During the summer of 1905 I did a certain amount of dramatic criticism for the Morning Post. I wrote notices on some of the foreign plays that were being given in London during that summer. Several foreign companies were with us. Duse had a season at the Waldorf Theatre; Coquelin played in L’Abbé Constantin, rather a tiresome, goody-goody play; Sarah Bernhardt produced Victor Hugo’s Angelo, l’Aiglon, Pelléas et Mélisande (with Mrs. Patrick Campbell), Phèdre, and Adrienne Lecouvreur, not Scribe and Legouvé’s play, but a play of her own.
I saw Duse display the full range of her powers in Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Femme de Claude; Goldoni’s La Locandiera; Dumas’ Une Visite de Noces, La Dame aux Camélias, Adrienne Lecouvreur; and D’Annunzio’s Gioconda; Sardou’s Odette and Fédora.
The most interesting of these performances was, I think, her Césarine in La Femme de Claude. Duse was blamed for appearing in a repertory of such plays. She was said to complain of the repertory herself. But it is doubtful whether, apart from all booking-office questions of popularity, she would have appeared to a greater advantage in plays of a more exalted character. Duse was not a tragic actress in the sense one imagines Mrs. Siddons and Rachel were tragic. She could not enlarge a masterpiece of poetry by her interpretation, nor give you a plastic poetic creation like a piece of a Greek frieze, as Sarah Bernhardt could and did in Phèdre. She was not the incarnation of the tragic muse; the gorgeous pall overwhelmed her; when she played Cleopatra, for instance (Shakespeare’s Cleopatra much mutilated), her peculiar power seemed to melt into thin air. I once heard a celebrated French actress, and a French critic, who had both only seen her play Cleopatra, wonder[306] what her reputation was based on. What she needed was something between high comedy and tragedy; and this was precisely what she found in certain parts of the modern repertory of Ibsen, D’Annunzio, Sardou, Dumas fils, and Pinero, in which she played during that summer.
Dumas’ play, La Femme de Claude, gave her not only an opportunity of showing her astonishing skill, her perfect technique, but it revealed unguessed-of, almost incredible, aspects of her genius. When she played parts such as Sudemann’s Magda and La Dame aux Camélias, one used to feel as if one ought not to be there; as if one were peeping through a keyhole at scenes of too intimate and too sacred a nature for the public eye. When Amando hurled money and hissed vituperation at her in the fourth act of La Dame aux Camélias, one felt as if the police ought to interfere, and save so noble a creature from outrage. One doubted whether Duse were an artist or even an actress in the true sense of the word, and whether all she gave were not glimpses of the extraordinary nobility of her personality; whether the play were not beside the question; whether she might not just as well appear on the stage in her ordinary clothes and tell us a few confidences—her joys and her sorrows.
But her performance in La Femme de Claude proved the contrary. It proved that in the subtle and objective interpretation of a definite character, a character utterly alien to her own nature, she could rival, if not surpass, any artist in the world.
La Femme de Claude was said by Théodore de Banville to be a symbolic play. Call it that if you will, or call it a melodrama. The subject is simple and dramatic, the action rapid and vigorous. An austere scientific engineer called Claude has married an evil wife, Césarine. She leaves him. He invents a new and powerful gun. She comes back. A foreign spy blackmails her. He threatens to make revelations about her to her husband, unless she obtains for him the secret of the gun. At first she defies this man. She says her husband knows all there is to be known; he then mentions incidents that her husband cannot know, for the bare knowledge of them would make him an accessory in crime. She undertakes to get the secret. She tries to win back her husband, fails, and then shows her teeth. She sets about to seduce her husband’s[307] pupil, a young man who is already in love with her. She persuades him to give her the papers and her husband shoots her dead when they are about to elope. At first sight you would have thought that Duse’s genius was too refined and too noble to render the snake-like, feline, insinuating, feverish, treacherous, panther-like, savage nature of Dumas’ she-monster. Sarah Bernhardt is the artist who at once leaps into the mind as being suited to the part, a part that might have been written for her. I have seen Sarah Bernhardt play it and play it superbly. At certain moments she carried you right off your feet.
