MISS
AMERIKANKA
OLIVE GILBREATH
3
MISS AMERIKANKA
'How lovely you are in that white
frock, Amerikanka"
MISS
AMERIKANKA
A Story
BY
OLIVE GILBREATH
ILLUSTRATED BY
SIGISMUND de IVANOWSKI
HARPER y BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Miss AMERIKANKA
Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1918
C-9
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAP. PAGB
I. THE CHINESE EXPRESS 3
II. A WAR SPECIAL 20
III. BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON 30
IV. CHRISTMAS ON THE STEPPE 43
V. CHILDREN OF THE FOREST 53
PART II
VI. PETER'S CAPITAL 71
VII. IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD 84
VIII. THE LEE OF THE WAR 98
IX. A RUSSIAN LYRIC 118
X. RUSSIAN TREACHERY 133
XI. THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES 146
XII. A FACE AT THE BALLET 157
XIII. Miss AMERIKANKA KNOWS 171
XIV. A MENTAL BREAD-LINE 179
XV. MOTHER VOLGA 193
PART III
XVI. BEHIND M. NOVINSKY'S EYES 217
XVII. AN ADVENTURE IN PERSONALITY 224
XVIII. NEWS FROM THE FRONT 233
XIX. "SOMETHING POIGNANT" 249
XX. FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD 254
XXI. THE SCORPION'S STING . . . 272
XXII. "THE BARIN RETURNS" 279
XXIII. REALITIES .... - v";~ 287
XXIV. Miss AMERIKANKA CHOOSES 292
2135668
ILLUSTRATIONS
"How LOVELY You ARE IN THAT WHITE FROCK,
AMERIKANKA" Frontispiece
"WHY AM I A ROAMER IN THESE WHITE WASTES?" Facing P. 4
LIFE WELLING UP FROM DEPTHS PASSIONATE,
BARBARIC " 114
EVERYTHING THAT HE LOVED WAS SINGING ITS
SWAN-SONG THROUGH His FINGERS .... " 144
PART I
MISS AMERIKANKA
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
IF the angel Uriel were casting an all-seeing
eye on the Manchurian plain to-night he
might observe a feeble fly crawling across its
great white coverlet. If he were omniscient
as well, he might answer the riddle that re-
volves in my mind why this vast whiteness
does not rush in and blot out the one thing
that dares move and have being in the face
of its immensity and what madness it is
that sets a woman wandering a night like
this. Twenty-four hours ago I sat content
behind the walls of Peking. Why to-night
am I a roamer in these white wastes? From
my window in the Chinese express, steadily
scurrying northward, I watch the moon
climb up out of those lonely borders of China
3
MISS AMERIKANKA
we are just leaving. Is she saying us farewell,
or does she, looking down on a land too wise
to be restless, only smile at the folly of wan-
dering? And there in Peking the kites hang
over the courts and the sound of the wind is
in the sycamores. One moment more behind
the walls of the old gray city and I had been
deaf to the call of the great world outside so
faintly it falls there in the gardens of Asia.
Across the aisle the General dozes in his
great red-lined cape-coat, his piratical mus-
tache doing solitary duty in his military face;
over the top of my seat a tall astrakhan cap
blots the dim window space like an adver-
tisement of "Popoff's Popular Tea"; the
cap signifies Dmitri Nikolai vitch Novinsky,
attache of the legation in Peking. Could
une jeune Americaine possess two stranger
guardians? The whole affair is incredible.
It is necessary to record it carefully, me-
thinks, to make sure I am not a little mad.
In the first place, am I the person who voy-
aged across the Pacific for a wedding in the
Orient Lise's wedding little Lise, that pi-
quant figure whom Chance threw across my
path in Egypt, grown since a permanent
figure in my world ; little Lise reared in every
4
"Why am I a roamer in these
white wastes?"
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
unknown corner of diplomacy in the East;
little Lise, a woman choosing now a mate, set-
ting out on the long, long trail passed on
into an unfamiliar land into which I can no
longer follow her? The images make it seem
more than half a dream: the lights gleaming
across the spaces of cool dark floors, yellow
figures in brocades, flaming Oriental charac-
ters of joy on all the windows, the color of
diplomatic uniforms, Lise's father silent and
dark, Lise herself in her film of white, and
that strange, strange expression.
Granted this, am I, further, the person who
three months ago was caravaning in Mongolia?
Can it be that for any one the world, three
months ago, was wool-caravans emerging
through the morning mists; horsemen mys-
teriously silhouetted against the horizon;
shimmering gold of rape-fields and deep in-
digo distances? It is strange to enter the
desert, but stranger still to come out to a
world disrupting. Plunge a man into chaos
out of a solitude starred with gentian, larkspur,
and a tiny creeping moonflower, if you would
break his rhythm of joy.
"What has happened down there since we
have been up here in eternity?" I remember
5
MISS AMERIKANKA
it was Lise's philosophical French friend who
pondered, as the slow cart-wheels bore us
along the great road which for ages has poured
the caravans into China.
1 ' Nothing !" I replied, dogmatically. ' ' Noth-
ing ever happens down there in the world."
It was one night while the caravaners sat
on the k'ang of a mud-walled inn, beyond the
Great Wall, that the news of the war came,
creeping in there on the fringe of things, like
rumors of the Judgment Day; a messenger
splashing the white dust of the road, de-
spatches in his bag for the living Buddha in
Urga, but no idea in his flat Mongol head of
who was friend and who was foe. All along
the road the next day it was the same tale:
we questioned the Chinese hawkers with
cages swung on poles across their shoulders,
but they had no news beyond the price of
thrushes; the Russian tea-merchant, too, was
uninformed but the canny merchant was
folding his blue summer tent and stealing
away to the north! In the sun-baked border
city Kalgan, the tobacco men young Brit-
ishers and Americans announced " Der Tag."
Adventist missionaries prophesied the coming
of Christ and prepared to ascend in chariots
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
of fire, while we scurried for the first train to
Peking.
Far and swift a man may travel alone, but
when danger threatens the call of the pack.
The fierce hunger of kind for kind which ran
through my blood, as we struck through the
Great Wall and raced by train down that
narrow pass for Peking, shot a light on some of
Old Nature's secrets. Every moment the air
thickened with the sense of something sinister
like a dust-storm from the Gobi. Something
was happening over there the world was
breaking up not this barbarism, but civiliza-
tion our world and we were barred out-
side! In Peking the storm broke; Peking
seething with chaos such as dazed us, children
of the desert. The banks, the legation, the
Wagon Lit s swarmed angrily knots of French,
German, British, Austrians gathered on the
corners. Over there, across Asia, the world
was breaking up. Legation Street, where
rickshas passed to afternoon tea, clattered
with the horses of the French guard in red
and blue capes off to Europe; Sikhs at the
gates of the British legation tightened their
red turbans and caressed their carbines with
lustrous eyes; and the industrious little
7
MISS AMERIKANKA
browns, under cover of a legation guard,
poured in sufficient troops to take the Chinese
capital. Peking is a mountain-top; but the
old gray city has seen few finer spectacles in
the valleys below than the first records of the
cosmic earthquake all under the apricot-
tiled and tilted roofs in the sunny August
weather!
Et moil I, too, wished to stream toward
Europe. And why not? Russia has always
been my desire, since I could remember my
godmother's first reading to me Russian
poetry.
Shall I ever forget the smell of that Chinese
rain swirling down Legation Street as I
picked my way across to the double-eagle
bronze gates behind which the Russians had
handsomely consoled themselves after the
Boxer indiscretion? Even before the trek
into Mongolia, and before the war-lords had
frowned, I had paid my gold for a ticket across
Siberia. Why should one's Government send
ministers abroad so firmly and paternally to
forbid one's heart's desire? The Russians
would be more kind. I passed the wildish
dun-colored Cossack guard at the double-
eagle gates. In ante-bellum days I had dined
8
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
with Lise's friends behind these same bronze
gates, but the great white houses, barren as
bird-cages, seemed to have increased in num-
ber and imposingness. The blond First Sec-
retary, who maintains Russia's reputation for
diplomacy in the East, was far less fearsome
than the Cossack guard, his eyes a Botticelli
blue even against the blue walls of his study;
the hands, which toyed with a bronze paper-
weight, white and powerful, with fine golden
hair at the wrists.
"To cross Siberia! Ny, Mademoiselle!"
He shrugged his shoulders and threw out his
hands in a Slavic gesture. "The road is
crowded, jammed with men and horses and
guns. Who knows? You might be left for
weeks in a Siberian village."
"Shto dyelatch, Monsieur? I have long ago
given my heart to Russia. I have all but put
my eyes out over your queer diddling alpha-
bet, and now that it is really fascinating, you
forbid it. Shto dyelatch?"
'"Shto dyelatch!' Ah, Mademoiselle." He
put down the paper-weight; he smiled; his
eyes searched me acutely for symptoms of a
spy, and he smiled again the smile of a big
country. " Nu vot! the road may clear. I
9
MISS AMERIKANKA
will send you across, but it may be months.
Have you Russian patience?"
Patience! I could give points to Job in
several languages. Three months I have sat
behind the walls of the old gray city. I am so
disorganized with patience that the sight of a
chit, delivered this morning by a coolie from
the Russian legation, sucked at my breath
like "the sight of a tiger's tail in the spring."
Had any one supposed that I really wished
to cross to Russia, to leave this apricot-tiled
city, the "last rampart of romance"?
"MADEMOISELLE [the note ran in Russian
an inconvenient compliment], The trans-
Siberian is still crowded with troops. It is
no time for a traveler least of all a woman
to be abroad. [I could see the giant First
Secretary driving the words along under the
signed portrait of Nicholas II.] "One of our
Generals leaves to-morrow, however, with
an attache. The General will be pleased to
look after your safeguard. If you must go
bon voyage!"
Bon voyage into these desolate wastes!
Before the steppe completely annihilates
us, I wish to record one fact ! It is not I who
wills this journey. It is something quite im-
IO
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
personal within me, that something which per-
mits me no word as to the size, shape, or color
of my destiny; that uncaring something
packed my luggage, bought a Mongolian dog-
skin for bitter nights and pitched me into
this! If it is gipsy blood, bad 'cess to it.
If it is career worse 'cess to it! The only
concession to me was of the finest silk in Silk
Street, turquoise blue, and neat about the
ankles! I shiver over my dogskin rug at this
level wildness. "Only fools enter Siberia in
mid-winter," I can hear Peking warn I know
she speaks truth as the train pulls out and
she slams the shadows of the Ch'e-men against
us, and then, to give point to her wisdom,
slowly, one by one, drops her four massive
walls barricading us outside in snow-dunes,
which threaten to rush in and blot us out,
who dare move in the face of their infinity.
The sun was tumbling out of a Chinese-blue
sky when I awoke this morning. Since the
General has looked in to inquire after the
health of I'Americaine, I feel less certain of
extinction. Very distingue the General, with
his lean body, his Hindenburg mustache and
his eagle look, hurrying to join the staff at the
front. He wears fatigue dress blue trousers
ii
MISS AMERIKANKA
with a red stripe at the side, a khaki-colored
coat and a cross of St. George where the col-
lar closes. I had not met him until I became
his protegee, but I have a vivid image of
this military figure clattering down Morrison
Street with outriders. M. Novinsky, the
attache, is a slim, exquisite Russian with
long eyes and a serene smile, as immaculate
as if he had just stepped from Piccadilly; a
type of Russian incredible to Americans bred
on lithographs of stout gentlemen in Cossack
beards and flannel shirts. We sat opposite
at dinner once in the great white glavnaya
missiya and have bowed since from our
passing rickshas. Curiously enough, I re-
member him from among the other attaches
and secretaries.
It was while I was standing at the window
this afternoon, watching the purple hills of
Shan-hai-kwan blocking themselves ruggedly
in the sunset and wishing that I might see the
Great Wall, after fourteen hundred miles of
mountain- tops, take its leap into the sea,
when this finished product of civilization
joined me.
"You are sad to leave the East, Mademoi-
selle?" he asked, with a quaint precision of
12
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
enunciation and a timbre of voice distinctly
un-English.
"Yes," I admitted, a bit disconsolately,
lifting my gaze to an immaculate collar. "Is
it not absurd? With every moment the old
gray walls unroll, I realize that I am leav-
ing what are no longer symbols of a strange
civilization, but signs of a land dearly be-
loved."
" No, it is not absurd," he returned, gravely,
with his eyes on the liquid amethyst of the
mountains, while the train rushed on into the
hollow North. "It depends upon what you
ask of a land. If it is to forget days that are
'sullen and gray and bereft,' China, more
than any other land, except Egypt, can gild
life with romance."
I glanced at the neatly knit figure, the
beautifully cut mouth and melancholy eyes
turned on the steppe. A figure I could have
imagined in Japan, but in great, dirty, pictu-
resque China never.
"Is it that one may not ask for romance?"
I inquired. "What will your Great Russia
give?"
"Russia?" he repeated slowly, as the tem-
ple roofs of a walled city emerged from the
13
MISS AMERIKANKA
dusk, "Russia something far more poignant
and homely than this!"
Nu, each to his own East. The Slav to his,
whatever it may be, and I to mine the junks,
and the pagodas among the azaleas, and the
sound of the wind in the bamboo groves.
Twenty-four hours to the north as the
geese fly! Twenty-four hours of blue figures
bending rhythmically in fields and of quaint
roofs angling the sky! Twenty-four hours I
had been lost in the dream that the Chinese
themselves dreamed for thousands of honorable
years, that never could one pass the boun-
daries of the Middle Kingdom when some-
thing new shot out of the day's end the
gas-lights of a modern station, trains shrieking,
porters hurrying luggage.
"Mukden!" The General's red-lined cape
gleamed in the dusky car at the door of my
compartment. "Civilization and soap. Made-
moiselle!"
Civilization and soap! It was like being
rolled from a silken scroll into a twentieth-
century serial.
"Civilization and soap," I shuddered. Over
there in the dark, somewhere, there were an-
14
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
cient Manchu palaces. I peered into the
darkness pendent with silver mists.
"Yes." His excellency tightened his belt.
"There is just time for dinner. You will find
Japanese creditable cooks."
When the two had departed to consult the
little brown Swiss of the East I voyaged about
the station sniffing the variegated potpourri of
the Orient. The station was unpromisingly
modern, but its occupants were drawn from
the oldest reservoirs of life in the world.
Chinese and Japanese sprawled in sundry
attitudes and varied garments; a Korean sat
in the corner, in his bird-cage hat; on the
floor lay bundles of fur. Bundles of fur!
After these, nothing held me. Sleeping Rus-
sians they were, in from the Far North, that
mysterious terra incognita into which within an
hour we ourselves should be whirling.
The terror of that first plunge into the bit-
ter shadowy night of the Farther North!
Peking had been but a prelude; this was the
precipice. Mukden itself is wind-swept enough
Heaven knows ! huddling there in the pale
of the Arctic storms; but, at least, it has
lights, humanity, and roofs. Its soft-winking
beacons called across the snow like lorelei
15
MISS AMERIKANKA
lorelei of fires and hearth. I confess that I
watched them dim and vanish across the
widening white with no slight misgiving and
a frenzied desire to rush back and claim sanc-
tuary before it was too late. But there was
no turning back. The mists had begun to
shroud us in their phantom pall. We were
already committed to the steppe.
They are wonderfully sympathetic, these
Russians, and deeply and properly impressed
with the responsibility of VAmericaine. The
General says that I am not American, but
north Italian in type; M. Novinsky does not
comment upon my type. They were stand-
ing guard over my place when I turned from
my vigil at the window, and then I discovered
the reason. The world was present but not
his wife. With the exception of the feminine,
it was a miniature cosmos. Seven fat Chinese
disposed their fur-lined brocades and settled
their embonpoint comfortably on the seats;
nine Japanese tucked their feet under cumu-
lative kimonos; the Standard Oil men, trim-
mers of the "lamp of Asia," the Swedish
minister, the General, and M. Novinsky
settled in their greatcoats. Each traveler
drew about him whatever mantle race had
16
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
provided him. The car stared internationally
and then fell into slumber. That is, all but
M. Novinsky, whom I could see from the
corner of one sleepy eye, proud as Lucifer,
immobile as the Buddha of Kamakura, while
opposite him a wadded Chinese slept the
unconcerned sleep of the East. The aris-
tocratic tradition is, I have observed, some-
times inconvenient.
Mukden had been cold, but this place where
I awoke surely went below thermometer
range. The British- American Tobacco man
and the Standard Oil men had vanished in the
night the last symbol erased from my fa-
miliar world. Frost eliminated the land-
scape. From a hollow drumlike distance
came the sound of bells, deep-toned Buddhists
and momentary ecstatics punctuating the
boom of the great ones. The General had
disappeared, but M. Novinsky stood at my
elbow, pale as Hamlet, but glossily booted
and shining as to hair. It seemed an uncon-
ventional morning encounter with an im-
maculate attache of the Russian legation!
"What is it, a Charpentier opera?" I de-
manded, trying to make a clearing in the
white rime of my window.
17
MISS AMERIKANKA
"No Charpentier, but Changchun," said
M. Novinsky, rescuing my Mongolian rug
from the claws of a rapacious coolie. "For
us it is breakfast."
"Changchun?" I had a painfully con-
fused sense of Beveridge and Putnam Weale.
"I know!" I cried, with sudden enlighten-
ment. "The far shore line of Great Russia
where the 'gray stream of men carrying ikons,
children and wives crawls down upon Man-
churia never to retreat.' '
"Totchno" agreed M. Novinsky. "You
speak in the language of an Imperial ukase.
At least, Mademoiselle, if your feet never
stray to the Back of the Beyond at least
you have stood where the East and the North
tryst."
The hotel is only a stone's throw from the
station, but the General and M. Novinsky
stowed me in a troika and we dashed up in
the manner of a De Quincy stage-coach, as
befitted our rank. It is next to being a cousin
to royalty to travel with a General. The
Russian has a taste for the dramatic which he
seems to gratify. Every one from the man-
ager to the smallest maltchik draws himself
up when we appear, while the General sails
18
THE CHINESE EXPRESS
through the line, very fierce, very distingue,
like the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievitch
himself.
And now the escort pay etiquette calls at
the Russian Consulate while I finish my
Amur caviare and read the Manchurian wool
market to the bells of the Near and Far
Easts. Extraordinary paradoxes, these Rus-
sians ; the most easy-going people of the globe,
and the most punctilious. At least, that is
the General. Monsieur Novinsky, though of
far older blood, I fancy, seems deeper rooted
in gentleness. Two Samoyedes steal past me
in long surtouts and close fur caps. Are they
also of the same nationality as the General
and M. Novinsky? Already I sense a nation
which is "not a nation but a world."
"I shall burn a candle in that Chinese tem-
ple to this unco 1 strange journey," I an-
nounce, as the escort depart.
"Better a taper for Nicolas, the Wonder-
worker," the General calls over the top of his
fur collar. "The Russian gods are jealous
gods. And these are the skirts of Great
Russia!"
3
II
A WAR SPECIAL
A WAR SPECIAL! An edition de luxe
war special for Russia! Am I dream-
ing? I rub my finger along the leather seats
and the mahogany casing. The white per-
spective of Harbin streets through the win-
dow vanishes a bit unreally but the izvost-
chiks are solid enough, and the Cossacks clump-
ing about with bread, and the shaggy ponies.
And there through the world, in the direction
my heels point, prosaic creatures are sitting
in offices, attending committees and taking the
elevated !
Ivan Caspitch, the General's orderly, a
taffy-colored Grenadier, has just brought a
samovar and red-currant jam. Ivan Cas-
pitch's idea of the world is sorrow, which
must be drowned in tea and jam. It is the
Russian post-train that has left me like this,
a fossil of prehistoric man, caught through the
20
A WAR SPECIAL
ages with my knees under my chin, and the
object of Ivan Caspitch's pity.
"Like the Russian Government," M. Nov-
insky declares the post, "meant to develop
an eyeless, mindless, collapsible creature."
For myself I should not have minded, but
it offended my sense of things as they should
be to see the General's glory eclipsed in a
crevice. Deep frost covered the window,
eliminating the landscape. It was too dark
to read, and one of the Forbiddens was to
lower the candle which warred with the Pow-
ers of Darkness in the upper regions of the
car. The guard, a surreptitious person in a
vast beard, hovered about the door, peering
in at irregular intervals as if to surprise IT
out of us.
"Whatever it is, I do not know," I pro-
tested to the General at the end of a tortuous
hour, "but for the grace of God and having
been born in America, I might be in the
Siberian salt-mines."
"You should have become accustomed to
spying in Japan," suggested the General.
"Japanese spying is something tangible," I
argued. "If one must have his luggage ran-
sacked, the Japanese do it deftly and pack
21
MISS AMERIKANKA
things more neatly than they came out. And
if they poke holes in the shoji after all, they
are their own shoji. But this this is an
evil spell."
"It may be a bad system, but it works.
Russia needs a strong hand." The General
pulled his long mustache.
The train-master had announced that we
should be in Harbin by eleven, but this
statement was Oriental tact and not truth.
It was two before we saw a delicate coronet
of lights scattering on the shining disk of
plain. I buried my nose in my dogskin; the
cold would crumple me up like a mimosa leaf,
while the Russians would step forth heroically
into their element, their native North. And
then I discovered another of Old Nature's
secrets. The Russians pulled their furs and
shivered in their greatcoats. Too many cen-
turies had winds from glaciers blown in their
faces, and laid deep in their memory a race-
terror, while I, with a less bitter ancestral
memory, breathed greedily of freedom and the
ecstasy of space! Sky, black velvet and
crystal; stars, pendent points of light, and
the plain a luminous blue-white reflector;
horses with high-arched collars; furs shag-
22
A WAR SPECIAL
gily blotching the snow. A magnificent fan-
tasie. It rushed upon me, an engulfing sea.
It was the North the Siberian North! It
rocked in my ears like a storm; the brilliant
savage North! I looked to the horizons; in
every direction sped these terrible white dis-
tances. Somewhere there in those prehistoric
gulfs, Breshkovskaya had kept burning her
lamp, and Dostoevski, Gorky, and countless
hundreds of the flaming hearts of Russia.
The station was dank and dreary after the
sonorous level of the steppe, dank and dreary
and futile as are all things human after great
spaces. I was glad that the General was
Viking-tall and easy to follow, for the crowd
moved about with a weary, troubled confusion.
Everything was written anew in symbols of
the North. Everybody was fur-clad, cap-d-
pie even to the newsgirl. I liked the skin-
side-inside-fur-side-outside coats of the nos-
iltchiki, perhaps because I liked the nosilt-
chiki themselves; burly, bearded chaps, with
the vigor of the North in their sinews and the
fear of God in their faces. But it was murky
after the steppe. And the smell! It rose in
clouds like incense, it descended like London
fog an intermingling of the odors of horses,
23
MISS AMERIKANKA
sheep, koumiss, and unwashed humanity; the
smell which the Mongolian tents take on from
sheltering the little "brothers of the field "-
calves and new-born lambs; the "distinctive
but not unpleasant" odor of which the great
Tolstoi writes. I was tired with the rocking
of the train, and cumulatively sleepy, and I
had grave doubts whether Tolstoi were not,
after all, a barbarian.
The man whose lantern has two sides
East and West soon becomes an epicure of
contrasts. The delight I take in nights spent
in a mud-walled Mongolian inn among the
wool-carts, set over against the memory of the
Savoy in season, is more thrilling than any a
collector of Whistler wrests from his treasure.
And I hug now the joy I shall take in a bill for
nine cents night's lodging for seven people,
three horses and a donkey against my next
squandering of gold in the tents of the West.
I was lost in my musing when the General
and M. Novinsky plucked me from contem-
plation of the skin coats.
"No train to-night!" The General drew
his great red-lined cape about him and led
the way outside to the hotel sleighs. What
would the Savoy or the Plaza say to such a
24
A WAR SPECIAL
trio at such an hour? Doubtless a superb
contrast to the comment of the bearded genii
who presides here on the edge of things where
the Ten Commandments are not, character-
ized by curiosity but no phrases.
"One piecee A-number-one laidee," he said
to the Chinese boy in blue. "One piecee A-
number-one room."
" How,'" acquiesced the Celestial, and with
a simple how I was committed to a room, sealed
but for one hinged pane; there I slept the
sleep of the East under a goatskin rug. I
discovered the next morning that the sheets
were exquisite table linen. I cannot explain
why, but it is Russian that they should have
been so, especially Siberian Russian, but it is
true. Harbin has the atmosphere of a gold
camp. But the memory of that night the
mingling of alien voices, Japanese and Rus-
sian, that rose from that fetid hot-box below
the howling of the wind and the sharp, cold
terror of those gulfs of gray mists!
It is amazing how naturally I have accepted
M. Novinsky's serene figure in my world.
Glossily booted and impeccable, he was look-
ing up at me from the foot of the stairs when
I appeared this morning.
25
MISS AMERIKANKA
" Nu! AmeHcaine," he said, his long gray
eyes stirring with a smile, "the road is
blocked by a tangle of trains. We may miss
the one express that crawls out to Irkutsk.
You know Kipling calls us ' the most westernly
of Easterns."
I felt a sudden access of enthusiasm. "The
best drama in the world, I assure you, is a
Chinese street quarrel. And an actor once
told me that he liked playing these Russian
tempers, because they are inexhaustible."
Did Rachel and Bernhardt, I wonder, learn
their furies from these boundless, timeless
Orientals? For an hour strange words hissed
and scratched expletives purely Slavonic and
unintelligible burned off over the wires in
every direction. I have no quarrel with a
Russian rage; it appeals to me as admirably
effective. Behold for us, at least, a result
magnifique! A war special stands on the sid-
ing being caparisoned for a dash across Si-
beria. One coach, an 1830 engine piled high
with wood which is roped on at every
conceivable angle, the whole looking like one
of those overburdened donkeys one sees along
the wall in Peking.
The vista ahead drops away in a vast white
it
A WAR SPECIAL
fog. Down that phantom-white distance the
wind is rising, the snow eddies past the win-
dows in plumy white swirls, and with every
swirl the unknown there grows fleecier. The
General strides up and down the platform, a
gaunt figure, his great red-lined cape unfurling
behind him like the wings of a monstrous bird,
while Cossack orderlies provision the car, their
striped trousers moving briskly over the
snow. The General brings always the same
curious vision before my eyes : armies march-
ing and countermarching, spreading myriad-
wise over the plain ; the passion of war; mill-
ions tramping to their death ; the music of the
battle-hymns. Certainly through the General
courses little of Pushkin's "dove-blood of the
Slav"!
Three young officers have come down from
the barracks to greet their superior officer
and stand about in delightful trepidation.
One little captain's wife, who evidently knows
her way about the world, arrives armed with
roasted ryabtchiks and a bottle of Madeira.
The car is a first-class car filched from the
Russian express, fitted with mahogany and
velvet and luxuriously appointed as the Rus-
sians know how to appoint. The General
27
MISS AMERIKANKA
stalks through the car, followed by the or-
derly.
"This half of the car, Mademoiselle Ameri-
caine," he decrees, with an authoritative wave
of his hand, "is your domain drawing-room,
bedroom, room to spare. M. Novinsky and I
enter only by your permission. Ivan Cas-
pitch will stow away your bags." And he
withdraws in form and with distinction a
masterly retreat.
Ivan Caspitch appears with the Siberian
crab-apple maid I have borrowed from the
hotel for the sake of les convenances until we
reach Irkutsk, red-aproned and a bundle un-
der each arm. More officers, more kvass, more
food, more wood ! Katya eyes both the steppe
and me with foreboding and crosses herself
broadly. It would be difficult to say which
she fears most the steppe or VAmericaine.
Ahead lies the dim abyss, filled with a
misty whiteness which showers from the sky
moment by moment, hour by hour a strange,
uncharted, soundless sea. Ten thousand
miles of silence, ten thousand miles of white
and tideless ocean! Snow flying, drifting,
swirling snow. The belted krestyanki and
izvostchiks wave as we leave the siding.
28
A WAR SPECIAL
"Gospode tebye! Gospode tebye!" shout the
hairy giants as we pull slowly out.
"It might be Peary's dash for the Pole or
Shackleton's relief," I murmur, as the strange
trio of us stand at the window, off for Europe.
"It might be anything thrilling and ro-
mantic if it were not for that absurd engine,"
grants M. Novinsky. "It so resembles a
donkey that I cannot believe but that at the
last moment it will have to be led into the
mystery."
Ill
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
WHAT a strange fabric of impressions
this journey across Siberia leaves in
one's hands! A naked level flowing to the
far horizon, white above and gray below, and
in that rim between earth and sky something
dark that flies and flies before the wind. It
is the mystery of all great spaces of Mon-
golia of Egypt. But there is no touch of
gold here, no sun, no heat, no shimmering
sand, no intense physical mystery. All is
dead, misty white; the mystery of tundra, of
forests and night and death; the mystery
which the Russian has written into his litera-
ture of Raskolnikoff, of Orloff and Anna and
Vronsky. Silence, space, death and furious
movement. I never shall and never wish to
lose the memory of these snow-dunes. For
me there is healing in these spaces, release for
the fretted prisoner of self, and escape from
30
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
the emphatically individual. It is one with
the assurance that the Orient had given me
the peace of the knowledge that life is but
episodic, a fragment of cloud scudding across
a night sky and soon to be merged with the
whole.
The General pores all day over maps and
war manuals while M. Novinsky and I ex-
plore the world like a pair of Robinson Crusoes.
In spite of our importance, we are on a
military schedule, and sometimes we sit on
the steppe for hours while the Cossacks
stretch their legs and walk the sturdy Siberian
ponies about in the snow. They are not hand-
some, these trans-Baikal troops with whom
we fraternize while the trains tangle. Sun
and wind and rain have reduced them to the
monochrome of the steppe until they might
almost be said to have protective coloring.
They are gaited, too, like Mongols; the gait
of men bred to ride, not to walk, and un-
familiar with their legs.
"They do not look particularly fierce," I
observed to M. Novinsky, as we clambered off
the train yesterday to cross the tracks.
"No man can look fierce with a loaf of
bread under one arm and a pan of milk under
31
the other," answered M. Novinsky. "The
Czar's special fighting men, nevertheless; they
wear the Cossack stripe from cradle to grave
and like their fighting well enough. Of all
the troops, they alone can never understand
why they should make prisoners. If a man
is dead, you can take his boots."
The General strides about like a giant sand-
piper, pulling his military mustache. "The
hardest troops in Europe," he vows. "Black
bread and a bit of straw; it is sufficient. But
fools!"
For myself I must confess to a certain
strangeness about, that makes our ultilitarian
civilization pale visibly.
How swiftly Mongolia unrolls at the sight
and smell of the ponies! The same wiry
beasts I have ridden with a llama for riding
master in purple and orange and a silver-
pommeled saddle. They are bound around
with memories, memories of grazing antelope,
of wool-carts high against the sky in a notch
of the pass, of wheeling eagles and brown-
skinned shepherd boys piping their lays on the
hillside.
"A chap like this nearly cost me my life once
in Turkestan," M. Novinsky said yesterday,
3 2
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
looking oddly incongruous against the shag-
giness of the ponies, rubbing a little palmetto's
nose with a neat dogskin glove. "I had been
sent on a mission to Kashgar; seven days over
granite mountains, and then the plateau. I
got some devil's sort of fever that made it
necessary to get to the doctor. One of the
Cossack ponies fell sick, too. 'Find another
horse and we will push on,' I ordered the next
morning. Do you think that beggar Cossack
would leave his horse? Not he. He ex-
pected a flogging, that is certain. He was
exactly like the quaking lad in Kuprin's story
do you remember? 'At your service, your
High Excellency,' he would say, touching his
cap a hundred times a day. But would he
leave that beast? He would not. And
well I couldn't order him flogged! And so
his Majesty, the Czar of all the Russias, in
the person of me, waited three days in a
Kirghiz tent, with mosquitoes and flies hold-
ing festa. There were compensations, I ad-
mit. The whole village turned out to amuse
me dancing and theatricals every night be-
fore my tent. I might have been the Pasha
himself. But that's another story."
"And your fever?"
33
MISS AMERIKANKA
"My fever? The pony entirely recovered
and I, too, in the end," he added with a
smile. " Shto dyelatch? Loyalty is the first
principle of life. A Chinese to his ancestors;
a woman to her heart ; a Cossack to his horse.
I liked the rascal for it, and when I came back
to Peking I brought him with me. He was
the most faithful servant I ever had."
Sometimes we explore the stations for food.
If I did not know by a hundred other proofs,
I should be convinced now that M. Novinsky
is a gentleman from the cheerfulness with
which he blots the future ambassadorial
escutcheon by eating shchee, greasy cabbage
soup, at long tables in company with peasants
and izvostchiks, to humor my whim.
"You see," I explained to-day, looking
about the murky station dining-room for a
means to vindicate my taste, and wondering
what Russian etiquette demanded one should
do with a slice of meat and an egg which my
spoon had fished from the bottom of my
soup, "you see, they are all old friends of
mine, from Gorky and Tolstoi and Dostoevski
and all the rest. Ten years I have known
them, but I never had a samovar with them
or swelled them before. You know, that one
34
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
over there at the end of the table is Turgenev's
Ermolai you remember, with the dogs. And
that lazy one is Vankya on Levin's estate
he went to sleep in the hay. Don't you
recognize him? Look at the way they fall
upon their food and devour it. I have seen
boatmen on a Chinese junk eat like that when
they have been poling for days against the
wind until they snarled and screamed like
beasts with the effort. It's not our way
it's hunger "
"Yes, it's hunger red hunger," rejoined
M. Novinsky, "but, Mademoiselle Americaine,
don't imagine they are not old friends to me!"
he added, earnestly. ' ' My grandfather owned
several thousand of them and my mother still
holds a sort of matriarchy down on her estate
in Tver. They come to her for everything
food, medicine, justice. It's rather nice to
see her holding court among them. . . . Old
friends ! Nu, they are such old friends as you
in your shifting America cannot comprehend.
My boyhood memories are all bound up with
them; fishing with Petya, dragging out in the
early morning and walking off my legs in the
marshes for grouse, fighting forest fires with
the foresters until I was blacked and blistered,
4 35
MISS AMERIKANKA
without eyelashes, and ordered off to the
great house. And lazy summer days, lying
on my back under the limes, while old Agatha,
the housekeeper, jingled her keys among the
storehouses and smuggled me gooseberry
tarts, which I, being delicate, was forbidden.
Nu, they are friends of generations. It was
one thing that made the old landlord decent
the responsibility of them. What to do with
them now, there's the rub. They are farther
down the scale than the Chinese peasant, of
an ignorance that you cannot imagine; un-
couth, canny, but superstitious and filled with
dark mystical and political passions. The
intelligentsia have fought back and forth
across them until now the whole land is sullen
and distrustful. And why not? To move
them, that is not impossible. But to deter-
mine their direction and momentum ah!
With the first touch of freedom they are
dangerous and impractical the malaise of
too long thwarting."
"There is something here that I never felt
even in the far regions of China," I ventured,
after a pause. "It is to descend into the
earth as it was in the beginning."
"That is Russia," said M. Novinsky, with
36
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
his eyes on the melancholy horizon. "The
earth as it was in the beginning."
The mates of these men we often see selling
milk and game at the stations, the wind whip-
ping their skirts, broad-hipped, broad-cheeked
creatures, eyes shadowed with an indefatig-
able sadness. I watch them for hours and
M. Novinsky often joins me. Yesterday the
three of us stood at the window looking at two
huge artichokes of shawls supported by felt
boots, coquetting with the izvostchiks after
the manner of young bears. Between these
uncouth figures and M. Novinsky I feel a
certain something in common, but the General
is different.
