_July 25, 1915._
The Tchedesky Pension is full of Poles--refugees from Poland and the
wooded Russian provinces.
Pan Tchedesky himself was formerly an enormously wealthy landowner near
Kiev. He loves to tell how he drove through town behind six white
horses. Gambling ruined him, and to pay his debts he sold one acre after
another to the Jews, who cut down the timber and ruined the land. Of
course, where there are no trees the rainfall is scarce. The crops dried
up, and finally Pan Tchedesky and his wife and children were forced into
the city. There remained enough of his former property to start a
_pension_. The rooms are full of the remains of his splendor--heavy gilt
mirrors, thick, flowered carpets, a Louis XVI set in the drawing-room,
upholstered in faded blue brocade.
Pan Tchedesky is a memorial of his own life; a relic suggesting an
earlier opulence. He is big-framed, but his flesh is shrunken, as though
the wind of conceit were oozing out of him day by day. His cheeks and
stomach hang flabbily. His blond mustache is getting thin and discloses
his full, sensual lips. His hands are thick and soft, always stained
with nicotine. He lives in constant terror of his wife, and all the
pockets of his coats are burned full of holes from his hiding his
cigarettes in them when he thinks he hears his wife coming. I have never
seen her, but she is the invisible force that keeps the _pension_
running, and controls her husband by her knowledge of his past failures.
"My wife is an executive woman--very executive," he says, shaking his
head sorrowfully.
The bills are made out by her. Occasionally he intercepts the maid
carrying her back the money, and extracts enough to pay a small per cent
of his I O U's, which allows him to continue gambling with his guests.
His moist, soft fingers tremble as he holds the cards, and he infuriates
every one by his erratic bidding.
A guest slams his hand down on the table and calls Tchedesky a name.
Tchedesky's whitish, livid cheeks shake, and his lips open uncertainly.
But he must be discreet. He does not dare offend his guests, for he
wants to play with them again, and he must not let his wife know that he
is gambling. So he begs pardon in a whisper.
There is a pretty maid in the _pension_ called Antosha. She has light,
frowzy hair, and a round, full figure. The other maids are jealous of
her. When she dresses up to wait on the table at dinner at three
o'clock, she wears a cheap pink silk waist and long gilt earrings, and
two or three little rings with blue and red stones. Her wages are
fifteen roubles a month. One day I saw Tchedesky kissing her on the
neck. Very white and shaken, he came to me afterwards and begged me to
say nothing about it to any one.
He has terrible scenes with his wife, who is hysterical and grows rigid.
He stays up with her all night and uses it as an excuse to get a
morphine injection for his own nervousness next day. He is quite
courteous and frankly loves women and food and money. I feel as though,
if I poked my finger into him, he would burst like a rotten potato.
There is the Morowski family from near Cracow. Pan Morowski's brother is
in the Austrian Chamber of Deputies, but he and his family are Russian
subjects. They have been here in Kiev for some months now. For seven
days he and his eldest daughter remained while the Russians and
Austrians fought for their farm. The rest of the family had been sent
into Kiev, but these two had hoped that by staying they might preserve
their farm from being plundered and burned. The Austrians had sacked
their neighbors' houses. The Austrian officers' wives had followed in
the wake of the army and had taken the linen from the closets, and the
ball-gowns, and the silver--even the pictures off the walls.
Lovely weather it was. The girl said you would hardly realize there was
war, sometimes. The gardener would go out and straighten the trampled
flowers. The carts of wounded would pass regularly, stopping
occasionally for water or tea. They would say the fighting had passed
on. And then, suddenly, the crack and boom would approach again, shaking
the house walls--the little uncurling puffs of smoke against the blue
sky--the gray-blue uniformed Austrians hurrying past in retreat. No
carts of wounded any more. There was too much hurry to bother about the
wounded.
Russians in possession again, and Russian instead of Austrian officers
quartered at their house. How much more polite the Russians were--so
much more gallant and kind-hearted! They didn't treat you as though you
were a servant--"Do this. Do that." They brought some of their wounded
to the farm, and Miss Morowski helped nurse them.
But at last the father and daughter had been obliged to leave with the
Russians. How furious the Russians had been--so depressed and
discouraged when the order came to retreat. There had been no fighting
round there for several days, and suddenly the news came that the whole
army was retreating. Why? They said there was no ammunition. So the
father and daughter left their property in the care of the gardener and
his wife, who were too old to move. How terrible it had been to abandon
this ground that so many Russians had died to win! No ammunition.
Waste--mismanagement--graft.
Those in Petrograd should think more of their country and less of their
own pockets. The unquestioning courage of the simple Russian soldiers!
Every one ready to die--and yet nothing to back them up. It was
disheartening.
"The Russians gave us a place in a cart, and we left in utter
confusion--soldiers, motor-cars, cattle, wounded, with the Austrian
cannon rumbling behind us."
