,
and consequently makes the general cost of publication less. The most
characteristic of the new war phenomena of Russia is still the cry
“_Gazette, Gazette!_” flung up at the trains from the fields wherever
you travel. You are asked to throw your old newspapers out of the train
window, that the people in the villages may read them. This cry will
hardly die down when the war is over. But will the gazette satisfy?
Will not books have to follow, and more substantial, better books,
because of what the peasants have learned from reality? Russia is
waiting for new national writers.

       *       *       *       *       *

An interesting phenomenon in the life of contemporary Russia is the
position taken up by Maxim Gorky as a challenger of the national and
traditional ideas in Russian life and literature. He has become the
spokesman of a considerable number of working men and middle-class
Russians, but has at the same time brought upon his head the wrath
not only of old-fashioned people but of a great number of liberal and
progressive thinkers. His campaign began when he returned to Russia at
the beginning of 1914 and launched his attack on Dostoevsky. The war
seemed to cause a lull in his activities, but last winter he resumed
his verbal warfare with more energy than ever. His point of view is,
that Dostoevsky is bad for Russia, because his outlook was concentrated
on suffering and death. Russia must turn her back resolutely on
Dostoevsky and seek life. Russia must cease to be mystical, suffering,
melancholy, and must become clear-minded and mistress of her soul. The
challenge raised a great clamour. At first not many sided with him; but
since the appearance of “Two Souls”[3] and “A Letter to the Reader”[4]
in the journal _Lietopis_ it becomes evident that he has some
following. He has raised a question, and many Russians are considering
it for the first time.

[3] “Two Souls,” by Maxim Gorky. (_Lietopis_, December 1915.)

[4] “A Letter to the Reader,” by Maxim Gorky. (_Lietopis_, March 1916.)

The Russian which Gorky attacks is just that which is spiritually
interesting to us in England--the mystical and unpractical Russia.
Russia on pilgrimage, artistic Russia; and that which he wants Russia
to be is just what would have least spiritual interest for us--Russia
optimistic, cocksure, businesslike, well-dressed, smart, and Western.
He writes:

  “The Russian seeking-after-God comes from an insufficiency of
  conviction in the force of reason--from the need of a weak man to find
  some guiding will outside himself.

  “The turning to mysticism and romantic fantasies is a turning towards
  stagnation, and is contrary to the interests of a young democracy,
  poisoning and enfeebling it, giving it a passive attitude towards
  reality, and suggesting doubt in the force of reason....

  “The mind of the ancient East weighs most heavily and murderously on
  our Russian life, and has an influence immeasurably deeper on our
  psychology than on that of Western Europe....

  “We Russians have two souls; one, derived from the wandering Mongol,
  is that of the dreamer, mystic, idler, believer in fate; the other is
  the soul of the Slav, which could burn up bravely and clearly, but
  cannot because of the other.”

One may reasonably question the correctness of this differentiation,
seeing that when we scratch a Russian we do not find a dreamer. We
should be inclined to say exactly the reverse; that the gentle,
dreaming, poetic soul was that of the Slav--and that Gorky would
find the educated Tartar considerably nearer his ideal than any
characteristic Slav.

The article entitled “Two Souls” made a considerable stir, the magazine
went quickly out of print, and a great number of criticisms were made
in the Press and on the platform. Their general tone was that Gorky was
out of his true medium and had better go back to his art. As a result
Gorky wrote “A Letter to the Reader” as a sort of collective answer
to “the more or less ironical or angry comments of my colleagues of
the pen,” and sarcastically quoted Lescov: “On the Russian people it
is good to look from afar, especially when he prays and believes”; and
he went on to excuse his being “a bad publicist” and to plead that his
words should have weight as being those of one who had lived through
a great deal and knew Russian life at least as well as any of his
opponents.

In this reply he exhibited a rather curious attitude towards
Anglo-Russian friendship which it would be well for English people to
note--a belief that we seek friendship with Russia merely to exploit
her materially and to keep her in a commercial bondage similar to that
which she has suffered from the Germans.

  “Our Russian philosophers argue in this way (says Gorky). The alliance
  with England is worthy of the greatness of the Russian people because
  it will lead to the union of the nations under the standard of the
  true spiritual culture of the mystical East. There are only two
  world Powers--Russia and England. And these two States have, as the
  foundation of their power, the lands and peoples of the religious
  East, rather than of the materialistic West. To these two is the
  problem of uniting culturally India, China, Japan. And when this union
  of the peoples of the mystic East takes place, the earth will be given
  ultimate liberty in peace. But for that end it is necessary that
  Russia keep true to her mission and establish her culture upon the
  mystical revelations leading to peace and love.”

But Gorky bids these philosophers be undeceived. It is no use, he
says, their getting rid of German capitalists simply to make way
for English ones. That was what English friendship meant. Such a
book, for instance, as “The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary” met
with so much approval because in picturing us as holy lazy-bones and
unpractical persons it allowed the English capitalist to rub his hands
with glee, seeing in Russia a future British colony such as Africa
or India. Whilst Russia is in her present state, friendship with any
European Power must be the friendship of the earthenware pot and the
iron kettle. Russia has to fight not for “ultimate liberty,” but for
the simplest civil rights as citizens. We must try to give the people
education and try to train their will toward life.

No doubt Gorky makes an appeal in these words; and if the average
Russian were asked what were the foundations of Anglo-Russian
friendship apart from the needs of the war, he would answer,
Commercial exploitation. Trade, it is true, is put jealously forward
as something to be captured after the war; but it seems a pity that
Russians should not realise the depth, the sincerity of our interest
in their characteristic religion, literature, and life. Whatever
political tendency our interest may help, it is nevertheless true that
England obtains from Russia spiritual help; and a great deal of that
which Gorky condemns in his own nation is coming to our help to redeem
us from commercialism and materialism. It is something of a paradox
that the bright spirits of Russia should hate the melancholy vistas of
Tambof and Kaluga and that the bright spirits of England should hate
the gloom of Newcastle and Leeds, that one should look with love from
England to the wandering pilgrims of Tambof and the other should sigh
for the clamour of wheels where “man at least is master.” But paradox
is tolerable where misunderstanding is not. For paradoxes abound in
truth, and truth is made up of such paradoxes.

Later on in his essay Gorky remarks that stormy and revolutionary
eras have produced great men, and his first example is Shakespeare,
who flourished “in the stormy time of Queen Elizabeth.” But rather,
they were “spacious days”; and great men, great thoughts are almost
always born in spacious days, halcyon days, when the dove broods on
waters. Strength is with calmness, not with noise and quarrellings and
revolutions. The critics are probably right when they say, “Return to
Art.” Art is creative, whereas argument is generally destructive. And
Maxim Gorky evidently wishes to create.

Maxim Gorky may be called the leader of the _porazhentsi_, the people
who believe in defeat. He has lately added to “Two Souls” and “A
Letter to the Reader”--the “Letters of William Simpleton, a Knowing
Stranger.”[5] But it is what we call “half-baked.” Gorky has read an
enormous number of books since he tucked his blouse inside and became
respectable, but it is difficult to see where he, or the reader, has
profited. He does not know where he is.

[5] Published in _Lietopis_ anonymously but generally ascribed to
Gorky.




IX

RUSSIA IN 1916


I WAS in Russia at the beginning of the war and during the
first months of conflict, and I witnessed the superb enthusiasm with
which she rose to fight. Again I was in Russia last year, when, owing
to the general shortage of shells west and east, Germany was able
to turn her superiority to account by retaking Galicia and ravaging
Poland, and I saw the humiliation almost amounting to despair of Russia
then. And therefore returning once more to Russia in June, 1916, I
could form a fairly just idea of the spirit of Russia to-day.

Last autumn, returning from Russia, I was bound to say I found Russia
pessimistic, and though it is really bad form to be pessimistic,
personally I certainly felt so myself. But all has gone well in the
intervening period, and when I reached Russia this year I found her
remarkably cheerful. My impression is that the Russians have settled
down to a long war. It may last three or four years more, but they
do not intend to worry. After the period of depression they are
brightly optimistic again. Perhaps some are too optimistic and rely
on mysterious prophecies as to the war finishing by Christmas, or
think that the German people will revolt and give us an easy victory
against a divided kingdom. One thing may be observed: the great work of
French and English on the western front is now fully reported in the
Russian Press. There are on an average two or three columns about us
in the Russian newspaper. The Havas Agency is quoted, the _Times_, the
_Manchester Guardian_, the _Westminster Gazette_, and other papers,
very fully. It is possible for an Englishman in Russia to form a fair
idea of each day’s news, so the Russian also can grasp it. That is
a splendid improvement on last year when we got only those laconic
non-committal communiqués which our smart English journalists can cause
to blossom with occult significance for our English newspapers, but
which in very truth translated into Russian merely gave the impression
that we were doing nothing.

Russia feels us closer. The distance across is not so great. Day by day
every one feels that we are all working happily together for one end
and with one interest.

