Chapter I: PROPOSED to go from Newcastle to Bergen, to go by Norwegian

steamer from Bergen to Vardö or Kirkenaes on the far north-eastern limits of Norway, and then wait for some sort of boat to take me to Ekaterina. In this I was successful, though it was not possible to book any passage beforehand in England.

I left the night the first misleading news of the North Sea battle was received. If that news had been correct it would have meant that the German Fleet had broken through and was at large, and that each war vessel had become a commerce trader. We stood a chance of being revised by Germans and perhaps of all English of age being taken away. A British captain said to me afterwards, “We received that first news as we were leaving a South American port with a cargo of nitre. We realised at once that the chances must now be considered against our arriving safely at a home port.”

Because of the battle the mail boat which had been due in at Newcastle in the morning, arrived only at nightfall, the revising officers were late in coming from the examination of the one to the examination of the other--the _Rhanvald Jarl_, due to go out from Newcastle that night. I did not get to my cabin till half-past-one in the morning, and had spent some hours among drunken sailors, one of whom was sick on the stairs of the Aliens Officer’s room.

The journey to Bergen was not pleasant.

No one to breakfast, no one to lunch, no one to dinner. I doubt if any one felt in the least anxious about German cruisers or stray mines. There was other preoccupation.

At Bergen I stayed three days in a hotel. The news in the Norwegian papers did not flatter the efforts of the Allies. Explanations of the real significance of the North Sea battle began to appear, but they had the suggestion of merely trying to give a better face to what was in reality a very unpleasant happening. For the rest the Germans seemed to be going ahead, and had captured the fort of Vaux. The only set-off against these things was the first intelligence of the Russian advance in Galicia.

I sailed northward in the _Vesteraalen_, the Norwegian mail boat going to far Kirkenaes. Boats go four or five times a week the whole distance of the Norwegian coast. They are slow, but, if time is no object, it is a most interesting journey--the placid fiords and jolly channels between mountains, the veritable gates in the rocks which upon occasion you pass through, the many fishing villages and the trawlers weighed down with herrings, the busy women with their knives cleaning the fish and emptying barrelful after barrelful of entrails into the sea, the thousands of gulls ever calling, dipping, screeching, chasing one another, and then the Lofoten Islands with their mighty heights, the increasingly stern more northern aspect of Nature, and the dwellings of man, the passing of the Arctic line, the brilliant nights with the sun still on the shoulder of the sky at midnight.

I fell in with an English Consul, a young man going to Vardö to do special work in connection with the war. He was accompanied by his wife, and she, for her part, had never been out of England before. At every place the steamer stopped we got out and went for a walk--sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour or so, according to the extent of the cargo that had to be discharged or taken on.

At Hammerfest, the most northern town in Europe, dirty snow still lay on the edges of the streets. A wild place this Hammerfest, apparently all men and no women, the roadway thronged with hardy sailors. A whole forest of masts in the harbour, an all-pervading smell of cod liver oil in the town, a grey and ugly port in June, whatever it may be later on.

Many Norwegians spoke English, though with an American accent, and they were very friendly to us. I was interested, too, to observe their love of their own land, a real attachment to the rocks of Norway. It is majestic scenery all the way from Bergen to the North Cape, and it has somewhat of the characteristic melancholy of the North. If Russians lived in this land they would love it for its sadness. But the Norwegians love its ruggedness, and they say that the wild and rugged nature of their land has made them what they are. And I suppose Scots would find there grandeur and the sublimity of Nature.

After the North Cape we entered a region of utter desolation, the coast a line of snow, the sea grey and dead with the occasional black back of a porpoise showing. The wind was cold and wintry. We knew that at Vardö we should find no flowers, no vegetation.

At Vardö I left the boat as I had discovered that boats went to and fro to Russia therefrom. An important place this Vardö, and a sharp look-out on Germans should always be kept here. If a submarine campaign against the shipping of Archangel broke out, there would probably be some connivance on the part of Germans or neutrals resident hereabout, and possible bases on this desolate coast.

A most forlorn region subject to terrific gales, cold and snowy. It has a great number of grey wooden docks with grey fishing-boats; almost all the houses are of wood, and are of the same grey complexion as boats and quays, they are low and squat, and the dirty streets are wide. Innumerable gulls are diving and dipping and fluttering--and shrieking in chorus.

There are two hotels. One is called appropriately “The North Pole,” the other is “Vinnans Hotel.” I stayed at the latter, and this, astonishing to relate, is a first-class hotel with electric light and a telephone in every room, though there is no one in the town with whom you can communicate. There is an electric arrangement on the wall for lighting your cigarette--you press a button and a disc becomes red-hot, and at that you light up. I suppose some Christiania contractor had put this up, faithful to the specification quoted in his tender. My windows had scarlet blinds, and all night long the midnight sun poured crimson light on my white bed, the huge wind howled and bellowed, and innumerable gulls cried up and down, now this side, now that.

In the bleak and lonely cemetery are Russian graves with naïve carvings of the Virgin and Child on the orthodox wooden crosses. Many a Russian sailor and fisherman has perished on this side of his fatherland.

There are amusements in the town, two cinema shows packed every night, a shooting saloon, an Aunt Sallie shy called “Amerikanske Sport.” I hit down one ugly face and received as a reward a postcard picture of a pretty Norwegian girl about to give a kiss to her beau; there are band-of-hope meetings with the most excruciating music, and you see advertised--raffles.

One day fifteen negroes arrived on a boat from Russia. They were the crew of the American ship _R_---- which had brought ammunition to Archangel, but was in such a bad condition that the negroes refused to take it back, got their money and cleared off. At Vardö one of them had quarrelled with the rest and was now said to be mad. No one would take him in, all the girls being frightened, and the children aiming stones at him. He was accommodated in the gaol.

