Nikolayeusk seemed to me the ends of the earth. I hardly know why it
should have done so, for I arrived there by way of a very comfortable
steamer and I have made my way to very much more ungetatable places. I
suppose the explanation is that all the other places I have visited I
had looked up so long on the map that when I arrived I only felt I was
attaining the goal I had set out to reach, whereas I must admit I had
never heard of Nikolayeusk till Mr Sly, the British consul, sketched
it out as the end of my itinerary on the Siberian rivers, and ten days
later I found myself in the Far Eastern town. I remember one of my
brothers writing to me once from Petropaulovski:
“I always said my address would some day be Kamseatkha and here I am!”
Well, I never said my address would be Nikolayeusk because I had never
heard of it, but here I was nevertheless. The weather was warm, the sun
poured down from a cloudless blue sky, and in the broad, grass-grown
streets, such streets have I seen in Australian towns, when the faint
breeze stirred the yellow dust rose on the air. And the town straggled
all along the northern side of the river, a town of low, one-storeyed
wooden houses for the most part, with an occasional two-storeyed house
and heavy shutters to all the windows. There was a curious absence
of stone, and the streets when they were paved at all were, as in
Kharbarosvk, lines of planks, sometimes three, sometimes five planks
wide, with a waste of dust or mud or grass, as the case might be, on
either side.
The Russians I found kindness itself. In Vladivostok I had met a man
who knew one of my brothers--I sometimes wonder if I could get to such
a remote corner of the earth that I should not meet someone who knew
one of these ubiquitous brothers of mine--and this good friend, having
sampled the family, took me on trust and found someone else who
would give me a letter to the manager of the Russo-Asiatic Bank at
Nikolayeusk. This was a godsend, for Mr Pauloff spoke excellent English,
and he and his corresponding clerk, a Russian lady of middle age who had
spent a long time in France, took me in hand and showed me the sights.
Madame Schulmann and I and Buchanan drove all over the town in one of
the most ancient victorias I have ever seen--the most ancient are in
Saghalien, which is beyond the ends of the earth--and she very kindly
took me to a meal at the principal hotel. I was staying on board the
steamer while I looked around me. The visit with this lady decided me
not to go there. It wras about four o'clock in the afternoon, so I don't
know whether our meal was dinner or tea or luncheon; we had good soup,
I remember, and nice wine, to say nothing of excellent coffee, but the
atmosphere left much to be desired. I don't suppose the windows ever
had been opened since the place was built, and no one seemed to see any
necessity for opening them. My hostess smiled at my distress. She said
she liked fresh air herself but that for a whole year she had lodged in
a room where the windows would not open. She had wanted to have one of
the panes--not the window, just one of the panes--made to open to admit
fresh air, and had offered to do it at her own expense, but her landlord
refused. It would spoil the look of the room. She advised me strongly
if I wanted fresh air to stay as long as I could on board the steamer at
the wharf, and I decided to take her advice.
The Russo-Asiatic Bank was not unlike the banks I have seen in
Australian townships, in that it was built of wood of one storey and the
manager and his wife lived on the premises, but the roof was far more
ornamental than Australia could stand and gave the touch of the East
that made for romance. The manager was good enough to ask me to dinner
and to include Buchanan in the invitation because I did not like to
leave the poor little chap shut up in my cabin. This was really dinner,
called so, and we had it at five o'clock of a hot summer's afternoon,
a very excellent dinner, with delicious sour cream in the soup
and excellent South Australian wine, not the stuff that passes for
Australian wine in England and that so many people take medicinally, but
really good wine, such as Australians themselves drink. The house was
built with a curious lack of partitions that made for spaciousness, so
that you wandered from one room to another, hardly knowing that you had
gone from the sitting-room to the bedroom, and James Buchanan going on a
voyage of discovery unfortunately found the cradle, to the dismay of his
mistress. He stood and looked at it and barked.
“Gracious me! What's this funny thing! I've never seen anything like it
before!”
Neither had I; but I was covered with shame when a wail proclaimed the
presence of the son and heir.
Naturally I expressed myself--truly--charmed with the town, and Mr
Pauloff smiled and nodded at his wife, who spoke no English.
