“I’m off to Petrograd for a couple of days,” said Christy one night in
the Guest House. “You’d better come while you’re waiting for a train to
the Volga district. I’ve fixed it with Weinstein. Here’s your pass.”
This visit to Petrograd gave Bertram another impression of Soviet
Russia, broadened his outlook on the tragedy of a great people, killed
something more of the petty selfishness of his own trouble.
He said something of the kind to Christy on the train journey through
endless fields sowed with rye six months from another harvest time.
“I find Russia makes one forget one’s ego. It’s like seeing the end of
the world—the death of civilisation. It’s absurd for the individual to
whine about the loss of a collar-stud, or a pretty wife, in the midst of
an Empire’s ruin.”
“A nice cheerful way of looking at things!” said Christy, with his usual
irony. “Heaven knows how gay you’ll be by the time you get to the Volga
Valley.”
“These people seem to be down to the bed-rock of primitive existence,”
said Bertram. “Nothing matters except food and shelter, and escape from
death. All the rest is so much ‘jam,’ as my batman used to say. It
simplifies things, as war does.”
“An easy process of simplification,” said Christy. “Another war, or
another drought in Russia, and a great part of Europe will be simplified
off the map.”
There was a great silence in Petrograd. Heavy snow had fallen, and lay
deep in the streets, except where gangs of men and women had shovelled a
passage-way for sleighs which drove slowly with a tinkle of bells. The
Neva was frozen over, and standing on one of the bridges, Bertram stared
at the panorama of the city, magnificent with its vista of palaces,
churches, vast galleries, and great blocks of stone buildings which had
once been the offices of the Imperial Government and of world-wide
trade, but grim and black under snow-covered roofs.
The silence of Petrograd was strange and fearful. There was no sound of
labour in the great factories across the river. No smoke came from their
chimneys. There was no throb of engines, or clang of iron. Nothing moved
on the quaysides. The immense buildings with sculptured façades on the
side of the city were deserted of all life. No man or woman went in.
None came out.
Along the Nevski Prospekt once, as Bertram knew, the greatest highway of
luxury in Europe, most of the shops were boarded up like those in
Moscow, and nothing was being sold or bought. But there were people
there, a sense of life, in contrast to the deadly quietude in other
streets. With fur caps pulled down, and sheepskin coats tucked up about
their ears, and with snow-shoes over their boots, they were dragging
hand sledges over pavements covered with frozen snow so slippery that
Bertram found it hard to walk without staggering or falling. The sledges
were laden with sacks of potatoes, logs of wood, or frozen meat, and
some of them were escorted by Red soldiers, as though this treasure
might be attacked on its way.
Bertram was aware of some difference between these sledge-draggers and
snow-shovellers of Petrograd and the population of Moscow. They were not
peasants, but city folk of the old bourgeois class. Their clothes still
showed traces of fashions that had passed. Some of these women, and
young girls, dragging heavy loads, had frocks of a style that would have
looked well in Paris, or Berlin, or London, before they had been torn,
and grease-stained, and mud-splashed. Elderly men, clearing the roads,
wore “bowler” hats, and coats with astrachan collars, and looked like
bank managers, or clerks, once respected in merchants’ offices, who had
come down in the world to the level of the doss house.
Some of the younger Russians wore their rags with a kind of swagger and
cheerful unconcern, only intent on keeping warm, by bits of sacking used
as shawls round the neck, or by wearing seamen’s jerseys under their
black jackets. Even in Petrograd youth had not lost all its spirit of
gaiety, and Bertram heard a laugh now and then from young folk who went
hurrying by, arm in arm. But the general impression of the faces he
passed was haggard, mournful, and anxious. Christy gave an explanation.
“This city is running short of food. Moscow, with its crowd of Soviet
officials, has first call on supplies. These people we pass are
wondering if their next meal will be their last.”
“I want to talk to them,” said Bertram. “If only I knew a bit of
Russian! I want to see inside their lives.”
“Try them with French, or German, or English,” said Christy. “Some of
these people shovelling snow used to spend the season in Paris, Berlin,
London.”
It was a woman selling cigarettes outside the station whose life was
revealed to Bertram.
She leaned against a wall, coughing, in a thin dress that was no proof
against a temperature of forty degrees below zero. She was a middle-aged
woman, with a thin face and sallow skin through which the cheekbones
showed. Bertram asked her in French for ten of her cigarettes, and paid
her ten times too much, in filthy paper.
