[Illustration: Every wave of revolution in Petrograd broke over the
cobbles of the great Winter Palace Square--The Dvortsovaya]
THE
RED HEART OF RUSSIA
BY
BESSIE BEATTY
War Correspondent of San Francisco Bulletin
ILLUSTRATED BY
PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1918
Copyright, 1918, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1918_
TO
FOUR WHO SAW THE SUNRISE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THREE GOOD SAMARITANS 3
II DIPLOMATS--OFFICIAL AND OTHERWISE 26
III IRRECONCILABLE BED-FELLOWS 46
IV SPECKS ON THE HORIZON 65
V THE BATTALION OF DEATH 90
VI IN THE HOLLOW OF THEIR HAND 115
VII OLD RIVERS AND NEW DOCTRINES 132
VIII THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 146
IX THE CENTRABALT MAKES AN EXCEPTION 164
X THE RISE OF THE PROLETARIAT 178
XI THE FALL OF THE WINTER PALACE 201
XII THE DAY OF SHAME 225
XIII THE GRAVE OF HOPE 244
XIV MOTHER MOSCOW WEEPS 259
XV BLASTING AT THE ESTABLISHED ORDER 271
XVI IN PLACE OF THE GUILLOTINE 292
XVII THE GREAT GRAY WOLF 312
XVIII TSARS AND PEASANTS 335
XIX WOMEN IN THE REVOLUTION 357
XX REVOLUTION TAKES A HOLIDAY 386
XXI ON THE ROCKS OF UNCOMPROMISE 407
XXII THE INTELLIGENTZIA OBJECTS 430
XXIII THE GREAT BETRAYAL 446
A MESSAGE TO MARS 475
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Every wave of revolution in Petrograd broke over
the cobbles of the great Winter Palace Square--The
Dvortsovaya _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
Around the statue of Alexander III, symbol of old
Russia, the talking multitudes surged 32
First Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ and Deputies 32
Alexander Kerensky in the study of the Tzar 33
The great stucco Winter Palace in which the
American guests were housed 33
Bessie Beatty in the “dark forests at the front” 80
A soldiers’ shrine behind the lines 80
Lake Narach--a part of No Man’s Land 80
Captured barbed wire entanglement--Peter at the
left 80
Blessing of the banners of the Battalion of Death 81
The Woman’s Regiment on review before its departure
for the trenches 81
Lining up for soup and kasha 112
Women soldiers at rest between drills 112
The crowd hugs the Nevsky to get out of range of
the machine guns in the July riots 113
The Cossacks bury their dead 113
A typical street scene in the Volga river towns 136
Barges of wood on the Neva 137
The Volga--the great highway of Russia from Petrograd
to the Caspian Sea 144
To Zizhni Novgorod, where the Oka and the Volga
rivers meet, the commerce of the world comes
flowing 145
Korniloff, his staff and Cossack bodyguard from
the “Wild Division” 172
Bicycle troops to the rescue of Kerensky 172
Baltic sailors’ bayonets speak for the Soviet 173
A dining room in the Matrosski Klub (Sailors’
Club), Helsingfors 173
The proclamation of the Military Revolutionary
Committee announcing the fall of the Kerensky
government 208
Women soldiers in their last stand before the Winter
Palace 209
The pass which permitted the author safe conduct
through the Bolshevist lines 209
The Winter Palace from the Red Arch 240
Russian soldiers at home in the Palace of a Grand
Duke 240
Soldiers and factory workers took the place of
striking telephone operators 241
Red Guards on duty before Trotzky’s door 241
The Minister of Rumania and his staff just before
his incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and
Paul 256
Old Ivan Veliki high up in the heavens faithfully
thundered the hours above the citadel of
church and state 257
Mother Moscow sat serene amid the domes of her
churches 272
After the Moscow battle 273
The Grave of the Brotherhood beside the old Kremlin
wall 273
Marie Spiridonova 288
Lunarcharsky 288
Leon Trotzky 288
Nikolai Lenin 288
Krylenko 288
Alexandria Kolontai 288
Kamineff 288
Yesterday and to-day on the Marsovaya Pola
Priests with lifted ikons and gorgeous robes
and Red Guards with bayonets and crimson
banners 289
A peasant milkman and his customers. Milk was
sold only on card to mothers with babies and
for invalids 320
In open-air bazars where there is little to sell but
many to buy, Russia does her marketing 321
Under the thatched roofs in villages like this, one
hundred and twenty million Russian peasants
make their home 352
Katherine Breshkovskaya and her two aged comrades,
Lazareff and Nicholas Tchaikowsky
with her American friends, Col. Wm. B.
