When I arrived at St. Petersburg, the situation was regarded as grave, but people still did not believe in war. Sir Charles Scott, our Ambassador, had just left, or was just leaving; and Cecil Spring Rice was in charge at the Embassy. The large Court functions which were held at the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, just after Christmas, were to take place: the Court concert and the State ball. The concert was held, and Chaliapine sang at it, but the State ball was put off. And never again was a State ball given in St. Petersburg. I had never seen St. Petersburg before. I was staying in the Fontanka, at Countess Shuvaloff’s house, and I was delighted by the crystal atmosphere, and the drives in open carriages; there was a little snow on the ground, but not enough for sledging.
People said there would be no war, and then we woke up one morning and heard the Japanese had attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, and torpedoed the Retvizan. Constantine Benckendorff, Count Benckendorff’s eldest son, was on board the Retvizan when this happened; and I was told afterwards, that no orders had been given by the port authorities, that is to say, by Alexeieff, the Viceroy, to put out torpedo-nets, or to take any precautions, although the Viceroy had been warned that day of the probability of an attack. The morning we heard that war had been declared I remember seeing a cabman driving by himself down the quays and nodding his head and repeating to himself: “War! war!” (“Voinà! voinà!”). It was like, on a smaller scale, the days of August 1914. The crowds in the street were enthusiastic. Officers were carried in triumph in the streets by the students, the same officers that a year later were hooted and stoned in the same streets.
I only stayed a short time in St. Petersburg, and then I went to Moscow, to the house of Marie Karlovna von Kotz, a lady[264] who took in English pupils, mostly officers in the British Army, to teach them Russian. She lived in an out-of-the-way street, on the second story of a small house, and gave one or two lessons every day. She was a fine teacher, and a brilliant musician; an energetic and extremely competent woman, and an example of the best type of the intelligentsia.
One day, a friend of hers, a young married lady, came in and said she was starting for the Far East, as a hospital nurse. She seemed to be full of enthusiasm. She was a young and charming person, bristling with energy and intelligence. The sequel of this story was a strange one. A year later, she reappeared at Marie Karlovna’s house—I think she had been to the war in the meantime—and said: “I am now going to the Far West,” and she went to Paris. She stayed there a short time, and then came back to Moscow and went to the play every night, bought jewels, went to hear the gipsies, and then quite suddenly shot herself on Tchekov’s tomb. The explanation of her act being her disgust with public events and her wish to give her land to the peasants. She left her estate to them in her will. In the normal course of things it would go to her brother, but her brother was a fanatical reactionary, and she killed herself rather than he should have it. But, as it turned out, she had reckoned without Russian law, which said that the wills and bequests of those who committed suicide in Russia were null and void, and so the property went to her brother after all. Suicides at the tomb of Tchekov became so frequent that a barrier was put round it, and people were forbidden to visit it.
There were one or more other pupils living in Marie Karlovna’s house besides the English Consul, who used to board there. We used to have dinner at two o’clock in the afternoon, and a late supper, ending in tea, which used to go on till far into the night. It was there I made my first acquaintance with the peculiar comfortless comfort of Russian life among the intelligentsia. Nothing could seemingly and theoretically be more uncomfortable; the hours irregular; no door to any room ever being shut; no fireplaces, only a stove lit once every twenty-four hours; visitors drifting in, and sitting and talking for hours; but nothing in practice was more comfortable. There was an indescribable ease about the life, a complete absence of fuss, a fluid intimacy without any of the formalities, any of the small conventions and minute ritual that distinguish German[265] bourgeois life and, indeed, are a part of its charm. In Russia, everybody seemed to take everybody and everything for granted. There were no barriers, no rules, no obstacles. No explanations were ever thought necessary or were either ever asked for or given. Time, too, had no meaning. One long conversation succeeded another, into which different people drifted, and from which people departed without anyone asking why or whence or whither. Moscow in winter was a comfortable city. The snow was deep; sometimes in the evening we would go to the montagnes Russes and toboggan down a steep chute, and more often I would go to the play.
At that time the Art Theatre at Moscow, the Hudozhestvenii Teater, was at the height of its glory and of its excellence. This theatre had been started about four years previously by a company of well-to-do amateurs under the direction of M. Stanislavsky. I believe, although I am not quite sure, they began by acting The Mikado for fun, continued acting for pleasure, and determined to spare neither trouble nor expense in making their performances as perfect as possible. They took a theatre, and gave performances almost for nothing, but the success of these performances was so great, the public so affluent, that they were obliged to take a new theatre and charge high prices. Gradually the Art Theatre became a public institution. In 1904 they possessed the best all-round theatre in Russia, if not in Europe.
