LONDON, MANCHURIA, RUSSIA
During the summer of 1905 I did a certain amount of dramatic criticism
for the _Morning Post_. I wrote notices on some of the foreign plays that
were being given in London during that summer. Several foreign companies
were with us. Duse had a season at the Waldorf Theatre; Coquelin
played in _L’Abbé Constantin_, rather a tiresome, goody-goody play;
Sarah Bernhardt produced Victor Hugo’s _Angelo_, _l’Aiglon_, _Pelléas
et Mélisande_ (with Mrs. Patrick Campbell), _Phèdre_, and _Adrienne
Lecouvreur_, not Scribe and Legouvé’s play, but a play of her own.
I saw Duse display the full range of her powers in Alexandre Dumas fils’
_La Femme de Claude_; Goldoni’s _La Locandiera_; Dumas’ _Une Visite de
Noces_, _La Dame aux Camélias_, _Adrienne Lecouvreur_; and D’Annunzio’s
_Gioconda_; Sardou’s _Odette_ and _Fédora_.
The most interesting of these performances was, I think, her Césarine in
_La Femme de Claude_. Duse was blamed for appearing in a repertory of
such plays. She was said to complain of the repertory herself. But it is
doubtful whether, apart from all booking-office questions of popularity,
she would have appeared to a greater advantage in plays of a more exalted
character. Duse was not a tragic actress in the sense one imagines Mrs.
Siddons and Rachel were tragic. She could not enlarge a masterpiece of
poetry by her interpretation, nor give you a plastic poetic creation like
a piece of a Greek frieze, as Sarah Bernhardt could and did in _Phèdre_.
She was not the incarnation of the tragic muse; the gorgeous pall
overwhelmed her; when she played Cleopatra, for instance (Shakespeare’s
Cleopatra much mutilated), her peculiar power seemed to melt into thin
air. I once heard a celebrated French actress, and a French critic, who
had both only seen her play Cleopatra, wonder what her reputation was
based on. What she needed was something between high comedy and tragedy;
and this was precisely what she found in certain parts of the modern
repertory of Ibsen, D’Annunzio, Sardou, Dumas fils, and Pinero, in which
she played during that summer.
Dumas’ play, _La Femme de Claude_, gave her not only an opportunity of
showing her astonishing skill, her perfect technique, but it revealed
unguessed-of, almost incredible, aspects of her genius. When she played
parts such as Sudemann’s _Magda_ and _La Dame aux Camélias_, one used to
feel as if one ought not to be there; as if one were peeping through a
keyhole at scenes of too intimate and too sacred a nature for the public
eye. When Amando hurled money and hissed vituperation at her in the
fourth act of _La Dame aux Camélias_, one felt as if the police ought to
interfere, and save so noble a creature from outrage. One doubted whether
Duse were an artist or even an actress in the true sense of the word, and
whether all she gave were not glimpses of the extraordinary nobility of
her personality; whether the play were not beside the question; whether
she might not just as well appear on the stage in her ordinary clothes
and tell us a few confidences—her joys and her sorrows.
But her performance in _La Femme de Claude_ proved the contrary. It
proved that in the subtle and objective interpretation of a definite
character, a character utterly alien to her own nature, she could rival,
if not surpass, any artist in the world.
_La Femme de Claude_ was said by Théodore de Banville to be a symbolic
play. Call it that if you will, or call it a melodrama. The subject is
simple and dramatic, the action rapid and vigorous. An austere scientific
engineer called Claude has married an evil wife, Césarine. She leaves
him. He invents a new and powerful gun. She comes back. A foreign spy
blackmails her. He threatens to make revelations about her to her
husband, unless she obtains for him the secret of the gun. At first she
defies this man. She says her husband knows all there is to be known;
he then mentions incidents that her husband cannot know, for the bare
knowledge of them would make him an accessory in crime. She undertakes to
get the secret. She tries to win back her husband, fails, and then shows
her teeth. She sets about to seduce her husband’s pupil, a young man who
is already in love with her. She persuades him to give her the papers and
her husband shoots her dead when they are about to elope. At first sight
you would have thought that Duse’s genius was too refined and too noble
to render the snake-like, feline, insinuating, feverish, treacherous,
panther-like, savage nature of Dumas’ she-monster. Sarah Bernhardt is
the artist who at once leaps into the mind as being suited to the part,
a part that might have been written for her. I have seen Sarah Bernhardt
play it and play it superbly. At certain moments she carried you right
off your feet.
But Duse played on the nerves till they vibrated like strings, in the
same manner as she herself was tremulously vibrating. It was a gradual
process of preparation, which began from the first moment she walked
on to the stage until she fell forward at the end with outstretched
hands when she was shot. Her art was like that of a cunning violinist;
the music with its delicately interwoven themes was phrased in subtle
progress and with divine economy of effect, till she reached the
catastrophe, and then Duse attained to that height where all style
disappears, and only the perfection of art, in which all artifice is
concealed, remains. The climax needed no effort, no strain; it was the
way every note had been struck before, that made it tremendous.
Of course she transfigured Césarine, the heroine; in the modern repertory
she always raised the scale of everything she touched, so that you cried
out for her to play tragedy, and that was just what she could not do.
She did not make Dumas’ heroine a better woman than he intended her to
be; but she made her a greater woman than he can ever have hoped she
would appear. Duse’s Césarine was wicked to the core; not thoughtlessly
non-moral, not invincibly ignorant in her wickedness, but consciously and
deliberately destructive; and the manifestation and expression of this
unmitigated evil was rendered ten times more impressive by the subtlety
of its expression and the delicate refinement which it was clothed with
and partially disguised. Duse reminded one of Tacitus’ description of
Nero’s wife, Poppæa, who, he says, professed virtue but practised vice;
and whose demeanour was irreproachably modest. “Sermo comis nec absurdum
ingenium: modestiam præferre et lascivia uti.”
When she met Claude’s young pupil in the first act, she gave, while
she deliberately bewitched him, the impression that she was herself the
victim of an ingenuous and involuntary passion. In the second act her
appeal to her husband would have deceived any jury and most judges. The
notes rang out with the authentic indignation of sincerity, with the
seemingly unmistakable agony of a victim of unjust circumstance and
outrageous fortune; in that long and arduous scene, in that tense duel,
fought inch by inch between the desperate woman and the unrelenting man,
she was a gallant, a glorious fighter in a losing battle; and at the
last, when she saw the game was lost, and she allowed her true nature to
show, the spectacle was not that of a savage beast that can do nothing
but snarl and howl, but of a gentle animal that suddenly shows ferocious
teeth and reveals a hellish hate.