Thompson and Col. Raymond Robins 353
Soldiers’ wives on the Nevsky demonstrating for increased
allowance 353
It was a dangerous partnership, for when the state
fell the church tottered also 400
New Russia votes for the Constituent Assembly 401
Young Russia makes revolutionary demonstration
at school 401
Meeting in the library of the Tauride Palace December
11 where in defiance of the People’s
Commissaries the Constituent Assembly was
declared open 448
The Constituent Assembly as it finally convened in
the Tauride Palace January 18 448
The Russian delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk 449
The photographs copyrighted by Orrin S. Wightman are published through
the courtesy of Colonel W. B. Thompson of the Red Cross Mission to
Russia.
THE RED HEART OF RUSSIA
CHAPTER I
THREE GOOD SAMARITANS
Petrograd!
Out there in the silver twilight of the white night she lay, a forest
of flaming church steeples and giant factory chimneys, rising vaguely
from the marshes. I pressed my face closer to the dust-crusted
windowpane and searched the flying landscape.
There on the edge of the East she waited for us, strange, mysterious,
inscrutable, compelling--a candle drawing us on from the ends of the
earth like so many fluttering moths.
Twelve long, hot, dusty days the Trans-Siberian Express had been
crawling toward her,--crawling like a snake across flower-strewn steppe
and velvet forest,--the one unclean thing upon this new-born world of
spring.
I glanced at my wrist-watch--it was twenty minutes past two on a
morning in early June of the year 1917. Here we were, despite war
and revolution, peeping into Peter’s “Window” only four hours behind
schedule.
Involuntarily I breathed a tiny sigh of disappointment. Nothing,
nothing, had happened. Even the dreary, desolate Siberian wastes had
failed to live up to their promise. Six thousand versts of emerald
meadows, cut with shimmering china-blue waterways, stretched behind
us. Six thousand versts of meadows, covered with a mist of wild
flowers--pink, mauve, and flaming yellow--and broken frequently with
deep woods, where silver birches played like sunshine against the
shadowed background of dusky pines--that was Siberia.
At every log station, with its red flags and its row of poplars, a
crowd of front-bound soldiers, in worn, dun-colored uniforms, tried to
board the train, only to settle peacefully back to more interminable
hours of waiting when the Committee of Workmen’s and Soldiers’
Deputies, traveling with us, had explained the necessity.
Occasionally in the night we were suddenly awakened, when the door of
our compartment was thrown open by a guard searching for an escaped
Austrian prisoner. Otherwise, the monotony of our journey had remained
unbroken.
Well, it was done. Ten minutes more, and Petrograd would open the door
of a new world to us. I glanced down the car at a row of passionate
faces flattened against the windows, while hungry eyes drank deep of
once familiar scenes. They were home-bound exiles, these companions of
mine, going back to a land whose door had long been closed in their
faces. Home! Every click of the wheels carried me farther and farther
away from that scrap of earth on the other side of the world which I
called home.
My mind wandered back to that sunny day, two months before, when
through a mist of tears I had watched the hills of California disappear
behind the Golden Gate. How blithely I had come away! Blithely, because
I knew that mine was a land where the latch-string was always out, and
I could go back again at a moment’s choosing.
I tried to think what it must be to be coming home to the land of the
bolted door, to the land of the black scowl--the land that had suddenly
thrown down its bars and turned a friendly, smiling face and open arms
toward the lonely outcasts.
My eyes wandered to the vestibule, where a Siberian soldier sat upon
his kit-bag, a tin can with a bunch of dead lilies-of-the-valley
held tightly in his two hands. For ten days and ten nights he had
sat there, his big, round, brown eyes looking out across the great
spaces, resignation and the infinite patience of these people of the
East and the North reflected in his face. Home for him was done up in
that little bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, long since dead. Every day
I had passed him on my way to the dining-car, and my body ached with
vicarious weariness as I saw him uncomplainingly sitting and dreaming
over the faded lilies. He and I, of all the passengers, were the only
ones who were not going home.