At Vardö there is a most able Russian Consul who is not only most useful to his own Government, but also to ours, affording him all the help he can. And a Russian knows more of this neighbourhood and its phenomena than an Englishman brought from Christiania or London. Through him I learned that a boat would soon be sailing for Alexandrovsk, the harbour of Ekaterina, and after a five-days’ stay at Vardö I got away.

Over the sea once more! In twelve hours I was at the Russian Monastery of Petschenga, and next day in a big snowstorm I came to the new harbour.

II

THE DARK HAVEN

FROM the end of November to the middle of January the sun does not rise in Russia’s new haven. All would be dark even at mid-day were it not for the snow. The stars never set. The lights in the little wooden dwellings are never put out. Great gales blow, rolling up mountainous waves on the Arctic. Or Polar mists swallow up everything. Snowstorms go on indefinitely and the frost may be forty degrees, fifty degrees. Here is no town, no civilisation. Alexandrovsk has no pavement, no high street, no cinema theatre, no hotel, not even a tavern. Its population is hard, gloomy, northern. No one has any intelligence of the great world far away to the south--the gaze is toward the North Pole.

They say it has a great future. ’Twill be a mighty city with roaring traffic and skyscrapers, theatres, cafés, passion, and sin. It will be the Odessa of the North. Valery Brussof anticipates such a city in one of his fantastic stories--Zvezdny, the capital of the Southern Cross Republic, and as we read we ask--“Could it be? Could such a place ever come to be?”

In any case, in the midst of this great destructive war one piece of constructive work is in hand, the fashioning of a new port for Russia far within the Arctic circle. We hear little of the work in England, or we hear laconic accounts, such as: “A branch of railways has been built on from Archangel to an ice-free port farther north, kept open by the Gulf Stream,” which is inaccurate as regards the route of the railway and, moreover, gives the impression that such a railway is easily built, might, in fact, be improvised. But in truth it is not so trivial a matter. The nearer you get to the actual place the more astonished you are to recollect the airy opinions you heard expressed in Fleet Street at home.

The harbour of Ekaterina, on which stand the town of Alexandrovsk and the barracks of Semionova, is a queen of harbours, a marvellous natural refuge, certainly no makeshift place. And then, as a glance at the map will convince, it is not near Archangel, least of all by land. No railway could ever go direct from Alexandrovsk to Archangel, and no railway of any kind could easily or rapidly be built over a thousand miles of _tundra_.

Those Russians who live in the north are in raptures over their new port. Russia shall face north, the whole of North Russia shall be functionised in Alexandrovsk and Archangel. And, indeed, the longer the war lasts the better for this northern region materially. If the war lasts three years longer Russia will certainly finish up in possession of a new port and a valuable railway.

An enormous undertaking this, of trying to plant a railway on the _tundra_. Many have died at work on it; hundreds must inevitably die before it is a _success_. It was difficult to engineer. Russians say now that it was badly surveyed to start with and needs re-planning, but in any case it was extremely difficult to find a way over the mosses and morasses and along the shores of the almost continuous lakes that lie between Kola and Kandalaksha. The map of the railway is now published in Norway and Sweden. It might just as well be made accessible to the English Press. When Lord Kitchener died, maps showing his route were printed in our papers as if he had been going to Alexandrovsk (which was not the case) to travel on a railway which was not in existence to Archangel! This caused much amusement in Russia.

As a matter of fact, the railway runs from Semionova across the Kola peninsula to the White Sea at Kandalaksha, and then becomes practically a coast railway to the little port of Kem. Thence there is a good railway to Petrozavodsk and Petrograd. It does not come near Archangel. Indeed, if the formation of this new harbour and railway should be a practical success, Archangel is almost bound to suffer and to relapse from its present state of prosperity to its former somnolence.

The railway when completed will be a memorable and valuable achievement. It has taken an enormous amount of labour to construct. First, Russian gangs were set to work and then they were called to fight for their country. A Canadian contractor or contracting company was then successful in obtaining the work. But the workmen sent over found themselves confronted by conditions that were necessarily difficult to have realised in advance. They faced the problem in a commercial rather than in a military spirit. And when they had gone there was almost as much work in prospect as when they came.

Their place was largely taken by Austrian prisoners who had volunteered from their internment camps to come out and work for a wage. The estimate of the numbers thus employed ranges from 10,000 to 20,000 men. They were guarded by Cherkesses, troops from the Caucasus who presumably had also volunteered, since military service was not obligatory for them. The Austrians worked well and did some of the best work on the railway. But there was considerable suffering. Now 10,000 Chinamen, Kirghiz, and Mongols of various kinds are at work.

In the summer, except for water under foot and mosquitoes in the air, the conditions are good, but in the winter all the men are working with torches in the darkness. Despite much forethought on the part of the Government many of the men have proved to be yet too thinly clad to withstand the great frosts. The food from a European point of view is coarse. Yet the work must go on, must be done. This year, before the spring, one engine covered the whole of the course of the railway--one only--and then the thaw came and enormous stretches of the track fell away, were washed off, disappeared.

The Austrians were reported to have laid the sleepers purposely on lumps of ice. When the thaw came they floated off. But in truth there was nothing much but ice to lay them on. The Canadians, working with torches in the darkness, were said to have failed to fix the rails with the right balance on the sleepers and the first engine that passed over worked havoc with the embankment. So they say in Alexandrovsk, but, probably, neither Austrians nor Canadians were to blame--but Nature simply had not yet been conquered, though there was a semblance of conquest at the end of the winter.