“She hates it,” said he; “she has never been well since we came here.”
She was white, poor little girl, as the paper on which this is written,
and very frail-looking, but it never seemed to occur to anyone that it
would be well to open the double windows, and so close was the air of
the room that it made me feel sick and faint.
“She never goes out,” said her husband. “She is not well enough.”
I believe there was a time in our grandmothers' days when we too dreaded
the fresh air.
And in this the town differed markedly from any Australian towns I have
known. The double windows were all tight shut these warm July days, with
all the cracks stopped up with cotton wool, with often decorations of
coloured ribbons or paper wandering across the space between. Also there
were very heavy shutters, and I thought these must be to shut out the
winter storms, but M. Pauloff did not seem to think much of the winter
storms, though he admitted they had some bad blizzards and regularly the
thermometer went down below -40° Fahrenheit.
“No,” he said, “we shut them at night, at four in the winter and at nine
in the summer. Leave them open you cannot.”
“But why?” I thought it was some device for keeping out still more air.
“There is danger,” said he--“danger from men.”
“Do they steal?” said I, surprised.
“And kill,” he added with conviction.
It seems that when the Japanese invaded Saghalien, the great island
which lies opposite the mouth of the Amur, they liberated at least
thirty thousand convicts, and they burnt the records so that no one
could prove anything against them, and the majority of these convicts
were unluckily not all suffering political prisoners, but criminals,
many of them of the deepest dye. These first made Saghalien an
unwholesome place to live in, but gradually they migrated to the
mainland, and Nikolayeusk and other towns of Eastern Siberia are by no
means safe places in consequence. Madame Schulmann told me that many
a time men were killed in the open streets and that going back to her
lodgings on the dark winter evenings she was very much afraid and always
tried to do it in daylight.
Nikolayeusk is officially supposed to have thirteen thousand
inhabitants, but really in the winter-time, says Mr Pauloff, they shrink
to ten thousand, while in the summer they rise to over forty thousand,
everybody coming for the fishing, the great salmon fisheries.
“Here is noting,” said he, “noting--only fish.”
And this remark he made at intervals. He could not reiterate it too
often, as if he were warning me against expecting too much from this
remote corner of the world. But indeed the fish interested me. The
summer fishing was on while I was there, but that, it seems, is as
nothing to the autumn fishing, when the fish rush into the wide river in
solid blocks. The whole place then is given over to the fishing and the
other trades that fishing calls into being to support it. All the summer
the steamers coming down the river are crowded, and they bring great
cargoes of timber; the wharves when I was there were covered with
barrels and packing-cases containing, according to Mr Pauloff, “only
air.” These were for the fish. And now, when the humble mackerel costs
me at least ninepence or a shilling, I remember with longing the days
when I used to see a man like a Chinaman, but not a Chinaman, a bamboo
across his shoulder, and from each end a great fresh salmon slung, a
salmon that was nearly as long as the bearer, and I could have bought
the two for ten kopecks!
He that will not when he may!
But great as the trade was down the river, most eatables--groceries,
flour and such-like things--came from Shanghai, and the ships that
brought them took back wood to be made into furniture, and there
was, when I was there, quite a flourishing trade in frozen meat with
Australia, Nikolayeusk requiring about two hundred and forty thousand
pounds in the year. In winter, of course, all the provisions are frozen;
the milk is poured into basins, a stick is stuck in it and it freezes
round it, so that a milk-seller instead of having a large can has an
array of sticks on top of which is the milk frozen hard as a stone.
Milk, meat, eggs, all provisions are frozen from October to May.
I do not know what Nikolayeusk is doing now war and revolution have
reached it. At least they have brought it into touch with the outer
world.
And having got so far I looked longingly out over the harbour and
wondered whether I might not go to Saghalien.
Mr Pauloff laughed at my desires. If there was nothing to see in
Nikolayeusk, there was less than nothing in Saghalien. It was dead. It
never had been much and the Japanese invasion had killed it. Not that he
harboured any animosity against the Japanese. Russians and Japanese, he
declared, were on very friendly terms, and though they invaded Saghalien
they did not disgrace their occupation by any atrocities. The Russian,
everybody declared in Nikolayeusk, bridges the gulf between the white
man and the yellow. Russian and Chinese peasants will work side by side
in friendliest fashion; they will occupy the same boardinghouses; the
Russian woman does not object to the Chinese as a husband, and the
Russian takes a Chinese wife. Of course these are the peasant classes.