"Bah!" he scowled. "The most wrinkled
old crone in China tosses off a street scene with
more relish than these peasants. An Italian,
a Burmese, a Chinese yes, but these Rus-
sians have no zest for life."
"Plain, endless winter, gray sky, does not
make for esprit" commented M. Novinsky,
calmly, without lifting his eyes to the General.
"No mountains, no sea; the rivers are the
only romance they have except such as they
find in their own souls. To understand the
Russian is to remember that the Russian
37
MISS AMERIKANKA
word for beauty is red. Read the Russian
geographically; and that means to see him
against the background of an endless gray
monotony. My conviction is that he drinks
and kills only because he is bored."
"But these are the brawny figures that pour
tides of men toward Europe," I ventured,
looking up at the autocratic face of the
General.
"Da Slavu Bogu! They breed as fecundly
as Mother Earth herself. Their raison d'etre.
And now that the men are gone, they must
bring forth bread as they have brought forth
men."
"Men and bread bread and men." The
words wearied my imagination. I felt myself
sinking slowly to the earth under some mon-
strous burden.
"Don't trouble yourself, Mademoiselle. It's
their lot. A muzhik who needs a baba for
harvest, I assure you, loses little time in
courting. They are used to it." And the
General turned away from the window.
I regard the General and M. Novinsky and
then I look at these babas outside in the snow.
Again I am struck with incredulity. Are they
gf the sajne race? M. Novinsky is finely rno4-
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
eled; face narrow, ey$s with more than a
tinge of Eastern inscrutability, skin fine in
texture, ringers nervously intelligent. In the
canine world he would be a borzoi. The
cigarette-case he has just laid down is shagreen
because he likes the feel, and stamped with a
tiny monogram in gold. A piece of peach-
blow or sang de bceuf he handles as if he were
worshiping. He has a passion for French
novels. The story he told me yesterday of a
Japanese girl near whom he stood for morning
ablutions at an inn in Tokio was related with
the subtlety of a Frenchman and the naivete
of an Italian, and probably no one but a Rus-
sian could have given it point in so many
different languages. The flower of an ex-
tremely sophisticated civilization, superfici-
ally everything that the peasant is not, he is.
Russia with all her sullen monotonies offers
the most brutal of contrasts. And yet, be-
tween M. Novinsky and the muzhiks I feel an
indefinable something in common; perhaps
only a simplicity.
The General is more baffling. Dinner we
always have at night in his compartment.
There are cavaire and soup, with fish and olives
and Siberian game. Ivan Caspitch places
39
MISS AMERIKANKA
two bundles on the table, between which the
decorations of the General's uniform gleam
like the jewels of the Mother of God. The
effect is somber but rich and Russian. I like
to watch the shadows play across the Gener-
al's face, his eyes darkening, his gaunt body
relaxed against the cushions, his fingers dex-
terously rolling a cigarette, speaking English
rapidly, brilliantly and with more distinction
than an Englishman. One forgets the indif-
ference of the steppe, the darkness closing
down like a cowl. He is interested in Amer-
ican women he says they sip the honey from
the flowers of the world a man for whom, I
am certain, life has run swift and deep.
Twice when I have discussed a man, he has
dismissed him with a shrug and the final
damnation, "He knows nothing of life."
Always he seems quaffing greedily at life
before some cold finality overwhelms him. I
wonder sometimes if he fears to meet his
death. Yesterday, when he had been mood-
ily watching the steppe, he turned away.
"The dark door," he said, and to-day again
almost with superstition. What life means
for him I do not know ; not what it means to
me nor, perhaps, to M. Novinsky, smoking
40
BLOTTING THE ESCUTCHEON
quietly in the corner, and watching him with
enigmatic eyes.
M. Novinsky, I am beginning to suspect,
holds the General in distrust. He is of too
excellent technique to disclose it, and perhaps
it would never have penetrated my conscious-
ness had it not been for a sudden flaring-up
to-day, after a discussion with the General.
" Half-breed !" M. Novinsky exclaimed, con-
temptuously, picking up a volume of Ferrier,
when the General had retired to smoke.
As a matter of fact, the General does con-
fess to Teutonic blood; he has told me him-
self, with a certain arrogant pride, that he
came from Riga. Perhaps this explains much
that has been puzzling me: a ruthless indif-
ference to the peasants, and an autocracy, cer-
tainly not of the Russians Russian. The
strands of the Russian loom are beginning to
separate. Is the General that type of Ger-
man bureaucrat who has denied freedom to
the most innately democratic people in the
world?
"And are these Baltic-Germans to officer the
war?" I murmur, half to myself, looking at
M. Novinsky, who continues to gaze at the
far gray horizon.
41
MISS AMERIKANKA
M. Novinsky is recovering from a long ill-
ness and is disqualified for military service,
but I hazard that something other than a
fling at the capital hurries this slim, keen
Slavophil toward Europe.
IV
CHRISTMAS ON THE STEPPE
CHRISTMAS in Siberia! That is, of
course, for a vagabond American. Rus-
sian Christmas lies thirteen days ahead. It
is a Christmas which, I dare say, when I am
old I shall count an illusion. Even now it
seems a flying chimera. At least we are on
what one without a yellow - journalist con-
science might term a dash. The demand for
the General at the front has cleared the
tangle, and all the trains of horses and am-
munition, sections of gray-coated Cossacks
and of Austrian prisoners bound for the
Siberian salt-mines, have been drawn up on
sidings, while our little special rushes past
like Thompson's Hound of Heaven. All day
yesterday the track lay along Lake Baikal,
that fragment of sea imprisoned here by some
strange chance in centuries past, tossing
yesterday in a black rage. Even the General,
43
MISS AMERIKANKA
who pores all day over maps, laid down his
papers, and the strange three of us with
Ivan Caspitch and Katya at the other win-
dow stood watching the weird scene. M.
Novinsky, sensitive to all beauty, I could feel
ravaged by its splendor.
"It is a Tarn o'Shanter race," I ventured.
"For which Beardsley drew the setting."
M. Novinsky completed the fancy.
The wind crumpling and crashing down
from the Arctic was so high that one could
scarcely stand between the cars, and the lake
roared like a beast. But beyond the black
waters the sun touched the mountains with
a dazzling whiteness.
"A new vision vouchsafed by the prophets, a
city celestial let down into the world!" M.
Novinsky murmured, watching the glory with
mystic eyes.
As night fell the mystery of the lake deep-
ened. Lighted headlands jutted out into the
waters and the whole took on a new profun-
dity, surcharged with the savagery of night
and the North. I fell asleep at the window,
still watching while darkness covered the face
of the waters. When I awoke it was two
o'clock, Christmas morning in the West.
44
CHRISTMAS ON THE STEPPE
The General stood in my doorway looking, to
my sleepy gaze, like a fur-clad angel ; outside
lights were foregathering.
"Irkutsk, Mademoiselle. The express
waits!"
I shall always treasure that sally. It was
the General's one bit of humor.
The thrilling delicacy of that early morning
in the North! I looked up at my tall Rus-
sians. M. Novinsky was breathing the air
of home; his long gray-blue eyes shone with
a nervous excitement. The General showed
less emotion. Through a silvery snow tissue
the lights of the big white station gleamed
with the festive air of an enchanted castle.
With its silvery blues and grays, its ethereal
other- worldliness, it might have been a scene
from Maeterlinck, incredibly lovely.
The General and M. Novinsky saw to a
ticket and a place in the post-train toward
Harbin for Katya, a little dazed but mainly
stolid, whose going wrung a tear from a Cos-
sack's eye, and then we wandered inside the
station. M. Novinsky and I sat down under
the dusty artificial palms to drink black cof-
fee from tall glasses, while the General found
acquaintance among the sworded and booted
45
MISS AMERIKANKA
officers with whose greens, blues and crimsons
the crowd was irradiated. A strange Christ-
mas!
After the wintry solitudes of the plain the
interior of the station seemed almost gay,
but it was a delusive gaiety, which be-
tokened the infection of humanity. Plainly
we had left the steppe. For some reason, dif-
ficult to define, it was less Siberian and more
Russian. The General and M. Novinsky, too,
seemed more Russian than in Peking, as if in
mingling with their own race they had ac-
quired a new access of nationality. On the
whole, the officers were well-set-up looking
men and somehow one felt one's self nearing a
mighty vortex. The hosts were gathering;
strange ethnological types such as I had never
seen before; foreshortened faces with copper
skins; tall hawk-nosed men, long-skirted and
green-girdled; sleeping muzhik faces under
close caps all sucked and dragged by cosmic
forces there beyond their world, neither of
their willing nor their ken. It is interesting
to watch one's imagination struggle upward.
I can almost put my finger on the moment
when the realization of Great Russia moved
into a large upper chamber of my imagination.
4 6
CHRISTMAS ON THE STEPPE
It was there in the station at Irkutsk, and it
came in one clear moment like a vision, as if
I had really sat on the rim of the sun with
Uriel from^the beginning of the world. I saw
a white level sweeping from the Pacific to the
Urals and rushing then from the Urals to
Western Europe, spreading north to the Arctic
Circle and melting to the south under the
blue skies of Crimea cool crystal spaces
greater than the surfaces of the moon which
watched over our voyagings. Across the wan
surfaces drifted saffron horsemen out of the
East, yellow clouds crossing the face of the
earth a tide that ebbed and flowed, advanced
and retreated receded to the East and there
for centuries rested. And now again the
cycle begins again a yellow tide flows toward
Europe ; variegated races, aliens among them-
selves, eying one another strangely, forsaking
their tents, their izbas, the dreams of their
youth, the work of their hands, now ten
centuries later to gather under one stand-
ard, to fight under one command of the
Great White Czar. "Not a nation, but a
world." I dimly comprehended. I went to
sleep dreaming of chill surfaces of the moon
Across which rayed shadowy variegated figures,
4?
MISS AMERIKANKA
streaming in a mighty flood toward a giant
mill-race somewhere there beyond.
A grotesque Christmas! I awoke in the
express, the sun shining and the whole land-
scape looking like a monster Christmas card,
silvered and frosted and ready to mail.
There through the world, in London and New
York, Christmas chimes were ringing. Pack-
ages were being untied and gay little notes
opened, and children were pulling toys out of
their stockings. I looked out at the monotony
of the steppe, at a row of birches fluttering
and dancing in the breeze.
But there was one bit of holiday. A plum-
pudding had been thrust into the car by a
kind English friend the last moment in
Peking. From Chinese train to Japanese,
from the Japanese train to the post bad 'cess
to it from the post to the special, from the
special to the express, we attended that pud-
ding his" Excellency the General, M. Novin-
sky and I. The Russians had never tasted
English plum-pudding and I was eager that
this should be irresistible. My first mission
this morning was to consult the chef. "Like
so many other things Russian," the General
48
CHRISTMAS ON THE STEPPE
assured me, "he will not be Russian at all, but
French." And French he was, smilingly,
piquantly French, as incongruous as a Paris
hat in the Siberian steppe. With a flashing
smile, which had lost none of its French
savoire faire in the wilderness, he promised me
that his sauce would make other puddings
taste like brown paper. It did. I knew that
it was a triumph the minute I saw the Gen-
eral's face. Under the new law there was no
champagne, but the Russians ate to Christ-
mas liberally.
"To America!" The General commanded
the table like a swarthy ikon.
"To Russia!" offered M. Novinsky, cos-
mopolitan, elegant.
"To the Entente!" I proposed, clutching at
the side of the rocking train.
"To an English plum-pudding made by a
Chinese cook, sauced by a French chef,
served by a Tartar on a rocking trans-Siberian
train," M. Novinsky rose again to the delight
of all the enormously dining guests, smiling
at us across the red table-cloths in the murky
little car, ' ' and British to the end !" What an
infinitesimal point of gaiety we were in that
somber brooding!
49
MISS AMERIKANKA
The Russian express is not so luxuriously
appointed as the Wagon Lits, but I should not
hesitate to commend it to a traveler. In fact,
to me it is depressingly comfortable but my
standards are a vagabond's. No more scurry-
ing off the train; no more soup from which
one may fish a whole course dinner, sans sweets
and cigarettes, eaten with red-bearded giants
who might pray to their own images for those
of the saints; no more candle-lighted dinners
a trois, with the darkness tipped over one
like a bowl. No more ministrations of Ivan
Caspitch. The salt would have lost its savor
indeed did not a new interest appear over the
horizon, numerous troop-trains carrying Aus-
trian and German prisoners.
Our train halts frequently and we cross the
tracks to talk to these "tattered creatures
who were once men." The rank and file of
them are different from our friends, the Cos-
sacks; a trifle more sophisticated, a little less
aloof, more quickly given to an intimate
a too intimate smile than the Cossacks.
Their clothing is thin for Siberian winds. I
saw one man yesterday leaning out of a box-
car window with only a vest and no shirt, but
he looked so cheerful that I wondered if it
so
CHRISTMAS ON THE STEPPE
were from choice and not compulsion. They
swarm to the windows and doors of the box-
cars where they are packed like traditional
herrings, with as keen interest in what may
be forthcoming from our side as we have in
theirs. They even board our train and strag-
gle through the cars unkempt gray men with
gold-exploring eyes, begging always the same
thing, always and without variation, ciga-
rettes. Papirossi will be as thoroughly em-
bedded in the vocabulary of the German as
coffee was rooted in the palate of the Viennese
after the Napoleonic wars. It is only the
men who thus fraternize. The officers are a
handsome, scowling lot, who seem always to
look beyond, into the heart of the Tyrol.
"Where were they taken?" I asked the
General yesterday, of an uncouth band who
were fighting to get within the range of my
camera.
"I never ask," the General answered, with
pointed brevity. I had blundered in the sol-
diers' world, indelicately.
"There are no guides in evidence. They
wander about at will?"
"The steppe itself is a guide that never
sleeps," stated the General. And I knew
5 51
MISS AMER1KANKA
that he spoke grimly true. Any invasion of
that white sanctity spells swift and inexorable
death.
Sometimes the wind moans across the
waste until I cannot sleep, but high above the
wind and the rush of the train come the
fragments of a song in a flash our express has
passed and gone but the memory lingers.
Whatever else slips through memory's net,
never will it be those snatches of song heard
on the steppe in the watches of the night
the melody of men crossing the void to keep
their tryst with death.
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
EVEN a fine style may grow monotonous,
and the steppe is akin to le grand style.
For days, more than ten now, my eyes have
implored the plain for an elevation, even the
slightest aspiring point in the level, but the
only answer has been more level. This
morning Ivan Caspitch awoke me at five to be-
hold the Urals, the caesura between Europe and
Asia. If seas flow between the Wests, what
a mighty break should yawn here between the
West and the East! Together we stood at
the window, scanning the hollow gray light,
Ivan Caspitch stolid and bulky in the half-
light and I shivering in my shuba, straining
my eyes for the pause between two con-
tinents.
"Where are they, Ivan?" I demanded. "I
cannot see them." My acquaintance with
the Urals had been mainly with lapis lazuli
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MISS AMERIKANKA
in the jewelers' windows, but I should have
been content with the earthiest earth had it
been mountains. But for all my vigilance,
there was only a placid flowing.
"There, barishnya" Ivan Caspitch pointed
to a darker scattering of forest swelling slight-
ly to the left and right. "There, we are
crossing them now. Bozhe moil bolshoi
vyeter!"
"Bolshoi vyeter!" Indeed it was, a great
wind. To that I agreed. It shrieked like
fiends from the Deserts of Nowhere, though
I had not known how to say it in Russian.
But mountains ! No mountains, only a barely
perceptible flaring up ancj. then quickly dying
down into lethargy. How like life is the
steppe, without plan, prologue, chapters, or
theme !
"The Urals," Ivan Caspitch affirmed,
briefly.
I looked at Ivan Caspitch as he stood in
the early morning darkness, broadly blocked,
neutral in color, without a single incisive
feature; the product and the symbol of that
somber, implacable, infinite heath.
"Ivan," I cried, "it is terrible! Do you
never fear and hate it the steppe?"
54
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
" Nu, barishnya, we are used to it." Ivan
Caspitch shrugged his shoulders stolidly.
The background is always the same, but
against its white monotone is imprinted a
various design. The last few days the pat-
tern has changed noticeably from the new of
Siberia to the old of Russia. We have left the
pencil sketches of the birches and now we are
among the somber oils of the deep forest.
There are more villages now and more fre-
quently the spires and domes of Russian
churches seen dimly through the flying snow.
More often little log huts, izbas, edge their
way out of the forest and blink at the world
like curious owls; and the peasant himself
comes out also to blink at the world or moves
along the clearing but another fruit of
the forest, like mushrooms and the lichens
among which he grows. Assuredly this is
different. Siberia I felt young, vigorous, the
pioneer. But Russia I feel old and weary,
the melancholy and mellow. Russia, the
mother.
What people emerge so simply from the
black earth and ascend so simply to God?
Few comprehend these children of the forest
as does Stephen Graham. Read the chapter
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MISS AMERIKANKA
on the "Age of Wood" in his Undiscovered
Russia.
The muzhik's cradle is a pine hole, scooped out like
an ancient boat. It hangs with hempen ropes from a
springy sapling in his mother's cottage. His coffin is
but a larger cradle, a larger, longer pine scooped out,
with an ax-hewn plank to cover it, and wooden pegs
to nail it down ; and between the cradle and the coffin he
lives, surrounded by wood. A robust baby, he clambers
out of his cradle onto a pine floor, also of grand ax-
hewn planks, too solid to wear into holes like other
men's poor floors. He crawls about until he learns
to run from one hand-carved chair to another, and at
last takes his seat at the table his father made a month
before the wedding. He crosses himself to the sacred
symbols made on birch bark. He eats all his meals
with a wooden spoon; forks and knives are almost
unknown in the forest. He eats off wooden plates or
out of wooden Russian basins. Even the salt-cellar
is from the forest and was plaited by his sister from reeds
last year. He gets big enough to go out to the forest
with his brothers and sisters, and they take birch-
bark baskets and gather mushrooms or yagodi all
forest fruits are called yagodi, berries. Vania they
call him little Vania Vaska when he looks like a
dirty little urchin. See him every day in muddy little
bare legs, hunting in the forest for berries or chasing the
cows who have gone astray there. He learns to walk
nimbly on the uneven, moss-covered ground, and can
even run among the broken branches and thorns and
leap from one dead tree to another or swarm up the
straight gray-green trunks. He learns to trap rabbits
56
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
and to catch young woodcocks, knows the wolf paw,
the fox paw, the bear paw, in the soft soil. The
priest teaches him a little in the school about God and
the Czar and observances of the Church, and such
education suffices for Varna. He is becoming a woods-
man. The forest is the best school, but he never re-
members how it was he learned there. He came to
know that when the sun set it was evening, and when it
rose it was morning. He learned that the foliage of a
tree takes shape according to the sunshine it gets and
the time of day the sunshine reaches it, and when he
is in the dark forest he knows by the shape of a trunk
the way out. Every tree is a compass in itself. But
so deep and subconscious is his knowledge that he does
not look at the tree at all. He does not know how he
knows. Ask him the way out of a wood and he will
point in this direction or that, as the case may be.
But he will not be able to tell you how he knew.
As I said, the forests are behind his eyes as well as in
front of them. The forests look into the simple soul,
placid as a lake, and draw their own pictures there.
The time comes for Vania to marry, and he had
better build himself an izba. It is of pine, and three
friends help him to build it, while his father stands by
and directs. They have no planes and chisels, saws,
squares, joiner's tables, and the like. All is wrought
by ax and every joint is ax-cut and every smooth
surface is ax-hewn. The walls of the house and of the
great stove are paneled. Vania hews out a sleeping-
shelf for himself and his wife above the oven. He
makes unbreakable chairs to sit on and make merry,
and a table, and finally, without other tool than his ax,
builds a cart to take himself and his bride from the
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MISS AMERIKANKA
church, and he builds the shafts and the Russian collar
arch to which the horse is yoked all of wood; even
the wheels are not faced with iron, and the harness is
made of wood and leather.
One night great-grandfather Vania that is, the
father of Vania's father comes into the new house
and prays to God. Then he tells them that his time
is passing. He is an old man. To-morrow he will
take a new log and build a coffin for himself, and he
will cut a wooden cross to put over his grave. Grand-
father Vania makes his coffin and puts it away until
it may be necessary. Meanwhile it may hold rye meal,
or, if there is little space in the old home, he can make
a bed in it and sleep in it o' nights. The time will come
when he will rest there all night and not rise the next
morning. Old Grandfather Vania will be dead.
Vania's father and Vania and other villagers will carry
the coffin out to the grave, and the old man's body
will be committed to the ancient pine mold.
Then Vania's father, himself a grandfather, follows
in the steps of man down to the grave, and Vania
ripens to his prime and little Vania grows up and
marries. All among the standing trees. Little Vania
has a child and the whole of human life turns round a
quarter-circle. So on, da capo.
There were ten of us when the express left
Irkutsk: a Siberian mine-owner and his wife,
so rich that one talked about them in whispers;
a bearded engineer from the Amur; the
Spanish-eyed, little Russian wife of an officer;
a baby who wailed with true Russian pessi-
58
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
mism; an old nyanya, voluminously clothed in
a white apron and coif, and equally enveloped
in folk-lore and superstition; and a cafe
chantant singer from Vladivostok, black-eyed,
crisply curled, and swathed in velvet and
furs after the manner of the divine Sarah.
But Russia has been populating her plains
longer than Siberia, and we are picking up
travelers. At Cheliabinsk there were several
passengers for the second-class and a Polish
woman appeared in the first-class, with whom
I must share my luxurious compartment.
And to-day Gogol's Taras Bulba himself
came aboard!
Most of the jollity of the car is shut up
in the compartment of the Siberian mine-
owner a thick-bodied, red-lipped man whom
I do not like and his wife, with both of whom
the General has made friends. M. Novinsky
knits his eyebrows and evidently he thinks
his own thoughts. Nevertheless, we both
sometimes join the group. It is difficult to
resist Madame at tea-time, when the samovar
is set. And perhaps now I have peeped
through another window into the General's
soul. Cherchez la femme, always, with a
Russian. Madame is a startling, fascinating
59
MISS AMERIKANKA
woman even among Russians, where one
finds color and fire. She is a type of the
south, from the vineyards and sunny hills of
Little Russia. Wide plains and the gray
skies could never have bred her so warm
and lazy and luxuriant, hair so auburn, eyes
a sapphire blue that bring constantly to mind
Crimean seascapes, and her laugh deep-
throated and rich.
If I were a man I should pray to be de-
livered from temptation and take the next
train!
Russian women are a bit unconventional
shall I say? in their dress. Both Madame
and the cafe chantant singer wear dressing-
gowns all day long. Both dine in their com-
partments, served by a battalion of waiters
and small boys, carrying all the dishes of a
course dinner through three cars. Madame's
robe is a zebra stripe such as Bakst would
hang on an Egyptian dancer, though Ma-
dame's figure is not that of an Egyptian; it is
in this robe that she dispenses a lavish tea
every afternoon. Heaven and the chef only
know where the dainties come from; it is
tea here on the plain as if we were in the
Plaza: Russian sweetmeats, caviare, nuts and
60
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
jam, pate de fois gras, and hothouse grapes.
One is expected not to eat and drink, but to
eat and drink more. If the Indian's accusa-
tion against the white man, that he plays with
his mouth, be true, the Russian is the arch-
criminal.
Every one speaks Russian, of course, hissing,
purling Russian, Madame's voice dominating,
as does her personality. I cannot under-
stand always, but I know that her language,
usually cultured, sometimes slips into the
voice and accent of a country baba. Yester-
day M. Novinsky glanced at me quickly to
see if I had understood. Madame followed
his glance.
"Monsieur Galahad!" she smiled, mock-
ingly.
If one crossed her! But then one does not!
Man is her game and him she hunts with a
splendid savagery that makes an English-
woman seem a cold, neuter creature beside this
Malva of Gorky.
The r61e of the cafe chantant singer is deep
seclusion. The Little Russian coquettes, but
even her Spanish eyes are ineffectual, pitted
against la belle sauvage. It is the bridge-
builder who most torments me with the re-
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MISS AMERIKANKA
minder of scenes his eyes have traveled over
and mine can never behold. But I can never
talk with him; he is dedicated to la belle
sauvage. Curiously enough, the most per-
sistent face is the servant of the Siberian
mine-owner whom I see walking outside in
the snow, a bearded man with smoky-blue
eyes and a peculiarly well co-ordinated car-
riage.
"Extraordinary type for a servant," I re-
marked to the General yesterday, watching
the fine stride, certainly not that of the class
to which he belongs.
"A lumpish fellow when one speaks to
him," returned the General, glaring moodily
out of the window.
Has my reading of human nature gone so
far awry, or is he other than he seems? But
why should the General ? It is puzzling.
Yesterday I stumbled on a treasure. It
came through the cracked piano which makes
the journey to and fro across Siberia in the
dining-car. I was improvising accompani-
ments to negro melodies, which M. Novinsky
had found charming, one gray day when the
darkness closed down early. Suddenly I felt
another presence and I turned around to see a
62
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
crooked, stocky figure at the other end of the
car, our waiter, his eyes blue, his face shining
with joy.
"Barina, Tartar ski ya," he said, proudly,
approaching with a napkin on his arm. "I
am Tartar! Yalublumysiky. Yatantzyu. I
love music. I dance." He threw out his
arms with an indescribable gesture of for-
gotten freedom.
Shades of Genghis Khan! The son and
heir of those vigorous hordes that overran
the world from Peking to Budapest, and from
the northern steppe to India this mild-eyed
creature, with shoulders bent, respectfully
waiting, a napkin on his arm! But if there
be any Tartar blood in his veins, it leaps up
with the music. I never play but that he
tells me that he is not Russki, but Tartarski.
Then he squares his shoulders, clears the
table, and marshals the crumbs off with the
air of the conqueror.
This is the sixteenth day since we went out
from the walls and towers of Peking. Every
one agrees that the journey is skuchno. The
train rocks abominably. I think I shall
never get it out of my brain. La Polskaya
lessened the space in my compartment,
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MISS AMERIKANKA
but also my ennui! She is excellent for my
Russian, too, since she speaks no English.
And for me, there is the joy of pursuing strange
impressions and penetrating farther into
strange lands.
La Polskaya is not a beauty. I should say
that nature is decidedly in arrears with her.
In fact, she represents about every feature of
Slavic plainness dingy skin, broad figure and
face, and apathetic expression. If it were
not for her eyes but she has kind, redeeming
Russian eyes. By day she reads Maeter-
linck's Death and smokes. By night she
wears gloves and continues to smoke. And
that reminds me that, in spite of her declara-
tion that nothing matters after forty, La
Polskaya has a weakness. Yesterday she
gravely produced two bottles of hair tonic
for my opinion. She had spent thirty dol-
lars in Harbin, she told me, for cosmetics and
lotions, and felt grieved that I could not
guarantee results. I consoled her by promis-
ing her my cold-cream from America, out of
gratitude for which she has given me a box
of French powder. Now that we have ex-
changed feminine civilities, she says that she
was born and bred in Warsaw, though I
6 4
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
should have guessed her a product of an out-
post of civilization.
My disrobing at night receives an embar-
rassing concentration of interest, but her
curiosity is so naive and her enjoyment so
sincere that I cannot show annoyance. Every
detail of dress, every movement of my toilet,
is honored with an individual attention which
in no whit diminishes with repetition. In
fact, La Polskaya quite settles down to the
half-hour. Only once, in the Rockies, have
I come upon anything like this, when a wee
girl, deserted by her mother in a cattle-camp,
used to ride her pony up our trail with the
sunrise, tuck herself away in a corner of the
cabin, and sit silent as the Sphinx the whole
golden day, fathoms deep in content at the
mere sight of a woman. We laugh a good
deal, and then when I am safely tucked away
La Polskaya lights a cigarette, with a sigh of
satisfaction, declares I am a child what is
in her mind I don't know puts on her
gloves, and lights another cigarette. The last
thing at night I am aware of is the aroma of
her cigarette, and it is my alarm in the
morning.
Yesterday I dressed and went into the din-
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MISS AMERIKANKA
ing-car early, and there, with a samovar be-
fore him, I found Taras Bulba. He must
have walked in from the steppe in seven-
league boots. I had been counting some of
the other belted men we saw as giants, but
he dwarfed them all a stature possible to be
conceived, it would seem, only at some earlier,
lustier period. His head was a viking's head
and crowned with heavy hair, which, I fancy,
could rumple mightily in his berserker rages.
As I entered he lifted his eyes in one power-
ful glance, and then apparently consigned me
to oblivion while he pursued his cakes and tea.
It was distressingly incongruous to see him
eat cakes and tea ; it ought to have been meat
torn in shreds and wassail out of one of those
up-curving Russian beakers. I wanted to call
to him to stand up and swing a battle-ax in-
stead of a teaspoon, but it was only a teaspoon.
When he rolled his way into the car, I followed
timidly after. Verily, the lion and the mouse.
I know no nation in which I feel a giant's power
physically and mentally as I do in the
Russian.
There is a stronger feel of civilization in the
air now, and more spurred and booted officers
are joining the train. To-morrow, if all goes
66
CHILDREN OF THE FOREST
well, the train-master announces that we
shall be in Petrograd; all the home-going
Russians have been telegraphing the news of
their imminent arrival. It wraps me with a
realization of how far there through the earth
lies America. We must always fly thus, it
seems perhaps into eternity so many days
have we fled in this narrow space between
earth and sky. Perhaps I should be content
if it were so, for I am "used to it." And to-
day I feel a waif standing before strange gates.
Here are friends. There who can say?
Who ever enters an unknown land without
a sense of mystery both alluring and repelling?
There on the plain, somewhere in the dimness,
lies a city whose existence has drawn me
seventeen days across this desert whiteness
a city I have not seen, whose streets I shall
wander, roofs that will lodge me, sky and
snow and river that will be mine, friends and
tides of influence a whole new world of
thought and feeling perhaps change which
in my natural world would never have been.
How dare we boldly evoke these unfamiliar
worlds for ourselves out of the void, forsaking
our own paths to explore their mysterious
ways!
6 67
PART II
VI
I
PETER'S CAPITAL
pETROGRAD! No land "east of the
1 sun and west of the moon," as I had
feared, but true ! That is, I feel a city there,
though my eyes are still baffled by the curtain
of darkness which has not as yet lifted. It is
morning, eight by the French clock on the
wall, but there is not the least rift in the
gloom, only a sense of something strange out-
lying there a trampling of boots, men pouring
endlessly through the streets, and a rumbling
of guns. They are shifting troops. I hear
a hoarse song and a sharp ura. How different,
how exceedingly different this turbulence from
the peace of the East, the solitary heart of the
whiteness from which we have come!
We were nearly the whole of the night finding
this miracle of the marshes. Eleven came,
twelve, one. The gaiety that had sprung up
like a breeze at the announcement of our ar-
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MISS AMERIKANKA
rival died down. The General was wrapped
in his own thoughts and M. Novinsky smoked,
moodily silent, and I felt a strange home-
sickness, not for place, but for spiritual kin-
dred. The General is still an enigma, but
M. Novinsky has become a charming friend
and companion. Yesterday he was not; to-
day he is; to-morrow he will cease to be.
How strange it all is !
Clouds were crossing the face of the moon,
shaping, reshaping, merging again. The wings
of the Angel of Wrath beat past us as we
fled down the Valleys of Time, a,nd only a
miracle, it seemed, could save us or discover
a city, other than mirage, in that wild in-
candescence. But at three the sky was il-
lumined in the west as if by a huge candle,
as the train flew on and the flare brightened
and resolved itself into myriads of points
scattering on the flame. They were the first
lights of "Peter's window toward Europe."
The trans-steppe journey was finished. At
four the train discharged its burden of Asio-
European travelers into the echoing Alex-
ander III. station. It seemed the porten-
tous arrival of ocean travelers rather than
that of a train. Every one met welcoming
72
PETER'S CAPITAL
faces, which, translated into Russian, means
arms.
That is, every one met welcome except one
Americaine, and I took refuge among the lug-
gage and stared at the feather-bed izvostchiks
tied about the middle with rainbow sashes.
The General was engulfed in the embrace of
two tall sons, and M. Novinsky had vanished
behind an astrakhan coat and cap. The
sight of women embracing publicly always em-
barrasses me a trifle, and as for men, I have
considered it a good reason for not being
Continental. Perhaps, to speak the truth,
I had a touch of three-in-the-morning forlorn-
ity. But the absence of welcome meant no
lack of warm farewell. La Polskaya wept
Slavonically on my shoulder. " Moya milaya"
she wailed. For the moment she was parting
with a friend of a lifetime. The General
clicked his heels together in military fashion
and waived my expressions of gratitude with
a French compliment.
"Shall we meet again, Mademoiselle? Ah,
it is on the laps of the gods. Proshchaiete. For-
give my sins. I leave to-morrow for the
front." He kissed my hand; I wished it had
been a white, perfumed hand, such as I am
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MISS AMERIKANKA
certain the General loves. A stiff bow to
M. Novinsky and then, the luggage having
been collected and laded on the leather-
aproned saints, M. Novinsky and his brother
led the way through the echoing station to the
dark bundles of fur outside, stowed me in a
swaying shell, and we clattered off down the
"main street of All the Russias."
How Russian M. Novinsky and his brother
looked in their Russian setting, pouring forth
a stream of language on each other; this
brother who comes for one day's leave from
the Grand Duke's staff and returns imme-
diately to the front. Most of the talk was
French, but the ejaculations were Russian.
I was too occupied with the square velvet sofa-
cushion hat of the izvostchik, too agitated with
the street, which I found to be the Nevsky,
and the signs, which I discovered I could
read, to heed the conversation. A river of
street here, a continent of square there, bulky
geologic strata of houses.
"And how do you feel it?" M. Novinsky's
brother asked, with a smile like Dmitri Nikola-
ivitch's, as we turned into the shadow of an im-
mense cathedral that somehow wafted back the
memory of Egypt and the temples on the Nile.
74
PETER'S CAPITAL
"If Japan is a miniature, Russia was done
by a scene-painter," I hazarded.
11 Quite true," he laughed, showing his white
teeth. "Nothing is small in Russia, not even
the virtues or the vices."
"And least of all the cobblestones and the
darkness," I could have added. "Or the
loneliness." I could have wept on M. Novin-
sky's elegant and unaware shoulder.
M. Novinsky and the General had debated
all the way across the steppe as to which hotel
to commit me to, and the decision had finally
fallen on the Angleterre as the dullest hotel in
Petrograd. I understood when I saw it.
But for the boy with peacock feathers in his
cap and a red rubashka, the general assur-
ance of Russian literature, I should have re-
signed myself to an English Sunday pall. A
whiskered portier has assigned me to this
room, and here I have been deposited by a
green-baize apron and sit in the glow of a
porcelain stove.
Black-earth Russia, armed Russia, Holy
Russia, potential Russia, Russia the bread-
giver of nations all lie out there in the void.
I wish the bread-giver would vouchsafe me a
morsel. There is not even a crumb, and I
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MISS AMERIKANKA
am famished. The darkness is Stygian; one
might loop it up, but it would always tumble
down, immense and suffocating. The last
familiar letter of my alphabet has vanished;
everything is written in Cyrillic letters and
punctuated with bearded Scythians. I won-
der could even the angel Uriel say why I
rocked seventeen days across Siberia !