In the autumn of 1915 Archangel froze unexpectedly early, and vessels that could not discharge there went to Alexandrovsk to wait for the railway. Ekaterina was packed with ships--you could almost step from one ship to another and thus get across from one side of the harbour to another. And as there were no rings for the moorings of the ships there was a certain amount of fear that a storm might arise and the ships dash themselves to bits against one another. But, as it proved, no matter how fierce the tempest raged outside, this virginal harbour was always placid.

Towards Christmas (one party on Christmas Eve) arrived our armoured-car men, now fighting so gallantly with the Grand Duke in Transcaucasia, telegraphists who erected the wireless stations, naval airmen, troops. Men-of-war guarded the harbour. In that strange Arctic refuge, what an assembly of British! They remained all the winter and thought this Russia they had come to the most God-forsaken place in the world. Nevertheless, they named the only street of Alexandrovsk “Pall Mall” and at their concerts they sang incessantly some song about “Leicester Square, Leicester Square.” One might think Leicester Square was really an important place in the minds of Englishmen.

One obtains the idea that it is perhaps the Mecca to which the British soldier turns, and some of the Russian soldiers who are fighting “to put the Cross on Sancta Sophia” have a vague idea, hearing our armoured-car men singing, that perhaps we are fighting to get back to Leicester Square. Their marching songs are folk-lore airs with national words. A contrast to our music-hall songs imported from America.

On English Old-Year’s night, which is a fortnight before the same date in Russia, the men on the ships decided to celebrate the coming of the New Year with festivity. The Russians ashore peacefully slept and the great gloomy cliffs that close the harbour in were silent as the grave. Suddenly from all the ships burst forth cries and fireworks and rockets, songs, shoutings. The Russians ashore all wakened up and thought the Germans had come.

This Ekaterina is a great sight, a most beautiful place, though forbidding and austere, a symmetrical, flask-shaped exit from the Arctic. In the storm of driving mist and snow it was difficult enough finding the neck of the flask, the way in; but once in, all was peace, though the storm raged in the heavens and in the air. There were no ships to speak of in the harbour then, but a good deal of life on the shore, especially at Semionova.

A tatterdemalion Russian population, some in sheepskins, some in Caucasian _bourkas_, some in bowler hats, some in old khaki overcoats, and smoking pipes--evidence of English influence. There were engineers in leather jackets and with flannel bashleeks over their heads, workmen in felt boots, many Circassian troops with their rifles and in ragged uniforms, men with pale, severe faces--they make probably the most terrible type of Russian troops, silent, faithful, relentlessly severe and very powerful, speaking little or no Russian, Mohammedan by religion--the guards of the Austrian prisoners.

When the railway is finished its terminus will be at Semionova, and that will probably be the name of the new port. Semionova is all new, unpainted wood. Here are hundreds of shanties and barracks, and an indescribable chaos of workmen, materials, and mud. Engines puff along the shore on the bit of railway which is in working order, and on these engines the various agents and engineers clamber to go to the place of action where the gangs are at work.

I fell in with various queer people; a speculator buying up land, a one-eyed man with smoky glasses seeking a site on which to build a cinema. Eight thousand roubles, would buy a cinema with all fixtures, including an electric piano. It was bound to be a success, he argued, for there would be no other place to go to in the long black winter. Land has been bought up all round the harbour, and by people who have never seen it--just for speculation, the curse of modern life in Russia. And all the time whilst Russian peasants and workmen are slaving and dying, comfortable commercial folk in the south are buying and selling the prospective fruits of their labour and sufferings.

Still, that is the way of the world, and these people pass, whereas the work remains. All the autumn and possibly through the winter the work goes on again in the continuous darkness, with torches, under the supervision of fur-clad engineers and grim Cherkesses. Many will be the sufferings, though not greater than the sufferings on the field of battle. Many have died and will die in the building and consummating of the Murman railway. Still the railway will remain as a peaceful memorial, the great new railway from Petrograd to the dark haven.

III

THE NEW ARCHANGEL

WHEN I last visited Archangel, six years ago, it was a dreamy, lifeless, melancholy port. One felt that, like its sister city, Kholmagora, it had once been great, but its greatness had finally set. You could feel the melancholy of Russia there, the sadness of material failure so characteristic of the Russian soul. But to-day! To-day the vision has fled, the _tempo_ has changed. All the ships of the world find anchorage in her harbour, and motley crowds throng her streets. That the war has brought about. A year before the war fifty vessels entered Archangel port. During the last twelve months something like 5000 have entered. Great liners and transports and weather-beaten tramps and three-deck river boats stand in majestic pride. Their smoke and steam make a dome over the city of Archangel when you approach it from the north.

There are Norwegians and Yankees, with their colours flamboyantly painted on their bows to warn the submarine off; Russians and French, with their tricolours streaming; but most of all English ships, with their proud rain-washed Union Jacks lolling in the wind. I was taken through the whole harbour in a little, arrow-like steam launch--from the Thames! How often it had shot under the arches of our little bridges, and now it was puffing and panting on the vast brown Dvina, be-dwarfed by huge ships, driven by a Lett from Riga, and constantly going short of steam and getting becalmed far from either shore.[1] Besides troops, the French are taking great quantities of alcohol used in the manufacture of high explosives, and I saw many barges heaped up with barrels of spirit and wondered if there were many leaks. The Russian manufacture of alcohol has probably not diminished as a result of the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating liquors in Russia, but has proved to be a valuable war export. This fact is especially important to take into consideration with regard to Russian temperance reform. When the war is over and the market for this alcohol is partially lost, will there not be another movement of resistance on the part of the manufacturers?

[1] Thirteen lines excluded by British Censor. Not to be published.

I saw all manner of crates with machinery, parts of aeroplanes, and the like, and British vessels discharging these things, and I saw grain and flax and timber going on for us from Russia.