"Were you frightened?" I asked. We were speaking French together.
"Not so frightened as sad. I was leaving my home. All my life I had
spent there excepting for a few weeks in the winter when mother used to
take us to Cracow for the balls. I hated to leave my beautiful party
dresses hanging up in the closets. I know some Austrian woman will wear
them. And I can't bear to think of our house burned! We have had such
jolly times there, hunting and riding and visiting the neighbors. You
don't know life on a Polish estate, do you? I can tell you there is
nothing so charming in the world."
Pan Morowski is a handsome, full-blooded man, and plays bridge all day
either in the _pension_ drawing-room or at the club.
His wife is small and nervous, and you can see that her main object in
life is to marry off her daughters well. She has three daughters,
pretty, fresh girls, who are fond of reading, and perfectly willing to
read only what their brothers permit them. Every day I run across one or
two of them in the circulating library in the town, and always try to
get them to take out a forbidden book. They are convinced that Bourget
has sounded the depths of feminine psychology. "Isn't it mean!" they
cry. "If only our brothers would let us read more of his wonderful
books!"
Sometimes, in the evening, we sit out on the balcony, and the Morowski
boys come in to talk to us.
"Aren't you ashamed to treat your sisters in this Oriental way?" I ask.
"The less they know till after they've married, the better for them. A
young girl should be pure in every thought." And then they begin to make
love to us.
There are two brothers who have taken refuge in the Tchedesky _pension_,
with a collection of servants. Their house was burned under their eyes,
and their property is now in the Austrians' hands. The eldest brother,
Count S----, is very handsome and aristocratic, with a cherished gray
mustache carefully twisted upward, and soft, brown eyes, which he uses
with advantage. Evidently the Romantic poets influenced his youth, and
he has found the melancholy Byronic traditions the most effective for
his ends, since he continues the attitude.
"He is very sad," his brother whispers a dozen times a day. "Of course
his experiences these past months have been frightful for one of his
nature. I am not so sensitive. But _he_ has always been this way.
Sometimes I'm afraid. Our other brother died insane."
Count S---- affects to believe that the Germans can do anything.
"They are devils! What can we do against them?" he cries at dinner,
combing his mustache with the little tortoise-shell comb he carries in
his vest.
He never forgets his soda tablets after eating.
His younger brother is round and red-faced, with twinkly blue eyes. He
limps, and follows his elder brother round like a faithful dog. The
slightest thing amuses him. Indeed, he laughs at nothing at all. He kept
the books on his brother's estates and he brought them with him in his
flight. They are his pride and joy. Sometimes he brings them into the
drawing-room after supper, with photographs of the property. There are
pictures of boar hunts, and huntsmen on horseback, with wolf-hounds in
the snow, and the tenants merry-making and the house and different
sections of the property, and the horses and dogs and cattle. I look at
them night after night. They love to live over again their life in
telling me about it.
Among the servants with the S---- brothers is an old woman, a kindly,
slack one, who rarely goes out, but observes the passing life from her
windows. She wears a short, loose wrapper and petticoat, and scuffs
about in list slippers.
Then there is a young girl with shy eyes and quiet, womanlike actions.
We often see her peeking through a crack in the door when Janchu is
naughty.
And then there is Sigmund, a sly, goody-goody child of six or seven,
whom the old woman treats like a son, and whom the eldest S---- brother
has adopted as his heir. He plays with Janchu. The brothers adore him
and take him to Koupietsky Park, and watch him when he plays in the
_pension_ garden. We have heard that he is Count S----'s illegitimate
child, and that the old woman is his mother. It seems quite probable
when you think of the life on a big Polish estate--the loneliness, etc.
These three people live together in one room. The samovar is always
boiling and some one is always drinking tea there. The brothers share an
adjoining room, but they are usually with those in there, who constitute
all that remains of their former habits.
Pan A---- lives in the _pension_, too. I am told that he is typical of a
certain kind of Pole. He is a turfman, with carefully brushed
side-whiskers dyed coal-black, and hawk-like eyes. He wears check suits,
and cravats with a little diamond horse-pin. His legs are bowed like a
jockey's. He was the overseer of a big Polish estate and has made a
fortune by cards and horses. His stable is famous. He has raced from
Petrograd to London. Now, of course, his horses have been requisitioned,
and he lives by his cards. Cards are a serious business to him. He will
not play in a room where he is apt to be interrupted. Occasionally, his
wife, a hard-faced woman with tight lips, comes to the _pension_,
between the visits she makes to friends in the country. Pan A---- pays
no attention to her except to treat her with an exaggerated politeness
at table; and she, on her side, concentrates on the young men in the
_pension_. After dinner he always hands her a cigarette first, out of
his massive gold case, encrusted with arms and monograms and jewels.
"It's curious, is it not?" he says, handing me the case. "My friends
have put on their arms and monograms and mounted the jewels as
souvenirs."
