The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary/Part 1/Chapter 1

by Stephen Graham

I

TO RUSSIA

Kief, January 1914.

All night long from Paris to Cologne the train speeds like a bird, joyously screaming. I am in the carriage next the engine, and as I lie full length in the darkened empty carriage I look out on snow-patched fields and hills, now partly obscured by wild volumes of vapour, now fierily illumined by the glow of the furnace, the black sky raining showers of red sparks on to the vague night landscape, the engine racing forward past signal-boxes and stations, clattering along the changing points of the rails of junctions, knowing apparently that all signals are for, never anticipating any hindrance, skirling and leaping in the exuberance of accomplishment.

We pass the Belgian frontier at three in the morning near Namur, and the German at Herbesthal in the dim glimmering before dawn. The world that becomes visible as the sun rises is the ordered world of the Germans. Everything is prim, everything is as it should be; the fields are symmetrical, the palings are vertical and in good repair, the manure heaps are compact; where houses are being pulled down or set up there is no disorder whatever; nothing is scattered about, everything is collected and numbered. At the little stations we pass through, the station-master in brilliant red and blue is standing erect at that point on the platform that it is his duty to occupy. On the train a woman in uniform has appeared. She has put thirty or forty little tablets of soap and two dozen hand-towels into the lavatory; she has picked up the bits of paper that lay scattered in the corridor all night; she has washed everything in the lavatory; put water in the cistern and boiled water in the carafe. The conductor, a well-groomed military man, has come and allotted us definitely numbered seats in the carriages and has seen that our respective hand-luggage occupies just that space in the rack which is above our numbered seats.

At Cologne there is just four minutes to cross the subway and get into the Berlin express. My porter—luggage-dragger, as the precise Germans call him—takes me across at a run and puts me in the train, and my registered box of books and papers and what-not is not allowed to miss the connexion. I hardly sit down in the speckless third-class carriage of the real German train before the whistle goes and we slip past the great black piles of Cologne Cathedral in the background. All day long we tear over Germany at sixty miles an hour to Berlin.

At Paris I had registered my box to the Charlottenburg Station of Berlin, but to my dismay the train did not stop there. I had only ten minutes in which to change francs to marks, get my ticket to the Russian frontier, have my luggage weighed and registered, and get into the train. And I do not speak German, but the Germans understood. I was put down at Zoological Gardens Station. My porter understood the situation at once, ran me along to some stairs, and pointed down them. I went down; he went "to expedite my baggage," so I understood. I took my ticket, and in doing so offered the girl in the booking-office about six more marks than was necessary. She pushed back the superfluous silver without a smile. Turning round, I saw my trunk reposing on the weighing machine. My porter pointed to the registration window. I paid two marks and obtained my receipt and went up the stairs to the platform for the Russian train, and had two minutes to spare.

How efficient the Germans are! They have a great excellence in their way. They permit no one to lose himself, they permit no disorder, everything is done by the chronometer rather than by the watch. They have a genius for orderliness, neatness, and precision. They have our English ideal of thoroughness and smartness, but they seem to have consummated it whilst we have paused in the ways of Destiny and changed our mind in favour of something different. If we could see Germans in a friendly spirit there are many English who would bow down in admiration to their civilisation. For the Saxon part of English nature has a similar instinct for order, for living one's life like a neatly-worked mathematics paper. It is the aboriginal Celtic base in us which with much that came over with the Normans has frustrated the Saxon element in our race. The British earth itself has formed us, inspired us: hence our kindliness, verve, and imaginativeness, human tenderness. Thanks to the ancient Briton in us, we are more like the Russians than the Germans. There is a people who are the antipodes of the Germans—wild in their emotions, anarchic in their spirits, amused by laws and regulations, lacking in the instincts that make "progress" possible. Naturally the Russians can't stand the Germans. As a Russian said to me when I recounted how once I left a Kodak behind in the waiting-room at Cologne station, wired from Dusseldorf my Russian address, and eventually received the apparatus in good condition at Rostof-on-the-Don, "The Germans are an accurate people. O Lord, how accurate they are!"

