attention, Oswald had shirked their realization. He had seen with his
one watchful eye, but he had not willed to see. A score of facts had
lain, like disagreeable letters that one hesitates to answer,
uncorrelated in his mind. The disorders of the Christmas party had
indeed left him profoundly uneasy. With the new year he went with Peter
on a trip to Russia. He wanted the youngster to develop a vision of the
European problem, for Peter seemed blind to the importance of
international things. They had crossed to Flushing, travelled straight
through to Berlin, gone about Berlin for a few days, run on to St.
Petersburg—it was not yet Petrograd—visited a friendly house near the
Valdai Hills, spent a busy week in and about Moscow, and returned by way
of Warsaw. They saw Germany already trained like an athlete for the
adventure of the coming war, and Russia great and disorderly, destined
to be taken unawares. Then they returned to England to look again at
their own country with eyes refreshed by these contrasts. And all the
time Oswald watched Peter and speculated about the thoughts and ideas
hidden in Peter’s head.
§ 2
This Russian trip had been precipitated by a sudden opportunity.
Originally Oswald had planned a Russian tour for his wards on a more
considerable scale. Among the unsolved difficulties of this scheme had
been his ignorance of Russian. He had thought of employing a courier—but
a courier can be a tiresome encumbrance. His friend Bailey, who was an
enthusiast for Russia and spoke Russian remarkably well for an
Englishman, wrote from Petrograd offering to guide Oswald and Peter
about that city, suggesting a visit to a cousin who had married a
Russian landowner in Novgorod, and a week or so in Moscow, where some
friends of Bailey’s would keep a helpful eye on the travellers. It was
too good a chance to lose. There was some hasty buying of fur-lined
gloves, insertion of wadding under the fur of Oswald’s fur coat, and the
purchase of a suitable outfit for Peter.
Bailey had his misogynic side, Oswald knew; he thought women troublesome
millinery to handle; and he did not include Joan in the invitation. On
the whole Oswald did not regret that omission, because it gave him so
excellent a chance of being alone with Peter for long spells, and
getting near his private thoughts.
It was an expedition that left a multitude of vivid impressions upon the
young man’s memory; the still, cold, starry night of the departure from
Harwich, the lit decks, the black waters, the foaming wake caught by the
ship’s lights, the neat Dutch landscape with its black and white cows
growing visible as day broke, shivering workers under a chill, red-nosed
dawn pouring down by a path near the railway into the factories of some
industrial town; the long flat journey across Germany; the Sieges-Allée
and the war trophies and public buildings of Berlin; the Sunday morning
crowd upon Unter den Linden; the large prosperity of the new suburbs of
Berlin; north Germany under an iron frost, a crowd of children sliding
and skating near Königsberg; the dingier, vaster effects of Russia,
streets in Petrograd with the shops all black and gold and painted with
shining pictures of the goods on sale to a population of illiterates,
the night crowd in the People’s Palace; a sledge drive of ten miles
along the ice of a frozen river, a wooden country house behind a great
stone portico, and a merry house party that went scampering out after
supper to lie on the crisp snow and see the stars between the tree
boughs; the chanting service in a little green-cupolaed church and a
pretty village schoolmistress in peasant costume; the great red walls of
the Kremlin rising above the Moskva and the first glimpse of that
barbaric caricature, the cathedral of St. Basil; the painted
magnificence of the Troitzkaya monastery; a dirty, evil-smelling little
tramp with his bundle and kettle, worshipping unabashed in the Uspenski
cathedral; endless bearded priests, Tartar waiters with purple sashes, a
whole population in furs and so looking absurdly wealthy to an English
eye; a thousand such pictures, keen, bright and vivid against a
background of white snow....
The romanticism of the late Victorians still prevailed in Oswald’s mind.
The picturesqueness of Russia had a great effect upon him. From the
passport office at Wirballen with its imposing green-uniformed guards
and elaborate ceremonies onward into Moscow, he marked the contrast with
the trim modernity of Germany. The wild wintry landscape of the land
with its swamps and unkempt thickets of silver birch, the crouching
timber villages with their cupolaed churches, the unmade roads, the
unfamiliar lettering of the stations, contributed to his impression of
barbaric greatness. After the plainly ugly, middle-class cathedral of
Berlin he rejoiced at the dark splendours, the green serpentine and
incense, of St. Isaac’s; he compared the frozen Neva to a greater Thames
and stood upon the Troitzki Bridge rejoicing over the masses of the
fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. In Petrograd he said, “away from
here to the North Pole is Russia and the Outside, the famine-stricken
north, the frozen fen and wilderness, the limits of mankind.” Moscow
made him talk of the mingling of east and west, western and eastern
costumes jostled in the streets. He was surprised at the frequency of
Chinamen. “Away from here to Vladivostok,” he said, “is Russia and all
Asia. North, west, east and south there is limitless land. We are an
island people. But here one feels the land masses of the earth.”
