By favour of a Soviet official with whom Christy was on terms of
friendship—“a very mild type of Bolshevik, like so many of them,” he
explained—they were allowed to visit the Port of Petrograd.
“Is it worth while?” asked Bertram; “I want the human side of things. I
want to know how people are living, and suffering in this frightful
country.”
Christy answered with a touch of rebuke.
“We’re not here for melodrama. This Port will tell us why people are
_not_ living in Russia. And why there’s unemployment in England. It was
one of the gateways of the world’s trade.”
It was a mournful place. They stumbled over cables concealed beneath the
snow, and wandered in solitude past docks and warehouses, empty of all
shipping and merchandise. Out in the snow lay numbers of ploughs and
reaping machines, brand-new in their crates.
Christy inspected them, and read a word.
“Düsseldorf. . . . That tells a tale. Do you remember what I said about
a Russo-German alliance?”
“Why are they left rotting in the snow?” asked Bertram.
“No means of transport, and Oriental inefficiency,” said Christy.
Further in the Port were three tramps flying the Swedish and Danish
flags, and one wide-decked vessel with one funnel called _Tyneside
Lass_, from Newcastle.
Christy was excited by that.
“From little old England! What’s she doing? Let’s go and see the Old
Man!”
At the top of the gangway was a young skipper, who looked surprised when
Christy hailed him in his own tongue.
“Glad to see you, gentlemen,” he said, with cheery greeting. “Come into
my cabin and have a spot. It’s biting cold.”
He mixed a stiff dose for each of them, and raised his own glass.
“Cheery oh!”
“What are you carrying to Petrograd?” asked Christy.
“Railway engines. All German. From Hamburg. My owners have a contract to
carry eight hundred. Four at a time. It looks as if I’ll get frozen in,
this trip.”
Christy looked over to Bertram, and raised his eyebrows, before asking
another question.
“How do the Bolshies pay for German engines, skipper?”
“Some gold. Mostly diamonds and furs.”
“Sound business for Germany,” said Christy. “How do you get on with the
Bolshies?”
The young skipper shrugged his shoulders.
“The officials keep civil tongues. They’d better. The stevedores are
poor lousy bastards. Can hardly lift a cable without breaking
theirselves. Half-fed, and no guts. Start work at eleven, and take two
hours to get the cranes working. Well-meaning enough. Some of ’em speak
a bit of English. There’s one that was Professor of Biology, or some
such thing, before the war. I gave him a slab of cheese, and he wept
tears and kissed my hand. I’ve no use for this Bolshevism. It don’t seem
to do a country any good, though there’s some that think so in
Newcastle.”
He wished them good health, and waved his hand to them from the top of
the gangway as they went back through the snow.
“Major,” said Christy, using the old title as though they were still in
Flanders’ fields, “those railway-engines from Hamburg give me furiously
to think. Here’s the key to Russia’s way of escape. Perhaps Germany’s
also, if France puts the screw on too hard. What about the Treaty of
Versailles—German indemnities—a French invasion of the Ruhr—if
Germany allies herself with Russia? Russia and Germany _contra mundum_!
A formidable combination, by the Lord!”
“Don’t you jump a bit too far ahead?” asked Bertram. “Four railway
engines in a Tyneside tug don’t seem to justify a prophecy of world
war.”
“Remember Owen,” said Christy calmly. “Reconstructed a Megatherium out
of one tooth. These four railway engines, with seven hundred and
ninety-six to follow—and those ploughs lying in the snow—mean that
Germany is getting her foot into Russia, doing business, preparing to do
more. For Russia’s sake I’m mighty glad, but it mustn’t be left to
Germany alone. If that happens, there’s going to be Hell to pay.”
Bertram was silent on the way back. Christy had the gift of seeing far
ahead, and his prophecies were rare, and never rash. The individual did
not interest him very much. He thought more of the actions and reactions
of peoples, of mass movements, economic laws, world balances, the ebb
and flow of trade, the undertow of passions, and political chances.
That night they went to the Marinsky Theatre, and lost their way in the
snow. With his few phrases of Russian, Christy asked the way of a young
lad in the uniform of a Red soldier, and was answered in very good
English.
“If you come with me, gentlemen, I shall be very glad to show you.”
“Are you English?” asked Bertram.
The boy laughed, and said his father was English, but now dead. His
mother was a Russian lady. She taught languages, especially English, to
students who came to her at night after their day’s work. She received
three thousand roubles a lesson, and was never home till past midnight,
and then very tired. He chattered cheerfully as he strode over the snow
in heavy boots, a little fellow, with bright eyes and a lively sense of
humour. Yet it was not a merry tale he told, though fantastic.
“I was an important person for a time. They made me President of Arts
and Sciences. I gave lectures to working men at night, on the origin of
art, evolution, and elementary biology.”
“How old were you then?” asked Bertram.
“Sixteen,” said the boy. “Now I am eighteen.”
He looked no more than fourteen.
One day he was arrested for counter-revolutionary opinions. Some
working-man had discovered that his father was an “aristocrat,” or
objected to his discipline in class. Anyhow, he was denounced, and kept
in prison for nine months. His poor mother had nearly died of grief.