The visits of the journalists and the parliamentarians to the West
have also helped a great deal. The journalists wrote their impressions
very fully and expressed themselves with great enthusiasm. Their
contributions on the subject lingered on throughout the summer. And
now they are collecting their articles and re-issuing them in book
form. Nabokof’s “From Militant England” has already had considerable
success. Lectures have also been given. The members of the Duma and the
Senate came back imbued with our enthusiasm, Radical and Conservative
alike, and what they saw of our work was luminous in debate. On the
whole the Russians have become much more warm and friendly towards us.
They are obtaining a better understanding of our ideals, our character
and national determination.

After the defeats of last autumn there sprang up a sort of intellectual
sect, the _porazhentsi_, people who believe in defeat. These held that
Russia stood to gain more by being beaten than by winning--a conclusion
that the Russian soul is more ready to accept than we should be.
Brusilof’s victories seem, however, to have dissipated this doctrine
for the time being, and the _porazhentsi_ are little heard of this
autumn.

Allied to this, however, has been a more important movement in favour
of a self-dependent Russia. Why should Russia struggle out of German
commercial bondage merely to fall into British hands? Why cannot she
manufacture for herself, be enough unto herself in all departments?
This sentiment has been very widespread. Russia has obtained the
impression that the striving toward Russian friendship going on for
many years before the war has been primarily with the idea of capturing
Russian trade. Whereas as a matter of fact the impulse for friendship
came first of all from literary and artistic England, then from England
as a whole, and the business men were the camp-followers.

The question of Russia and trade needs very careful treatment in the
Press. The phrase “exploiting Russia after the war” is obnoxious and
almost devoid of real meaning. Many small merchants will be led to try
and _exploit_ Russia after the war and will simply burn their fingers.
All trade with Russia must be carefully arranged on broad principles
to benefit both countries equally as before the war. Russia is the
great producing country of the world and she needs a world market for
her products--that Britain can obtain for her and that will be for the
health of Russia and of the world. In return we shall send much to
Russia, but not haphazard, and not shoddy dump, I hope.

Russian trade of all kinds is in a bad way just now and it is a trying
time for Russian merchants--especially when they read frequently in
their newspapers “Britain’s Record Month of Trade,” and the like. I
think these joyful telegrams about our trade should be accompanied
by an explanatory note to the effect that the greater part of that
so-called trade is a matter of war materials and necessities. The
figures really represent our tremendous activity in the Allied cause.
War is a material waste, and every moment it is prolonged we lose
heavily _materially_. And in this material sense we lose more than
Russia loses. We have had more to lose. Our trade figures represent the
height of our temperature in the war-fever.

Russia is suffering internally through the fact that she has had only
two open ports of value--Archangel and Vladivostock--and she cannot
import the manufactures she needs. The railways and the ships are
needed for the transport of munitions and food for the Army. The Army
comes first, the war comes first, and everything else must give way.
The people in the background have a real share in the privations of
the war. Disorganisation amounts at times to dislocation, owing to
war needs. But the Russians bear things cheerily. All manner of new
economic phenomena appear, and the Russians try measure after measure
to remedy the troubles.

Practically every man of military age throughout the vast empire is
either fighting or training. Before the war many had used influence to
avoid military service, had obtained medical exemption on the slightest
grounds. But there has been a thorough revision, and large numbers have
been recovered. You see the new troops marching and drilling on the
open places of the large towns, in camps on the steppes, and as the
train takes you through the country you see boy-Cossacks prancing about
on their ponies and practising with their lances.

Russia is altogether in the war and for the war. She is doing her
utmost. And her spirit is good. It is well English people should feel
that to-day. And from us should go out to this great people, suffering
and struggling as we are, a great fellow-feeling of gratitude and
generous affection.




X

RUSSIAN MONEY


BEFORE the war for £10 you received 94 roubles, but now you
receive 150. Last year after the great Russian retreat the exchange
stood at over 160, but banks refused to give more than a nominal
exchange. And in order to stop traffic abroad and foreign speculation
in Russian money it was forbidden by law for any one to take more than
500 roubles out of the country. Now, however, the new value of the
rouble seems to have been accepted, and banks generally give the due
exchange value. Although the rouble has slightly improved it is not
anticipated that the paper money will ever regain its guaranteed gold
exchange. Each Russian note is in the form of a certificate that the
State Bank will pay in exchange for it a certain quantity of gold. That
certificate has little value to-day, and it is an open secret that the
Government buys gold at a rate which assumes a lower value for the
rouble. People who have hoards of gold coinage--and they are many in
Russia, for the people are disinclined to use banks--are keeping their
gold, and their action is justified by the privileges which are already
accorded those who can pay the Government in coin. It is expected by
many that at the end of the war the rouble will be assigned a lower
gold value.

One obvious effect of the depreciation of the rouble has been that all
real estate and material belongings have increased in money value.
If you have an estate worth 94,000 roubles before the war, it is now
worth 150,000 roubles, and you are lucky if your fortune was in this
comparatively more real form, of land. People, on the other hand, who
were in debt have found the actual weight of the debt diminishing as
money lost value. This has been particularly noticeable in the case of
people who have mortgaged property. Suddenly it has been possible to
sell the property at a high figure, pay off the debt, and still retain
an unexpectedly large margin.

My friends the M.s have long wished to sell their large house in
Vladikavkaz, but have held its value at what was in the old days
an absurdly high figure. People used to laugh when the price was
mentioned. But this year, “as if by miracle,” to use my friends’
phrase, a purchaser turned up, agreed to their price and completed
the transaction in six hours. He was pleased and they were pleased.
“What sort of a man was he?” I asked. “Oh, a sort of a Tartar,” they
replied. He made a long way the better bargain, for he understood to
what extent the rouble had lost value. On the other hand my friends
paid off a big debt with these depreciated roubles, and there also they
gained.

The people who have made money by the war are busy buying land and
houses. This is reproachfully called land speculation, but is in
reality commonsense action on the part of those who wish to make fast
their wealth. When I paid a visit to Kislovodsk in the Caucasus, an
extremely popular watering place in the mountains, I found a perfect
rage of buying and selling property, brought about by this elementary
change in values.

The public are still exhorted to pay for their railway tickets in gold,
but are less inclined to do so than ever. There is reason to believe
that there are a number of millions of gold coins being hoarded in the
country. Friends have shown me their private supplies. When one reads
of burglaries, there is often a mention of several hundreds of roubles
in gold being stolen.

In the southern districts of the Empire German agents have appeared,
offering 15 roubles paper for 10 roubles gold. In this way Germany
is said to have collected a considerable amount of Russian gold. The
traffic was discovered by the police in Russian Central Asia, where men
were found to be carrying this gold into Persia and thence to Turkey
and Germany in small hand-bags. Many arrests were made, including that
of M. Poteliakhof, a rich Bokhara Jew and dealer in cotton, who was
found to be deep in this nefarious trade.

Russia has no gold in circulation, but also she has no silver and no
copper. Russian silver coinage became last year, at least in popular
estimation, worth its weight in silver, and people began hoarding it;
copper also was hoarded, and after the retreat from the Carpathians
there were a series of small-change panics in the towns in the
background. Many shops were sacked because the shopkeepers refused to
give change; people travelled free on the trams because the conductors
could not change their rouble notes. On other occasions you were
obliged to accept sticky postage stamps as change. Thorough Government
action swiftly followed, and paper tokens for all the small coins were
introduced. Postage stamps without gummy backs were issued for 10, 15
and 20 copecks, a shilling note (50 copecks) was issued, and slips
were printed for 1, 2, 3 and 5 copecks. How filthy this money became
may be imagined. People gave it to beggars saying, “I give you this
not because I pity your state, but because the money is so dirty.”
Still this new paper was accepted without riots, and the people soon
realised that it was more convenient than “sounding” money, and that
five roubles’ worth of it could be put in a small purse without adding
a considerable weight to one’s pockets. Thoughtful people welcomed it
as teaching the ignorant that money had no value in itself, but only as
a token of exchange. To-day one never sees a silver piece in Russia.
All is being hoarded.

Perhaps, however, the war and the substitution of paper for coin has
taught some people to care less for money. The Russian word is _dengy_,
which is really a Tartar word. Indeed, where money is concerned the
Russian is a bit of a Tartar and loves to feel the metal between
his hands. If a substantial sum is mentioned, he nods his head and
exclaims, “That is money!” as if he could see it being emptied out with
a joyous clash on the table in front of him. Of course the people
who see money that way always see it in small quantities. The Russian
business man is crafty over small deals. I imagine his money sense
fails him more or less in very large deals and financial operations. To
the true financier money must be somewhat of an abstraction and high
finance a sort of higher thought.




XI

WITHOUT VODKA, BEER, OR WINE


THERE is a great difference throughout the land, something
unmistakable, and you cannot say that it is undefinable, you know at
once what it is. Vodka has disappeared. Beer has gone. Wines are sold
at the chemists’ only on presentation of a medical certificate endorsed
by the police. So far from relaxing, the liquor prohibition vigilance
has been increased, and districts to which the Tsar’s original _ukase_
did not apply, such as Russian Central Asia, have been taken in. You
see smart officers sitting down to a bottle of _citro_, and it is
rather a surprise that they do not grumble. Male complexions generally
are becoming less red.

