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.