The finest moment of the play came after this, when she sets about her
final capture of the young man and makes him deliver her husband’s
secret. When she triumphed and said the word “_Vieni_,” it was as if one
were watching some demi-goddess, some Circe, swoop gracefully but with
terrible accuracy of aim on to her prey; swift and calm in the deadly
certainty of her stroke and of her triumph. Nobody can ever have acted
better than Duse did at that moment.
Duse’s performance as Césarine was the finest complete creative work I
ever saw her do—finer, in my opinion, than her Magda, because in Magda
she was too noble for the part, and rendered none of the _cabotine_ side
of the character.
The most charming of Duse’s parts was Mirandolina in Goldoni’s comedy,
_La Locandiera_, in which she gaily twisted all men round her fingers and
played on their weaknesses as a harper on his strings. On the same day
she gave this exhibition of gaiety, charm, rippling fun, and sly humour,
the whole as easy and spontaneous and as fresh as a melody by Mozart, she
played Lydie in Alexandre Dumas’ terrible little masterpiece in one act,
_La Visite de Noces_, and showed with unflinching truth not realism but a
Tolstoy-like reality how a woman with despair in her soul can calmly and
deliberately unravel the skein of man’s weakness, cowardice, and infamy,
and then spit out her disgust at it.
In Scribe and Legouvé’s tinsel and lifeless melodrama, _Adrienne
Lecouvreur_, she was wasting her talent, and indeed in her hands the
greater part of the play fell flat as far as there is anything in it to
fall flat. But in the death scene she revealed new phases of her genius:
“Silver lights and darks undreamed of.”
She turned the tinsel of the play into gold by her bewilderment, when she
felt the first effects of the poison, her delirium, when she imagined
herself on the lighted stage, and by her final battle with Death, when
she recovered her senses once more, in the last moments of her agony. One
gasped for breath when she felt the first throes of the poison; and when
she became delirious, the surroundings seemed to fade; we were face to
face with a ghost; we felt the icy wind blowing from the dark river.
In D’Annunzio’s play, _La Gioconda_, she might have been De Quincey’s
Our Lady of Sorrows. In Sardou’s _Fédora_ not all her technical skill
could supply the acid necessary to make that particular and peculiarly
constructed engine work. The engine was made for Sarah Bernhardt, and
nobody else has ever succeeded in making it deliver the strong electric
shock, the infectious thrill that it produced when Sarah Bernhardt dealt
with it. It may not have been worth doing; but only she could do it.
Looking back on all the plays in which I saw Duse act, and on all the
striking moments and scenes in those plays—her confusion when she
recognised the man who had seduced her in _Magda_, the pathos of her
death scene in _La Dame aux Camélias_, her withering scorn in Sardou’s
_Odette_, her irony in Ibsen’s _Doll’s House_, her fiendish leer of
seduction and triumph in _La Femme de Claude_—there was one moment in one
play which impressed me more than everything else. This was in the last
act of Pinero’s _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, when she looks at herself
in a hand-glass and realises that when she loses her looks she will have
lost all. Duse looked in the glass, and she passed her hand over her
face. It was only a flash, a flicker; it only lasted a second, and yet
in that second her face reminded me of the title of one of Kipling’s
stories, _The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows_. She looked suddenly, and for
a second, fifty years older, and one felt that the act of suicide with
which the play ends was not improbable, whatever else it might be—was, in
fact, inevitable.
Sarah Bernhardt, Duse, and Chaliapine were the three greatest artists
I have seen on the stage; for Chaliapine, in addition to his glorious
voice and his consummate singing, is a great actor, and his range is
prodigious. He can sing one night in _Ivan the Terrible_ and freeze you
to the marrow by his interpretation of the grim, half-insane, majestic,
and frenzied King; and the next night give you a picture of calm and
serene saintliness in the part of the old Believer in _Khovantincha_;
or in the _Barbier de Seville_ he can be comic with a rollicking gusto.
Perhaps his finest part is that of Mephistopheles in Boito’s opera. When
he comes on to the stage in the first act disguised as a monk you feel
that the devil is there, the Prince of Darkness, and not a fancy-dress
ball Mephistopheles; and in the scene on the Brocken, he looks and plays
as if he were Milton’s Satan. There is a titanic grandeur about him. He
wears the pall of tragedy as easily as if it were a dressing-gown. Like
all great actors, he gives you the impression that his acting is quite
simple, an easy thing which anyone could do. If you watch him closely, it
is impossible to detect how and when he makes a gesture or gives a look
or an intonation. It is done before you have time to see it done. He told
me once that his great desire and ambition was to play in Shakespeare;
and his _Boris Godounov_, in which he gave so ineffaceable a picture of
sombre ambition, brooding fear, and eating remorse, indicated that he
would have been magnificent as Othello, Richard III., or Lear. The finest
acting I ever saw on the English stage were Irving’s Becket with its
sublimely dignified and impressive death-scene in the Cathedral; Ellen
Terry’s Beatrice with its inspiring pace and rippling diction—indeed,
Ellen Terry in any part, Portia, Imogen, Nance Oldfield—Sir John Hare in
_A Pair of Spectacles_ and the _Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith_; Mrs. Kendal in
_The Likeness of the Night_, and, for imaginative character acting, Tree
as Svengali. Hare had the same seeming simplicity in his art, the same
concealment of all artifice, the same undetectable conjury that struck
one in the work of Duse, Chaliapine, Sarah Bernhardt, and all great
actors.
Mrs. Kendal acted so well, when she and her husband and Sir John Hare
used to appear regularly at the St. James’s Theatre, and people took the
excellence of her acting so much for granted, that they tired of it. She
left us. She toured in America, and then she came back and appeared in
a play called _The Greatest of These_, at the Garrick Theatre, in June
1896; and Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his notice of the play, said: “Mrs.
Kendal, forgetting that London playgoers have been starved for years in
the matter of acting, inconsiderately gave them more in the first ten
minutes than they have had in the last five years, with the result that
the poor wretches became hysterical and vented their applause in sobs
and shrieks. And yet in the old days at the St. James’s they would have
taken it as a matter of course and perhaps grumbled at the play into the
bargain.”
But of all my playgoing, I think what I enjoyed most of all was a summer
troupe at the Arena Nazionale in Florence, in the summer of 1893. The
troupe was an ordinary one; but they produced a different play every
night; and I there saw nearly all the plays worth seeing in the European
repertory, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dumas, Sardou, Maupassant,
Sudermann—besides many Italian plays. The seats were cheap; smoking
was allowed. The auditorium was open to the sky. The Italians acted so
naturally, and so easily, that they were more like children improvising
charades than professionals working for their bread; and among them was
an actor who made a great name for himself later—Zacchoni. I remember
that when I came back to London and went to a play for the first time,
the diction of the English players seemed so stilted, laborious, and
artificial, after these easy, babbling Italians, that I felt as if it
was in London and not in Florence that I had been listening to a foreign
language.