The Russian authorities made very definite arrangements for keeping out
Chinese from Siberia, as I saw presently when I went back up the river.
But the more I thought of it the more determined I was not to go
back till I had gone as far east as I possibly could go. The Russian
Volunteer fleet I found called at Alexandrovsk regularly during the
months the sea was open, making Nikolayeusk its most northern port of
call. I could go by the steamer going down and be picked up by the one
coming north. It would give me a couple of days in the island, and Mr
Pauloff was of opinion that a couple of days would be far too long.
But the _John Cockerill_ was going back and Buchanan and I must find
another roof and a resting-place. According to the inhabitants, it would
not be safe to sleep in the streets, and I had conceived a distinct
distaste for the hotel. But the _Erivan_ lay in the stream and to
that we transferred ourselves and our belongings, where the mate spoke
English with a strong Glasgow accent and the steward had a smattering.
It was only a smattering, however. I had had a very early lunch and
no afternoon tea, so when I got on board at six in the evening I
was decidedly hungry and demanded food, or rather when food might be
expected. The steward was in a dilemma. It was distinctly too early for
dinner, he considered, and too late for tea. He scratched his head.
“Lunch!” said he triumphantly, and ushered me into the saloon, where
hung large photographs of the Tsar, the Tsarina and the good-looking
little Tsarevitch. In the corner was an ikon, St Nicolas, I think, who
protects sailors. And there at six o'clock in the evening I meekly sat
down to luncheon all by myself.
Lying there I had a lovely view of the town. At night, like Vladivostok,
it lay like a ring of diamonds along the shore of the river; and in
the daytime the softly rounded green hills, the grey-blue sky and the
grey-blue sea with the little white wavelets, and the little town just
a line between the green and the blue, with the spires and domes of the
churches and other public buildings, green and blue and red and white,
made a view that was worth coming so far to see. There were ships in the
bay too--not very big ships; but a ship always has an attraction: it has
come from the unknown; it is about to go into the unknown--and as I sat
on deck there came to me the mate with the Scots accent and explained
all about the ships in sight.
The place was a fort and they were going to make it a great harbour, to
fill it up till the great ships should lie along the shore. It will
take a good time, for we lay a long way out, but he never doubted the
possibility; and meantime the goods come to the ships in the lighters
in which they have already come down the river, and they are worked by
labourers getting, according to the mate, twelve shillings a day.
“Dey carry near as much as we do,” said he.
Then there were other ships: a ship for fish, summer fish, for Japan,
sealers for the rookeries, and ships loading timber for Kamseatkha. I
thought I would like to emulate my brother and go there, and the Russky
mate thought it would be quite possible, only very uncomfortable. It
would take three months, said he, and it was rather late in the season
now. Besides, these ships load themselves so with timber that there
is only a narrow space on deck to walk on, and they are packed with
passengers, mostly labourers, going up for the short summer season.
My old trouble, want of air, followed me on board the _Erivan_. On deck
it was cool, at night the thermometer registered about 55° Fahrenheit,
but in my cabin Buehanan and I gasped with the thermometer at over 90°,
and that with the port, a very small one, open. That stuffiness was
horrible. The bathroom looked like a boiler with a tightfitting iron
door right amidships, and having looked at it I had not the courage
to shut myself in and take a bath. It seemed as if it would be burying
myself alive. As it was, sleep down below I could not, and I used to
steal up on deck and with plenty of rugs and cushions lay myself out
along the seats and sleep in the fresh air; but a seat really does leave
something to be desired in the way of luxury.
But the early mornings were delightful. The first faint light showed a
mist hanging over the green hills marking out their outlines, green
and blue and grey; then it was all grey mist; but to the east was the
crimson of the dawn, and we left our moorings early one morning and
steamed into that crimson. The sun rose among silver and grey clouds,
and rose again and again as we passed along the river and the mountains
hid him from sight. There were long streaks of silver on the broad
river; slowly the fir-clad hills emerged from the mist and the air was
moist and fragrant; the scent of the sea and the fragrance of the pines
was in it. A delicious, delicate northern sunrise it was; never before
or since have I seen such a sunrise. Never again can I possibly see one
more beautiful.