Go into the chief restaurant of Archangel, and as like as not all the customers are English captains, and they are reading back numbers of the _Daily Mail_ and talking “ship.” At the Café Paris there is a “skippers’ table,” where they are also captains all, and the waitresses quarrel as to who shall serve there, though none of them knows two words of English. In the Alexandrovsky Gardens you see English sailors with Russian girls, and neither can say a word to the other. Their only language is that of looks. One of our men showed me a card with poetry written and violets painted and asked me to translate the words for him and write an answer. It ran something like this--

What need for words when without them you are so eloquent? Why should the lips move When the eyes speak so well?

Sailors tell wonderful stories of feminine conquests, and it is evident the Russian girls are partial to them. Even at the theatre, in front of you are sitting such unlikely persons as a fireman and a stoker, and one says to the other with disgust, “I can’t understand a blooming word. Can you?” Some Englishmen have exercise books with Russian words and phrases laboriously copied out--an impossible language!

All is going well in Archangel. The Russians, in spite of their inexperience, are handling the immense quantities of materials well, and the “stuff” is all steadily proceeding to the places where it is most needed. New quays have been built, and loops of railway run along them, and some ships, carrying nothing weighing less than three tons, yet discharge all their immense articles of cargo in considerably less time than it took to put them on at Liverpool or Dundee or Newcastle as the case may be.

The Russians earn unheard-of wages in the docks, and the rumour attracts thousands of workers from all parts of Russia. A journalist writing in the _Russkoe Slovo_ in July called it the Russian Klondike. All Russians who go there are pleased with it. The port in its present grandeur is a sort of promise for Russia, and it flatters her commercial future.

I was warned I should not find a room anywhere in the city, and that people paid five roubles a night for the privilege of sleeping in a passage. But I obtained a clean room at the Troitsky Hotel for 2 roubles 75 copecks, which was not dear. Notices in the room were printed both in English and Russian, indicating how many English visitors they have now.

I called on my friend Alexander Alexandrovitch Beekof, the hunter and draper whom I described in “Undiscovered Russia.” He had now opened a boot shop and was rich, selling his wares at three or four pounds the pair. He was proud of his business success and rejoiced in the independence which it gave him. He is now a member of the Gorodskaya Duma, and when a representative of the city was wanted to carry an emblem to the Archangel troops at the front, Beekof was thought to be the best.[2] He shared the hardships of the common soldiers, and was fain to stay at the front, but was mixed up in the great retreat from Austria and felt very sick of everything before he got back to his native city and the boot shop.

[2] Four lines excluded by Censor.

Since I was in Archangel last the young revolutionary exile Alexey Sergeitch, now pardoned and married and teaching history in Moscow, has brought out a little book on the Monastery of Ci. I saw him later when I got to Moscow.

I was invited by the town council to partake of a glass of tea on the occasion of the opening of the electric tramway. All the notables of the town were accommodated on board a special steamer, and went slowly along the Cathedral pier a mile or so to the new electric power station. Here priests met us with banners and ikons and holy water. A service was held in the power station, and the smell of burning incense mingled strangely with the smell of new paint and oil and machinery. Holy water was flung in all corners and over our heads, and then the dynamos were set in motion and the whole place buzzed and groaned. I think Repin, the engineer, proud of having constructed the most northern tramway in the world, was a little anxious lest the holy water should spoil his engines.

But all went well, and we took our seats in the virgin trams to make the first journey, all the notables of the town and with them every beggar and labourer and tatterdemalion dock-hand that could get a footing. In Germany I can imagine how swiftly these gentlemen would have been dealt with. But in Russia “all is permitted” and we had a joy-ride. We went cheerfully along on our parade journey. The conductresses in brand new uniforms and shining metal clips and punches stood with their money bags and their full rolls of tickets. Directly following our trip to the Town Hall the cars were open to the public, and fares would be collected. Car after car drew up and we stepped out and walked up the stone stairs to the long tables and the glasses of tea and the proud speeches of the great men of Archangel.

Now the trams are in full operation, and bring in about £1,000 a week. Archangel is united, and friends within the city have become nearer. All day the trams carry passengers, and all night they carry goods, so I am told.

As I write of this now in the winter after I have come back to London, I imagine that probably now all is frozen over again. The brown river became white, and within twenty-four hours you could drive a horse and cart over it. It did not melt again till the spring. Captains and their crews thinking of leaving in a few days and grumbling because of small delays as they always do grumble, were suddenly condemned to remain idle for months; their ships, dotted here, there, and everywhere in the ice, had a processional aspect, and looked as if they were sailing out and yet never getting forward. The men cut pine branches and made avenues from their ships to the shores, well-trodden roads with names. There was “Broadway” leading to a big American ship, and K---- Avenue leading to the _K_----, and _R_---- Avenue leading to the _R_----. I may not mention the name of any British ship, but the detail has a picturesqueness which is worth noting. The Russian Government paid the owners of these boats hundreds of thousands of roubles damages for this unexpected incursion of Jack Frost. It was highly unprofitable to Russia, but every one made the best of it and no one grumbled.

The happy co-operation of the Russians and the English shows to advantage in Archangel. Russians and English like one another and get on well together there, though the souls of the common people are so different and Russian ways so different from our own.

IV

THE COST OF LIVING

EACH time returning to Moscow I notice change. Last year after the riots it was a city of broken windows and more or less empty streets. This summer I found the life patched up and the windows more or less repaired. There were more people; there was an obvious prosperity of a kind, among the shopkeeping class. Every one talked of the dearness of living and yet every one had more money wherewith to buy. And all shops were thriving. Many shops with German names have now put up a notice to the effect that the owners are Russian. Not that the German shops which were sacked in July, 1914 have recovered. Einem, the great confectioner, with all his branches seems to have sold his retail business. The first-rate art shop and publishing house of Knebel & Grossman has had to obtain a Government loan in order to make a start again and supply the schools, but most precious negatives and blocks and originals perished, and it will be a long time before the firm can make up for what was lost. Many new cafés and places of amusement have been opened, testifying to the money in people’s pockets. Rich fugitives from the districts conquered by the Germans and Austrians seem to have started businesses in Moscow and have imparted to it a tinge of the complexion of Warsaw--part of the extra gaiety of Warsaw seems to have arrived; one notices such new names as that of the Piccadilly Café opposite Phillipof’s.