At the end of the summer of 1905 I went back to Manchuria. I spent
a few days in St. Petersburg, and then I embarked once more in the
Transbaikalian railway. The journey was pleasantly different from what it
had been in 1904, and almost as interesting in another way. An officer of
the German forestry, and a friend of a Hildesheim friend of mine—Erich
Wippern—was in the train. He was reading the second part of Goethe’s
_Faust_. I shared a compartment with an army doctor. We crossed Lake
Baikal in a steamer. It was blue, and there was nothing of the ghostly
unreal look about it that it wears in the winter. Kharbin was changed
beyond recognition. The town was twice as big and seemed to be almost
deserted. General Linevitch, the new Commander-in-Chief, did not allow
officers to go there any more except on pressing errands and for good
reasons. I spent a few days there, and I got to know some of the local
officers, among others a charming General Zacharoff who was in charge of
the demobilisation. I found myself suddenly plunged into a new society
which was not unlike what Chekhov depicts in his plays. A small drama
was progressing round the wife of a local engineer, who was the Circe
of the place. She was not particularly beautiful, but she did what she
liked with whomsoever she pleased. There were quarrels, duels arranged,
suicides threatened, revolvers fired; the whole ending in conversation
and cigarette smoke—just as in a Chekhov play, of which the motto might
have been: “L’amour passe; la fumée reste.”
On 1st September peace was declared, and the soldiers in the place tore
the telegram from one another’s hands.
I went to Gunchuling, which was the remoter G.H.Q. of the army, and
I stayed with the Press censors. Although peace had been declared,
an officer whom I knew got orders to go and fortify positions, and
Kuropatkin’s army was said to have received orders to advance. At the
time this seemed inexplicable. The reason of this was, I learnt a long
time afterwards, that news had been received of a revolution in Japan.
From Gunchuling I went to Godziadan, which was the advanced G.H.Q.
where the Commander-in-Chief lived in a train. I had telegraphed from
Gunchuling to the 2nd Transbaikal battery, asking them to send horses to
fetch me. The battery was in Mongolia, at a place called Jen-tsen-Tung,
on the extreme right flank of the army and eighty miles from Godziadan.
Two Cossacks arrived with a pony for me and my own saddle on it, and we
started at eight o’clock in the morning on our long and exhausting ride.
We spent the first night at the Chinese town of Ushitai, and halted for
our midday meal the next day at a Chinese village, a small tumble-down
place near a large clump of trees. A Chinaman came out of the house and,
seeing the red brassard of the correspondents on my arm, thought I was a
doctor. In pidgin Russian he told me his child was ill; and leading me
into his house he showed me a brown and naked infant with a fat stomach.
The infant had a white tongue and had been feeding, so the Chinaman told
me, on raw Indian corn. I prescribed cessation of diet, and the Chinaman
seemed to be satisfied, and asked me whether I would like to hear a
concert. I said: “Very much”; he then bade me sit down on the _K’ang_ and
said: “_Smotri, smotri_” (“Look, look”). Presently another Chinaman came
into the room, and taking from the wall a large and twisted clarion made
of brass, he blew on it one deafening blast and hung it up on the wall
again. There was a short pause. I waited in expectation, and the Chinaman
turned to me and said: “The concert is now over.” I then went to have
luncheon with the Cossacks under the trees, the meal consisting of rusks
as hard as bricks swimming in an earthen bowl of boiling water, on the
surface of which tea was sprinkled. When we had finished our meal, and
just as we were about to start, the Chinaman in whose house I had been
entertained, rushed up to me and said: “In your country, when you go to
a concert, do you not pay for it?” The concert was paid for, and we rode
on. We rode through grassy and flowery steppes: this was the beginning of
Mongolia. We met Mongols sitting sideways on their ponies and dressed in
coats of many colours, and we arrived at Jen-tsen-Tung at eight o’clock.
There I found my old friend Kislitski of the battery, who was living in
an immaculately clean Chinese house, and there I dined and spent the
night. The next morning I rode to a village two miles off, where the
battery was quartered. There I stayed from the 15th of September until
the 1st of October, living a life of ease and interest. The village where
we were quartered was picturesque. It lay in a clump of willow trees,
and near it there was a large wood which stretched down to a broad brown
river. Next door to us lived a Chinaman who was preparing three young
students for their examination in Pekin. He was an amiable and urbane
scholar, and he used to put on large horn spectacles and chant the most
celebrated stop-shorts in Chinese literature. Stop-shorts are Chinese
poems in four lines. They are called stop-shorts because the sense goes
on when the sound stops.
We spent the time in riding, reading, bathing, sleeping, and playing
patience.
Jen-tsen-Tung was a large and picturesque town; a stream of Mongols
flowed in and out of it, wearing the most picturesque clothes—silks and
velvets of deep orange and sea-green that glowed like jewels. At one
of the street corners a professional wizard, dressed in black silk,
embroidered with silver moons and wearing a black conical hat, practised
his trade. You asked a question, paid a small sum, and he told you the
answer to the question; but he refused to prophesy for more than a
hundred days ahead.
The evenings in our quarters were beautiful. The sky would have a faint
pinky-mauve tinge, like a hydrangea, and a large misty moon hung over the
delicate willow trees that were silvery and rustled faintly in the half
light. From the yard would float the sounds of music, music played on a
one-stringed instrument and accompanying a wailing song, an infinitely
melancholy music, less Oriental than Chinese music, and more Eastern than
Russian music.
I left this dreamy paradise on the 1st of October, and I arrived at
Kharbin on the 7th of October.
At Jen-tsen-Tung I had consulted the magician who practised his arts in
the street about my journey home. His answer was that I could go home by
the west or by the east; west would be better, but I should meet with
obstacles. His prophecy came true, but the obstacles did not begin till
we arrived at Samara. I was in the Trans-Siberian express. There were
on board the train some officers, a German savant, two German men of
commerce, three Americans—who were on their way back from Siberia, where
they had managed a mine—a Polish student, and some ladies. I shared a
compartment with Alexander Dimitriev-Mamonov, whose acquaintance I had
made at Kharbin. He was the landlord of a small property near Kirsanov.
During the war he had been employed in the Russo-Chinese Bank at Port
Arthur, where he had worked during the daytime. At night he had served
in the trenches. He spoke English perfectly, although he had never been
to England. The first part of the journey was uneventful, and nothing of
interest happened till we arrived at Irkutsk, except that the German man
of commerce had a violent quarrel with one of the officers because he did
not take off his hat in the restaurant car, in which there was a portrait
of the Emperor. Had the German been a little better versed in Russian
law, he would have known that a recent decree had made this salutation
unnecessary; as it was, he gave in and submitted to the incident being
written down in a protocol.
