Chapter I: Three Good Samaritans

Petrograd!

Out there in the silver twilight of the white night she lay, a forest of flaming church steeples and giant factory chimneys, rising vaguely from the marshes. I pressed my face closer to the dust-crusted windowpane and searched the flying landscape.

There on the edge of the East she waited for us, strange, mysterious, inscrutable, compelling--a candle drawing us on from the ends of the earth like so many fluttering moths.

Twelve long, hot, dusty days the Trans-Siberian Express had been crawling toward her,--crawling like a snake across flower-strewn steppe and velvet forest,--the one unclean thing upon this new-born world of spring.

I glanced at my wrist-watch--it was twenty minutes past two on a morning in early June of the year 1917. Here we were, despite war and revolution, peeping into Peter’s “Window” only four hours behind schedule.

Involuntarily I breathed a tiny sigh of disappointment. Nothing, nothing, had happened. Even the dreary, desolate Siberian wastes had failed to live up to their promise. Six thousand versts of emerald meadows, cut with shimmering china-blue waterways, stretched behind us. Six thousand versts of meadows, covered with a mist of wild flowers--pink, mauve, and flaming yellow--and broken frequently with deep woods, where silver birches played like sunshine against the shadowed background of dusky pines--that was Siberia.

At every log station, with its red flags and its row of poplars, a crowd of front-bound soldiers, in worn, dun-colored uniforms, tried to board the train, only to settle peacefully back to more interminable hours of waiting when the Committee of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, traveling with us, had explained the necessity.

Occasionally in the night we were suddenly awakened, when the door of our compartment was thrown open by a guard searching for an escaped Austrian prisoner. Otherwise, the monotony of our journey had remained unbroken.

Well, it was done. Ten minutes more, and Petrograd would open the door of a new world to us. I glanced down the car at a row of passionate faces flattened against the windows, while hungry eyes drank deep of once familiar scenes. They were home-bound exiles, these companions of mine, going back to a land whose door had long been closed in their faces. Home! Every click of the wheels carried me farther and farther away from that scrap of earth on the other side of the world which I called home.

My mind wandered back to that sunny day, two months before, when through a mist of tears I had watched the hills of California disappear behind the Golden Gate. How blithely I had come away! Blithely, because I knew that mine was a land where the latch-string was always out, and I could go back again at a moment’s choosing.

I tried to think what it must be to be coming home to the land of the bolted door, to the land of the black scowl--the land that had suddenly thrown down its bars and turned a friendly, smiling face and open arms toward the lonely outcasts.

My eyes wandered to the vestibule, where a Siberian soldier sat upon his kit-bag, a tin can with a bunch of dead lilies-of-the-valley held tightly in his two hands. For ten days and ten nights he had sat there, his big, round, brown eyes looking out across the great spaces, resignation and the infinite patience of these people of the East and the North reflected in his face. Home for him was done up in that little bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, long since dead. Every day I had passed him on my way to the dining-car, and my body ached with vicarious weariness as I saw him uncomplainingly sitting and dreaming over the faded lilies. He and I, of all the passengers, were the only ones who were not going home.

My musings were suddenly cut short. The Trans-Siberian Express, train de luxe of the longest railroad in the world, was slipping quietly to its place beside a deserted platform. A clean-cut young Englishman, on his way to be married in Petrograd, adjusted his coat collar the final time, and patted his hat to see that it was placed at the proper angle. Then he put his head out of the window to receive the first welcoming smile of the sweetheart he had not seen for a year. He drew his head in again, surprise, pain, embarrassment mingled on his fine, boyish face. She was not there.

Farther down the aisle, Count Tolstoy, son of the great Tolstoy, returning from America, lifted his window and searched the vacant platform for the face of his wife. He, too, turned back disappointed. Petrograd was as unaware of us as though we had been so many ghosts flitting invisibly through the air. Petrograd was entirely engrossed in its own very important affairs. Even the station-master had failed to take cognizance of our coming. In the absence of porters, we trucked our own baggage; and we had to wake up the guard to unlock the door and let us through.