Apart from that street gaiety, however, there is sufficient sadness and anxiety in the background. As in England and France, every family has its personal stake in the war, and for many that stake has become the wooden cross over a grave. Young and splendid regiments are still to be seen marching, however, and to look at them in their new uniforms one might think for a moment that it was only the beginning, Russia was entering the war, and no one had yet been lost.

There is engaging enthusiasm still, and withal the noted Slav patience that does not ask for things to be done quickly. A slow war in many respects suits the Russian temperament. The most characteristic thing in Russia is the waiting: waiting hours for your ticket at the booking-office, waiting hours for Chinovniks, waiting for one’s money at the bank, waiting for a turn to buy a seat for next week’s performance at the theatre, whole days if Shaliapin be going to sing. And now they are waiting with their accustomed cheeriness and patience.

Certainly they have their hardships, those who dwell in the background. They have plenty of subjects for grumbling and complaints. Their talk is all of the terrible _dorogovizna_. The pretty word _dorogovizna_ means dearness of living, and it is the commonest in the townsman’s vocabulary this season of the war. The price of nearly every commodity in Russia has doubled or trebled since the outbreak of war. One would expect the price of manufactured goods to rise there; but the surprising phenomenon is that, despite the overwhelming abundance of foodstuffs in Russia and Russia’s inability to export any of that abundance, food has become, on the whole, dearer than in Berlin. The _Russian Word_ has a long list of comparative prices, showing that out of sixteen common articles of food ten have increased more in price in Moscow than in Germany. The price of mutton has increased 180 per cent. in Berlin, but it has increased 281 per cent. in Moscow; pork 114 per cent. in Berlin, 142 per cent. in Moscow; white bread 27 per cent. in Berlin, 45 per cent. in Moscow; sugar, 27 per cent. in Berlin, 57 per cent. in Moscow, and so forth. Sugar has in many districts disappeared entirely, and shop windows exhibit the notice “No sugar whatever,” which means not even the dirty brown soft sugar which has displaced the _rafinade_. At Archangel there is a fixed allowance of 1 lb. of sugar per person per month, and that is only accessible for settled inhabitants. As a visitor I was lucky to purchase twenty-four lumps at a halfpenny a lump. At the railway stations at many buffets you are offered sugar candy or raspberry drops with your tea, or a wrapped caramel with your coffee. In cases where they have sugar the waiters have the audacity to put it in for you, lest you should secrete what you did not want. Now cards have been introduced for sugar almost everywhere, even in the villages. The possession of a card entitles you to purchase the article specified on it. At first receiving the food card the heart rejoices. But it is one thing to possess a card and another to find a grocer who has anything to sell. If we introduce cards in England we shall probably experience the same anomaly, though we have certainly more gift for organisation than the Russians. For food tickets to be a success an extraordinary thoroughness in administration is necessary and also a good social conscientiousness on the part of individuals.

When the blue food cards were distributed in one village a rumour spread that the Anti-Christ had arrived in Russia and was giving these out. It is said that one inhabitant of foreign origin bought up all the cards from the peasants at a low price, and they now contentedly buy their provisions from him when he has them.

Meat has so risen in price that throughout all Russia four meatless days have been proclaimed, and on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday you must keep to vegetables, fish, or fowls. On these days no meat may be sold and no cattle may be slaughtered. The meat may not be sold in a smoked state nor as sausage. When this measure was introduced the butchers wailed, if the cows and the calves rejoiced. The chickens suffered for it. But ask a Russian, and he will tell you all suffer for it. The price of vegetables has risen, the price of meat on the days when you buy it has risen, the price of fish and fowl has risen. One day at the National Hotel in Moscow I noticed cauliflowers standing at the superb price of 3 roubles, 50 copecks, about 5_s._

From scores of districts in Russia petitions have been sent to Petrograd--Cancel the regulations as to meatless days. But the regulations are not likely to be cancelled. At the restaurants such small portions are given that it is difficult to make a good meal even at large expense. And the soups which are made without meat are the same price as they used to be when meat was allowed. It seems that if meatless days are to be introduced in Britain it will not be merely one a week for it is always possible to buy meat for two days. They should be for three or four days a week as in Russia. But phenomena similar to those I noted will be repeated with us. Vegetables will rise rapidly in price as a result of meatless days.

Sugar has disappeared because the Germans and Austrians are in possession of some of the richest beetroot country of Russia, and also of several sugar factories. Coffee is scarce because there is war with Turkey; butter and eggs because the peasants, being unable to obtain vodka, have no particular use for extra cash, and won’t sell their products. Speculators are holding large quantities of provisions in ice-houses and waiting till the prices are pushed higher and higher. The banks are holding quantities of sugar. There are many explanations.

In one window in Moscow is exhibited a notice, “Soap is received daily and is sold in lumps of not less than 10 lb. up to 10 A. M.”; in other windows is the notice, “No soap,” and one involuntarily recalls that piece of nonsense--

A great she-bear passing down the street. What, no soap; and so she
married the barber,

in which some Mrs. Gallop might read an occult reference to the Russia of these days.

