It was a six days’ journey to Kazan, and seemed interminable. The
“special train” was not so magnificent as its name, but exactly similar
to the one from Riga—in discomfort, and in lice. The American Colonel
arrived with a young man acting as a kind of A. D. C., and with Dr.
Weekes, two other young men of the American Relief Administration, a
Russian officer of the Red Army, detailed as interpreter, the two
Russian ladies appointed as secretaries, and Nadia. Jemmy Hart, the
newspaper correspondent, joined up with Bertram, and two officers of the
_Cheka_ accompanied the party, nominally as police protection, but
really for political espionage.
Christy came down to the station to say farewell. He revealed a hint of
anxiety about Bertram.
“Don’t take too many risks, Major.”
He had an idea that he might not stay much longer in Moscow. He would
leave Russia to Bertram. Probably their next meeting-place would be
Berlin or London.
In his casual way he mentioned an exciting item of news.
“Janet has come out to Berlin. I may go and see her there.”
Janet Welford in Berlin! What was she doing there?
“Having a look round,” said Christy. “Getting a background for a new
novel. . . . There’s another reason.”
He mentioned the other reason in a “by the way” kind of tone.
“I asked her to meet me there. Now that my wife’s dead, there’s no
reason of consanguinity, affinity, or spiritual relationship why these
two persons should not be joined in holy matrimony. If Janet’s willing,
which is very doubtful.”
“Well, here’s luck!” said Bertram.
He spoke the words heartily, and gripped Christy’s hand, but, at the
back of his brain, as it were, was a sense of envy. Envy of Christy, his
best friend! Inconceivable, that—and yet there was the thought nagging
at him. Janet had been very kind to him in her rooms at Battersea Park.
She had once made his heart thump by a cry of regret that they had not
met and married before Joyce came along. What were her words? He
remembered them.
“A pity, Sir Faithful, that you didn’t marry me instead of Joyce! I
understand you better. And you were my first Dream Knight, in the days
when you kissed me in Kensington Gardens.”
He leaned out of the carriage window, and gripped Christy’s hand again.
“Give my love to Janet. Tell her that I’ve killed self-pity. She’ll
understand!”
“Take care of yourself!” said Christy, and then sloped away from the
Kazansky station, with his pipe in his mouth.
The journey began, and continued, day after day, with many halts in the
middle of Russian forests and the open countryside. Snow lay heavily on
the branches of fir-trees, and thick on the ground, so that a
traveller’s eyes tired of the white monotony. Every twenty versts or so
they reached a Russian village, with its low roofed wooden houses,
surrounded by high stockades. Peasants were shovelling snow to make
pathways to their village. They gathered in the station yards to stare
at the train, kept back from too near approach by soldiers of the Red
Army who looked half frozen and half starved. In many stations were
refugee trains without engines, with snow up to the axle wheels of their
closed trucks, in which families were densely crowded, lying together
all hugger-mugger, for warmth’s sake. It seemed as though they had been
there for months. There was no apparent prospect of these trains ever
moving. Those who died were buried in pits by the railway track. Across
the flat snow-fields there were here and there processions of men, women
and children, crawling like ants on the march, black against the
whiteness of their way. They, too, were refugees from Famine—without
much hope ahead, thought Bertram, remembering The End of the Journey, in
Petrograd. He wondered how many would lie down to die in the snow.
“They are wonderful in endurance,” said Nadia, to whom he put the
question, as they stood together in the corridor, looking out of window.
“In every village they pass they get a bit of bread from those who can
ill spare it. So they live from place to place. Those who are strong.”
He had many talks like this with Nadia in the corridor, or in her
compartment, with the two other ladies, belonging, like herself, to the
old régime, once ladies in waiting of the Imperial Court. The Colonel of
the A. R. A. had provided food for the party, mostly tinned stuff which
Dr. Weekes and Bertram, appointing themselves cooks, heated up in enamel
saucepans over tins of solid alcohol. It made the time pass, and was
more comforting than cold food.
At night, in the darkness of the corridor, Nadia stood by his side, and
sometimes they held hands, like children when the lights are out.
They talked of the mystery of life and death, the chances of world
peace, the future of civilisation. Strange topics of conversation
between a young man and woman! But travelling through Russia after war
and revolution, they seemed the only subjects worth discussing.
Dr. Weekes joined them, and told stories of his experiences in Armenia
and the Balkans—tragic tales of widespread famine, disease, death. He,
too, balanced the possibilities of Western civilisation. Disease, unless
checked by international effort, might wipe it out in Central Europe. It
had already made deep tracks in fields of child life. Another war,
anything like the last, would so weaken Europe, apart from its own
massacres, that plague and pestilence might do more destruction than
Attila and his Huns in the old days of the Roman Empire.
“You and I,” he said, turning to Nadia with his slow smile, “are two of
the most important people in the world. We’re disease-killers, apostles
of sanitation. But the odds against us are millions to one.”