“You’ve given me too much,” she said, in a weak voice, “and I have no
change.”
Her French was more perfect than Bertram’s.
“Never mind the change,” he said. “It’s cold for you, standing here.”
“Soon I shall be dead,” she said. “Are you French?”
“No, English.”
She stared at him with a kind of wonderment.
“Once I was a governess in England.”
She mentioned the name of an English family, unknown to Bertram.
“You have been here during the Revolution?” he asked.
“Since the beginning of the war. My husband was shot when Kerensky went.
He was an officer, and his men killed him, like so many others.”
“You are alone now?”
“I have a little son. He is dying of hunger. I cannot earn enough to
feed him. Sometimes I have thought of killing him, but have not the
courage.”
“That is terrible!” said Bertram. “How can I help you?”
“Why should you help me?” she asked, in a harsh voice. “What am I to
you? I am only one of millions who starve in Russia.”
He gave her a bundle of paper money, and she stared at it with dazed
eyes, and gave a little cry, not of joy, but of anguish. Perhaps this
charity from a stranger only sharpened her sense of misery, made more
poignant her knowledge of inevitable death.
Bertram raised his hat, and moved away, joining Christy again.
“It’s useless, old man,” said Christy. “I began like that. But I’ve
chucked it up. How much did you give her?”
“Five hundred thousand roubles. Surely that will help her a little?”
Christy shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.
“In this city one pays a hundred and twenty thousand roubles for a pound
of tea. Eighty thousand roubles for a pound of bread. Sixty thousand
roubles for ten cigarettes. What can you and I do in private charity?
It’s merely pandering to one’s own sentiment.”
“One can’t leave a woman like that without giving her something. One’s
coat, if one has nothing else.”
“Useless, Major. Useless. There are millions like her, as she said. We
can do better than that. Our job is to tell the truth about the agony of
these people, so that the outside world may help in a big way. Poke up
the conscience of all our Pharisees who pass by on the other side, while
Russia lies bleeding in the ditch.”
He took Bertram to a camp for refugees from the famine districts of the
Volga.
“You saw some of these on their way in the cattle-truck trains. This is
the end of the journey for some of them. I’m told it’s worth seeing.”
It was called a “camp,” but the refugees in the place to which Christy
went—there were many others round Petrograd—were housed in the old
Imperial Barracks—an immense white-washed building on four sides of a
hollow square. It was worth seeing, as Christy said, but not pleasant to
see. Outside the thermometer told forty degrees below zero. Inside there
was no heat except that of human bodies lying huddled together on bare
boards. There were thousands of peasants with straw-coloured beards and
blue eyes from Samara, and Saratoff, and other places which soon to
Bertram were to have a frightful significance. They had with them their
women folk and children who squatted about in the barrack rooms or lay
sleeping in tangled heaps like those in the station at Moscow. A meal
was being served from the kitchen—thin potato soup, and a square hunk
of black sour-smelling bread, provided by the Soviet Republic for these
people of the sun-burnt valley, once the richest granary of Russia. The
soup was ladled out to those who lined up in queue, with mugs and bowls,
but Bertram saw that many did not take their place in the line. They lay
on the bare boards, flopping their heads from side to side, or very
still, with glazing eyes.
“Typhus—dysentery—weakness,” said Christy, after some words in German
to a Russian doctor.
The doctor was a black-bearded man in a white surgical coat. He had
grave, thoughtful eyes behind his glasses.
“We do what we can,” he said, in German. “But the food is hardly enough,
and there are no medicines, no soap, no change of clothes, no fuel for
heat. Disease is spreading. But we do our best.”
Passing through the courtyard with Bertram and Christy, he pushed back a
wooden door, and beckoned them to look.
Inside was a great pile of dead bodies, thrown one on top of the other,
men, women, and children, mixed up together in a huddle of death, with
brown, claw-like hands protruding from the mass of corpses, and faces
staring upwards, and here and there a bare limb revealed in its skin and
bone. They had been tossed on top of each other, like rubbish for the
muck-heap.
“Two days dead,” said the Russian doctor.
“The End of the Journey,” said Christy, in a low voice to Bertram.
Bertram was sick for a moment in the corner of the yard. This stench of
death was worse than a battlefield.