Blagoveschensk is built on much the same lines as all the other
Siberian towns that I have seen, a wooden town mostly of one-storeyed
houses straggling over the plain in wide streets that cut one another
at right angles. Again it was not at all unlike an Australian town, a
frontier town to all intents and purposes. The side-roads were deep in
dust, and the principal shop, a great store, a sort of mild imitation of
Harrod's, where you could buy everything from a needle to an anchor--I
bought a dog-collar with a bell for Buchanan--was run by Germans. It was
a specimen of Germany's success in peaceful penetration. It seemed as if
she were throwing away the meat for the shadow, for they were interning
all those assistants--400 of them. Now probably they form the nucleus of
the Bolshevist force helping Germany.
The Governor's house was on the outskirts of the town, and it was
thronged with people, men mostly, and Buchanan and I were passed from
one room to another, evidently by people who had not the faintest
notion of what we wanted. Everybody said “Bonjour,” and the Governor and
everybody else kissed my hand. I said I was “Anglisky,” and it seemed
as if everybody in consequence came to look at me. But it didn't advance
matters at all.
I began to be hungry and tired, and various people tried questions upon
me, but nothing definite happened. At last, after about two hours, when
I was seriously thinking of giving up in despair, a tall, good-looking
officer in khaki came in. He put his heels together and kissed my hand
as courteously as the rest had done, and then informed me in excellent
English that he was the Boundary Commissioner and they had sent for him
because there was an Englishwoman arrived, and, while very desirous of
being civil to the representative of their new Ally, nobody could make
out what on earth she was doing here and what she wanted!
I told my story and it was easy enough then. He admired Buchanan
properly, drove us both to his house, introduced me to his wife and made
me out a most gorgeous protection order written in Russian. I have it
still, but I never had occasion to use it.
Opposite Blagoveschensk is a Chinese town which is called Sakalin,
though the maps never give it that name, and in Vladivostok and Peking
they call it various other names. But its right name is Sakalin, I know,
for I stayed there for the best part of a week.
At Sakalin the head of the Chinese Customs is a Dane, Paul Barentzen,
and to him and his wife am I greatly beholden. I had been given letters
to them, and I asked my friend the kindly Russian Boundary Commissioner
if he knew them. He did. He explained to me I must have a permit to
cross the river and he would give me one for a week. A week seemed
overlong, but he explained the Russian Government did not allow free
traffic across the river and it was just as well to have a permit that
would cover the whole of my stay. Even now, though I did stay my week, I
have not fathomed the reason of these elaborate precautions, because
it must be impossible to guard every little landing-place on the long,
long, lonely river--there must be hundreds of places where it is easy
enough to cross--only I suppose every stranger is liable sooner or later
to be called upon to give an account of himself.
The ferries that crossed the Amur to the Chinese side were great boats
built to carry a large number of passengers, but the arrangements
for getting across the river did justice to both Chinese and Russian
mismanagement. Unlike the efficient Japanese, both these nations,
it seems to me, arrive at the end in view with the minimum amount of
trouble to those in authority--that is to say, the maximum of trouble
to everybody concerned. The ferry-boats owing to local politics had a
monopoly, and therefore went at their own sweet will just exactly when
they pleased. There was a large and busy traffic, but the boats
never went oftener than once an hour, and the approaches were just as
primitive as they possibly could be. There was one little shed with a
seat running round where if you were fortunate you could sit down with
the Chinese hawkers and wait for the arrival of the boat. And when it
did come the passengers, after a long, long wait, came climbing up the
rough path up the bank looking as if they had been searched to the
skin. They let me through on the Chinese side and I found without
any difficulty my way to Mr Paul Barentzen's house, a two-storeyed,
comfortable house, and received a warm invitation from him and his wife
to stay with them.
It was a chance not to be missed. I was getting very weary, I was tired
in every bone, so a chance like this to stay with kindly people who
spoke my own language, on the very outskirts of the Chinese Empire, was
not to be lightly missed, and I accepted with gratitude, a gratitude I
feel strongly. Mr Barentzen was a Dane, but he spoke as good English as
I do, and if possible was more British. His wife was English. And that
night he celebrated the coming into the war of Britain. He asked me
and the Russian Boundary Commissioner and his wife and another Russian
gentleman all to dinner in the gardens at Blagoveschensk.