Boots have become difficult to buy. Existing supplies are nearly exhausted. In a boot-shop window in Moscow one pair of boots exhibited--the last. Second-hand boots are valuable. Boot thieves have appeared in the hotels, and a new notice has appeared in your room, “You are requested not to put your boots out at night.” My friend Beekof, of Archangel, made a huge pile of money selling boots. I met him lately in Moscow where he has been purchasing expensive works of art, and even thinks of buying an original Levitan. Boots are too expensive to buy. They say plaited birchbark or lime-bark boots, which used to be sold for 2_d._ a pair in the country, now fetch 5_s._ Peasants are sitting plaiting boots on suburban stations and selling them as fast as they make them. Repairs are so expensive that a parlourmaid spent a month’s wages on having her boots mended. Happily the town councils have fixed a tariff in Moscow and Petrograd at last, both for boots and for repairs.

Russian houses are heated with wood, and strange to say, in the midst of her enormous forests she is short of wood. Wood has doubled and trebled in price. The poor people must freeze. There are not working hands to cut wood--so many having been taken for more profitable occupations. I have been asked a shilling for a packet of rubbishy envelopes. Paper is very dear--some of the best Russian paper mills are in the hands of the enemy. All metal articles are expensive. A decent samovar costs 50 to 60 roubles. There is said to be famine in medicine, and the chemists’ supplies are short. Certainly the Russians seem to be enjoying better health on the whole.

They say all is going to be regulated. The Government is going to take charge of the whole business of supply and there will be cards for everything, and you must call at the grocer and present your card. Once more calls and cards, and cards and calls. But our Russian friends are the most unpractical people. You see every day in Moscow queues a street long, waiting hours with cards in their hands, waiting for a pound or so of sugar. Such queues turned up at the butchers’ shops on the mornings of the meat days that the butchers decided to issue tickets the day beforehand--on each ticket a number designating your turn to buy meat on the morrow. Thus recently 2,000 waited on Arbat from 4 P. M. to midnight for a ticket for a turn next day. The vegetarian propagandist turns up to look at their solemn faces. “Is it worth it?” he asks. Happy vegetarians!

“But you know if I don’t get meat my stomach will go wrong,” says a Russian plaintively.

“What is tea without sugar?” says another. “And what is life without tea?”

Another comes to the doctor and says, “Prescribe, if you please. I’ve lost my appetite. I can’t eat.”

And the doctor replies, like that friend of Carlyle--

“My dear fellow, it isn’t of the slightest consequence.”

“The Army has meat, tea, sugar, white bread?”

“Yes, the Army has all these in plenty.”

“Slava Tebye Gospody! That’s all right.”

V

LIFE IN THE COUNTRY

FROM Moscow I journeyed to see some friends of the artist Pereplotchikof, the E. family, on a small estate in the Government of Voronezh. At the small wayside station an unfamiliar figure greeted me--this was an Austrian prisoner, a Hungarian who could not speak a word of Russian. He was the new coachman, and would drive me the ten miles to the farm. The former coachman has gone to the war, and so now an Austrian prisoner, in the same uniform in which he surrendered and wearing the familiar high military hat, is doing his work. He carried my bags from the station, for there was no porter, and put them in the carriage, and then drove me on through verdant forest and along the terrible road deep in liquid mud and water.

A great feature of the new country life in Russia is the Austrian prisoners at work. One seldom comes across any Germans. But of Austrians there are great numbers. They volunteer to go out to work, rather than remain in the internment camps. In order to obtain Austrian prisoners to work on an estate you apply to the government town, and they are hired out to you at eight roubles a month, four roubles of which are allowed to be deducted for keep. It turns out that on the whole the prisoners work merely for board and lodging and what would keep an ordinary smoker in tobacco. Prisoner labour is altogether cheaper than that of ordinary Russian labourers. So if you can get a strong detachment of prisoners on your estate you are somewhat advantageously circumstanced. No guards, however, are supplied with the prisoners, and you are held responsible for them in case they attempt to escape. The prisoners on the land are generally those who were agriculturists in their native Austria and they are highly serviceable. They do not take their new duties too seriously, but all the same do more work than the average hired Russian labourer would do. To work is more pleasant to them than to sit together and talk or sing, and their industrious habits are a matter of pleasant surprise for their employers.

On Mme. E.’s estate the prisoners were Hungarians. She knew no Hungarian, they no Russian, and no grammars or dictionaries of the Hungarian language were obtainable in Moscow or Petrograd--the only aid to learning the language which Mme. E. was able to obtain was an officer’s war guide containing maps, geographical details, and five or six pages of military phrases with translations. Even so, good progress was being rapidly made in mutual understanding. These Hungarians will carry back to their own country many funny-sounding Russian words, and on the other hand some Hungarian expressions may remain locally.

Certainly the prisoners are of great economic aid to Russia. Each Austrian captured is not only one Austrian less in the enemy ranks, but one harvester more to take in the precious grain. The Russian women, the old men and the children, seem to be insufficient to keep up the present extent of cultivation and to reap the harvest--the labour of the prisoners makes up the deficiency.

In many respects the prisoner of this foreign element in the midst of Russian country life is sufficiently objectionable from the Russian point of view. There are said to have been a number of marriages, though the difference in religion must have precluded the possibility of legal marriage in most cases where it may have been desired.

There is a cloud over the village, and it cannot be said that the war is popular among the women. They want the men back; the wives want their husbands, the girls want their sweethearts. Girls of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen are persistently gloomy. They feel that time is slipping past without bringing the necessary bridegroom. They should have been betrothed and married by now. Nineteen is a dreadful age for an unmarried girl--she feels herself already an old maid, and is disinclined to tell her age. Pretty Tania the serving-maid does not look so pretty this year; she has let the fact that she is eighteen prey upon her mind. She knows that when the boys come back they will not look at any one so old as she, and she will be left.

