Читать книгу Tinker's Leave - Maurice Baring - Страница 10

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Miles and Alyosha were settled in the first-class carriage of the Trans-Siberian Express; they had two compartments. When they had boarded the train they were given one compartment, with two sleeping berths to share between them. The train was full. There were, besides Miles and Alyosha, several officers going to the front, some officials, some men of business; four Americans besides Paul Haslam—two of them newspaper men, and the others mining engineers; a Norwegian military attaché, a French man of business and his wife, and an Englishman called Walter Troumestre, who was going out as the correspondent of an English newspaper.

On the morning after they had started, Alyosha had a short talk with the train conductor; and at the first station at which a passenger alighted, his compartment, which contained two berths, was given to Alyosha and Miles, so they now had one compartment each, and they opened the door between them.

They were somewhere between Samara and Pensa, and steaming through the brown rolling plains. There was as yet no sign of Spring. They passed village after village of squat brown log-built houses thatched with straw. The weather was warm and grey.

Miles was writing a letter to his friend Haseltine. He had written to his Aunt Fanny. After giving his friend a short summary of the events which had taken him to Russia, and a brief sketch of his adventures in St. Petersburg, he got as far as his arrival at Moscow.

“We arrived in the morning about half-past nine. Everything was unlike what I expected; the houses are low and square, and all coloured, green and red roofs. It is very noisy—cobble-stones—and everybody shouts. The coachmen wear a blue dressing-gown, and some of them are stuffed. They wear a sort of clothes-basket under the blue cloth dressing-gown, which is swelled out tight. It makes them look like giants. They drive very fast, in a one-horse carriage. Kouragine took me directly we arrived to a small church called Our Lady of Unexpected Joy. We went there from the station. He put up a candle there, and one for me. I asked him if he expected anything; he said ‘No’—that was the point. We then drove to a rather shabby hotel called the Dresden, in a large red square. The basins in the bedrooms had no water-jugs, but a sort of fountain that plays on your hands. We then went and had tea, and some good rolls called kalachi, which K. told me you could only get properly made here, because of the Moscow water. Only Moscow water produces the right kind of taste. I wanted the recipe for Aunt Fanny, but he says it would be useless to send it, as anywhere else they would turn out differently.

“Even in St. Petersburg they cannot make these rolls the same—so much so that one of the Tsars (K. says we should never say Tsar, but Emperor) had Moscow water sent to him every day to St. Petersburg, so that he might have his rolls for breakfast.

“Next door to the hotel there is a tailor, and K. says that this man had lent him and all his friends a lot of money at one time. Debt, he said, was the cause of all his troubles. I do not know what these troubles are.

“We went to the Kremlin, saw the Cathedral and a twisted church, drove to some shops, and walked about till luncheon time. Then K. remembered he had an appointment, and said I must have luncheon by myself. He said he would write down the names of the dishes for me in English and Russian. He tried to teach me how to pronounce them. One was Ikra, and meant caviare; the other was rastigai, it meant a fish pie. The third I forget. He went with me to the restaurant in a cab. The restaurant was on the first floor of a large building. The waiters were dressed in white. I was bowed to a seat, and felt helpless. I had lost the piece of paper. I remembered the first word, and said ‘Ikra’ to the waiter. But all that happened was that he went to a large orchestrophone (one of those closed cupboards that hold all the instruments in the world), and it started to play William Tell. I said ‘No, no; ikra, ikra,’ and the waiter then changed the tune and made the instrument play Carmen. K. said they had probably thought I said another word which means ‘play.’ I had no better luck with the rastigai, so I asked for the menu and chose a dish at random. It was written in Russian, and I did not understand a word of it. The dish, which took a long time in coming, turned out to be an enormous slice of roast pork embedded in brown rice. I could only eat a small piece of it.”

When Miles had got as far as this, Alyosha said: “We are just reaching a station; would you like to come out?”

It was a large station. There was a crowd of peasants on the platform, a smell of boot-leather, tobacco, and damp stuff.

Alyosha and Miles walked up and down the platform. There was another train at a siding, a slow train, also full of people; these got down and made a rush for the refreshment room, where they jostled each other to get to the counter, at which hot meat patties were being sold. A little further up the platform there was a small gang of men dressed in dun-coloured clothes with square caps. They asked Alyosha for something. He at once gave them all the cigarettes he had in his pocket and some money besides.

“What are those people?” Miles asked.

“They are what we call unfortunates—convicts on their way to Siberia. They were asking for tobacco.”