My musings were suddenly cut short. The Trans-Siberian Express, train
de luxe of the longest railroad in the world, was slipping quietly to
its place beside a deserted platform. A clean-cut young Englishman, on
his way to be married in Petrograd, adjusted his coat collar the final
time, and patted his hat to see that it was placed at the proper angle.
Then he put his head out of the window to receive the first welcoming
smile of the sweetheart he had not seen for a year. He drew his head in
again, surprise, pain, embarrassment mingled on his fine, boyish face.
She was not there.
Farther down the aisle, Count Tolstoy, son of the great Tolstoy,
returning from America, lifted his window and searched the vacant
platform for the face of his wife. He, too, turned back disappointed.
Petrograd was as unaware of us as though we had been so many ghosts
flitting invisibly through the air. Petrograd was entirely engrossed in
its own very important affairs. Even the station-master had failed to
take cognizance of our coming. In the absence of porters, we trucked
our own baggage; and we had to wake up the guard to unlock the door and
let us through.
Outside, the big circle was flooded with the light of the white night.
My eyes focused for a moment on Trubetskoy’s squat, heavy, powerful
granite man on horseback, Alexander III,--symbol of departed Romanoffs,
symbol of dead Russia,--then wandered about in dazed bewilderment.
The cobblestones were dotted with men and women gathered in groups and
talking in high-pitched, excited voices, eyes blazing and arms waving:
students, peasants, soldiers, workmen, pouring a torrent of words into
the night.
“What is the matter? Is it another revolution?” I asked breathlessly.
“No,” some one answered, “nothing is happening. They are just talking.
It has been like this ever since March.”
“But it’s the middle of the night,” I said. “It’s nearly morning.
Something must be wrong.”
“They talk all day and all night, all the time,” my informant
continued. “In the old days, you know, they were not allowed to talk,
and now that the dam is broken, the flood of language never stops.”
One lone and dilapidated carriage, drawn by a bored and weary looking
horse, with head framed in a high wooden collar, stood at the curb. A
Russian came through the door, and shouted, apparently into the air, a
single magic word: “Izvostchik!”
A perambulating feather-bed in voluminous folds of blue broadcloth
detached itself from the nearest crowd, swept its broadcloth train
majestically over the sidewalk, and mounted the box. The carriage
rattled away, the linguistically accomplished Russian and all his bags
stowed neatly within. I watched this achievement with undisguised
admiration and envy, blankly wondering what I should do next.
A fellow traveler, a Swedish girl on her way home from Japan to be
married to an English officer, joined me. Behind her waddled the stout
and pleasing person of the Finnish missionary who with her “many
luggages” had shared my compartment from Harbin.
We held a consultation. Here we were, all utterly alone at half-past
two in the morning, in this great, strange city which talked on and on
without even a glance in our direction. Our telegrams to friends were
probably traveling in the mail-bags on the same train or coming along
on next week’s express.
A young Russian officer came gallantly to the rescue.
“I telegraphed for a room--you ladies can have that,” he said; and,
turning to me: “If you will stay and mind the luggage, we will go
uptown and see about it.”
The last thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment was
to stay and mind the luggage. The station was hot, close, and
dirty. Soldiers--weary brown men in worn uniforms, unwashed and
unshaven--asleep on their kit-bags or curled up on the floor in their
overcoats, lay so thick that you had to pick your way carefully. I was
tired of places that were close and dirty. I longed to be out in those
strange, wide streets, so full of people with so many things to say
that the days were not long enough. Politeness set a seal upon desire.
My friends promised to be back in twenty minutes, so I returned to the
stuffy waiting-room, and the odd assortment of bags and bundles for
which I was to be responsible.
There was a clock on the wall, and the minute-hand slowly made its way
around the dial. An hour passed--it was half-past three. Still no sign
of the Russian gallant. The minute-hand began another journey.
Once for a few seconds I forgot the minute-hand. The waiter from
the dining-car, who had grown more and more stepmotherly in the
distribution of portions as the journey progressed, entered the
room. He walked to the corner where half a dozen bundles of soiled
table linen were stacked, and, glancing about to see that no one was
looking, he swiftly untied them. From the center of each he took a
fifty-pound sack of white flour. It was no longer difficult to explain
the sparkling stones from the Ural Mountains appearing on the hands of
the dining-car crew as the train pulled out of Vyatka, or difficult
to believe the stories of the five-hundred-ruble game in progress in
the dining-car of evenings. Flour in Petrograd was scarcer than Ural
brilliants and far more highly priced.