The place was a blaze of light, there were flags and lamps and bands
everywhere, the whole city was _en fête_ to do honour to the new
addition to the Grande Entente. When we were tired of walking about the
gardens we went inside to the principal restaurant that was packed with
people dining, while on a stage various singers discoursed sweet music
and waved the flags of the Allies. But the British flag had not got as
far as the capital of the Amur Province. Indeed much farther west than
that I found it represented by a red flag with black crosses drawn on
it, very much at the taste of the artist, and “Anglisky” written boldly
across it to make up for any deficiency.
Mr Barentzen had foreseen this difficulty and had provided us all with
nice little silk specimens of the Union Jack to wear pinned on our
breasts. About ten o'clock we sat down to a most excellent dinner,
with sturgeon and sour cream and caviare and all the good tilings that
Eastern Siberia produces. A packed room also dined, while the people on
the stage sang patriotic songs, and we were all given silk programmes
as souvenirs. They sang the Belgian, the French and the Russian national
anthems, and at last we asked for the British.
Very courteously the conductor sent back word to say he was very sorry
but the British national anthem was also a German hymn and if he dared
play it the people would tear him to pieces. Remembering my tribulations
a little way down the river, I quite believed him, so I suggested as an
alternative _Rule, Britannia_, but alas! he had never heard of it. It
was a deadlock, and we looked at one another.
Then the tall Russian who was the other guest pushed his chair from
the table, stood up, and saluting, whistled _Rule, Britannia!_ How the
people applauded! And so Britain entered the war in Far Eastern Siberia.
We certainly did not go home till morning that day. For that matter, I
don't think you are supposed to cross the river at night, not ordinary
folk, Customs officials may have special privileges. At any rate I came
back to my bunk on the steamer and an anxious little dog just as the
day was breaking, and next day I crossed to Sakalin and stayed with the
Barentzens.
The Russians then took so much trouble to keep the Chinese on their own
side of the river that the Russian officers and civil servants, much to
the chagrin of their wives, were nowhere in the province allowed to have
Chinese servants. The fee for a passport had been raised to, I think,
twelve roubles, so it was no longer worth a Chinaman's while to get one
to hawk a basket of vegetables, and the mines on the Zeya, a tributary
of the Amur on the Russian side, had fallen off in their yield because
cheap labour was no longer possible. The people who did get passports
were the Chinese prostitutes, though a Chinese woman has not a separate
identity in China and is not allowed a passport of her own. However,
there are ways of getting over that. A man applied for a passport and it
was granted him. He handed it over to the woman for a consideration, and
on the other side any Chinese document was, as a rule, all one to the
Russian official. Remembering my own experience and how I had difficulty
in deciding between my passport and my agreement with my muleteers, I
could quite believe this story.
Blagoveschensk is a regular frontier town and, according to Mr
Barentzen, is unsafe. On the first occasion that I crossed the river
with him I produced a hundred-rouble note. Almost before I had laid it
down it was snatched up by the Chinese Commissioner of Customs.
“Are you mad?” said he, and he crumpled up the note in his hand and
held out for my acceptance a rouble. I tried to explain that not having
change, and finding it a little awkward, I thought that this would be a
good opportunity to get it, as I felt sure the man at receipt of custom
must have plenty.
“I dare say,” said my host sarcastically. “I don't want to take away
anybody's character, but I'll venture to say there are at least ten
men within hail”--there was a crowd round--“who would joyfully cut your
throat for ten roubles.”
He enlarged upon that theme later. We used to sit out on the balcony of
his house looking out, not over the river, but over the town of Sakalin,
and there used to come in the men from the B.A.T. Factory, a Russian in
top-boots who spoke excellent English and a young American named Hyde.
They told me tales, well, something like the stories I used to listen
to in my childhood's days when we talked about “the breaking out of the
gold” in Australia, tales of men who had washed much gold and then
were lured away and murdered for their riches. Certainly they did not
consider Blagoveschensk or Sakalin towns in which a woman could safely
wander. In fact all the Siberian towns that they knew came under the
ban.
But of course mostly we talked about the war and how maddening it was
only to get scraps of news through the telegraph. The young American was
keen, I remember. I wonder if he really had patience to wait till his
country came in. He talked then in the first week of the war of making
his way back to Canada and seeing if he could enlist there, for even
then we felt sure that the Outer Dominions would want to help the
Motherland. And the Germans were round Liège--would they take it?