“And you are allowed to give it to them?”

“Of course. You had better give them some too. Nobody understands tobacco as much as prisoners. Did you think we treat the poor like you do?”

“What do you mean? Do you think we treat the poor worse than you do?”

“Of course.”

“I thought the poor in Russia had no rights. I thought any one could be put in prison at any moment for anything, because, after all, you are governed by an autocrat.”

“That is just it. Well, take your own case. You were put in prison the other night ... we had better get back into the carriage—that is the second bell ringing.” They climbed back into the compartment. “You were put in prison,” he went on, “the other night for being ‘drunk and disorderly and for assaulting the police.’” Miles blushed. “If that had happened in England, what would have been done to you? Would you have been sent home by the police? Would the police have called on you the next morning, and asked you to give them something towards a new uniform, seeing that you had spoilt three Government uniforms, made them ‘unserviceable.’ I think not. You would have been locked up for the night. You would have had to appear the next morning before the magistrate, and you would have been fined, or put in prison; and it would probably have been written about in the newspapers—most certainly so if you were well known. Here in Russia you are sent home with care, like a precious parcel, and no questions asked.”

“I agree that I should have been taken up in London, but once taken up, I should be sure of my rights, sure of the Habeas Corpus.”

“Exactly; but that cuts both ways. You couldn’t be imprisoned illegally, but you couldn’t be let out illegally either—and the great thing for a prisoner is to get out. It is impossible to get out in England if it’s against the rule....”

“But,” said Miles, “there is no Habeas Corpus here at all.”

“There are dozens, but they are overlooked; and I repeat, this is a thing that cuts both ways. For you it was an advantage. If the rules are kept to the letter, one suffers as much, and sometimes more, than when they are laxly kept and elastic—as I showed you in your case.”

“But you began by saying the poor. I don’t belong to the poor. Your police knew I was staying with a Princess, in a well-to-do house.”

“I say the poor are better treated here than in your country. In your country people are put in prison for begging, and they starve in the streets. That would be impossible here, really impossible.”

“But when they are put in prison here——”

“Even then I don’t know if they are not better off here. I once heard a Russian sailor say that there is less liberty at large in your country than in prison in ours.”

“Really?” asked Miles.

“Yes,” said Alyosha, “and I will tell you a story.

“One of my aunts was married to a rich man, who was a General, and lived in Petersburg. Every summer they used to go to a house they had beyond Moscow and take a few servants with them. The cook always took his holiday in the summer, and they had to hire another. My uncle managed everything always, my aunt never interfered, nor even asked to know about anything. Every summer they went to the country, and they always had the same temporary cook there. He was a kind of peasant, and he cooked extremely well, far better than a French cook; and he could have got a magnificent place, I expect, only he didn’t care. One day my aunt asked him where he was going for the winter, and he said ‘To prison.’ She then asked him questions, and he said that he had no family of his own, and as he was a lonely man, he had been in the habit of committing a small theft every autumn—just a big enough theft to keep him in prison at the Government’s expense until the spring came. He had himself arrested, he said, (arestovalsia), then in the summer he would be cooking again for His Excellency. He was fond, he said, of company. This happened in the ’sixties or the ’seventies, I don’t quite know.”

“What an extraordinary story!” said Miles.

“Not extraordinary,” said Alyosha, “in this country, and I daresay it might happen in England, in the winter; but you see our code is really milder. For instance, we have no capital punishment. If I had been an Englishman, I should not be at large at this moment.”

“Why?”

“Because I have once murdered some one.”

“You murdered some one?”

“Yes; I shot him dead, and was tried and convicted.”

Miles got crimson; he felt as if he had committed the murder. “Oh!” was all he said.

“They sentenced me to ten years’ travaux forcés, and to five years in Siberia as well. It worked out at less because there was an amnesty.”

Miles felt dreadfully uncomfortable, as if somehow it were his fault, and he wished that he had never broached the topic of prisons ... also he wondered what Aunt Fanny would think if she knew he was travelling with a man who had served a sentence for murder.

Alyosha noticed his embarrassment and laughed.

“Don’t be uncomfortable,” he said; “I shall convert you in time to a more human view of life. Don’t be afraid of me either; I am not dangerous. It was what was called un crime passionnel, an impulse. I should have probably been let off the guillotine in France. But in England I should have been hanged, without a doubt. I will tell you the whole story some day, not now.” Alyosha buried himself in his novel, and Miles went on writing his letter.