Peter was preoccupied with a gallant attempt to master colloquial
Russian in a fortnight by means of a _Russian Self-Taught_ he had bought
in London; he did not thrust his conversation between Bailey and Oswald,
but sometimes when he was alone with his guardian and the mood took him
he would talk freely and rather well. He had been reading abundantly and
variously; it was evident that at Cambridge he belonged to a talking
set. If he had no directive form in his mind he had at any rate
something like a systematic philosophy.
It was a profoundly sceptical philosophy. There were moments when Oswald
was reminded of Beresford’s “Hampdenshire Wonder,” who read through all
human learning and literature before the age of five, and turned upon
its instructor with “Is this _all_?” Peter looked at the world into
which he had come, at the Kings and Kaisers demanding devotion to “our
person,” at the gentlemen waving flags and talking of patriotism and
service to empires and races and “nationality,” at the churches and
priests pursuing their “policies,” and in effect he turned to Oswald
with the same question. In the background of his imagination it was only
too manifest that the nymphs—with a general family resemblance to Hetty
Reinhart—danced, and he heard that music of the senses which the
decadent young men of the _fin de siècle_ period were wont to refer to
as “the pipes of Pan.”
He and Oswald looked together at Moscow in the warm light of sunset.
They were in the veranda of a hillside restaurant which commanded the
huge bend of the river between the Borodinski and the Kruimski bridges.
The city lay, wide and massive, along the line of the sky, with little
fields and a small church or so in the foreground. The six glittering
domes of the great Church of the Redeemer rose in the centre against the
high red wall and the clustering palaces and church cupolas of the
Kremlin. Left and right of the Kremlin the city spread, a purple sea of
houses and walls, flecked with snowy spaces and gemmed with red
reflecting windows, through which the river twisted like a silver eel.
Moscow is a city of crosses, every church has its bulbous painted cupola
and some have five or six, and every cupola carries its brightly gilded
two-armed cross. The rays of the setting sun was now turning all these
crosses to pale fire.
Oswald, in spite of his own sceptical opinions, was a little under the
spell of the “Holy Russia” legend. He stood with his foot on a chair and
rested his jaw on his hand, with the living side of his face turned as
usual towards his ward, and tried to express the confused ideas that
were stirring in his mind. “This isn’t a city like the cities of western
Europe, Peter,” he said. “This is something different. Those western
cities, they grow out of the soil on which they stand; they are there
for ever like the woods and hills; there is no other place for London or
Rouen or Rome except just where it stands; but this, Peter, is a Tartar
camp, frozen. It might have been at Nijni-Novgorod or Yaroslav or Kazan.
It might be anywhere upon the Russia plain; only it happens to be here.
It’s a camp changed to wood and brick and plaster. That’s the
headquarters camp there, the Tsar’s pavilions. And all these crosses
everywhere are like the standards outside the tents of the captains.”
“And where is it going?” said Peter, looking at Moscow over his fur
collar, with his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.
“Asia advancing on Europe—with a new idea.... One understands Dostoevsky
better when one sees this. One begins to realize this Holy Russia, as a
sort of epileptic genius among nations—like his Idiot, insisting on
moral truth, holding up the cross to mankind.”
“_What_ truth?” asked Peter.
“They seem to have the Christian idea. In a way we Westerns don’t.
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their endless schools of dissent have a
character in common. Christianity to a Russian means Brotherhood.”
“If it means anything,” said Peter.
The youngster reflected.
“I wonder, is there really this Russian idea? I don’t believe very much
in these national ideas.”
“Say national character then. This city with its endless crosses is so
in harmony with Russian music, Russian art, Russian literature.”
“Any city that had to be built here would have to look more or less like
this,” said Peter.
“If it were built by Americans?”
“If they’d lived here always,” said Peter. “But we’re arguing in a
circle. If they’d lived here always the things that have made the
Russians Russians, would have made them Russians. I’ve gone too far. Of
course there is a Russian character. They’re wanderers, body and brain.