We reached the Russian frontier at one in the morning, and, passing in single file, gave up our passports to the sentry. At the Custom-house the baggage was submitted to a vigorous examination. An armed Customs officer in a heavy overcoat with black astrakhan collar directed the operations; three or four porters and inspectors fumbled in the trunks, turning things almost upside down, and a slim girl of twenty-five, a female expert, scrutinised all the clothes for the things that men were not likely to see of themselves—embroidery, lace, silk underwear, neatly packed away Paris blouses, feathers, new costumes with artificial creases and tacked-in dirty linings. But I am not smuggling anything through, and no one takes the trouble even to look at the contents of my books.

I take my ticket to Kief and a supplement to Warsaw. At half-past three we are allowed to board the Russian train and spread out our bedding and make ourselves comfortable. The station is dark and gloomy, the dreariest station in western Russia. As we stand at the windows of the train and look out a strange procession comes up out of the darkness—threescore of men in irons, following a soldier who carries on a pole high above his head a flaming naphtha torch. The faces of the men are pale, furtive, hairy, their shoulders awkward; some are in old blouses, some in collars, some in sheepskins; they are Jews, Poles, Russians, chained together in fours, marching along the railway track to a barred convict-train waiting at a siding. Foot soldiers accompany them with drawn swords in their uplifted hands. They come out of the darkness like living shadows and disappear into the darkness again.

"Soloveiki," says the conductor disparagingly.

"Well," says a Russian, "I don't suppose they're heroes. Poland swarms with thieves and smugglers, and people smuggling themselves across the frontier in order to get to America."

"They are human beings," says another. "They are in chains and we free. It is a heavy sight."

But the second bell and the third bell sound, and the train moves gradually out of the station and nearly every one lies down to sleep. Even when we arrive at Warsaw many of the passengers are snoring and have to be awakened up by acquaintances or porters.

Across the two miles of the slush-covered cobbles of Warsaw, through driving rain and sleet, in an open droshky at dawn, from the Vienna to the Brest station.

"A vam ne skoro!" says the Russian porter who greets me. "Your train is not soon. The next for Kief is at four o'clock in the afternoon."

I have breakfast. I stroll into the rainy city and back, have a plate of hot soup, read the papers, write letters.

Opposite me in the Kief train was a little girl in simple but antique national attire, in soiled clothes, but having a fresh and delicate classical face and black hair in two plaits, one about each little ear—a rare beauty: it was a piquant pleasure just to look at her.

"When do we get to Kharkof?" she asked.

"Seven, to-morrow night."

"Oh, what a long time! It's a long way: it's the first time I've been away from home."

As the guard blew his whistle she stood up, looked towards the city, and crossed herself.

"Are you a little Russian?" I asked.

"No; a Pole. I was once a Jewess, but have just been baptized. See . . ."

She showed me a little crucifix, and the figure of the Virgin on a little medallion hanging from her neck.

"You're a Catholic now?"

"Yes; and I don't like the Jews."

I wondered whether in view of the ill odour in which the Jews were at that time, she had been told by her mother to announce her conversion very distinctly.

"Such a mama I have!" said she, turning out a basket of provisions—two bags of nuts, several pots of jam, biscuits, a Polish Christmas pudding.

There were in the carriage besides myself and the girl opposite me a Russian student, a young Polish flaneur, and a middle-aged, grizzly, smelly, Polish peasant. The young convert offered us all nuts. She was very engaging. She took out a long bottle, put it to her lips and drank from it. She told me it was cold tea with sugar at the bottom of the bottle, but to the Pole announced that it was vodka.