At a quarter to five my friends returned. There was not a room to be
had in Petrograd, they said. The Hotel Europe was crowded. At the
France they were sleeping in the sitting-rooms. The Astoria, which
had been the best hotel in town, was occupied by the military, and no
civilians were allowed.
The Russian suggested that we stay where we were until the populace
began to wake up,--about ten o’clock,--then consult our respective
consuls. Nothing on earth could have induced me at that moment to
spend five seconds longer in the fetid atmosphere of that station. Five
hours was a prospect I refused even to contemplate.
The guard was once more asleep and the door locked. I made my way
through a labyrinth of baggage-rooms to an opening on a side street.
The same groups of men were still excitedly talking, and here and there
along the curb a peasant woman, with a market-basket of hard-boiled
eggs, cucumbers, lemons, or sunflower seeds, offered her wares.
I paused at the corner and speculated as to which road to take. The
Nevsky Prospect, famous as the Champs Elysées, the Strand, and Fifth
Avenue, though I knew it not for itself at the moment, stretched wide
before me in one direction. To my left was another street only slightly
narrower, and flanked on either side by towering buildings, large
enough to house a world of little people like myself. Surely, in all
those great masses of wood and stucco and stone, there was some little
corner where I could put my weary head. I walked in a daze, peering up
at the strange painted signs. If it had been an overcoat, a cheese,
or a pair of boots for which I had been searching, it would have
been quite simple; for the little shops were profusely covered with
frightful paintings of all these things, designed for people who, like
myself, could not read.
Three blocks from the station I came upon a huge ornate gray building,
rambling around three sides of a court. There was an air of elegance
about the place, and on one of the doors was a small brass sign, which
looked as though it might be designed for people who could read. I
picked out the letters one by one, trying frantically to remember
whether the English _r_ was the Russian _p_ or vice versa. The building
had the look of a hotel. It might as easily have been a theater, or a
palace, or the police-station, for all the intelligence those strange
letters conveyed to me.
I was just screwing up my courage to the point of entering when an
_izvostchik_ drove up to the door, and Count Tolstoy and the lost wife
stepped out. He came quickly to the rescue.
“Yes, yes, this is the Select Hotel,” he said. “If you will step inside
I will ask if there is a room for you, and perhaps you would like to
take my _izvostchik_ back to the station for your baggage. But first
the passportist must have your passport.”
Five minutes later I was back at the depot, announcing the news to the
astounded group, and gathering the weary women and the “many luggages”
into the ramshackle old carriage. At six o’clock the wild pigeons in
the courtyard sang me to sleep.
I awoke with a start six hours later. “Where am I?” I asked. “In
Petrograd,” I answered myself--“in Petrograd, in the heart of the
Revolution.” The midday sun, creeping through the window of my tiny
room, made all its imperfections pitifully plain. I was grateful to
that room as to a stranger who had found me homeless and opened her
door, but I wanted to be quickly away, out into the exciting promise
of the blue-and-gold day. I dressed hurriedly and ran through a stack
of letters of introduction, but discarded them all. On a slip of
paper I found an address, “Moika 64.” It was the home of a newspaper
man--a fellow correspondent, an old friend. On this day I needed an
old friend. I would find Moika 64, and on the way I would stop for
breakfast at the Hotel Europe.
It was all quite simple, you see. Where were those threatening dangers
poured like poison into my ears? Petrograd was like any other place.
The clerk at the desk answered my simple English request for directions
with a shake of his head and a volley of Russian, from which I fled in
laughing despair.
Once outside, I made my way to that wide street rejected earlier in the
morning. There was an air of importance about it, something that made
me feel it led to that nebulous locality which in every city we call
“uptown.”
A dozen street-cars passed me. They were crowded with soldiers who
filled seats, aisles, and platforms, and overflowed on to the steps. I
hailed one, and squirmed my way through the faded uniforms to the woman
conductor in blue broadcloth and gold buttons.
“Pazhal’sta, Hotel Europe?” I said, exhausting in one breath half of my
entire Russian vocabulary.