The rise of such a theatre in Russia was not the same thing as that of an Art Theatre would be in London. For in Moscow and St. Petersburg there were large State-paid theatres where ancient and modern drama was performed by highly trained and excellent artists; but it stood in relation to these theatres as the Théatre Antoine to the Comédie Fran?aise, the Vaudeville, and the Gymnase in Paris: with this difference, that the acting, though equally finished, was more natural, and the quality of the plays performed unique on the European stage. The Art Theatre made the reputation of Tchekov as a dramatist. His first serious play, Ivanov, was performed at one of the minor theatres at Moscow, and we can read in his letters what he thought of that performance. Another of his important plays, The Seagull (Chaika), was performed at one of the big State-paid theatres at St. Petersburg, and well performed, but on conventional lines. It is not surprising the play failed. When[266] this same play was performed by the Art Theatre at Moscow, it was triumphantly and instantly successful. The reason is that Tchekov’s plays demand a peculiar treatment on the stage to make their subtle points tell, and cross the footlights. In them the clash of events is subservient to the human figure; and the human figure itself to the atmosphere in which it is plunged. Later, I saw The Seagull played at a State theatre at St. Petersburg, long after Tchekov’s reputation was firmly established. It was well played, but the effect of the play was ruined, or rather non-existent. In London, I saw The Cherry Orchard and another play of his done, where the company had not even realised the meaning of the action, besides being costumed in the most grotesquely impossible clothes, as grotesque and impossible as it would be to put on the English stage a member of Parliament returning from the House of Commons in a kilt, or dressed as a harlequin. One of the most dramatic situations in one of these plays had simply escaped the notice of the producer, and was allowed not only to fall flat, but was not rendered at all. It was this: a man, who has been wounded in the head and has a bandage, has a quarrel with his mother, and in a passion of rage, he tears his bandage from his head, with the object of reopening his wound, and killing himself. The company had, I suppose, read the stage direction, which says: “Man removes bandage,” and the words of the scene were spoken without any emotion or emphasis, and at one moment, the man quietly removed his bandage, and dropped it on the floor, as though it were in the way, or as if he were throwing down a cigarette which he has done with.
In Moscow, in the Art Theatre, every effect was made to tell, and the acting was so natural that on one occasion I remember a man in the stage-box joining in the conversation and contradicting one of the actors. Although the ensemble of the troupe was superlative, they had no actor or actress of outstanding genius, no Duse, no Sarah Bernhardt, no Irving, no Chaliapine; on the other hand, there was not one small part which was not more than adequately played.
In 1904, they had just produced The Cherry Orchard by Tchekov, and soon afterwards, Tchekov died. That winter, I saw The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vania, Shakespeare’s Julius C?sar, and Hauptmann’s Lonely Lives.
The end of Uncle Vania was unforgettable. The subject[267] and action of that play can be summed up in a few words. The play is called Scenes from Country Life. A professor, not unlike Casaubon, in Middlemarch, marries a young and beautiful wife. His estate is managed by his first wife’s brother, Uncle Vania, assisted by his niece, a good girl ill-favoured in looks. Astroff, a doctor, is called in to minister to the professor. Uncle Vania is in love with the professor’s wife. His niece, Sonia, is in love with Astroff. The professor’s wife, a non-moral, well-meaning Circe, is interested, but not more than interested, in the doctor, and flirts with him enough to prevent his marrying the girl. The nerves of these various characters, under the stress of the situation, are worked up to such a pitch, that Uncle Vania actually tries to kill the professor, and shoots at him twice, but misses him. Then the professor and his wife go away; the doctor goes back to his practice, and Uncle Vania and his niece are left behind to resume the tenor of their way. You see the good-byes: a half-passionate, half-cynical good-bye, between the professor’s wife and the doctor—the professor says good-bye to Uncle Vania, and to Uncle Vania’s old mother. You hear the bells of the horses outside, in the autumn evening. One after another, Uncle Vania’s mother, his niece, and the old servant of the house come in and say: “They have gone!”