“... I was interrupted, and now I can go on. After luncheon we drove outside the town to a hill where Napoleon looked at Moscow for the first time. The Trans-Siberian train didn’t start till the next evening, so we had a night to spend at Moscow. We went to see a play called The Cherry Orchard, which is new. It was an extraordinary play. K. told me the story as it went on. Nothing happens in it, and it is gloomy; but I thought they acted beautifully. K. said that only two of the characters were really like they would have been in real life. It has only been running a short time. The next morning we went to see a picture gallery, and did some more shopping.

“I don’t like Moscow, but I daresay one could get fond of it in time. K. again left me at luncheon, but this time I succeeded in getting a kind of caviare, but not the sort I wanted. It was pressed, and I couldn’t explain I wanted the other sort. We started in the evening. The country, as much as I have seen of it so far, is monotonous. We pass village after village; it is all brown and flat; one village looks just like another; log-built huts thatched with straw, and churches with blue cupolas and small white towers, and sometimes a windmill.”

Alyosha, as if he had been following Miles’ train of thought, threw down his book and looked out of the window.

“What do you think of the country, the landscape?” he asked.

“I think it is rather monotonous,” said Miles.

“Yes, it is, and it will be like that until we reach the Urals, and more or less like that, with the exception of forests and marshes, till we reach Irkutsk. But it is what we would call an ‘infectious’ country. You can’t say that in English, I suppose. Some countries are like that. They tell me Ireland is the same. You will be infected. Once the microbe gets into one’s blood—the Russian microbe, I mean—the disease never dies; it is fatal like a love-philtre, and to the end of your life you will say, ‘Russia, what is there between you and me?’ That is what Gogol, one of our writers—you don’t know him in translation, no?—explains. Russia is a country without any obvious attractions and ornaments. There are no show sights: no Niagara, no Vesuvius, no Killarney: and on the other hand, no Parthenon, no Heidelberg Castle. Russia has no elegant make-up, no frills; and yet any one of these villages has more charm for me than all those things put together.”

“But surely that is because you are Russian; because it is your home?”

“No, you are wrong. In the first place, I am only half Russian. My grandfather was German and my mother was half German. Secondly, I spent nearly all my childhood in France and in Italy. We lived at Mentone in a villa when I was a child, and we would sometimes go to Florence and to Rome. My father was fond of historical research. But in the summer, when it was too hot to stay in Italy, or was thought too hot—it was never too hot for me—we used to go to South Germany, to the Tyrol, and to a castle where my grandmother lived, my mother’s mother. It was in Austria, and on the top of a hill near a little river which ran through a toy village with white houses that had red roofs. There were green meadows and fir-woods and white geese and goose-girls; and the castle had round pointed turrets, and storks used to build there. I used to wake up in the morning to the sound of sheep-bells. Germany, not Russia, was the first source of Romance to me. It held all the romance of my childhood, and it still is the home of Romance for me.

“I was educated in France first, and then I was sent to a school in North Germany. I lived en pension with a family in a small town near the Hartz Mountains; and just as I was beginning to be educated, I left it and went to the Cadet School in St. Petersburg. That is why I never learnt Russian properly. I began too late.”

“But how did you learn English?”

“My nurse was English, and later my governess; and my father and mother often used to speak English together and teach me. We went to England, too, sometimes. We spent a summer in the Isle of Wight, another in Ireland. I taught myself: the only way to learn anyhow. I read English books; there are amusing books for boys to read in English—amusing grown-up books, I mean. I read Tom Jones. My childhood was over, you see, by the time I got to Russia, so it is not a question of early associations. But directly I lived in Russia I caught the microbe, and when, after spending all the years of penal servitude in the Island of Saghalien, and of exile in Siberia, I was amnestied, and I could have gone back to Europe again—I thought of Constantinople and Greece, Athens and Rome. I had once been to Constantinople with my parents. It was in the Spring, and the Judas-trees were out, and the wooden houses were smothered in wistaria, and Stamboul shone like a soap-bubble with all the colours of the rainbow. And from there we went to Athens and Taormina and Naples, Rome.... I could go back to Russia if I liked, but I didn’t want to. I could no more live in Russia, but I had no desire for Western Europe; and at least there was the Far East, so I settled at Verkhneudinsk, and even there I was homesick. But what could I do? I had to live somewhere, and Verkhneudinsk was just the right place for an ex-convict who is a déclassé and has once seen better times. And there I settled and married, and lived ever since, till I was sent to America, and on the way back I saw France and Paris; but I had no desire to stay in Europe, only a longing to be back in Russia ... and that is what you will feel one day, more strongly perhaps than I, because Russia will be your romance; what Germany is to me. Russia is my blood relation, like a sister, but Germany is the country I was in love with, and France and Italy my step-mothers. You will fall in love with Russia.”