She shook her head, a simple gesture that I understood perfectly, then
followed it with a volley of language which left me dazed. She looked
at my blank and bewildered face.
“American,” I said. Again she shook her head. Then a great light broke
into her face.
“Amerikanka, da, da, da!” she said, and laughed in pleased delight at
her discovery.
I handed her my paper with Moika 64 upon it. It was written in English
and conveyed nothing to her.
By this time the entire car had become interested. A simple-looking
woman, with a _platok_ on her head, took the paper, and she and two
companions consulted long and earnestly over it. They motioned me to
wait. The car moved slowly up the wide wood-paved Nevsky; past faded
brick and yellow stucco palaces, whose proud sides were pasted with
revolutionary posters and proclamations; past the great Gostinny Dvor
(Court of the Strangers), where the little shops were shuttered now in
Sabbath seclusion behind the hedge of linden trees.
Like the muddy water in a stream, the endless procession of khaki-clad
soldiers flowed along the street. The feather-bed _izvostchiks_,
calling encouragement to their horses, rattled over the wooden
cobbles. Under the columns of the great Kazan Cathedral, the little
people, dwarfed by the mighty proportions of this pile of masonry,
passed back and forth, crossing themselves and dropping alms into the
hands of beggars on the wide steps. On the gravel-covered paths in the
formal garden the children played hop-scotch, while their parents sat
on the benches, contentedly watching them.
On every corner, and in between streets, the groups of people were
talking, talking, talking! Ambulances and field hospital wagons,
decorated with red flags and green boughs, and filled with crippled
soldiers and Red Cross nurses, darted in from side streets and all
hurried off in the same direction.
Quite abruptly we turned a corner and skirted the edges of a pleasant
park, with trees in full leaf, and a multitude of birds noisily
chattering in the young spring green. Ivan in khaki, with Vera beside
him in her best spring clothes, strolled along the winding paths, or
sat contentedly munching sunflower seeds, and talking as volubly as the
noisy sparrows up above.
Peace, joy, exultation, was upon that spring-clad city. Freedom was
young then, like the spring, like the leaves on the trees, like Vera
and Ivan. Freedom was a butterfly upon a high bush, the sheen still
upon her wings; and Vera and Ivan looked, rejoiced, and feared to
touch--so new, so beautiful, so fragile.
Poor Ivan! Poor Vera! They could not guess that afternoon, any more
than I, what the months would do to their butterfly treasure. They
could not know that they themselves would soon lay violent hands upon
it, and the day would come when the broken wings would lie crushed like
a blade of grass beneath a heavy boot. They could not know that Freedom
must return in many other guises before she would be strong enough for
Russia’s need.
Eyes and ears hungrily drinking in strange sights and sounds, and
thoughts darting back and forth from the land of Tolstoy, Turgenieff,
and Dostoievsky to the Russia of Ivan’s dreaming, I almost forgot that
I had a destination, and a rapidly increasing appetite.
Suddenly one of the three women who had taken me under their wings
touched me on the shoulder and motioned me to follow. She left her
friends, and together we walked blocks and blocks, while she searched
silently for street numbers, and I tried to look the gratitude I could
not speak. Finally she stopped, smiling happily, and pointed to a sign
that read “64.” Then, with a cheery, friendly “Dosvidanya!” (Goodbye!),
she left me.
I knocked on the first door. The _dvornik_ shook his head. Then I tried
the second. I battered at a dozen before I realized that in Russia
the entire building has the same number. At last, up five flights of
stairs, I found a gleam of recognition in the eyes of the servant. She
made it clear by means of the sign language that there was no one at
home. But at sight of my crest-fallen face she invited me in, and for
half an hour tried vainly to reach my friend by telephone. She wept
with exasperation at her inability to help me, and to make herself
understood.
It was half-past three when I found myself again on the tree-bordered
canal. I was still without breakfast or luncheon, and heaven and the
Russians only knew what had become of the Hotel Europe. Both seemed to
be involved in a conspiracy of silence on the subject.
I wandered up the canal, stopping every likely and unlikely person to
ask if they spoke English. Always I got the same headshake and the same
kindly “Nyet, nyet, barishna!”
I came out upon a huge square, crowded with ambulances and
field-wagons, automobiles, and trucks, filled with crippled soldiers
and sailors, men from the ranks who had already paid the heavy toll of
war,--armless men and legless men, and men with eyes to which sight
would never come back,--all were pleading with their able-bodied
brothers to fight to a victorious conclusion.