And the great river widened. There were little settlements, the
five-pointed tents of the Russian soldiers and many places for catching
fish. No wonder the fish--fish is always salmon here--like this great
-wide river. The brownish water flowed on swiftly and the morning
wind whipped it into never-ending ripples that caught the sunlight. A
wonderful river! A delightful river! I have grown enthusiastic over
many rivers. I know the Murray in my own land and the great rivers of
tropical Africa, the Congo, the Gambia, the Volta, grand and lovely
all of them. I felt I had looked upon the glory of the Lord when I had
looked upon them, but there was something in the tender beauty of the
Amur, the summer beauty veiled in mist, the beauty that would last so
short a time, that was best of all.
Meanwhile the passengers and officers of the _Erivan_ were much
exercised in their minds over me. What could an Englishwoman want
in Saghalien? To my surprise I found that none had ever stayed there
before, though it was on record that one had once landed there from a
steamer. The mate was scathing in his remarks.
“Dere are skeeters,” said he, “big ones, I hear,” and he rolled his
“r's” like a true Scotsman.
“But where can I stay?” He shook his head.
“In de hotel you cannot stay. It is impossible.” That I could quite
believe, but all the same, if the hotel was impossible, where could I
stay?
However, here I was, and I did not intend to go back to Vladivostok by
sea. At Alexandrosvk, the town of Saghalien, I proposed to land and I
felt it was no good worrying till I got there.
We entered De Castries Bay in a soft grey mist, a mist that veiled
the mountains behind. Then the mist lifted and showed us the string of
islands that guard the mouth of the bay, strung in a line like jewels
set in the sea, and the hills on them were all crowned with firs; and
then the mist dropped again, veiling all things.
It was a lonely place, where I, being a foreigner, was not allowed to
land, and we did not go close up to the shore, but the shore came to us
in great white whale-boats. Many peasants and soldiers got off here, and
I saw saws and spades in the bundles, the bundles of emigrants. There
were a few women amongst them, women with hard, elemental faces, so
different from the Chinese, that were vacuous and refined. I remembered
the women who had listened to the lecturer at Fen Chou Fu and I drew
a long sigh of relief. It was refreshing to look at those big-hipped
women, with their broad, strong feet and their broad, strong hands and
the little dirty kerchiefs over their heads. Elemental, rough, rude, but
I was glad of them. One was suckling a child in the boat, calmly, as if
it were the most natural thing to do, and somehow it was good to see it.
The beginning of life.
The morning brought a dense mist, and as it cleared away it showed us
a sparkling, smooth sea, greyish-blue like the skies above it, and a
little wooden town nestling against fir-clad hills. We had arrived at
Alexandrosvk and I wondered what would become of me.
And then once again I learned what a kind place is this old world of
ours that we abuse so often. I had gone on board that steamer without
any introduction whatever, with only my passport to show that I was a
respectable member of society. I knew nobody and saw no reason
whatever why anyone should trouble themselves about me. But we
carried distinguished passengers on board the _Erivan_. There was the
Vice-Governor of Saghalien, his wife and son, with the soldiers in
attendance, and a good-looking young fellow with short-cropped hair and
dreamy eyes who was the Assistant Chief of Police of the island, and
this man, by command of the Governor, took me in charge.
Never again shall I hear of the Russian police without thinking of the
deep debt of gratitude that I owe to Vladimir Merokushoff of Saghalien.
I do not think as a rule that people land from steamers at Alexandrosvk
on to red tapestry carpets under fluttering bruiting to the strains of
a band. But we did; and the Chief of Police--he spoke no language but
Russian--motioned me to wait a moment, and when the Governor had been
safely despatched to his home he appeared on the scene with a victoria
and drove me and Buchanan to the police station, a charming little
one-storeyed building buried in greenery, and there he established us.