But Duse played on the nerves till they vibrated like strings, in the same manner as she herself was tremulously vibrating. It was a gradual process of preparation, which began from the first moment she walked on to the stage until she fell forward at the end with outstretched hands when she was shot. Her art was like that of a cunning violinist; the music with its delicately interwoven themes was phrased in subtle progress and with divine economy of effect, till she reached the catastrophe, and then Duse attained to that height where all style disappears, and only the perfection of art, in which all artifice is concealed, remains. The climax needed no effort, no strain; it was the way every note had been struck before, that made it tremendous.
Of course she transfigured Césarine, the heroine; in the modern repertory she always raised the scale of everything she touched, so that you cried out for her to play tragedy, and that was just what she could not do. She did not make Dumas’ heroine a better woman than he intended her to be; but she made her a greater woman than he can ever have hoped she would appear. Duse’s Césarine was wicked to the core; not thoughtlessly non-moral, not invincibly ignorant in her wickedness, but consciously and deliberately destructive; and the manifestation and expression of this unmitigated evil was rendered ten times more impressive by the subtlety of its expression and the delicate refinement which it was clothed with and partially disguised. Duse reminded one of Tacitus’ description of Nero’s wife, Popp?a, who, he says, professed virtue but practised vice; and whose demeanour was irreproachably modest. “Sermo comis nec absurdum ingenium: modestiam pr?ferre et lascivia uti.”
When she met Claude’s young pupil in the first act, she gave,[308] while she deliberately bewitched him, the impression that she was herself the victim of an ingenuous and involuntary passion. In the second act her appeal to her husband would have deceived any jury and most judges. The notes rang out with the authentic indignation of sincerity, with the seemingly unmistakable agony of a victim of unjust circumstance and outrageous fortune; in that long and arduous scene, in that tense duel, fought inch by inch between the desperate woman and the unrelenting man, she was a gallant, a glorious fighter in a losing battle; and at the last, when she saw the game was lost, and she allowed her true nature to show, the spectacle was not that of a savage beast that can do nothing but snarl and howl, but of a gentle animal that suddenly shows ferocious teeth and reveals a hellish hate.
The finest moment of the play came after this, when she sets about her final capture of the young man and makes him deliver her husband’s secret. When she triumphed and said the word “Vieni,” it was as if one were watching some demi-goddess, some Circe, swoop gracefully but with terrible accuracy of aim on to her prey; swift and calm in the deadly certainty of her stroke and of her triumph. Nobody can ever have acted better than Duse did at that moment.
Duse’s performance as Césarine was the finest complete creative work I ever saw her do—finer, in my opinion, than her Magda, because in Magda she was too noble for the part, and rendered none of the cabotine side of the character.
The most charming of Duse’s parts was Mirandolina in Goldoni’s comedy, La Locandiera, in which she gaily twisted all men round her fingers and played on their weaknesses as a harper on his strings. On the same day she gave this exhibition of gaiety, charm, rippling fun, and sly humour, the whole as easy and spontaneous and as fresh as a melody by Mozart, she played Lydie in Alexandre Dumas’ terrible little masterpiece in one act, La Visite de Noces, and showed with unflinching truth not realism but a Tolstoy-like reality how a woman with despair in her soul can calmly and deliberately unravel the skein of man’s weakness, cowardice, and infamy, and then spit out her disgust at it.
In Scribe and Legouvé’s tinsel and lifeless melodrama, Adrienne Lecouvreur, she was wasting her talent, and indeed in her hands the greater part of the play fell flat as far as there[309] is anything in it to fall flat. But in the death scene she revealed new phases of her genius:
“Silver lights and darks undreamed of.”
She turned the tinsel of the play into gold by her bewilderment, when she felt the first effects of the poison, her delirium, when she imagined herself on the lighted stage, and by her final battle with Death, when she recovered her senses once more, in the last moments of her agony. One gasped for breath when she felt the first throes of the poison; and when she became delirious, the surroundings seemed to fade; we were face to face with a ghost; we felt the icy wind blowing from the dark river.
In D’Annunzio’s play, La Gioconda, she might have been De Quincey’s Our Lady of Sorrows. In Sardou’s Fédora not all her technical skill could supply the acid necessary to make that particular and peculiarly constructed engine work. The engine was made for Sarah Bernhardt, and nobody else has ever succeeded in making it deliver the strong electric shock, the infectious thrill that it produced when Sarah Bernhardt dealt with it. It may not have been worth doing; but only she could do it.