Outside, the big circle was flooded with the light of the white night. My eyes focused for a moment on Trubetskoy’s squat, heavy, powerful granite man on horseback, Alexander III,--symbol of departed Romanoffs, symbol of dead Russia,--then wandered about in dazed bewilderment.

The cobblestones were dotted with men and women gathered in groups and talking in high-pitched, excited voices, eyes blazing and arms waving: students, peasants, soldiers, workmen, pouring a torrent of words into the night.

“What is the matter? Is it another revolution?” I asked breathlessly.

“No,” some one answered, “nothing is happening. They are just talking. It has been like this ever since March.”

“But it’s the middle of the night,” I said. “It’s nearly morning. Something must be wrong.”

“They talk all day and all night, all the time,” my informant continued. “In the old days, you know, they were not allowed to talk, and now that the dam is broken, the flood of language never stops.”

One lone and dilapidated carriage, drawn by a bored and weary looking horse, with head framed in a high wooden collar, stood at the curb. A Russian came through the door, and shouted, apparently into the air, a single magic word: “Izvostchik!”

A perambulating feather-bed in voluminous folds of blue broadcloth detached itself from the nearest crowd, swept its broadcloth train majestically over the sidewalk, and mounted the box. The carriage rattled away, the linguistically accomplished Russian and all his bags stowed neatly within. I watched this achievement with undisguised admiration and envy, blankly wondering what I should do next.

A fellow traveler, a Swedish girl on her way home from Japan to be married to an English officer, joined me. Behind her waddled the stout and pleasing person of the Finnish missionary who with her “many luggages” had shared my compartment from Harbin.

We held a consultation. Here we were, all utterly alone at half-past two in the morning, in this great, strange city which talked on and on without even a glance in our direction. Our telegrams to friends were probably traveling in the mail-bags on the same train or coming along on next week’s express.

A young Russian officer came gallantly to the rescue.

“I telegraphed for a room--you ladies can have that,” he said; and, turning to me: “If you will stay and mind the luggage, we will go uptown and see about it.”

The last thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment was to stay and mind the luggage. The station was hot, close, and dirty. Soldiers--weary brown men in worn uniforms, unwashed and unshaven--asleep on their kit-bags or curled up on the floor in their overcoats, lay so thick that you had to pick your way carefully. I was tired of places that were close and dirty. I longed to be out in those strange, wide streets, so full of people with so many things to say that the days were not long enough. Politeness set a seal upon desire. My friends promised to be back in twenty minutes, so I returned to the stuffy waiting-room, and the odd assortment of bags and bundles for which I was to be responsible.

There was a clock on the wall, and the minute-hand slowly made its way around the dial. An hour passed--it was half-past three. Still no sign of the Russian gallant. The minute-hand began another journey.

Once for a few seconds I forgot the minute-hand. The waiter from the dining-car, who had grown more and more stepmotherly in the distribution of portions as the journey progressed, entered the room. He walked to the corner where half a dozen bundles of soiled table linen were stacked, and, glancing about to see that no one was looking, he swiftly untied them. From the center of each he took a fifty-pound sack of white flour. It was no longer difficult to explain the sparkling stones from the Ural Mountains appearing on the hands of the dining-car crew as the train pulled out of Vyatka, or difficult to believe the stories of the five-hundred-ruble game in progress in the dining-car of evenings. Flour in Petrograd was scarcer than Ural brilliants and far more highly priced.

At a quarter to five my friends returned. There was not a room to be had in Petrograd, they said. The Hotel Europe was crowded. At the France they were sleeping in the sitting-rooms. The Astoria, which had been the best hotel in town, was occupied by the military, and no civilians were allowed.

The Russian suggested that we stay where we were until the populace began to wake up,--about ten o’clock,--then consult our respective consuls. Nothing on earth could have induced me at that moment to spend five seconds longer in the fetid atmosphere of that station. Five hours was a prospect I refused even to contemplate.