Buchanan he appreciated as a dog likes to be appreciated, and he gave
up to me his own bedroom, where the top pane of the window had actually
been made to open. His sitting-room was a very bower of growing plants,
and when I went to bed that night he brought his elderly working
housekeeper, a plain-faced woman whom he called “Stera,” and made
her bring her bed and lay it across my door, which opened into the
sitting-room. It was no good my protesting; there she had to sleep. Poor
old thing, she must have been glad my stay was not long. Every day she
wore a blue skirt and a drab-coloured blouse, unbelted, and her grey
hair twisted up into an untidy knot behind, but she was an excellent
cook. That young man got himself into his everyday holland summer coat
and to entertain me proceeded to lay in enough provisions to supply a
hungry school. He showed me the things first to see if I liked them, as
if I wouldn't have liked shark when people were so kind. But as a matter
of fact everything was very good. He produced a large tin of crawling
crayfish, and when I had expressed not only my approval but my delight,
they appeared deliciously red and white for dinner, and then I found
they were only _sakouska_--that is, the _hors d'ouvre_ that the Russians
take to whet their appetites. I have often lived well, but never better
than when I, a stranger and a sojourner, was taken in charge by the
hospitable Russian police, who would not let me pay one penny for my
board and lodging. We fed all day long. I had only to come in for a
bottle of wine or beer to be produced. I was given a _gens d'arme_ to
carry my camera and another to take care of Buchanan. Never surely was
stranger so well done as I by hospitable Saghalien. The policeman
made me understand he was an author and presented me with a couple of
pamphlets he had written on Saghalien and its inhabitants, but though
I treasure them I cannot read them. Then the Japanese photographer was
sent for and he and I were taken sitting side by side on the bench in
his leafy porch, and, to crown all, because I could speak no Russian, he
sent for two girls who had been educated in Japan and who spoke English
almost as well as I did myself, though they had never before spoken to
an Englishwoman. Marie and Lariss Borodin were they, and their father
kept the principal store in Alexandrosvk. They were dainty, pretty,
dark-eyed girls and they were a godsend to me. They had a tea in my
honour and introduced me to the manager of the coal mine of Saghalien
and took care I should have all the information about the island it was
in their power to supply.
There were then about five thousand people there, one thousand in
Alexandrosvk itself, but they were going daily, for the blight of the
convict was over the beautiful land. The best coal mine is closed down
on fire and the one whose manager I met was leased to a company by the
year and worked by Chinese on most primitive lines. There is gold,
he told me, this business man who surprised me by his lavish use of
perfume, but he did not know whether it would pay for working--gold
and coal as well would be almost too much good luck for one island--and
there is naphtha everywhere on the east coast, but as it has never been
struck they think that the main vein must come up somewhere under the
sea. Still it is there waiting for the enterprising man who shall work
it.
Saghalien used to be as bad as Nikolayeusk, they told me, after the
Japanese had evacuated the northern part; but now the most enterprising
section of the convicts had betaken themselves to the mainland, and
though the free settlers were few and far between, and the most of the
people I saw were convicts, they were the harmless ones with all the
devilment gone out of them.
Alexandrosvk is a place of empty houses. When the Japanese came the
people fled, leaving everything exactly as it was; and though the
Japanese behaved with admirable restraint, considering they came as
an invading army, many of these people never came back again, and the
alertness in a bad cause which had sent many of the convicts there
against their will sent them away again as soon as they were free. All
down by the long wooden pier which stretches out into the sea are great
wooden storehouses and barracks, empty, and a monument, if they needed
it, to the courteous manner in which the Japanese make war. They had
burnt the museum, they told me, and opened the prison doors and burnt
the prison, but the other houses they had spared. And so there were
many, many empty houses in Alexandrosvk.
All the oldest carriages in the world have drifted to Saghalien.
They are decrepit in Western Siberia, they are worse, if possible, in
the East, but in the island of Saghalien I really don't know how they
hold together. Perhaps they are not wanted very often. I hired the most
archaic victoria I have ever seen and the two girls came for a drive
with me all round the town and its neighbourhood. It was a drive to be
remembered. The early summer was in all its full freshness, the red and
white cows stood knee-deep in grass that was green and lush everywhere.