While we were quietly travelling, the Russian revolution had begun. The
first news of it came to me in the following manner. We had crossed
the Urals, and we had been travelling thirteen days; we had arrived at
Samara, when the attendant, who looked after the first-class carriages,
came into my compartment and heaved a sigh. I asked him what was the
matter. “We shan’t get farther than Toula,” he said. “Why?” I asked.
“Because of the unpleasantnesses” (_niepriatnosti_). I asked, “What
unpleasantnesses?” “There is a mutiny,” he said, “on the line.” We passed
the big station of Sisran and arrived at the small town of Kousnetsk,
which was no bigger than a village. There we were told the train could
not go any farther because of the strike.
We expected an ordinary railway strike, which would mean at the most a
delay of a few hours. We got out and walked about the platform. By the
evening the passengers began to show signs of restlessness. Most of them
sent long telegrams to various authorities. They drew up a petition in
the form of a round-robin, which was telegraphed to the Minister of Ways
and Communications, saying that an express train full of passengers,
extremely over-tired by a long and fatiguing journey, was waiting at
Kousnetsk, and asking the Minister to be so good as to arrange for
them to proceed farther. This telegram remained unanswered. The next
day resignation seemed to come over the company, although innumerable
complaints were voiced, such as, “Only in Russia could such a disgraceful
thing happen,” and one of the passengers suggested that Prince Kilkov’s
portrait, which was hanging in the dining-car, should be turned face to
the wall. Prince Kilkov had built the railway, and was at that moment
driving an engine himself from Moscow to St. Petersburg, as no trains
were running. He was over seventy years old. The Polish student, who
had made music for the Americans, playing by ear the accompaniment
to any tune they whistled him, and many tunes from the repertory of
current musical comedy, played the pianoforte with exaggerated facility
and endless _fioriture_ and runs. I asked an American mechanic who was
travelling with the mining managers, whether he liked the music. He said
he would like it if the “damned hell were knocked out of it,” which was
exactly my feeling. On the second day after our arrival, my American
friends left for Samara with the intention of proceeding thence by water
to St. Petersburg. I have wondered ever since how long the journey took
them, and whether they found a steamer. As it was, their departure was
not without a comic element. This is what happened. They were talking
frankly about the supine inertia of the Russians when faced with an
emergency, and were pointing out how different were the ever-ready
presence of mind and the instant translation of ideas into action that
marked men of their own country. They added that they had lost no time
in chartering the best horses in the town, and were starting for Samara
in an hour’s time. They were not going to take things lying down. While
they were telling us this in the restaurant car, a minor, very minor
and rather shabby, Russian official was sitting in the corner of the
car saying nothing and drinking tea. It turned out he had overheard and
understood the conversation of the Americans, for, when they carried
their luggage to where they expected their frisky Troika to be, it
was there indeed, but they had the mortification of seeing the little
official already inside it, galloping off and waving them a friendly
farewell. They had to be content with an inferior equipage and a later
start.
The passengers spent the time in exploring the town, which was somnolent
and melancholy. Half of it was built on a hill, a typical Russian
village—a mass of squat brown huts; the other half in the plain was like
a village in any other country. The idle guards and railway officials sat
on the steps of the station room whistling. Two more trains arrived—a
Red Cross train and a slow passenger train. Passengers from these trains
wandered about the platform, mixing with the idlers from the town. A
crowd of peasants, travellers, engineers and Red Cross attendants,
sauntered up and down in loose shirts and big boots, munching sunflower
seeds and spitting out the husks till the platform was thick with
refuse. A doctor who was in our train, half a German, with an official
training and an orthodox mind, talked to the railway servants like a
father. It was wrong to strike, he said. They should have put down their
grievances on paper and had them forwarded through the proper channels.
The officials said that would have been waste of ink and penmanship.
“I wonder they don’t kill him,” Mamonov said to me, and I agreed.
Each passenger was given a rouble a day to buy food. The third-class
passengers were given checks, in return for which they could receive
meals. However, they deprecated the plan and said they wanted the amount
in beer. They received it. They then looted the refreshment room, broke
the windows, and took away the food. This put an end to the check system.
The feeling among the first-class passengers rose. Something ought to be
done, was the general verdict; but nobody quite knew what. They felt
that the train ought to be placed in a safe position. The situation
on the evening of the second day began to be like that described in
Maupassant’s story, _Boule de Suif_. Nothing could be done except to
explore the town of Kousnetsk. There was a feeling in the air that the
normal conditions of life had been reversed. The railway officials and
the workmen smiled ironically, as much as to say, “It is our turn now,”
but the waiter in the restaurant car went on serving the aristocracy,
which was represented by a lady in a tweed coat and skirt, and two old
gentlemen, first. The social order might be overturned, but, though
empires might crash and revolutions convulse the world, he was not going
to forget his place.
It was warm autumn weather. The roads were soft and muddy, and there
was a smell of rotting leaves in the air. It was damp and grey, with
gleams of weak, pitiful sunshine. In the middle of the town there was
a large market-place, where a brisk trade in geese was carried on. One
man whom I watched failed to sell his geese during the day, and while
driving them home at sunset talked to them as if they were dogs, saying:
“Cheer up, we shall soon be home.” A party of convicts who belonged to
the passenger train were working not far from the station, and asked the
passers-by for cigarettes, which were freely given to the “unfortunates,”
as convicts were called in Russia. I met them near the station, and they
at once said: “Give the unfortunates something.” Towards evening, in
one of the third-class carriages, a party of Little Russians, Red Cross
orderlies, sang together in parts, and sometimes in rough counterpoint,
melancholy, beautiful songs with a strange trotting rhythm with no end
and no beginning, or rather ending on the dominant as if to begin again,
and opposite their carriage on the platform a small crowd of _muzhiks_
gathered together and listened and praised the singing.
On the morning of the fourth day after we had arrived, the impatience
of the passengers increased to fever pitch. A Colonel, who was with us
and who knew how to use the telegraph, communicated with Pensa, the next
big station. Although the telegraph clerks were on strike, they remained
in the offices talking to their friends on the wire all over Russia.
The strikers were civil. They said they had no objection to the express
going farther; that they would neither boycott nor beat anyone who took
us, and that if we could find a friend to drive the engine, well and
good. We found a friend, an amateur engine-driver, who was willing to
take us, and on the 28th of October we started for Pensa. We had not
gone far before the engine broke down. Directly this happened all the
passengers offered advice about the mending of it. One man produced a
piece of string for the purpose. But another engine was found, and we
arrived at last at Pensa. There, I saw in the telegrams the words “rights
of speech and assembly,” and I knew that the strike was a revolution. At
Pensa the anger of the soldiers whose return home from the Far East had
been delayed was indescribable. They were lurching about the station in
a state of drunken frenzy, using unprintable language about strikes and
strikers.