The guard was once more asleep and the door locked. I made my way through a labyrinth of baggage-rooms to an opening on a side street. The same groups of men were still excitedly talking, and here and there along the curb a peasant woman, with a market-basket of hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, lemons, or sunflower seeds, offered her wares.

I paused at the corner and speculated as to which road to take. The Nevsky Prospect, famous as the Champs Elysées, the Strand, and Fifth Avenue, though I knew it not for itself at the moment, stretched wide before me in one direction. To my left was another street only slightly narrower, and flanked on either side by towering buildings, large enough to house a world of little people like myself. Surely, in all those great masses of wood and stucco and stone, there was some little corner where I could put my weary head. I walked in a daze, peering up at the strange painted signs. If it had been an overcoat, a cheese, or a pair of boots for which I had been searching, it would have been quite simple; for the little shops were profusely covered with frightful paintings of all these things, designed for people who, like myself, could not read.

Three blocks from the station I came upon a huge ornate gray building, rambling around three sides of a court. There was an air of elegance about the place, and on one of the doors was a small brass sign, which looked as though it might be designed for people who could read. I picked out the letters one by one, trying frantically to remember whether the English _r_ was the Russian _p_ or vice versa. The building had the look of a hotel. It might as easily have been a theater, or a palace, or the police-station, for all the intelligence those strange letters conveyed to me.

I was just screwing up my courage to the point of entering when an _izvostchik_ drove up to the door, and Count Tolstoy and the lost wife stepped out. He came quickly to the rescue.

“Yes, yes, this is the Select Hotel,” he said. “If you will step inside I will ask if there is a room for you, and perhaps you would like to take my _izvostchik_ back to the station for your baggage. But first the passportist must have your passport.”

Five minutes later I was back at the depot, announcing the news to the astounded group, and gathering the weary women and the “many luggages” into the ramshackle old carriage. At six o’clock the wild pigeons in the courtyard sang me to sleep.

I awoke with a start six hours later. “Where am I?” I asked. “In Petrograd,” I answered myself--“in Petrograd, in the heart of the Revolution.” The midday sun, creeping through the window of my tiny room, made all its imperfections pitifully plain. I was grateful to that room as to a stranger who had found me homeless and opened her door, but I wanted to be quickly away, out into the exciting promise of the blue-and-gold day. I dressed hurriedly and ran through a stack of letters of introduction, but discarded them all. On a slip of paper I found an address, “Moika 64.” It was the home of a newspaper man--a fellow correspondent, an old friend. On this day I needed an old friend. I would find Moika 64, and on the way I would stop for breakfast at the Hotel Europe.

It was all quite simple, you see. Where were those threatening dangers poured like poison into my ears? Petrograd was like any other place. The clerk at the desk answered my simple English request for directions with a shake of his head and a volley of Russian, from which I fled in laughing despair.

Once outside, I made my way to that wide street rejected earlier in the morning. There was an air of importance about it, something that made me feel it led to that nebulous locality which in every city we call “uptown.”

A dozen street-cars passed me. They were crowded with soldiers who filled seats, aisles, and platforms, and overflowed on to the steps. I hailed one, and squirmed my way through the faded uniforms to the woman conductor in blue broadcloth and gold buttons.

“Pazhal’sta, Hotel Europe?” I said, exhausting in one breath half of my entire Russian vocabulary.

She shook her head, a simple gesture that I understood perfectly, then followed it with a volley of language which left me dazed. She looked at my blank and bewildered face.

“American,” I said. Again she shook her head. Then a great light broke into her face.

“Amerikanka, da, da, da!” she said, and laughed in pleased delight at her discovery.

I handed her my paper with Moika 64 upon it. It was written in English and conveyed nothing to her.