Men of an endless land. But——”
“Well?”
“Not much of a Russian idea to it.... I don’t believe a bit in all these
crosses.”
“You mean as symbols of an idea?”
“Yes. Of course the cross has meant _something_ to people. It must have
meant tremendous things to some people. But men imitate. One sticks up a
cross because it means all sorts of deep things to him. Then the man
down the road thinks he will have a cross too. And the man up the road
doesn’t quite see what it’s all about but doesn’t like to be out of it.
So they go on, until sticking up crosses becomes a habit. It becomes a
necessity. They’d be shocked to see a new church without four or five
crosses on it. They organize a business in golden crosses. Everybody
says, ’You _must_ have a cross.’ Long ago every one has forgotten that
deep meaning....”
“H’m,” said Oswald, “you think that?”
“It’s just a crowd,” said Peter, thinking aloud. “Underneath the crosses
it’s just a swarming and breeding of men.... Like any other men.”
“But don’t you think that all that million odd down there is held
together by a distinctive idea? Don’t you feel sometimes the Russian
idea about you—like the smell of burnt wood on the breeze?”
“Well, call it a breeze,” said Peter. “It’s like a breeze blowing over
mud. It blows now and then. It’s forgotten before it is past. What does
it signify?”
He was thinking as he talked. Oswald did not want to interrupt him, and
just smiled slightly and looked at Peter for more.
“I don’t think there’s any great essential differences between cities,”
said Peter. “It’s easy to exaggerate that. Mostly the differences are
differences of scenery. Beneath the differences it’s the same story
everywhere; men shoving about and eating and squabbling and multiplying.
We might just as well be looking at London from Hampstead bridge so far
as the human facts go. Here things are done in red and black and gold
against a background of white snow; there they are done in drab and grey
and green. This is a land of dull tragedy instead of dull comedy, gold
crosses on green onions instead of church spires, extremes instead of
means, but it’s all the same old human thing. Even the King and Tsar
look alike, there’s a state church here, dissenters, landowners....”
“I suppose there is a sort of parallelism,” Oswald conceded....
“We’re not big enough yet for big ideas, the Russian idea, or the
Christian idea or any such idea,” said Peter. “Why pretend we have
them?”
“Now that’s just it,” said Oswald, coming round upon him with an
extended finger. “Because we want them so badly.”
“Does every one?”
“Yes. Consciously or not. That’s where you and I are at issue, Peter.”
“Oh, I don’t _see_ the ideas at work!” cried Peter. “Except as a sort of
flourish of the mind. But look at the everyday life. Wherever we have
been—in London, Paris, Italy, Berlin, here, we see every man who can
afford it making for the restaurants and going where there are women to
be got. Hunger, indulgence, and sex, sex, sex, sex.” His voice was
suddenly bitter. He turned his face to Oswald for a moment. “We’re too
little. These blind impulses——I suppose there’s a sort of impulse to
Beauty in it. Some day perhaps these forces will do something—drive man
up the scale of being. But as far as _we’ve_ got——!”
He stared at Moscow again.
He seemed to have done.
“You think we’re oversexed?” said Oswald after a pause.
The youngster glanced at his guardian.
“I’m not blind,” he fenced.
Then he laughed with a refreshing cheerfulness. “It’s youthful
pessimism, Nobby. My mind runs like this because it’s the fashion. We
get so dosed with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—usually at second hand. We
all _try_ to talk like this. Don’t mind me.”
Oswald smiled back.
“Peter, you drive my spirit back to the Victorians,” he said. “I want to
begin quoting Longfellow to you. ’Life is real, life is earnest——’”
“No!” Peter countered. “But it ought to be.”
“Well, it becomes so. We have Science, and out of Science comes a light.
We shall see the Will plainer and plainer.”
“The Will?” said Peter, turning it over in his mind.
“Our own will then,” said Oswald. “Yours, mine, and every right sort of
man’s.”
Peter seemed to consider it.
“It won’t be a national will, anyhow,” he said, coming back to Moscow.
“It won’t be one of these national ideas. No Holy Russia—or Old England
for the matter of that. They’re just—human accumulations. No. I don’t
know of this Will at all—_any_ will, Nobby. I can’t see or feel this
Will. I wish I could....”
