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There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union: everybody can, and indeed must, work; and so far as I know, everybody does. As a kind of offset to this universal activity, everybody—when not working—sits about and waits.

At the Leningrad Hotel I also sit about and wait. I wait for the Intourist Bureau to telephone the people to whom I have brought letters of introduction. I wait for the lift, which has just taken three Comrades upstairs, to come down again—which it never does. I wait for my ten o'clock supper—ordered at nine, and brought—with any luck—at about eleven. I sit in the hall and wait, for nothing in particular. I am becoming Russianized.

A very old man comes in, wearing a fur cap and a coat. (Ancien régime, like a picture in an old nurserybook.) He sits down on a fraction of a bench which is already occupied by two French ladies, a girl in a blouse and skirt, and a Comrade smoking a cigarette.

There are never enough seats to go round in the hotel. Most of the people who come in and wait have to wait on their feet, leaning against walls. They do it fatalistically, obviously inured. The enormous shabby portfolios they all carry—like degraded music-cases—lie at their feet.

What, I wonder, are all these cases? They can't all be carrying important secret documents for the Government. Yet all the Comrades have portfolios, except the very old man who has a newspaper parcel instead, from which protrudes the tail of a fish. Perhaps the Comrades who are less ancien régime carry their fish in portfolios? The old man, I am sorry to say, spits.

I turn my attention elsewhere. An English tourist has come into the office, and I know by the brisk and businesslike way in which he begins that he is newly arrived and has no experience of Russian methods—unlike me. (At this I feel elderly and superior, and think of Julia Mills amid the Desert of Sahara.)

"There's a man I want to get hold of as soon as possible," says the Englishman blithely. "I haven't got his address, but you'll find him in the telephone book. Harrison, the name is."

"Harrison?"

"Harrison."

"You do not know where he lives?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Not in which street is his apartment?"

"No. But he'll be in the telephone book."

"Perhaps you know where is his office?"

"No, but—"

"Not in which street is his office?"

"I only know that his name is Harrison, and he's in Leningrad, and you'll find him in the telephone book."

"Ah, But you have not his address."

"It'll be in the telephone book."

"Ah."

There is a long silence. At this stage—for I have heard this dialogue before, and have often taken part in it myself—some English tourists, and most American ones, look round for the telephone book and swoop down upon it. This Englishman, however, is of inferior mettle. Or perhaps he has Russian blood in him.

He waits.

Presently Intourist utters once more:

"He has a telephone number?"

"Yes. He'll be in the book."

"Ah, It is at his house or at his office, the telephone?"

"His office, I think."

"And the name it is Harrison?"

"Harrison."

Faint demonstrations of searching for the book.

"The book it is not here. I will send."

A young blonde, who has, to my certain knowledge, been standing waiting for the better part of an hour, is sent to fetch the book. Perhaps it is for that and nothing else that she has been waiting? Intourist waits, the Englishman waits, we all wait.

The French ladies on the bench have begun to mutter to one another, low and venomously.

"Mais voilè—elle n'a pas de cceur. Tout simplement. Elle manque de coeur."

"Ça, par exemple—non!"

"Moi, je vous dis que si."

"Moi, je vous dis que non."

Deadlock.

The very old man has now, I think, fallen into a coma. What an abominable thing it is to keep him waiting all this time! He is a hard-working peasant, and his haughty employer, the Grand Duke, is upstairs drinking champagne—

What am I thinking of? The poor Grand Duke is, if fortunate, giving dancing lessons somewhere on the Riviera. The old man is a worker, a Comrade—he is quite all right.

Still I don't think they need keep him waiting such a very long while.

Presently the blonde returns with the telephone book, and Intourist begins to turn over the leaves, and to say once more:

"Harrison?"

"Harrison."

"Ah, Harrison," Along pause.

"No. He is not here,"

"But I think he must be. I say, would you mind if I had a look?"

The Englishman has a look, and runs Harrison to ground in a moment.

"Here he is! A. M. Harrison—that's the man."

"Ah? He is in the book?"

Intourist is only mildly surprised, and not in the least interested. The blonde, in a thoughtful way, says into space:

"Harrison."

The voices of the French ladies surge upward once more.

"Ah! son mari! Comme je le plains!"

"Et moi, non. Au contraire."

I should like to know more of the ménage under discussion—they can't both be right—but they shrug their shoulders simultaneously, glare, and say nothing more.

The Harrison quest goes on. I say to myself, we are progressing slowly, ma'am. If I knew as many quotations from Shakespeare or Plato, or even Karl Marx, as I do from Dickens, I should hold a very different, and much more splendid, place in the ranks of the literary.

"You want that I should telephone to him, yes?"

"Please. If you will."

Intourist will.

But not at once.

"It is his apartment or his office?"

"Well, I don't really know—but whichever number is in the book will find him, I expect."

"I will try," says Intourist pessimistically.

They know, and I know, that their pessimism is justified. The Englishman, as yet, does not know.

He waits—I suppose hopefully—and the telephone is brought into action.

It is customary—necessary, for all I know to the contrary—to shriek, rather than speak into it, and the first fifteen "Allo's" meet with no acknowledgment. Then something happens. The Exchange has replied.