As a result of over two years’ temperance, violent crime has
practically disappeared from whole countrysides, and when occasionally
some brutality has occurred, the police have managed to bring to book
not only the direct offender, but also the person who was secretly
brewing the liquor. The spirit of peace has come into the industrial
or mining village on the Sunday and Saint’s Day, where formerly there
were often scenes of outrageous public hooliganism on the part of whole
populations. Money has increased in the pockets of the poor. There
is a higher standard of living; butter is being spread on the black
bread. Peasant families are enjoying the eggs which formerly they would
have sold for the money to buy drink. One of the reasons given for the
shortage of food supplies in the great towns is that owing to the fact
that the peasants find nothing on which to spend their money they
will not sell their produce. Formerly they could buy vodka. Infant
mortality is already very much on the decrease. On the whole, children
seem better cared for, though Russian peasants are always inclined
to be rather careless of these gifts of God. There is an outbreak of
“fashions” in the village, and if you ask your cook or serving-maid she
will tell you how cottons are being cut this year, though the details
seem to have little reference to _modes de Paris_. There is a popular
joke that the peasant women make a mistake in the word they employ for
fine dresses. “Just look at the _snariadi_ (shells) I am wearing,” when
they mean to use the word nariadi, a townspeople’s word for Sunday best.

There would also be much new reading in the village but for the fact
that for the peasant there is as yet a dearth of printed matter.
Children are sent to cry out to passing trains for newspapers, and one
finds the wisps of old papers in one’s carriage and throws them on to
the wind. They are eagerly picked up.

It is noticeable that the people are more active, less sluggish,
particularly in the towns. There is an unwonted amount of energy in
play. The suppression of vodka is good, but it would be absurd to say
that the energies unleashed are entirely on the side of good. The
old Adam can express itself in many ways. The wrong impulse merely
prevented is not excised, it breaks out in another place. There is more
gambling, more unrestrained sexual sin. I suppose no Tsar’s _ukase_
could clean up the Nevsky Prospect or Tverskaya, or stop love affairs
with other men’s wives. But even if it could the sinful impulse would
break out somewhere else with perhaps greater vigour.

I have been over thousands of miles of Russia this year, in town and
in village, in the melancholy north and in the passionate south, and
I can give authentic witness. There is no noticeable leak of vodka.
Except in Archangel city, I saw no drunken man anywhere. There they
were drunk with English whisky obtained from the boats in the harbour.
The pilot taking boats out always expects a bottle of whisky as well as
his three-rouble tip. All manner of people are, as a British captain
expressed it, “bumming around for whisky.” I believe it is now probable
that ships bound for Archangel will only be allowed to take a limited
supply in future. Poor thirsty Russians, one can easily understand the
wiles of those who think they can get it at Archangel!

_Shinkarstvo_, or illicit distilling and sale, has, it is true, broken
out, as M. Kokofstef predicted when opposing the local option measure
before the war. Alcoholic substitutes are prepared and sold in small
quantities. There were several hundred prosecutions during the past
year. But the police seem to have the suppression of this _shinkarstvo_
well in hand.

Some incurables have taken to methylated spirit, eau de Cologne,
furniture polish, and some have died in consequence.

My impression is that enforced temperance in alcoholic drink is going
to be permanent in Russia--at least as far as the Tsar’s reign is
concerned. National sobriety is one of the ideals of the Tsar. It
is not a temporary measure. Licences may be granted after the war
on certain conditions, and the rich may have their wines again. But
popular drinking is not likely to be reestablished unless some business
Government should ever get into power having big alcoholic interests.
But business governments are not likely there.

The chief gain to Russia from a military point of view must undoubtedly
be held to be the great increase of efficiency in the nation. Their
warm sociality always betrayed them heretofore. In Russian character
and temperament the elimination of strong drink has not had the effect
which it might be expected to have if introduced in this country. Here
our efficiency, which is becoming higher than before, would probably be
little affected by prohibition, but personal character and outlook on
life would be changed beyond doubt.

I have had to answer publicly several letters on the subject of Russian
Prohibition and I append one letter and answer as perhaps helpful
generally. I am constantly asked to refute false statements concerning
the sale of alcoholic liquor in Russia, but as replies take time to
write I feel that the many temperance societies might well establish
vigilance committees to correct false statements. A reference to the
Russian Consul-General in London on the subjects generally elicits a
simple confirmation of what I write on the matter.

  _To the Editor of The Times._

  “SIR,--In your issue of the 8th inst. Mr. Stephen Graham
  writes: ‘No wine or beer ... is obtainable in Russia except
  clandestinely, as at Archangel.’

  “Mr. Graham’s knowledge of Russia is admittedly unique; he may be able
  to explain, therefore, what is a puzzle to those who are interested in
  the subject.

  “I take from your Russian Section of October 28 the following excerpts:

  “_Page 6._--‘The Imperial Duma, while generally prohibiting the
  consumption of liquors containing alcohol, adopted an indulgent
  attitude towards grape wine. On July 14 (27), 1915, the Government
  imposed upon grape wine a small excise at the rate of 1 rouble 60
  copeck per vedro. In the case of grape wine, consumption amounts to
  40,000,000 vedros (120,000,000 gallons).’

        *       *       *       *       *

  “Then, again, referring to mild beer:

        *       *       *       *       *

  “‘This drink is supposed to contain not more than 1-1/2 per cent. of
  alcohol, although it is manufactured almost without Excise inspection
  and might easily be made stronger. The breweries are earning big
  profits from the sale of this beverage, bigger even than their former
  profits from beer; the State itself gets nothing.’

        *       *       *       *       *

  “Again, in the Returns of State Revenue, page 14, there is given as
  receipts in 1916 from Liquor Excise, 41,322,000 roubles in 1916, as
  against 18,084,000 roubles in 1915.

  “Again, on page 15.--‘Profits of Liquor Monopoly, 503,904,000 roubles
  in 1916, as compared with 30,718,000 roubles in 1915.’

  “Can Mr. Graham reconcile the total prohibition which he affirms now
  obtains in Russia with these excerpts, or are there some errors in the
  figures which can be explained?

                                         “Yours faithfully,
                                                  “H---- S. K----”

  “----,
       “_November 9_.”

The following answer was given:

  _To the Editor The Times._

  “SIR,--It is quite profitable to consider Mr. K----’s letter
  because of the blurred notion of Russian temperance reform which is
  prevalent in this country. It is most important that whatever opinion
  we may hold regarding enforced temperance or other questions, we
  should yet keep a clear picture of the current life of our Allies.

  “I am now just six weeks back in England after a four months’ journey
  in which I visited places so wide apart in the Russian Empire as
  Ekaterina, in the far north, and villages of the Central Caucasian
  range, in the south; and I stayed a while in Petrograd and Moscow,
  Rostof, Orel, and other considerable cities, and I can say by the
  evidence of my eyes that intoxicating liquor has disappeared. The only
  drunken men I saw were in Archangel. Officers to-day sit down to talk
  over a bottle of _citro_. In the restaurants you are given _kvas_, a
  sort of fruity ginger-beer, which in truth is not allowed to have more
  than 1-1/2 per cent. of alcohol, and is in no sense a beer.

  “The article in the Russian Section is by the Petrograd Correspondent
  of _The Times_, and consists chiefly of extracts from an article by
  the Russian Professor Migulin. I find the phrase in the translation
  is ‘malt beverage,’ and not ‘mild beer,’ as Mr. K---- puts it; and
  I think it refers to a beverage something like birch beer as sold
  in America, a sort of empty symbol of beer taken not because it is
  pleasant but because one must order something with one’s meals. It has
  no alcoholic reality, is sold in bottles, and is of a standardised
  taste and quality.

  “As regards wine, it must be remembered that in the Caucasus, in
  Transcaucasia, and in Russian Central Asia there are wine industries,
  wine is the local popular drink, not tea as in Russia proper. This
  wine is usually kept in skins and sold in pots. There is also a
  bottling industry, but the export of this wine from these remote parts
  of the Empire to Russia proper has been prohibited except in cases of
  specially guaranteed orders.

  “I believe British and American and other foreign subjects are
  allowed to purchase wine for their private use on the presentation of
  a certificate. Professor Migulin appears to be advocating a State
  monopoly in the sale of wine on the ground that ‘only on condition
  of a State monopoly would it be safe to allow the free circulation
  of grape-wine; otherwise under the guise of wine vodka will again
  make its appearance.’ For the phrase ‘grape wine’ read ‘grape juice.’
  Professor Migulin’s figures are apparently incorrect--the population
  of Russia is not consuming a gallon of grape-juice per head in
  addition to what it drinks in the way of _citro_, _kvas_, _narzan_,
  birch beer, etc.

  “As regards the revenue returns, may I make the following remarks:

   “1. Although the sale of alcohol in the form of drink has been
   abolished, the manufacture continues in perhaps larger quantities.

   “Enormous quantities have been exported to France for use in the
   manufacture of high explosives, and I do not need to say more than
   that on the head of the extensive industrial uses of alcohol.

   “2. In the figures of profits of liquor monopoly are included (_a_)
   debts recovered; (_b_) sums brought in after the winding-up of big
   shops where the accounts were not simple; (_c_) sale of vodka in
   Russian Central Asia and Transcaucasia (lately prohibited in both
   these districts also); (_d_) sale abroad; (_e_) the sale in Government
   shops of Caucasian mineral waters, now very extensive.