Looking back on all the plays in which I saw Duse act, and on all the striking moments and scenes in those plays—her confusion when she recognised the man who had seduced her in Magda, the pathos of her death scene in La Dame aux Camélias, her withering scorn in Sardou’s Odette, her irony in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, her fiendish leer of seduction and triumph in La Femme de Claude—there was one moment in one play which impressed me more than everything else. This was in the last act of Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, when she looks at herself in a hand-glass and realises that when she loses her looks she will have lost all. Duse looked in the glass, and she passed her hand over her face. It was only a flash, a flicker; it only lasted a second, and yet in that second her face reminded me of the title of one of Kipling’s stories, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows. She looked suddenly, and for a second, fifty years older, and one felt that the act of suicide with which the play ends was not improbable, whatever else it might be—was, in fact, inevitable.
Sarah Bernhardt, Duse, and Chaliapine were the three greatest artists I have seen on the stage; for Chaliapine, in addition to[310] his glorious voice and his consummate singing, is a great actor, and his range is prodigious. He can sing one night in Ivan the Terrible and freeze you to the marrow by his interpretation of the grim, half-insane, majestic, and frenzied King; and the next night give you a picture of calm and serene saintliness in the part of the old Believer in Khovantincha; or in the Barbier de Seville he can be comic with a rollicking gusto. Perhaps his finest part is that of Mephistopheles in Boito’s opera. When he comes on to the stage in the first act disguised as a monk you feel that the devil is there, the Prince of Darkness, and not a fancy-dress ball Mephistopheles; and in the scene on the Brocken, he looks and plays as if he were Milton’s Satan. There is a titanic grandeur about him. He wears the pall of tragedy as easily as if it were a dressing-gown. Like all great actors, he gives you the impression that his acting is quite simple, an easy thing which anyone could do. If you watch him closely, it is impossible to detect how and when he makes a gesture or gives a look or an intonation. It is done before you have time to see it done. He told me once that his great desire and ambition was to play in Shakespeare; and his Boris Godounov, in which he gave so ineffaceable a picture of sombre ambition, brooding fear, and eating remorse, indicated that he would have been magnificent as Othello, Richard III., or Lear. The finest acting I ever saw on the English stage were Irving’s Becket with its sublimely dignified and impressive death-scene in the Cathedral; Ellen Terry’s Beatrice with its inspiring pace and rippling diction—indeed, Ellen Terry in any part, Portia, Imogen, Nance Oldfield—Sir John Hare in A Pair of Spectacles and the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith; Mrs. Kendal in The Likeness of the Night, and, for imaginative character acting, Tree as Svengali. Hare had the same seeming simplicity in his art, the same concealment of all artifice, the same undetectable conjury that struck one in the work of Duse, Chaliapine, Sarah Bernhardt, and all great actors.
Mrs. Kendal acted so well, when she and her husband and Sir John Hare used to appear regularly at the St. James’s Theatre, and people took the excellence of her acting so much for granted, that they tired of it. She left us. She toured in America, and then she came back and appeared in a play called The Greatest of These, at the Garrick Theatre, in June 1896; and[311] Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his notice of the play, said: “Mrs. Kendal, forgetting that London playgoers have been starved for years in the matter of acting, inconsiderately gave them more in the first ten minutes than they have had in the last five years, with the result that the poor wretches became hysterical and vented their applause in sobs and shrieks. And yet in the old days at the St. James’s they would have taken it as a matter of course and perhaps grumbled at the play into the bargain.”
But of all my playgoing, I think what I enjoyed most of all was a summer troupe at the Arena Nazionale in Florence, in the summer of 1893. The troupe was an ordinary one; but they produced a different play every night; and I there saw nearly all the plays worth seeing in the European repertory, including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dumas, Sardou, Maupassant, Sudermann—besides many Italian plays. The seats were cheap; smoking was allowed. The auditorium was open to the sky. The Italians acted so naturally, and so easily, that they were more like children improvising charades than professionals working for their bread; and among them was an actor who made a great name for himself later—Zacchoni. I remember that when I came back to London and went to a play for the first time, the diction of the English players seemed so stilted, laborious, and artificial, after these easy, babbling Italians, that I felt as if it was in London and not in Florence that I had been listening to a foreign language.