Association is a curious thing. Whenever I hear of Liège I cannot
help thinking, not of the Belgian city, but of a comfortable seat on a
balcony with the shadows falling and the lights coming out one by one
on the bath-houses that are dotted about a little town on the very
outskirts of the Chinese Empire--the lights of the town. There are the
sounds and the smells of the Chinese town mingling with the voices of
the talkers and the fragrance of the coffee, and the air is close with
the warmth of August. There comes back to me the remembrance of the
keen young American who wanted to fight Germany and the young Russian in
top-boots who was very much afraid he would only be used to guard German
prisoners.
Sakalin was cosmopolitan, but it had a leaning toward Russia, hence the
bath-houses, an idea foreign to Chinese civilisation; and when I got a
piece of grit in my eye which refused to come out it was to a Japanese
doctor I went, accompanied by my host's Chinese servant, who, having
had the trouble stated by me in English, explained it to another man in
Chinese, who in his turn told the doctor what was the matter in Russian.
Luckily that man of medicine was very deft and I expect he could have
managed very well without any explanation at all. I have the greatest
respect for the Japanese leech I visited in Sakalin.
On the Sunday we had a big picnic. The Russian Boundary Commissioner
came across with his wife and little girls, Mrs Barentzen took
her little girl and the Chinese Tao Tai lent us the light of his
countenance. He was the feature of the entertainment, for he was a very
big man, both literally and socially, and could not move without a large
following, so that an escort of mounted police took charge of us. The
proper portly Chinaman of whom this retinue was in honour spoke no
English, but smiled at me benevolently, and wore a petticoat and a
Russian military cap! The picnic was by a little brook about seven miles
from the town and I shall always remember it because of the lush grass,
waist-high, and the lovely flowers. I had looked at the Siberian flowers
from the steamer when they were ungetatable, I had gathered them with
joy in Saghalien, and now here they were again just to my hand. In June
they told me there were abundant lilies of the valley, and I regretted
I had not been there in June. Truly I feel it would be a delight to
see lilies of the valley growing wild, but as it was, the flowers were
beautiful enough, and there were heaps of them. There were very fine
Canterbury bells, a glorious violet flower and magnificent white
poppies. Never have I gathered more lovely flowers, never before have I
seen them growing wild in such amazing abundance. No one is more truly
artistic than the average Chinese, and I think the Tao Tai must have
enjoyed himself, though it is against the canons of good taste in China
to look about you.
Presently I was asking the chief magistrate's good offices for Buchanan,
for he, my treasured Buchanan, was lost. In the Barentzens' house
there was, of course, as in all well-regulated Chinese houses run by
foreigners, a bathroom attached to every bedroom, and when I wanted a
bath the servants filled with warm water the half of a large barrel,
which made a very excellent bath-tub. And having bathed myself, I bathed
Buchanan, whose white coat got very dirty in the dusty Chinese streets.
He ran away downstairs and I lingered for a moment to put on my dress,
and when I came down he was gone. High and low I hunted; I went up and
down the street calling his name, and I knew he would have answered, he
always did, had he been within hearing. All the Customs men were turned
out and I went to the Chinese Tao Tai, who promptly put on all the
police. But Buchanan was gone for a night and I was in despair. Mr
Barentzen's head boy shook his head.
“Master saying,” said he, “mus' get back that dog.” So I realised I was
making a fuss, but for the moment I did not care. The Tao Tai gave it
as his opinion that he had not been stolen. There were many little dogs
like him in the town, said he, no one would steal one, which only shows
a Chinese magistrate may not be infallible, for I was sure Buchanan
would not stay away from me of his own free will.
And then at last the servants turned up triumphant, Buchanan, in the
arms of the head boy, wild with delight at seeing his mistress again.
The police had searched everywhere, but the servants, with their
master's injunction in mind and my reward to be earned, had made further
inquiries and found that a little boy had been seen taking the dog into
a certain house occupied by an official, the man who was responsible for
the cleaning of the streets. This was the first intimation I ever had
that the Chinese did clean their streets: I had thought that they
left that job to the “wonks” and the scavenger crows. The police made
inquiries. No, there was no little dog there. But the servants--wise
Chinese servants--made friends with the people round, and they said:
“Watch. There is a dog.” So a junior servant was put to watch, and when
the gate of the compound was opened he stole in, and there was poor
little James Buchanan tied up to a post. That servant seized the dog and
fled home in triumph.