   “3. Under the heading Liquor Excise is included the tax on mineral
   waters, grape-juice, etc., tax on real wine in Central Asia and
   Transcaucasia, on wine specially supplied for foreign consumption, on
   wines allotted to chemists for medical purposes, etc.

   “4. The great increase in the returns is due to the tax on
   non-alcoholic drinks and Government sales.

   “5. In these revenue returns the classification and nomenclature is
   not scientific, and the primary intention is to give a rough guide to
   the figures of the Budget.

  “I hope these remarks do something to clear away the doubt in the minds
  of students of figures and papers. For the rest I can only reiterate
  the evidence of my eyes--Russia is without spirits, beer, or wine, and,
  if I may add it, she does not feel in any way persecuted or tyrannised
  over because of it.

                                           “Your obedient servant,
                                                  “STEPHEN GRAHAM.”




XII

GAY LIFE


I WAS at Petrograd and also at Kislovodsk, which is a sort of Petrograd
set in the midst of the Caucasus, Russia’s greatest watering-place,
a resort of the rich. As is commonly said, you leave your children
behind when you go to Kislovodsk; they would only be in the way. Here
turn up in these war years many who would otherwise be at Nauheim and
Carlsbad or on the Riviera. It is a place of few conveniences, but it
has an army of doctors, it has the springs, and it has “society.” It
was so crowded this summer of 1916 that people slept in passages, in
outhouses, in ramshackle cupboards and bathhouse, and paid fancy prices
for the privilege. Return seats in the trains were all booked for two
months ahead, and but for “the loop-holes of escape” I should have been
forced to stay in the Caucasus until the end of September.

Petrograd and Moscow being so desperately serious in tone, many
pleasure-lovers decided to extend the summer season, and even to try
Kislovodsk as a winter resort. There was lively speculation in rooms
and _datchas_ with a view to high prices reigning throughout the winter.

An unhealthy spot this Kislovodsk, the air of its little streets
heavy with the odour of decay and dirt. It is in a valley and there
are glorious moors and hills about it. But one never sees any visitor
on the hills. The visitors keep to the leafy promenades in the park,
within hearing of the music of the bandstands and in reach of the
café and the ice-cream bar. The women are mostly in white, but more
coarse of feature than in most places in Russia--the faces of women
on a low level of intelligence, of the sort who pride themselves on
being “interesting” to men. They wear their diamonds in the afternoon.
A lady was robbed of her diamonds in broad daylight in Essentuki, a
neighbouring resort, and on being reproached for wearing diamonds in
wartime, replied, “Where else should I show them except at the waters?”

The people who have made fortunes out of the war are prominent at
Kislovodsk, and the emptiness of their gay life is an unpleasant
contrast to the realities of the time. Not the cultured of Russia,
these, not the noble and the wise, not the people who really are the
nation! Yet enter into conversation with one of these commercial
parvenus and you find boundless vanity and self-importance. “We are the
people who count in Russia,” they say. Go into a restaurant and your
senses will be lacerated as you see them all around you eating with
their knives. The books they are reading are Artsibashef, Fonvizin,
Verbitskaya. Ask about the real artists of Russia and they raise their
eyebrows or express contempt. They are nearest to the class in America
that invented the word “high-brow” and for whom commercial talent must
go on manufacturing huge quantities of loathsome “low-brow” literature,
art, music and drama.

Many people asked me about England, but I was obliged to say the spirit
of England would not tolerate a Kislovodsk; we have nothing quite so
shameless during the war. We have people who are profiting by death and
destruction and calamity and sorrow, but public opinion does not allow
these venal gains to be flaunted in this way.

At Russian theatres, as indeed in English theatres at home, flippant
and indecent farces, the theatres themselves going ahead of the people
and leading downward. One thing we may generally surmise, comparing one
side of the footlights with the other--the life of the people looking
on is ten thousand times better than the life presented on the stage.
The vulgar and cynical notions expressed by the actors and actresses
are only regarded as curious or amusing or spicily outrageous by the
people who have paid so much money for the doubtful privilege of
listening.

I witnessed a three-act play, translated or adapted from the French,
where there was the usual dressing and undressing on the stage and
scampering about in undergarments. Suddenly the lady who had the most
abominable part to play, in the midst of one of the most unpleasant
parts clutched at her breast with her hand and fell with a loud thud
on the stage. Then the curtain came down. We waited. Presently out came
a weedy-looking pale-faced commercial and made the following statement:

As Mme. A. has had a heart seizure we cannot continue the performance.
The management, however, hope that the audience will not on that
account feel a grievance or that the money ought to be returned.
To-night’s tickets will be available to-morrow night, when a substitute
will be found for Mme. A.

At this there were angry shouts from all over the theatre:

“What is the money to do with it?”

“We don’t want to see the wretched play again.”

“How is her health?”

“Tell us how she is.”

Some one else came out from behind the curtain and asked:

“Is there a doctor here?”

A young woman at once came up. But the audience left its seat and
crowded forward towards the curtain asking angrily how the actress was.
The actress was not a particular favourite. But the people cared, and
what is more, they had been made ashamed by the callous but sincere
statement of the management on the more important aspect of the
interruption of the programme. Life on the stage and life, how wide
apart!

Intoxication through alcohol has disappeared, and with it a certain
amount of abnormal and bestial vice, but the world remains as evil and
human.

Drink, as the porter in _Macbeth_ said, is the great equivocator, it
sets on and sets off, persuades and then disheartens. The removal
of drink has left men more restless--at least in the towns. Probably
in the village the removal of all kinds of drink has been an unmixed
blessing. But in the towns the roving eye of man has roved further.
It is impossible to clear up the immorality of the towns by Imperial
_ukase_. The Russian boy of the town is born into a world of more
temptations and risks than the English boy. A great deal of disclosed
Russian genius must be poisoned between the ages of twelve and twenty
by certain social conditions which no one in Russia seems capable of
making an effort to clear up. The Russian town of to-day is no doubt
none too easy for the young woman, and it seems a sort of hell for the
young man, a long burning and the worm which dieth not. Health, health,
how to obtain conditions of health, that is the problem!

I was speaking to a somewhat famous Russian senator about the
deportation of superfluous population from Petrograd and he said: “The
decentralisation of our cities’ populations is one of the things which
are coming. Why should Moscow and Petrograd increase in size? They only
do so at the expense of Russia as a whole. We have plenty of room for
all----”

I strayed into various cafés in strange towns this summer and ordered
my coffee and settled down to write parts of a long book on religion
and life with which I was preoccupied all these months in Russia. I was
generally intent to sit down and write out some idea which had occurred
to me whilst I had been walking. One evening I found myself in a
typical den--the long alley of a café with women on each side, painted,
powdered, striking, their legs crossed or spread about the table legs,
cigarettes in their hands, half-finished glasses of coffee in front of
them.

Down the alley came young men with flickering eyes and lips, now and
then a leer, a sickly smile, a cynical or satirical grin. “This is the
world,” think the young men, “this is the gay wicked world where what
should never be sold can be bought.”

But they are wrong--it is only a wee wicked corner. The great wide
world is sweeter, healthier.




XIII

OLD FRIENDS


I MET Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof, the hunter of Archangel
at Moscow. He had purchased three fine pictures by our friend
Pereplotchikof, and they stood in his room in the Gostinny Dvor in
wooden packing cases. Alexander Alexandrovitch stood me a lunch at
Martianitch’s in the Red Square on a meatless day--a merchant’s
restaurant where you may see many antique Russian types of merchants
wearing knee boots and blouses and longish hair. We had a nice dish of
fish-pie (_rastegai_) with our soup, and though no wine was available,
the bill, as I saw, for the two of us was twenty roubles, and three
roubles more went for the tip. In that way war prosperity expressed
itself. My friend had to spend many days in Moscow collecting boots in
small parcels. As the Government allows no packing-cases with goods
to be taken by train from Moscow to Archangel (I imagine fine art is
exempted from this regulation), Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof had to
buy some twenty portmanteaus to take his purchases of boots back to his
native city.

Pereplotchikof the painter is not very well. Heart weakness deprived
him of the use of his legs this summer. He was confined to his bed and
felt very wretched. I spent many mornings and evenings sitting and
talking to him. The doctors say that vegetarianism has been too much
for his constitution. One evening I brought him a quantity of rich
honey I had come across in a little shop in Moscow. He was delighted
as a child, and honey he said was ideal food for him. In exchange for
this gift he gave me an old cross which he had once picked up on a
market stall.

Alexey Sergeitch came with me to visit Pereplotchikof one evening and
was much touched to see the change in him. But we had a very lively
talk of old days on the Dwina. Alexey Sergeitch is now a teacher of
history in several secondary schools in Moscow. He has just published
his first book, the fruit of some historical research, and he looks
forward to writing other books of like character, so making a career
in history. He has the directly opposite view to mine regarding Russia
and we had many long and inconclusive debates on Church and State. His
sister, Varvara Sergevna, is nurse in an immense military hospital on
the Volhonka. I spent an evening up till midnight with her, helping
to cut rolls of linen for bandages with atrociously blunt scissors.
Russia has few machines for this work. Every night thousands of Russian
girls are arduously cutting linen as we did with Varvara.