He had said his say. Oswald turned again to the great spectacle of the
city. Did all those heavenward crosses now sinking into the dusk amount
to no more than a glittering emanation out of the fen of life, an
unmeaning _ignis fatuus_, born of a morass of festering desires that had
already forgotten it? Or were these crosses indeed an appeal and a
promise? Out of these millions of men would Man at last arise?...
Slowly, smoothly, unfalteringly, the brush of the twilight had been
sweeping its neutral tint across the spectacle, painting out the
glittering symbols one by one. A chill from outer space fell down
through the thin Russian air, a dark transparent curtain. Oswald
shivered in his wadded coat. Abruptly down below, hard by a ghostly
white church, one lamp and then another pricked the deepening blue. A
little dark tram-car that crept towards them out of the city ways to
fetch them back into the city, suddenly became a glow-worm....
§ 3
Twenty years before Oswald would not have talked in this fashion of the
Will. Twenty years before, the social and political order of the world
had seemed so stable to an English mind that the thought of a sustaining
will was superfluous. Queen Victoria and the whole system had an air of
immortal inertia. The scientific and economic teachings under which
Oswald’s ideas had been shaped recognized no need for wilfully
co-ordinated efforts. The end of education, they indicated, was the
Diffusion of Knowledge. Victorian thought in England took good motives
for granted, seemed indeed disposed to regard almost any motive as
equally good for the common weal. Herbert Spencer, that philosopher who
could not read Kant, most typical of all English intelligences in those
days, taught that if only there were no regulation, no common direction,
if every one were to pursue his own individual ends unrestrained, then
by a sort of magic, chaos, freed from the interference of any collective
direction, would produce order. His supreme gift to a generation of
hasty profiteers was the discovery that the blind scuffle of fate could
be called “Evolution,” and so given an air of intention altogether
superior to our poor struggles to make a decent order out of a greedy
scramble. For some decades, whatever sections of British life had ceased
to leave things to Providence and not bother—not bother—were leaving
them to Evolution—and still not bothering....
It was because of Oswald’s discovery of the confused and distressed
motives of Joan and Peter and under the suggestions of the more kinetic
German philosophy that was slowly percolating into English thought, that
his ideas were now changing their direction. Formerly he had thought of
nations and empires as if they were things in themselves, loose shapes
which had little or nothing to do with the individual lives they
contained; now he began to think that all human organizations, large and
small alike, exist for an end; they are will forms; they present a
purpose that claims the subordination of individual aims. He began to
see states and nations as things of education, beings in the minds of
men.
The parallelism of Russia and Britain which Peter had made, struck
Oswald as singularly acute. They had a closer parallelism with each
other than with France or Italy or the United States or Germany or any
of the great political systems of the world. Russia was Britain on land.
Britain was Russia in an island and upon all the seas of the globe. One
had the dreamy lassitude of an endless land horizon, the other the
hardbitten practicality of the salt seas. One was deep-feeling, gross,
and massively illiterate, the other was pervaded by a cockney
brightness. But each was trying to express and hold on to some general
purpose by means of forms and symbols that were daily becoming more
conspicuously inadequate. And each appeared to be moving inevitably
towards failure and confusion.
One afternoon during their stay in Petrograd, Bailey took Oswald and
Peter to see a session of the Duma. They drove in a sledge down the
Nevski Prospekt and by streets of ploughed-up and tumbled snow, through
which struggled an interminable multitude of sledges bringing firewood
into the city, to the old palace of the favourite Potemkin, into which
the Duma had in those days been thrust. The Duma was sitting in a big
adapted conservatory, and the three visitors watched the proceedings
from a little low gallery wherein the speakers were almost inaudible.
Bailey pointed out the large proportion of priests in the centre and
explained the various party groups; he himself was very sympathetic with
the Cadets. They were Anglo-maniac; they idealized the British
constitution and thought of a limited monarchy—in the land of
extremes....
Oswald listened to Bailey’s exposition, but the thing that most gripped
his attention was the huge portrait of the Tsar that hung over the
gathering. He could not keep his eyes off it. There the figure of the
autocrat stood, with its sidelong, unintelligent visage, four times as
large as life, dressed up in military guise and with its big cavalry
boots right over the head of the president of the Duma. That portrait
was as obvious an insult, as outrageous a challenge to the self-respect
of Russian men, as a gross noise or a foul gesture would have been.
“You and all the empire exist for _ME_,” said that foolish-faced
portrait, with its busby a little on one side and its weak hand on its
sword hilt....