The T'ai T'ai (the official's wife), said the people round, had wanted
the pretty little dog.
I was so delighted to get my little friend back that I should have been
content to leave things there. Not so Mr Barentzen. He sent for that
official, and there in his drawing-room he and I interviewed a portly
Chinese gentleman in grey petticoats, a long pigtail, a little black
silk cap and the tips of the silver shields that encased the long nails
of his little fingers just showing beyond his voluminous sleeves.
“An officious servant,” he said. He was extremely sorry the Commissioner
of Customs and his friend had been put to so much inconvenience. The
servant had already been dismissed. And so we bowed him out, face was
saved, and all parties were satisfied. It was very Chinese. And yet we
knew, and we knew that he must have known we knew, that it was really
his wife who received the little dog that everyone concerned must have
realised was valuable and must have been stolen.
Here in Sakai in I heard about the doings of the only wolves that came
into my wanderings. In the little river harbour were many small steamers
flying the Russian flag and loading great barrels with the ends painted
bright red. These barrels, explained the Customs Commissioner, contained
spirits which the Russians were desirous of smuggling into Russian
territory. The Chinese had not the least objection to their leaving
China after they had paid export duty. They were taken up and down the
river and finally landed at some small port whence they were smuggled
across. The trade was a very big one. The men engaged in it were known
as the wolves of the Amur and were usually Caucasians and Jews. In
1913, the last year of which I have statistics, no less than twenty-five
thousand pounds export was paid on these spirits, and in the years
before it used to be greater. I wonder whether with the relaxing of
discipline consequent on the war and the revolution the receipts for the
export have not gone up.
The wide river was beautiful here, and Blagovesehensk, lying across the
water, with its spires and domes, all the outlines softened, standing
against the evening sky, might have been some town of pictured Italy. I
am glad I have seen it. I dare not expiate on Mr Barentzen's kindness.
My drastic critic, drastic and so invaluable, says that I have already
overloaded this book with tales of people's kindness, so I can only say
I stayed there a week and then took passage on the smaller steamer which
was bound up the Amur and the Shilka to Stretensk and the railway.
I had, however, one regret. I had inadvertently taken my plates and
films on which I had all my pictures of the Amur and Saghalien across
the Sakalin and I could not take them back again. The Russian rule was
very strict. No photographs were allowed. Everything crossing the river
must be examined. Now to examine my undeveloped films and plates would
be to ruin them. I interviewed a Japanese photographer on the Sakalin
side, but he appeared to be a very tyro in the art of developing, and
finally very reluctantly I decided to leave them for Mr Barentzen to
send home when he got the chance. He did not get that chance till the
middle of 1916, and I regret to state that when we came to develop them
every single one of them was ruined.
The steamer that I embarked on now was considerably smaller, for the
river was narrowing. The deck that ran round the cabins was only thirty
inches wide and crowded with children; worse, when James Buchanan and
I went for our daily promenades we found the way disputed by women,
mothers, or nursemaids, I know not whieh, propelling the children who
could not walk in wheeled chairs, and they thought Buchanan had been
brought there for their special benefit, a view which the gentleman
himself did not share. However, he was my only means of communication
with them, for they had no English or French.
But I was lucky, for one of the mates, brass-bound and in spotless
white, like so many Russians had served in British ships and spoke
English very well with a slight Scots accent. With him I used to hold
daily conversations and always we discussed the war. But he shook his
head over it. It was not possible to get much news at the little wayside
places at which we stopped. There were no papers--the Russian peasant
under the beneficent rule of the Tsar was not encouraged to learn to
read--and for his part he, the mate, put no faith in the telegrams. All
would be well, of course, but we must wait till we came to some large
and influential place for news upon which we could rely.
But that large and influential place was long in coming, in fact I may
say it never materialised while I was on the river. There are at least
eleven towns marked on the way between Blagoveschensk and Stretensk, but
even the town at the junction where the Aigun and the Shilka merge into
the Amur is but a tiny frontier village, and the rest as I know the
river banks are only a few log huts inhabited by peasants who apparently
keep guard over and supply the stacks of wood needed by the steamers.