Nicholas, my first Russian friend, whom I met in London ten years ago
and tried to learn Russian from, the boy who invited me to spend my
first Christmas in Russia at his father the deacon’s in Lisitchansk, is
now settled down and married, and has a family at Kishtim in the Urals,
where his knowledge of English has found him a place in the office of
an Anglo-Russian mining company.

Nicholas and I lived with another poor student, three in a room, in
Moscow--that was after the Christmas in the country. Our most intimate
friend was a certain Sasha, a gaunt but happy student of philology.
He used to bring stories and read them aloud to our weekly student
parties on Saturday evening. From him I heard first some of the stories
of Kuprin and also Chekhof’s Dushetchka or “Little Soul,” which Mrs.
Garnett has lately translated under the title of “The Darling”[6]--a
famous story. Sasha has grown cold to Nicholas now, and I had lost
sight of him, but the many references to my work in the Russian Press
brought to his mind the idea that the Englishman he once knew was the
same as the one now so well known. So he wrote to me, and I tried to
see him this summer--married now and in good circumstances, working in
the Russian Foreign Office.

[6] “The Darling” by Anton Chekhof tr. by Constance Garnett.

Julia, of whom I wrote in “The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary,” as
a type of a Martha, has had a year of pain, caught erysipelas from a
servant, and this developed into a sort of blood-poisoning. Sores
appeared all over her body, and then one big sore threatening her with
death; she has been, as it were, vivisected through the open wound all
the summer, and felt that she herself must have cut up live animals for
science’s sake in some previous existence, and is now living through
the animals’ experience that her soul may really know what it means.
She has been in terror lest her sisters should be infected from her
and she has been afraid lest she should die and they be left without
her motherly protection. Poor Julia! But I left her on a fair way to
recovery. Little Lena is very well. The old lady, the Queen of Spades,
is more frail and is suffering from the effects of a bad fall.

Varvara Ilyinitchna is much older, has lost a son, has had heart
attacks, and is bound to take things more easily. Alexander Fedotch
looks extremely well. The daughter is matron of a small hospital, and
has a wonderful time with her men.

Amelia Vasschevina, the old grandmother, has sold the white house,
has paid her debts and has a large margin over. I fear, however,
high prices will whittle her little fortune of ready money away. Her
daughter Masha, the despair of all doctors, suffering from an incurable
internal complaint which has been diagnosed as cancer, appendicitis,
neuritis, inflammation of the solar plexus and what not, and for
which she has had all manner of treatment and swallowed all sorts of
medicine, has recommenced her work as a dentist. And though suffering
agonies of pain she has the nerve to doctor teeth and smile at the
lugubrious and fearful faces of her patients. Poor Masha, she has been
cut open and examined and sewn up again, mesmerised, prayed into, and
this last spring a miracle worker was brought to consider her. He
always carried about with him an Indian sword.

He said: “Don’t tell me what you think is the matter with her or what
the symptoms are. That would only make it more difficult for me.” He
came into her room took out a bit of glass from a waistcoat pocket, and
looked at her face through it.

“You will live,” said he, and he dropped his glass and went away. “But
I charge you nothing,” he added, and he brandished his sword as he went
out at the door.

Loosha, of whom I have sometimes written, feels more happy than she has
ever done before. What the secret is I do not know. But she has begun
to write poetry.

Katia of Kief married the young lawyer. He was taken for the war, but
the family used influence to bring him back to a safe job in the rear.
I do not know what happened to discarded Boris.

Mme. Odintsefa is still keen on her evangelicals, and reads Spurgeon’s
sermons with the same enthusiasm as in old days she read Mrs. Besant.




XIV

RUSSIA’S NEW WAR PICTURE


RUSSIA has now a popular war-picture done by one of the most famous of
her artists, Nesterof. It appeared during the past winter, and prints
of it are now exposed in every city, postcard reproductions on every
book-stall in Russia. It shows a wounded Russian officer standing
beside a Russian sister of mercy. He is in khaki, and is decorated with
the Order of St. George; she in white hospital dress. Both faces are
marvellously expressive of suffering--the woman seems drowned in past
suffering, and yet aware of the immensity of suffering that yet must
come. The man has the vision in his eyes that makes it all worth while.

Her face is one of faith, his of vision. Together they express the
ideal relationship of a man and a woman, he fighting the great fight,
living life as it ought to be lived, she supporting him with her faith
and her love.

Nesterof when he was yet a boy began to paint frescoes in churches, and
has painted in his time many a wonderful Madonna and Child. In this
picture where he has descended to paint just a woman and a man in the
midst of daily life you may see a sort of suggestion of the Mother and
Child, a reflection of some other composition, of some Russian Madonna
and leaping Babe. Here also the man is really a child, though his eyes
have the knowledge of the ideal and the quest, and the woman’s face has
purity and love and foreknowledge of the suffering that must come.

The background of the picture is Russia, the green forest of pines
and firs, the melancholy placid lake, the wan white church with its
swelling coloured dome. Russia is in the background. Russia bore them,
and their hearts yearn towards her.

So it can be a popular Russian war picture and be hung on many walls
and looked into and loved in this strange year of grace 1916.

The words printed below are the famous lines of the poet Khomiakoff:

  The _podvig_ is in battle:
  The _podvig_ is in struggle:
  The highest _podvig_ is in patience,
  Love and prayer.

I leave the word _podvig_ because, as I wrote in my chapter explaining
the word in “Martha and Mary,” it is difficult to render it by any
one word in English. But it is one of the most important words in the
Russian language. Here possibly the nearest word is “trial.” It means
a noble deed, an act of faith, a noble battle against fearful odds, a
great sacrifice or act of renunciation, a shaming of the devil, a bold
religious affirmation. Volumes might be written on it. The acts of the
anchorites and hermits are _podvigs_. St. George killing the dragon
performed a _podvig_. The seven champions of Christendom would in
Russia be the seven _podvizhniks_ and their heroic exploits _podvigs_,
but there we have not a word. For performing _podvigs_ Russian soldiers
are decorated. But, as Nesterof tells us in his picture, there are the
greatest for which there is no decoration.

  The greatest _podvig_ is in patience,
  Love and prayer.

The sound of these Russian words is so beautiful in the original tongue
that inevitably after you have read them you go on murmuring them till
they are yours--a possession of the heart:

    _Podvig yest ee f srazhenie:
    Podvig yest ee f borbay:
    Veeshy podvig f terpenie,
    Liubvy i molbay._

This is not absolutely correct transliteration, but I have written in
the hope that it maybe easier to say.

This picture is true for Russia and will be valuable long after peace
has come as a historical witness of the spirit of the time. In the war,
despite all its ugliness and accidentoriness, human nature is revealed
as more beautiful, more daring, also more tender. The Russians have
this picture, and we also have the reality. There is a strong spiritual
life manifest among us. It is manifest in the faces of the soldiers and
in the life of their anxious and loving women they leave behind. Will
not some one paint it for us?




XV

IN THE HOSPITAL


I VISITED several hospitals in Moscow, Rostov, and Petrograd. Those
in the north had not many wounded, those in the south had the men who
had been hurt in Brusilof’s advance. Russia looks her best in hospital
where the men are suffering not only for Russia but for us, where the
appearance of the men has the idealisation of hospital dress, and the
transfiguration of care. There is no more sweet possession for a woman
than a hospital where tenderness and love may be lavished and patience
given without end.

Russia has had generally more wounded than any other nation, and the
arrangements for the receipt of the wounded have been wonderful all
the time. Despite a national incapacity for organisation, the wounded
have not died for want of care and forethought. In that speaks the
Russian compassion and love for suffering humanity. The nursing of the
wounded is an endless tale of personal devotion.

Several of my Russian women friends are in hospitals, and I visited
them and talked to the soldiers, heard all the tales of their prowess.
Surprising what a number of boys there are among the wounded, young
fellows of thirteen or fourteen who have managed somehow to get into
the Army. It was difficult to know how to address them--as boys or as
men.

I visited the Anglo-Russian Hospital at Petrograd one evening, and saw
how our English sisters have become friends with the simple Russian
lads, sit at their bedside with dictionary and notebook, and carry
on delightful and pathetic conversations. The Russian authorities
will not allow a wounded man to leave until he is well enough to
return to his unit. The consequence is that the wounded man remains
longer in a hospital in Russia than he would in a similar hospital in
England. And the longer they stay the better are they known to those
who tend them. The English in the hospital on the Nevsky at Petrograd
obtain a fair notion of the character and temperament of the Russian
soldier. My impression was that they admired and loved him greatly. He
was all that had been written of him and said of him, and something
more--religious, simple, brave, patient, cheerful, and sociable. Jolly
boys these Russian wounded, not dour like Cromwell’s soldiers although
they are as religious as his, not Puritans, not intolerant. No one
asks suspiciously of the sister nursing him, “Are you not perhaps a
Protestant?” And then feels suddenly, “I am saved and she is damned,”
but a general feeling that God’s mercy is needed more for the poor
suffering soldier than for the bright angel who is nursing him.