The curtain has lifted! But not on the
"gayest capital in Europe," not while there is
still a trail to Vienna and Budapest, and even
blithe old London in May ! Oh, for the purple
skies of Egypt, or the black and gold of
Nikko, or the cherry blossoms of Myanoshita,
to waft away the memory of this dun city on a
swamp! Monotony on the steppe is accept-
able; it comes to have the assurance of a
great, buoyant friendship, but by what right
has a capital to be written in gray? Twilight
skies, trailing mists, a melancholy folk emerg-
ing oddly as in a dream, muffled silence.
Small wonder that Peter must needs flog his
subjects into leaving belfried Moscow for this!
The braziers blaze up, giant tiger-lilies
against the snow. The blue poison mists,
which the swamp exhales to veil the banalities
of the street, offer their own peculiar welcome
76
PETER'S CAPITAL
to foreigners, and I am the victim of one of
the newly-arrived-in-Russia influenzas. It
leaves me of a mind with the American
attache who despatched a fierce diatribe to
the State Department, to the effect that
children could not live in Petrograd he him-
self being fifty and a bachelor and took the
first boat for America. For myself, I could
happily yield up my ghost at the foot of an
ikon and leave my aching bones under a
broad Russian cross in a quiet old nunnery
yard. And this is the land that brings the
devotional look to M. Novinsky's eyes, eyes
that still remember sunny Vevey, Florence,
and the Seine ! ' ' Something poignant ' ' yes,
perhaps. I can dimly sense it. The Slav
to his East, but I will have mine, junk sails and
pagodas.
The portier and the peacock boy and my
waiter are kind, and I am not the object of
more staring than a woman not yet decrepit
may expect if she travels alone on the Con-
tinent. I have always given the palm for real
annoyance to a Frenchman, but yesterday I
was ready to yield it to the Slav. But for
M. Novinsky, I should believe half of what I
read of these veneered Tartars. It was in the
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MISS AMERIKANKA
reading-room that the staring began, quiet
and unobtrusive. I retreated to the drawing-
room, again to be stared at politely but inter-
mittently until I fled. By a quick detour I
reached the door, but there I was a prisoner
while for two hours a steady tramping con-
tinued before my door. To-day, again, the
assiduous stare. I fled this time to the
manager.
"Forgive him," said the manager, "he is an
ill-mannered person." Forgive him! Kak
Rysski that manager!
Already I ache with the violence of Rus-
sian contrasts. Is not this the land whose
women Tolstoi and Turgenev portray? Are
not these Russian women vigorous, emanci-
pated, comrades to man in every national and
progressive movement? Has the sex-ridden
world ever seen such camaraderie? And yet
this Russian treats me like a Turk.
As soon as Russian holidays are over I
shall cease to be merely a hotel denizen and
go just across the Moika to live with Olga
Stepanovna, my godmother's friend; per-
haps Russia then will give up her secret. Olga
Stepanovna called to-day, archly pretty in
her furs, wistful brown eyes, cheeks pink from
78
PETER'S CAPITAL
the cold and that intangible fineness that satis-
fies in friendship. She is private secretary
at one of the embassies where she and her
husband often danced at the embassy balls.
Some story, I am certain, lies back of that
chiseled face, struck off so incisively with
Slavic gaiety and finished so softly with
Slavic gentleness.
M. Novinsky came, too. I discovered my
voice making off into forbidden side-streets of
delight as we whisked away in a breathless
sleigh to collect our luggage from the Customs.
It is delicious to see a face which does not
press in the fact of one's alienage. Russia is
stranger even than China; the very extrava-
gance of China sets it apart, but Russia one
expects to penetrate, and does not.
The Customs were a FingaTs cave. Each
bearded giant arriving bowed to the room,
kissed the hands of the women clerks, and
crossed himself to the ikons in the corner.
Over all hovered an ancient, musty mystery.
" I wish I might see it with American eyes,"
said M. Novinsky.
"They have all been clipped from the
Civil War," I ventured. "I have seen them
all on my grandfather's wall,"
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MISS AMERIKANKA
"That is Russia," answered M. Novinsky,
himself a particularly modern and immaculate
note in this ancient, ikoned murkiness, "the
oldest of Old World settings, and the newest of
ideas." I wondered what it meant to him,
returned from "beyond the borders," all this
shagginess, this superstition, this unventilated
North.
M. Novinsky 's card accelerated the pace
and augmented the bowing. He is bringing
magnificent brocades and Han bronzes. The
official passed our trunks perfunctorily after
he had tried to open a cake of my soap. I
was closing my luggage when my glance fell
upon a trunk at the other end of a room from
which the examiners were lifting guns! Be-
side it stood a man with particularly well-
poised shoulders and blue eyes.
"Look!" I whispered to M. Novinsky.
"That man the mine-owner's servant."
The sharp glance which M. Novinsky
turned upon him had little of the exquisite
dreamer.
"Cest vrai," he answered, speaking per-
emptorily to the boy who was folding the
brocades. "Let us go." He put me quickly
into a sleigh.
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PETER'S CAPITAL
My interpreter was silent and abstracted
as we flew back to my respectable hotel
through the pastel streets, clinging limpet-
wise to that elusive sleigh which threatened
to leave us at every corner. As for me, my
color sense was becoming acclimatized. There
was a miraculous flying beauty this afternoon,
I admit, in the spires and domes, seen dimly
through a vaporous gray, the pale gold of the
monastery crosses rising amid the black filigree
of the trees, and the whiteness of the canals
broken into linear patterns by the barges. It
is the vanishing and unreal beauty of the
north, a bit low-keyed and evanescent for
eyes accustomed to the peacock Orient.
But the Customs incident. I have heard
that rifles have been imported from Tsingtau
which certain treacherous Russian factories
have used as models for accumulating stores
of ammunition fitting German not Russian
guns. Have I seen the first undercurrent in
"superb, mysterious Russia"?
To-morrow is Russian Christmas. M. No-
vinsky despatched a hasty note by messenger,
and then we sat at the window, drinking tea
and watching the sleighs dash up and bear
off the trees from the great square in front of
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St. Isaac's Cathedral. There had been a
massed formation of stiff firs pointing greenly
and blithely the chill Petrograd skies, when I
awoke, but the ranks were now plainly deci-
mated. The Nevsky Prospekt might almost
be Chicago or New York, except that it is
more snowy, more furry, and there are more
galoshes, more horses, and fewer motors.
Benevolent old gentlemen poke eleventh-hour
turkeys in the ribs; the small boy is lost
among the black-booted officers and baggy-
trousered, short-haired students ; the crowd is
beparceled with packages from the sweet-
shops and jostles no, the crowd does not
jostle as in America. Russia is of the East.
"Christmas is not the festa in Russia that
it is in England and America," I observe.
"No, with us the occasion magnificent is
Easter. Then the angels on the top of the
cathedrals trail flaming torches against the
sky and all the dusky interiors shower candles
from the highest vaulting. And it is con-
gruous that it should be so. Christmas, the
birth, for the Anglo-Saxon with his roots in
family and home. Easter, the resurrection,
for the Slav, always in quest of God!"
A certain passion kindled in M. Novinsky's
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PETER'S CAPITAL
face as we stood at the window silently watch-
ing the mammoth square enveloped in the
oncoming dusk and the great cathedral, ever
remote in its majesty, now still farther within
its shadows; the granite columns gleaming
solemnly as gleam their kinsmen on the Nile,
the great dome loSt in the chiaroscuro of
night. The Russians have a charming word,
which you understand only in Russia
sympateechnie, a word that grows tenderer
in Russian than its counterpart in French.
Do Russians love Russia? Not perhaps as
the Britisher loves the bonny isle, its sticks
and stones and every inch of the hawthorn
hedges no, not thus. The immensity of
steppe and tundra cannot thus be gathered
into an intimate personal love. Rather as
the tragic mother is Russia loved as one
loves the sorrowing Mother of God. I had
thought of Russia as fatal, mysterious, medie-
val, but to-night as I watch the moon rise
over St. Isaac's she seems, rather, gentle,
melancholy, brooding.
VII
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
IT seems unco' strange to be part of a
Russian household, perched on a white
canal flowing under a red bridge, a magnified
winter Japan. Opposite, the new hotel As-
toria strikes the one American note in Petro-
grad; on the other side stands the Russian
House of Lords. From my window I can see
the graceful Italian Embassy and what re-
mains of the German Embassy after the
populace had effaced the nude figures which
had always offended their taste. Farther
down, where the Moika wanders out to the
Neva, the yellow stucco palace of Prince
Yusuppoff stirs one's sense of romance.
Othello himself might emerge from the iron
gates. A place marked surely for Shake-
spearian tragedy! I am as puffed up as a
pouter pigeon after this Russian fashion of
welcoming a new householder! Bowls of
8 4
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
acacia from M. Novinsky fill the room with
fragrance ; and from the General came a cake
of parts, iced and garlanded like a German
denkmal, borne in by a retinue, the dvornik
and two little peasant maids.
A Russian house is designed for nothing so
prosaic as living, but for the magnificence of
entertaining. Our rooms open in a row; the
ceilings are high, the windows French, the
floors are the beautiful polished floors that
one associates with Russia after one 'has lived
in this land of wood. My room is long and
narrow and white, like a prioress's chamber.
At night I put a red cushion on the floor and
sit in the glow of my stove in the wall. Olga
Stepanovna, finding me thus, named me
Tziganka. Tziganka the blithe Russian word
for gipsy. It does bring back the feel of
junk and caravan days. Broad-waisted Sasha
supplies the stove with tindery birch bark,
the ruddy glow splashing her arms, white like
the birches themselves.
Olga Stepanovna says that when spring
opens I may have my petit dejeuner on the
balcony under the white umbrella, while the
barges trail past. It sounds Italian and
tempting, ri 'est-ce-pas? But the snow drifts
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MISS AMERIKANKA
like the setting for Snyeguritchka (The Snow
Maiden), and in the mean time I am content
with the fire gleaming across the spaces of the
polished floor and on the dull gold of old bind-
ings in the drawing-room and a cantankerous
general who hangs opposite the windows.
The samovar is always set, and Sasha or
Dasha near to give me tea. Russian tea we
have at nine at night on the gay blue-and-red
peasant cloth.
This Russian drawing-room interests me
immensely; full of luxurious trifles, bearing
an air of French sophistication, but wrapped
indisputably in the atmosphere of a country
larger than France; reminiscent of the day
when the Russian noble sought everything
French and despised everything Russian, but
wearing its French taste as a decoration, not
the measure nor the mold of its spirit. From
the massiveness of the furniture and a general
lavishness, it seems to a French drawing-
room as a man's apartment to a woman's.
There is more than a suggestion of the sensuous
Orient a case of damascened daggers and
some Persian pottery. One need not scratch
this drawing-room deep to find the Tartar!
And I know nothing more Slavic than this
86
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
acme of elegance underlaid with the bar-
baric.
We are a quiet household ; Olga Stepanovna,
my godmother's friend from her St. Peters-
burg days, and now my hostess; Agasha
Feodorovna, a gray old Russian governess of
Olga Stepanovna (Olga Stepanovna shelters all
strays, witness Agasha Feodorovna and me) ;
Sasha and Dasha, peasant maids; and Dolly,
a white doggie asleep on a blue velvet chair.
Little Dasha wakes me with peasant rounde-
lays in the firm and shining-eyed convic-
tion that she serves a princess and old
Agasha tells fairy-tales around the samovar at
night. After this enveloping mantle of Rus-
sian kindness, all other is a thin, worn little
shawl.
It was sitting in this drawing-room last
night that Olga Stepanovna told me some-
thing of the history of the Novinskys.
"One of the most interesting families in
Russia," she said, watching the fire, "and in
Russia, you know, it is far less a matter of
title than it is of great families. I knew
Madame Novinska when she was a girl, the
young Princess Korovotskaya. Originally, I
believe, they were French barons who had fled
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to Russia at the time of the Huguenot mas-
sacre; another branch went to England, and
another to Italy. The members of this branch
have intermarried with Russians until they
are pure Russian; no entangling German al-
liances. The great-great-grandmother of this
family was a woman of great spirit, whom the
Empress Elizabeth admired to the extent of
granting her immense estates in Crimea. It
was in the days when largesse from the crown
was on a colossal scale, not only lands, but
revenue, and these land-barons were poten-
tates in their own right, not unlike the lesser
Indian rajahs. There is a spicy diary, I
believe, in the Novinsky family, describing
this family traveling to and from the Crimea
carriages, outriders, postilions, children, tu-
tors, governesses, servants by the score in
the style of le grand baron. The Novinsky
collection of miniatures is one of the best in
Russia, and one of the family married an
Italian from whom she inherited a gallery of
Italian portraits. You will see this great gal-
lery at the Novinsky s'. Madame Novinska
herself much resembles her French ancestress.
Dmitri Nikolai vitch's father was her cousin, a
gallant man who lost his life in the Crimea.
88
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
"They have always stood for Russia great
in the best sense; Monarchists, but liberal.
Madame Novinska's father freed his serfs vol-
untarily and established schools for them.
In spite of the fact that they have all been
educated abroad in Paris, in Vevey, in
England they have devoted endless time
and constructive work to their estates and to
the agrarian problem ; and it is not always easy
to work with the peasants, especially in Tver,
where their land lies. They have always been
patrons of Russian art, too, even in the dark
days, when every one was building hideous
memorials to German art. In the famine of
1905 Tolstoi counted them among his chief
support, and Madame Novinska has had a
school for the revival of the ancient peasant
weaving and embroideries. A splendid fam-
ily you will find in the Novinskys, and Dmitri
Nikolaivitch, a son worthy of this tradition
and a charming younger Russian. It is the
hope of Russia's salvation, this type of young
Russia, and not the fanatic radical with
neither experience in governing nor tradition,
with no test of practical action to balance his
ungovernable theories and no conception of
the golden mean in his talk-intoxicated brain.
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MISS AMERIKANKA
The fall of bureaucracy, the establishment of
constitutional monarchy, backed by such in-
fluence as that of the Novinskys ah, there is
the hope of Russia. Would that there were
a hundred thousand of Dmitri Nikolaivitch
among the young landed nobility anywhere
among any class. Yes, a splendid tradition
the Novinsky tradition."
I was sitting in front of the fire this after-
noon, pondering a number of things I am
still a prisoner of the poison mists when
little Dasha appeared, with M. Novinsky in
her train, little Dasha stammering and blush-
ing as if she had entangled for me a grand
duke in this black-booted, immaculate figure
with the smile of a young Beethoven.
" Nu, Americaine, I have come to carry you
off to the brilliance of Petrograd," M. Novin-
sky said, depositing his stick with Dasha,
who blushed with pleasure as if some one had
bestowed upon her a coronet.
"But," I protested, "one does not go to
ballet at three in the afternoon. And that is
the brilliance of Petrograd, n'est-ce-pas?"
"No," he said, with a blithe expression
such as I had seen but once or twice on the
steppe. "One does not go to ballet at three
90
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
in the afternoon. One goes out on to the Mor-
skaya, where all the Petrograd world assembles
and the street flows like a river with those
breathless sleighs, as you call them, and
officers in red-lined capes and deep, silky furs ;
all the blues and grays deepen into velvet
blacks, whites turn to silver and the air is a
gauzy iridescence. It is the most perfect
ballet setting in Russia ! And then one drinks
tea at a little place I know on the Nevsky
Russian tea, with honey cakes and then one
goes at five to the cathedral mass for the
brilliance of Russia is a brilliance of night and
interiors."
"In time I shall be counting day but a
caesura?"
"And night the consistent interval, as it
is in Russian winter," smiled M. Novinsky,
gravely.
Dasha had been coming and going with the
tea-things, her nose and chin and eyes shining
like the seraphim. " Nyet, Dasha. No sa-
movar to-day. I am carrying the barishnya
away for tea and for mass. Otchen kraseevi
it's very beautiful, mass at Isaac's." There
is something of the Celt in M. Novinsky;
something of that exquisite sensibility of a race
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old in living. I had never been more aware
of it than when he spoke with his amazing
gentleness to the little peasant. Is this the
Russian noble, this wearing smooth of the
grooves, or is this only Dmitri Nikolai vitch?
Petrograd is brilliant by night and interiors.
I saw it to-day. And of all the pale back-
ground the shimmering opulence of the cathe-
drals is the richest punctuation. Every trav-
eler finds that the land through which he
travels is a land of contrasts, and I am no
exception. Russia is extravagant in her ex-
tremes. And from the artist's point of view
there is no more breathless turning of the
page than that from the wan streets to the
cathedral interiors, aglow with jewels and
the sheen of gold and silver, and hung with
moving veils of incense.
I have never crossed the square and failed
to be inexpressibly thrilled. It is a splendid
medieval pageant: the heavy massing of the
shadows in the great spaces; the dusky gleam
of myriad candles high in the vaulting; the
ancient barbaric mystery of the ikons; the
fall of light on the iridescent chasubles of
the priesthood emerging from the gloom of
the chancel.
92
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
"It is true," I confessed to M. Novinsky
as we stood apart in a niche. "There is a
magnificat of splendor in this shadow-filled,
incensed, and jeweled dusk, beside which an
English cathedral seems cold and a Chinese
temple barren."
M. Novinsky 's face bore something of the
rapt look with which he handles an old ivory.
"Vereschagin painted it in his Japanese in-
teriors," he said, lifting his eyes to the blue
light playing about the lapis lazuli columns,
"this immemorial magnificence, this heaping
of treasure without ostentation, but with an
exaltation strange to the intellectualist of the
West. Once having seen a Russian cathedral,
one can never doubt that Russia's Christianity
is of the East, and her spirit of worship is that
of the oldest of mankind." As he spoke with
his eyes turned upward to the pillared dusk of
the cathedral Egyptian in its majesty I
think something new stirred in my conscious-
ness of religion.
M. Novinsky was keeping an appointment,
but I lingered for hours in the shadow of a
niche while the stream of humanity ebbed and
flowed around the feet of the Mother of God;
and above the worshipers, through the spaces
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of the cathedral and into the vaulting, poured
a flood of tender, compassionate Russian sing-
ing. The French say that a man is his style,
but the Russian is his religion. And the
more one stands in the sanctuary the more
deeply one peers into his soul. Can one ever
forget how the souls of Gorky's submerged
ones floated away on a ribbon of sound when
first one and then another took up the song
in the damp bakery cellar? I have never
heard such singing. Waves of religious feel-
ing "rolled through me, as through a great
organ."
I have always resented Life's caricatures
those faces nearing the journey's end, piti-
lessly distorted with toil and sorrow! To-day
I saw a bit of human wreckage kneeling before
the ikon of the Virgin Mary, touching her head
reverently to the floor and crossing herself
with the broad sign of the Russian cross.
But when she raised her head her eyes fastened
on the Mother of God with a tenderness for
one moment of which I would gladly have
given ten years of my life. Perhaps it is
superstition unquestionably, the Slav needs
to associate works with faith but I cannot
but believe that this annihilation of self and
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IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
adoration of a God is an excellent thing in
human experience.
Next after the mother came a general,
clanking the gold-tasseled sword of distin-
guished service. He did not touch the floor
with hisf orehead, but he crossed himself slowly,
kissed the ikons, and passed out, his silver spurs
jingling faintly in an interval of the music.
A glancing little figure in a red velvet hat
and ermine tripped up the steps of the ikon,
saluted the ancient lemon-hued visage with
fresh lips, and passed on, making way for
those dusty gray figures we had met in transit
across Siberia. They are legless and armless
now, and their stubby hair is hidden under
white bandages; they are in charge of a Red
Cross nurse and a sanitar. Evidently from a
far province these, perhaps even from those
wild Chinese borders we had passed. All the
city is strange, the streets and the cathedrals;
even the language is not theirs. But the
ikons are their own the Holy Fathers wisely
saw that it should be thus centuries ago when
they forbade a change in the sacred images
and it is the ikons they seek last before
they go to battle and first if ever they
return.
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I walked slowly back, to find Olga Stepa-
novna deep in the outgoing embassy mail.
" Nu, Amerikanka," she inquired, looking up
with her arch, sparkling smile, "do you find
us idolaters?"
"No," I answered. "Each nation must
have its own worship as each nation its own
idiom of language, and I can understand that
for the Slavonic soul, passionate and idealis-
tic, the form must be both glowing and mysti-
cal. In China and Japan I often felt that the
temples were deserted because the gods had
fled the souls of those who prayed, but
here God is because He is in the souls of the
worshipers."
"That is true of the Slav," she said, her
eyes filling as M. Novinsky's had filled with
mysticism. "The Russian feels two things
supremely: the brotherhood of man and the
adoration of God. Self-annihilation in love
that's the heart of the Russian. The saving
of his own individual soul interests him least
of all. But he can find no comfort or in-
spiration in abstract logic or reason. He must
have something at which he may light the
flame of his spirit something radiant and
sensuous; legends, symbols; something mys-
96
IN A RUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD
tical by which he may be caught up out of
his own soul and merged with God trans-
muted and purified. And do you know, mod-
ern as I am, I always feel an almost translated
happiness in confessional and mass."
"Does that solve the mystery of M.
Novinsky, I wonder?" I pondered. "In his
mind he is agnostic, but to-day he was full of
the worship of the East."
"Yes, I think that solves it. Dmitri
Nikolaivitch is modern Russian," said Olga
Stepanovna, "struggling with new philoso-
phies, but in his heart the anciently dreaming,
mystic Slav."
VIII
THE LEE OF THE WAR
HPHE Autocrat of All the Quartiers, the
1 brush - whiskered old soldier who plays
at being a dvornik, has just climbed the stairs
with the post. Perhaps his heart is softened,
too, by those blue and yellow junks that sail
in with Chinese cargo. Oh, for one touch of
Pekinese gold in this twilight North! There,
in Peking, Lise's letter runs, the apricot roofs
are piled with snow like monster meringues.
Strings of camels, shaggily furred by a long
summer in Mongolia, or bearers of tribute
from Tibet, tread disdainfully the road be-
neath the crimson walls of the Forbidden City.
Kites, yellow and blue and green, hang over
the courts in a turquoise sky. Small need
for geographers to explain to me the "drang
nach Osten."
But I have found something here in this
pale North almost as lovely as a bamboo grove
98
THE LEE OF THE WAR
my second Russian caller, Mile. Novinska.
She came to-day in a smart Russian turnout,
one of those low sleighs filled with furs, a
dapper groom clinging bat-like in the rear, and
black horses covered with blue nets. The
nets are to prevent snow from flying into the
sleighs, a comment on this Jehu-like Russian
driving. If Undine had driven, I am sure her
horses would have been like these.
Tall, picturesque, le plus pur type aris-
tocrat, Mile. Novinska. Long gray eyes,
like Dmitri Nikolaievitch's, but more heavily
fringed with black, and a curious Syrian qual-
ity like that of Zuloaga's Countess Matthieu de
Noailles. She has that suggestion of sleeping
power which is characteristic of the Russian,
and an extremely rare simplicity of manner,
the product of as many centuries of civiliza-
tion as an English turf. One of her ancestors
figures in Boris Godunov, which, perhaps, es-
tablishes her right to the manner. She wore a
black frock and it sounds melodramatically
Russian, but it is true a single string of
extraordinarily beautiful pearls.
I was seized with a spasm of fright until she
spoke, and then I breathed easily. It was
English. The Russian offers this language-
8 99
MISS AMERIKANKA
courtesy, as a matter of course, to more
nationalities than any one else in the world.
The Orient interested her, and we talked long
of China. Curiously enough, the Russian
travels far oftener in the West than in that
ancient land, where his ancestry was brewed.
All the capital is in black these days; hence
Mile. Novinska's wearing of black had meant
nothing to me, but I can never forgive myself
for the pain which a random remark of mine
brought to her face a look of despair which
made me know once for all that I had never
touched even the fringes of sorrow.
" Perhaps my brother has not told you,"
she said. I do not yet understand her con-
fidence unless it be that desperate frankness
that one may feel for a stranger. "I have
lost my fiance in one of the early battles in
Galicia." And then she related to me the
story, quietly, almost objectively.
He had been a young marechal de noblesse
in the province of X and he had long
loved her. "And I," she said, with a wist-
ful humility, "I loved freedom." And then
came the call to arms. As she described the
summons, the crowds marching through the
streets, singing that wonderful soldiers' chorus,
IOO
THE LEE OF THE WAR
kneeling bareheaded before the Winter Palace
and thronging the cathedrals with streaming
faces, the sadness vanished and her eyes
burned with deep Slavonic fire. I could feel
her own enthusiasm take wing, I could see the
brilliant man caught up in the exaltation of
the moment, and I could hear Russia singing
her high song.
"I could not refuse him then," she said,
quietly.
It was early in September. His regiment
went almost immediately to the front. At
first there were letters, hasty scribbles, telling
of the blue-and-gold autumn hanging over the
trenches, of the stifling pits, of the will to kill
and the blackness in the charge.
Then fell silence.
October brought no message. November,
too, limped by without a line, but December
laid the envelope from the War Office on her
desk "Lieutenant , shrapnel in his side
while leading a charge" and that was all.
The brilliance fled ; not a trace of the man who
had gone out into the sunshine that September
day, nor a sword, for remembrance' sake.
"I am sorry I had not told you," said
JOI
MISS AMERIKANKA
M. Novinsky. "I was not certain of Na-
talya's wishes. It was difficult for you," he
added, regarding me intently.
"Ah, but she is so young!" I cried. "She
will find the will to live again. Tell me,
Dmitri Nikolaievitch, that she will find en-
thusiasm for life!"
M. Novinsky had come in with a volume of
Claudel for me and stood, his slim back to the
fire, looking down with thoughtful eyes at the
cathedral square and the tiny figures hurrying
through the dusk under the bronze warrior,
while the bells chimed from a tower across
the Neva.
"I do not know," he said, gravely. "With
us love is like worship. We fall in love more
deeply and more seriously, perhaps, than you.
It is an actual factor in our lives. You re-
member Sonia and Raskolnikoff. It is like
that, together a sort of spiritual regenera-
tion. We put it at the heart of everything.
We expect more of it and without it we are
more bereft."
The realities seem to be freshening and
deepening these days in Russia, like some
great tide. Love and religion ! How poignant
and beautiful life might be!
202
THE LEE OF THE WAR
I am all alone in the house, except for Sasha,
Dasha, and the fire. It is Saturday night, a
long evening to squander. Below-stairs the
little girl who studies at the conservatoire is
playing Tchaikowsky softly, softly. Dasha
has just brought a big arm-load of birch bark
for my stove in the wall, with a shy smile for
the barishnya.
Dasha is not of that hierarchy of Perfect Ser-
vants, but she is one of the gems of Petrograd,
along with St. Isaac's and the Alexander Third
Museum and the ballet. Olga Stepanovna
found her with a Russian priest in the coun-
try, where she performed the duties of a
slavey at the rate of a dollar a month. The
frock in which she stood, a shawl, an.d a
string of beloved beads, together with an
undersized body, were her earthly possessions;
but she possessed one thing not earthly, and
that was her soul. I had been in the house
some three days before I really was aware of
Dasha, so obscure, so like dust beneath every-
body's chariot wheels, so completely merged
with the background was she, and not un-
til last week did she become a distinct pat-
tern.
I was alone in the house when a strange
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melody came stealing into my study, a lit-
tle melody full of minors and unexpected
intervals and forbidden tuggings at one's
heart-strings. The source, I discovered, was
the kitchen, and I stood quite still outside
the door. A bit of church ritual followed the
quaint melody, one of those beautiful chants
sung in every house of God in Russia. I
gently pushed open the door. There in the
great Russian kitchen, between the porcelain
stove and the window, sat Dasha, singing and
polishing brasses, which shone not more than
her eyes and her nose and her chin. Blushing
and wiping her hands on her red-and-blue
peasant apron at the presence of a barishnya
in the kitchen, she tumbled off her high stool.
If you could have seen her so shy and
awkward, mattering so little to any one in the
world, spawn cast on the tides of life in
Russia's careless man-making, just a tiny
candle in the wind! The fates must have
lent me a seventh sense for Russian; some-
how we made friends, and then she sang the
little folk-song again and again for me, with
blushes at every stanza. Afterward we talked
mostly about mothers her mother and my
mother. It costs three dollars to go from
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THE LEE OF THE WAR
Petrograd to her village, and she had not seen
her mother for two years.
Olga Stepanovna she adores as one of the
saints, and just now she leaned over my table
to tell me that I am a choroshaya barishnya
a bonny lady. When I ask her why, she is
reduced to saying that she is growing used
to me. Such a Russian answer! When I
ask the soldiers in the hospital, where I have
been much of late, if they were frightened on
the field or are tired in hospital, they in-
variably answer, as Ivan Caspitch had an-
swered on the steppe, as Dasha answers, "No,
barina; we're used to it."
Absurd little Dasha, running at every one's
bidding, aslant at an angle of forty-five de-
grees, which threatens to precipitate her and
still further tip-tilt her premature nose, keep-
ing the samovar for us at night after the
theater, flying to buy the last edition of the
Vremya, rushing down four flights of stairs
to give Dolly an airing in the court. Once I
knew her to surrender her only holiday in two
weeks lest the doggie be lonely, alone in
the house. Every morning I hear Agasha's
querulous, gray voice scolding and calling her
stupid. Agasha is doubtless right; but in
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this strange land I would not exchange little
peasant Dasha for G. B. S. himself!
Sasha is buxom and different. Her attitude
is hands on hips and her expression a general,
"What's to be done?" which usually means
that something ought to be and nothing will
be done. No one would charge Sasha with
running at any angle.
Sasha has been looking very troubled re-
cently, and one morning last week, when she
brought Olga Stepanovna's coffee, Olga Step-
anovna questioned her. After fidgeting about
the room, she finally stammered in some em-
barrassment, "Father's been troubling mother,
barina."
"'Father's been troubling mother!'" re-
peated Olga Stepanovna. "But I thought
your father was dead, Sasha."
"Yes, he's dead, but he has been troub-
ling mother and all the neighbors say
it isn't right that father should trouble
mother."
"But how, milaya? Tell me how your
father troubles your mother." Olga Step-
anovna gently questioned her. "How can
the dead trouble the living?"
"He follows her, barina, and sometimes he
THE LEE OF THE WAR
walks opposite in the road when she goes to
church."
"Do other people see him?"
"No, but she always sees him."
"Does he speak to her?"
"No, he doesn't speak to her."
"Is she afraid?"
" No, of course she isn't afraid. It's father.
But why does he walk there? What are we
to do, barina?"
Olga Stepanovna is a saint, and wise be-
sides; moreover, it is not the first time she has
had to deal with a Russian.
"You know the little Chapel of the Mother
of God, Sasha?" she asked.
Sasha knew.
"Then you must go to buy candles and burn
them there, and you must ask the priest to
pray for your father's soul, and every day
you must go and pray there, too."
Sasha would.
"When you have done that, I will write to
your mother what you have done and that
you have been a good daughter and that she
must believe, for that will help the soul to find
peace."
Fancy charging a baba with hallucinations
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and sending her to a nerve specialist! The
priest is the peasant's nerve specialist, and
there are many worse. After all, who knows?
Perhaps it is we whose eyes are holden and
the peasant mother who sees.
Now Sasha has been to pray and to burn
candles and the priest has promised a Mass.
And yesterday Olga Stepanovna wrote the old
troubled mother in the country. Now may
peace be upon the souls of the living and of the
dead!
Sasha has just come in to ask if there is a
post to America. The cook next door says
there isn't.
We dwell under the lee of the war these days
as under the shadow of a mighty Golgotha.
My first waking consciousness is of soldiers
marching, sharp hoarse uras and sometimes
a strain of battle-song the same troubled un-
ease that I sensed that first morning in the
darkness. It is not yet light, but the boots are
trampling and, stirring luxuriously in my warm
bed, I know that the cold gray squares in front
of Kazan and the Winter Palace are filling with
men. They are always in the background of
one's consciousness, these figures dim in the
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THE LEE OF THE WAR
half-light, their tall Cossack caps drifted with
white, their coats turned ludicrously back
like evening dress; simple sunburnt faces
and muscular bodies, soon to be set against
German steel. Crunch crunch crunch a
pause. I know that interval. Twenty yards
of wriggling on their stomachs through the
snow. A straw enemy hangs obligingly ahead
and there is a bayonet charge, bloodless and
without qualms. The paws of the bear hold a
bayonet as deftly as a connoisseur would
handle a bit of peachblow, and plainsmen's
eyes trained to the steppe pierce easily the
light mists of a cathedral square
Yesterday I was walking along the Neva
when a group of those dusty gray figures
thronging everywhere emerged suddenly from
a side-street, their wiry Siberian ponies half
hidden under their long capes, their bayonets
upright like a shining bamboo forest, singing
something short and primitive that breaks
into strange rhythms, stirs the pulse, and
grips the throat; gray, almost impalpable
shapes wrapped in the mists, sitting their
horses like centaurs. Russian accents are so
strange to Anglo-Saxon ears that they set one
wondering whether the whole Russian bio-
109
logical and psychological beat is not different.
The war correspondents declare that war is
shorn of its picturesqueness ; but how escape a
flight of blood through the body at the sight
of these Asiatics flung off when the mold of
the world was young? There are far more
here than in the station at Irkutsk ; a sense of
monstrously primeval life such as one is aware
of in Tolstoi's Cossacks. How Milton would
have rolled out their names in sonorous ca-
dences! Persians, Kirghiz, Sarts, Turkomans,
Ostraks, Armenians, Lithuanians, Dunkans,
Afghans, Cherkesses, Zinians, Shamans, Os-
satines, Lesghians, Kalmuks, Tchudes, Geor-
gians, Samoyedes, Tchouvachs, Tcheremis-
sans, Tartars, Little Russians, White Rus-
sians, Great Russians. A sad loss for the
great epic-maker! It is not liking I feel for
Russia, but I am fascinated by her fascinated
by her potential power, the congress of these
violent semi-Asiatic tribes; it thrills all the
nomadic turbulence in me, exceedingly thinly
veneered by civilization.
M. Novinsky came with me to-day to the
American hospital, where I work twice a week,
and the men talked as one Russian to another.
In general, the Slav is more aware of the
no
THE LEE OF THE WAR
stream of his consciousness and its significance
than the Anglo-Saxon. Even the peasant, a
primitive esthete, tastes the flavor of his
perceptions, expressing them crudely, but
often with biblical force. Some one has
imaged these two moods of emotion and ap-
preciation as "two runners racing abreast,
one oblivious of all but the motion, the other,
with eyes not on the goal, riot blind with the
rush of it, but turned, deeply observant, on the
face of his companion." That is the Russian;
the Anglo-Saxon does not run, he plods and
singly.
The soldier fresh from the shock of battle-
field is silent, but as the keen edge of memory
is turned he grows more communicative. It
was Sergei Pavlovitch who talked most to-day,
Sergei Pavlovitch from somewhere deep in
the Caucasus, eyes tender and blue as a girl's,
cheeks as pink as a Siberian crab-apple.
"There were four of them," Sergei Pavlo-
vitch said, relating an incident in Galicia
"three men and an officer. We found them
in an old house. The officer would not sur-
render. He tried to throw himself down a
well. We killed them with bayonets. What
else was to be done?" And the hands that
in
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held the bayonet delicately turned the stem
of a pink tissue Easter rose.
I looked at Sergei Pavlovitch and I won-
dered, as I often wonder when I look at more
weather-beaten faces, if these steppe eagles
ever pity their foe. To-day I asked a trans-
Siberian Cossack with a peaked head and a
face that might have come from Dostoev-
ski's House of the Dead, not a typical Russian
face nor one from which you would expect
quarter.