Generally, he goes to the Café François with a tall blonde woman, the
wife of an Austrian. Her husband and son are fighting in the Austrian
army, but she came to Kiev with the Russian General who occupied her
town. Now her protector is at the front, and she goes about with A----.
A---- is cynical. Women and horses and cards make up his life. In a
conversation he feels his audience as if it were a new horse he is
learning to ride. He goes as near the danger line as he dares. He has no
breeding, and spends his money extravagantly.
K----, the last comer at the _pension_, is a journalist. He has no race
or polish, and the rest rather despise him for having none of their
landed traditions. He is lean and brown, with a razor-like jaw and a
twisted, sardonic expression to his lips. His face is cruel. At Warsaw,
where he was working, he was thrown into prison time after time on
account of the radical, revolutionary character of his articles. He is
well known for the strong, intellectual quality of his work. The
reactionaries fear him. The slipshod Russian way of handling things gets
on his nerves. His eyes get like steel when he talks about it. Russia's
corruption and the German advance--ammunition willfully miscarried--guns
sent to the front without ammunition, and ammunition sent that doesn't
fit; and the soldiers obliged to fight with their naked fists!
He has sent me Chamberlin's "Genesis of the Fourteenth Century." We
discuss it after dinner. It's interesting, though Chamberlin sets forth
an idea he tries to prove at all costs. Read it, if you haven't already.
How terribly I miss you. Why do I write of Pan Tchedesky and the
Morowskis when I only want to be telling you how I love you and miss
you? But it is almost unbearable to write you a love-letter. So many
miles are between us and so many months still separate us. Over a year
more to be lived through. No. I must keep to decaying Polish gentlemen
and exiled noblemen and trust you to know that every word in this letter
is a love-word to you, telling you I hold you so close to me that you
are one with me in everything I think or do.
_July 27, 1915._
_Darlingest Mother and Dad:--_
It is very hot, and food is unappetizing. The drinking-water must be
boiled, and inevitably we drink it lukewarm. It never has time to cool.
There is fruit sold on the street, but we are warned against it on
account of cholera. There is already cholera and typhus reported in the
city. So we thick vegetable soup with sour cream, fried bread with
chopped meat inside, cheese noodles with sour cream, etc., all Polish
cooking. And we drink _kvass_.
"What do you think of Bulgaria, now?" Count S---- asks me gloomily,
after dinner.
"I still think she will go with Russia," I reply. "In every Bulgarian
house I've ever been in there is the picture of the Czar liberator. A
Bulgarian regards a Russian as of his own blood. Bulgaria gave Russia
her alphabet, and the languages are much the same: only the Russian is
richer in words and expressions. Why, there is a Bulgarian, General
Dimitrief, holding a high command in the Russian army. When I left
Bulgaria there was no talk of her going with Germany. 'We will never go
with Germany,' I've heard over and over."
"But there is a strong German party?"
"Yes, and they're being paid well. If England and the Entente only took
the trouble to understand the Balkans. Germany has sent her ablest men
to Sofia with unlimited credit. The English representatives offend by
their snobbery."
"Do you think they'll go in at all?" S---- persists.
"Probably they'll be forced in, in the end. But the people don't want to
abandon their neutrality. They're making money. They're recouping after
the Balkan wars. Bulgaria has had nothing but wars and crises for the
last five years."
"They say there are already German officers in the Bulgarian army."
"I don't believe it's so. The Bulgarians are very independent. If they
went in I think they would command their own army."
"But this war is not conducted along Balkan war lines," K---- said
amusedly.
"No," I agreed. "You know more about the situation now than I do. I
can't even read a newspaper. All I know is the spirit of Bulgaria when I
left."
"Isn't Bulgaria's Government autocratic enough to declare war without
consulting the people?" K---- continued.
"Perhaps--unfortunately. The Bulgarians say, 'We have a wonderful
constitution, if the Czar would only use it.'"
"The papers to-day already speak of Bulgaria's treason and ingratitude,"
K---- observed.
I was angry. "In Bulgaria, some think Russia doesn't want them to go in
on the Entente side. They think Russia wants to make a Russian lake out
of the Black Sea, and a Russian province out of Bulgaria. They say
Russia is the obstacle to their having joined the Entente months ago."
"She will go with Germany," Count S---- insisted fatalistically.
"Everything is going Germany's way."
"No--no--no!" I cried.
"Of course she will go where she sees her advantage," said K----.
"All she wants is to fight for Macedonia before the close of the war.
Certainly, it isn't too much to ask if she allows the English and
Russians to cross her territory to get at Turkey. The war will be
shortened by months if she goes in with the Entente, and Turkey in
Europe will be finished."
I know you'll laugh, Dad, and think my pretentions to a political
opinion presumptuous. My hope is that I'll know more when I'm older!
Love to you all. Think of me, won't you? Don't let _miles_ make any
difference.