When our women were on the point of going out to Russia to work in this
Anglo-Russian Hospital I confess I felt a doubt as to whether they
would not find fault when they got to Russia and dislike the Russian
Tommy because he was unlike his British brother. But I was wrong. The
Russian peasant is convincing when you see him day after day, and it
is your lot to tend him whilst he is suffering. Singing their national
songs and their national Church music in those good choruses which
without selection any hospital affords, you hear the voice of Russia
with your ears be they keen or dull, and dressing wounds and watching
you see character. Undoubtedly if the same party of British nurses and
doctors were thrown simply into the midst of ordinary educated men and
women in Petrograd or Moscow instead of being given to the wounded they
might easily come away with a less true impression.

But here amongst the men suffering for you and me and all of us is Holy
Russia, which was and which is.

A considerable amount of spiteful nonsense is written against the
notion of Russia conveyed by the term Holy Russia, and I among others
am blamed for idealising Russia, or as Mr. Zangwill puts it, of
Ruskinising her. And another Hebrew writing under an assumed name
finds fault with me because I said at the National Liberal Club, “Love
Russia, and do not distrust her as you have done in the past.” Another
Russian Jew, who has been embittered by political treatment writing
also under a pseudonym, pursues a violently misrepresentative campaign
in Russia against the conception of Russia as a country that can be
spiritually helpful to us.

How bitter these other friends of Russia are! They are those who have
suffered through political disabilities; they are those, who not being
Christian cannot be expected to be touched as we are; they are those
who would prefer to see in Russia a free but non-Christian democracy as
in France; for that end they are political revolutionaries.

Holy Russia is a living fact. And if it had ceased to be, study of
Russia would be merely history and archæology. Nietszche said to German
women, “Hope that your child may be the superman--the antichrist--hope
that he may be a Napoleon.” The covenant to Russian women and to
our women is “Hope that your child may be the Christ-child.” It is
the Christian thing which Russia has to give, and may God help the
Christian background of Russia to shine clear to Europe. If Russia
were merely Sturmer, Protopopof, Gorky, Rubinstein (the finance
manipulator), Reinbot (who organised the police graft of Moscow),
Rasputin (the debauched Siberian), Sukhomlinof (who is at rest in the
fortress of Peter and Paul), Masoyedof (who was hanged for betraying
Russia), Azef, Milyukof, Kerensky, Count Benckendorf, etc., etc., how
little interest she would have for us!

If the crassly selfish, materialistic, middle-class of the Russian
towns were Russia, who would stir one little finger to be friendly with
her, except simply our commercial people who see that money can be made
in Russia?

No one has shown more unsparingly the dark side of the Russian life
than I have in my books. In describing the pilgrimage to Jerusalem I
described the exploitation that I saw. I have perhaps even gone too far
in describing the uglinesses of modern Russia (in “Changing Russia”).
But I do believe in Holy Russia, and as far as Russia is concerned do
not care for anything else. I hate to see her being commercialised and
exploited, and to see her vulgar rich increasing at the expense of
the life-blood of the nation. Without any question the new class of
middle-rich coming into being through Russia’s industrial prosperity
is the worst of its kind in Europe. They are worse than anything in
Germany, and it is they who are beginning to have the power in Russia.
It is the green and inexperienced who think that power wrested from the
Tsar and his Court is grasped by the idealists of Russia. It is grasped
by the capitalists and often by the foreign capitalists.

Poor Russia, she has not many faults, she has only many misfortunes.
I am asked to discount Holy Russia and set off various things against
it. The Russians steal--well, they did not steal in the villages till
the railway came, bringing the thieves. And where there are no railways
now there are no thieves. They lie--that is a matter for psychological
inquiry. They do not lie as we lie. They are cruel. So are we all, but
the Russians are tender also. Tenderness is their characteristic. What
else is there to say against the Russian peasant? He does not work
enough.

Well, grant everything, admit all that can be said against him, and
subtract all from Holy Russia. I am not afraid to do it. I have had to
do it long ago for myself. And there still remains Holy Russia, the
beautiful, spiritual individuality of the nation.




XVI

THE PROSPECTS FOR PEACE


THE year 1916 closes in peace discussion. There has always seemed to me
to be a likelihood that the war, the khaki and the guns, the gallant
men and the sacred graves alike would be snowed over with papers and
eventually almost lost sight of. Some eloquent German pastor cried out
in a war sermon--

_“White snow, white snow, fall, fall for seven weeks; all may’st thou
cover, far and wide, but never England’s shame; white snow, white snow,
never the sins of England.”_

Our attitude would be rather: Never the sins of Germany. But even they
must be covered at last. And the snow which the pastor asked for has
begun to fall, blown by a somewhat gusty westerly wind.

It is America that is sending it across and I imagine that Americans
would be specially interested what Russians think of the prospects for
peace.

The problem of peace as it affects Russia differs somewhat from the
problem as it affects France and Britain. It is well to keep in view
the central facts.

Germany made war on Russia and showed herself ready to sacrifice Russia
on the altar of her own greatness. The Kaiser so far from being on
friendly terms with the Tsar, set out to despoil the Tsar of tracts of
territory. Russia being an autocracy much more depended on the Tsar and
his ministers than on the Duma or the voice of the people manifested
in the press. He answered War with War. As far as can be ascertained
no attempt was made by so-called “Germans at court” to stave off war
or make a pact with Germany and sacrifice France. Several large German
landowners sold their estates and returned to the Fatherland before
the war broke out, for they knew the cash was coming. Germany did not
wish to come to an understanding with Russia before July, 1914. Germany
thought it more profitable to sacrifice the Russians than to share with
them power in Europe.

The German people confident in the possession of an enormous armament
and of a genius for organisation which put them first and the
rest nowhere, despised Russia. Russia’s friendship was not worth
striving to obtain. There were admirable foundations for building a
German-Russian friendship of a most lucrative kind, deep German roots
in finance, commerce, government and administration and blood ties and
inter-marriages amongst important German and Russian families, but it
was thought to be more profitable to fight than to be friends.

Doubtless a German victory would have increased the profits of many
pseudo-Russian merchant houses. But from the Imperial point of view
it should be borne in mind that there is probably not the slightest
doubt or vagueness in the Tsar’s mind, and there has not been since
the outbreak of war. The Kaiser has not only injured but has insulted
Russia. There is a quarrel which can only be happily settled by the
Germans being beaten utterly in the field.

The Russian people ratified the decision of the Tsar. There was a very
great unanimity, doubtless revolutionary Russia was glad to be fighting
for the same cause as republican France and free England. The war
has been called all manner of things pleasing from a liberal point
of view, a war to protect small nations, a war against militarism, a
war of progress against reaction. But fundamentally it is a quarrel.
The press can say what it likes and theorists may theorise in terms
interesting or not interesting to those at the head of affairs. But
they for their part know one thing clearly, that it is a quarrel--it
does not matter how people justify it to their consciences as long as
they co-operate heartily in the great task of defeating the enemy.

The war, however, goes on a long time and there have been many blunders
and scandals. The political extremists care for one thing more than
for defeating Germany and that is for their political game at home
whatever it may be. It has occurred to them--cannot the war be made
the means of overthrowing the autocracy as such, by making ministers
responsible to the Duma instead of to the Emperor as heretofore. And
since the Russian retreat of 1915 a large political game with important
possibilities has developed. Political war of a kind has raged
unceasingly and rages now.

This has played a little into German hands and had it not been for
the complete, steadfast and unwavering hostility of the Tsar towards
Germany, Russia would have succumbed to the seductions of internal
strife. Germany as it is, hopes steadily for revolution in Russia--for
a nation divided against itself cannot stand.

All through 1916 a rumour, however, has been persistently spread by
word of mouth that the Tsar was likely to sign a separate peace. Every
scandal that could damage the name of the Tsar has been repeated and
magnified--the object being to obtain a transference of French and
British sympathies from the Tsar and his ministers to the Duma and
the progressive parties in the nation. Such a transference of sympathy
would naturally endanger the stability of Russia and play into the
German hands--quite apart from the question of the future of Russian
internal government and control.

I cannot record here the gossip about Rasputin, Sturmer, the Empress,
the falls of ministers. An immense amount of random rubbish is talked
in Russia. Talking political scandal is one way of passing the time.
The influence of Rasputin (a Siberian peasant and not a monk, not a
priest, though he called himself Father and gave blessings) was greatly
exaggerated. Some ladies took him up, as miracle-workers and magicians
are taken up when they can be found. But he never had any influence
with the Tsar. He seems to have been a curious character but he is now
dead and the gossip about him will cease. I do not believe he was
working for Germany--as he had very little notion of what Germany
was and could not even pronounce three consecutive words of his own
language correctly. He was an obscure being and degraded even so. He
prophesied that the Tsarevitch would lose his health if he, Rasputin,
should cease to support him. I should say the boy’s health would
improve, now that the black arts have been removed.

Sturmer, the ex-Premier, was the most unpopular prime-minister Russia
has had. He, happily, has gone. And in Russia they never come back.