"Oh," he said, cheerfully, "when the order
is passed through the trenches to charge, you
shout and run. Everything goes black. You
do not think. You kill." And then a slow
smile began to overspread his face.
"How is it possible for the Russian to make
a good soldier?" I asked M. Novinsky, as we
turned away from the trans-Siberian Cossack.
"His nature melts away into kindness like but-
ter on bleeni, as the plain flattens away from
the horizon."
"No Russian positively enjoys fighting
except the Cossack," answered M. Novinsky
with an amused smile. "The Russian is as
unmilitary as the Chinese, but the world does
not know it. It is the one factor to be con-
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sidered when the bogy of Pan-Slavism is held
before Europe. The German? Of course the
German knows this! and laughs contemptu-
ously up his sleeve. But it is part of his
game holding the Slavic peril over Europe.
The peasant will fight, if he must, stubbornly
and without squeamishness. It is for the
Little Father. But his idea is always to be
killed rather than kill. And zest? He has
no zest for a fight as a fight. The Russian
peasant harbors far less animal resentment
than he is credited with; he is too much a
'brother' to all the world to hold a grudge;
he has no logical mental insistence on right.
The only resistance he shows consistently is a
fatalistic lethargy. Do you know, if the
truth were known, what every one of those
fellows is dreaming of? A little izba under
the birches. A Cossack Europe, did Na-
poleon say? Russia might roll over on Europe
in her sleep, but she would never have the
desire or the collected energy to step on her."
There are two new cases this week, sent
over from the central distributing hospital.
One is a pink-cheeked boy with exaggeratedly
solemn blue eyes and an equally exaggerated
appetite. He is in the hospital for what is
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termed a scratch a fissure an inch deep the
length of his leg and pneumonia which he
caught in trench water and by which he feels
himself disgraced. When the men chaff him
his blue eyes fill with tears and he doubles up
his fists. He continues to look misused
through dinner while he speedily stows away
two plates of soup, two plates of meat and
vegetables, and two bowls of mannaya kasha.
The second patient is a beady-eyed little man
with whom I sometimes play checkers. The
expression of concentrated cunning on his
face when he tracks my men has opened a new
window in the peasant soul and explained
some of the cruelties against man and beast
in the uprising of 1905 which I had never
understood. I can never win at checkers and
I should not like to match wits with him
seriously. To-day Gregory stood on his crutch
behind me and helped the Amerikanotchka
against the beady-eyed man.
We were in the midst of it when the Am-
bassador came with the aide-de-camp of the
Emperor, sending a wild flutter through the
hospital. Oddly enough, the aide is a friend
of M. Novinsky's, a keen, dry military man,
and we strolled through the hospital with
114
Life welling up from depths passionate,
barbaric
THE LEE OF THE WAR
him. It was the first time I had seen M.
Novinsky with a man of his own rank since
we had come to Petrograd, and his ease and
knowledge of affairs set me wondering whether
he was not the cosmopolitan first and Slav
second. No, he is Slav first. And if I do
not mistake, something of significance is
shaping itself behind those steadfast Slavic
eyes.
Vereshagin did a mad thing last week.
Some one had sent a guitar, with a blue bow,
which every one has had a turn at strum-
ming. There are two balalaikas also, and
sometimes the music mounts fast and furious,
one voice leading and others taking up the
song at different intervals in Russian fashion.
Suddenly Vereshagin sprang into the center of
the room, whirling and leaping in the Russ-
kaya and then dropping, spinning on his
haunches, a flying gray ball. It was a reck-
less thing to do and in a moment he was
smiling weakly at the nurse who put him back
in bed. But for the moment he had not been
Vereshagin wounded, but Vereshagin Russian,
gloriously alive.
The saddest figure in the hospital is "the
man who was." No one knows what has
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happened, a shell bursting near him or only
the strain. He is really young, but nature has
slipped a cog somewhere and left him the
oldest thing in the world. I never see him
but that I am reminded of that ancient man
of Dostoevski's moaning: "How old I am!
Oh, God, how old I am!" All day long he lies
on his back and stares at the ceiling, or totters
weakly about trying to find his cot, with a
troubled, weary gesture toward the back of
his head. He is utterly unable to talk, and
the instinct to feed seems to have fled, too.
Kasha from a metal spoon meant nothing.
Luckily some one thought to put a wooden
spoon in his hand. For a moment he held
it, while we all watched breathlessly, and then
the routine laid deep in his nerves itself
instinct stronger than injury asserted itself.
His hand slowly began to make the journey
from bowl to mouth. Opposite him lies Piotr
Alexandrovitch, above whose cot hangs a copy
of a German airplane. He had learned the
lines well enough those tortured days when
the original hung over the Russian trenches.
Piotr Alexandrovitch carves realistic Sisters
of Mercy, too, dragged away by Uhlans.
They are not from life, thank Heaven, but
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THE LEE OF THE WAR
from a magazine sent by one of the embassy's
secretaries.
Turgenev spoke truly when he said that the
Russian never fumbles in his pocket for a
word, but plucks it from underneath his
heart. Here is a sentence from a letter which
I have happened to come upon, written by
Vassili Vassilivitch to one of the "little
mothers" at the hospital:
Greetings from Vassili Vassilivitch, dear little
mother. Slavu Bogu! Glory be to God that you are
well. God keep you in health, matushka, dear little
mother. And may God keep in health all the kind
Americans who have taken our bloody wounds upon
their hearts, who gathered us into a clean white nest
as God's little birdie gathers her young under her wing.
Gospode Tebye. God be with you.
Imagine this from Tommy Atkins!
IX
A RUSSIAN LYRIC
IN an elbow of the sea, beyond the Neva, lie
islands where summer Petrogradski sip
their kvass under a green tracery of trees amid
the luminous white nights of May ; islands that
now sleep solitary under the somber shadows
of Bocklin's Island of the Dead. It was
there that Dmitri Nikolaievitch and Natalya
Nikolaievna were giving a skating party last
night for two officers home from the front-
on eerie background for an arabesque of
gaiety, an extravaganza such as I venture
could occur only in the Russian capital.
Recklessly mad driving it was, whisking in
one of those vanishing sleighs, on, on through
the swift white silence, the horses' hoofs cast-
ing a shower of sparks in the furtive white
evanescence. The Russian love of space and
silence with its motif of furious speed I often
118
A RUSSIAN LYRIC
wonder if it does not symbolize to the Slav
the background of eternity, against which
weaves the swift shuttle of life for its little
while.
Last night the quaint little datcha, ablaze
with lights, beckoned through the falling snow
like an Enchanted House in the Woods. The
Petrogradski often take these summer houses,
sheltered under the pines, for a night or a
week-end, and send servants ahead to build
fires and fill the house with flowers. Last
night there were fragrant magnolia, and
poinsettia in bronze bowls, and dwarfed
bushes with clusters of red berries. A band
of gipsies sat under the stairway, black-
browed pirates; the firelight splashed the
polished floor with shadows like pools of
blood and shone on the medals and uniforms
of officers, and on gleaming hair and eyes and
shoulders of women. From a narrow supper-
table, lighted with candles and rich with old
silver, the Novinsky servants in livery served
Russian delicacies. Intoxicating, these gor-
geous Russian interiors, after the eternal
snow! And over all and through all stole the
gipsy music, having in its fire a drop of
Russian tenderness alluring, ravishing mu-
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sic, singing of moonlit izbas sleeping under the
birches, of Marya awaiting her lover by the
pale deep river, of sweet nights under the
stars. How fascinatingly alien it was, like a
scene from Anna Kareninal Without being
able to define it, one was aware of a dif-
ferent background, other memories, other
origins; something enormously natural and
unconscious, no premature sobering down;
life welling up from depths passionate, bar-
baric.
The men were all officers, mighty-bodied
men for the most part, in high black boots and
silver spurs. I liked the guests of honor, a
bearded Muscovite and a tawny, triangular-
faced man from Kiev. These are akin to the
men at Sebastopol who inspired in Tolstoi
a so cheerful conviction of the invincibleness
of the Russian people. Inevitably his words
recur to one's memory:
What they are doing, they do so simply, with so
little effort and exertion, that you are convinced that
they can do a hundred times more that they can do
anything.
One looks at these men with their tremen-
dous elan and one hopes that Tolstoi's tribute
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A RUSSIAN LYRIC
to the soldiers of Sebastopol might be repeated
to-day:
You understand that the feeling which makes them
work is not that feeling of pettiness, ambition, forget-
fulness which you have yourself experienced, but a dif-
ferent sentiment, one more powerful and this cause is
the feeling which rarely appears, of which a Russian is
ashamed, that which lies at the bottom of each man's
soul love for his country.
Russian women are not often beautiful, to
my mind. Their mouths, like Russian land-
scapes, are too wide and their features are
not neatly modeled, but there is a fiery lan-
guor about them which makes them often
fascinating, as was my Siberian Malva. There
were two Turkestan princesses to-night, with
bird-like black eyes, hair like fine spun glass,
and agile movements, and a fair-haired little
Polish countess who danced the mazurka,
stamping her tiny feet with such frenzy that
she had to be carried fainting to the balcony.
Mile. Novinska, in her dark furs, looked a
delicate Circassian gipsy. M. Novinsky, more
nearly the debonair personality which made
him the most desired dinner-guest in Peking
than I had seen him since we had left the
Chinese capital, was curiously elated, a fact
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which puzzles me in him whose every move-
ment and expression is significant.
Like the table-linen at Harbin, it was in-
definably Russian the background of white
silence, the lyric gaiety, the swift, exhilarating
speed, the skimming over the ice under the
velvety shadows of the pines, the ring of the
skates in thin night air, brittle as porcelain
while there, somewhere in the dimness which
we touched, lay Kronstadt and Riga and the
relentless German menace. And then back
through the pines, across the snow, laced
delicately and pooled with shadows a plunge
from the ghostliness into the ruddy firelight,
to dance again to the gipsy music, music
which sang not of a pale and frozen north, but
of the sunny hills and purple skies of Little
Russia, of sapphire cliffs and warm sweet
winds, and nights along the Black Sea.
And good talk exhilaratingly good talk!
The bearded officer from Moscow was my
supper partner, and we talked of Russia.
Every one talked; whatever the assembly,
the end is always the same in Russia talk.
It was like a scene from a Russian novel;
words whirling, turning, thickening like snow;
talk ranging far in philosophy and religion,
A RUSSIAN LYRIC
with an amazingly keen mental and spiritual
avidity, a freer camaraderie than ours and a
different atmosphere.
"And how do you feel Russia?" asked the
tall Muscovite, himself a cosmopolitan of a
long residence in India and two years in an
Egyptian monastery.
"How do I feel Russia?" I smiled invol-
untarily at the bearded man as he put the
stupendous question. The thing I had been
trying to formulate ever since I strayed into
its immensity! "Perhaps I see it as the
East, coming to it as I do. ' Nu kak more-
it is as the sea/ as Russians say of the Volga.
I cannot express it."
"Certainly, the Eastern gate is the only one
through which to enter Russia," rejoined the
Muscovite, a light stirring in the depths of
his melancholy eyes. "Russia is not a na-
tion, but a congress of peoples largely East-
ern. To understand Russia, one must strike
her at the source and follow her westward in
space, exploring her various ages the Dark
Ages, the Middle Ages, the sixteenth century,
the eighteenth century, the twentieth century,
and that wonderful era of thought which she
is projecting, to-morrow's century. No man
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can comprehend us who backs in on us from
modern Europe and stares at us like a crab."
"But further? How do you feel the East
in us?" urged the little man from Kiev.
"Curiously enough, my first impression
came one night at the opera in Paris," I said,
slowly, recalling with amazing vividness the
memory. "Ivan the Terrible. Do you re-
member the serfs crawling on all-fours under
the knout? It haunted me for weeks, that
cringing on the ground. In America, it
dropped out, but it has shot back now,
in these figures crouching in the cathedrals.
There is a deep race-memory of fear in their
nerves; I see it in the gestures of the dancing,
too."
"It is a part of the carrying over of the
East in us," agreed the man from Kiev, who
himself looked a direct descendant of the
Golden Horde. "We inherit a drop of fire,
too, from those Mongolian horsemen, which
we are all proud to have mixed with our
somnolent Slav blood. It is an interesting
sum total, if one cares to take his world
ethnologically."
"It is China that I see particularly," I
continued, a hundred images crowding my
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A RUSSIAN LYRIC
memory, as he paused, inquiringly. "Here is
the same vigorous use of color bespeaking an
unwearied imagination. In the Forbidden
City at Peking, as at the ballet, I am aware of
strange vales of the imagination and peaks
of fantasie which never, never in my world
could have been.
"There is the same lethargy; here, too, as
in China, the resistance and cohesion of the
peasantry; the bottomless rage; the 'just
about' quality of China that can never hang
a door or run a government with precision;
the mandarinish wish for seclusion; the sedu-
lous mystery surrounding the Czar as it al-
ways enveloped the Son of Heaven and still
attends the Japanese Emperor; 'squeeze,'
that peculiar form of graft that is as purely
of the East as are its fauna and flora, sprung
largely, I presume, from the form of gov-
ernment "
"Yes, that trait which is ruining us in this
war as it did in the Napoleonic campaigns and
in the Russo-Japanese war," broke in the man
from Kiev, passionately.
"China and Japan at first interested me
most," I groped my way. "And they must
always be of enormous interest, all that toiling,
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MISS AMERIKANKA
sweating humanity welling out of the earth
to flow a little while above surface and then to
disappear again in her shadowy caverns
however cities and civilizations may rise and
fall, a life that goes on forever. And this
same vast earth-tide of life, which staggers
imagination, Russia has; vague, immense
power, barbaric, potential. To pass from
Europe into Russia is, as some one has said,
to pass from something ordered and advanced
to something unordered and portentous, to be
engulfed and swept away in the tide. The
same portentousness that one senses in China
is here, but here it is something vastly nearer,
breaking the flood-gates. Russia is more
overwhelming than the Far East. In China
and Japan one stands above the stream and
shares the life vicariously, but in Russia one
cannot escape. Russia is of one's own color!
In a word, Russia is to me the most mysterious,
the most troublous force in the world, freighted
at present with a conspicuous significance. The
body of Asia, the thought of Europe, with this
one enormous advantage over Europe: be-
cause of her immense naturalness of life, she
casts up from her depths a product amaz-
ingly, cellularly fresh. I' think it must thrill
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A RUSSIAN LYRIC
one, as if a voice had spoken from the void,
this volcanic thought, these spiritual concep-
tions cast up as if by some primeval force,
de profundis. Only one thing fascinates me
equally, and that is her convulsive contrasts.
One can grow dizzy wandering through the
labyrinths and wondering where one may lay
down one's questionings and say : ' This is true
of Russia.' America is a melting-pot, but
Russia holds her elements unamalgamated.
Her paradoxes are unresolved; to state a
truth about her is to be false to her. There
is no encompassing her; she is not only the
buffer between East and West, but between
East and Future. As you say, 'She is as the
sea:
The Muscovite, who had been listening with
serious intent ness, took up the theme where
I had laid it down.
"Russia the old and weary, the melan-
choly; but so young that she seems but half
shaped from the black earth. Russia baring
a new world of delicate psychological and
spiritual truths; but dark medieval and bar-
baric. Russia innately democratic and in-
dividualistic; but ruled by despotism. Rus-
sia without conceit, even to humility; but
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with a tidal assurance of her own destiny.
Russia quickly flaming up in her emotions;
but dying down again to apathy. Russia
the tender lover of the despised and rejected
of men; but shot through with Oriental
cruelty. Russia the religious. Russia the
unmoral. Russia superb, fatal, mysterious.
Russia also gentle, monotonous. Russia
with a bewildering, multitudinous variety;
but as ununified as the sands of the sea.
"To my mind, Russia symbolizes the roman-
tic in art," he continued, enlarging on his
subject, "as France symbolizes the classic.
Russia is not to be reasoned about or put into
bounds. Russian natures are not small na-
tures, easily labeled, but large natures, un-
coralled and uncorrelated. Russia of all na-
tions sings with color, like the walls of some
old monastery; enormously natural but sel-
dom vulgar. Of all people, she shows the
least evidence of growing didactic; of all
people, the least economical of her medium.
Russia, multum, but not multum in parvo!
Russia, the uttermost contradiction of the
principle, maximum effect with minimum
means; Russia in her life, as in her art, lavish
and unrestrained and yet without coarseness
128
A RUSSIAN LYRIC
living, as she does, with a deep unconscious-
ness. That fine logic, which is the glory of the
French, Russia has none of. But her dis-
order, is it the 'disorder of the forest and the
stars'? What will be the fate of this inchoate
thing in the new world which seems immi-
nent, where nothing will be left to chance?
Or is there a new order and a new symmetry,
beyond the order and the symmetry of lesser
foolish men, that Russia has divined?"
The tall Muscovite had risen and was stand-
ing before the fire, his head outlined against the
paneling like a young Turgenev.
"What do you see as Russia's greatest gift
to the world?" I asked, as he stood looking
at the fire, wrapped in abstraction.
"Russia offers three great gifts, as I see
them," he answered, rousing himself. "One
is pushing out the walls of life, exploring new
paths of joy and pain, discovering a new,
intense mental passion; secondly, the delicate
psychological analysis of the soul voyaging
about these new paths; most rare of all, the
acceptance of pain. We are not the only na-
tion to discover the beauty of pain, but it was
Dostoevski who caught the great salutary
value of pain suffering not alone, but suf-
10 129
MISS AMERIKANKA
fering together. Do you realize that Russians
never write romances? We have proven out-
worn that theory that it is idealists who, in
order to escape the sordidness of the world,
write romances. We Russians are the su-
preme discontents of the world, but we do not
write romance; we are the ultimate word in
realism. And this because we have pierced
the shell and have discovered the inner, fan-
tastic romance of reality, the alluring romance
of the mental and spiritual. It is the romance
of which Hamlet is a typical hero and Dos-
toevski's Raskolnikoff another. Raskolnikoff
committed no crime of the passions, but of
intellectual curiosity, a passionate mental
questioning. He wished to discover whether
he was a super-man with a right to kill the
old pawnbroker the 'louse' as Napoleon
murdered his thousands, or whether he was
only 'vermin/ too. And besides these ro-
mances of the mental and spiritual, the ro-
mance of pirates and dungeons even that ac-
cidental personal adventure which the Anglo-
Saxon accepts as love is trivial. In these
features, the Russian must be read geograph-
ically and historically. With that great out-
lying monotony of earth, neither sea nor
A RUSSIAN LYRIC
mountains, not any chance under a tyrannical
rule to find his destiny, the Russian has been
driven in to search his own being. And
searching the human, he has come upon a
mystery as disordered and as infinite as the
sands of the sea.
"And with what marvelous psychology he
has added to our knowledge of that restless
creature, the soul! The delicacy with which
Tolstoi reads the soul in terms of the body!
And Dostoevski begins where Tolstoi leaves
off. After Russian literature, Anglo-Saxon
novels seem but attenuated creations. Per-
haps most precious of all he has contributed
to life is the recognition of pain as a part
of destiny and that moral fervor to experi-
ence it.
"It may be that never, never will Russia
emerge, not out of the chaos of her institu-
tions and government, but out of chaotic
chasms of her own being. But if ever she
does, she will be the superbly great people of
the earth! I have a vision of the Slav, when
lesser peoples, more easily catalogued and
composed, are ended and their cities dust and
their kings rest with that other mighty war-
rior, where
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MISS AMERIKANKA
The wild ass stamps o'er his grave, but cannot break
his sleep
I have a vision of the Slav, with his roots as
deep as the roots of Isdragil itself, towering
high against the sky with an incomprehen-
sibly beautiful spiritual burgeoning. But who
can say of Russia?"
The tall Muscovite spoke mystically, like a
prophet of new Russia, and I looked at this
superb man, accepting his destiny of pain, and
as I listened to his rich voice chanting this
vision of Russia I saw again the steppe, the
gray gulfs of mists, and I heard the wind moan
in the forest ; and, again, like an illumination,
the words of Georg Brandes flowed through
my memory.
Black land, fertile land, new land, grain land the
broadly constituted, rich, warm nature the broad un-
limited expanse which fills the mind with melancholy
and hope the incomprehensible darkly mysterious
the womb of new realities and new mysticism Russia
and the future.
The womb of new realities and new mys-
ticism!
X
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
PHE leaves are turning swiftly these days.
1 Yesterday, Russia lyric; to-day, Russia
treacherous and intriguing! A look in at
the hospital to inquire about Vereshagin and
to deliver sweets resulted in staying for tea.
I can never resist the white oil-cloths and the
brown bath-robes chanting a sonorous grace
to the decadent little ikon in the corner.
They say we are breeding revolutionists here.
I do not know. Fancy what decent food and
clean beds must mean to these men, accus-
tomed to cabbage soup and a handful of
straw!
And after the hospital, a walk home along
the Neva. These veiled days in the north
are beginning to have a wondrous charm for
me. To-day the Neva stretches far out to
sea, a white mystery, only the black hulls
breaking it in impressionistic designs. Peter
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MISS AMERIKANKA
and Paul, sometimes a golden sword, rises
to-day but a smoky pencil against the
sky.
It was in the station at Irkutsk that I began
to realize the greatness of Russia, and to-day
I gave the "green bough of my affection" to
this pastel of Peter's. It's a Turner, the
softest in the world; a Japanese sketch,
quickly done, half effaced. On filmier days,
but a shadow city washed over with white.
I have searched my vocabulary through and
yet I can never express the charm of its
spectral half-tones, rubbed together with a
wonderfully soft blue atmosphere, picked
out with the charcoal of the park trees and
wanned with a dash of buff in the old Ad-
miralty. There is something of the phantom
city about it, after all. On a late winter
afternoon no other city, not even London nor
Venice, offers the mystery and beauty of
Petrograd. I wonder that I ever could have
missed it, low-keyed though it is.
I was just turning home along the Admiralty
gardens when I came suddenly face to face
with M. Novinsky, his compact figure and
dreaming eyes pure Celtic that moment in
the mists.
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
"You!" I cried, with the joy of the un-
expected.
"Yes." His eyes, set in Eastern fashion,
smiled engagingly under his tall sealskin cap.
"I was just on my way to pay my compli-
ments. You are looking distractingly mys-
terious to-day, Amerikanka. You Americans
are marvelous your variety vsegda inter-
eosni "
"This is serious, M. Novinsky," I smiled.
"Intrigue! My annals are no longer simple."
"You have been finding Russia a world for
Stevenson or Sherlock Holmes?"
"Yes," I nodded, importantly. "I used to
give the palm to those sumptuous caravan-
saries of Egypt, or to the dingy corridors of the
Wagon Lits in Peking, but now I yield both
to Petrograd."
M. Novinsky swung his stick at the statue
of Peter the Great, rearing above the Neva.
When he was lodged in the blue velvet chair
before the fire, while Dasha clattered the tea-
things, shining with joy at the presence of the
beautiful barin and singing the distracting
delights of Olya's white feet in the river, I be-
gan the tale. The incident had really troubled
me.
MISS AMERIKANKA
"It came through one of Olga Stepanovna's
clients, an American who is here for a gigantic
order in steel. Olga Stepanovna has trans-
lated for him and we have seen him often at
the house. In America he would not stand
out from the background of a thousand others,
an honest, self-made business man, but here
in this old world he looks like an ingenuous
child. Olga Stepanovna declares 'He never
could have grown in Europe,' and it is quite
true. The system of things as they are he has
absolutely refused to accept. A government
which pivoted on beautiful ladies he would
have none of. He had his ideas as to the
conduct of business in Russia. He would
invite the Minister to luncheon, sign the con-
tract with the cigars, and this sleepy old East
would have learned something."
"And as usual he found no royal road
in fact, no road whatever to the Ministers,
except through the engineers?" M. Novinsky
lighted a cigarette.
"Exactly. It would have been an excellent
international comedy of manners if it had not
been so tragic, to watch the processional of
emotions sweep his countenance incredulity,
irritation, anxiety, subjection. He was weeks
136
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
by the clock learning even to get a petition
before the Minister.
"Steamers have come and steamers have
gone and still he waits to hear the Govern-
ment oracle speak.
"Fortunately he has a fancy for the spots
where Czars have been murdered, and Petro-
grad offers numerous such points for his diver-
tisement. Whatever he had to teach Russia,
Russia has given him her lesson first pa-
tience.
11 Sometimes the engineers come with him to
Olga Stepanovna's for conferences, and storms
of language sweep the house! The Yankee
backs up against the fireplace, watching them
with shrewd eyes. In sheer brains he is more
than a match for these wolves in engineer's
clothing, but in languages as uneducated as a
savage. Of those soft, hissing sounds on
which hang his millions he understands not a
syllable. He does not even know French.
He must wait for Olga Stepanovna's transla-
tion. I am sure that his dying word to the
world will be, 'languages'!"
"He might not find another translator so
trustworthy as Olga Stepanovna, though he
'searched through this great world with a
MISS AMERIKANKA
candle by daylight/" suggested M. Novinsky,
flicking his ash.
"As a matter of fact, Olga Stepanovna is
the only soul in Petrograd he trusts," I as-
sented, as Dasha installed the samovar. "He
will not stir an inch to the Ministers without
her, and, of course, his helplessness appeals to
all the Russian in her. . . . After months of
quibbling, yesterday was set at the Ministry
for receiving the estimates from the six com-
peting firms, the representatives of which to
make a perfect melodrama all live at the
Hotel de 1'Europe. At eight last night Sasha
was bundled into a shawl and despatched to
the hotel with the American's estimates.
Olga Stepanovna had dropped into her chair
when the telephone rang. The American!
The papers? Had Sasha been waylaid and
robbed or was she only gossiping with some
stupid servant? Every quarter-hour from
then until midnight the American telephoned.
He was very commendably controlled, but he
was angry. Olga Stepanovna walked the
floor and wrung her hands.
"Nine. Ten. At twelve Sasha arrived,
hands on hips, the picture of health.
"' Nu, Sasha, quick, where have you been?
138
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
The papers?' Olga Stepanovna's impatience
flared up.
il Ai, barina, I was so ill,' Sasha related,
glibly.
'The papers quick!' Olga Stepanovna's
eyes flashed.
1 'At the hotel, as you told me,' Sasha wept,
stoutly.
"Little Dasha, the sleepless, was asleep.
How it happened no one ever knew, but in a
trice the drowsy mite was bundled into a
shawl and off through the snow to verify
Sasha's tale. I should like to have witnessed
the scene in the lobby of the hotel Sasha,
buxom and brazen, questioning his Braided
and Buttoned Magnificence, the portier; and
little Dasha peering out from her shawl,
probably too awed by the portier' s splendor to
hear a word he was saying. The sleeping bell-
boys were tumbled out and lined up for
Sasha's inspection. In the end one of them
remembered. Sasha had delivered the papers.
She brought Dasha home with an izvostchik
and, extravagance of extravagances, two
horses! And to-day she has a new collar and
a string of beads."
"And the end, the blunt American?" M.
139
MISS AMERIKANKA
Novinsky was smoking cigarettes silently,
deftly, his eyes on the fire.
"Tales do have a way of rounding out to a
full close in the East and not paling out half-
. way, as they do at home. But the end of this
I cannot say. The American came this
afternoon, taciturn and gloomy. The papers
had been found at three in the morning in the
rooms of a pseudo-interpreter. That is all
we know. Of course the terms had been tam-
pered with, and of course the offers of the
firms were not placed before the Ministry to-
day. The American saw to that! And now
the six-handed game may be months in nar-
rowing again to an issue. Nine hundred thou-
sand dollars the American had offered the engi-
neers for the order and it was not enough!"
"And to-day a contract for forty millions
was signed at the Astoria. It means poods
of silver to cross the palms of the engineers."
M. Novinsky had sunk into abstraction.
I do not know how to explain the subcon-
scious impulse that prompted my question.
"What news from the front?" I asked, after
a pause. "From the General?" I am still
unable to account for the query.
M. Novinsky glanced at me quickly, his
140
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
eyes narrowing to two steel points. "Why
do you ask?"
"I don't know," I stammered. "I really
couldn't say."
M. Novinsky sat with pale lips, graven like
a statue.
"I confess to you," he said, wearily, "that,
like Turgenev, I should often despair of my
race were it not for the wonderful Russian
language. Think me sentimental if you will,
but it is my one consolation. When I con-
sider this 'great, mighty, powerful, and free
Russian language ' I cannot but believe that it
comes from a great people. Even as a boy
lying on my back under the limes, making
friendships with the poets, I felt its wonder.
A language wrought in little izbas, in forests
and on the steppe, despised and rejected as
the language of serfs, even unclothed until
Pushkin gave it the exquisite symbols of a
poet, yet fragrant with the deeps of human
life; the most powerful, the most burning,
the tenderest language of the human soul.
Surely such a language could not be conceived
of but by a people sincere, powerful, and as-
piring." He spoke so reverently that I hes-
itated to break his mood.
141
MISS AMERIKANKA
"What will come to pass," I asked, softly,
"when the peasants know that they were left
to face German shells with bare hands while
those who were responsible for them haggled
across Petrograd counters for the last penny
of booty?"
" I do not know I do not know! Three of
your engineers I am acquainted with. Three
are Russians three German Russians from
the province of Riga. Enough of the treach-
ery is Russian, but you cannot imagine the
complexity and penetration of German in-
trigue." He was holding himself in check,
but his eyes were as intensely blue as the
minaret of the Mohammedan mosque. ' ' What
a history Russia's has been! In the old days
she was forced to rule with a hand of iron all
those outlying turbulent tribes which meant
Russia. That day has passed partially. I
believe Russia still needs something of a strong
hand. There is a chance now for freedom, too,
but Russia is caught in a power a thousand
times more terrible than the knout of Ivan
Grozni the German bureaucracy. Always it
has plunged its hands into the coffers of Rus-
sia, and now it is dribbling the Russian
people through its hands like water. You
142
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
cannot conceive what it is to live in a nation
of peasants a hundred and eighty million
peasants. What chance has such a people-
plastic, good-natured, ignorant against Teu-
ton masters? Treasure for German exploita-
tion, that is what Germans have considered
Russians their proper gain 'Russian pigs/
Russia herself will never be conquered from
the outside. To fight her is to fight the ele-
ments winter the steppe Nature herself.
Old amorphous Russia can close over her
enemy as a jungle closes over its slain. Would
that she could engulf and strangle now every
German overseer, every German factory agent,
every German-paid monk ! It is the first step
in the righting of Russia!"
M. Novinsky was pacing between the fire
and the window, his hair slightly disordered
a feature far more alarming to me than an-
other man's complete disintegration. The
tides had loosed. The serene man I had
known had vanished and another had sprung
up white, straining, son of an emotional race,
with a swift tongue and passionate movements.
"A monstrous net of intrigue a net of
treachery that must be broken if it takes
every life in Russia." He stopped with a
143
MISS AMERIKANKA
sudden gesture at control and gazed moodily
out over the hooded Moika.
The little French clock ticked steadily
while I sat in silence. A premonition chilled
me as I followed him, of origins so different
from mine, but in a thousand thousand ways,
that mattered more my nearest of kin, East
or West in all the world.
"The sucking and draining her dry from the
inside, and flinging her up pulpous dead
flesh Bozhe moi!"
The twilight deepened over the square
while the lamp-lighter began his rounds over
the Red Bridge. And then, as night began to
weave her shimmering web about the branch-
ing trees and the dim canal, he sat down at
the piano and played fragments of things
Russian a folk-song from Glinka; the mel-
ody of peasants dancing in the white night;
a moving harmony of Borodin; a dissonance
of Scriabine fire and flood and the dissolution
of the world; a mass of Mussorgsky's; the
East Indian's song, unearthly sweet, from
Sadko; fragments from Chopin, a dirge of
Tchaikowsky, a largo of Rachmaninoff. I
had never heard him play so stormily or so
wistfully. The Russian hurricane seemed
144
Everything that he loved was singing
its swan-song through his fingers
RUSSIAN TREACHERY
breaking over him, and everything that he
loved and everything that he hated was sing-
ing its swan song through his fingers. And,
as he played, everything that I loved and
everything that I hated and feared in Russia
crowded there in the darkness and filled the
room with ominous shapes. Bozht moil and
how much there is in Russia to love and hate
and fear!
XI
THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES
THE dvornik rushes in; he begs pardon,
but the house is on fire. It is incon-
veniently cold and I am thrust deep in an
arm-chair and Balzac, but I slide out of my
dressing-gown and dress myself for the street ;
whereupon in he rushes again, begs pardon, a
thousand regrets, but the house is not on fire.
These vacillating Russians!
It leaves me in somewhat the same state as
my presentation. For I have been presented.
No, not to the Czar, but to Madame Novinska.
How I quaked when the envelope came, de-
livered by private messenger like a command
from the Vatican. I felt that I must rush
away to buy a white veil and souvenirs to be
blessed. If there had been a choice, I am
sure I should have chosen the Czar, for they
say he always looks indifferent, as if he
wanted to go home and play with his children.
146
THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES
M. Novinsky came for me, looking immacu-
late and grave. He is always immaculate
and usually grave, except when he leans for-
ward to talk to one quite personally, and then
his eyes light with an exquisite sort of com-
prehension, the rarest tribute and the subtlest
flattery to a woman. I had not seen him
since we had talked of the intrigue in Russia,
and there were a thousand things I longed to
ask. But a pause seemed to have fallen upon
us, like a pause before a sentence, as we rolled
past the old coroneted houses on the English
Quai. It was not a giddy sleigh, but one of
the Novinsky carriages. I clutched at the
skirts of my departing French verbs while
M. Novinsky leaned on his stick, watching
the Neva. The mother whom he worships
and the withdrawn life in the old Faubourg
St.-Germain of the Russian capital I had
tried to imagine, but in vain. No more could
I read him to-day no trace of the furious
Tartar, but an enigma, his eyes dark inter-
ludes, reflecting some inner drama I knew
not what.
The house, which stands on a quiet side
street, planted with lime-trees, is an old
wooden Russian house, built around a court
H7
MISS AMERIKANKA
entered through iron gates and one of those
venturesome vaulted gateways, not magnifi-
cent, but with the luxury of seclusion. I am
sure it is charming under the limes in the
spring. The door was opened by a man-
servant in livery and an irreproachable air
of belonging to the best family in Petrograd.
If I am not mistaken, it was Andrei, who once
crawled into a bear's den at the command of
his small autocrat, to find himself confronted
by two fiery eyes, and who would have lost
his life but for the presence of a Cossack;
the same Andrei who threw himself on the
ground and wept passionately upon his mas-
ter's return, after the manner of the East.
The order of the house I can remember only
dimly. There is a broad stairway, leading out
of the entrance hall into a larger hall above
lined with old portraits, a head of Pushkin
and one of Lermontov and a few ingenuous
busts done by a dilettante of the family; a
music-room in green and birch, deliciously
recalling a birch forest ; a long white-and-gold
salon with heavy glass chandeliers and yellow
damask curtains ; glimpses of a smaller draw-
ing-room with eccentric birds in flight across
a Chinese screen; and a library of paneled
148
THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES
Russian oak. The floors everywhere are of
beautifully polished wood, and quaint wooden
steps, worn into hollows by generations of
Novinskys, lead up and down between the
rooms. Tourists would probably find it lack-
ing in magnificence, and I would rather be
drawn and quartered than expose anything so
dim and tender and fragrant with human asso-
ciation to a vulgar gaze. It is the house in
which M. Novinsky was born and I felt new
doors of personality opening as we passed
through the mellow rooms, with a garden
framed through the French windows beyond,
together with a sudden quick gratitude for
this new admittance.