It was to that figure they asked young Russia to be loyal.
That dull-faced Tsar and the golden crosses of Moscow presented
themselves as Russia to the young. A heavy-handed and very corrupt
system of repression sustained their absurd pretensions. They had no
sanction at all but that they existed—through the acquiescences of less
intelligent generations. The aged, the prosperous, the indolent, the
dishonest, the mean and the dull supported them in a vast tacit
conspiracy. Beneath such symbols could a land under the sting of modern
suggestions ever be anything but a will welter, a confusion of
sentiments and instincts and wilfulness? Was it so wonderful that the
world was given the stories of Artzibachev as pictures of the will forms
of the Russian young?
§ 4
Through all that journey Oswald was constantly comparing Peter with the
young people he saw. On two occasions he and Peter went to the Moscow
Art Theatre. Once they saw _Hamlet_ in Russian, and once Tchekhov’s
_Three Sisters_; and each was produced with a completeness of ensemble,
an excellence of mechanism and a dramatic vigour far beyond the range of
any London theatre. Here in untidy, sprawling, slushy Moscow shone this
diamond of co-operative effort and efficient organization. It set Oswald
revising certain hasty generalizations about the Russian character....
But far more interesting than the play to him was the audience. They
were mostly young people, and some of them were very young people;
students in uniform, bright-faced girls, clerks, young officers and
soldiers, a sprinkling of intelligent-looking older people of the
commercial and professional classes; each evening showed a similar
gathering, a very full house, intensely critical and appreciative. It
was rather like the sort of gathering one might see in the London Fabian
Society, but there were scarcely any earnest spinsters and many more
young men. The Art Theatre, like a magnet, had drawn its own together
out of the vast barbaric medley of western and Asiatic, of peasant,
merchant, priest, official and professional, that thronged the Moscow
streets. And they seemed very delightful young people.
His one eye wandered from the brightly-lit stage to the rows and rows of
faces in the great dim auditorium about him, rested on Peter, and then
went back to those others. This, then, must be a sample of the
Intelligentzia. These were the youth who figured in so large a
proportion of recent Russian literature. How many bright keen faces were
there! What lay before them?...
A dark premonition crept into his mind of the tragedy of all this eager
life, growing up in the clutch of a gigantic political system that now
staggered to its end....
This youth he saw here was wonderfully like the new generation that was
now dancing its way into his house at Pelham Ford....
It was curious to note how much more this big dim houseful of young
Muscovites was like a British or an American audience than it was to a
German gathering. Perhaps there were rather more dark types, perhaps
more high cheekbones; it was hard to say....
But all the other north temperate races, it seemed to Oswald, as
distinguished from the Germans, had the same suggestion about them of
unco-ordinated initiatives. Their minds moved freely in a great old
system that had lost its hold upon them. But the German youths were
co-ordinated. They were tremendously co-ordinated. Two Sundays ago he
and Peter had been watching the Sunday morning parade along Unter den
Linden. They had gone to see the white-trousered guards kicking their
legs out ridiculously in the goose step outside the Guard House that
stands opposite the Kaiser’s Palace, they had walked along Unter den
Linden to the Brandenburger Tor, and then, after inspecting that
vainglorious trophy of piled cannon outside the Reichstag, turned down
the Sieges Allée, and so came back to the Adlon by way of the Leipziger
Platz. Peter had been alive to many things, but Oswald’s attention had
been concentrated almost exclusively on the youngsters they were
passing, for the most part plump, pink-faced students in corps caps,
very erect in their bearing and very tight in their clothes. They were
an absolutely distinct variety of the young human male. A puerile
militarism possessed them all. They exchanged salutations with the
utmost punctilio. While England had been taking her children from the
hands of God, and not so much making them as letting them develop into
notes of interrogation, Germany without halt or hesitation had moulded
her gift of youth into stiff, obedient, fresh soldiers.
There had been a moment like a thunderclap while Oswald and Peter had
been near the Brandenburger Tor. A swift wave of expectation had swept
through the crowd; there had been a galloping of mounted policemen, a
hustling of traffic to the side of the road, a hasty lining up of
spectators. Then with melodious tootlings and amidst guttural plaudits,
a big white automobile carrying a glitter of uniforms had gone by,
driven at a headlong pace. “_Der Kaiser!_” Just for a moment the
magnificence hung in the eye—and passed.