At the end of the summer of 1905 I went back to Manchuria. I spent a few days in St. Petersburg, and then I embarked once more in the Transbaikalian railway. The journey was pleasantly different from what it had been in 1904, and almost as interesting in another way. An officer of the German forestry, and a friend of a Hildesheim friend of mine—Erich Wippern—was in the train. He was reading the second part of Goethe’s Faust. I shared a compartment with an army doctor. We crossed Lake Baikal in a steamer. It was blue, and there was nothing of the ghostly unreal look about it that it wears in the winter. Kharbin was changed beyond recognition. The town was twice as big and seemed to be almost deserted. General Linevitch, the new Commander-in-Chief, did not allow officers to go there any more except on pressing errands and for good reasons. I spent a few days there, and I got to know some of the local officers, among others a charming General[312] Zacharoff who was in charge of the demobilisation. I found myself suddenly plunged into a new society which was not unlike what Chekhov depicts in his plays. A small drama was progressing round the wife of a local engineer, who was the Circe of the place. She was not particularly beautiful, but she did what she liked with whomsoever she pleased. There were quarrels, duels arranged, suicides threatened, revolvers fired; the whole ending in conversation and cigarette smoke—just as in a Chekhov play, of which the motto might have been: “L’amour passe; la fumée reste.”
On 1st September peace was declared, and the soldiers in the place tore the telegram from one another’s hands.
I went to Gunchuling, which was the remoter G.H.Q. of the army, and I stayed with the Press censors. Although peace had been declared, an officer whom I knew got orders to go and fortify positions, and Kuropatkin’s army was said to have received orders to advance. At the time this seemed inexplicable. The reason of this was, I learnt a long time afterwards, that news had been received of a revolution in Japan.
From Gunchuling I went to Godziadan, which was the advanced G.H.Q. where the Commander-in-Chief lived in a train. I had telegraphed from Gunchuling to the 2nd Transbaikal battery, asking them to send horses to fetch me. The battery was in Mongolia, at a place called Jen-tsen-Tung, on the extreme right flank of the army and eighty miles from Godziadan. Two Cossacks arrived with a pony for me and my own saddle on it, and we started at eight o’clock in the morning on our long and exhausting ride.
We spent the first night at the Chinese town of Ushitai, and halted for our midday meal the next day at a Chinese village, a small tumble-down place near a large clump of trees. A Chinaman came out of the house and, seeing the red brassard of the correspondents on my arm, thought I was a doctor. In pidgin Russian he told me his child was ill; and leading me into his house he showed me a brown and naked infant with a fat stomach. The infant had a white tongue and had been feeding, so the Chinaman told me, on raw Indian corn. I prescribed cessation of diet, and the Chinaman seemed to be satisfied, and asked me whether I would like to hear a concert. I said: “Very much”; he then bade me sit down on the K’ang and said: “Smotri, smotri” (“Look, look”). Presently another Chinaman[313] came into the room, and taking from the wall a large and twisted clarion made of brass, he blew on it one deafening blast and hung it up on the wall again. There was a short pause. I waited in expectation, and the Chinaman turned to me and said: “The concert is now over.” I then went to have luncheon with the Cossacks under the trees, the meal consisting of rusks as hard as bricks swimming in an earthen bowl of boiling water, on the surface of which tea was sprinkled. When we had finished our meal, and just as we were about to start, the Chinaman in whose house I had been entertained, rushed up to me and said: “In your country, when you go to a concert, do you not pay for it?” The concert was paid for, and we rode on. We rode through grassy and flowery steppes: this was the beginning of Mongolia. We met Mongols sitting sideways on their ponies and dressed in coats of many colours, and we arrived at Jen-tsen-Tung at eight o’clock. There I found my old friend Kislitski of the battery, who was living in an immaculately clean Chinese house, and there I dined and spent the night. The next morning I rode to a village two miles off, where the battery was quartered. There I stayed from the 15th of September until the 1st of October, living a life of ease and interest. The village where we were quartered was picturesque. It lay in a clump of willow trees, and near it there was a large wood which stretched down to a broad brown river. Next door to us lived a Chinaman who was preparing three young students for their examination in Pekin. He was an amiable and urbane scholar, and he used to put on large horn spectacles and chant the most celebrated stop-shorts in Chinese literature. Stop-shorts are Chinese poems in four lines. They are called stop-shorts because the sense goes on when the sound stops.
We spent the time in riding, reading, bathing, sleeping, and playing patience.
Jen-tsen-Tung was a large and picturesque town; a stream of Mongols flowed in and out of it, wearing the most picturesque clothes—silks and velvets of deep orange and sea-green that glowed like jewels. At one of the street corners a professional wizard, dressed in black silk, embroidered with silver moons and wearing a black conical hat, practised his trade. You asked a question, paid a small sum, and he told you the answer to the question; but he refused to prophesy for more than a hundred days ahead.