On festival nights there is the same singing in the village street, the parade of village fashions, but somehow it is rather meaningless since there are no male partners and no weddings can be arranged. Letters of course go to and fro between the Army and the village, but the soldier does not write to “his sweetheart,” or if he does it is because his sweetheart is his wife. For long engagements do not take place in the country. Queer letters the soldiers send back, full of greetings to neighbours and relatives, and containing little or nothing about the war. There is never any need to censor them. The peasant wives bring their letters to Mme. E. and she reads them aloud. Or they come to her when they want to write their letters, for though most of the men can read and write, the women seldom are able.

My hostess was delightful with the peasants. She has taught among them, nursed them, cared for them, and understands their souls. She sits with pen and paper on the sunny verandah of the big sunny house and writes at dictation whilst the peasant wife, with her hands dangling at her side, maunders on about the cow, the hole in the roof which needs mending, the state of the crops, little Willie’s health, the amount of work these Austrian prisoners do, and so on. She puts down literally what the _baba_ says, as if she were doing an exercise in phonetics, and never corrects a word or a wrong expression or a grammatical error. The consequence is that the soldiers at the other end actually hear their wives speaking to them, and highly appreciate it. The letters which Mme. E. writes for the wives are the best.

Still, letters are makeshift ways of talking to one’s nearest, and it is a great day in the village when a soldier actually returns, a wounded man invalided back or a man with some sort of message. Alas, Russian troops get very little “leave” whilst they are well. It often happens that from the day of mobilisation to the peace day when the men come home, nothing is seen or heard of the common soldier--especially when he cannot write. Lists of casualties in the ranks are not published, and the village has to wait patiently to know whom it has lost and who are saved. More attention is paid to officers, even to ensigns, and I met down here in Voronezh Province a private who had been sent from the front to convey to the home people the decorations and last tidings of a young ensign who had perished leading his men. This officer had been greatly beloved by the soldiers--they rushed to him when he fell, and he seemed merely to be asleep. But one bullet had gone through his mouth and two through his skull. He was given the Cross of St. George after his death, and a soldier was detached to carry the last honours home and tell the tale of his death. Incidentally the soldier brought to the village his story of the war.

A rainy summer in the village. In many places the priests prayed for the rain to stop. The hay rotted where it lay, and could not be taken in, but the wheat and the rye were good everywhere. And the fruit harvest was good. Some one made a handsome profit on apples, since the common price in Moscow was threepence or fourpence apiece. Despite the dearth of sugar, jam-making was carried on in the country to an even greater extent than usual. People felt that it was a good way to save sugar for the winter, to put it into jam. Russian jam is much sweeter than ours, and is often put in tea as a syrup. It is never spread on bread and butter. Mme. E. obtained several sacks of soft sugar, about three hundredweight in all, and the half of that she used for making jam.

The orchard’s fruit, however, had been sold in advance in the spring. An Armenian had come, considered the blossom, and offered a price which was accepted. He had made a good speculation as it turned out, and he put a watchman in among the trees with a dog to see that nothing was stolen. The watchman was one of the unfortunate refugees from the territory now occupied by the Germans. Two years ago he had been a prosperous farmer with his own land and horses and cows and what not, now he is a miserable half-savage in sheepskins lying in a rain-soaked straw shelter in the orchard--sans land, sans wife, sans everything. A Roman Catholic he, but he went to the Orthodox Church on Sunday, as did also the Hungarian prisoners, for they said in their halting way what it is difficult for the more prosperous to understand, that _Bog odin_, God is One, and that if there be no Catholic church by, it is as easy to pray to God in the church that there is.

VI

FATHER YEVGENY

THE faces in the passing crowd are always somewhat of an enigma. There are so many that we do not know, each with his own wide story, which, however, does not touch our story. One is tempted to go up and place the hand in the slightly unwilling and doubtful hand of the stranger and say, “I know you, do I not?” And it is always somewhat of a miracle if in the midst of the sea of faces there suddenly turns up the familiar face. There happened to me when I returned to Moscow after my stay at Mme. E.’s a miracle of this kind. I met one of my pilgrims again, one of those I accompanied to Jerusalem five years ago, whom I did not expect to see again--the aged hermit Yevgeny.

I passed and repassed him twice, and he for his part stopped and seemed to be vaguely wondering what he should do next. ’Twas outside the Yaroslavsky station, and I was hurrying to catch a suburban train to visit some friends. There was a great swirl of traffic, and many trams were circling and groaning, emptying and receiving passengers.

“Father Yevgeny,” said I. “Do you not recognise me?”

He seemed taken aback, and shrank rather as if the devil had taken a new form to tempt him. I recalled that he was considerably troubled by the devil.

“We met at Jerusalem, did we not?” said I. “Don’t you remember, we used to read the Bible together in the mornings?”

Then he recognised me, and a bright and happy smile transfigured his pallid, wrinkled cheeks and sunken eyes.

He lifted up his bent shoulders and kissed me, first on one cheek, then on the other, and proclaimed in a loud voice, “God has done this. It is a miracle. He meant that we should meet again. But how changed you are! You have grown taller. Yes, it is you. But it is a miracle. God has done it.”

We were a strange contrast. I in a light summer suit and wearing a straw hat; he, in any case a remarkable figure, tall though drooping, with yellowish-white ancient locks and toothless gums. Several people stopped to look at us, and some approached more closely to hear what we were talking about. The representatives of two contrary worlds seemed to have met, for I clearly belonged to that gay, worldly, commercial Moscow which is so out of touch with Holy Russia, and the monk was one of those forbidding figures one would not expect to smile and be demonstrative in the public street.

I wrote him my address, and he promised to come to me on the morrow. I then sped on to catch the train, my heart full of delight at this surprising meeting, this true miracle to which the bright Sunday had given birth.