“The fewer men, the greater share of honour,” said Nadia.
She had a surprising knowledge of literature, Russian, French, and
English, and, better than such knowledge, a keen intelligence and
candour of outlook which made her opinion astonishing for so young a
woman.
But Bertram admired her, not for her cleverness of opinion, but for her
spiritual quality and entire absence of self-consciousness. Delicate as
she was, the daughter of an aristocracy to which physical labour had
been abhorrent, she stooped to dirty work with a sense of beauty in its
labour, and Bertram was horrified to find her swilling down the filthy
lavatories before the rest of the travellers had stirred from their
bunks.
“For God’s sake,” he said, “leave that to the _provodnik_. It’s his job,
not yours.”
“It’s a job he neglects,” she said, smiling. “As one of the medical
staff of ‘Ara,’ cleanliness and sanitation are in my department. The
smell from this place is terrible.”
“All the more reason for you to avoid it,” said Bertram.
She shook her head.
“In the Famine district there will be worse smells and worse dirt, and
lice everywhere. If I wanted to avoid them, I should not be here.”
“You are wonderful!” he said.
“A simple Russian woman,” she answered. “Why do you think me wonderful?”
There were other people in the train who thought her wonderful when
Bertram told them of that early morning act. The Colonel and Dr. Weekes
were filled with admiration.
“By God,” said the Colonel, “if all the Russian people were like that
young woman, this country wouldn’t be plague-stricken with Bolsheviks
and bugs!”
At night, in their candle-lit carriage, the Colonel and the Doctor, and
Jemmy Hart, the newspaper man, and the Colonel’s A. D. C., or “pup,” as
Hart called him, played poker with Russian roubles. They gambled
fiercely, raising the stakes by tens of thousands, with a limit of a
hundred thousand, as though possessed of untold wealth. But at the end
of the long evening’s play, no one had lost or gained more than a few
dollars in American rates of exchange.
During these poker games Bertram went into the dusky corridor again to
stand by Nadia. They were left alone, for the other two Russian ladies
went early to their bunks. The train crawled slowly, or halted for hours
while new fuel was stacked in the engine. The moon rose and flooded the
white landscape and the snow-capped farmsteads and the laden boughs.
“Russia is like a dead body under its white shroud,” said Nadia.
“It seems as lonely as an undiscovered land,” said Bertram.
She asked him to tell her a little of his life, so that she might know
him more. He told her only of the things that had happened, the war, his
marriage, the death of the child, Digby’s murder in Ireland, his
mother’s death, his separation from Joyce. He was not good at
self-analysis, and too much of an Englishman to attempt it. Yet she
seemed to understand more than he told her.
“Russia does not hold all the unhappiness of life,” she said. “You have
crowded too much suffering into a few years. It has wounded your spirit.
You feel broken, and perhaps a little resentful of Fate. So much bad
luck after the strain of war!”
“I’m not whining,” said Bertram. “Your courage through more dreadful
things rebukes my cowardice.”
“You are not cowardly,” she told him. “I think you will be very strong
and brave when your wound is healed. You have the eyes of leadership.
One day you will help to lead your country in thought or action.”
He laughed at her, but she was sure.
One thing she said in those night talks as the train went crawling
through the white wilderness, gave him a glimpse of a spiritual passion
in her soul.
“I hated ugliness, and pain, and dirt. As a child these things were all
hidden from me. As a young girl I was surrounded with beauty and
illusion. Now I want to get deeper and deeper into the misery of the
people. I want to be with them in their pain and their filth. I want to
share their worst agony. It is to pay back to them by the suffering of
my body and spirit for all the cruelties of my ancestors. If you will
read Russian history, you will find my father’s name—though not my
father—attached to acts which kept the peasants enslaved, and
brutalised them. The old régime is suffering now for the sins of its
fathers. It is right that we should be punished.”
“I don’t believe in that doctrine,” said Bertram. “We should be punished
for our own acts, perhaps—though we are the children of heredity—but
not for the crimes of those who gave us life.”
“It is the Law,” she said. “The Greeks knew it. Fate pursues us. It is
in the Christian faith. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon
the children.”
“It’s unfair,” said Bertram. “Damned unfair.”
“Alas, it is true,” she said. “We must do good for our children’s sake.”
“I had a child who died, as I have told you,” said Bertram. “Sometimes
I’m glad. The world is too cruel.”
“Not too cruel for those who have courage,” she said.
She spoke of her desire to have a child.
“Perhaps, if we love each other, you and I may have a child, dear sir.
That would give me great happiness.”
Bertram was profoundly moved by those words, spoken with such
simplicity.
“I am a stranger to you,” he said. “You do not know my weakness and my
character.”
“I knew you,” she said, “when you looked my way in the market place.”
That night they clasped hands in the darkness of the corridor.
“My Russian comrade!” he said to her.
“Dear friend of Russia and of me,” she answered.