He saw something of the melodrama of Moscow in the Trubnaya Market,
which had been opened again, owing to Lenin’s new law allowing private
trading. Until that time, all private barter had been forbidden under
severe penalties, yet it had gone on secretly between city folk and
peasants and, as Bertram found afterwards, there was hardly a man or
woman in Moscow or Petrograd, outside the class of Soviet officials, who
had not been imprisoned for this “crime.” Now it was done publicly, and
legally.
Bertram walked through the market which covered a great square with
dilapidated houses, pock-marked by bullet-holes, on each side. There
were rows of wooden booths with room enough between them for three
people to walk abreast, all crowded with peasant folk in their
sheepskins. They were selling the produce of their little farmsteads,
and the food made a brave show in the capital city of a famine-stricken
land. Bertram saw plenty of meat, butter, cheese, and bread. For those
who had paper money in big enough bundles, here was nourishment enough.
There were other people besides peasants. Standing on the outer edge of
the wooden rows, were long lines of men and women—mostly women—who, he
saw at a glance, were not peasants. Some of them were in peasant dress,
but their faces could not disguise a heritage of education and
gentility. Others wore the clothes of the old régime, of bourgeoisie and
Western fashion—black dresses, frayed and worn and grease-stained,
leather boots, down at heel, or broken at the toes, hats which had come
originally, perhaps, from smart modistes in the Nevsky Prospekt, or even
from Paris, a bit of lace at the throat and wrists.
These ladies, for they were that, stood in the market-place holding out
the last relics of their former state—ermine stoles, fur tippets,
embroidered slippers, fine linen, old boots (less broken than those they
wore), cloth jackets, silk petticoats, trinkets with glittering stones,
gold lockets, rings, lace, embroidery, perfumes, combs, hair pins,
brooches. Some of them seemed hardly able to stand, and were thin and
weak and haggard. Bertram noticed their hands, delicate and finely
shaped, but grimed with dirt of hard work and lack of soap. Gipsy hands
of patrician women. They avoided his eyes when he looked at them. They
seemed startled by his own appearance, knew him instantly as a man of
the class that was once theirs, and shrank from his scrutiny.
One girl, younger than the others, flamed scarlet at his glance, and
turned her head away with visible distress. He did not look at her
again, in order to avoid this hurt to her pride, and indeed he had a
sense of shame in walking down the lines of those women, scrutinising
their faces, witnessing this public humiliation of their pride. Yet he
had an intense wish to get into conversation with them, to find out
their way of life. They were the last of the old régime within the
frontiers of Russia, less lucky than the Countess Lydia and her sister,
and all the crowds of émigrés who had escaped in time. What stories they
would have to tell! What agonies they must have suffered before arriving
at this market-place!
He stood in front of an elderly woman who was holding out a little tray
on which was a gilt crucifix. She had a thin face, with grey hair almost
white, beneath a little black bonnet. He asked the price of her
crucifix, speaking in French, and at his question her hands trembled so
that she could hardly hold the tray.
“Why do you speak to me in French?” she asked, replying in the same
language.
“I guessed you spoke French. And I don’t know a word of Russian.”
“You are not French?” she said, looking timidly into his face.
“I’m English.”
She answered him in his own tongue.
“I thought so when I saw you before you spoke. How do you come to be in
Russia? Few foreigners come here now.”
“I’m a newspaper correspondent. I’ve come to write about the Famine,
when I can get as far as that.”
“There is misery to be found without going so far,” she said. “There are
many who are hungry even in Moscow. I am one of them.”
“May I buy your crucifix?”
She glanced nervously on each side, and spoke to him in French again in
a low voice.
“We are being watched. It is very dangerous for me to be in the market
place. They do not like my name. Perhaps you would be good enough to
go.”
He was aware of a young officer of the Red Army standing three paces
away, watching and listening.
“_Au revoir, madame._”
He turned away, stared into the face of the officer, and went further
down the line.
The girl who had flamed scarlet at his glance was still there, and gave
him a strange, wistful, lingering look which startled him. Then, as he
drew near, she left her place in the line, and went to the lady with
whom he had been speaking and whispered to her.
These people were frightened, in spite of the “New Economic Laws” which
permitted private trading. They had come out into the open, but were not
certain of this new liberty. Perhaps they had been trapped in some such
way before.
After wandering about the streets and markets of Moscow for a long
morning, Bertram became conscious suddenly of hunger, and he puzzled as
to the way in which he could satisfy this desire. It was a long tramp
back to his Guest House, across the river, and it would be more amusing
to find an eating house of some kind. Christy had told him that two had
just been opened in a street called the Arbat, the only two in Moscow—a
city of two million people—which once was crowded with restaurants as
luxurious as any in the world. He hailed a _droschke_, and by good luck
made the _isvostchik_ understand the name of the street, paying him a
hundred thousand roubles from a wad of paper advanced by Christy, for
the short drive.
The man seemed satisfied, touched his fur cap, and said, “_Spaseeba,
tavarish_.”
A few shops were open down a long street of houses which had all been
shops, by the look of them, but were now mostly empty and boarded up,
and falling into ruin. The newly opened places had a few objects of
merchandise in the windows. A pair of top boots, marked at a million
roubles, adorned one window-front. In another were three fur caps, a
guitar, a German pipe, and a wicker cradle. A motley collection of
household goods—including a leather arm-chair, a broken bedstead, some
rather good rugs, a cloisonné clock, and a rosewood piano—was the
greatest display of “stock” which he could observe through any window.