Next day Yevgeny came to the hotel at which I was staying and asked for me. He had put on for the occasion an old straw hat and over it a surprisingly old and dirty Egyptian sun-helmet. In his hand he bore a tall cypress staff with a cross on the top, a true palmer’s staff, but a rare enough sight in Moscow.

The porter of the hotel is artificially made fat like a swell coachman, and he wears in his hat a circle of tips of peacock-feathers which make him look very grand. It is his business to know every one who goes in and out of the great hotel. Probably for the first time in his experience a monk made to enter the establishment. Father Yevgeny and he--again two worlds confronting one another.

“No. 214 on the second floor,” said the respectful man in charge of keys and correspondence.

“This way!” said a small boy, pointing to the lift.

But old Yevgeny had never been on a lift in his life.

“My sinful old legs will carry me up,” said he--he mounted the many stretches of broad carpeted stairway to the second floor, which is really the third. There was a timid knock at my door, and my visitor had arrived.

“Father Yevgeny!” I cried.

I showed him his portrait in my book, and translated aloud the chapter written there about him. He seemed to be extremely pleased. We considered the portraits of the other pilgrims in turn. Abraham, who had been twenty times to Jerusalem, was of a Cossack family. The man carrying the lantern designed for the holy fire was now dead. The priest standing beside the dead pilgrim in the picture was now at Troitskaya Lavra. I made Father Yevgeny a present of the volume, and he bade me write in it in Russian, “To the hermit Yevgeny of Mount Athos.”

“How is it you come to be in Moscow and not at Mount Athos?” I asked.

“The war prevented me. I had come back to Russia to visit my native village before I died, and whilst I was here the war broke out. I was hastening back, but our Moscow Metropolite put his hand on my head one Sunday after morning service and said, ‘Thou art thinking of going to Afon--wait, do not go.’ Then war with Turkey commenced, and the way was stopped. Good Father Philaret of the Bogoyavlensky Monastery gave me shelter, and that is where I am living now.”

He recounted how, when the war broke out, he had a vision. He looked up into the sky, and it was filled with little white clouds hurrying southward. He was mistaken in thinking them clouds; he saw later that they were in fact the hosts of the angels ranging themselves on the side of Serbia to save her from the Austrians.

Yevgeny and I spent the whole day together. In the evening I had to leave Moscow, and he saw me off at the station. He talked a great deal about his visions. For instance, he had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. One sunny afternoon in the monastery yard he fell into a trance, and in the trance he saw what he had wanted to see all his life--a vision of the Kingdom. “There are really four heavens,” said he. “The first is so splendid, so full of light, that it is almost impossible to look at it; and in the midst of the light sit the Holy Trinity. Round and round them all the while and for ever the cherubs keep moving and they sing oi-oi-oi-ei-ei-ei-ai-ai-ai ... and never cease for a moment. In the second heaven I saw the apostles and the prophets. In the third heaven were the holy _ugodniki_, and in the fourth were a great crowd of all sorts and conditions of men and women all in white. There were many, many of our Russians there--I was so glad, so full of joy that I went. And then suddenly it all vanished, and I found myself in the monastery yard and on my knees, and my hands were on the white head of an old, old pilgrim woman. I asked her if she had seen anything, but she had seen nothing.”

I asked Father Yevgeny about the Mount Athos heresy, and the Name-of-Godites, as the heretics were irreverently called. I had a faint suspicion that Yevgeny might be one of them. But he was very robustly against them. “It all sprang from one man who was himself illiterate,” said he. “He held that as the Three were One, therefore Jesus and God were one and the same, and that in the beginning Jesus made the heavens and the earth. And he got a great following among the Russian monks. But he was altogether in the wrong, and if he had read he would have understood that Jesus the Son of God was born in the fulness of time, and the Name of God must therefore have priority. Ah! now they have all confessed they were wrong, and have been pardoned.”

We walked out into the Moscow streets, and all the while the old monk talked most energetically, and made astonishing gestures. One moment he saw a large triangle on a poster and spat to one side as he passed. “The symbol of the masons,” said he. “To-day the Cross is fighting the triangle, that is one meaning of the war. Do you know, many of the stewards of the old vodka shops were secretly masons, and it was found that they cut out on the floor underneath the shop counters, a cross--so that the drunkards might trample it under foot.” Yevgeny’s large intellectual face with wizened white eyebrows, and fine eyes at the bottom of caverns of wrinkled flesh, was full of animation, his gap-toothed mouth blurted the long torrent of words which it could hardly control, his long black gown from neck to ankles flapped in the wind.

I was sorry to have to part with him again so soon. But I promised to re-find him when I returned to Moscow. He came with me to the Kursky station. “God meant that we should meet again,” said he. “It was a miracle. All my life is full of miracles.” He told me the miracles of his birth. His mother was one of the serfs. She married, but was eight years childless. This caused her great grief, and she did not cease to pray to God that she might bear a child. “If it be a boy, he shall be either a soldier or a monk,” she promised God. Interesting that she should feel that to be a soldier was also to be consecrated to God. Yevgeny was born, and when he grew up he volunteered to be a soldier, and went to fight the Turks. He was wounded, and as he lay on the battlefield in great pain, and facing death, he promised his life to God. He then rapidly recovered, and, fulfilling his promise, entered a monastery. Since then all his life he has allowed himself to be guided by visions and inspirations rather than by reason.

In the vague light in the train, all the passengers were quarrelling over places, and the porters were struggling with baskets and bundles. The old monk stood on the grey platform and embraced me very warmly, and then I stepped up, and the third bell tinkled and the whistle blew, and the train slowly ran out--leaving Yevgeny at the far end of the platform and the space of unoccupied rails behind the train, momentarily increasing.

VII

A RUSSIAN COUNTESS