It was a lovely river now going north, north and then west, or rather
we went north, the river flowed the other way, it was narrower and wound
between wooded hills and it was very lonely. There were occasional, very
occasional, little settlements, on the Chinese side I do not remember
even a hut, though it was a lovely green land and the river, clear as
crystal, reflected on its breast the trees and rocks among which we made
our way.
Once on the Russian side we landed from a boat a woman with two little
children and innumerable bundles. They had been down, I suppose, to
visit the centre of civilisation at Blagoveschensk and now were
coming home. In the dusk of the evening we left her there looking down
thoughtfully at her encumbrances, not a living creature in sight, not
a sign of man's handiwork anywhere. I hoped there were no tigers about,
but she has always lived in my memory as an unfinished story. I suppose
we all of us have those unfinished stories in our lives, not stories
left unfinished because they are so long drawn out we could not possibly
wait for developments, but stories that must finish suddenly, only
we are withdrawn. Once I looked from a railway carriage window in the
Midlands and I saw a bull chasing a woman; she was running, screaming
for all she was worth, for a fence, but whether she reached it or not
I have no means of knowing. Another time I saw also from a railway
carriage window two men, mother naked, chasing each other across the
greensward and left them there because the train went on. Of course I
have often enough seen men without clothes in the tropics, but in the
heart of England they are out of the picture and want explaining.
That explanation I shall never get. Nor is it likely I shall ever know
whether that unknown woman and her little children ever reached their
unknown home.
We were luxuriously fed upon that little steamer. The Russian tea with
lemon and the bread and butter were delicious, and we had plenty of
cream, though gone was the red caviare that farther east had been so
common. But I was tired and at last feeling lonely. I began to count the
days till I should reach home.
On the Amur the weather had been gorgeous, but when we entered the
Shilka we were north of 53° again and well into the mountains, and
the next morning I awoke to a grey day. It rained and it rained, not
tropical rain, but soft, penetrating rain; the fir-clad hills on either
side were veiled in a silvery mist. The river wound so that as we looked
ahead we seemed to be sailing straight into the hills. The way looked
blocked with hills, sometimes all mist-covered, sometimes with the green
showing alluringly through the mist, and occasionally, when the mist
lifted and the sun came out, in all the gullies would linger little grey
cloudlets, as if caught before they could get away and waiting there
screened by the hills till the mist should fall again. Occasionally
there were lonely houses, still more occasionally little settlements of
log huts with painted windows hermetically sealed, and once or twice a
field of corn ripe for the harvest but drowned by the persistent rain.
But the air was soft and delicious, divine; only in the cabins on board
the crowded steamer was it pestilential. The mate told me how, six weeks
before, on his last trip up, an Englishman had come selling reapers and
binders, and he thought that now I had made my appearance the English
were rather crowding the Amur.
Sometimes when we stopped the passengers went ashore and went berrying,
returning with great branches laden with fruit, and I and Buchanan too
walked a little way, keeping the steamer 'well in sight, and rejoicing
in the flowers and the green and the rich, fresh smell of moist earth. I
do not know that ever in my life do I remember enjoying rain so much.
Of course in my youth in Australia I had always welcomed the life-giving
rain, but thirteen years in England, where I yearned for the sunshine,
had somehow dimmed those memories, and now once again the rain on the
river brought me joy. The mist was a thing of beauty, and when a ray of
sunshine found its way into a green, mist-veiled valley, illuminating
its lovely loneliness, then indeed I knew that the earth was the Lord's
and the fullness thereof.
Sometimes we passed rafts upon the river. They were logs bound together
in great parallelograms and worked with twelve long sweeps fixed at each
end. Twelve men at least went to each raft, and there were small houses
built of grass and canvas and wood. They were taking the wood down to
Nikolayeusk to be shipped to Shanghai and other parts of the world for
furniture, for these great forests of birch and elm and fir and oak must
be a mine of wealth to their owners. I do not know whether the wood is
cut on any system, and whether the presence of these great rafts had
anything to do with the many dead trees I saw in the forests, their
white stems standing up ghostlike against the green hill-side.
I have no record of these lovely places. My camera was locked away now
in my suit-case, for it was war, and Russia, rightly, would allow no
photographs.
Seven days after we left Blagoveschensk we reached Stretensk and I came
in contact for the first time with the World's War.