In most cases there was nothing but what could be seen at a glance. The
“private trading” in Moscow was not yet magnificent. He discovered the
restaurant by the sight of an uncooked leg of mutton, baldly displayed
in one of the windows, and by the words, “Angliske Restaurant” written
in Russian characters above it.
When he entered, he saw a bare room set out with wooden chairs and
tables, with here and there a piece of furniture of the Louis XV.
period, and on the walls some gilded mirrors of the same style. A woman,
shabbily dressed, and wearing carpet slippers, but with an unmistakable
air of elegance, was stirring something in a pot over a wood fire. At
the back of the room was a long counter, on which stood some tall
bottles, a samovar, and some coffee cups, and behind it, on a high
stool, sat an elderly man with silver hair and a little white beard. He
was peeling some potatoes, while behind him, with her hand on his
shoulder, was a girl of sixteen or so, as poorly dressed as Cinderella,
but as pretty, in a dark way, with large brown eyes.
Bertram was aware of three pairs of eyes upon him, studying him
intently, with surprise and suspicion. The woman who had been stirring
the pot, advanced with her ladle, pointed to a table, and spoke in
Russian.
He answered in French, and asked politely whether he might have
something to eat.
“You do not understand Russian?” she answered suspiciously, in French.
“No, not a word, alas! I’m English—just arrived in Moscow.”
“English!”
She spoke the word in his own tongue, with joyful intonation.
“Why do you leave happy old England to come to this miserable land?”
“To help the starving people of Russia, if I can,” he answered.
“That is brave of you,” she said. “There is much danger in Russia, and
no kind of comfort.”
She called to the white-headed man behind the counter. “Nicholas, Katia,
here is a gentleman just come from England!”
They came from behind the counter, and the elderly man clasped Bertram’s
hand.
“I used to know England well, and love my memories of it. I was a
painter in those days. We lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Katia was a
baby then.”
The girl took Bertram’s hand, and dropped a curtsey like an English
debutante.
“I remember England, just a little. It seems like a fairy-tale now!”
They served him with some soup called Bortsch, and afterwards cooked a
piece of meat for him with some of the potatoes which the elderly man
had peeled; and while he was eating, the lady talked to him rapidly,
emotionally, as though relieving the pent-up thoughts of agonising
years.
It was a tale of misery. Her husband, now peeling potatoes, had been a
painter at the Imperial Court, and known to be a personal friend of the
Empress. He had been arrested by the _Cheka_ and thrown into prison,
where he was kept without trial for eighteen months, half-starved, in a
foul cell crowded with men of good class. Many times he was examined at
night by the Extraordinary Commission, mostly young lads who tried to
bully him into admission of counter-revolutionary acts. Each time he
believed he was being taken to execution, like others in the cell who
were taken out and shot. For some reason they had spared him. Perhaps
because he was an artist, and they pretended to reverence art, though
they had no reverence for life. She and Katia had been turned into the
kitchen of their beautiful house, which for a time had been used as a
billet for Red soldiers—rough country lads who stabbed their knives
into her husband’s canvases, used the tapestries to wipe the mud off
their boots, and were unspeakably filthy in their habits. She had been
very much afraid for little Katia. Those young soldiers had been rough
with her, as they were with peasant girls. . . . She and the child had
starved many days. They would have starved to death unless they had
sold, secretly and at great risk, some of the jewels they had hidden.
They sold them to peasant women for potatoes and cheese. Now the peasant
women were hungry themselves because of the drought! She had worked at
the hardest toil, chopping wood, shovelling snow, dragging sledges to
Government stores.
“Look at my hands, monsieur!”
She showed her hands, coarsened and begrimed, like a gipsy’s.
Then she had been arrested for the crime of private trading, and
imprisoned for six weeks. All that time she had thought only of Katia,
left alone with the brutal soldier-boys. But God and His angels had
guarded the child. Two months after coming out of prison her husband was
liberated, without explanation or excuse. Just pushed out of prison with
the words, “_You can go, tavarish!_” That was happiness beyond words, to
be together again, in spite of poverty and starvation and coarse toil.
“We have suffered less than others,” said the lady. “We have been lucky.
My friends have been worse treated by the cut-throats and robbers who
rule our unhappy country.”
Her husband whispered to her.
“Hush, my dear. For the love of God—”
A look of terror came into his eyes, because two young men came into the
restaurant and sat down at a table near the counter. The lady became as
white as death for a moment, lest they had overheard her words. But they
called for plates of Bortsch and talked together in low voices, paying
no heed to those who served them. They were unshaven and dirty, with
long over-coats and top boots, caked in mud, and the Red Star of the
Soviet Republic in their caps showed them to be officials of some kind.
There was no more conversation from the lady. She went into a little
back kitchen. Her husband, once painter to the Imperial Court, peeled
more potatoes. Katia added up some figures on a slate, glancing over at
Bertram with a little smile about her lips and in her timid eyes.
There seemed to be no sense of freedom, no respite from fear in Soviet
Russia. Those women in the market place had been scared when he
approached them. This little family dared not talk a word before unknown
men of their own city.