We spent the night at Pensa. The next morning we started for Moscow,
but the train came to a dead stop at two o’clock the next morning at
Riazhk, and when I woke up, the attendant came and said we should go no
farther until the _unpleasantnesses_ were over. But an hour later news
came that we could go to Riazan in another train. Riazan Station was
guarded by soldiers. A train was ready to start for Moscow, but one had
to join in a fierce scrimmage to get a place in it. I found a place in a
third-class carriage. Opposite me was an old man with a grey beard. He
attracted my attention by his courtesy. He gently prevented a woman with
many bundles being turned out of the train by another _muzhik_. I asked
him where he had come from. “Eighty versts the other side of Irkutsk,”
he said. “I was sent there, and now after thirteen years I am returning
home at the Government’s expense. I was a convict.” “What were you sent
there for?” I asked. “Murder!” he answered softly. The other passengers
asked him to tell his story. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Tell it!”
shouted the other passengers. His story was this. He had got drunk, set
fire to a barn, and when the owner had interfered he killed him. He had
served a sentence of two years’ hard labour and eleven years of exile.
He was a gentle, humble creature, with a mild expression, and he looked
like an apostle. He had no money, and lived on what the passengers gave
him. I gave him a cigarette. He smoked a quarter of it, and said he would
keep the rest for the journey, as he had still three hundred miles to
travel. We arrived at Moscow at 11 o’clock in the evening and found the
town in darkness, save for a glimmer of oil lamps. The next morning we
woke up to find that Russia had been given a charter which contained not
a Constitution, as many so rashly took for granted, but the promise of
Constitutional Government.
I stayed at the Hôtel Dresden, which when I arrived was still without
lamps or light of any kind, and the lift was not working.
The first thing which brought home to me that Russia had been granted
the promise of a Constitution was this. I went to the big Russian baths.
Somebody came in and asked for some soap, upon which the barber’s
assistant, aged about ten, said, with the air of a Hampden: “Give the
_citizen_ some soap” (“_Daite grazhdaninu mwilo_”). Coming out of the
baths I found the streets decorated with flags and everybody in a
state of frantic and effervescing enthusiasm. I went to one of the big
restaurants. There old men were embracing each other and drinking the
first glass of vodka to free Russia. After luncheon I went out into the
theatre square. There is a fountain in it, which forms an excellent
public platform. An orator mounted it and addressed the crowd. He began
to read the Emperor’s Manifesto. Then he said: “We are all too much
used to the rascality of the Autocracy to believe this; down with the
Autocracy!” The crowd, infuriated—they were evidently expecting an
enthusiastic eulogy—cried: “Down with you!” But instead of attacking
the speaker who had aroused their indignation they ran away from him!
It was a curious sight. The spectators on the pavement were seized
with panic and ran too. The orator, seeing his speech had missed fire,
changed his tone and said: “You have misunderstood me.” But what he
had said was perfectly clear. This speaker was an ordinary Hyde Park
orator. University professors spoke from the same platform. Later in
the afternoon a procession of students arrived opposite my hotel with
red flags and collected outside the Governor-General’s house. The
Governor-General appeared on the balcony and made a speech, in which he
said that now there were no police he hoped that they would be able to
keep order themselves. He asked them also to exchange the red flag, which
was hanging on the lamp-post opposite the Palace, for the national flag.
One little student climbed like a monkey up the lamp-post and hung a
national flag there, but did not remove the red flag. Then the Governor
asked them to sing the National Anthem, which they did; and as they went
away they sang the “Marseillaise”:
“On peut très bien jouer ces deux airs à la fois
Et cela fait un air qui fait sauver les rois!”
At one moment a Cossack arrived, but an official came out of the house
and told him he was not needed, upon which he went away, amidst the
jeers, cheers, hoots, and whistling of the crowd. On the whole, the day
passed off quietly. There were some tragic incidents: the death of a
woman, the wounding of a student and a workman who tried to rescue the
student from the prisoners’ van, and the shooting of a veterinary surgeon
called Bauman.
While I was standing on the steps of the hotel in the afternoon a woman
rushed up frantically and said the Black Gang were coming. A student
who came from a good family and who was standing by explained that the
Black Gang were roughs who supported the autocracy. His hand, which was
bandaged, had been severely hurt by a Cossack, who had struck it with
his whip, thinking he was about to make a disturbance. He came up to my
room, and from the hotel window we had a good view of the crowd, which
proceeded to
“Attaquer la Marseillaise en la
Sur les cuivres, pendant que la flute soupire,
En mi bémol: ‘Veillons an salut de l’Empire!’”
That night I dined at the Métropole Restaurant, and a strange scene
occurred. At the end of dinner the band played the “Marseillaise,” and
after it the National Anthem. Everybody stood up except one mild-looking
man with spectacles, who went on calmly eating his dinner; upon which a
man who was sitting at the other end of the room, rather drunk, rushed
up to him and began to pull him about and drag him to his feet. He made
a display of passive resistance, which proved effectual, and when he had
finished his dinner he went away.
The outward aspect of the town during these days was strange. Moscow
was like a besieged city. Many of the shops had great wooden shutters.
Some of the doors were marked with a large red cross. The distress,
I was told, during the strike had been terrible. There was no light,
no gas, no water; all the shops were shut; provisions and wood were
scarce. On the afternoon of 2nd November I went to see Bauman’s funeral
procession, which I witnessed from many parts of the town. It was an
impressive sight. A hundred thousand men took part in it. The whole of
the _Intelligentsia_ was in the streets or at the windows. The windows
and balconies were crowded with people. Order was perfect. There was
not a hitch nor a scuffle. The men walking in the procession were
students, doctors, workmen—people in various kinds of uniform. There
were ambulances, with doctors dressed in white in them, in case there
should be casualties. The men carried great red banners, and the coffin
was covered with a scarlet pall. As they marched they sang in a low
chant the “Marseillaise,” “Viechni Pamiat,” and the “Funeral March”[10]
of the fighters for freedom. This last tune is most impressive. From a
musician’s point of view it is, I am told, a bad tune; but then, as Du
Maurier said, one should never listen to musicians on the subject of
music any more than one should listen to wine merchants on the subject of
wine. But it is the tune which to my mind exactly expressed the Russian
Revolution, with its dogged melancholy and invincible passion. It was
as befitting as the “Marseillaise” (which, by the way, the Russians
sang in parts and slowly) was inappropriate. The “Funeral March” had
nothing defiant in it; but it is one of those tunes which, when sung
by a multitude, makes the flesh creep; it is commonplace, if you will;
and it expresses—as if by accident—the commonplaceness of all that is
determined and unflinching, mingled with an accent of weary pathos. As
it grew dark, torches were brought out, lighting up the red banners and
the scarlet coffin of the unknown veterinary surgeon, who in a second,
by a strange freak of chance, had become a hero, or rather a symbol; an
emblem and a banner, and who was being carried to his last resting-place
with a simplicity which eclipsed the pomp of royal funerals, and to the
sound of a low song of tired but indefatigable sadness, stronger and more
formidable than the pæans which celebrate the triumphs of kings.