Mile. Novinska came to meet me in her
manner which resembles floating rather than
walking, to say that her mother was awaiting
me in one of the small drawing-rooms. She
looked paler than the first day I saw her,
wearing something blue, with a narrow line of
uncut emeralds about her throat emphasizing
the whiteness of her skin. I remember that a
woman, who had been physician to the Em-
press Dowager of China, once told me that
she had never once really seen the apartments
to which she was commanded. Each time
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MISS AMERIKANKA
she struggled to look at the appointments of
the palace in the Forbidden City; invariably
she came away without the image of a single
detail. Once within the Empress Dowager's
presence, it was impossible to detach one's
attention for a moment from the "Old
Buddha." I recall only some small tapestry
panels, the high-backed carved chair in which
Mile. Novinska sat near me for my res-
cue, if I needed her! and a high, wide fire-
place.
Madame Novinska has been an invalid since
the tragic death of her second son, and she
was half -reclining as I entered. A portrait of
her could be painted only in the grand manner
a face of alabaster, white hair under the
ivory lace of her cap, and tense, dark eyes,
thoughtful like M. Novinsky's. My first im-
pression, among others that crowded forth,
was of a woman who looked far beyond our
ken. The hand she held out to me was
slender and blue- veined, and offered with that
indescribable mingling of graciousness and im-
periousness which marks the great lady to
whom homage is due and rendered. And,
joy of joys, she expressed her pleasure at see-
ing me in English! "Ah, that is the expres-
150
THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES
sion of your eyes!" she said, as she turned me
to the light. How amazingly simple the real
people are even in this formal Old World!
It was the atmosphere of a salon, and the deft-
ness with which she put the stranger at ease
was nothing less than magical. Among a
people old and experienced in living, it is not
the least beautiful of the arts.
I find the Russian extremely sensitive to
foreign culture, and the fact that his own land
has so long been counted a barbarian camp
has driven the aristocrat abroad until, as the
fruits of his exile, he is now the cosmopolite
of the world. Madame Novinska's knowledge
of America and her interest in American af-
fairs were amazing. Helen Keller, the Amer-
ican war policy, Burbank perhaps a word
only in passing, but laden with suggestion.
Under her skilful shifting and sorting of
topics one talked in spite of one's self, and all
the time her eyes were registering something
neither Helen Keller nor Burbank nor the
American war policy. And yet I did not feel
disquieted, for she gave that rare and generous
assurance that the best in one would not be
ignored.
"You know our interest in America is of
MISS AMERIKANKA
long standing," smiled Mile. Novinska. "Ma
mere knew Washington as a girl."
"Yes, my uncle was attached to the em-
bassy at Washington and I made a visit to
your capital as a very young girl," reminisced
Madame Novinska. "But I remember it as
vividly as if it were yesterday the summer
nights on the Potomac and the ' darkies ' sing-
ing below our windows in the dusky night.
They are exceedingly picturesque, your ne-
groes; I wonder if Americans know just how
picturesque. And the tall, clean-shaven of-
ficers. I remember stealing down the curving
stairway to watch the dancers in the ball-
room. Of course, as a jeune file I lived se-
cluded; Russian girls are younger than your
young girls. But it was a wonderful memory.
Can you imagine Turgenev's Liza there?
What airy delight I took in the barouches
and perhaps I might have dreamed a longer
time of officers with Yankee chins had it not
been for a young cousin in Russia." She
glanced instinctively above the fireplace to
the portrait of an officer with a slim, delicately
poised head and eyes like M. Novinsky's.
"America has much to teach Russia. In
spite of a certain youth in our muscles, we are
THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES
old and weary in our consciousness. But
America America is so healthy, so strong!
She has never had the ' courage of her destiny
dwarfed,' as have we of Europe. She has
no skeletons of human failures to strew the
path. What colossal naive unawareness,
what faith, what enthusiasm! All that Eu-
rope has tried and found impossible she
achieves before she hears that it is impossible!
Russia has a few ancient ruins and crumbling
cities to remind her of man's failure, but she
has many centuries of remembered chaos
and insufficiency. For too many generations
life for Russia has been to sit all day in a
dressing-gown. The educated man has but
two openings for his energy to manage his
estate and to put on the uniform of a tchinovnik
and become another spider in the web of
officialdom. There is no normal, unrestricted
outlet for him, as there is in America, because
everything is bound about with Government
influence. And inhibition prolonged breeds
sleep in the blood, and a certain confused
futility. The most depressing feature of Rus-
sian autocracy has not been the visible thwart-
ing of individual life, but the disintegration of
a whole national fiber. Through disuse, the
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MISS AMERIKANKA
Russian has lost his sinew. Turgenev knew.
See his Nezhdanoff struggling to act, but
stumbling and falling and shooting himself
under an apple-tree. All these centuries that
grooves should have been laid in men's minds,
there have been none. When the revolution
comes, then we shall reap the harvest of all
these trackless brains. Russian women are
far more practical and stronger than Russian
men. Ah, it is great good fortune to be born
an American! I see America in the poise of
your head and in your eyes. But it must come
some day, our self-realization. The steppe
has left us a great heritage a belief in the
brotherhood of man and the oneness of God, an
immense social cohesion and a tremendous
power and simplicity."
Madame Novinska spoke as one who treas-
ures her ideals like a dream. I feel it in all
of them in Dmitri Nikolai vitch, in Mile.
Novinska, in Olga Stepanovna, in Agasha,
gray and grumbling though she be the wor-
ship of the ideal. Can they, will they, I won-
der, ever embody the ideal in action?
Tea was served after half an hour by a butler
descended from one of the house-serfs freed
by Madame Novinska's father, an ancient
THE HOUSE UNDER THE LIMES
servitor whose face, like that of Turgenev's
Pistchalkin, "has set in a sort of solemn jelly
of positively blatant virtue." Mile. Novinska
herself poured from a quaint old silver service
with a design in bas-relief, copied from an
ancient Persian tomb, which had been brought
the tea service, not the tomb by another
diplomatic ancestor who had seen long service
in Persia and Turkey. And the firelight
gleamed on the crested porcelain, on the fine
damask inset with heavy Russian lace, and on
Mile. Novinska's thin hands.
M. Novinsky spoke little, but his eyes rested
adoringly on his mother. When I said my
adieus he accompanied me down the winding
velvet-carpeted stairway, past the Fragonards,
into the great stone-floored hall below, where
the carriage waited inside the wrought-iron
gates. It was indescribably charming, this
bit of Old World quietude, the gabled roofs
pointing against the deepening saffron sky, the
court filling with dusk. The lights were be-
ginning to come out and their pale light
struggled feebly with the amethyst shadows,
splashing the court with pools of black. An
entirely consistent figure in this mellow back-
ground, M. Novinsky, slimly silhouetted
MISS AMERIKANKA
against the great doors, looking down at
me.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"Please do not say you thank me." There
was an inexplicable ache in my throat. "It
has been a day I shall remember." I dared
not look up at the face in the dusk, lean and
delicate with thought and feeling.
"Pardon, Amerikanka, but you have been
a deep pleasure to madame, ma mere." His
voice was low, strongly Slavic in accent. ' ' These
are darker days in Russia, perhaps, than you
know. You have been a thread of gold shot
across our somber background. And there is
also another reason." The eyes, almost elec-
tric blue even in the twilight, gazed at me
with a new, strange earnestness. "I shall be
leaving Petrograd and I wanted to see you
here in this old house."
XII
A FACE AT THE BALLET*
I HAVE been sitting by the French window,
watching the cathedral lose itself in the
dusk. Twilight is the enchanted hour in any
land. How many other images surge through
my mind and struggle for place! It is the
Japanese Inland Sea; twisted islands sharpen
from the sea-green mists, beckon and vanish
again phantoms; from the shore, lights
twinkle under thatched roofs, and quaint
silhouettes move against paper screens. In
Kobe and Nagasaki jagged peaks, patterned
like a willow-plate, cut sharply against the
sky; below in the harbor, lateen-sailed junks
home-bound pole quietly in among freighters
and steamers and yachts and all the unas-
sorted craft that make up a harbor in the
East. There are other images: the bund at
Shanghai Shanghai, that brilliant hybrid of
East and West, pouring along its gay ante-
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dinner throng. Clean, white-flanneled young
Englishmen; pale, laborious Germans; Sikhs
with immobile eyes, in red turbans and khaki
uniforms; natives in delicate blue and laven-
der silks; rickshas beginning to light their
long Chinese lanterns ; ladies in carriages with
tasseled mafus, and runners that scatter the
crowds all in a sensuous, heated atmosphere
against the darkening blue of the Hwangho.
Egypt unrolls like a frieze: black palms fring-
ing the cooling sands of the Nile; the thin blue
smoke of the evening meal curling upward from
a mud-walled Arab village to an orange sky;
strings of home-coming camels; women with
water-pots, majestic creatures. Over all the
tented silky sky and the darkling river weav-
ing the shifting tints into a rich brocade. . . .
Memories, too, of Peking: monster gates tow-
ering above the city, freighted with the
mystery of North China, dwarfing even the
camel-caravans that emerge from their shad-
ows; brocaded gentlemen airing their birds
on the wall in the cool of the evening; the
faint, sweet plaint of the samisen from the
lantern-lighted city below. . . . Memories all
of shimmering sand and heat and tumultuous
life. How incredibly different those other
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A. FACE AT THE BALLET
twilights from this spacious gray light of the
North ! Is this happiness, I wonder, that one
feels in Russia? It is not a land to which one
turns with song and laughter, Russia. It is
like the face of Dus6 a thing of shadows,
weary, wistful, poignant. But I would not
surrender it, though it is pain and struggle;
there is something more mysterious seeking to
break through here than anywhere else in the
world. In Russia I have ceased to be what I
fear I have been a person with an interest
in the graceful beauty of life and I am de-
veloping I hope! a soul. But it has been
M. Novinsky's Russia, seen through his inter-
pretation, through the medium of his per-
sonality. What will it be without my ex-
quisite ambassador my friend?
MADEMOISELLE, Lend us your West-world eyes to-
morrow night for the ballet. It may be my last this
season and I want to see it with the old illusion.
Yours faithfully,
DMITRI NOVINSKY.
"Olga Stepanovna," I cried, when my host-
ess had joined the samovar, singing its little
folk-song, "I shall a-balleting go!"
"Ballet!" Olga Stepanovna pronounced
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MISS AMERIKANKA
the word Russian fashion with a "t," while
the samovar burbled with excitement. "Bal-
let nu, golubtchik, as I have explained to you,
ballet is subsidized by the Crown, tickets are
sold by abonnement and boxes are inherited with
the estate and family jewels. It 13 difficult."
I put the note written in M. Novinsky's
neat script into her hands.
"Ah, with the Novinskys! Mozhno. The
Novinsky box has been in the family three
generations; Madame Novinska had it from
her father, old Prince Korovotsky. There is
no difficulty. It is the fashion now to send
one's box to the officers on leave and there
will be a gay show of color. And Sunday
night wear your prettiest frock, dushenka."
"Cricket for the Britisher and ballet for
the Russian," I heard Olga Stepanovna's
voice rippling on. While my eyes followed the
last phrase again, "my last this season," Olga
Stepanovna chattered on, volubly, screening
me gratefully. "I had an aunt in Little Rus-
sia who had never seen ballet until she came
to Petrograd last winter. If you could have
beheld her radiance! Sixty, the mother of
many sons and the child of many sorrows, but
ah, the taste was in her! I heard strange
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A FACE AT THE BALLET
sounds in her rooms at two in the morning,
after the ballet; I pulled on a dressing-gown
and slipped down the corridor. And there
stood my venerable aunt before a mirror, gray
and ponderous so, Amerikanka! arrayed in
a short petticoat, rising on her toes, pirouet-
ting, chasseing and trying all the floatings of
the gauzy ballerinas. She blushed a little
when I came in. 'Don't take me for a fool,
little Olga,' she sighed. 'It was so beauti-
ful!' And do you know, milaya, I did not
take her for a fool."
I slipped the note into its sheath. I knew
that I had not yet pressed against the coldest
terror of pain, and I longed desperately for
something warm and human.
"Ah, milaya, you can never comprehend
the ballet." My godmother more than half
guessed, I think, as she ran on: "In your
happy America, to dance is merely to seek
pleasure and, therefore, it means nothing.
But in Russia, to dance is to rebel to rebel
against tyranny, against the futility of life.
Do you not hear it in our music, the moaning of
the wind in the forest, the lonely gray of the
steppe, the terror of night, the despair? Ah,
me! you do not know the steppe nor the mad
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MISS AMERIKANKA
carousals and debauch with which those
shaggy giants there seek to shake it off.
Wait until you hear the songs on the Volga!
How they sound across the water from the
rafts at night! They know and they are
seeking to forget, those river boatmen "
Little Dasha had donned a new collar and
a string of red beads, and her cheeks and eyes
shone as if the pumpkin coach and the mice
footmen stood outside the door. No dreary
hours for little Dasha these days, with Prince
Charming at the door, nor for Agasha Feo-
dorovna. Agasha summoned me a score of
times to see my frock and herself set my fur
galoshes before the fire. This Russian kind-
ness it wraps one like a Scotch plaidie in a
cauld, cauld blast.
Perhaps to American eyes the Maryinsky
Theater might be a bit lack-luster, but I like
the sleighs fleeing past us in the white dis-
tance of the Moika, to appear again over the
arched bridges of the river; the purple dome
of sky, threaded with iridescent mists, bulging
izvostchiks, dashing across the mammoth
square, discharging rainbow cargoes from
furry depths and making way sharply for the
next bearded Jehu.
"It isn't as brilliant as London or Paris
theater-going," said M. Novinsky, gazing out
of the carriage window at the white ribbon of
avenue.
"But I like it the northness and scintilla-
tion. It's more hand-made. It's Russian!"
"You are beginning to feel the charm of
Russia?" M. Novinsky 's eyes turned on me
with serious intentness.
I catch the slantwise line of his profile,
nervously incisive under the flickering lights
of the carriage, his expressive smile, medita-
tive eyes, eyes that can narrow and burn.
A mondain, yes but sincere, objective; a
beautiful, natural human being. The carriage
is pervaded with the faint fragrance of Rus-
sian cigarettes, so entangled for me with
other memories memories of Peking, of black
nights on the steppe and filmy days along the
Neva so much of joy and pain and struggle
and so much of exquisite content. We are
passing the Yusuppoff Palace. I turn my
eyes away for refuge in the mystery of the
great iron gates. Suddenly I realize this is
what Life, with all her shifting and selecting
and wearing-down process, ought to produce.
Never before had I so felt the appeal of beauty
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in a human being. And now all this fineness
to be lost in the gaping void of Russia's
destiny? One topic lies, a dead thing, veiled,
between us to-night when we are seeing ballet
with the old illusion.
"Russia, like China, is a bit shabby, but
she has the air of the grand dame." That is
all I find courage to say.
Below the box bloomed a painter's riot of
color: silver-daggered Circassians, like kings
incognito; handsome young Hussars in blue
or crimson trousers; Robin Hood colonels in
green. Diaghileff may bring ballet to Amer-
ica, but not even he can carry all this con-
tingent color. Surely, ballet blossoms its su-
premely bizarre and beautiful flower only here
on Russian soil.
It was not a large party; two fair-haired
young officers home from the trenches, a
lovely Titian-haired friend of Natalya Niko-
laievna's, and a miniature aunt of the Novin-
skys in black velvet and diamonds.
"Nu, Amerikanka," said Mile. Novinska,
mistily pale in her black tulle, the row of un-
cut emeralds emphasizing the pallor of her skin
and the lurking shadow of her eyes, as she held
out her hand with a smile always a little dis-
164
A FACE AT THE BALLET
trait. " It is good to have you here. This is
a quaint old Russian folk- tale that Dmitri and
I used to watch as children from this very box
with our grandmother, and we have always
loved the little awkward tow-headed prince,
fumbling his cap before the court beauties he
had evoked, and then setting off with the
little Humpbacked Horse, for the One Most
Beautiful of All." Her eyes lingered for a
moment on the brother whom she resembles
as one thoroughbred borzoi resembles another.
"And why do they all stand?" I begged,
gazing at the spectrum of color below. When
one is American one is expected to be wide-
eyed and breathless; it is one of the privileges.
"Why do all those officers magnifique stand?"
"Since the Czar's box is here, they may be
in the presence of his Majesty," explained the
young officer. "And he is present sometimes
with the little grand duchesses and the Em-
press Dowager. The Empress never comes;
she is melancholy." He added the latter under
his breath with an enigmatic glance at me.
"And those lovely Andalusians with the
mobile eyes and sloping shoulders?" I breathed
from the edge of the box.
"Armenians from Baku; after the Circas-
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sians, the most beautiful women in Europe,"
M. Novinsky answered, his eyes following the
two I had indicated, with the same connois-
seur's air he would have shown examining
a jade or Meissen.
They were constantly dropping into the box,
between acts, these men from the front. One
could almost smell the fresh hardness of the
camp about them. And the lusty delight of
them to be again in the capital, and the pot-
pourri of tongues! French, English, Russian
one never knew which the arrival would
speak. The last news from the front, the
freshest bit of court gossip, and the newest
military scandal. Bagdad and Babel in one;
life vast, quivering, momentous, with always
the sense of the snows beyond there some-
where the sound of the guns and the fate of
the world hanging in the uncleared smoke
brilliant, dangerous, terrible.
It would have been intoxicating if for one
moment one could have forgotten. I glanced
at Mile. Novinska. I wondered if she knew.
"Do you feel a peculiar intensity here?" a
young captain of the Pavolski regiment the
regiment that four times has gone out and four
times has not come back asked me. "It is
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A FACE AT THE BALLET
not simply the joy of returning. That is enough
for your Englishman, but for the Russian
there is another appeal the contrast of the
snowy dugouts, the terrible and violent, with
this heaped and perfumed luxury; it is that
the Russian loves. It stirs in him a sense of
the lyric, the extraordinaire" And looking
into his susceptible Slavic eyes, I knew that it
was true. And I remembered nights on the
steppe and skating under the pines.
It was the dowager who really informed me
as to the ballet. What stores of knowledge
I should have had, could I have listened to her !
To her lively questions I answered that I
spoke Russian little and badly.
"Neetchevo," she returned, briskly. "Keep
trying! English and American speak every-
thing badly. Do you like the ballet? Yes?
Ah, but you cannot understand it! No one
can comprehend who is not Russian. It is
racial, this passion for the acme of the sophis-
ticated, combined with barbaric strength.
Cest absolument Slave. And do you realize,
mademoiselle, the Russian, fickle to his other
mundane loves, is amazingly faithful to his
ballet favorites? That is because we worship
art and not personalities. Have you seen
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MISS AMERIKANKA
Karsavina, the beautiful, the prima ballerina
of Petrograd as Gelza is of Moscow? But
you should see the house when tiny Prebyshen-
skaya, the grandmother of the ballet, flits
across the stage. Pavlova? Konyechno. But
we seldom see her. She returns only to put
an edge to her dancing and keep her place on
the pension-roll. Here she is but one and
interests us largely because of her vogue with
you. It is Kseshenska, the court favorite of
twenty years ago, now the wife of a grand duke
and mother of a tall son, who is the one great
ballerina of all Russia. It is Kseshenska who
sets all the ballet standards. It is Kseshenska
who has the most beautiful jewels in Russia.
Elle est merveilleuse! And she has cost the
peasant more than one battle-ship!"
It was pleasant in the shadows of the ca-
pacious box, Mile. Novinska's profile gleaming
palely in the half-light and the two young
officers lost in the flying harmonies. If I
could have but forgotten! With most of the
officers I feel that the ballet is caviare for
capricious appetites, but in M. Novinsky it
appeals to deeper and more subtle sensibilities.
I could not see him, but I was aware of him
with his arms folded, lost in the poesy of the
168
A FACE AT THE BALLET
rich ensemble, sunk deep in the melancholy of
the Slav, which is not a trivial melancholy of
the despair, but of man's whole impotence
and impermanence. How pleasant it was,
how sweet there in the dim box like a hanging
balcony above the garden of color! And
over it all hovered the Rimsky-Korsakov
music, an accompaniment to one's dream,
languidly rising, touching everything mysteri-
ous and sacred, loosing everything barbaric
in one.
"Do you like it?" M. Novinsky leaned
forward with his head on his hand.
"Yes," I confessed. "But I feel like a
heathen at prayers, when to you each flying
posture of the dancer is as distinctive as the
tone of Elman or Kubelik."
"It brings a thousand other images of liquid
movement. I see again horsemen silhouetted
against the horizon the bronze bodies of
Chinese coolies boats clustering down the
Nile. Russian literature, I confess, depresses
me sometimes; Russian dancing and music,
never! They have caught all the color of the
Slav and shot a new pattern through the old
web of life."
I was about to reply to this sensitive Slav,
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MISS AMERIKANKA
who runs swiftly before me in every appercep-
tion of beauty, when my eye fell upon two
figures who had come in and were standing in
one of the boxes opposite, a general with a
sharp mustache and many decorations, and a
junior staff-officer, noticeable for his carriage.
The words ebbed away from me. Could it be?
I stared again. And the younger officer, he
of the smoky-blue eyes! The younger man
was clean-shaven now, but the peculiar car-
riage!
"Dmitri Nikolaievitch" one instinctively
lowers one's voice in Russia "in the opposite
box the general and the other the young
officer"
I had expected to see M. Novinsky startled,
but he continued to follow his program.
"Yes," he assented, without lifting his eyes
in the direction in which I was staring. "It
is his Excellency." His voice had a curi-
ously hard edge which I had never heard be-
fore. "And the other 'the servant.' It is
impossible to explain now, mademoiselle, but
if I may ask you to trust me I beg a thousand
pardons you will not address the General?"
XIII
MISS AMERIKANKA KNOWS
I WAS just entering Kazan Cathedral this
afternoon, to burn a taper against these
troublous times, when I met M. Novinsky
emerging abstractedly like a figure in a
dream. I could feel my face flush with joy,
and then an icy gray flood poured through
me. I had seen that look in men's faces and
I knew. I knew. I knew.
"I have been burning a candle to my patron
saint," M. Novinsky said, his smile stealing
through me like healing. " Shall we turn back
into the cathedral for a moment? I was just
on my way to you."
I glanced again at his pale, grave face as we
entered the shadowy jeweled dusk and found
a niche away from the throng that ebbed and
flowed through the cathedral. / knew. There
was no need for him to speak, for his words
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MISS AMERIKANKA
could contain little that I had not already
divined.
"It is true as you have surmised," he said,
as calmly as if he discussed a dinner invitation.
"I am going to the front, not in the usual way,
but on a special mission. It is of the utmost
importance. The nature of it must remain un-
known even to my sister and I am sorry to
you, Amerikanka. I wanted to tell you be-
cause there are not many chances that I shall
return. Neetchevo. That is of trifling impor-
tance. If I accomplish my end, it will be an
immense coup d'etat for Russia. But I could not
go without thanking you for an experience
completely satisfying such as comes to but few
men and never . . . twice in a lifetime."
He spoke slightly formally, as if he had
thought it all out carefully, controlled. His
voice, strongly Slavic, died away as the music
poured about us in a whirling flood. It was
Rachmaninoff's Mass for the Dead. ... I
leaned against the foot of an ikon, struggling
with the desolate gray sea which threatened
to engulf me, while the music languished and
moaned among the somber spaces.
"Shto dyelatch?" M. Novinsky asked, in his
quiet, un-English voice, looking down at me
172
MISS AMERIKANKA KNOWS
while the light from silver candelabra fell on
his smooth, dark head and the music ebbed
about the shadowy pillars. "It is the com-
mon fate and the common sacrifice. But it is
not pain. I had feared to lose my chance, and
now it has come the opportunity to serve
Russia. Except for my mother, I am in-
describably happy. It is magnificent har-
mony to be caught up in the whole, thrown
into the current, living not one, but a hun-
dred million lives. This is what life ought
to mean concerted effort." His eyes bore
the same quiet mysticism they had shown
that night as we watched the cathedral in
the oncoming dusk, and a certain luminous
release with which sacrifice sets her men
apart.
I found my voice coming as from a dim dis-
tance. "I know I can guess." I faltered.
"But not our" I could not bring myself to
frame the General's name.
"I did not know you were aware." M.
Novinsky turned a penetrating glance on me.
"Yes" he dropped down on a stone bench
in the niche, resting his head on his hands
"he, too. It is all part of an enormous plot.
I have known ever since I came to Petrograd.
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MISS AMERIKANKA
Three factories have gone over into German
hands and without ammunition it means
slaughter for the men at the front. Yes, he,
too. That is why I asked you not to see him
last night at the opera. I wanted to spare you
that memory. * I could not bear in after
years " The plastic figure with his back
bowed in the half-light did not finish, but I
knew.
The chant had ebbed and died and the glory
of the priestly vestments had passed into
the tenebrous chancel. An old peasant bun-
dle of rags lay at the foot of an ikon, clasp-
ing the feet of the Christ. We came slowly
out and stood for a moment together in the
shadows, M. Novinsky with his arms folded,
I struggling with my loneliness, like figures in
some ancient Greek drama looking up at the
giant pillars dwarfing our two pigmy figures
with pity and fear. Above shone the stars as
they had shone in Siberia as they shone on
my West there across the sea as they shone
now on those snow-dunes there in the fantastic
white night.
Olga Stepanovna has taken me with her
many times these days, silently protecting, as
MISS AMERIKANKA KNOWS
best she may, this godchild whose feet are
set in paths of pain.
One of Olga Stepanovna's friends is a queen
and we have been shopping to-day for church
brocades with which to bind a volume of
poems for her Royal Highness. The bro-
cades are rarely beautiful, richer than the
brocades of China or Japan, but difficult to
buy. The Japanese has no hesitation in selling
his sacramental robes, but the Russian neither
wears the cross as a decoration nor traffics in
his priestly vestments. Perhaps we search
for laces among the peasant craft-shops while
the old woman runs on about the famine of
1905 and the great Tolstoi's aiding the peas-
ants, helping them to pick up again the old
folk-patterns and to improve their work. Or
perhaps we take a swift sleigh to the islands
beyond the Neva, where at a little cafe Olga
Stepanovna orders a luncheon for me, purely
Russian. There are little meat pies and a soup
in each plate of which floats a hard-boiled
egg whether for refreshment or divertise-
ment I never discovered. But it is of no use.
It is as Dmitri Nikolaivitch's city I have seen
Petrograd and it will always be his city. Yes-
terday he was; to-day he is not; to-morrow ?
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MISS AMERIKANKA
It's snowing in Petrograd to-day. A Rus-
sian snow. There has been a victory, too.
One sentence by wireless, and the city is flung
into pseans of rejoicing. If you wish Russian
opera, here it is the opening chorus. The
streets are thronged with multitudes tramping
bareheaded through the snow, the ikons borne
aloft on their shoulders, Slavic fire kindling
through Slavic languor; and as they tramp
they sing strange Slavic rhythms. Tramp,
tramp the cathedral squares are filling, and
the place before the Winter Palace is lit with
impassioned faces. The Slavic melody breaks
into wilder, stronger rhythms, and above all
float the Double Eagles of Russia in the
whirling, whitening snow. How quickly they
flare up, these children of Russia, and as
swiftly die down. You ask whether Russians
love Russia. The reverential babas and iz-
vostchiks answer to-day. It is the soul of
Russia singing her high song.
I had stood silent while the soldiers' chorus
passed. As the song died away in the muffled
distance toward the Winter Palace, came an-
other sound of slow drums and the Chopin
Marche Funebre. Out of the white distance
down the Litenyie slowly wound a cortege, a
176
MISS AMERIKANKA KNOWS
gun-carriage stripped and drawn by artillery
horses ridden by war-worn soldiers; a rider-
less horse following the still figure, pricking his
ears at the empty, useless stirrups ; then three
officers in long belted coats; a white carriage
filled with flowers; and other veiled and
shrouded women's figures walking slowly.
That weary, weary walking through the snow
that intimate last camaraderie which the
Russian rich and poor alike pay their dead!
A somber pageant under the pall of that
Marche played with the curious Russian
rhythm, sadder than any other rhythm in the
world.
" Matushka, an officer do you know
who?" I touched a shawled baba who stood
near me while the crowd watched silently with
bared heads. A sudden breathless pain rushed
through me at that moment when her wrinkled
lips framed the name. How silently, unan-
nounced, tragedy stands at the door!
His image was still before me as he stood
before the fire and talked of Russia that
night on the islands under the pine, his mag-
nificent Turgenev head and shoulders out-
lined against the paneling. He had come to
say farewell before he went to the front, the
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tall Muscovite, Dmitri Nikolaivitch's com-
rade, who had not feared to meet his destiny
of pain. And now his viking length of limb
had passed on the gun-carriage. I crossed
myself with the broad Russian cross as the
cortege wound into the mists. So falls the
curtain of life or does it open there some-
where in a dazzling radiance? I wondered,
as I had wondered a thousand times since I
stood with M. Novinsky that night amid the
shadows of the cathedral.
"Was he one of yours, milaya?" The old
woman turned to me with patiently dumb
eyes.
"Yes, matushka" I faltered.
From the further whiteness the dirge drifted
back slow and sad with indefatigable Slavic
sadness.
"Gospode tebye, milaya" The old mother
laid a shawled arm about me while I sobbed
quietly with the incomprehensibility of it all.
"I have lost five sons in the war. It is too
much sorrow even for women."
XIV
A MENTAL BREAD-LINE
1AM too restless to read, these days. To
walk endlessly in the snow it is the only
way to forget the obscurity out there into
which men drop.
To-day I found myself in Vassily Ostrov.
It was not without trepidation that I passed
a sleepy dvornik and through an arched door-
way into the courtyard of what seemed a colos-
sal apartment-house. I entered such a court-
yard last week. It was the right number, but
when I adventurously opened one of the doors
on a chance, the room was filled with startled
dark-looking men, one of whom came quickly
forward to meet the intruder.
The snow was melting in puddles and the
eaves pelted me with drops as I picked my
way through the slush. It recalled the court
in Gorky's Twenty-six Men and a Girl and I
half expected to see the girl crossing the court,
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her skirts held neatly above trim ankles, to
meet the baker with fine golden hair on his
forearm. I steered my way between puddles
to the only door visible, an unlikely-looking
one opposite the entrance. A mutely humble
woman opened the door, removed my fur
galoshes and hung up my shiiba in a row of
other fur coats with a manner that could not
exist with us any more than could an English
butler's face. It was the women's university.
I don't know what I expected to see a
short-haired committee discussing bombs, per-
haps. At any rate, the atmosphere was very
different. Not for an instant could one have
held the illusion that one had dropped into
an American university. As I wandered up
the stairway I began to be inundated by
crowds of Russian university girls, and to
breathe more deeply that atmosphere so
amazingly different. Arnold Bennett called
our education a pageant, and he might have
added, "through which the youth of America
walk like young gods." If Arnold Bennett
were in Russia he would call education a
bread-line.
My guide was a junior from Rostov who had
been twice in England and who spoke a su-
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perior English. She was not one of your pink-
and-white English beauties, but she was
amazingly magnetic, her face typically Rus-
sian, broad like a Tartar's across the cheek-
bone, and without definitive line or color.
Her hair, tawny as a Cossack's, but fine and
thick, she wore cut short like an early Italian
or a child, and continually tossed it out of her
eyes with what seemed to me an infinity of
patience. In Solomon's time her throat
would have been celebrated in song, so like a
tower of ivory, so firm, so clearly marked with
the necklace of beauty that it tempted the
fingers like a piece of sculpture.
We sat down in the assembly-room while
the girls promenaded by twos around the
room, and she talked in a low voice that came
well from the ivory throat. The more she
talked the more I found myself liking to look
at her; I kept recalling, too, Henry James's
description of Turgenev in Daudet's salon in
Paris. As the confreres of Turgenev in the
exploit e atmosphere of Paris saw beyond him
the gray horizon of Russia, so beyond my
friend from Rostov I saw the mysterious
steppe. She was carrying a beautifully bound
Petrarch and she told me that she read Italian,
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Perhaps it was to the collector's joy in me she
contributed, since I had found in her, it seemed
to me, that blend of culture with Titan
strength that has so bound me to the Russian
people.
The other girls were different. They come
from the four corners of Great Russia, my
guide told me from the Caucasus and the
Urals and from those stretches trans-Baikal.
The university, not in the least paternal or
patriarchal, makes no provision for their hous-
ing, and the result is a f our-in-a-room, cooking-
over-a-gas-jet arrangement, which tells its own
haphazard tale in anemic faces and old bodies.
It is Latin Quartier life, but a la Russe, which
means, perhaps, less light-heartedness than in
Paris, to pass it off under gray Russian skies,
and fewer mustard-cafes where a gay meal and
red wine may be had for a franc. Humanity
en masse, especially strange humanity, is not
beautiful, and I found myself hunting almost
distractedly among the dull-haired, dingily fair
girls for even one fresh-faced, clear-eyed figure.
There was only one, and when I found her she
stood out like a poster.
But the hunger and thirst of those faces!
Whatever else slips through memory's fingers,
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it will not be that. I will not say that the
American student is not eager;" he may be, but
he is not starving intellectually, and such ap-
petite as he has he takes philosophically. One
can, if his appetite does not gnaw and if he
knows that nine-tenths of those who come will
not find a closed door and an empty bowl.
But I agree to what a Russian Jewish tailor
in America once said to me, that a Russian
boy at sixteen has more intellectual curiosity
than an American college graduate. My
friend from Rostov tells me, however, that
their system follows too much of the Oriental
system of rote and leads to suicide rather than
to success. She would have more of applied
science and more technical schools. And
doubtless she is right.
There was no sign of revolutionists, al-
though the university is a notorious hotbed
and often closed for months at a time by order
of the Government. But once I glimpsed
something of the hidden fire that must kindle
at the bottom of all revolutionary movements.
At the end of the second lecture a wisp of a
girl came forward to beg hospital funds. She
was a revolutionary type, with burning, dark
eyes and a voice with a thrilling undercurrent
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of appeal. The effect was instantaneous!
The margin of these students is for the most
part the kopeck, hardly more than the marginal
tenth of a cash in China, but there was no
question of means, only the profound Russian
response to need the Russian always, as
Merezhkovski points out, flying where we
walk, mad where we are sane, seeking not to
save, but always to lose himself! And this is
the stuff of which revolutions in Russia, of
which Russia herself, are made!
It is Easter the Easter that M. Novinsky
told me of, that night, watching the cathedral.
Last year it fell in Japan where the shadows of
the cryptomeria brighten with the yellow of
the pilgrims' garbs and the temple bells call
tranquilly across the little valleys; and once
in Rome I watched the devout on their knees
ascend the weary Via Dolorosa. But this
Easter promises to linger longest of all; at
least it is the only Easter memory I have
of returning in a ball-gown at four in the
morning!
Not a theater nor an opera open; even the
play-bills are torn down, as reminiscent of the
devils of the world ; the sweets are made with
honey, "God's sugar," but for the last three
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days only crusts of bread and water have
passed our lips. And how the women wailed
when the body of the Christ was borne into
the center of the cathedral! I confess to
thinking that the pagan in me likes the
pageantry of priesthood in black velvet and
silver and all the splendid ecclesiastical pano-
ply of grief. But to-day the pall has lifted,
the shadows fled. To-day is Easter! The
priests have burst from their black-and-silver
chrysalides into full iridescent glory. " Chris-
tos Voskresen!" and the bells from all the
golden cupolas are ringing, not as Japanese
temple bells across a quiet valley, but with
Slavic ecstasy.