When I first saw the play, this is what I wrote about it, and I have nothing to add, nor could I put it differently:
“Described, this appears insignificant; seen, acted as it is with incomparable naturalness, it is indescribably effective. In this scene a particular mood, which we have all felt, is captured and rendered; a certain chord is struck which exists in all of us; that kind of ‘toothache at heart’ which we feel when a sudden parting takes place and we are left behind. The parting need not necessarily be a sad one. But the tenor of our life is interrupted. As a rule the leaves of life are turned over so quickly and noiselessly by Time that we are not aware of the process. In the case of a sudden parting we hear the leaf of life turn over and fall back into the great blurred book of the past—read, finished, and irrevocable. It is this hearing of the turning leaf which Tchekov has rendered merely by three people coming into a room one after another and saying: ‘They’ve gone!’
“The intonation with which the old servant said: ‘They’ve gone’—an intonation of peculiar cheerfulness with which servants love to underline what is melancholy—was marvellous. The lamp is brought in. Lastly the doctor goes. The old[268] mother reads a magazine by the lamplight; the clatter of the horses’ hoofs and the jingling of bells are heard dying away in the distance; and Uncle Vania and his niece set to work at their accounts … you hear the abacus—always used in Russian banks—making a clicking noise … and the infinite monotony of their life begins once more.”
The first performances of The Cherry Orchard were equally impressive. I saw it acted many times later, but nothing touched the perfection of its original cast. The Cherry Orchard is the most symbolic play ever written. It summed up the whole of pre-revolutionary Russia. The charming, feckless class of landowners; the pushing, common, self-made man, who with his millions buys the estate with the cherry orchard that the owners have at last to sell, because they cannot consent to let it to cut their losses; the careless student; the grotesque governess; all of them dancing on the top of a volcano which is heaving and already rumbling with the faint noise of the coming convulsion. The Russo-Japanese War and its consequences were the beginning of these convulsions; and, as Count Benckendorff prophesied to me in 1903, as soon as war came to Russia, there was a revolution.
Pierre Benckendorff, Count Benckendorff’s second son, who was an officer in the Gardes-à-cheval, started for Manchuria soon after the war began. He exchanged into a Cossack regiment for the purpose, as the Guards did not go to the front. He looked so radiantly young and adventurous, when he started, that we were all of us afraid he would never come back. He passed through Moscow on his way to the front, and I spent the day with him. He asked me why I did not try to go to the war as a newspaper correspondent, as I could speak Russian, and his father would be able to give me letters of recommendation to the military authorities. His words sank deep, and I determined to try and do this. I at once wrote to his father.
Count Benckendorff thought the idea was an excellent one; and just before Easter I went to London to try and get a newspaper to send me out. I went to the Morning Post, where I knew Oliver Borthwick, the son of the proprietor, Lord Glenesk. At first the matter seemed to be fraught with every kind of difficulty, but in the end things were arranged, and towards the end of April I started for St. Petersburg, on my way to Manchuria, laden with a saddle, a bridle, a camp bed, and innumerable[269] cooking utensils. I knew nothing about journalism, and still less about war, and I felt exactly as if I were going back to a private school again.
I stopped two nights in St. Petersburg, and engaged a Russian servant. He was a gigantic creature, who had served in a cavalry regiment of the Guards. At Moscow, I met Brooke, who was going out as correspondent for Reuter, and we settled to travel together.
The journey was not uneventful. As far as Irkutsk, we travelled in the ordinary express train, which had comfortable first-and second-class carriages, a dining-room, a pianoforte, a bathroom, and a small bookcase full of Russian books. The journey from Moscow to Irkutsk lasted nine nights and eight days. Guy Brooke and I shared a first-class compartment. I made friends with the official who looked after the train, and gave him my pocket-knife; and he undertook to post a letter for me when he got back to Moscow. He kept his promise, and my first dispatch to the Morning Post, the first dispatch from our batch of correspondents, got through without being censored. There was not much war news in it. In fact, it contained a long and detailed account of a performance of Tchekov’s Uncle Vania at the Art Theatre at Moscow.
On board the train, there was a French correspondent, M. Georges La Salle, and a Danish Naval Attaché, and another English correspondent, Hamilton; several Russian officers, and a Russian man of business, who lived at Vladivostok. This man gave us a good deal of trouble; he thought we were English spies, and told us we would never be allowed to reach our destination. He did his best to prevent our doing so. He told the officers we were spies, and their manner, which at first had been friendly, underwent a change, and became at first suspicious, and finally openly hostile. The passenger trains ran from Irkutsk to Baikal Station, and it was at Baikal that the real interest of the journey began. Lake Baikal was frozen, and was crossed daily by two large ice-breakers, which ploughed through three feet of half-melted ice. The passage lasted four hours. The spectacle when we started was marvellous. It had been a glorious day. The sun in the pure frozen sky was like a fiery, red, Arctic ball. Before us stretched an immense sheet of ice, powdered with snow and spotless, except for a long brown track which had been made by the sledges. On the[270] far-off horizon a low range of mountains disappeared in a veil of snow made by the low-hanging clouds. The mountains were intensely blue; they glinted like gems in the cold air, and we seemed to be making for some mysterious island, some miraculous reef of sapphires. Towards the west there was another and more distant range, where the intense deep blue faded into a delicate and transparent sea-green—the colour of the seas round the Greek Islands—and these hills were like a phantom continuation of the larger range, as unearthly and filmy as a mirage.