The fall of Sazonof was a shock. The motive for his retirement is said
to be the Japanese agreement which he arranged. It was also said to
be due to disagreement over Poland. The British diplomatic body has
undoubtedly leaned on Sazonof and would like to bring him back. Our
diplomacy in Russia during 1916 has, however, been in no way inspired.
Its object seems to have been to play a political game, as at Salonika
so at Petrograd, and to back the Duma at any cost. Buchanan has turned
out to be an extraordinary speech maker; a contrast to the silent
Russian Ambassador in London.

A cloud has been over the East obscuring it from our eyes. Happily
however at the end of the year the cloud has lifted. Sturmer has gone.
Rasputin is dead and Russia has announced clearly by the voice of her
new minister and emphatically through the lips of the Tsar what she is
fighting for.

The Tsar’s message to his army before Christmas has more significance
in it than many parliamentary debates, speeches of ministers or
theories of theorists, and I leave it fittingly as the close of this
attempt at a political elucidation.

  It is now more than two years since Germany in the midst of peace and
  after secretly preparing over a long period to enslave all the nations
  of Europe, suddenly attacked Russia and her faithful Ally France. This
  attack compelled England to join us and take part in our battle.

  The complete disdain which Germany showed for principles of
  international law as demonstrated by the violation of the neutrality
  of Belgium and her pitiless cruelty towards the peaceful inhabitants
  in the occupied provinces, little by little united the Great Powers of
  Europe against Germany and her ally Austria.

  Under the pressure of the German troops, which were well provided
  with the technical aids to warfare, Russia and France were compelled
  in the first year of the war to give up a portion of their territory,
  but this temporary reverse did not break the spirit of our faithful
  Allies, nor of you my gallant troops. In time, by the concentrated
  efforts of the Government, the disparity of our own and the German
  technical resources was gradually reduced. But long before this time,
  even from the autumn of 1915, our enemy was experiencing difficulty
  in retaining the territory he had occupied, and in the spring and
  summer of the current year suffered a number of severe defeats and
  assumed the defensive along the whole front. His strength apparently
  is waning, but the strength of Russia and her gallant Allies continues
  to grow without failing.

  Germany is feeling that the hour of her complete defeat is near, and
  near also the hour of retribution for all her wrong-doings and for
  the violation of moral laws. Similarly, as in the time when her war
  strength was superior to the strength of her neighbours, Germany
  suddenly declared war upon them, so now, feeling her weakness, she
  suddenly offers to enter into peace negotiations and to complete
  them before her military talent is exhausted. At the same time she
  is creating a false impression about the strength of her Army by
  making use of her temporary success over the Rumanians, who had not
  succeeded in gaining experience in the conduct of modern warfare.

  But if, originally, Germany was in the position to declare war and
  fall upon Russia and her Ally France, in her most favourable time,
  having strengthened in wartime the Alliance, among which is to be
  found all powerful England and noble Italy, this Alliance in its turn
  has also the possibility of entering into peace negotiations at such a
  time as it considers favourable for itself.

  The time has not yet arrived. The enemy has not yet been driven out
  of the provinces occupied by her. The attainment by Russia of the
  tasks created by the war--the regaining of Constantinople and the
  Dardanelles, as well as the creation of a free Poland from all three
  of her now incomplete tribal districts--has not yet been guaranteed.

  To conclude peace at this moment would mean the failure to utilise the
  fruits of the untold trials of you, heroic Russian troops and Fleet.
  These trials, and still more the sacred memory of those noble sons
  of Russia who have fallen on the field of battle, do not permit the
  thought of peace until the final victory over our enemies.

  Who dares to think that he who brought about the beginning of the war
  shall have it in his power to conclude the war at any time he likes?

  I do not doubt that every faithful son of Holy Russia under arms who
  entered into the firing line, as well as those working in the interior
  for the increase of her war strength or the creation of her industry,
  will be convinced that peace can only be given to the enemy after he
  has been driven from our borders; and then only when, finally broken,
  he shall give to us and our faithful Allies reliable proof of the
  impossibility of a repetition of the treacherous attack and a firm
  assurance that he will keep to these promises. By the strength of
  these guarantees he will be bound to the fulfilment in times of peace
  of those things which he undertakes.

  Let us be firm in the certainty of our victory and the Almighty will
  bless our standards and will cover them afresh with glory, and will
  give to us a peace worthy of your heroic deeds, my glorious troops--a
  peace for which future generations will bless your memory.

                                                     NICHOLAS.

_Postscript_: 1915, 1916 and then _annus mirabilis_ we are told.
Wonderful things will happen in 1917. That means we hope and expect
peace in 1917. Germany does also. The only peace possible, however,
seems to be that of complete victory over the enemy. As a personal
opinion I think it unlikely that complete victory will be obtained in
1917. It is also unlikely that a compromise peace will be effected. The
bill against Germany is too heavy for the German nation to accept.

If instead of making a vague general offer of peace in December, 1916,
Germany had offered the _status quo_ we might possibly with great
humiliation and vexation have all accepted the proposal. I think we
should not, but we conceivably might. But Germany and her allies would
have liked to keep some of the fruits of their victories and they could
not then offer _status quo_. In all probability they will offer it
later but then it will be too late as it is too late now in January,
1917. The bill against the Germans grows more heavy every day and every
week the war is prolonged. Our chance of victory over them at the same
time seems to increase as steadily. Next summer when the Germans have
been routed in France and Belgium and Poland--shall we be more likely
to consider a peace that would be acceptable to the Germans? I am sure
not. Will Russia be more ready? Certainly not. Rather the demands on
Germany will have increased.

I do not write this urging more war or craving for peace, but rather as
a commentator. I am sorry for the Germans in a way. But I realise that
in July-August, 1914, they chose a line of action from which followed a
certain set of consequences if they failed.

We on the Entente side have not improved our cause. We have tried to
fight the Germans in their way. We have seemed to behave abominably
in Greece--have become entangled in an irrelevant political quarrel
there. But then we have simply been doing the best we can, according
to our ability. Not many idealists would rush to offer their life for
our cause now and great numbers have lost interest in it. But the
unsolvable quarrel remains. How long the war will last seems to depend
chiefly on the length of time the German armies can hold out against
the ever-increasing machinery of death and destruction which faces
them.




XVII

HOME


BECAUSE of the regulations regarding taking printed matter in one’s
luggage I was obliged to post to London some thirty packets of books.
Possibly by appealing to our Embassy at Petrograd I might have obtained
what is called a Foreign Office bag and have been immune from censor
revision. A considerable number of British subjects are accommodated in
this way. But it seems to me to be an incorrect thing to do.

I had bought some dozens of pictures and ikons. I had precious
manuscript which I should not dream of trusting to the post, and if
it had been proposed to confiscate that manuscript at Archangel as I
stepped aboard I should have remained in Russia to save it. But I got
through without trouble.

Our people at Archangel were extremely kind to me, and put me on a
returning ammunition ship, and I went all the way to Britain in comfort
and without change.

The boat was a turret ship, one of those with hollowed-in sides,
constructed to evade the true charges of the Suez Canal, where the toll
is according to the breadth of the vessel. It had been ten times a year
through the Suez Canal for twenty years, and now for the first time in
its history was in northern latitudes. The crew were shivering Lascars,
tripping about in one garment and looking more like girls than men.
Each and every one had received from the Government two warm suits of
underclothing, woolly trousers, coats, and wraps, but these things were
locked away in their boxes, and you could not persuade them to wear
one. For the Lascar is a real Jew in temperment and has a passion for
selling clothes and chaffering over them.

We steamed out gently through the traffic and along the narrow channels
of the many-mouthed river, and after some hours got clear into the
White Sea.[7]

[7] Seven lines concerning mines and buoys excluded by Censor.

When we passed a buoy the captain, who was rather a character, would
retire to his sitting-room, take up his concertina, and play “Land of
Hope and Glory,” the “Dead March” in _Saul_, “Ip-I-addy,” and other
favourites.

We sailed under sealed orders and did not sight another vessel except
British war-ships and patrol boats till we were nearing Lerwick.

In the Arctic there was calm, and we recaptured the light which
was fleeting with the approach to the equinox. The evenings grew
appreciably longer. It was cold, and the barometer was going down “for
ice.”

The captain and officers felt the cold badly, stamped to keep warm, and
came in to meals with red faces and bright eyes. “If there is a Gulf
Stream it ought to be warmer than it is,” said the captain. “Do you
believe in its existence?”

I could not give an opinion.

“According to the hand-book, there is,” said the skipper. “It flows
north-east, but a little note says ‘it has been known to flow
south-west.’ Two and two make four, but they have been known to make
five. All I can say is that if there is a Gulf Stream we are going
against it at this moment and beating our engines. Our maximum is
11-1/4 knots, and we are doing 12.”

It was touching to hear English coming over the water when we were
hailed by British patrols.

“What is the name of the ship?”

“_Glamis._”

“What is your cargo?”

“Wood--and--flax. Wood--and--flax.”

“Ah well, I can’t attend to you now, you’d bettah drop your ankah.”

At one point, to the great disgust of the skipper, we were stopped by
a cruiser and some twenty mail-bags were sent to us. And we lost our
steam. “They signalled us six miles away. Why couldn’t they have said
they wanted us to slow up for mails, instead of allowing us to come
up at full speed, and then giving us ‘Stop immediately’ and making us
reverse the engines and go full astern.”