He was fool enough to believe her, and at once cast about in his mind some means of doing her an ill turn. He came over and made love to her in excited whispers, and was so rude and urgent that at last the girl refused to have anything more to do with him, and turned sullen and angry. He for his part sneaked off to another compartment, and we saw no more of him. After a while the girl relaxed and smiled, took out a large but cracked hand-mirror, looked at her pretty face, and patted the curls to her temples. I got a kettleful of boiling water and made tea for the grizzly peasant and her and myself. Then the peasant climbed on to the shelf above and spread out his big overcoat and slept on it, and the little girl, after explaining that she was going to live with Poles in Kharkof, and that her father played the violin and she the mandoline, and that she was going to take a part in a "troop" and earn her living, undid her black locks, put down a quilt and a pillow, and curled herself up and slept. The conductor came round and searched under the seats for "hares," the flickering candle burned low, and I was about to turn in and sleep when the Russian student, who had been trying to read a newspaper by the aid of a dip of his own, finally gave up the task and set himself to talk to me.

"How far are you going? Where from? What for? How long have you been away from Russia? What interest can Russia have for you? I should have thought the West more interesting . . ." and so on, the usual flood of questions.

Then my questions. "Has much happened in Russia during the year? What are people talking about? What are they doing? What is in the air?"

"Oh," said he, "the Futurists are walking about with gilded noses and dyed faces. The Jew-haters of the Black Hundred want to raise a temple in memory of the Christian boy Yushinsky. Every one has been discussing a play of Artsibashef called Jealousy. Literary Russia has been giving a welcome to the Belgian poet Verhaeren, such as you in England have been giving Anatole France. Every one is either hearing or giving lectures about Verhaeren. But I suppose most clamour of all has been raised about Gorky and Dostoieffsky and the Theatre of Art at Moscow. They propose to perform Dostoieffsky's Demons at the Theatre of Art, and Gorky has raised a great protest. He holds that Dostoieffsky is so reactionary in tendency that he ought not to be played at the great democratic theatre. Not only that, but he holds that Tolstoy, and indeed all Russian literature, is on the wrong side in the struggle for the liberation of the people. He is almost ready to say, 'Burn the works of Tolstoy and Dostoieffsky; burn them, and let us be free!'"

"How does Russia take it?" I asked. "It is indeed true that Dostoieffsky's work is not on the side of progress and freedom. He believed in suffering; he believed in the Russian Church, and was a Christian."

"Russia is mostly against Gorky," said the student. "Merezhkovsky, for instance, has written a brilliant article against him in the Russian Word, and he says, 'Yes, Gorky is keenly sensitive, but in Italy or Greece, where he lives,^[1] he is too far away to feel what Russia is now. Russia has changed much in the last eight years. Her wounds have healed up, many of them; she has the great hope of the convalescent. If Gorky breathed Russian air he would understand that there was now in Russia a strong religious movement.'"

"And what do you think?" I asked. "Do you possibly agree with Gorky?"

"No. I don't think it is right to steal an instrument from the other side's box of tricks. The Censorship is one of their weapons, not one of ours. The people have loved Dostoieffsky more than they have loved any other Russian author; he is still beloved. We Russians are a religious and loving people. We will never sacrifice humanity for ideas. . . ."

We talked a long time. When I lay down on my shelf to sleep I felt only gladness that I was coming back to Russia, coming to live with her and for her once more, after a year in England and America. It seemed to me a pity that Gorky had not come back the year before when so many exiles took advantage of the Tsar's manifesto, and returned to the open arms of a loving, astonishingly patriotic people!

Next morning at dawn I arrived at Kief, said "Good-bye" to the little girl who was sleepily stretching herself, and to the student who was chatting with a new acquaintance in the gangway and smoking a cigarette. The grizzly peasant I let snore on. . . .

A fine crowd this of the Kief streets: stalwart, diverse, interested in one another, attractive-faced, they are a refreshment, such a refreshment, after Paris and New York.

But I do not reckon that I have achieved the first stage of my journey back till I enter the Cathedral of St. Vladimir and light candles before Queen Olga, King Vladimir, and the Mother and Child, baring my head in the presence of Russia and accepting her sanctuary from the West.

1. He had not then returned to Russia.