Blagoveschensk is built on much the same lines as all the other Siberian towns that I have seen, a wooden town mostly of one-storeyed houses straggling over the plain in wide streets that cut one another at right angles. Again it was not at all unlike an Australian town, a frontier town to all intents and purposes. The side-roads were deep in dust, and the principal shop, a great store, a sort of mild imitation of Harrod\'s, where you could buy everything from a needle to an anchor—I bought a dog-collar with a bell for Buchanan—was run by Germans. It was a specimen of Germany\'s success in peaceful penetration. It seemed as if she were throwing away the meat for the shadow, for they were interning all those assistants—400 of them. Now probably they form the nucleus of the Bolshevist force helping Germany.
The Governor\'s house was on the outskirts of the town, and it was thronged with people, men mostly, and Buchanan and I were passed from one room to another, evidently by people who had not the faintest notion of what we wanted. Everybody said “Bonjour,” and the Governor and everybody else kissed my hand. I said I was “Anglisky,” and it seemed as if everybody in consequence came to look at me. But it didn\'t advance matters at all.
I began to be hungry and tired, and various people tried questions upon me, but nothing definite happened. At last, after about two hours, when I was seriously thinking of giving up in despair, a tall, good-looking officer in khaki came in. He put his heels together and kissed my hand as courteously as the rest had done, and then informed me in excellent English that he was the Boundary Commissioner and they had sent for him because there was an Englishwoman arrived, and, while very desirous of being civil to the representative of their new Ally, nobody could make out what on earth she was doing here and what she wanted!
I told my story and it was easy enough then. He admired Buchanan properly, drove us both to his house, introduced me to his wife and made me out a most gorgeous protection order written in Russian. I have it still, but I never had occasion to use it.
Opposite Blagoveschensk is a Chinese town which is called Sakalin, though the maps never give it that name, and in Vladivostok and Peking they call it various other names. But its right name is Sakalin, I know, for I stayed there for the best part of a week.
At Sakalin the head of the Chinese Customs is a Dane, Paul Barentzen, and to him and his wife am I greatly beholden. I had been given letters to them, and I asked my friend the kindly Russian Boundary Commissioner if he knew them. He did. He explained to me I must have a permit to cross the river and he would give me one for a week. A week seemed overlong, but he explained the Russian Government did not allow free traffic across the river and it was just as well to have a permit that would cover the whole of my stay. Even now, though I did stay my week, I have not fathomed the reason of these elaborate precautions, because it must be impossible to guard every little landing-place on the long, long, lonely river—there must be hundreds of places where it is easy enough to cross—only I suppose every stranger is liable sooner or later to be called upon to give an account of himself.
The ferries that crossed the Amur to the Chinese side were great boats built to carry a large number of passengers, but the arrangements for getting across the river did justice to both Chinese and Russian mismanagement. Unlike the efficient Japanese, both these nations, it seems to me, arrive at the end in view with the minimum amount of trouble to those in authority—that is to say, the maximum of trouble to everybody concerned. The ferry-boats owing to local politics had a monopoly, and therefore went at their own sweet will just exactly when they pleased. There was a large and busy traffic, but the boats never went oftener than once an hour, and the approaches were just as primitive as they possibly could be. There was one little shed with a seat running round where if you were fortunate you could sit down with the Chinese hawkers and wait for the arrival of the boat. And when it did come the passengers, after a long, long wait, came climbing up the rough path up the bank looking as if they had been searched to the skin. They let me through on the Chinese side and I found without any difficulty my way to Mr Paul Barentzen\'s house, a two-storeyed, comfortable house, and received a warm invitation from him and his wife to stay with them.
It was a chance not to be missed. I was getting very weary, I was tired in every bone, so a chance like this to stay with kindly people who spoke my own language, on the very outskirts of the Chinese Empire, was not to be lightly missed, and I accepted with gratitude, a gratitude I feel strongly. Mr Barentzen was a Dane, but he spoke as good English as I do, and if possible was more British. His wife was English. And that night he celebrated the coming into the war of Britain. He asked me and the Russian Boundary Commissioner and his wife and another Russian gentleman all to dinner in the gardens at Blagoveschensk.
The place was a blaze of light, there were flags and lamps and bands everywhere, the whole city was en fête to do honour to the new addition to the Grande Entente. When we were tired of walking about the gardens we went inside to the principal restaurant that was packed with people dining, while on a stage various singers discoursed sweet music and waved the flags of the Allies. But the British flag had not got as far as the capital of the Amur Province. Indeed much farther west than that I found it represented by a red flag with black crosses drawn on it, very much at the taste of the artist, and “Anglisky” written boldly across it to make up for any deficiency.
Mr Barentzen had foreseen this difficulty and had provided us all with nice little silk specimens of the union Jack to wear pinned on our breasts. About ten o\'clock we sat down to a most excellent dinner, with sturgeon and sour cream and caviare and all the good tilings that Eastern Siberia produces. A packed room also dined, while the people on the stage sang patriotic songs, and we were all given silk programmes as souvenirs. They sang the Belgian, the French and the Russian national anthems, and at last we asked for the British.