Last night was a night to be remembered.
How I wished for M. Novinsky, to see the
loveliest sight in all Russia! I was just
crossing the snowy square in front of St.
Isaac's, returning from the last Mass before
the midnight Easter service, when suddenly
were the gates of fairyland flung open. Down
the aisle of columns, out from among the
dusky pillars of the great cathedral, in twos
and threes or sometimes alone, a voluminous
shawled and aproned nyanya in the background
came figures, gravely intent little figures,
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each carefully shielding his candle with tiny
cupped hands or twists of white paper, the
yellow candle-light flaring up into faces as
cherubic as Reynolds's "Age of Innocence,"
but weighted with all the sweet solemnity of
Miltonic angels : children bearing home sacred
candles lighted at the altar for their own
Lares and Penates. Out from among the in-
scrutable shadows and down the steps of the
vast cathedral they nickered and floated in
twos and threes, and still farther down the
canons of the dark streets, the spirit lights
wavering and gleaming like myriad will-o'-the-
wisps, phantom ships floating on a phantom
tide. It reminded me of nothing so much as
of that night of ancestor worship in the East,
when lotus lanterns burning for the dead
are set afloat on river and bay and far out
to sea.
The streets were ablaze with illuminations,
the hotels in red and blue, the embassies
great galleries of light, the coronets of the old
aristocratic houses along the Neva glowing
above the gateways, and the torches of the
cathedral angels streaming triumphantly
against the midnight sky. The cathedral
square was packed with humanity, but the
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cathedral itself lay, as always, inaccessible
among its shadows.
Suddenly the giant doors were flung open as
if by some supernal impulse, and a mighty
flood of light and music poured out into the
night; from the heart of the radiant flood
emerged a processional of gold-and-silvery-
raimented priests, with tapers aloft, crosses
agleam with jewels, the light falling superbly
on miter and crown, on cross and diadem.
Slow- wandering through the snowy night,
solemn, stately, flowed the iridescent stream
under the Northern velvet sky, banners and
crosses borne high, tapers gleaming in the
darkness a fantastic arabesque searching
the night for the Christ. I looked and lin-
gered, and still I lingered while the chants
searched among the night winds.
Inside the multitudes waited with the
silence of death, every face turned toward the
portal with intense expectation. And again
the great doors flung open for the proces-
sional returning. Now the strain rose tri-
umphant, " Christos Voskresen! Christos
Voskresen!" ("Christ is Risen! Christ is
Risen!") as down the aisle swept the
radiant, silvery stream of figures while from
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the hosts there rose the mighty incense of
adoration.
We had seats near the altar in the gold-
laced diplomatic section, but I was more con-
tent to stand in the great nave. The woman
next me was in a ball-gown; on the other
side of the ikon knelt a shawled figure, but
every face was alike exalted. And then oc-
curred that wonderful moment in the Russian
service when the Metropolitan advances to a
dais in the center of the nave and proclaims
to the waiting hosts that "Christ is risen."
Instantly and joyously the people turn to one
another, falling upon one another's shoulders,
peasant and noble alike exchanging the holy
kiss of brotherhood. For one moment the
flood-gates of heaven are opened and a new
joy is let down into the world. A moment
exquisitely Russian!
I had not felt sure that my brotherly love
would stand the crisis of a bearded salutation,
but the old baba on the other side of the ikon
had evidently been regarding with pity my
unkissed state, and I suddenly felt myself in a
shawled embrace. Mile. Novinska kissed me
on the other cheek and I, too, emerged a
brother to all mankind!
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I glanced at Natalya Nikolaievna as we
turned to leave. Her eyes were soft and
bright and as if by one impulse we bought
candles at the door and lighted them in the
great ^silver candelabra for Dmitri Nikolai-
vitch. Perhaps I am a ritualist. How else
explain the inexpressible comfort of remember-
ing that little taper burning there among the
shadows of the Old World cathedral?
And then we went away to break our fast
on pasha, a sweet, delicious cheese, kuleetch,
hard-boiled eggs and ham, and strange recher-
che delicacies. The Novinskys were enter-
taining a brilliant supper-party, the men in
uniform and the women in evening dress, the
whole animated and Russian.
When we passed home the angels on the
cathedrals had extinguished their torches and
the streets were hollow and dark. But the
archangels themselves could never dim for me
the wonderful memory. I sat meditating
long on brotherly love and the many things
that Russia has laid deep in my spirit.
The days are lengthening up here in the
North at the top of the world; the light grows
warmer and longer. Children are beginning
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to shout at play in the sunny courtyards and
the boy who skates over our floors to polish
them came to-day in a Cossack blouse with-
out a shuba. My pastel streets look as if they
had been dropped into the Mississippi or the
Yangtse, all the evanescent grays and whites
vanished in a night. Alas and alack! for the
fleetingness of beauty! Alas and alack! for
the fleetingness of life, too! No message out
of the emptiness, and Natalya Nikolaievna
lives in an abstraction from which it is dif-
ficult to withdraw her.
I sometimes wonder why the fates wove
Dmitri Nikolaievitch into the pattern of my
days. There is in me that utterly-vanished-
from-the-earth sense, such as hangs over the
great Mongolian plain.
For me the first breath of spring, that pecu-
liar smell of black earth, which Turgenev sings
so triumphantly, has brought a sadness that
I never felt in the crispy winter days at
least not at all in the sparkling winter nights.
Now I feel Russia not ancient, but old, melan-
choly. Nowhere in the world does the pulse
beat so high or the tides of life ebb so low as
here; nowhere an equal abandon, nowhere
that deadliest ennui, skuchno. As I wander
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aimlessly under the gnarled lime-trees along
the canals, in front of the yellow stucco houses
that have lined these canals for two hun-
dred years aristocratic old houses, some of
them, softly Italian in coloring, but staring
pathetically in their dotage and haunted by
centuries of ghosts all life seems inexplicably
suffused with pathos. I have lost all the
major notes and I hear only the minors. It
is the reverse of the shield, this mild melan-
choly the sad twin of Slavic abandon.
In the Neva alone I feel joy and adventure.
It is still frozen, but every day I can feel it
tugging at its bonds. Some day, they tell
me, the ice will break with a crash and a boom
and the river will rush away to her lover, the
sea, leaving a wake of open waters, while the
banks line themselves with humanity to cheer
her en voyage. There is a chord in these morbid
giants that responds to this torrential power.
I remember old Gordyeev in Gorky's novel,
watching the ice crush his steamers on the
Volga and roaring with a sort of Titanic delight :
Give it to her now again squeeze crush!
Come once more now r-r-rui! See how the Volga is
working! It's robust hey? Mother Volga can rend
the whole world apart as one cuts curds with a knife!
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As I lean over the Troitski bridge I can see
far down the river the black hulks of boats
that checker the white spaces of the Neva,
feeling the stir of life like great birds eager to
lift their wings and put out to the open sea.
I must go down to the seas again, for
The call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that
May not be denied;
I must go down to the seas again, to
The vagrant gipsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way,. where
The wind's like a whetted knife.
I have said farewell to Olga Stepanovna
and Agasha Feodorovna, to Dasha and Sasha
and Dolly, and brought the script and bowl
of my soul to the Volga. The Novinskys I
shall see again at their summer place in Tver.
Perhaps it was the boats in the Neva, per-
haps it was "time to make a pilgrimage,"
perhaps it was who knows? There was a
softness of spring in the air in Petrograd and
the promise of open canals, but I beat my
wings against the bars for open spaces. With-
out my exquisite ambassador I had lost the
key to Russia in Petrograd; perhaps I shall
find it here again with brawny, wide-skied
Mother Volga.
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MOTHER VOLGA
TO make the whole journey on this ancient
Russian whale path, still the highway of
romance through the plain, one should float
from Rybnisk far to the south, to Astrakhan,
where the faces that line the sun-baked earth
broaden into the Tartar, and the river, spread-
ing over the pale sand, merges with the sea.
Below Nizhni and Kazan, however, the Rus-
sians tell me there is but a variety of monot-
onies. These are the names with which to
conjure, these of the middle Volga, and the
sound is like their own cathedral bells
Yaroslov, Kostroma, Nizhni Novgorod, Kazan.
This is Holy Russia, black-earth Russia; the
Russia that Turgenev and Tolstoi and Tche-
kov and Pushkin and Lermontov and Gogol
loved. "Nizhni Novgorod, Kostroma, the
Volga! Ah, there is the heart of Russia!"
your Slav will murmur, looking beyond you
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with a mystical smile. Red-shirted giants
were loading black barges this morning when
I left Rybinsk. I am bound for Nizhni
Novgorod, but I should be content to drift
south with the rafts to Astrakhan, dolce far
niente.
Agasha has so filled my imagination with
epic tales of the whale path that it is a painful
anachronism to take other than a sail in the
silver wake of the heroes ! But a steamer it is
there are few sails on the Volga and that
not differing greatly from a Mississippi boat
other than by an adventurous run of bizarre
and delicious food. I curl up in the bow, con-
tent to watch the broad, pale stream moving
majestically out to sea. The human element
is picturesque enough ; not the first deck that
is as sparsely inhabited as the shores we pass
but the steerage, which shows fine patriarchal
beards blowing in the winds, caftaned backs
and crude faces, half mechant, half submissive.
Great Russians stolidly view the mystery of
this northland; gay Little Russians coquette,
the memory of sunny hills and vineyards in
their faces; there are two Kalmyks "infra-
human in their ugliness," a group of Tartars
in fur caps and khalatis, each carrying a strip
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MOTHER VOLGA
for prayers and furnishing an animated half-
hour at sunset. An agitated business, being a
Mohammedan on so winding a stream as
the Volga! The only really outstanding fea-
ture is the smell of disinfectants, the after-
math of the typhus which a few weeks ago
scourged the river with a fierceness that should
suggest to a cautious traveler the wisdom of
weighing the Volga against a trip with Charon!
The gulls sweep and flash about the steamer,
the silver path beckons mysteriously on; in
the west the sun is shining. It is a scene from
a shield ! And then one by one the gulls drop
back, white flecks in the blue; the barges and
the red-shirted giants fade in the perspective.
A day of steppe and the feel of Siberia is sub-
merging me. Monotony but is not monot-
ony the test of one's response, not only to this
river of the steppe, but to Russia? In the
Russian plain there lies a beauty of great
spaces, but little of dramatic quality, neither
that of Mongolia rushing swiftly to the north
nor Siberia, epic in its waste. When the world
was young, one might have looked to the
horizon for mysterious figures of horsemen
fleetly appearing and disappearing, but these
swift horsemen lie now with Kublai Khan.
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The Russian plain is the level of life itself,
that level portrayed by Tchekov in the Three
Sisters and sung in every mourning peasant
cadence, without plan, prologue, epilogue, or
climax to the Anglo-Saxon, with little zest
for the inner adventure, the cruelest enigma in
life.
This is not to record that the fabric of the
plain is wholly without design, but the design
is repeated end on end, like the chorus of a
peasant melody. Pines point a sky wide and
compassionate, or little maiden birches
courtesy in the breeze. A peasant plows the
black earth, his caftan streaming behind him
like the beard of a prophet, Riepin's Tolstoi.
A turn in the highway, the green roofs and
golden domes of a monastery thrust their
aerial arabesque above the dark band of the
trees. The Volga is essentially Holy Russia
and these quaint symbols frequently repeated
become the Volga motif. Like Tibetan lamas-
series, they shelter hundreds of monks. We
have pilgrim seekers of their shrines on our
boat ragged anchoritish figures, feet bound
in lapti, staff in hand; less picturesque than
the Chinese pilgrims in yellow brightening
the approaches to the Buddhistic shrines, but
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MOTHER VOLGA
gray, with the charm of things of eld. They
have heard of a holy man to the north and
they have come from beyond the Caspian to
seek him. And thus is perpetuated the mys-
tic Slavic quest for God!
I have been exploring the lower deck and
making friends among the fish-casks. In the
gloom of the sleeping shelves it is difficult to
differentiate between bundled goods and bun-
dled babas in felt boots and rags, but in the
sunshine of the decks the springs of life bubble
up not yet dry, and wrinkled faces peer up,
canny but friendly, from the layers of shawls.
It is night that evokes the Slavonic soul.
When dusk has drawn her gray curtains and
lighted the low-hanging stars on the plain,
mystery burns up from the Russian like in-
cense. The peasant girls who stand about in
the day, arms intertwined, dance as Russians
dance, with head, shoulders, eyes, trailing
their kerchiefs, striking the decks with their
hands, stamping with bare feet. Coquetry
never learned under a roof, a primitive gambol
far removed from the artificial elegancies of
the ballet, and yet, root and branch, Russian
dancing. Last night an old crone, who
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squatted at the side, threw off her ragged
shawls, a Salome unveiling, and cleared the
floor. A worthless generation of dancers!
She herself showed me the polka, flinging her
gaunt arms, stamping her heavy boots, tossing
her toothless head. Zest? How I longed to
confound the General with her! It is only
when I depart, however, and leave them to
the bundles and fish-casks, that they pour
out their whole hearts in brooding songs
songs sometimes answered from the rafts.
An abandon of grief that delights a Slav!
Sometimes I make my way up the broad,
cobbled streets to the dusky monastery in-
teriors. The Russian service is hauntingly
beautiful. I could return again and again to
its strange hieratic splendor with a sense of
something far deeper than liturgical satisfac-
tion if it were not for other memories! But
those other memories of Russian priests!
Within a side-chapel a group of pilgrims are
touching their foreheads to the floor and weep-
ing in an ecstasy of adoration before the
Mother of God. I stand silent, a trifle awed.
But the priest is victim of no such sentimen-
tality; the adoration of peasants is a too
familiar phenomenon. Authoritatively he en-
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MOTHER VOLGA
ters in his heavy black garments and evicts
the weeping but unprotesting body en masse
from the sanctuary; and then turning gra-
ciously, he invites a heterodox Amerikanka to
rest her eyes on the bones of the saints
worldly eyes, far more concerned with the
wondrousness of wrought-silver casket than
had been the peasants who now weep outside.
Sometimes I reach only the monastery gates
under the silvery birches, where holy men sit
as inevitably as crows perch on the golden
crosses above. I usually lighten my purse,
but the Russian beggar shares the languor
of his race and, competing with an Italian or
Chinese, would bear an empty bowl.
I am the only foreigner on the boat. Yes-
terday I discovered my social status and it
is not a matter to boast of! The discovery
came through a country landowner and his
wife. The barin is a melancholy-faced giant
dressed in tall black boots, bloomers of gray
alpaca, a smock, also of gray alpaca, which
breaks into a full skirt at the back, giving him
an appearance of a* sulky but unrepentant
child. With the barina nature had been de-
cidedly slack; Tartar in type, but hastily done
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with broad strokes and illy defined as to line
and color. She wears a white blouse the
buttons of which gaily shirk their duty at the
back. Food comes and goes with them like
ammunition for a machine-gun: soup soly-
anka, ryabtchiks, caviare, mushrooms. And
still they eat stolidly, imperturbably, occa-
sionally eying me with the perplexed sorrow
of the Slav. Yesterday, suddenly, with a
tingling shock, it came to me they had mis-
taken me for a German ! After a hasty recon-
naissance I made a friendly onslaught upon
the steward in Russian. The landowners
pushed back their chairs. They left their
mushrooms. Proshchaiete! A thousand par-
dons and a glass of kvass! And would I do
them the imperishable honor to visit them on
their estate in Tambov? An anarchistic
young man who had eyed me violently begged
a passionate pardon, and a waiter wiped his
eyes contritely in a corner. The sensitive
heart of Russia!
Now that the barina and I have exchanged
civilities we sometimes explore the booths
together. Unpicturesque as she is on the
steamer patterned after Mother Volga her-
self, subject for Bogdanov-Belsky or Zorn
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MOTHER VOLGA
she is not unpleasing against the background
of the bazars. Yesterday was a purely secu-
lar day; no monasteries, but we found a
turquoise-studded belt of ancient workman-
ship and a beaten-silver bowl, set with the
coin of Catherine the Great. Troikas seldom
come into the squares, the war having taken
toll of the smart third horse that gallops at
the side. The peasant of the river town,
where the echoes of the world are heard, has
laid aside his beautiful peasant embroideries,
too, and wears products of the loom that
justify a protest against the commercializa-
tion of Russia. And yet the scene may not
be mistaken for other than Slavic lounging
haphazard figures with smoldering or dazed
or dreamy eyes all moving over broad flags
under wide arcades so like an opera chorus,
that I am only amazed that the director
does not order my Anglo-Saxon figure off
stage!
It was in the great square of Yurievets yes-
terday that one of those tragic fragments of
life, sometimes cast up like driftwood, was
flung at my feet. Why the memory should
persist I know no reason except, perhaps, a
sensitized moment of insight into reality or
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that strange chance that fixes forever a face
seen in the parting of a crowd. A Cossack's
leave-taking it was, a million times repeated
this spring. That was all. But it was more
symbol of woman's ancient and inarticulate
grief. The soldier himself, a mighty-bodied
young fellow, was visibly moved; he openly
wiped his eyes on his coarse brown sleeve,
while under both arms he clutched absurdly
at two enormous loaves of black bread; a
child in the mother's arms fluttered small, in-
effectual hands in the direction of the steamer.
But the silence of that Tartar-cheeked woman
of the North! She wept neither "ai, ai" nor
"oi, oi" \ neither touched her man in farewell
nor seemed to know any of those small caresses
by which we seek to mitigate our grief. The
sullen monotony of the North had laid its
finger on her; only her eyes showed her ter-
ror, following her mate with the unreasoning
grief of the jungle-sprung. As the steamer
moved slowly out into the gray dusk of the
evening I fancied I could see her face strain-
ing through the mists like an archaic mask
of despair.
These sturdy, patient women unconscious
vessels of that black-earth force which is
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Russia! The steamer calls at only the larger
towns, but we often pass the villages edging
out of the forest or lodged between the folds
of green, wide-streeted, wide-timbered, sprung
from the earth like mushrooms or lichens. In
the fields women are plowing, uncouth figures
from whose broad loins have emerged those
multitudinous armies which swarm myriad-
wise across the plain. And still they bring
them forth. Men and bread! Bread and
men! It is well that mother earth teaches
patience.
The river is an endless rosary, strung with
days as alike as the white towns and all laden
with a sense of life, sluggish and primal. The
scent of pines, of new-mown hay, of drying
nets, and the fragrance of lilacs. Brawny
sailors in red and blue shirts shout and splash
one another with water as they scrub the
decks; grain-steamers whistle; hammers sound
from barges building along the shore; anchor
chains rattle as we drop into the wharf where
fishermen are unloading their shining catch.
A robust river life, not unfamiliar in essentials,
but transposed into strange keys and staged
on a magnificent scale. Near Astrakhan the
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river teems with life as at Canton, but here
all is of the sky and the plain.
The rafts are the most Russian craft we
meet, piles of yellow logs as delicious-looking
as taffy, bound together with withy young
saplings, each raft bearing its tiny hut for
the families who make the journey with the
rafts, weeks and even months en voyage to the
sea; people with rollicking figures balancing
themselves with long poles and laughing and
shouting unintelligible cries to us as the
steamer surge threatens their footholds. The
trackers we never see, burlaki, muscles knot-
ting in their hairy throats, thews straining
like the haunches of horses against the dead
weight of the barges, men of herculean strength
as Ryepin has painted them leashed to the
river under the lash of the burlaki driver. They
have passed with the passing of the sails on
the Volga; only occasionally a boat must be
towed up-river. But the other figures on
the rafts, in the fishing-boats, driving along
the edge of the forest are their brothers.
One hundred and eighty million of these faces
crude and filmed with ignorance, freshly
emerged from the black mold! Can these be
the units of a republic? Again that varie-
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MOTHER VOLGA
gated tide streaming westward in Siberia en-
gulfs me. "Russia needs something of a
strong hand but there is a chance for free-
dom, too."
Kostroma at sunset an ancient Stamboul,
lying high above the river! Russia by day,
but by night Haroun-al-Raschid's own city.
With the passing of day all the cities along
the Volga become less Russian and more
Oriental, darkness eliminating the detail and
leaving them to cut the sky like giant card-
board silhouettes. It is past sunset when we
sight the domes and minarets of Kostroma,
but a tent of orange and purple hangs in the
sky. Below the great ramparts the river
flows, a nocturnal mystery. On our mon-
strous steamer pushes, past caravans of barges
and lighted steamers, under an arched and
jeweled bridge, which casts its reflection on the
tugs and sets myriad-million balloons of light
afloat on the murky water below. The anchor
chains rattle, the bearded saints shout and
bawl; but I am little conscious of the flare of
light and of noise in the ship only of the
cascade of minarets above us, a giant-starred
citadel, climbing up, up into the sky! What
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Oriental whimsicalities of outline lying there
above the mighty river! It is to wish not for
the artists who line the salons with harsh
wintry sketches, but for Vereschagin, with the
magic caught in Japanese temple interiors and
the courts of Indian rajahs, to paint night in
this Oriental Russia.
Our mission at Kostroma, however, is not
Oriental, but purely Russian. We are landing
one of the great bells for which the city is
famous. From the pier, under the streaming
torches, a hushed medley of faces gazes up at
us reverently. We might, indeed, be the
Lohengrin ship. There are a few caftaned
passengers to depart with their bundled goods,
and then a gangway is cleared across the pier
and through the cavernous shadows of the
warehouse. Around the bell are cast cables,
slipping far down on its sides bronze under the
torches, and around its graven base. And
then forty men, twenty on a side, throw
themselves at the ropes with rhythmical cries
and a sort of religious ecstasy. Perhaps it is
an act of devotion to land so monstrous a bell !
And, trampling and straining, they chant a
broken rhythm that catches at one's pulses,
and draw the bell from the deck and across the
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MOTHER VOLGA
landing, their voices returning faintly from the
warehouse like the voices of a retreating opera
chorus. There is a vigorous harmony in its
concerted human effort, like that of the
rhythmically reaching arms and backs of "The
Gleaners." The apotheosis of labor! And
for a moment I caught the vision of Russia
united in a mighty brotherhood.
For all the robust daylight life, the memory
of night on the Volga lingers most Russian
and ineffaceable. There is none of the re-
hearsed picturesqueness of the Nile, dayabeahs
clustering like giant butterflies nor lateen sails
hastening down the dusky river, but night
unique, to be remembered when more theatri-
cal memories have passed. Sunset is splendid,
the sky hung with shifting tints as if all the
bazars of the East were tenting there. Nor
does the glory leap up for a moment and then
pale into a fleeting and evanescent aftermath,
as on the Nile, but deepens and darkles
steadily, magnificently, into the velvety black-
ness of night. The shore merges with the
plain and the whole takes on the immensity of
the sea. The water, thick, black, and buoy-
ant, reflects the stars like fringed daisies.
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The sky is withdrawn to greater depth, and
across sky and river and steppe is written a
new and poignant mystery. A steamer swings
out from a bend in the river like "a lighted
basilica" and blazes its way down the trail, its
funnels staring back like eyes from the dark-
ness; barges emerge, slow-sailed and ponder-
ous, their bulky shapes blocked heavily against
the curtain of night, spars rocking softly under
the starlit heavens a silent nocturnal pag-
eant. There are other shapes imminent there
in the darkness gray forms, dim and indis-
tinct, barely discernible among the uncouth
shadows of the river rafts floating, drifting
there in the unknown, riding the swell of the
steamer, jostling one another in the eddying
current infinitesimal points of life pitted
against the menace of night and the river. It
is not difficult to project oneself there, to see
the mists from the steppe inclosing them like
walls reaching to the sky, and eyes that
"slumber not nor sleep" peering through the
fog the fog soundless except for the lapping of
the water. Muscles are taut to pole the un-
wieldy masses from the jutting banks or to
turn them from sudden death in the path of the
towering steamers. From across the water,
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MOTHER VOLGA
at the edge of the rafts, tiny brushwood fires
are twinkling like autumn fires, calling to us
that there are brothers there in the void.
Sometimes sounds of a carousal float on the
night wind, a debauch of hairy giants rebel-
ling against the level of life and the steppe.
Again silence. A single voice threads out of
the darkness, wails out a despairing lament to
the stars, and sinks back into the void. Si-
lence! I know of nothing by which the sense
of the whole submerged and despairing life of
Russia so passes into the soul as by these
cries from the heart of the river.
Nizhni Novgorod. Even here in the Near
East the name bears an aromatic flavor. A
Slavic Scheherazade, teasing away time for an
ennuied knyaz, must have told him tales of
this city whose gates so often heard the
battering-rams of the rival khans of Kazan,
and I dare say the potentate was vastly en-
tertained. The great fair does not open until
August, but even now there is an odor and
feel, an inexplicable suggestion of the bazars.
The streets lie in the morning sunshine like a
huge deserted stage, ready to quicken into
life. Whimsical golden domes, fantastic open
booths, official white houses square and bare
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as bird-cages, twisted and curling spires of
milk-white, apple-green, and sky-blue a gro-
tesquerie of color, a motley of East and
West such as one sees nowhere outside of
Russia. For ten months Nizhni is a desert
city; for two, a European capital. A month
more, the wide-girthed hotel-keeper tells me,
and preparations will begin. Beggars will be
evicted from their winter quarters; booths
and awnings will spring up overnight like
yagodi; by every train wares will pour in from
Moscow and Petrograd, Paris and Vienna.
Barges will anchor at the wharves, laden with
wood, tallow, and skins, while from the East
will loom the caravans bearing apricots and
oils, skins, furs, and wools; hircine Kirghiz,
Kalmuks, Georgians, turbaned Persians all
to barter in the tongues of Babel.
The boat, being Russian, deposited us on
the wrong shore of the river, but, approaching
the ferry, I could see banks rising dark and ram-
partwise, and crowned with gleaming apoca-
lyptic domes and spires. Below on the plain
the Volga stretched, a gigantic blue " Y," the
two prongs pointing to the Arctic Sea, and the
main river leading sluggishly southward to the
Caspian. With this sight of the Volga,
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MOTHER VOLGA
Turgenev's tribute to the Russian language
ran through my memory: "Oh, thou great,
mighty, powerful and free !" A fit apos-
trophe, too, for this great Russian river. Both
sides of the river below the crotch of the Y
were stippled with golden spires and domes
and the west bank was dotted with river
craft, hulking black barges, mammoth white
lumber-steamers, and strings of yellow rafts,
not a fleet shape among them, but all broad
and robust, like Mother Volga herself.
The ferry was almost equally divided be-
tween mujiks and little brown calves, the latter
not less quiet than the peasants who stood
bareheaded in the morning sun, silently cross-
ing themselves with the broad Russian cross.
It is a mid-Russian morning, somnolent and
blue; the Volga, deep-breasted, mirrors a sky
not luminous as the Japanese heavens nor
inscrutable as the intense blue of Egypt, but
near, kind, and compassionate. Whether it is
the tranquillity of the morning or the peasants
crossing themselves, I do not know; I feel
myself laved and sunk in peace. A person-
ality, many personalities before this one,
steals back from the past. I seem to feel
white curtains blow across me, I wander in a
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garden. The wind is in the trees. And then
with a flash it all comes to me. Those spires
and domes are the heaven of my childhood!
I see it all again, the castellated walls and
pinnacles and the golden streets and the jew-
eled gates. An aunt in my childhood always
wore on her forefinger an oblong amethyst
stone basis of my early anticipation in the
joys of Paradise. There among the dark
trees must be flashing the amethyst gate, and
the jasper and the chrysoprase and the "sar-
dine stone" whatever that was! And I
think it must have had something of this
meaning to the muzhiks.
Since it is not yet time for the train, I have
strolled up to the terrace above the river to
drink tea amber tea which halves every
grief and doubles every joy in Russia! Below
me walls of a thousand years keep guard
toward Asia. And here it is, on this free
sweep of terrace hanging above the crumbling
walls, with the wind blowing from the eastern
steppe, that the most powerful impression of
the Volga is laid deep in my consciousness.
On all sides the plain spreads toward the
horizon with the continuity of the sea, a wild,
illimitable level. But it is the river that holds
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MOTHER VOLGA
me fascinated. One of the lumber-steamers
anchored above the caravan pushes off with
rings of smoke and swings out into the river
past the thick-bodied, flat-bottomed boats,
the waves foaming white with the paddles;
the main current is laden with a caravan of
river rafts which the water bears as cockle-
shells. It could crush them, too, as cockles.
It pours itself along now a molten, deceptive
blue, but I remember that at the spring thaw
warnings must be flashed ahead to dwellers
on even the tributary banks that the river has
broken bounds, is splintering the black hulks
frozen in its surface, and crashing its thunder-
ous gray-grained way to the sea. I know that
old Ignaat Gordyeev spoke true, old Ignaat
watching his handsome new grain-steamers
crushed against the banks. "Mother Volga
can rend the whole world apart as one cuts
curds with a knife." And so it can, "as one
cuts curds with a knife," and pass on, vast, un-
hurrying, uncaring, a huge force "not having
as yet created for itself clear aims and de-
sires"; like Russia, unconscious, inconquer-
able; a ruthless protean power as yet escaped
the subduing which has come to man through
toil and anguish, this vast old whale path!
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PART III
XVI
3 9'
BEHIND M. NOVINSKY'S EYES
A WHITE barrage moves across Moscow,
1\ but, in spite of the phantom bombard-
ment, I have been sitting on the Kremlin wall,
watching the city like a dim old enamel below.
I understand now the glow in M. Novinsky's
face. This is the Russia that lay back of his
eyes, this quaint tapestry woven and dyed
with centuries of Russian dreams and prayers,
this splendid old Bagdad. This and the
Volga! Dmitri Nikolaivitch's Russia and
mine. The manager of the hotel has given
me a room overlooking a court where pigeons
are fluttering and feeding in the sunshine as
if at St. Mark's. I sit for hours, a balconied
princess looking beyond to roofs patterned
like a caliph's dream. It is not sad to be
alone here. Strangely enough, I feel com-
panioned. It is the illusion of place. I must
meet M. Novinsky here, it seems to me, in
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these devious old streets, this ancient brocade,
overlaid with medievalism, mellow with all the
accumulated richness of the Slavic race.
Moscow it is the flower of Russia ! Petro-
grad is a bureaucrat's town, transplanted and
artificial, but Moscow is the sum of the natural
processes of centuries of a race-soul. One
need not be told ; it is in the churches and the
streets, in the aura of the people. Here are
still the houses of the boyars. Here rose the
stronghold of consolidated Muscovite power;
here in the sacred Uspe-nsky cathedral the
Czars are christened, wed, and crowned.
Above the city reigns the Kremlin, not the
Kremlin of the Middle Ages, but a phoenix
rising each century resplendent from its ashes,
more sheerly dominating the city than any
other city in the world is dominated, than
Peking by the Great Gates or Rome by St.
Peter's.
Of course I can never comprehend Moscow ;
without Dmitri Nikolaievitch I am bewildered.
No Westerner, born and bred to miles of gray
stones, could be other than astonished and
subdued at the sight of the Kremlin, a con-
gress of starry palaces and cathedrals, rising
mystical and barbaric above the pink em-
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BEHIND M. NOVINSKY'S EYES
battled walls with which the Tartars encom-
passed their city; "the two extremes of Asia
joined together and enshrined in the heart of
Slavism the marauding spirit of the Mongol
conquerors mixed with the sensuality of By-
zantine Orientalism the God of Battles and
the God of Prayer explained as one and the
same conception of God, worshiped on a half-
overturned altar of Moloch."
It is for me a never fully explored dream, the
Kremlin. Perhaps it is the marauding Mon-
gol in me that turns my steps thither, stopping
sometimes at the shrine of the Iberian Virgin,
a street chapel so sacred that even the Czar
must pray there before he enters the Kremlin,
through the red Spasskaya gate where every
man from izvostchik to Emperor must remove
his hat in order to be prepared for the glories
within; past the "Czar Poushka," the king
of cannon captured from Napoleon's broken
army; and leads my way among palaces and
cathedrals into the dimmest and richest of
recessed interiors.
The spacing is not magnificent as it is at
St. Isaac's; the cathedrals are all built on a
closer scale, like the boyars' houses, but so
rich in jeweled mosaics that for a moment one
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fancies the Peacock Throne of the Great
Moguls translated into a room. The gorgeous
beauty hangs about one like incense, the spirit
of Slavic adoration made tangible, exultation
made manifest. I am all alone here except
for peasant women, but I am never without
the sense of the shadowy hosts. There hang
the banners of Pultova and Plevna, and by
the altar is the sacred ikon that went before
the armies of Kulikovo. Here is a scimitar
of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the floor is
a jasper gift from the Shah of Persia. This
candelabrum of solid silver, from the Russian
soldiers themselves, commemorates Napo-
leon's broken army; and in that ikon is an
emerald that might flank the Kohinoor. To
pray in this niche is to shudder, for here Ivan
the Terrible used to hear Mass ; there lies his
body at rest freed at last from its murderous
rages. Under a silken canopy sleeps Boris
Godunov and the little prince he slew. The
peasant women kiss the mask of the mur-
dered malenki, the little one. It was in
Uspensky, most sacred of cathedrals, that
Napoleon stabled his horses, and sometimes
in the silence of the praying peasant women I
fancy I can hear the drums fore and aft.
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BEHIND M. NOVINSKY'S EYES
Sometimes I climb to the aery of "Kolokol,
the Big Bell," and there from the Ivan Bell-
tower, hung and strung with bells, I can look
far down the river and across to the old green
monastery roofs. There is a beautiful paint-
ing in one of the Petrograd galleries of the
Russian bell-ringers in the towers and I have
promised myself to haunt Kolokol until some
saint's day sees him rung, the picturesque
ringers pulling mightily at the ropes!
There in the upper air, too, I feel nearer
the abyss out there.
The Russia that I hear in Rachmaninoff,
in Rimsky-Korsakov, in Tchaikowsky, is here
the Russia that I see in the ballet, that I
felt most powerfully on the Volga, that I
sensed but never found in the capital, that I
am aware of deep in M. Novinsky. A nation
growing widely, thrusting its roots deep, living
with a deep unawareness; a nation for whom
life is "not performance, but adventure"; a
nation too great to be labeled and catalogued,
colossal enough to topple over and crush any
system, menacing but fascinating; a nation
exploding so powerfully from within that its
destiny can neither be predicted nor deter-
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mined by any man nor any group of men,
evolving strange symmetries and casting up
from its depth its own new orders and new
laws which form only to break and form
again. Is it only the pagan in me that
shrinks from having Russia learn the super-
ficial advancedness, the sophisticated tech-
nique, the thin knowingness of the West?
Is it only the barbarian that hopes out of this
unordered portentousness, these bizarre sym-
metries, to catch new meanings, new elan of
life, new mystic sources of power?
M. Novinsky is the cosmopolitan, more
neatly finished than anything purely Russian,
but for all his polished perfection and mon-
daine quality it is the Russia of his back-
ground, and I think his charm is this same
immense naturalness. I remember seeing the
passion for it in his eyes once when we were
watching the Tartar scene in "Kitish," and
his expression as he exclaimed, "God forbid
that that scene should ever sober down!"
There is a nostalgia perhaps in each of us for
the earth as it was in the beginning.
This to me, a cellular sensitiveness of life,
must be always the miracle of Russia. Not
happiness no, it is not happiness, for happi-
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BEHIND M. NOVINSKY'S EYES
ness is built on peace, but something more
turbulent, more poignant, but more profound.