The impression left on my mind by this funeral was deep. As I saw these
hundred thousand men march past so quietly, so simply, in their bourgeois
clothes, singing in careless, almost conversational, fashion, I seemed
nevertheless to hear the “tramping of innumerable armies,” and to feel
the breath of the—
“Courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.”
After Bauman’s funeral, which had passed off without an incident, at
eleven o’clock a number of students and doctors were shot in front of
the University, as they were on their way home, by Cossacks, who were
stationed in the Riding School, opposite the University. The Cossacks
fired without orders. They were incensed, as many of the troops were, by
the display of red flags, and the processions.
The day after Bauman’s funeral (3rd November) was the anniversary of
the Emperor’s accession, and all the “hooligans” of the city, who were
now called the “Black Gang,” used the opportunity to make counter
demonstrations under the ægis of the national flag. The students did
nothing; they were in no way aggressive; but the hooligans when they came
across students beat them and in some cases killed them. The police did
nothing; they seemed to have disappeared. These hooligans paraded the
town in small groups, sometimes uniting, blocking the traffic, demanding
money from well-dressed people, wounding students, and making themselves
generally objectionable. When the police were appealed to they shrugged
their shoulders and said: “Liberty.” The hooligans demanded the release
of the man who had killed Bauman. “They have set free so many of their
men,” they said, referring to the revolutionaries, “we want our man set
free.” The town was in a state of anarchy; anybody could kill anyone
else with impunity. In one of the biggest streets a hooligan came up to
a man and asked him for money; he gave him ten kopecks. “Is that all?”
said the hooligan. “Take that,” and he killed him with a Finnish knife.
I was myself stopped by a band on the Twerskaia and asked politely to
contribute to their fund—the fund of the “Black Gang”—which I did with
considerable alacrity. Students, or those whom they considered to be
students in disguise, were the people they mostly attacked. The citizens
of the town in general soon began to think that this state of things
was intolerable, and vigorous representations were made to the town
Duma that some steps should be taken to put an end to it. The hooligans
broke the windows of the Hôtel Métropole and those of several shops.
Liberty meant to them doing as much damage as they pleased. This state of
things lasted three days, and then it was stopped—utterly and completely
stopped. A notice was published forbidding all demonstrations in the
streets with flags. The police reappeared, and everything resumed its
normal course. These bands of hooligans were small and easy to deal with.
The disorders were unnecessary. But they did some good in one way: they
brought home to everybody the necessity for order and the maintenance of
order, and the plain fact that removal of the police meant anarchy.
In spite of all this storm and stress the theatres were doing business
as usual, and at the Art Theatre I saw a fine and moving performance of
Tchekov’s _Chaika_ and also of Ibsen’s _Ghosts_. On 7th November I went
to see a new play by Gorky, which was produced at the Art Theatre. It was
called _The Children of the Sun_. It was the second night that it had
been performed. M. Stanislavsky, one of the chief actors of the troupe
and the stage manager, gave me his place. The theatre was crammed. There
is a scene in the play where a doctor, living in a Russian village, and
devoting his life to the welfare of the peasants, is suspected of having
caused an outbreak of cholera. The infuriated peasants pursue the doctor
and bash someone on the head. On the first night this scene reduced a
part of the audience to hysterics. It was too “actual.” People said
they saw enough of their friends killed in the streets without going
to the play for such a sight. On the second night it was said that the
offensive scene had been suppressed. I did not quite understand what had
been eliminated. As I saw the scene it was played as follows: A roar is
heard as of an angry crowd. Then the doctor runs into a house and hides.
The master of the house protests; a peasant flies at his throat and half
strangles him until he is beaten on the head by another peasant who
belongs to the house. The play was full of interesting moments, and was
played with finished perfection. But Gorky had not Tchekov’s talent of
representing on the stage the uneventful passage of time, the succession
of the seemingly insignificant incidents of people’s everyday lives,
chosen with such skill, depicted with such an instinct for mood and
atmosphere that the result is enthrallingly interesting. Gorky’s plays
have the faults and qualities of his stories. They are unequal, but
contain moments of poignant interest and vividness.
The next night (8th November) I went to St. Petersburg. There I saw
Spring-Rice, Dr. Dillon, and heard _Fidelio_ at the opera. The young
lions in the gallery did not realise that _Fidelio_ is a revolutionary
opera and the complete expression of the “Liberation movement” in Germany.
A Post Office strike, followed by a strike of other unions, was going on,
and one night while I was at the Opéra Bouffe, where the _Country Girl_
was being given, the electric light went out. The performance continued
all the same, the actors holding bedroom candles in their hands, while
the auditorium remained in the dimmest of twilights.
I stayed in St. Petersburg till the 21st of November, when I went to
London. I travelled to the frontier with a Japanese Military Attaché
and a Russian student. We three passengers had a curious conversation.
The Japanese gentleman rarely spoke, but he nodded civilly, and made
a sneezing noise every now and then. The student talked of English
literature with warm enthusiasm. His two favourite English modern authors
were Jerome K. Jerome and Oscar Wilde. When I showed some surprise at
this choice, he said I probably only thought of Jerome as a comic author.
I said that was the case. “Then,” he said, “you have not read _Paul
Kelver_, which is a masterpiece, a real human book—a great book.”
When we got out at the frontier the Japanese officer wanted to fetch
something but as there was no porter in sight, was loath to leave his
bag. The student offered to keep watch over it, but the Japanese would
not trust him to do this, and stood by his bag till a porter arrived. The
student was astonished and slightly hurt.
After I had stayed a little over a fortnight in London I went back first
to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow.
I had not been two days in Moscow before there was another strike. It
began on Wednesday, the 20th of December, punctually at midday. The lift
ceased working in the hotel, the electric light was turned off, and I
laid in a large store of books and cigarettes against coming events.
The strike was said to be an answer to the summary proceedings of the
Government and its action in arresting leaders of the revolutionary
committee. Its watchword was to be: “A Constituent Assembly based upon
universal suffrage.” Beyond the electric light going out, nothing
happened on this day. On Thursday, the 21st, most of the shops began
to shut. The man who cleaned the boots in the hotel made the following
remark: “I now understand that the people exercise great power.” I heard
a shot fired somewhere from the hotel at nine o’clock in the evening. I
asked the hall porter whether the theatres were open. He said they were
shut, and added: “And who would dream of going to the theatre in these
times of stress?”