Very courteously the conductor sent back word to say he was very sorry but the British national anthem was also a German hymn and if he dared play it the people would tear him to pieces. Remembering my tribulations a little way down the river, I quite believed him, so I suggested as an alternative Rule, Britannia, but alas! he had never heard of it. It was a deadlock, and we looked at one another.
Then the tall Russian who was the other guest pushed his chair from the table, stood up, and saluting, whistled Rule, Britannia! How the people applauded! And so Britain entered the war in Far Eastern Siberia.
We certainly did not go home till morning that day. For that matter, I don\'t think you are supposed to cross the river at night, not ordinary folk, Customs officials may have special privileges. At any rate I came back to my bunk on the steamer and an anxious little dog just as the day was breaking, and next day I crossed to Sakalin and stayed with the Barentzens.
The Russians then took so much trouble to keep the Chinese on their own side of the river that the Russian officers and civil servants, much to the chagrin of their wives, were nowhere in the province allowed to have Chinese servants. The fee for a passport had been raised to, I think, twelve roubles, so it was no longer worth a Chinaman\'s while to get one to hawk a basket of vegetables, and the mines on the Zeya, a tributary of the Amur on the Russian side, had fallen off in their yield because cheap labour was no longer possible. The people who did get passports were the Chinese prostitutes, though a Chinese woman has not a separate identity in China and is not allowed a passport of her own. However, there are ways of getting over that. A man applied for a passport and it was granted him. He handed it over to the woman for a consideration, and on the other side any Chinese document was, as a rule, all one to the Russian official. Remembering my own experience and how I had difficulty in deciding between my passport and my agreement with my muleteers, I could quite believe this story.
Blagoveschensk is a regular frontier town and, according to Mr Barentzen, is unsafe. On the first occasion that I crossed the river with him I produced a hundred-rouble note. Almost before I had laid it down it was snatched up by the Chinese Commissioner of Customs.
“Are you mad?” said he, and he crumpled up the note in his hand and held out for my acceptance a rouble. I tried to explain that not having change, and finding it a little awkward, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to get it, as I felt sure the man at receipt of custom must have plenty.
“I dare say,” said my host sarcastically. “I don\'t want to take away anybody\'s character, but I\'ll venture to say there are at least ten men within hail”—there was a crowd round—“who would joyfully cut your throat for ten roubles.”
He enlarged upon that theme later. We used to sit out on the balcony of his house looking out, not over the river, but over the town of Sakalin, and there used to come in the men from the B.A.T. Factory, a Russian in top-boots who spoke excellent English and a young American named Hyde. They told me tales, well, something like the stories I used to listen to in my childhood\'s days when we talked about “the breaking out of the gold” in Australia, tales of men who had washed much gold and then were lured away and murdered for their riches. Certainly they did not consider Blagoveschensk or Sakalin towns in which a woman could safely wander. In fact all the Siberian towns that they knew came under the ban.
But of course mostly we talked about the war and how maddening it was only to get scraps of news through the telegraph. The young American was keen, I remember. I wonder if he really had patience to wait till his country came in. He talked then in the first week of the war of making his way back to Canada and seeing if he could enlist there, for even then we felt sure that the Outer Dominions would want to help the Motherland. And the Germans were round Liège—would they take it? Association is a curious thing. Whenever I hear of Liège I cannot help thinking, not of the Belgian city, but of a comfortable seat on a balcony with the shadows falling and the lights coming out one by one on the bath-houses that are dotted about a little town on the very outskirts of the Chinese Empire—the lights of the town. There are the sounds and the smells of the Chinese town mingling with the voices of the talkers and the fragrance of the coffee, and the air is close with the warmth of August. There comes back to me the remembrance of the keen young American who wanted to fight Germany and the young Russian in top-boots who was very much afraid he would only be used to guard German prisoners.
Sakalin was cosmopolitan, but it had a leaning toward Russia, hence the bath-houses, an idea foreign to Chinese civilisation; and when I got a piece of grit in my eye which refused to come out it was to a Japanese doctor I went, accompanied by my host\'s Chinese servant, who, having had the trouble stated by me in English, explained it to another man in Chinese, who in his turn told the doctor what was the matter in Russian. Luckily that man of medicine was very deft and I expect he could have managed very well without any explanation at all. I have the greatest respect for the Japanese leech I visited in Sakalin.
On the Sunday we had a big picnic. The Russian Boundary Commissioner came across with his wife and little girls, Mrs Barentzen took her little girl and the Chinese Tao Tai lent us the light of his countenance. He was the feature of the entertainment, for he was a very big man, both literally and socially, and could not move without a large following, so that an escort of mounted police took charge of us. The proper portly Chinaman of whom this retinue was in honour spoke no English, but smiled at me benevolently, and wore a petticoat and a Russian military cap! The picnic was by a little brook about seven miles from the town and I shall always remember it because of the lush grass, waist-high, and the lovely flowers. I had looked at the Siberian flowers from the steamer when they were ungetatable, I had gathered them with joy in Saghalien, and now here they were again just to my hand. In June they told me there were abundant lilies of the valley, and I regretted I had not been there in June. Truly I feel it would be a delight to see lilies of the valley growing wild, but as it was, the flowers were beautiful enough, and there were heaps of them. There were very fine Canter............