However crusted over by institutions and
tradition, life here is a stream swiftly chang-
ing, complex; organic rather than inorganic;
cells dividing from within, newly combining;
ceaseless processes of mental and spiritual par-
turition. However ringed about by the steel
ring of bureaucracy, Russia has never died at
the heart; she grows from within as sturdily
as a young bamboo.
As I sit on the Kremlin wall, gazing down
on the city below, I ponder many things.
America is like a design leading out from the
center and leaving one restless and dissatis-
fied. But Russia, thrown constantly back
upon herself, has built up a soul to pit against
the world. Is not this the reason why, a
hundred years after she had a literary lan-
guage, she produced the one notable literature
of this century? A tongue newly articulate,
but a life old in wisdom. The West has laid
ingenious hands upon the trappings, the sub-
stitutes and imitations, all the anodynes of
life, but I cannot but feel that Russia has the
quivering reality.
16
XVII
AN ADVENTURE IN PERSONALITY
DAY after day the gods are pouring sun-
shine steadily down on this old citadel of
the North, picking out the colors like the stones
in a Florentine mosaic. What a wonderful old
city for happiness! I feel a powerful rhythm
in this old city, not yet disrupted by the war,
although I have lost my own beat and I sit
in the sunshine, waiting, waiting for Some-
thing that never happens, for Somebody who
never comes. Can it be that all that subtle
sense of significance, all that responsiveness,
all that remembered tenderness, have perished
out there in the dark? "It is the common
fate." But even to have been his friend for
a day is to feel life mellow, full of nuance,
overhung with a soft wonder.
Moscow does what she may to warm the
cockles of the heart. She might be Italian
were she not so Russian; and I did discover a
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AN ADVENTURE IN PERSONALITY
bit of Venice yesterday, an old woman feeding
pigeons in the piazza, of the cathedral near
the Spasskaya gate, a pleasant bit of grotes-
querie against the apple-green, milk-white,
sky-blue spires of the cathedral which soared
to the heavens in strange flutings and con-
volutions. I longed to hear her tell tales of
the Tartar Khans of Kazan, as Sasha told
me tales of little devils sitting on a rooftree
and the sprites that filled their pitchers at
the spring. I would be troubadour for a
day, for only a troubadour could faintly
express the fragrance of this "many-towered
Camelot."
After all, personality is the great adventure,
and I have come upon a rare one in Madame
Novinska's greatest friend in Moscow, Ma-
dame Berentskaya. Moscow w Russian tra-
dition. Many noble houses here are more
ancient than the reigning house of Romanoff,
and Madame Berentskaya has opened the door
of some of these houses before which one
might sit a lifetime in vain, doors through
which I have caught glimpses of old Russian
life, as one sometimes glimpses courts and
flowers and moon-doors through the great
gates of the East. No longer magnificent in
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estate, Madame Berentskaya, but none the less
the unmistakable patrician of intelligence and
heart, with an atmosphere much the same as
that of Madame Novinska. The fine fiber
was always there, I am certain, but perhaps
her association with Tolstoi has left its stamp
of moral earnestness. Many guests have
come and gone at Yasnaya Polyana, but few
have stood so near the prophet as Madame
Berentskaya, a co-worker in the famine re-
lief of 1905 and a translator of Tolstoi's works.
Her reminiscences of those famous after-
dinner moonlit causeries, when the master
himself set the key for discussion, should be
chapters in Russian literature.
Being of a scribe's tendency myself, I find
as inexhaustible interest in the habits of the
writing genus homo as Fabre found in his bee
world. Tolstoi's daily life at Yasnaya Polyana
Madame Berentskaya has often discussed with
me. His habit was to have tea alone in his
study and to work through the morning; to
lunch with his family and guests, and to ride
or walk through the estate in the afternoon,
alone or with a companion of his choosing;
to dine again at night at the long family
table. It was he who usually started the
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AN ADVENTURE IN PERSONALITY
brilliant talk after dinner which pointed up
the thought of the day.
"And by what standard shall we judge the
artist?" began the gaunt figure, pacing up
and down under the trees, one white night at
Yasnaya Polyana.
"By three things, I say: by invention, by
sincerity, by form."
"And what would you say of Russian
writers measured by these standards?" ven-
tured somebody among the respectful group
who listened in the shadows.
"Gogol first in every respect," he answered,
after a pause. "Dostoevski, no. Invention,
marvelous; sincerity, undoubted; form, none."
"And Tolstoi, what of him?"
"Tolstoi," mused the figure in the peasant's
smock. ' ' Tolstoi invention, yes, to some de-
gree; form, chaotic; sincerity, absolute!"
Sincerity was, to Madame Berentskaya,
Tolstoi's passion, and not the least part of his
genius.
When I voiced the world's question as to
the reason for Tolstoi's flight just before his
death from everything that was personally
human and dear, Madame Berentskaya named
Tolstoi's secretary.
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"A man of inflexible purpose," she said,
"the preservation of Tolstoi's spiritual legacy
unspotted to the world. If Tolstoi would
leave his ideal pure, resurgent, it was as
necessary in the eyes of this man that he
should die one of the despised and rejected
as it had been that Christ should be crucified.
It has been an ever-present question in my
mind whether Leov, left alone in those feeble
last days, would not have sought the sacra-
ment of the Church. The two did stop at a
monastery this secretary and he you re-
member, but they went on. I have so often
wondered what Leov would have done had he
been alone. He died at the railway station
soon after, with poor Countess Tolstoi begging
outside for permission to say farewell. You
remember her cry, 'The friend of a lifetime,
and I am not even permitted to hear his last
words.' Ah, milaya, there it is again the
incompatibility of the actual and the ideal!
It is to make one despair."
"And is there no reconciliation?" I begged.
Madame Berentskaya shook her head. "I
do not know," she answered, sadly.
The sincerity of Tolstoi I have often heard
questioned in Russia. He is not in his own
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AN ADVENTURE IN PERSONALITY
land the mountain -peak as is Dostoevski,
with his boundlessly suggestive philosophy,
and knowing the Russian, I find it not dif-
ficult to understand the reason. But to ques-
tion his sincerity, it is inconceivable!
Once, after he had been dangerously ill,
Madame Berentskaya was invited to Yasnaya
Polyana. Tolstoi was still in bed and weak.
"And now, Leov, tell me," said Madame
Berentskaya as she sat down by his bedside,
"since you have been so near death, tell me
what you think of the beyond."
A strong emotion passed over Tolstoi's face
and for some minutes he did not answer.
And then turning his shaggy gaze upon her,
he replied, "Elena Ivanovna, I assure you, so
great is my sense of sin that if I believed that
I must carry it with me beyond this life, I
could not be responsible." And he fell back
trembling.
"Is it true, then," I begged of Madame
Berentskaya, "that Tolstoi did not believe in
the continuity of identity after death, in a
personal immortality?"
And again Madame Berentskaya answered
sadly and slowly, "I do not know."
Yesterday I came to Madame Berentskaya
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looking a bit fagged. Turning me to the
light, she scrutinized me closely.
"You have been overworking again, golubt-
chik," she warned.
"Yes, madame," I smiled, hopelessly. "I
am trying to paint a Russian man."
"Ah, milaya," Madame Berentskaya shrug-
ged her shoulders with a gesture of despair.
"Who can paint a Russian man?"
Last night I dined in an ancient house, built
around a court, as is the Novinskys', a house
in which one of the scenes from War and
Peace is laid, and quite the same as in the
old days when the brilliantly uniformed young
officers swaggered through its high-ceilinged
rooms at balls or enormous suppers, home
from conquering Napoleon!
It is all so strange. Am I really walking
through War and Peace? The same names
recur, the same figures with which Tolstoi's
gigantic canvas is crowded. These men with
whom I dine, they are Rostovs and Volkon-
skys; I recognize them. I even know the
bear-like Pierre BezukhofT. The Russians
themselves say that it is a re-turning of the
pages of history, even to the hesitations, de-
lays, shifting of responsibility that character-
230
AN ADVENTURE IN PERSONALITY
ized the Napoleonic campaigns the national
characteristics endlessly repeated. Some-
times when I have come from the Tolstoi
Museum, where I have pored over photo-
graphs of Yasnaya Polyana, of the shaggy
peasant figure in the fields, on horseback, in
his study, with wife, with daughter or guests,
alone under the limes, gnarled, weighted with
the sense of sin and moral responsibility,
agonizingly isolated in his spiritual anguish, I
feel that in a parting of the throng I must
come upon the Terrible Seeker. One need
never in Moscow be lonely for the dead.
Often, too, on the street I feel that I must
meet Tchekov, who loved Moscow tenderly.
I have heard Madame Berentskaya reminisce
of him, too, a whimsically sad, keen, but with-
drawn man. And often I remember that
great wind of which he speaks which is to
clear Russian life. And it is here in Moscow,
Tchekov's own city, where the hospitals are
overflowing and every house has lost a son,
that one feels Holy Mother Russia.
No, one need not in Moscow feel lonely
for the dead. Of late M. Novinsky has been
inexplicably here, too. I go on the walks he
would have chosen. I speak to him about the
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pictures he loved. I can see his face lighting
with his un-self -conscious smile, the move-
ment of his narrow hands, his slight, compact
figure. If there were mists here as in Petro-
grad, I am certain he would emerge. Is it
possible that he, too, has passed za gmnitza
beyond the borders and returned to me here
in Moscow, where the dead are known?
XVIII
NEWS FROM THE FRONT
NATALYA NIKOLAIEVNA is in Mos-
cow. I met her at the station this morn-
ing, the same station where Vronsky first sees
Anna alighting from the train. It was Tolstoi's
scene repeated; the train rumbling in, shaking
the station, the smart conductor and the het-
erogeneous passengers. One of the slim, long-
waisted officers talking near me might have
been Vronsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch, the
luxurious figure with curling beard and the
flower in his buttonhole. Sometimes I see
Anna Karenina in Natalya Nikolaievna, the
dark hair clustering about a semi-pellucid
skin, and the sensitive red mouth, except that
Natalya Nikolaievna is taller than Anna
Karenina, with more the air of a reserved
young princess. The resemblance was very
striking to-day when she alighted from the
train, less frail than usual and more vivacious.
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"Ah, Amerikanka," she cried, kissing me on
both cheeks, her long gray eyes shining
through her black lashes, "I bear good tid-
ings! News! News! Do you understand,
Amerikanka? God grant that it is true
news from my brother, from Dmitri!"
A message out of that blind immensity!
I could not speak ; I could only look at her as
one might look at some bright angel who bore
confirmation of a paradise.
And then while Masha, the little maid with
fair braids wound round her head, and old
Anton looked after the luggage, she told me
the meager detail. A message had come,
only one word, a quaint word they had used
as children. "The word makes it certain."
She laid her hands on my shoulders and
looked at me with shining eyes. "No one
knew but Dmitri and me."
She withdrew her hands from my shoulders
and stood for a moment, wrapt in memory.
She was very like Dmitri Nikolaievitch at that
moment. What an intensity of feeling these
Russians have, that makes other passions look
compromising and commonplace! And then
we made our way out of the cavernous station,
through which the spring sunshine stole ten-
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
tatively like new little tendrils of joy in a
barren life, and rolled away tinder the bur-
geoning limes which seemed but the precipita-
tion of one's own joy.
Natalya spread her thin hands in the sun-
shine. "Ah, this wonderful old city!" she
cried, as we followed the winding streets.
"My school-days were spent here. How I
love it! One does not ask enough of life!"
One does not ask enough of life !
I have been to pray at the little chapel
under the Kremlin Hill. "Unexpected Joy,"
the Russians have named it the chapel that
I love best in Moscow. How well these Slavs
know the heart! Dear godmother, once you
warned me that life would lead me to religion ;
it has not been through sorrow, as you feared,
but it is something akin to pain.
Perhaps it is only the sunshine, perhaps it
is the news of a Russian victory, perhaps it is
the maltchiks crying great bunches of lilies on
the street that makes me so blithe. But
suddenly in the midst of it there strikes one
grim note. Seven officers were hanged to-
day. The Novoye Vremya prints only the
statement and the Russians are silent.
It is not in victory, but in crises, that one is
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most conscious of the Slav. It is in catas-
trophe that the Russians draw together as if
by racial impulse, and from the circle of their
anxiety look coldly or indifferently at the
foreigner. They talk little, ceasing when I
enter, and I am warned not to speak English,
the language of an ally, on the street. What
do we of America, the blend of every nation-
ality, know of this pure, white-hot flame of
an inbred race? How many new currents
are visible nowadays! At first Russian life
moves on a fairly undisturbed stream of
existence, but gradually, as one's eyes be-
come accustomed to the complexity, and
more observant, mysterious whirlpools man-
ifest themselves, and strange subterranean
flows.
A bit of Mile. Novinska's natural gaiety has
returned, an enchanting thing to see. To-day
we went to the Nobility School near the Red
Gate, at which she was educated, an enormous
white structure rambling about a court. We
were admitted by a decorative butler, who
scrutinized me suspiciously and left us to wait
in the drawing-room furnished with rosewood
and a chrysoprase table and pervaded with a
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
fragrance which suggested the passing of a
Lely or a Kellner beauty.
"He regards you as if you might be about
to elope with the pet princess," twinkled Mile.
Novinska.
Madame T., the principal, was more cordial.
It was touching to see her when she took
Natalya Nikolaievna's hands.
"Ah, dushenka, I know. The fiance," she
murmured, kissing Natalya Nikolaievna on
both cheeks. "But you are brave and God
will be good to you."
She turned to me with an enveloping smile.
" I remember this one as so tiny a child. ' The
black witch,' the girls used to name her. She
was so fiery, with a wee face and such thin
arms, always curled up reading. And madame,
votre mere? Ah, mademoiselle, she is one of
the truly great ladies of Russia. And the
little brother who was at the Corps des
Pages? Do you remember how he used to
come in his long uniform, always with a big
box of sweets, looking like a young Napo-
leon?"
We had tea at the hands of the suspicious
butler, who evidently approved no Americans
invading this sacrosanct spot, where not a drop
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of other than titled blood flows, whose walls
not even an American millionairess could scale
with father's golden ladder.
"I wish Mademoiselle I 'Americaine to see
our monastery," Mile. Novinska said.
"If you are expecting luxuries," Madame T.
warned, "turn back. No scented quarters
here heaped with silken pillows; no seductive
sweet-eating princesses."
And indeed it was, in spite of Madame T.'s
warning, far less luxurious than I had im-
agined. A scrubbed and sanded monastery
with white walls and rows of iron beds. We
entered into an airy room with beds in a row,
each with an ikon at its head. The plain
toilet articles and bath slippers of straw were
arranged with geometric precision. Madame
T. opened the wardrobes that we might see.
Each showed one heavy stuff dress, two pairs
of woolen stockings, a coat, and a tam-o'-
shanter for outside, not in the street little
nobles do not walk in the street, but in the
courtyard, the same sunny courtyard that we
could see outside the window, where the Czar
and Czarina come for tea. The school was
established by Elizabeth and is directly under
the patronage of the Czar, the highest medal
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
that a girl can win being the monogram of the
Empress in diamonds.
"She rarely comes now, the Empress," said
Madame T., "but how lovely she was in those
days!"
"Yes, I remember," Mile. Novinska mur-
mured.
In the linen-room, stacked high with snowy
homespun linen, patient maids were mending
with exquisite stitches. Mile. Novinska
greeted two of the maids while I gazed and
gazed at those peasant-plain garments. Un-
like the poet, I thought not a little of the
revelation therein. Before me seethed the
embroidery and lace from which the American
girl rises like Venus from the foam. These
garments were simplicity itself, not only sim-
ple, but heavy and durable.
"No man could quite comprehend the
abysmal difference," I murmured to Natalya
Nikolaievna.
"In all things the young Russian girls, like the
young French girls, are superbly unspoiled,"
answered Mile. Novinska, reading my thought,
"but when they are married their trousseaus
are magnificent. The trousseau of my best
friend, when she was married, was fit for a
17 239
MISS AMERIKANKA
museum. As for seclusion, at first she dared
not even drive alone or drink so much as a
white wine without her husband's permission,
all of which amused the husband enormously."
"And in all this there is the touch of the
epicurean East."
"Yes. How more deliciously prepare a
woman? When she goes to her husband, her
senses, her imagination, are as fresh as the day
she was born," said Mile. Novinska. "She
is ready for all the delicate allurements of life,
for the Russian loves a woman not alone for
the woman herself, but for what she can give
him."
"In spite of all the camaraderie in Russia"
Madame T. frowned severely "we are not
yet free from the harem."
The princesses themselves are stiff little
figures in such costumes as I can imagine
no boarding-school girl in America wearing:
heavy blue stuff skirts, coarse, clean cotton
blouses, broad leather belts, and hair in braids.
They courtesy shyly as we pass, with a well-
bred lack of curiosity. Three girls were
standing at a cross-section of the corridor, a
roguish gipsy face and two paler, straighter
types with short bangs like an old French print,
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
all in the heavy blue skirts and aprons tied at
the back.
"Countess X's daughter, the dark one,"
said the principal, mentioning a famous name.
"Her grandfather is one of our richest land-
owners. She will be a figure some day in
Russia."
"All these bobbing little girls are the bear-
ers of the great names of Russia," said Natalya
Nikolaievna. "In a few years they will ex-
change their sensible boots for French heels,
put up their long braids, lengthen their skirts
overnight, and, voilal the Kittys and Na-
tashas and Anna Kareninas the brilliant, so-
phisticated women of Russian society."
"None of them speak less than five lan-
guages," added Madame T.
"And are they so well educated in other
ways?" I asked, respectfully eying the little
polyglots.
Madame T. shook her head gravely.
"Russians are Orientals in temper, and the
children, like their elders, are wretchedly dis-
ciplined," she sighed. "I know one woman
who was so bewildered and terrified by her
children that she never went near her nursery.
Can you imagine a little girl of eight declaring
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vehemently to the governess, 'You may beat
us and pinch us and cut us up in fine pieces
and boil us in oil, but we will never, never
say that we love mother as well as we love
you.' All wealthy Russians employ English
governesses to discipline their children."
Through miles of spotless corridors we went,
past innumerable immaculate rooms where
smooth braids bent over books or industrious
ringers recounted endless scales.
"It was there I had scarlet fever," smiled
Natalya Nikolaievna, looking in at the cool,
white hospital. "Dmitri sent old Yegor with
his parakeet do you remember? lest I might
die!"
And then we went below to see the baths.
"The same Russian banya in which all Russia
steams in one mighty cloud every Saturday
night from the Arctic to the Caspian, from the
Pacific to the Gulf," laughed Natalya Nikolai-
evna. And so it was, a long, heated room
with benches and a flagged floor, where the
little patricians splash and scrub one another
and climb on the top shelves to steam.
"Can you imagine it in England or in
America," said Natalya Nikolaievna, "all this
steaming aristocracy ? ' '
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
"A scene for a Russian Alma-Tadema,
ri ' est-ce-pas?"
Perhaps it was only our mood that made it
all seem so amusing. Our trail led back
through the dining-room, where on the tables
clustered blue glass bowls.
" Nu, Amerikanka, of course you cannot un-
derstand," Mile. Novinska laughed, deli-
ciously. "Have you ever read of gentlemen
who waved their hands to dry them and rinsed
their mouths from golden ewers? These
bowls are of the Middle Ages. One rinses
one's mouth after dining! The custom con-
tinues in not a few houses of the old nobility."
How I should have liked seeing the little
lad from the Pages' School solemnly sending
his parakeet to the little black witch sister,
"lest she might die!"
This more than half old Byzantine city is
forever flinging a new jewel into one's lap as
magnificently as if she were the mistress of
Aladdin's lamp. And it is well to have bau-
bles, for no one knows when Dmitri Niko-
laivitch returns. Last night it was the Ar-
tistic Theater, the despair and the joy of
connoisseurs Gordon Craig, Granville Bar-
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ker, and even the Germans. And yet Madame
Novinska remembers, only twenty years ago,
an evening of amateur theatricals at the house
of a rich merchant, Alexieff, in which the
merchant himself played the leading roles.
And the merchant is still playing the leading
roles, for he was Stanislavsky.
The theater is of the simplest. The walls
are done in a forest brown with a frieze of
Tchekov's chaiki, sea-gulls, in stenciled flight.
The curtain also is a woodsy brown, with
white gulls pinioned against it, reminiscent
of Tchekov's "Sea Gull," and also of the in-
comparable Komissarshevskaya's tragically
wild and tender r61e. The whole atmosphere
is serious. It is not the mode to dress, and the
audience looks like a flock of wrens. But the
faces are intellectually eager and the eyes
smoldering eyes never seen on Broadway.
"I never feel so much a vulgar intruder as
at the Artistic Theater," Mile. Novinska de-
clares, "spying on private affairs which should
be no concern to the public."
To me the Artistic Theater spells two great
traits of the Russian: extreme realism and a
deep vein of poetry. In a realistic play, the
art is photographic. If a play is to be given
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
in the Tambov dialect, the company lives in
Tambov for the summer. If the scene is laid
in Greece, the r61es are assimilated under
Hellenic skies. The peasant is disgustingly
true to life! The Russians are realists and
their dramatic realism reaches its meticulous
ne plus ultra in Tchekov, a whimsical master
of genre who opposed the artificial cutting
away of contingent matter and the intense fo-
cusing of dramatic conversation and action.
He wrote, one might say, in the flat. And
yet, through what seems a sea of irrelevant
and trivial detail runs a large and inexplicable
poetry. And with a similar technique the
Artistic Theater plays Tchekov, casting up sig-
nificance from the commonplace, chaotic de-
tails like a delicate lacy pattern. That which
with other players is unintelligible and dull be-
comes, with their technique, suffused with
meaning pathos, despair, longing which are
the reality of Russian provincial life. When
the play is not realistic, the Russian wanders
in strange vales of the imagination, of which
the Saxon has little intimation. Gordon
Craig, searching for new symbols of dramatic
representation, chose among the players of
the Artistic Theater for figures to set against
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his sweeping lines of pity and fear. The re-
sult of the experiment was a "Hamlet" that
marked a new epoch in the theater a "Ham-
let" Greek in the pity and fear induced by its
setting, and as acted by these marvelously in-
telligent and sensitive players, Greek in its
terror and tragedy a high poetic achieve-
ment.
"Stanislavsky is the dominant personality
now, as he has always been," Mile. Novinska
informed me. "A leonine Byronesque man
with magnificent dark eyes under his heavy
brows."
Mile. Knipper is the premiere among the
actresses. The play was "Autumn Violins,"
a dramatic bit, as melancholy as a Russian
autumn itself. One can but follow Knipper
avidly. She is not beautiful now, but she is
poetic and sympateechnaya and the woman
whom Tchekov loved.
We had tea between the acts with the little
beagle-eyed secretary, who told us that but
for the war the company would have been in
England next year, and asked about certain
productions in America, with an eye to the
future of the Artistic Theater. And then
after the theater, through his kindness, we
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NEWS FROM THE FRONT
went behind the scenes to Tchekova's (Mile.
Knipper's) dressing-room.
Lafcadio Hearn's epitaph to the grass-lark
who, when Hana, the housemaid, forgot to
feed him, ate his own legs, might have been
written above Tchekova's door: "Yet, after
all, to devour one's legs for hunger is not the
worst that can happen to a being cursed with
a gift of song. There are human crickets who
must eat their own hearts in order to sing."
A spent figure in a lavender dressing-gown sat
limply in front of an enormous mirror, while
a maid, too wise to touch her, hovered in the
background. In "Autumn Violins" she had
played the r61e of a mother who married her
own lover to a daughter in order to avert
scandal. The Russians all about us had com-
mented, "She ages moment by moment."
And I had felt it, too, with anguish less akin
to pity than to terror. Now this disintegrat-
ing woman sat before me, dark lines following
her sagging cheeks, two splashes shadowing
her eyes, the weariest thing in the world.
And I realized as if I had not realized it a
thousand times before the pain of a being
"cursed with the gift of song."
When I thanked Tchekova for the pleasure
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she had given me she looked at me with
Russian kindness and a little curiosity. "You
liked my play?" she asked, a little wistfully.
It may have been acting; if so, it was superb.
Tchekova, the idol of Russia, wistfully asking
for commendations!
"But that is quite sincere," Mile. Novinska
assured me, as we turned away. "With us,
especially at the Artistic Theater, our great
players are very humble." I wanted to beg
Mile. Knipper to talk of Tchekov, but it did
not seem the one perfect topic, since the rumor
is that she made him miserably unhappy.
The company was leaving on the night train
to play their annual term in Petrograd, afesta
in the theatrical world for the capital, and I
lingered only long enough to beg Tchekova
to come to America, an idea in which she was
as interested as the barest neophyte. Two
strong impressions will always remain of this
premiere among Russian players sympathy
and work a sympathy as universal as life
the human being marvelously realized and
relentless labor.
I comprehend, too, why the Russian, when
in London, avoids the drama.
XIX
"SOMETHING POIGNANT'
ONE might linger forever in this sunny
paradise; as a matter of fact, however,
I shall be away to the Novinskys' summer
place as soon as the lake clears. No mes-
sage from Dmitri Nikolaievitch out of the
dark. My life is a House of a Thousand
Emptinesses.
Madame Novinska went to Tver before the
ice broke, but just now the lake is an impasse
and the only road to Bortnaka is a hundred
versts around the shore over Russian roads,
difficult at any time and bottomless in spring.
I remember Madame Novinska's narration of
how the doctor at drove all night, with
fresh horses every hour, once when M. Novin-
sky was ill, only to assure her that she was
doing all that was possible, drink huge
draughts of coffee, snatch a fish-pasty, and
then drive all day back again.
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I have been making pilgrimages these days
to all the well-beloved haunts of my Bagdad
to the intimate sketches of Russian life at the
Tretyakov Gallery, and the Vereshchagins,
Oriental and opulent and shimmering with
heat; to Gelza last night at the ballet, danc-
ing her fantastic Belgique, gleaming in red
and gold and trumpet-clear, the apotheosis
of the Belgian spirit ; to Kolokol and Uspensky
and, not least, to the pigeons at the Spasskaya
gate. And to-day I am just home from
Sparrow Hills.
Princess Kalitzina's cousin came for me,
and it was charming out on that old Moscow
road to Sparrow Hills, past the "Not Dull"
palace stretching its pale buff length along
the river among the mysterious Bocklin trees,
and the park, a fresh sunny paradise. From
the terrace of Sparrow Hills the city unrolls,
a vast, illuminated scroll below, the capital
picked out in blue and green and gold, bound
only by the silver of river and sky. If the
hills had kept a guest-book they would have
recorded many a famous guest, even that most
distinguished Moscow visitor, Napoleon Bona-
parte ! It was from this terrace that Napoleon
sought to decipher the beautiful prize and
250
'SOMETHING POIGNANT'
gazed upon the long-coveted city disappearing
in fire and smoke.
It was inexpressibly fragrant as we sat and
sipped tea on the parapet in the soft spring
sunshine, under the budding limes Anna
Tcherbatskaya (Princess Kalitzina's delicious
young cousin not long since married, ab-
sorbed in a pensive reverie of the young sur-
geon at the front) and I . Anna Tcherbatskaya
has just been on a visit to the front, traveling
like a young empress, and has lived seventeen
days just below the crest of a hill, under the
roar of the guns. I look at her, and for the
moment I am in the Petrograd hospital again
and I hear M. Novinsky's quaint, un-English
voice, "No one gives herself like a Russian."
Nevertheless, I count it something for a girl
who, until her marriage two months ago, had
never crossed the street alone. And so we
sat, I musing on the city below, on Napoleon
and many things neither the city nor Na-
poleon, on this strange world which that
something within me called from the unknown,
and which I feel has taken for me a significance
of finality.
Of one thing I am certain never again
shall I be free from Russia. Foot-loose, I
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must always turn eastward. It flashes various
colors through me, this modern Byzantium;
sometimes I feel positively iridescent with
the radiance gorgeous, barbaric unleashing
everything that the Anglo-Saxon has tamed
in me. A curious dream which has haunted
me since childhood has returned: the dim
cool of a Byzantine courtyard, a blue sky
above, columns ineffably gray and old, the
soft pad, pad of slave feet in the dust, and a
woman, lying near a pool, dreaming passionate
dreams. The image had been long allayed
until it came to life again in this Oriental
Russia. Sometimes, again, this fragrant, mel-
ancholy old land calls to something strange
and deep within me. I seem to hear the
Nubians singing again at night on the Nile,
and yet I no longer thrill. A strange white
peace fills my soul; at the heart of the tur-
bulence lies infinite repose. A quiet hand has
been laid upon me. I feel all the hopes and
loves of all the ages breaking about me, and
the beauty and pathos of life becomes poig-
nant, unendurable! It is not happiness, is it,
this pain?
And yet it draws me the mystery of all
this brooding land draws me irresistibly.
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'SOMETHING POIGNANT"
Like death, Russia throws everything into
greater significance. Perhaps it is Dante's
blessedness. Perhaps it is Who can define
it? Beside it, placid English life flowing be-
tween its lush banks seems spiritually flat and
commonplace. Something so far stranger and
sweeter and deeper is here, that for one second
of it one would not exchange ten years of
cheerful security. In both America and the
Orient lies a far clearer happiness than in
Russia: America strong, youthful, certain;
the lotus-East with its suggestion of eternal
peace, the junk sails in the purple mists, and
the temple bells calling across the little val-
leys. And yet I must always return to this.
" Something homely and poignant."
Yes, I comprehend, Dmitri Nikolaievitch,
though you no longer bare for me its injus-
tice, its struggle, its melancholy, and you,
whether you live still here or there beyond,
have become for me the sum and crown of
its poignance.
XX
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
BORTNAKA at last ! Russian country, be-
loved by poet and peasant, and now add-
ing another adorer though an alien. Dmitri
Nikolaievitch's Russian country! I left Mos-
cow in the late afternoon and journeyed by
night, an eerie white night which only half
closed the curtains of day and invested the
world with a gray ghostly charm. Summer
travelers across Siberia must needs carry blue
curtains to defend themselves against this
pervasive half-light. Without these blue
guards the journey may add to itself as ex-
perience, but it sadly deteriorates as a journey.
Sleep is out of the question, and the senses,
overstrained by the continuous light, are as
ragged as the beggars who peer out of the
stations. Verst after verst, hour after hour,
the plain unwinds endlessly, monotonously,
like wool from a skein. Objects fringe ghost-
254
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
ily; trees blur in the half-light and grow
preternaturally large. A primitive terror
sweeps through one's limbs. The earth is off
its orbit, running wild in space. One calls to
the eternal hills for deliverance but there is
not even a rise in the ground! With mid-
night springs up a delusive promise of respite
from the light; a shadow creeps reassuringly
over the earth, but it is dusk and not darkness.
At eleven the sun dips below the horizon;
at two-thirty it is balancing itself again on
the rim of earth like a flattened orange, spill-
ing a crimson-and-amethyst flood over the
world. The relentless cycle has begun again.
It is a lonely mood, and yet I am not lonely;
I am curiously, half -pensively, half -childishly
content. Am I not bound for Agatha and the
tarts and the limes? Besides, again the illu-
sion of place is upon me. With every new
spot, Dmitri Nikolaievitch, it seems to me,
must appear. A message must wait at Bort-
naka!
The train deposits me at what should be an
early hour, but, by the tale of the sun, a day
well advanced. It is a dusty little station,
inside which travelers in smocks are drinking
tea, sucking sugar under their tongues. A
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shy little peasant girl offers me buttercups and
daisies "for the love of God and the aid of
the wounded" a kindly little creature. I
want to ask her if she fancies gooseberry tarts,
but I have only time to fumble for a penny
and clamber into a cavernous vehicle which
scurries off through the dust in the direction
of the boat. What a calash is I have never
known, but that rickety, swinging shell,
threatening every moment to dissolve into
the elements from which it came, satisfies en-
tirely my imagination. Perhaps I am not
exigent to-day bound for Bortnaka.
Russian landscape is like an amateur photog-
rapher's work, all sky and only a rim of land.
It is like a giant billiard-table ready for the
play, except that there are no pockets, and the
sky lies imminent above. Sky in Russia does
not offer a varied show. I cannot remember
seeing ever the rich pageantry that I used
to watch for hours through the arch of
the caravan in Mongolia, but in the ab-
sence of anything else one becomes intimate
with it, and gradually it induces the mood of
netchevo.
The lake might be a Scottish lake, were there
more hills. There are few passengers; only
256
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
peasants, lounging, thick-muscled fellows with
tanned necks, and women in red skirts. The
two men in corduroy next me talk hunting-
dogs while I gaze at the monastery towers,
flashing a startling, unearthly radiance across
the waters, and watch the weather-beaten cap-
tain release his hands from the wheel to cross
himself to the spires and domes. In spite of
Agatha and the tarts, I feel lost, and that
not in a country, but in a continent. Never
have I had the sensation of traveling so far in
so strange, so earthy a land. No sea, no
outlet. It is one of the things I hate in Rus-
sia, this suffocation by the earth.
After two hours we begin turning into a
small bay, and the captain, who looks after
Madame Novinska's guests, comes to point
out what seems to me a village overlooking the
lake. I discern a great house with white
pillars, half encircled by izbas and backed on
three sides by deep forest M. Novinsky's
ancestral rooftree. An old Southern planta-
tion dwelling it might be, except for the som-
ber forest, purely and unmistakably Russian.
An air of leisure and a patriarchal charm lies
upon its grassy slopes. Will Tolstoi's Levin
or Turgenev's Liza step out from the portico?
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MISS AMERIKANKA
The Novinskys I have always seen in far more
formal environment.
Mile. Novinska and three big hunting-dogs
from the Czar's kennels with two lordly
youths in hunting-togs, cousins just home on
furlough, are standing at the pier, with a
fringe of barefooted peasant maids in the
background, all a-flutter in their gay aprons.
It is an event, and I am the event ! As for me,
I feel myself immersed in peace. I could
deposit myself on the pier, never to stir, except
to watch the wind moving among the piny
trees or follow the uncouth shadows on the
lake.
Of my endless gallery of Russian pictures,
few in which Mile. Novinska figures I shall
ever forget. She is wearing a broad hat
which adds a piquant mystery to the shadows
of her languid eyes, and trails her white
skirts delicately over the greensward, tall and
picturesque, not an image designed to make
one abolish aristocracy. I search the thin
face under the broad hat eagerly. A fainter
tinge of rose follows the curve of the porcelain
cheek than when I had seen her in Moscow.
"There has been no other news," she says,
as our pageantry winds up the greensward
258
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
under the trees toward the white columns,
while two young peasant lads throw them-
selves^ on my luggage. "But for the sake of
ma mere we must have courage. Who knows,
there may be a message any day, any mo-
ment. I will not so easily believe that all is
not well." I could feel her long fingers
trembling on my arm.
And this is the hidden source of M. Novin-
sky's life. I cannot sleep for the delight of
being here under this ancestral rooftree in the
heart of the country, the background that
yields a figure satisfying the deeps of one.
Through the window I can see the little izbas
dreaming wanly in the moonlight as dream the
streets in Whistler's French villages. Beyond
sighs the forest, blue-black, immense in this
pale nocturnal stillness, as impenetrable as the
heart of Russia itself; above its inchoateness
the pines alone are like adventurers, tall ship
masts above the band of black. After the
open steppe, the forest allays my fears, bids
me "lay down my heart," sings to me of se-
curity. I watch it, fascinated, as I have
watched other woodlands the gray-green,
elfin forests of Ireland, the whispering bam-
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MISS AMERIKANKA
boo groves of China. This forest is far more
enigmatic than other forests, far more sentient ;
in such fastnesses has been forged the will of
Russia, in such mysteries has been shaped her
soul. The wind rises and falls like a chant,
like the desire of a people. How many strange
shapes seem about to emerge Stenka Razin,
the boyars of Nizhni Novgorod and Kazan
days; M. Novinsky's father. M. Novinsky
himself must have come out of it many times
as a dreaming little lad, hunting and fishing,
as the university student, as the young barin.