The next day I drove with Marie Karlovna von Kotz into the country to
a village called Chernaya, about twenty-five versts from Moscow on the
Novgorod road, which before the days of railways was famous for its
highway robberies and assaults on the rich merchants by the hooligans
of that day. We drove in a big wooden sledge drawn by two horses, the
coachman standing up all the while. We went to visit two old maids, who
were peasants and lived in the village. One of them had got stranded in
Moscow, and, owing to the railway strike, was unable to go back again,
and so we took her with us; otherwise she would have walked home. We
started at 10.30 and arrived at 1.30. The road was absolutely still—a
thick carpet of snow, upon which fresh flakes drifting in the fitful
gusts of wind fell gently. Looking at the drifting flakes which seemed to
be tossed about in the air, the first old maid said that a man’s life was
like a snowflake in the wind, and that she had never thought she would go
home with us on her sister’s name-day.
When we arrived at the village we found a meal ready for us, which,
although the fast of Advent was being strictly observed and the food
made with fasting butter, was far from jejune. It consisted of pies with
rice and cabbage inside, and cold fish and tea and jam, and some vodka
for me—the guest. The cottage consisted of one room and two very small
ante-rooms—the walls, floors, and ceilings of plain deal. Five or six
rich ikons hung in the corner of the room, and a coloured oleograph of
Father John of Kronstadt on one of the walls. A large stove heated the
room. Soon some guests arrived to congratulate old maid No. 2 on her
name-day, and after a time the pope entered, blessed the room, and sat
down to tea. We talked of the strike, and how quiet the country was,
and of the hooligans in the town. “No,” said the pope, with gravity,
“we have our own hooligans.” A little later the village schoolmaster
arrived, who looked about twenty years old, and was a little tiny man
with a fresh face and gold-rimmed spectacles, with his wife, who, like
the æsthetic lady in Gilbert and Sullivan’s _Patience_, was “massive.”
I asked the pope if I could live unmolested in this village. He said:
“Yes; but if you want to work you won’t be quiet in this house, because
your two hostesses chatter and drink tea all day and all night.” At three
o’clock we thought we had better be starting home; it was getting dark,
the snow was falling heavily. The old maids said we couldn’t possibly go.
We should (1) lose our way; (2) be robbed by tramps; (3) be massacred by
strikers on the railway line; (4) not be allowed to enter the town; (5)
be attacked by hooligans when we reached the dark streets. We sent for
Vassili, the coachman, to consult with him. “Can you find your way home?”
we asked. “Yes, I can,” he said. “Shall we lose our way?” “We might lose
our way—it happens,” he said slowly—“it happens times and again; but we
might not—it often doesn’t happen.” “Might we be attacked on the way?”
“We might—it happens—they attack; but we might not—sometimes they don’t
attack.” “Are the horses tired?” “Yes, the horses are tired.” “Then we
had better not go.” “The horses can go all right,” he said. Then we
thought we would stay; but Vassili said that his master would curse him
if he stayed unless we “added” something.
So we settled to stay, and the schoolmaster took us to see the village
school, which was clean, roomy, and altogether an excellent home of
learning. Then he took us to a neighbouring factory which had not struck,
and in which he presided over a night class for working men and women.
From here we telephoned to Moscow, and learned that everything was quiet
in the city. I talked to one of the men in the factory about the strike.
“It’s all very well for the young men,” one of them said; “they are
hot-headed and like striking; but we have to starve for a month. That’s
what it means.” Then we went to the school neighbouring the factory where
the night class was held. There were two rooms—one for men, presided over
by the schoolmaster; and one for women, presided over by his wife. They
had a lesson of two hours in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The men
came to be taught in separate batches, one batch coming one week, one
another. This day there were five men and two boys and six women. The men
were reading a story about a bear—rather a tedious tale. “Yes, we are
reading,” one of them said to me, “and we understand some of it.” That
was, at any rate, consoling. They read to themselves first, then aloud
in turn, standing up, and then they were asked to tell what they had
read in their own words. They read haltingly, with difficulty grasping
familiar words. They related fluently, except one man, who said he could
remember nothing whatsoever about the doings of the bear. One little boy
was doing with lightning rapidity those kinds of sums which, by giving
you too many data and not enough—a superabundance of detail, leaving
out the all that seems to be imperatively necessary—are to some minds
peculiarly insoluble. The sum in question stated that a factory consisted
of 770 hands—men, women, and children—and that the men received half as
much again as the women, etc. That particular proportion of wages seems
to exist in the arithmetic books of all countries, to the despair of
the non-mathematical, and the little boy insisted on my following every
step of his process of reckoning; but not even he with the wisdom and
sympathy of babes succeeded in teaching me how to do that kind of sum. He
afterwards wrote in a copybook pages of declensions of Russian nouns and
adjectives. Here I found I could help him, and I saved him some trouble
by dictating them to him; though every now and then we had some slight
doubt and discussion about the genitive plural. In the women’s class, one
girl explained to us, with tears in her eyes, how difficult it was for
her to attend this class. Her fellow-workers laughed at her for it, and
at home they told her that a woman’s place was to be at work and not to
meddle with books. Those who attended this school showed that they were
really anxious to learn, as the effort and self-sacrifice needed were
great.
We stayed till the end of the lesson, and then we went home, where an
excellent supper of eggs, etc., was awaiting us. We found the two old
maids and their first cousin, who told us she was about to go to law
for a legacy of 100,000 roubles which had been left her, but which was
disputed by a more distant relation on the mother’s side. We talked of
lawsuits and politics and miracles, and real and false faith-healers,
till bedtime came. A bed was made for me alongside of the stove. Made
is the right word, for it was literally built up before my eyes. A
sleeping-place was also made for the coachman on the floor of the small
ante-room; then the rest of the company disappeared to sleep. I say
disappeared, because I literally do not know where in this small interior
there was room for them to sleep. They consisted of the two old maids,
their niece and her little girl, aged three, and another little girl,
aged seven. Marie Karlovna slept in the room, but the rest disappeared,
I suppose on the top of the stove, only it seemed to reach the ceiling;
somewhere they were, for the little girl, excited by the events of the
day, sang snatches of song till a late hour in the night. The next
morning, after I got up, the room was transformed from a bedroom into a
dining-room and aired, breakfast was served, and at ten we started back
again in the snow to Moscow.
On the 23rd we arrived in the town at one o’clock. The streets of the
suburbs seemed to be unusually still. Marie Karlovna said to me: “How
quiet the streets are, but it seems to me an uncanny, evil quietness.”