[314]
The evenings in our quarters were beautiful. The sky would have a faint pinky-mauve tinge, like a hydrangea, and a large misty moon hung over the delicate willow trees that were silvery and rustled faintly in the half light. From the yard would float the sounds of music, music played on a one-stringed instrument and accompanying a wailing song, an infinitely melancholy music, less Oriental than Chinese music, and more Eastern than Russian music.
I left this dreamy paradise on the 1st of October, and I arrived at Kharbin on the 7th of October.
At Jen-tsen-Tung I had consulted the magician who practised his arts in the street about my journey home. His answer was that I could go home by the west or by the east; west would be better, but I should meet with obstacles. His prophecy came true, but the obstacles did not begin till we arrived at Samara. I was in the Trans-Siberian express. There were on board the train some officers, a German savant, two German men of commerce, three Americans—who were on their way back from Siberia, where they had managed a mine—a Polish student, and some ladies. I shared a compartment with Alexander Dimitriev-Mamonov, whose acquaintance I had made at Kharbin. He was the landlord of a small property near Kirsanov. During the war he had been employed in the Russo-Chinese Bank at Port Arthur, where he had worked during the daytime. At night he had served in the trenches. He spoke English perfectly, although he had never been to England. The first part of the journey was uneventful, and nothing of interest happened till we arrived at Irkutsk, except that the German man of commerce had a violent quarrel with one of the officers because he did not take off his hat in the restaurant car, in which there was a portrait of the Emperor. Had the German been a little better versed in Russian law, he would have known that a recent decree had made this salutation unnecessary; as it was, he gave in and submitted to the incident being written down in a protocol.
While we were quietly travelling, the Russian revolution had begun. The first news of it came to me in the following manner. We had crossed the Urals, and we had been travelling thirteen days; we had arrived at Samara, when the attendant, who looked after the first-class carriages, came into my compartment and heaved a sigh. I asked him what was the matter.[315] “We shan’t get farther than Toula,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Because of the unpleasantnesses” (niepriatnosti). I asked, “What unpleasantnesses?” “There is a mutiny,” he said, “on the line.” We passed the big station of Sisran and arrived at the small town of Kousnetsk, which was no bigger than a village. There we were told the train could not go any farther because of the strike.
We expected an ordinary railway strike, which would mean at the most a delay of a few hours. We got out and walked about the platform. By the evening the passengers began to show signs of restlessness. Most of them sent long telegrams to various authorities. They drew up a petition in the form of a round-robin, which was telegraphed to the Minister of Ways and Communications, saying that an express train full of passengers, extremely over-tired by a long and fatiguing journey, was waiting at Kousnetsk, and asking the Minister to be so good as to arrange for them to proceed farther. This telegram remained unanswered. The next day resignation seemed to come over the company, although innumerable complaints were voiced, such as, “Only in Russia could such a disgraceful thing happen,” and one of the passengers suggested that Prince Kilkov’s portrait, which was hanging in the dining-car, should be turned face to the wall. Prince Kilkov had built the railway, and was at that moment driving an engine himself from Moscow to St. Petersburg, as no trains were running. He was over seventy years old. The Polish student, who had made music for the Americans, playing by ear the accompaniment to any tune they whistled him, and many tunes from the repertory of current musical comedy, played the pianoforte with exaggerated facility and endless fioriture and runs. I asked an American mechanic who was travelling with the mining managers, whether he liked the music. He said he would like it if the “damned hell were knocked out of it,” which was exactly my feeling. On the second day after our arrival, my American friends left for Samara with the intention of proceeding thence by water to St. Petersburg. I have wondered ever since how long the journey took them, and whether they found a steamer. As it was, their departure was not without a comic element. This is what happened. They were talking frankly about the supine inertia of the Russians when faced with an emergency, and were pointing out how different were the ever-ready[316] presence of mind and the instant translation of ideas into action that marked men of their own country. They added that they had lost no time in chartering the best horses in the town, and were starting for Samara in an hour’s time. They were not going to take things lying down. While they were telling us this in the restaurant car, a minor, very minor and rather shabby, Russian official was sitting in the corner of the car saying nothing and drinking tea. It turned out he had overheard and understood the conversation of the Americans, for, when they carried their luggage to where they expected their frisky Troika to be, it was there indeed, but they had the mortification of seeing the little official already inside it, galloping off and waving them a friendly farewell. They had to be content with an inferior equipage and a later start.