Miles looked out of the carriage window. The sun was setting; there was a pink streak under the grey layers of cloud in the west. The air was warm, but the fields and the trees were bare, and there was nothing to relieve the monotony of the brown immensity except now and again the outline of a squat village. There were no signs of Spring anywhere yet, and surely it was high time. Soon the invasion would come, and the Spring, like a young Napoleon, would conquer the country in one sudden, swift, and decisive campaign. But Miles did not know this. He watched the great shadows and the rain-clouds, deepening to violet, roll over the plain. He wondered whether it was true, whether there would, as Alyosha had prophesied, ever be anything between him and this grey, monotonous brownness; he thought it improbable. He thought of the woods and marshes and fields of his home, the solid, sane, green English countryside. The birds’ nests in April; the autumn tints; the horse-chestnut and the flaming creeper; the yellow stubble-fields with the corn in stacks against the finely graduated blues of distant fields and near and far-off elm-trees; the mellowness—the softness with which one tint melted imperceptibly into another; the sheep penned in hurdles; the dusty lanes fringed with ripening blackberries; the spider’s web on the honeysuckle; the climbing tea-roses; the Michaelmas daisies. How beautiful, and how comfortably beautiful, that all seemed compared with what he was looking on now!

“But I suppose,” he said, “if you hadn’t Russian blood, that wouldn’t have happened?”

“No, not at all. It happens to foreigners too. It will happen to you; and perhaps some day in the future you will remember this journey, and it will haunt you like the face of some one you once loved. You will never get rid of the infection, never escape. It was so with me. I remember, when I first came to Russia, after my first journey to the country, I thought I hated it; it was all so ugly and uninteresting; too hot in summer and too cold in winter—then when I went away for the holidays, and came back for the first time, I already remember liking that home-coming better than any I had had before. When I say liking it better, I mean it was different.

“Now, after all these years, I remember the first time I went to the country in Russia. It was at the beginning of the summer holidays, the end of June; it was very hot, there was dust everywhere. I travelled all night, and changed when it was still dark at a station, and watched the dawn—the barns and the ricks, great brown shapes, gradually growing distinct. You are sure to see this one day. I travelled in a slow train, that took hours to get to the station I was bound for; and there I drove through the village ... it was the day of the bazaar, the fair. People were driving away cattle and horses ... the place was full of creaking carts ... there was a great noise of talk, and a strong smell of leather tulups, the peasants’ coats. They were playing accordions ... I think there had been a wedding the day before; children were walking about in small processions, beating tom-toms; and there was a braying of song everywhere, and a great many half-drunk, and some quite drunk, people staggering about, happy.... I drove to my Uncle Pierre’s house—the uncle you met in Paris.... A wooden house with a large garden, like the house in The Cherry Orchard play ... like that house ought to have been. I was met by the old nurse, who had a scarf on her head, and kept on saying, ‘Priyechali’ (‘you have come after all’) ... they were making jam. We had luncheon out of doors, on the verandah, and ate kasha, and drank kvass, and afterwards some home-made nalivka—what you call sloe gin. It was so hot we didn’t go out till the evening. Then we drove to the river and bathed. The water was still.... I thought there might be a Russalka in the reeds.... That is what you call a pixie. They have green eyes, and if you make friends with them you go mad.... And there was a king-fisher ... and we came home late ... the green corn was in flower, and it smelt good.

“We drove home through the corn. After dinner we sat out on the terrace, and listened to the people in the village singing.... They were still celebrating the wedding ... dogs barked, and the drunken people sang and danced. You could hear them stamping ... somewhere far away lovers were singing ... a very sad song.... That, I remember, was my first experience of the country in Russia.”

“Yes,” said Miles, looking out of the window. It had grown dark; the glow had faded from the low belt in the west, but there was still the remains of a watery gleam; the upper clouds were black; lights twinkled here and there. “Yes,” he said, “I wonder. At present—so far, that is to say—it all seems to me brown and monotonous, and there is such a strong smell everywhere of boot leather and tobacco, and a kind of smell like the smell of wet tweed or a dog that’s been out in the rain.”

“Yes,” said Alyosha, “that is part of it.”