There were fir-trees on the hills and on every spur of the hills, and
there were hedges with dog-roses blossoming all over them; there were
fields of dark blue iris; there were little red tiger lilies and a
spiked heliotrope flower like veronica, only each bloom grew on a single
stalk of its own; there were purple vetches and white spiræa growing in
marshy places, and the land was thick with sweet-scented clover among
which the bees were humming, and in a little village there was a Greek
church that, set in its emerald-green field, was a very riot of colour.
There were balls on the roof of royal blue, the roof itself was of pale
green, the walls were of brown logs untouched by paint and the window
edges were picked out in white. I photographed that picturesque little
church, as I did the peasant women standing at the doors of their log
huts and the queer old shandrydan in which we drove, but alas! all my
photographs perished miserably in Russia. The girls wondered that I
liked town and country so much, that I saw so much beauty in everything.
“Ah! Madame,” they sighed, “but you can go away tomorrow! If only we
could go!”
They had been educated at a convent and they produced the English books
they had read. They were very apologetic but they had found them rather
tame. Had I read them? I smiled, for they all turned out to be the
immortal works of Charles Garvice!
And we had tea in the dining-room, where father slept because they were
rather crowded, the store took up so much room; and it was a very nice
tea too, with raspberry jam in saucers, which we ate Russian
fashion with a spoon, and the roses in the garden tapped against the
window-panes, asking to come in and join us, and Buchanan got what his
soul loved, plenty of cake. They apologised because there was no fruit.
No fruit save berries ripen in Saghalien and the strawberries would not
be ready till well on in August. No words of mine can tell how kind they
were to the stranger.
I went back in the long twilight that was so cool and restful and sat
outside the leafy shaded police station and killed mosquitoes, for the
mate had heard aright, there were “skeeters” and to spare, the sort to
which Mark Twain took a gun. I watched the grey mist creeping slowly
down, down the beautiful mountains, and when it had enveloped them the
night was come and it was time to go in and have dinner and go to bed.
Perhaps it would not do to stay long in Saghalien. There is nothing to
do. She lies a Sleeping Beauty waiting the kiss of the Prince. Will this
war awaken her? The short time I was there I enjoyed every moment.
The people seemed nondescript. The upper class were certainly Russians,
and all the men wore military caps and had their hair clipped so close
it looked shaven, but it would be utterly impossible to say to what
nationality the peasant belonged. There were flaxen-haired Russians
certainly, but then there were dark-bearded men, a Mongolian type, and
there were many thrifty Chinese with queues, in belted blouses and
high boots, generally keeping little eating-shops. There may have been
Japanese, probably there were, seeing they hold the lower half of the
island, but I did not notice them, and there is, I am afraid, in that
place which is so full of possibilities absolutely nothing for that
go-ahead nation to do.
My pretty girls complained dreadfully. They looked after the shop and
then there was nothing. In the winter they said they had skating and
they liked the winter best, but the really bad time in places like
Saghalien and Nikolayeusk were the two months when it was neither
winter nor summer. Then their only means of communication with the
outside world, the river and the sea, was too full of ice to admit of
navigation and yet was not solid enough for dog-sled, so that if the
telegraph broke down, and it very often did, they are entirely cut off
from the world. Saghalien, of course, is worse off than the town, for on
the mainland presumably there are roads of sorts that can be negotiated
in case of necessity, but the island is entirely isolated. In the winter
the mails take five days coming across the frozen sea from the mainland,
and often when there are storms they take much longer. Fancy living on
an island that stretches over nearly ten degrees of latitude, which
for five months in the year gets its mails by dog-sled and for two goes
without them altogether! On the whole, there may be drawbacks to living
in Saghalien!
I left it at nine o'clock in the evening, after the darkness had fallen,
and the police officer and the pretty girls saw me on board the steamer
which was to take me back to Nikolayeusk.
They loaded me with flowers and they were full of regrets.
“Oh, Madame, Madame, how lucky you are to get away from Saghalien!”
But I said truly enough that I felt my luck lay in getting there. And
now that I sit in my garden in Kent and watch the beans coming into
blossom and the roses into bloom, look at the beds gay with red
poppies and violas, cream and purple, or wander round and calculate the
prospects of fruit on the cherry and the pear trees, I am still more
glad to think that I know what manner of island that is that lies so far
away in the Eastern world that it is almost West.