The passengers spent the time in exploring the town, which was somnolent and melancholy. Half of it was built on a hill, a typical Russian village—a mass of squat brown huts; the other half in the plain was like a village in any other country. The idle guards and railway officials sat on the steps of the station room whistling. Two more trains arrived—a Red Cross train and a slow passenger train. Passengers from these trains wandered about the platform, mixing with the idlers from the town. A crowd of peasants, travellers, engineers and Red Cross attendants, sauntered up and down in loose shirts and big boots, munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks till the platform was thick with refuse. A doctor who was in our train, half a German, with an official training and an orthodox mind, talked to the railway servants like a father. It was wrong to strike, he said. They should have put down their grievances on paper and had them forwarded through the proper channels. The officials said that would have been waste of ink and penmanship. “I wonder they don’t kill him,” Mamonov said to me, and I agreed. Each passenger was given a rouble a day to buy food. The third-class passengers were given checks, in return for which they could receive meals. However, they deprecated the plan and said they wanted the amount in beer. They received it. They then looted the refreshment room, broke the windows, and took away the food. This put an end to the check system. The feeling among the first-class passengers rose. Something ought to be done, was the general verdict; but nobody quite[317] knew what. They felt that the train ought to be placed in a safe position. The situation on the evening of the second day began to be like that described in Maupassant’s story, Boule de Suif. Nothing could be done except to explore the town of Kousnetsk. There was a feeling in the air that the normal conditions of life had been reversed. The railway officials and the workmen smiled ironically, as much as to say, “It is our turn now,” but the waiter in the restaurant car went on serving the aristocracy, which was represented by a lady in a tweed coat and skirt, and two old gentlemen, first. The social order might be overturned, but, though empires might crash and revolutions convulse the world, he was not going to forget his place.
It was warm autumn weather. The roads were soft and muddy, and there was a smell of rotting leaves in the air. It was damp and grey, with gleams of weak, pitiful sunshine. In the middle of the town there was a large market-place, where a brisk trade in geese was carried on. One man whom I watched failed to sell his geese during the day, and while driving them home at sunset talked to them as if they were dogs, saying: “Cheer up, we shall soon be home.” A party of convicts who belonged to the passenger train were working not far from the station, and asked the passers-by for cigarettes, which were freely given to the “unfortunates,” as convicts were called in Russia. I met them near the station, and they at once said: “Give the unfortunates something.” Towards evening, in one of the third-class carriages, a party of Little Russians, Red Cross orderlies, sang together in parts, and sometimes in rough counterpoint, melancholy, beautiful songs with a strange trotting rhythm with no end and no beginning, or rather ending on the dominant as if to begin again, and opposite their carriage on the platform a small crowd of muzhiks gathered together and listened and praised the singing.
On the morning of the fourth day after we had arrived, the impatience of the passengers increased to fever pitch. A Colonel, who was with us and who knew how to use the telegraph, communicated with Pensa, the next big station. Although the telegraph clerks were on strike, they remained in the offices talking to their friends on the wire all over Russia. The strikers were civil. They said they had no objection to the express going farther; that they would neither boycott nor beat anyone who took us, and that if we could find a friend to drive the[318] engine, well and good. We found a friend, an amateur engine-driver, who was willing to take us, and on the 28th of October we started for Pensa. We had not gone far before the engine broke down. Directly this happened all the passengers offered advice about the mending of it. One man produced a piece of string for the purpose. But another engine was found, and we arrived at last at Pensa. There, I saw in the telegrams the words “rights of speech and assembly,” and I knew that the strike was a revolution. At Pensa the anger of the soldiers whose return home from the Far East had been delayed was indescribable. They were lurching about the station in a state of drunken frenzy, using unprintable language about strikes and strikers.
We spent the night at Pensa. The next morning we started for Moscow, but the train came to a dead stop at two o’clock the next morning at Riazhk, and when I woke up, the attendant came and said we should go no farther until the unpleasantnesses were over. But an hour later news came that we could go to Riazan in another train. Riazan Station was guarded by soldiers. A train was ready to start for Moscow, but one had to join in a fierce scrimmage to get a place in it. ............