We were a lot of cheerful British grumblers. I was the only passenger
on board, and so got to know them all pretty well. Every man was a
character in his way, and their remarks filled me constantly with mirth.

Our last three days were stormy in the extreme--regular equinoctial
weather. The captain did not sleep, for the waters were, in his
opinion, “too submariny.” I put out my lifebelt and wrapped up my
manuscripts in a waterproof packet.

“What will happen should we strike a mine or be torpedoed?” I asked of
the captain.

“Unless the engines were blown up we should proceed as best we could on
the injured ship,” said he. He showed me what were the vital sections
of the vessel.

“In any case we should not take to the boats except in the worst
extremity,” said he. “For the Lascars have no will to live and they
would not row us far. We should throw three dead overboard every
morning, they so quickly lose hope.”

At Lerwick we learned the name of the port for which we had to make.
’Twas Aberdeen, and as the captain shouted this to us from the boat in
which he was returning from the man-of-war, all the officers rushed to
look at their shipping almanacks to see what the tides were. We made
out that we could just get in in time. And the vessel that night did
the best she ever did.

Still we missed the tide and had to wait all day outside Aberdeen, and
that was very tantalising. I had made up my mind to stay the night
at a hotel, and then suddenly the Daylight Saving Bill made me an
unlooked-for present of an hour, and it was possible to catch the 8.30
night train for London.

An extremely cautious Customs Officer looked at my things, but said
naught, and he insisted on my unpacking the samovar which I was
bringing home. When he saw it, he remarked:

“It’ll be something for taking pictures?”

He said this because I had put in the chimney a number of pictures and
maps to keep them from crumpling.

The doctor when he came thought we might be detained in quarantine for
a week. The captain had a sore throat. He must go to a hospital and
have a culture of it taken.

“A lot of bally rot, I call it,” the captain kept repeating, and tears
were almost trickling from his eyes.

The doctor, however, let me go, and I sent a small boy to fetch a taxi.
The taxi appeared at about 8.25 P. M., and I just got to the station in
time. There was half a minute.

“Take it easy, you’ve plenty of time,” said a porter to me,
characteristically.

All my possessions were labelled, and the doors of the guard’s pan
opened in the moving train and accepted the extra bags. I sped along
through a throng of women waving good-bye to soldiers, and got into a
carriage as by miracle.

There for a moment I paused and considered.

What a contrast to Russian ways, the possibility of getting off by a
train with such a hairbreadth of margin.

The contrast was flattering to ourselves.

Soon, however, came another contrast, less flattering. Two drunken men
got in. I was feeling particularly tender to everything English, and
could not possibly have felt critical or wished to grumble.

But one of the drunken men wanted to fight. He stood up and held on a
minute to the window-strap, looked at me vaguely, and exclaimed:

“I pronounce my ultimatio.”

“What is it?” I asked cheerfully.

“Self-defence,” he replied, and then relapsed into his seat with a bump.

So I was home. And all night long the train rushed on to London.

                                THE END


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Stephen Graham is a close student of Russia; he has a consuming
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national characteristics, particularly as typified by her religious
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and this is especially true of Russia, because the intensity of Russian
character demands some absorbing ideal to which it may turn.

“All that is beautiful in Russia’s life, art and culture,” writes Mr.
Graham, “springs from the particular and characteristic Christian ideas
in the depths of her. She is essentially a great and wonderful unity.
It is of that essential unity that I write.”

“The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary” is a valuable addition to the
list of important books Mr. Graham has written on Russia, books that
are treasuries of information and a source of inspiration to those who
love mankind.


  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  Publishers      64-66 Fifth Avenue      New York




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

Russia and the World

  _Illustrated, cloth, 8vo, $2.00_


For more than seven years Stephen Graham has been a close student of
things Russian. Compelled by an intense sympathy with the country and
its people, he forsook his native England and went to Russia when he
was twenty-three to study at first hand the life and customs of that
country. This was the beginning of an attachment which grew stronger
with the years and out of which have come several of the most important
contributions made to English literature bearing on the Russia of
modern times.

At the outbreak of the present European war Mr. Graham was in Russia,
and his book opens, therefore, with a description of the way the news
of war was received on the Chinese frontier, one thousand miles from a
railway station, where he happened to be when the Tsar’s summons came.
Following this come other chapters on Russia and the War, considering
such subjects as, Is It a Last War?, Why Russia Is Fighting, The
Economic Isolation of Russia, An Aeroplane Hunt at Warsaw, Suffering
Poland: A Belgium of the East and The Soldier and the Cross.

But “Russia and the World” is not by any means wholly a war book. It
is a comprehensive survey of Russian problems. Inasmuch as the War is
at present one of her problems it receives its due consideration. It
has been, however, Mr. Graham’s intention to supply the very definite
need that there is for enlightenment in English and American circles
as to the Russian nation, what its people think and feel on great
world matters. On almost every country there are more books and more
concrete information than on his chosen land. In fact, “Russia and the
World” may be regarded as one of the very first to deal with it in any
adequate fashion.


  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  Publishers      64-66 Fifth Avenue      New York




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

A Tramp’s Sketches

  _Cloth, illustrated, 8vo, $1.75_


“The author’s notes on people and places, jotted down in the open
air, while sitting on logs in the forests or on bridges over mountain
streams, form a simple narrative of a walking trip through Russia.
The sketches read like those of a rebel against modern conditions and
commercialism, who prefers to these the life of a wanderer in the
wilderness.”--_Outdoor World._

“A book throbbing with life which cannot help but prove of interest
to many readers. The book is a treasury of information, and will be a
source of great inspiration to those who love mankind; while the author
tells us much of the sorrow and degradation of the world he also tells
as much of his own high and noble thinking.”--_The Examiner._

“It is with life itself rather than the countries visited that this
collection of sketches is concerned. It is personal and friendly in
tone, and was written mostly in the open air while the author was
tramping along the Caucasian and Crimean shores of the Black Sea, and
on a pilgrimage with Russian peasants to Jerusalem.”--_Country Life in
America._

“Mr. Graham has seen many interesting parts of the world, and he tells
of his travels in a pleasing way.”--_Suburban Life._

“... there is much that the reader will heartily appreciate and
enjoy.”--_Boston Transcript._


  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  Publishers      64-66 Fifth Avenue      New York




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

With Poor Immigrants to America

  _Decorated cloth, 8vo, illustrated, $2.00_


“We collected on the quay at Liverpool--English, Russians, Jews,
Germans, Swedes, Finns.... Three hundred yards out in the harbor stood
the red funneled Cunarder which was to bear us to America....” The
beginning of the voyage is thus described, a voyage during which the
reader sees life from a new angle. The trip across is, however, but the
forerunner of even more interesting days. Stephen Graham has the spirit
of the real adventurer and the story of his intimate association with
the immigrants is an intensely human and dramatic narrative, valuable
both as literature and as a sympathetic interpretation of a movement
which too frequently is viewed only with unfriendly eyes.

“Mr. Graham has the spirit of the real adventurer. He prefers people to
the Pullmans, steerage passage to first cabin. In his mingling with the
poorer classes he comes in contact intimately with a life which most
writers know only by hearsay, and interesting bits of this life and
that which is picturesque and romantic and unlooked for he transcribes
to paper with a freshness and vividness that mark him a good mixer
with men, a keen observer and a skillful adept with the pen.”--_North
American._


  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  Publishers      64-66 Fifth Avenue      New York




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem

  _Decorated cloth, illustrated, 8vo, $2.75_


=The journey of the Russian peasants to Jerusalem has never been
described before in any language, not even in Russian. Yet it is the
most significant thing in the Russian life of to-day. In the story lies
a great national epic.=

“Mr. Stephen Graham writes with full sympathy for the point of view of
the devout, simple-minded, credulous peasants whose companion he became
in the trip by boat from Constantinople to Jaffa and thence on foot to
the holy places.”--_The Nation._

“Apart from the value which must be attached to the authenticity of
the glimpses of Russian life that Mr. Graham gives in his latest book,
it also clearly ranks him as the best modern writer of the saga of
vagabondage.”--_N. Y. Times._

“Mr. Graham has written an intensely interesting book, one that is a
delightful mixture of description, impression, and delineation of a
peculiar but colorful character.”--_Book News Monthly._

“A book of intensely human interest.”--_The Continent._

“The book is beautifully produced, illustrated with thirty-eight
exceptionally fine snapshots, and is of commanding interest, whether
read as a mere piece of adventure or as revelation of an almost unknown
tract of religious belief.”--_Christian Advocate._

“The story is written with a graphic and eloquent pen.”--_The
Congregationalist._


  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  Publishers      64-66 Fifth Avenue      New York




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

The name “Korolenko” on page 88 has been changed to “Korolinko” to
match the first occurrence on that page. All other names of persons and
places have been retained as originally typeset.

The Tsar’s Christmas announcement has been set as a blockquote, to the
best of the Transcriber’s ability. The Transcriber was unable to find a
verbatim record of the announcement.

Minor changes have been made to clarify indistinct punctuation.

Hyphenation has been left as originally typeset.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUSSIA IN 1916 ***

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