By this time the entire car had become interested. A simple-looking woman, with a _platok_ on her head, took the paper, and she and two companions consulted long and earnestly over it. They motioned me to wait. The car moved slowly up the wide wood-paved Nevsky; past faded brick and yellow stucco palaces, whose proud sides were pasted with revolutionary posters and proclamations; past the great Gostinny Dvor (Court of the Strangers), where the little shops were shuttered now in Sabbath seclusion behind the hedge of linden trees.

Like the muddy water in a stream, the endless procession of khaki-clad soldiers flowed along the street. The feather-bed _izvostchiks_, calling encouragement to their horses, rattled over the wooden cobbles. Under the columns of the great Kazan Cathedral, the little people, dwarfed by the mighty proportions of this pile of masonry, passed back and forth, crossing themselves and dropping alms into the hands of beggars on the wide steps. On the gravel-covered paths in the formal garden the children played hop-scotch, while their parents sat on the benches, contentedly watching them.

On every corner, and in between streets, the groups of people were talking, talking, talking! Ambulances and field hospital wagons, decorated with red flags and green boughs, and filled with crippled soldiers and Red Cross nurses, darted in from side streets and all hurried off in the same direction.

Quite abruptly we turned a corner and skirted the edges of a pleasant park, with trees in full leaf, and a multitude of birds noisily chattering in the young spring green. Ivan in khaki, with Vera beside him in her best spring clothes, strolled along the winding paths, or sat contentedly munching sunflower seeds, and talking as volubly as the noisy sparrows up above.

Peace, joy, exultation, was upon that spring-clad city. Freedom was young then, like the spring, like the leaves on the trees, like Vera and Ivan. Freedom was a butterfly upon a high bush, the sheen still upon her wings; and Vera and Ivan looked, rejoiced, and feared to touch--so new, so beautiful, so fragile.

Poor Ivan! Poor Vera! They could not guess that afternoon, any more than I, what the months would do to their butterfly treasure. They could not know that they themselves would soon lay violent hands upon it, and the day would come when the broken wings would lie crushed like a blade of grass beneath a heavy boot. They could not know that Freedom must return in many other guises before she would be strong enough for Russia’s need.

Eyes and ears hungrily drinking in strange sights and sounds, and thoughts darting back and forth from the land of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, and Dostoievsky to the Russia of Ivan’s dreaming, I almost forgot that I had a destination, and a rapidly increasing appetite.

Suddenly one of the three women who had taken me under their wings touched me on the shoulder and motioned me to follow. She left her friends, and together we walked blocks and blocks, while she searched silently for street numbers, and I tried to look the gratitude I could not speak. Finally she stopped, smiling happily, and pointed to a sign that read “64.” Then, with a cheery, friendly “Dosvidanya!” (Goodbye!), she left me.

I knocked on the first door. The _dvornik_ shook his head. Then I tried the second. I battered at a dozen before I realized that in Russia the entire building has the same number. At last, up five flights of stairs, I found a gleam of recognition in the eyes of the servant. She made it clear by means of the sign language that there was no one at home. But at sight of my crest-fallen face she invited me in, and for half an hour tried vainly to reach my friend by telephone. She wept with exasperation at her inability to help me, and to make herself understood.

It was half-past three when I found myself again on the tree-bordered canal. I was still without breakfast or luncheon, and heaven and the Russians only knew what had become of the Hotel Europe. Both seemed to be involved in a conspiracy of silence on the subject.

I wandered up the canal, stopping every likely and unlikely person to ask if they spoke English. Always I got the same headshake and the same kindly “Nyet, nyet, barishna!”

I came out upon a huge square, crowded with ambulances and field-wagons, automobiles, and trucks, filled with crippled soldiers and sailors, men from the ranks who had already paid the heavy toll of war,--armless men and legless men, and men with eyes to which sight would never come back,--all were pleading with their able-bodied brothers to fight to a victorious conclusion.