It lies mystic, quiescent now, draped with
mists caught up in white garlands as if for
some bridal nom de Dieu! some ghostly
bridal!
I was awakened this morning by old Yegor's
voice, and looked out my casement window to
see Madame Novinska, in a black frock with
a white Elizabethan collar, cutting roses which
she deposited in a shallow basket borne by
the old majordomo. It is the first item in
her day.
The Bortnaka house starts with a formal
enough hall, paneled in red and hung with
trophies of the chase, but it soon trails out
into a small room where one may dry one's
260
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
hunting-togs in winter, and on this side turns
into a big living-room facing the lake. There
are the usual beautiful hardwood floors,
deeply luxurious divans, some fine old colored
etchings, exquisite Persian rugs and embroid-
eries which Madame and M. Novinsky gath-
ered in Persia. The most formal room in the
house is a room resplendent with ancestors,
opening through French windows on the lake
terrace and scented with the fragrance of
wistaria and the lime walk below.
"You will find the house not less informal
than the inmates," Mile. Novinska had
warned me the first morning. "The Russian
is too wayward to stiffen into convention like
the Britisher, and such punctiliousness as is
his he leaves in town." On this old Russian
estate, lif e is as simple and as rural as Tolstoi's
Levin ever lived, with a venerable patriarchal
charm, such as one finds under the ancestral
roofs of the East.
Bortnaka breakfast is a movable feast.
Imagine an addicte of the French roll and a
cup of black coffee confronted by a ham
entire; by a deep pottery bowl from which
cream is ladled by a silver dipper; by monu-
ments of hot bread suggestively neighbored
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MISS AMERIKANKA
by jams and marmalades, the whole guarded
at the end of the table by a samovar of tea
and an urn of coffee, all under the eyes of
peasant maids in blue and red coifs, who take
advantage of your innocence to leave bacon
and eggs before you and desert you to your
fate. Luncheon, only less astounding than
breakfast, is served on the veranda under
the limes, attended by a sapphire-eyed Per-
sian cat who looks reflectively to the lake,
dreaming, perhaps, of his own East. Every-
body comes in outdoor togs, for everybody
sails or swims or walks. Stepan and Piotr,
very much the land banns, have been inter-
viewing the forester or inspecting the wheat
in the village beyond, or accompanying the
official sent by the Government to teach the
peasant intelligent methods of agriculture.
And that in itself is another story. I am
constantly amazed at the time and patience
the landowners expend on their peasants. . . .
Or it may be that Piotr has been out hunting
with the dogs since dawn. There are two
teas, one at four when the mail arrives the
postmaster is so terrified with English mail
that he sends it outright to Madame Novinska
and we sort it and the other at nine, Russian
262
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
fashion. And we dine, too ! One changes for
dinner, but it can hardly be called dressing,
and afterward there is tennis in the twilight,
that wondrous white light which invests all
this northland with its eerie poetry.
The overseer comes with reports of the
crops, the priest from that white tower across
the lake, an old countess from the next estate,
in worn Paris finery. And all through the
house there is a stream of life, of men and
dogs and hunting and news of the field and all
the intangible freshness of things out of doors,
and rarely good talk. The Russian does not,
like the Saxon, leave his conversation in the
city. The house is full of books: French
novels, English biography, an excellent collec-
tion of Persia, some of them inscribed in a
hand like Dmitri Nikolaivitch's neat script.
I am never sure whether I like rainy days
when I curl up in the library, watching the
storm sweep down the lake, hearing tales of
Bagdad or swirling down the Tigris in a
basket, or the sunny days when I betake
myself to the forest, watching the rafts build-
ing or simply wandering deeper and deeper
among the ravines of shadows, looking into
the upper leafy spaces. Madame Novinska
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MISS AMERIKANKA
spends much of her time alone, writing or
working over plans for the estate. She feels
a greater anxiety for Dmitri Nikolaivitch, I
am certain, than she would admit, and in spite
of the movement through the house there is
always for the first time, I confess it a
dread waiting for one knows not what from
out there like that weary, weary walking with
the dead.
I am writing from the veranda on the lake
side of "The Flugel." The sunshine is pour-
ing down gloriously, lighting the dark pines
and picking out all the colors in the shirt of
the Cuttlefish who is weeding beets in the
garden below. Yesterday I helped Stepan
and Piotr and Casper Caspich land the boat
and free the shiny wrigglers from the nets
hung on the fence. But to-day it is too heav-
enly quiet to move more than an eyelash.
The Cuttlefish is just the man to watch on
such a morning.
It is as peaceful as a Persian garden, an
illusion furthered by Ossman, who perches on
the veranda railing, waving a plumy black
tail, even as a hand-maiden waveth her fan.
Ossman is a true Mussulman. His ancestors
264
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
were transported in a basket from Persia by
Madame Novinska herself, and with him he
brought all the manner of the East.
But Bortnaka is not Persian, despite Oss-
man; it is the Russianest Russian, a page from
Turgenev's own world. The estate, an orig-
inal grant from the Czar, has been in the
family three hundred years. On one side lie
three villages, one of them the village which
M. Novinsky's father built for his freed serfs.
Beyond these lies another great estate be-
longing to Princess Kalitzina. One may
walk all day and never leave the piny forests
of Bortnaka itself, but if one proceeds along
the lake long enough in the opposite direction
from the villages, one comes upon what was
once a magnificent place belonging to a mem-
ber of the Tolstoi family. I believe the
famous author visited here as a boy and men-
tions it in one of his books.
A wing of one of the quarters which belonged
to the house serfs is now given over to the
country post-office. When Natalya Niko-
laievna and I drove over in the troika yester-
day for the mail, I begged to peek at the
interior of the great house that stretched itself
along a hill-crest and overlooked the lake in
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MISS AMERIKANKA
truly regal style. I can't quite take a Russian
estate yet without the least bit of thrill;
an atmosphere lingers about even the more
modest ones, strange to the child from a land
where "you are as good a man as I and I'm
a better man than you." And this Tolstoi
place, even in decay, has the truly and royally
Russian grand manner. In America I should
have listed the house as seen from the lake
as a summer hotel, and that it is soon to
become under the direction of an astute man-
ager. It is a loose-jointed house, with in-
mAmerable corridors and rooms for the hosts
of guests who used to gather from the estates
round about, and wings at the sides for the
three hundred house serfs once attached to the
domain. Beyond lie orchards and broad
fields of rye, which employed the ten thou-
sand serfs who went with the estate. Ten
thousand "souls," as the Russians say, and
all of one's own color! It staggers my
imagination, and my grandfather was a slave-
owning Southerner.
Only one of the beautiful rooms remains in-
tact a dining-room paneled in dark Russian
oak and carved with the Tolstoi coat of arms,
and a little medieval balcony on both sides
266
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
above, where the musicians played during
dinner. Madame Novinska has told me of
guests riding over to this estate in the old days
to hunt wolves or bears all day and dance all
night or play at private theatricals in the ball-
room, with ladies applauding from the balcony.
Just what this mighty Russian feasting and
drinking and revelry must have been, with
wines and choice viands from the four corners
of the earth, and boar-hunting, and ballet-
dancers down from Petrograd! A regal old
tyranny!
A door in the dining-room not high enough
for a man to enter, Natalya Nikolaievna ex-
plained: "The serfs must enter there to greet
Madame Tolstoi and to receive their silver
from her majordomo on Easter morning. Its
lack of height insured humility." But this
extravagant despotism is of the past. The
only one who remembers all those gay days,
besides Madame Novinska, is blind now. The
Tolstoi family have all scattered. The old
Tolstoi house is fallen into decay and, like
those who made the hall and the high-ceil-
inged rooms ring 'with laughter, it, too, is
wrapped in memories.
From the house we wandered across the
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MISS AMERIKANKA
fields to the old Tolstoi church, still lifting its
domes and its spires above the high cloister
wall. A double row of white birches beckoned
above the path that led through the half-
open gates. White clouds were floating in the
sky above the blue domes, and the golden
Russian cross seated a crow. The peace of
the dead was over all, a peace so deep, so
intense that it quivered like silence; but one
was not lonely. One felt near the Russian
God. The fragrance of the human and the
present lingers, too, about the white walls and
the sedgy grasses. A week ago they brought
a young soldier home and laid him to sleep, his
last sleep, under the silvery birches, where the
guns do not roar nor the shells shriek, but all
is God's peace. ... In such a God's Acre
the Novinskys, too, sleep their long sleep.
Alexei was waiting for us with reproachful
eyes, and we turned home again, straight
through the deep, piny forest, vaulting like
cathedral arches above our heads for twenty
versts. I know a road at Nikko where the
arches vault higher, but I know no road that
I love so much as this needle-carpeted path
through the hush of the forest. The horses
love it, too. Orlik, who gallops at the side
268
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
while the others trot, throws up the needles
with his flying heels and tosses his head far to
the side, as a properly trained outside troika
horse should do, as if to say, "This is a Russian
road and I am Russian and I love it." Alexei,
the coachman, throws back his head, braces
his feet, sometimes half -standing and leaning
forward, as if he were driving the chariots of
the sun, and urges the horses on with strange
Russian cries. With his long black beard
streaming in the wind, his rose-colored sleeves,
and his velvet jacket girt about with a brilliant
blue shawl, Alexei looks like a Bakst fantasy.
Alexei, like La Polskaya, is vain; with
Alexei, it is an extraordinary pride of his
beard. Last winter he kept pointing out his
extreme value as a coachman because of his
handsome beard. When no higher wages were
forthcoming for this superior beauty, he sug-
gested that he might shave it off.
"Do, Alexei," urged Madame Novinska,
seriously. "I have never had a coachman
without a beard."
About two versts from the house we heard
the voices of the raftsmen at work, building
the great rafts which every spring the estate
at Bortnaka sends down the Volga. A large
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MISS AMERIKANKA
part of the revenue of Bortnaka comes from
these huge cuttings of pine and oak, and Mile.
Novinska explained to me how thousands of
rubles may lie in knowing how to replant, how
to cut the trees properly for the least waste,
and also the dread of forest fires. In their
newly peeled state, the logs looked like
Brobdingnagian piles of taffy straws, fresh
and delicious enough to eat. Out on the blue
waters of the lake two mammoth rafts were
already afloat, the long timbers laid in orderly
rows and bound together with young saplings ;
the same rafts, each carrying a little hut, that
we had met on the Volga. I could see them
on the river as they floated farther and farther
toward Astrakhan. And I could hear the
raftsmen's songs ringing out on the river when
the little fires were lighted at night, and often-
times the sound of a gipsy carousal, river
giants protesting against the monotony of life
and the steppe. And farther and farther
down the river they float, by day and by
night, and fainter and fainter the songs,
until the river widens into the sea.
How near one comes to the heart of life
here on this old estate! It accounts for much
270
FROM TURGENEV'S WORLD
of M. Novinsky's simplicity, the simplicity of
people reared away from the marts, which no
term in the world could ever cloud ; a sense of
inherited responsibility which nothing and no
person could ever lose. I would burn a
thousand tapers to Nicholas the wonder-
worker to see him once against this old back-
ground under the rooftree of his fathers.
To-night there beyond the fields of green,
under the eaves at the izbas, a peasant girl is
singing, a wild wailing melody running like a
silver thread through the white night a
melody torn from underneath a woman's
heart, an air of unfulfilment. Ah! Dmitri, I
understand.
19
XXI
THE SCORPION'S STING
T IKE scorpions the war stings far more
I v cruelly here in the country than in the
city. To pay taxes, gold and silver that is
one thing but to cut the sinews of war out of
your own flocks and herds! The second com-
mandeering of horses has begun. The ukases
have been up for three weeks, and since dawn
to-day the peasants have been gathering in
the square of the whitewashed chapels under
the birches; blotches of gaily kerchiefed
women and boys in red and blue rubashkas and
old men, torpidly assembling. How old a
Russian peasant grows! The sky is a com-
passionate Volga sky, but it looks down on a
scene less untroubled. The Government of-
ficers have come, smart fellows in khaki riding-
trousers; they stand in a cleared space of the
grassy street among horses :black and gray
and pinto measuring them with a long pole
272
THE SCORPION'S STING
marked with a nail at the proper height. A
rather swaggering officer, the younger, with
a cropped tan mustache, who would not
waltz badly; the other a thick-bodied, red-
nostriled man who would make a good fourth
at bridge both thoroughgoing and indifferent
to the grumbling of the muzhiks.
The older strikes an attitude of authority,
pulling at his mustache, legs far apart. " Ny,
show me his paces!" he orders, throwing the
rope bridle of a gray horse to a lumbering
young peasant. Little matter to him if this
is the last horse which Ivan Ivanovitch has to
plow the grain-land. War is war! As a
matter of fact, it is not Ivan Ivanovitch's
last horse; he has concealed another in the
bushes. But he clambers on him as slowly
as if it were and rides him off under the
dappling birches. Two foresters pass in fur
caps with shrewd glances. The cook comes
out from the long, rambling kitchen, dressed
in pure white, his mustache turning up like
the points of a scimitar, a knife stuck through
his belt, and makes a few derogatory com-
ments on the horse. As a matter of fact, the
gray proves himself no great steed. Ivan
J vanovitch clambers clumsily off again, ' ' Be-
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MISS AMERIKANKA
sides, he kicks, your Excellency," he offers,
cannily. But one officer writes something in
a black book and the other marks the horse
with a cross of red paint, while Marya, Ivan
Ivanovitch's wife, sinks beside the beehive
and rocks with her head in her apron. Six
from the Novinsky stables are chosen this
time, and one of them is Orlik, who gallops
at the side in the troika. The peasants
watch them indifferently as they are led away.
" Neetchevo" they shrug their shoulders.
"There is always plenty of everything at the
great house."
"How do they feel the war?" I asked of
Piotr Pavlovitch, the overseer of the estate,
an amorphous-bodied, keen old Russian with
shaggy hair and eyes far apart, a mighty bear-
hunter in his time.
"The peasants?" He centered his gaze on
the uncouth faces filmed over with ignorance.
"The Germans are just over that hill there,
in their minds, and if they do not fight the
Nyemetzki will come over the slope and take
all their horses! He is a shrewd one, the
peasant. Da barishnya (you have said it).
But his world is as big as his own field.
Before this war is finished there will be the
274
THE SCORPION'S STING
devil to pay." Piotr Pavlovitch strikes off in
the direction of the wheat while I turn back
to the house.
At night I hear the horses leaving, like a
great wind rushing through the wood. Why
do they always take them at night? All
through the hours I awake with a sense of
uneasiness such as I felt in Siberia and that
first morning in Petrograd: tides of men
streaming down the white path fragments of
song the trampling of boots and the rumbling
of guns ; then they all drop into an abyss which
gives back nothing.
I love to see Madame Novinska here in the
country. In Petrograd and at her great
place, the palace of Peter the Great, Madame
Novinska is the grand chatelaine, but here on
this old estate buried in the heart of Russia,
with these peasants who have been the re-
sponsibility of her father and her father's
father before her, she is the simple barina.
It is a wonderful cultural factor, that in-
herited sense of noblesse oblige, the respon-
sibility of the greater for the less, the powerful
for the humble, which we possess so meagerly
in America. I find it running all through
this "nobleman's nest." Yes, I am aware
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MISS AMERIKANKA
that it is a social and economic maladjustment
that has brought about this condition; that
it is the lover of brocaded fabrics, of pageants,
in me that finds it charming, but I am not sure
that it brings out the worst qualities of
human beings.
Madame Novinska was returning from a
drive to a neighboring estate with her chari-
oteer of the sun when I emerged on the terrace
yesterday afternoon. There had been a new
and important order posted in the town of
O and the peasants clustered around her
carriage while she read to them slowly, care-
fully, as one reads to apprehensive children.
Perhaps this is the portrait of M. Novinsky's
mother that I like most of all: the exquisite
contours of her face undimmed, infinitely sad
and paling daily with anxiety for Dmitri
Nikolai vitch, but looking with eyes tender
with Russian tenderness at her other children,
the peasants. Madame Novinska belongs to an
older generation, but she has always seemed to
me to have achieved that toward which our
generation struggles : a discriminating and in-
tense personal emotion, but released from the
merely personal into that larger love for a
people, a race. Beyond her one feels as the
276
THE SCORPION'S STING
confreres of Turgenev felt beyond him, as one
feels beyond all Russians who love Russia, a
shadow; the sense of hopeless yearning over
these confused and dim-eyed ones, denied
their right to knowledge, and now both a
promise and a menace. Some day it will be
M. Novinsky's, this responsibility for "souls"
if ever he returns. Every day here throws
him into higher relief. I am less certain to
misunderstand him, now that I have seen this
old Russian background.
Natalya Nikolaievna had come out on the
terrace and we stood looking down at the
scene in the waning light. It was all like
a part in a play far more like a play than
those realistic scenes from Tchekov: Natalya
Nikolaievna in her white gown and turquoise
shawl, slim, patrician, inexpressibly lovely;
the barina below moving slowly toward the
house, followed by a train of bright kerchiefs
and white blouses ; and beyond, the lake, the
forest purpling in the dusk, the impenetrable
background of all this simple patriarchal life.
Natalya Nikolaievna caught my glance.
"Fancy, Amerikanka," she said, quietly.
"In the revolution of 1905 they stoned every
one our own peasants did. They even bolted
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MISS AMERIKANKA
the stable doors and burned our horses and
stoned my father. My mother was the only
one who could go among the villages. This is
medieval Russia. Ma mere they count not as
human, but one of the saints."
The post has come.
Only a letter from Feodor, Marya's husband,
who is a gunner of the battery to which two of
the Novinsky horses are attached. The
horses "draw bravely," he writes. There are
new-comers in the regiment, a little girl of
seven and a boy of five. The father had
found the mother dead when he returned to
the village on furlough. There were no rela-
tives in the village and he carried the children
back to the trenches. The soldiers are very
kind to them. Shto dyelatch? What else was
to be done, Feodor asks.
No word from Dmitri Nicholaivitch. I can-
not bear staring forever like this into empti-
ness.
XXII
"THE BARIN RETURNS"
THE whole world has changed its dim hues
for the colors of joy ! A sweet, mellow old
place! The limes are showering the air with
fragrance, the earth is carpeted with lilies-of-
the valley, a cuckoo called this morning from
the edge of the forest. Even the caftan and
the beard of the old peasant who plows that
point of land seem to blow debonairly. All
day the housekeeper jingles her keys among
the storehouses; Madame Novinska walked
down the terrace to the roses this morn-
ing without a cane; Natalya Nikolaievna is
peacock-eyed. Old Yarshin, in charge of the
bathhouse, is transporting cans of water on
long poles over his shoulder. The toothless
old babas and batushkas, sitting in the grassy
dooryards, are nodding their heads and whis-
pering. "The young barin returns. God's
hand is not against us. Slavu bogu!" can it
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MISS AMERIKANKA
be true? The message came to Madame
Novinska yesterday. Only Agatha and I are
useless, toothless old Agatha rocking and
weeping with her head in her apron, and I
I steal away to the forest.
The beloved old forest ! Green, veiled with
a luminous white, an indescribable ethereal
loveliness; black earth, the scent of lilies-of-
the valley everything that is transcendently
fresh against all that is immemorially old.
Spring comes on the wing, here in Russia,
with a sudden rush of joy as nowhere else
the resurrection! The rain has left the forest
fragrant, full of moving currents of air and
elusive shadows. To-day a flock of yellow
butterflies flit through the labyrinths, trem-
ulously pendent like flecks of gold in old
liqueur. I follow them swiftly, eagerly, still
deeper and deeper into the wood, leaving the
needle-carpeted road and open spaces for dim
arcades, hung every day with new and deli-
cately moving filigrees.
To-day is a fete-day, and "the maidens
neither plait their hair nor the birds build
their nests." The bells in Moscow and
Petrograd ring madly to-day from the bell-
towers; here in the countryside they call
280
'THE BARIN RETURNS*'
tranquilly from the white monastery tower
across the lake.
This afternoon, while we were drinking tea
on the terrace, under the limes, a peasant
woman appeared suddenly at the French
windows of the dining-room, a young and
comely woman, her gown pinned up above
her bare feet and a gay handkerchief tied over
her head.
I recognized her as Marya, the "cow-
woman," for I remembered having seen her
among the shining dairy things. For a mo-
ment she stood in the doorway with a troubled
gaze, and then her eyes began to dilate with
tears and her hands clutched convulsively at
her peasant apron.
"Oh, barina," she cried, throwing herself at
Madame Novinska's feet and sobbing, "they
will bury my malenki, my baby, to-night ! Will
not the barishnya come and make a picture
of him before they lay away my little pigeon?"
Of course I promised to come my camera
has been an open sesame among the peasants
and to-day I could refuse no man aught!
The poor mother began kissing the hem of my
skirt in passionate gratitude.
Marya had married outside her own village
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MISS AMERIKANKA
and she lived three villages beyond Bortnaka.
After tea, Mile. Novinska and I walked
through the vivid green of the rye-fields that
"clothe the world and meet the sky" toward
the squat, gray- timbered houses folded be-
tween the hills. The grassy streets of our own
village were peopled with the old babas and
batushkas taking their holiday in the sun,
whispering in awestruck tones, " Malenki, the
little one." How they knew all about it I am
unaware. How they know of Dmitri Niko-
laivitch I cannot say. The peasant knows
everything.
The children were less impressed, and with
each village we gained a following of dingily
fair little boys in high boots and red-belted
Cossack blouses, and shy little blue-eyed girls
in pink who hung on the gray gates to open
them for us and then fell in behind us. One
of the older boys played an accordion and two
had balalaikas, to the accompaniment of
which they sang endless verses, each of which
ended in a sharp, up-turning minor, very like
the songs of the Chinese river boatmen. What
a pageant we would have offered a painter
Bagdanov-Belsky, for instance, with his gen-
ius for genre as we passed through the fields
282
'THE BARIN RETURNS"
of rye, lying glazed and green against the sky-
line, and poured down into the villages a
chromatic scale of reds, pinks, and yellows,
bright embroidery of the hills.
The village where Marya lived was all agog
with our coming; the space about the little
chapel was crowded with other village mothers,
their offspring tugging at their skirts, and among
them stood Marya, like a young Rachel, not
weeping, but not the less mourning for her
dead. We followed her into the little chapel,
a crude, whitewashed structure with one
window and a primitive ikon.
And there in a white coffin lay a wee blos-
som of a baby, his long lashes sweeping his
cheeks like petals, so inexpressibly exquisite
that it seemed he could not have strayed amid
such uncouthness; one wondered if his soul,
a stranger and dismayed, had not taken flight
to nearer kindred. Candles burned at his head
and feet, and in his hand was a waxy flower of
many petals.
The young mother silently picked up the
little coffin and carried it outside. There in a
cleared space, surrounded by the other women,
she stood like a statue, clasping the precious
receptacle in her strong young arms. After
MISS AMERIKANKA
the pictures were made we waited for her to
return the coffin to the chapel, but she put it
down only for a moment, tightened the ker-
chief over her head, and then, taking up her
white burden, and followed by half a dozen
other women, strode off down the grassy
street of this village of wood toward the
shore. There are no men in the village and
the women must needs bury their dead. The
mother placed the coffin in a boat; three or
four brawny women clambered in after her
and, taking up the oars, they pushed off
strongly from the shore. Night was falling
and the lake had already begun to darkle in
the mists, but through the dusk the white
tower of the monastery shone like an angel's
wing athwart the sky.
These are the realities, and beside them my
life has been filled with phantoms. No more
ghosts to-morrow but for me, too, the white
samite radiance of reality?
I had so often imagined him, but never as
he came to-day, walking so slowly, so weary,
weary, slowly down the forest road. Joy had
driven me for refuge to the woodland, but I
hid my eyes against the trunk of a pine, seek-
284
'THE BARIN RETURNS"
ing a haven from pain. How young and
buoyant, invincible, he had been in those
other days! The gallant body was still held
proudly, but that faint look of "the man who
was"! The forest seemed to rock about me.
I could only wait, mute, until he came op-
posite me in the path and he stopped, regard-
ing me intently.
"I have dreamed you like this under the
trees," he said, a ghost of the old expression
stirring in his eyes. "It is you, Amerikanka?"
One of his hands was crushed. He carried
his shoulder painfully. But it was his eyes
that held the injury, horror that would be his
till death, mystery that could never be shared.
He leaned against the buttressed trunk of a
tree near me that familiar movement! as
I had seen him often watching the steppe in
Siberia, as he had leaned against the malachite
column that day in the cathedral. The light
fell dimly through the trees on his slim, dark
head. It was M. Novinsky of the steppe,
M. Novinsky of the islands under the pines,
of that night at the ballet. I could have wept
for joy at the old known posture.
"How lovely you are in that white f rock-
here in the forest, Amerikankal"
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My voice was still lingering in forbidden
registers, but, looking up into the gray-blue
eyes, set in Eastern fashion, I touched the
bandaged sleeve gently, very gently with my
fingers.
" Neetchevo-pravda. It is of no moment
truth. The fortunes of the day," he said,
gently, while his eyes continued to consider
me carefully as if I had been a phantom
and then slowly, wonderingly wandered up to
the film of green.
\
XXIII
REALITIES
WE sat down on an overturned pine and
bit by bit the tale came, slowly, with
fewer reserves than an Englishman would have
shown, with less of "fledgling simplicity," but
with Slavic sensitiveness, the repulsion, the ter-
ror and fascination, the overwhelming ghastli-
ness the esthete tasting his emotion.
"You knew of the treachery among Russian
officers, a constant giving over of the most
important plans to the enemy. There was a
scheme among three of us to stop the leakage
three of us who had been friends at school in
Petrograd. . . . We all knew that it meant
our lives. Not one of us expected to return
I told you but that was no matter. . . .
Russians do not fear to die. We all scattered
into different regiments. I chose my own.
Do you remember the Cossack who refused to
desert his horse in Kashgar? Partially through
20 287
MISS AMERIKANKA
his help, partially through an officer, I went
as a common soldier, later as an orderly."
M. Novinsky paused and his eyes followed
the curve of the lake. "It was worse even
than we expected," he continued, after a
silence, speaking slowly and distinctly. " There
were terrible things. ... It w r as worse than
anyone could have dreamed this side of inferno.
Idon't mean the battle, thefighting that is bad
enough. The eternal guns, the filth, the em-
bruting of the whole fabric of life one gets
used to that. But the treachery of officers
dribbling all that life through their hands like
water. . . . Shells and shells and no guns.
. . . Guns and no shells. . . . Guns and
shells that Bozlie moil do not fit. ... Can
you imagine what it is to trap men in their
trenches empty-handed to be riddled with
shell-fire? ... To watch them helpless like
children big as oxen clambering out of the
trenches slow and dazed facing German
steel, waiting for comrades to fall so that they
may take their guns. Bozlie moil There are
some things it is necessary to forget. . . .
Nado zabeetch! Why those young giants did
not choke their officers with bare hands ! . . .
Out of the trenches, wave after wave, helpless
288
REALITIES
bayonet charges against howitzers. A gun
is money, but a man is only a man. All
those peasant bdbas in Siberia are breeding
men and in Russia besides their raison
d'etre. Millions of men for the asking . . .
and staff -officers at the back in a wood eating
mushrooms. A man is only flesh and blood
blood Nom de Dieu! I shall never forget that
slippery field. ..."
A yellow butterfly winged past us, hanging
like a golden mote in the subdued gloom.
1 ' And when you left the regiment? 1 ' I breathed,
tentatively.
Dmitri Nikolaievitch roused himself from
the reverie into which he had fallen. His voice
plodded on. "I was with the regiment ten
days, and then it was necessary for some one
to go into Germany. We had our observa-
tions, but they had to be verified for absolute
certainty. It was a matter of lots. We drew
before we went, and I had the lucky number.
... I went. ... Of that I can never tell you.
It was difficult, terribly difficult. Luckily I
am one Russian who speaks languages as well
as we have the reputation for speaking them.
I had been at school in Germany da, I know
them very well. If my German had been
289
MISS AMERIKANKA
less perfect, or if I had ever been for one
instant afraid for my life, my life would not
have been worth a kopeck. They are ef-
ficient but stupid. Two weeks I was in Ger-
many, and then I came back. I traveled once
in a day-coach with an officer mainly by
night any way, every way. It was easier
getting over than back, I assure you. But I
arrived. It was done what I had set out
to do. I could have come home then. I
joined the troops again, I don't know why.
Perhaps it was only a barbarian's desire to
fight." He put his hand to his head with the
same troubled gesture of "the man who was."
"That was when this came. It is glorious
to have something happen to your body after
you had seen with your eyes. It's a point
something bright and hard to fix your mind
besides that. Perhaps I had not counted on
lying a day and a night in ' No Man's Land.' '
he added, with a smile. "Twenty-four hours
of staring up at a rainy gray sky with an oc-
casional one of those oxen-like creatures crawl-
ing over one trying to get back to the trenches.
And the rain, the everlasting rain sodden,
like Gorky's rains. Andrei was in the same
regiment it was he who found me. , , , Have
290
REALITIES
you read the papers two weeks, three weeks,
ago? . . . Seven officers they were hanged."
The forest roared past me like the torrent
of a night sea. M. Novinsky sat resting his
head on his hand, staring into the depths of the
wood. From the distance came the sound of
the foresters' singing; the fragrance of lilies-
of-the-valley rose from the black earth, sweet
and unendurable ! But I was far from the forest.
I was again on a trans-Siberian train, watching
a gaunt figure relaxed against the cushions, his
eyes turned moodily on the steppe.
"Dmitri Nikolaievitch " I found courage,
after a silence, looking at the sensitive profile
of the man at my side "he was not one?"
M. Novinsky turned his eyes to me as if to
steady me. "He was, Amerikanka Pro-
shcliaiete menya. ... It had to be."
As long as I live, the scent of pines or of
lilies, the sound of a lake lapping against the
shore, will bring two words in a grave, un-
English voice, and I shall see a swarthy face
framed between candles, the decorations of a
uniform gleaming richly like the jewels of the
Mother of God.
"The dark door" it had opened to the
General.
291
XXIV
MISS AMERIKANKA CHOOSES
WE sat in quivering silence, I aching with
the incomprehensible futility of life and
M. Novinsky staring again with his head on
his hands.
"I am happy that America is yours to re-
turn to." The voice with its un-English
timbre roused itself after a pause. "But you
will never forget Russia. It will always re-
main something tragic, magnetic, to be re-
membered. . . . Perhaps these are the last
days we shall have together and I must
speak out my heart. That is the Slav. It
may be that in Peking you have heard that
I am a worshiper of women. I am. I wor-
ship all beauty. But you are the first woman
I have ever known well. . . . You cannot
know what it means, you your joy against
this old unhappiness so intrinsically a part of
my fiber. ... It is unspeakably dear this
experience unspeakably rare. If I loved you
292
\
MISS AMERIKANKA CHOOSES
less I should ask more of you. But I prize
you as you are I love you unique singular.
... I tremble lest this Old World cloud your
fountain of joy."
I could not look at M. Novinsky. The
terror of night and the steppe seemed flowing
over me as on that day at the cathedral. The
world without this figure so simple, so gentle,
so subtly understanding it was dull, un-
imaginable! Whatever paths of the heart
life might lead me into, it would never be this
one, desired. I rose from the pine where
we had been sitting, putting my hand to my
throat to free it from ache. What mattered
the world old or new without this tender
figure this exquisite sensibility!
"I shall always return." I tried to choke
back my tears. "Something compelled me
here I do not know what and I shall always
return. I love Russia."
M. Novinsky had risen and we were again
on the needle-carpeted road, Orlik's road,
moving toward a little woodland bridge under
the high vaulting trees. He stopped now as
we came to a turn in the forest road, subdued
and fragrant from a thicket of a delicately
flowering white bush.
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MISS AMERIKANKA
"Russia has given me a soul," I repeated,
avoiding him and looking up at my dim green
comrades, the trees, blindly struggling against
a cold gray tide. "I shall always return."
M. Novinsky had never kissed my hands
before, after the manner of his race; he bent
over them as if it were a rite.
" Americaine" he said, slowly, searching my
face with a terrible earnestness, "Russia is
not a land to which one returns with joy. If
it were not my own country, perhaps I should
love it less than other lands of sunshine and
freedom. If she were at a less crisis or less
unhappy I might leave her; but as she is
now, struggling, upheaved, I am bound to
her. You love Russia, but you do not know
Russia. The Russia you see is the Russia of
to-day; what Russia of to-morrow will be no
one knows. We are on the brink of change.
Everything one loves and everything one hates
is going into the melting-pot, and what will
emerge no one can say. In time we shall
evolve into a great free nation. In time
but what is one man's lifetime in the evolution
of a race? For the next hundred years we are
going to be the most unhappy people in the
world. In my case, if one can envisage the
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MISS AMERIKANKA CHOOSES
personal a thing I have almost forgotten-
it may mean the loss of everything of estates,
of home, even this old Bortnaka. ... It is a
Novinsky tradition of which we are proud
our long fight for Russia's freedom. But we
are nobles and the first new uncouth forces
of democracy for which we are striving will
have little place for us." He added the latter
with a whimsical smile, but all the weariness
of Asia looked out of his eyes. He was silent
for a moment, staring down the road, and the
contours of his face sharpened in white lines of
pain as he turned again to me. "But you,
Amerikanka do you not see, it is cruel to
bring you here to this chaos, this change-
no one knows what with your clear title to
happiness there."
I could feel the taut figure, looking down
at me with sea-blue eyes, quivering under the
leash. He had resigned me. My choice was
in my own hands, but his eyes were compelling
me, wistfully questioning, exploring my soul,
burning out the very essence of me with the
intense emotion of the Slav. And that in-
tensity, the prescience of which had drawn
me overseas that passion of the East was
drawing me now irresistibly to this man lifted
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MISS AMERIKANKA
up in pain before me. I closed my eyes. I
was promising myself away, my country,
pledging my hope and my ambition. I had
a sense of pathos as at the closing of a chapter.
That was all. Of irresolution none. The
tender eyes and sensitive mouth I could
hardly see them through a film of tears. I
knew that there lay my world, in those fires
ready to light at my touch.
"I shall not return I shall stay in Russia.
Whatever your destiny whatever the destiny
of this Old World it is mine, Dmitri Niko-
laievitch. . . . Sonia and Raskolnikoff . . . you
know . . . together."
He was trembling violently as I said the
last words, but he put his free hand on my
hair and turned me toward him M. Novinsky
of my memory. "Your whole life do you
understand your whole life?" His voice was
steady, but his face was pale and straining,
his eyes touched with the mysticism of the
Slav.
" My whole life, Dmitri Nikolaievitch." My
soul seemed holding out her woman hands to
this dim, questing face and these darkening
eyes. "Together."
" Moya Amerikanka . . . life . . . together/' 1
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MISS AMERIKANKA CHOOSES
The passion of the East, sweeping me up in
its embrace, lifting me on full flood-tides,
wrapping me in mystic fire his arms closing
about me his body trembling, exquisitely
near ... a torrent rushed through me like the
wind in the forest, but at the heart was peace
infinite repose. Strange sweet tides bore
me far, far out out out to unknown seas!
Something poignant in Russia yes, I had
touched it.
THE END
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