Marie Karlovna lived in the Lobkovsky Pereulok, and I had the day before
sent my things from the hotel to an apartment in the adjoining street,
the Mwilnikov. When we arrived at the entrance of these streets, we
found them blocked by a crowd and guarded by police and dragoons. We got
through the other end of the street, and we were told that the night
before Fiedler’s School, which was a large building at the corner of
these two streets, had been the scene of a revolutionary meeting; that
the revolutionaries had been surrounded in this house, had refused to
surrender, had thrown a bomb at an officer and killed him, had been fired
at by artillery, and had surrendered after killing 1 officer and 5 men,
with 17 casualties—15 wounded and 2 killed. All this had happened in my
very street during my absence. An hour later we again heard a noise of
guns, and an armed rising (some of the leaders of which, who were to
have seized the Governor-General of the town and set up a provisional
Government, had been arrested the night before in my street) had broken
out in all parts of the town in spite of the arrests. A little later I
saw a crowd of people on foot and in sledges flying in panic down the
street shouting: “Kazaki!” I heard and saw nothing else of any interest
during the day. There were crowds of people in the streets till nightfall.
On Sunday, Christmas Eve, I drove to the Hôtel Dresden in the centre of
Moscow to see Mamonov. The aspect of the town was extraordinary. The
streets were full of people—_flâneurs_ who were either walking about or
gathered together in small or large groups at the street comers. Distant,
and sometimes quite near, sounds of firing were audible, and nobody
seemed to care a scrap; they were everywhere talking, discussing, and
laughing. Imagine the difference between this and the scenes described in
Paris during the street fighting in ’32, ’48, and ’71.
People went about their business just as usual. If there was a barricade
they drove round it. The cabmen never dreamt of not going anywhere,
although one of them said to me that it was most alarming. Moreover, an
insuperable curiosity seemed to lead them to go and look where things
were happening. Several were killed in this way. On the other hand, at
the slightest approach of troops they ran in panic like hares, although
the troops did not do the passers-by any mischief. Two or three times
I was walking in the streets when dragoons galloped past, and came to
no harm. We heard shots all the time, and met the same groups of people
and passed two barricades. The barricades were mostly not like those of
the Faubourg St. Antoine, but small impediments made of branches and an
overturned sledge; they were put there to annoy and wear out the troops
and not to stand siege. The revolutionaries adopted a guerilla street
warfare. They fired or threw bombs and rapidly dispersed; they made
some attempts to seize the Nikolayev Railway Station, but in all cases
they were repulsed. The attitude of the man in the street was curious;
sometimes he was indignant with the strikers, sometimes indignant with
the Government. If you asked a person of revolutionary sympathies he told
you that sympathy was entirely with the revolution; if you asked a person
of moderate principles, he told you that the “people” were indignant
with the strikers; but the attitude of the average man in the street
seemed to me one of sceptical indifference in spite of all—in spite of
trade ceasing, houses being fired at, and the hospitals being full to
overflowing of dead and wounded. The fact was that disorders had lost
their first power of creating an impression; they had become an everyday
occurrence.
Here are various remarks I heard. One man, a commissionaire, asked
whether I thought it was right to fire on the revolutionaries. I
hesitated, gathering my thoughts to explain that I thought that they
thoroughly deserved it since they began it, but that the Government
nevertheless had brought it about by their dilatoriness. (This is exactly
what I thought.) Misunderstanding my hesitation, he said: “Surely you,
a _foreigner_, need not mind saying what you think, and you know it is
wrong.” (This was curious, because these people—commissionaires, porters,
etc.—were often reactionary.) A cabman said to me: “Who do you think
will get the best of it?” I said: “I don’t know; what do you think?”
“Nothing will come of it,” he said. “There will still be rich people
like you and poor people like me; and whether the Government is in the
hands of the _chinovniks_ or the students is all one and the same.”
Another man, a porter, an ex-soldier, said it was awful. You couldn’t go
anywhere or drive anywhere without risking being killed. Soldiers came
back from the war and were killed in the streets. A bullet came, and
then the man was done for. Another man, a kind of railway employee, said
that the Russians had no stamina; that the Poles would never give in,
but the Russians would directly. Mamonov, who was fond of paradox, said
to me that he hoped all the fanatics would be shot, and that then the
Government would be upset. A policeman was guarding the street which led
to the hotel. I asked if I could pass. “How could I not let a Barine with
whom I am acquainted pass?” he said. Then a baker’s boy came up with a
tray of rolls on his head, also asking to pass—to go to the hotel. After
some discussion the policeman let him go, but suddenly said: “Or are
you a rascal?” Then I asked him what he thought of it all. He said: “We
fire as little as possible. They are fools.” The wealthier and educated
classes were either intensely sympathetic or violently indignant with
the revolutionaries; the lower classes were sceptically resigned or
indifferent—“Things are bad; nothing will come of it for us.”
At midnight the windows of our house had been shaken by the firing of
guns somewhere near; but on Christmas morning (not the Russian Christmas)
one could get about. I drove down one of the principal streets, the
Kuznetski Most, into another large street, the Neglinii Proiesd (as if
it were down Bond Street into Piccadilly), when suddenly in a flash
all the cabs began to drive fast up the street. My cabman went on. He
was inquisitive. We saw nothing. He shouted to another cabman, asking
him what was the matter. No answer. We went a little farther down, when
along the Neglinii Proiesd we saw a patrol and guns advancing. “Go back,”
shouted one of the soldiers, waving his rifle—and away we went. Later,
I believe there was firing there. Farther along we met more patrols and
ambulances. The shops were not only shut but boarded up.
Next day I walked to the Nikolayev Station in the afternoon. It was from
there that the trains went to St. Petersburg. The trains were running
then, but how the passengers started I didn’t know, for it was impossible
to get near the station. Cabs were galloping away from it, and the square
in front of it had been cleared by Cossacks. I think it was attacked
that afternoon. I walked into the Riask Station, which was next door. It
was a scene of desolation; empty trains, stacked-up luggage, third-class
passengers encamped in the waiting-room. There was a perpetual noise of
firing. The town was under martial law. Nobody was allowed to be out of
doors after nine o’clock under penalty of three months’ imprisonment or a
3000 roubles fine. Householders were made responsible for people firing
out of their windows.
On the morning of 27th December there was considerable movement and
traffic in the streets; the small shops and the tobacconists were open.
Firing was still going on. They said a factory was being attacked. The
troops who were supposed to be disaffected proved loyal. The one way
to make them loyal was to throw bombs at them. The policemen were then
armed with rifles and bayonets. A cabman said to me: “There is an illness
abroad—we are sick; it will pass—but God remains.” I agreed with him.