As we moved, the steamer ploughed the ice into flakes, which leapt and were scattered into fantastic, spiral shapes, and flowers of ice and snow. As the sun sank lower, the strangeness and the beauty increased. A pink halo crept over the sky round the sun, which became more fiery and metallic. Some lines from Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” came into my head which exactly fitted the scene:
“And now there came both mist and snow
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by
As green as emerald.”
As the sun set the whole sky became pink, and the distant mountains were like ghostly caverns of ice.
We arrived at eight. It was dark, and the other ice-breaker was starting on its return journey to the sound of military music.
About eleven o’clock we resumed our journey. The train was so full that it was impossible not only to get a seat in the first-or second-class, but at first it seemed doubtful whether we should obtain a place of any kind in the train. I jumped into a third-class carriage, which was at once invaded by a crowd of muzhik women and children. An official screamed ineffectually that the carriage was reserved for the military; upon which an angry muzhik, waving a huge loaf of bread (like an enormous truncheon), cried out, pointing to the seething, heterogeneous crowd: “Are we not military also—one and all of us reservists?” And they refused to move.
The confusion was incredible, and one man, by the vehement way in which he flung himself and his property on his wooden seat, broke it, and fell with a crash to the ground. The third-class[271] carriages were formed in this way: the carriage was not divided into separate compartments, but was like a corridor carriage, with no partition and no doors between the carriage proper and the corridor. It was divided into three sections, each section consisting of six plank beds, three on each side of the window, and one placed above the other, forming three stories. There was besides this one tier of seats against and over the windows in the passage at right-angles to the regular seats. The occupant of each place had a right to the whole length of the seat, so that he could lie down at full length. I gave up my seat in the first carriage, as I had lost sight of my luggage and my servant, and I went in search of the guard. The guard found places for Brooke and myself in a carriage occupied mostly by soldiers. He told them to make room for us. It seemed difficult, but it was done. I was encamped on a plank at the top of the corridor part of the carriage. I remember being awakened the next morning by a scuffle. A party of Chinese coolies had invaded the train. They were drunk and they slobbered. The soldiers shouted: “Get out, Chinese.” They were bundled backwards and forwards, and rolled on to the platform outside the train, where they were allowed to settle. It was now, in this railway carriage, that I for the first time came into intimate contact with the Russian people, for in a third-class railway carriage the artificial barriers of life are broken down, and everyone treats everyone else as an equal. I was immensely interested. The soldiers began to get up. One of them, dressed in a scarlet shirt, stood against the window and said his prayers to the rising sun, crossing himself many times. A little later a stowaway arrived; he had no ticket, and the under-guard advised him to get under the seat during the visit of the ticket collector. This he did, and he stayed there until the visit of the ticket collector was over, and whenever a new visit was threatened, he hid again.
After the first day, I was offered a seat on the ground floor in the central division of the carriage, because I had a bad foot, and the fact was noticed. My immediate neighbours were Little Russians. They asked many questions: whether the English were orthodox; the price of food and live stock; the rate of wages in England; and they discussed foreign countries and foreign languages in general. One of them said French was the most difficult language, and Russian the easiest. The[272] French were a clever people. “As clever as you?” I asked. “No,” they answered; “but when we say clever we mean nice.”
I gradually made the acquaintance of all the occupants of the compartment. They divided the day into what they called “occupation” and “relaxation.” Occupation meant doing something definite like reading or making a musical instrument—one man was making a violin—relaxation meant playing cards, doing card tricks, telling stories, or singing songs. In the evening a bearded soldier, a native of Tomsk, asked me to write down my name on a piece of paper, as he wished to mention in a letter home that he had seen an Englishman. He had never seen one before, but sailors had told him that Englishmen were easy to get on with, and clean—much cleaner than Russians. He told me his story, which was an extremely melancholy one. He had fallen asleep on sentry-go and had served a term of imprisonment, and had been deprived of civil rights. For the first time I came across the aching sadness one sometimes met with among Russians, an unutterable despair, a desperate, mute anguish. The conversation ended with an exchange of stories among the soldiers. One of them told me a story about a priest. He wondered whether I knew what a priest meant, and to make it plain he said: “A priest, you know, is a man who always lies.”