The two French ladies, tired of looking angrily at each other, turn their heads; the blonde lifts hers from its apathetic angle; only the old man is unmoved. (Disgraceful, that he should have been ignored so long. I believe no one has so much as asked him what he wants. Hotel servants the same all the world over, Comrades or no Comrades.)

"Shall I—?" says the Englishman, ready to leap at the receiver.

"The number is bee-zy,"

"Busy?"

"It is bee-zy, If you will wait a little I will try once more."

We all settle down again.

A woman with a baby—and a portfolio—comes into the hotel with a businesslike air, and goes up and speaks to the porter in Russian.

He nods.

Like Jove, I think, and ought to be pleased to find that I am moving a step away from Dickens and toward the classics; but on the other hand I like Dickens, and I don't even know the classics.

The woman with the baby sits down, in the absence of any unoccupied chair, on a marble step leading to the barber's shop, and waits.

I wonder what amount of information Jove can have conveyed to her in that single nod, for her to know—as she presumably does—that it is going to be worth her while to sit down and wait.

Presently the French ladies get up. They both say "Eh bien!" and the one who didn't pity the husband adds: "A quelque chose, malheur est bon" in a philosophical way.

They move toward the lift, their mysterious allusions for ever unexplained.

Not that they leave us immediately. Far from it. They have to wait for the lift. Then they have to wait because the lift can take only four people, and there are already three inside it and they decline—fiercely—to go separately.

"Mais passez donc—"

"Non, non, non. Allez, je vous en prie."

"Mais non, mais non. Allez, vous—"

"Da tout."

A solitary Ukranian, who has been waiting—probably for the lift—for hours, is encouraged by the liftman to take advantage of this indecision and fill the vacant place.

He does so, and the French ladies are left, shrugging their shoulders again. One of them says that it is "fantastique."

The bench on which the old man of the ancien régime is sitting has now two vacant places, which are at once filled by four people. They take advantage of the old man's state of suspended animation to shove him and his fish to the extremest edge of the seat. I think that presently he will fall off.

The Englishman is still seeking his Harrison.

"I should think you might give them another ring now."

"I will try."

The effort is made.

"There is no reply from that number."

"No reply?"

"No. I think it is his office. It does not answer,"

"But there must be somebody there."

"There is nobody there. To-day it is the day of rest. The offices are all shut."

The Englishman is staggered. I can positively see the thoughts flying through his mind.

Tuesday, the day of rest? By Jove, yes! there are no Sundays in Russia now, but they have a holiday every sixth day. Then why on earth couldn't they say so sooner? Of course the offices would be shut. Good God, what a country!

"I suppose I'd better try again to-morrow morning," he says angrily. "Unless you could ask the Exchange if they know the number of his private house?"

"You want to ask the telephone number of his house?"

"If they can give it to you."

"Ah. I can ask them, if you wish,"

He does wish.

A little boy with a shaven head and bare feet and carrying a small attaché-case, comes in and adds to the congestion.

The lift returns and the two French ladies, after a few passes as to which of them shall enter it first, get inside. Then they wait again while the lift-man looks for a singleton passenger. He may not take more than four people at a time, but is determined not to take less.

The Englishman is now leaning against the wall with his arms folded. Russia is growing on him, I can see it plainly.

"They ring his apartment," says Intourist. "They say there is no reply."

"He must be away."

"He is bee-zy, Or perhaps he is seek."

These are the favorite alternatives of Intourist when a telephone connection is unobtainable. They do not say that the number is engaged or the telephone out of order. They make the less impersonal suggestion that the owner of the required number is either busy—too busy presumably to answer his telephone calls—or that he is ill.

The Englishman says that he supposes he must wait till to-morrow. Already he seems to me to be wilting slightly.

As he moves away from the Intourist Bureau he stops and reads a notice informing him that excursions will start punctually at ten o'clock each morning and tourists must on no account be late. I wonder if he believes it?

Perhaps I have been here long enough, and ought to give up my chair to one of the numerous Comrades who are standing about doing nothing. I am not really waiting for anything in particular—only just waiting. But I should like to see somebody pay a little attention to the ancient in the fur cap. He has been waiting longer than anybody else and has probably got rooted to his minute fragment of the bench by this time.

Comrades come and Comrades go, the blonde in the office folds her arms on a table and lays her head upon them, the Englishman buys a copy of the Moscow Daily News and reads about abortion—at least I suppose he does, as the papers devote much more space to that than to any other subject—and the Comrade with the cigarette gets up and is followed by the Comrade in the blouse and skirt, who has been sitting next him all the time but with whom he has never exchanged word or look. But they go away arm-in-arm and are, no doubt, husband and wife in the sight of Stalin.

Other people drift in, and take their places, and wait. The old man comes out of his coma. He is going to demand attention, to insist upon doing whatever it is that he has come to do, and for which he has waited so interminably. Not at all. He picks up his fish, rises very slowly to his feet, and walks out again into the street. He came, apparently, for the express purpose of sitting and waiting, and for nothing else. How little he knows that he has supplied me with the title for this article.