It was a war demonstration, a pitiful, futile attempt of the broken
men to rally their brothers to a standard they were rapidly deserting.
For the first time, my eyes were seeing what war does to human flesh.
I stood there, watching the faces of these men, listening to the
unintelligible torrent of eloquence that poured from their lips, and
thought sorrowfully of another country half way across the world making
ready for this.
Finally I recalled my quest. Surely in all that vast throng there
must be some one who spoke English. I walked in and out, trying one
and another; meeting always with that same bewildered headshake, and
that same sympathetic glance of true regret which every Russian, be he
prince or peasant, gives you when he is unable to do the thing you ask.
I crossed the square, walking aimlessly I knew not where. On the corner
was a huge building with high, boarded windows and bullet-holes in the
plastered walls. A man was sitting in the doorway, and I asked if he
spoke English. He shook his head. I did not know which way to turn. For
some strange reason that I shall never fathom, I walked through the
doorway and into the building.
I found myself in a huge, empty marble lobby, opening into a series
of large rooms stripped bare of everything but a broken plate-glass
cabinet of silver inlay, and a bloodstained but once bright
rose-colored velvet carpet. I stood wondering where I was, and what I
should do next, when down the broad stairs came a Russian officer in
the splendid full-skirted wine-colored coat of the Caucasians. His
dark olive face and black hair were topped with a high military hat,
and a sword of inlaid silver jangled on each marble step as he walked.
“Pardon, do you speak English?” I asked in a faint and by this time
rather despairing voice.
He clicked his spurs together, and bowed low before me.
“A leetle, madame,” he answered. “Can I be of service to you?”
Never again will the sound of my native tongue be such blissful music.
I told him of my recent arrival, and of my search for friends, and
ended with:
“I want to go somewhere where I can get something to eat.”
He looked at me out of smiling and kindly brown eyes.
“This is a hotel,” he said. “The Astoria Hotel. But it is now the
headquarters of the military, the Voina Gostinnitsa (War Hotel), and
civilians are not allowed. At the time of the Revolution it was sacked,
as you can see; so the dining-room has been closed since, and meals are
served only in one’s room. If you had a room you might have luncheon
here. Are you the wife of a military man, or something of that sort?”
I shook my head, told him I was nothing “of that sort,” and offered my
card and credentials. He brightened.
“Ah!” he said. “There may yet be a way. The correspondents are under
the control of the military now, and it is just possible the General
might make an exception and permit you to stay here. Shall I take you
to him?”
I glanced at him for a single searching second, then nodded. We climbed
the marble stairs, and at the end of a long corridor we came upon the
General, white-haired and white-whiskered, and all that a Russian
General should be. He arose from behind a flat-top mahogany desk, bowed
low, kissed my hand, and invited me to a seat.
My new-found Caucasian friend explained me in Russian, and the General
nodded.
Fifteen minutes later, comfortably established in my own little
blue-and-white room on the sixth floor of the War Hotel, amid all the
conveniences of a first-class American hotel, I sat down to a platter
of cold meat and a service of steaming Russian tea. Another hour found
me collecting typewriter and passports and preparing to establish a
base of operations from which to explore that vast new Russia.
That night, on the roof-garden of the Europe, overlooking the
glistening domes and spires of the City of Peter, I dined with friends.
I had stumbled upon them when I had ceased to look.
“Where are you stopping?” one of them asked.
“At the War Hotel,” I answered.
Mouths and eyes opened in chorus.
“But it is impossible!” they said. “That is for the military, and they
are most strict that no civilian be admitted.”
I told them the story of the three Good Samaritans--of the little woman
with the shawl over her head, who left the car, her friends, and her
own pleasure, to walk blocks through the scorching sun with a total
stranger; of the maid who almost wept in her distress because she could
not help me; and, last, of the dark-haired knight of the Caucasus, who
made Cinderella’s fairy godmother seem a mere stepmother by comparison.
Back in the little blue-and-white room, wrapped in the warm glow of
their kindliness, I sat down in a bewildered heap to think it over.
My mind wandered far that night,--into the black past of Russia, and
into the vague unknown future,--but never did it even remotely suspect
the stirring times that room and I would share together in the year to
come.