I asked the bearded man if he knew any stories. He at once sat down and began a fairy-tale called The Merchant’s Son. It took an hour and a half in the telling. Very often the men who in Russia told such stories could neither read nor write, but this man could read, though he had never read the story he told me in a book. It had been handed down to him by his parents, and to them by his grandparents, and so on, word for word, with no changes. This is probably how the Iliad was handed down to one generation after another. Later on I was told stories like this one by men who could neither read nor write. The story was full of dialogue and reiteration, and every character in it had its own epithet which recurred throughout the story, every time the character was mentioned, just as in Homer. When he had finished his story, he began another called Ivan the Little Fool. It began in this kind of way: “Once upon a time in a certain country, in a certain kingdom, there lived a King and a Queen, who had three sons, all braver and brighter than pen can write or story can tell, and the[273] third was called Ivan the Fool. The King spoke to them thus: ‘Take each of you an arrow, pull your bow-string taut, and shoot in different directions, and where the arrow falls there shall you find a wife.’ The eldest brother shot an arrow, and it fell on a palace just opposite the King’s daughters’ quarters; and the second son shot an arrow, and it fell opposite the red gate of the house where lived the lovely merchant’s daughter; and the third brother shot an arrow, and it fell in a muddy swamp and a frog caught it. And Ivan said: ‘How can I marry a frog? She is too small for me.’ And the King said to him: ‘Take her.’” And then the story went on for a long time, and in it Ivan the Fool was, of course, far more successful than his two elder brothers. Another soldier told me a version of the story of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury.
The ballad says that King John asked the Abbot three questions. The first one was how much he was worth; the second one how soon he could ride round the world; and the third question the Abbot had to answer was, what the King was thinking of. And the Abbot answered the third question by saying: “You think I’m the Abbot of Canterbury, but I am really only his shepherd in disguise.” The soldier told it in exactly the same way, except that the Abbot became a Patriarch, and King John the Tsar of Moscow, and the shepherd a miller. And when he had finished, he said: “The miller lives at Moscow and I have seen him.”
The soldiers spoke little of the war. One of them said the Japanese were a savage race, upon which the sailor who had been to Nagasaki, cut him short by saying: “They are a charming, clean people, much more cultivated than you or I.” One of the soldiers said it would have been a more sensible arrangement if the dispute had been settled by a single combat between Marquis Ito and Count Lamsdorff.
The night before we arrived at Manchuria station the passengers sang songs. Four singers sang some magnificent folk-songs, and among others the song of the Siberian exiles: “Glorious Sea of Holy Baikal,” one singing the melody and the others joining in by repeating or imitating it. But the song which was the most popular was a ballad sung by a sailor, who was taking part in the concert. He had composed it himself. It was quite modern in tune and intensely sentimental. It was about a fallen maiden, who had left the palaces[274] of the rich and died in hospital. It was exactly like the kind of song I heard bluejackets sing on board an English man-of-war years later. At Manchuria station we had a lot of bother owing to the commercial gentleman, and I annoyed him greatly by talking in front of him to a Greek merchant, who was at the buffet, in Greek—a language with which he was imperfectly acquainted. The commercial gentleman tried to prevent us going farther, but he did not succeed, as our papers were in perfect order. But he succeeded in having us put under arrest, and two Cossacks were told to keep watch over us during the remainder of the journey. In the meantime the officers had telegraphed for information about us to Kharbin, and the next morning they received a satisfactory answer, and their whole demeanour changed. From Manchuria station to Kharbin the journey lasted three days and two nights, and we arrived at Kharbin after a journey of seventeen days from St. Petersburg.
I have forgotten the latter part of that journey, but I recorded at the time that a crowd of Chinese officers boarded the train at one station and filled up the spare seats, especially top seats, whence they spat without ceasing on the occupants of the lower seats, much to the annoyance of a French lady, who said: “Les Chinois sont impossibles.”
Kharbin was a large, straggling place, part of which consisted of a Chinese quarter, an “Old” Russian quarter which was like a slice of a small Russian provincial town, and a modern quarter: Government Offices, an hotel, restaurants, a church, and the Russo-Chinese bank.
The sight of Kharbin when I arrived—the mud, the absence of vehicles, the squalor, the railway station, a huge a............