Then he was liberated, luckier than others who had been shot in batches
for the same suspicion. Now he was an office-boy in a Government
department.
“It’s been perfectly rotten,” he said, using English slang with a
foreign accent.
He halted outside the Marinsky Theatre, and saluted, and then shook
hands.
Bertram tried to slip some money into his hand, but he shook his head.
“My father was an English gentleman,” he said simply.
There were tickets for sale in the theatre, according to the “New
Economic Laws,” but it was plain that most of the people had passes, and
it was explained to Christy by a young Jew who spoke French, that it was
a “Trade Union” night.
It was a performance of “Carmen,” magnificently staged, and well played,
but to Bertram and Christy the audience was of more interest than the
performance. The immense and splendid theatre was packed with “the
proletariat.” Nearly all of them wore the Russian blouse, belted round
the waist, or the Red Army tunic. The women were dressed very much like
an audience in one of the poorer suburbs of London, but here and there a
few had ventured to put on a bit of “finery”—a little lace round the
neck and wrists, a trinket or two. In the Imperial box sat a group of
men with black hair over their foreheads, like women’s “fringes,” and
grimy hands. Above their heads the Imperial Eagle had been covered with
the Red Flag of Revolution.
Bertram thought of the pale-faced Czar sitting there with the Empress
and their beautiful daughters, with high officers and ladies of the
Court.
Then, by some curious association of ideas, he thought of Joyce, as he
had sat with her in the boxes of London theatres, so beautiful, so
exquisite in her evening frocks. The Emperor and Empress and all their
family had been murdered. Joyce had disappeared from his life, by some
act of revolution which had murdered _him_, killed his spirit, stone
dead.
The body of Bertram Pollard sat in the stall of the Marinsky Theatre at
Petrograd, but it was not the Bertram Pollard of Holland Street,
Kensington, or “Somewhere in France.” He had changed. He was a different
man. This visit to Russia was changing him still further. It made all
other things seem trivial and insignificant—the things he had made such
a fuss about. Ireland! It did not mean much to the world in progress or
reaction. That guerrilla warfare was a Chinese cracker compared with the
frightful things that had happened here in Petrograd. The Social
Revolution in England—Holme Ottery up for sale! How laughable, how
negligible, compared with the utter extinction of the Russian gentry!
Petrograd and Moscow put things in a different proportion. The agony of
these people made private troubles, heart-breaks, love affairs,
strangely small. Those dead bodies in the barracks—they too put things
in a different proportion, made life itself of but little account,
individually. What was this new sense of proportion going to mean to
him?
Perhaps he would find the meaning at last for which his mind had been
groping, like a man in a dark room. Perhaps he would get outside himself
in service to these people who were so immensely stricken.
“A hundred thousand roubles for your thoughts,” said Christy.
“I’m wondering what I’m here for,” said Bertram.
Christy glanced at him sideways.
“To learn a bit of life. Perhaps to light a little lamp in the darkness
of a human heart. Anyhow to see ‘Carmen’ jolly well played!”
The young Jew who had spoken to them before, came up during the
entr’acte, when they joined the crowd in the _foyer_, a strange,
shaggy-haired, pale-faced crowd, very cheerful on the whole, and
enjoying their evening.
“What do you think of it?” he asked.
“Magnificent,” said Christy. “Who are all these people in the audience?”
“Soviet workers of one kind or another.”
“Communists?” asked Christy.
The young Jew smiled, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Are we still Communists under the New Economic Laws? We’ve gone back to
private trading, private property, money instead of rations, foreign
capital, if it can be got.”
“Do the people like the new way?”
“It’s like a weight lifted off their shoulders! They’re beginning to
breathe again.”
He lowered his voice.
“I’m in a Soviet office. But like most Jews I believe in trade, barter,
property. All the same, the Revolution did some good. The workers didn’t
get free seats at the Opera in the time of the Romanoffs.”
He looked at them with shifty eyes, afraid that he was talking
dangerously, yet wanting to talk.
“Bread and circuses are all right,” said Christy, “but circuses without
bread are poor fare.”
The young Jew couldn’t follow this allusion, and looked mystified.
“Was the Revolution very terrible in England?” he asked.
“What Revolution?”
“The English Revolution.”
“It hasn’t happened yet,” said Christy. “It won’t happen.”
The young Jew was incredulous.
“We have read a lot about it in _Prahvda_. That’s our Soviet paper. All
your people are starving, are they not?”
“They were pretty well fed when I left them,” said Christy, laughing.
The young Jew did not believe him, by the look in his eyes, but the
curtain was rung up again, and they left him.
“They all think there’s been a bloody revolution in England,” said
Christy. “They get no news except the stuff published for propaganda
purposes. The outside world is a mystery to them.”
“It will soon be to us,” said Bertram. “I’ve heard nothing since I left
Riga. For all I know England may have been sunk beneath the sea. Or
Ireland.”
“No such luck,” said Christy, making the obvious gibe.
They went back through the snow with the audience of the Marinsky
Theatre, to the music of sleigh-bells. That night they slept at a place
called the International Hostel, which was another kind of
“Guest-house,” mostly inhabited by Soviet officials of high rank, and by
German traders. Most of the night was spent in catching bugs.