It was a war demonstration, a pitiful, futile attempt of the broken men to rally their brothers to a standard they were rapidly deserting. For the first time, my eyes were seeing what war does to human flesh. I stood there, watching the faces of these men, listening to the unintelligible torrent of eloquence that poured from their lips, and thought sorrowfully of another country half way across the world making ready for this.

Finally I recalled my quest. Surely in all that vast throng there must be some one who spoke English. I walked in and out, trying one and another; meeting always with that same bewildered headshake, and that same sympathetic glance of true regret which every Russian, be he prince or peasant, gives you when he is unable to do the thing you ask.

I crossed the square, walking aimlessly I knew not where. On the corner was a huge building with high, boarded windows and bullet-holes in the plastered walls. A man was sitting in the doorway, and I asked if he spoke English. He shook his head. I did not know which way to turn. For some strange reason that I shall never fathom, I walked through the doorway and into the building.

I found myself in a huge, empty marble lobby, opening into a series of large rooms stripped bare of everything but a broken plate-glass cabinet of silver inlay, and a bloodstained but once bright rose-colored velvet carpet. I stood wondering where I was, and what I should do next, when down the broad stairs came a Russian officer in the splendid full-skirted wine-colored coat of the Caucasians. His dark olive face and black hair were topped with a high military hat, and a sword of inlaid silver jangled on each marble step as he walked.

“Pardon, do you speak English?” I asked in a faint and by this time rather despairing voice.

He clicked his spurs together, and bowed low before me.

“A leetle, madame,” he answered. “Can I be of service to you?”

Never again will the sound of my native tongue be such blissful music. I told him of my recent arrival, and of my search for friends, and ended with:

“I want to go somewhere where I can get something to eat.”

He looked at me out of smiling and kindly brown eyes.

“This is a hotel,” he said. “The Astoria Hotel. But it is now the headquarters of the military, the Voina Gostinnitsa (War Hotel), and civilians are not allowed. At the time of the Revolution it was sacked, as you can see; so the dining-room has been closed since, and meals are served only in one’s room. If you had a room you might have luncheon here. Are you the wife of a military man, or something of that sort?”

I shook my head, told him I was nothing “of that sort,” and offered my card and credentials. He brightened.

“Ah!” he said. “There may yet be a way. The correspondents are under the control of the military now, and it is just possible the General might make an exception and permit you to stay here. Shall I take you to him?”

I glanced at him for a single searching second, then nodded. We climbed the marble stairs, and at the end of a long corridor we came upon the General, white-haired and white-whiskered, and all that a Russian General should be. He arose from behind a flat-top mahogany desk, bowed low, kissed my hand, and invited me to a seat.

My new-found Caucasian friend explained me in Russian, and the General nodded.

Fifteen minutes later, comfortably established in my own little blue-and-white room on the sixth floor of the War Hotel, amid all the conveniences of a first-class American hotel, I sat down to a platter of cold meat and a service of steaming Russian tea. Another hour found me collecting typewriter and passports and preparing to establish a base of operations from which to explore that vast new Russia.

That night, on the roof-garden of the Europe, overlooking the glistening domes and spires of the City of Peter, I dined with friends. I had stumbled upon them when I had ceased to look.

“Where are you stopping?” one of them asked.

“At the War Hotel,” I answered.

Mouths and eyes opened in chorus.

“But it is impossible!” they said. “That is for the military, and they are most strict that no civilian be admitted.”

I told them the story of the three Good Samaritans--of the little woman with the shawl over her head, who left the car, her friends, and her own pleasure, to walk blocks through the scorching sun with a total stranger; of the maid who almost wept in her distress because she could not help me; and, last, of the dark-haired knight of the Caucasus, who made Cinderella’s fairy godmother seem a mere stepmother by comparison.

Back in the little blue-and-white room, wrapped in the warm glow of their kindliness, I sat down in a bewildered heap to think it over. My mind wandered far that night,--into the black past of Russia, and into the vague unknown future,--but never did it even remotely suspect the stirring times that room and I would share together in the year to come.