Nikolayeusk seemed to me the ends of the earth. I hardly know why it should have done so, for I arrived there by way of a very comfortable steamer and I have made my way to very much more ungetatable places. I suppose the explanation is that all the other places I have visited I had looked up so long on the map that when I arrived I only felt I was attaining the goal I had set out to reach, whereas I must admit I had never heard of Nikolayeusk till Mr Sly, the British consul, sketched it out as the end of my itinerary on the Siberian rivers, and ten days later I found myself in the Far Eastern town. I remember one of my brothers writing to me once from Petropaulovski:
“I always said my address would some day be Kamseatkha and here I am!”
Well, I never said my address would be Nikolayeusk because I had never heard of it, but here I was nevertheless. The weather was warm, the sun poured down from a cloudless blue sky, and in the broad, grass-grown streets, such streets have I seen in Australian towns, when the faint breeze stirred the yellow dust rose on the air. And the town straggled all along the northern side of the river, a town of low, one-storeyed wooden houses for the most part, with an occasional two-storeyed house and heavy shutters to all the windows. There was a curious absence of stone, and the streets when they were paved at all were, as in Kharbarosvk, lines of planks, sometimes three, sometimes five planks wide, with a waste of dust or mud or grass, as the case might be, on either side.
The Russians I found kindness itself. In Vladivostok I had met a man who knew one of my brothers—I sometimes wonder if I could get to such a remote corner of the earth that I should not meet someone who knew one of these ubiquitous brothers of mine—and this good friend, having sampled the family, took me on trust and found someone else who would give me a letter to the manager of the Russo-Asiatic Bank at Nikolayeusk. This was a godsend, for Mr Pauloff spoke excellent English, and he and his corresponding clerk, a Russian lady of middle age who had spent a long time in France, took me in hand and showed me the sights. Madame Schulmann and I and Buchanan drove all over the town in one of the most ancient victorias I have ever seen—the most ancient are in Saghalien, which is beyond the ends of the earth—and she very kindly took me to a meal at the principal hotel. I was staying on board the steamer while I looked around me. The visit with this lady decided me not to go there. It wras about four o\'clock in the afternoon, so I don\'t know whether our meal was dinner or tea or luncheon; we had good soup, I remember, and nice wine, to say nothing of excellent coffee, but the atmosphere left much to be desired. I don\'t suppose the windows ever had been opened since the place was built, and no one seemed to see any necessity for opening them. My hostess smiled at my distress. She said she liked fresh air herself but that for a whole year she had lodged in a room where the windows would not open. She had wanted to have one of the panes—not the window, just one of the panes—made to open to admit fresh air, and had offered to do it at her own expense, but her landlord refused. It would spoil the look of the room. She advised me strongly if I wanted fresh air to stay as long as I could on board the steamer at the wharf, and I decided to take her advice.
The Russo-Asiatic Bank was not unlike the banks I have seen in Australian townships, in that it was built of wood of one storey and the manager and his wife lived on the premises, but the roof was far more ornamental than Australia could stand and gave the touch of the East that made for romance. The manager was good enough to ask me to dinner and to include Buchanan in the invitation because I did not like to leave the poor little chap shut up in my cabin. This was really dinner, called so, and we had it at five o\'clock of a hot summer\'s afternoon, a very excellent dinner, with delicious sour cream in the soup and excellent South Australian wine, not the stuff that passes for Australian wine in England and that so many people take medicinally, but really good wine, such as Australians themselves drink. The house was built with a curious lack of partitions that made for spaciousness, so that you wandered from one room to another, hardly knowing that you had gone from the sitting-room to the bedroom, and James Buchanan going on a voyage of discovery unfortunately found the cradle, to the dismay of his mistress. He stood and looked at it and barked.
“Gracious me! What\'s this funny thing! I\'ve never seen anything like it before!”
Neither had I; but I was covered with shame when a wail proclaimed the presence of the son and heir.
Naturally I expressed myself—truly—charmed with the town, and Mr Pauloff smiled and nodded at his wife, who spoke no English.
“She hates it,” said he; “she has never been well since we came here.”
She was white, poor little girl, as the paper on which this is written, and very frail-looking, but it never seemed to occur to anyone that it would be well to open the double windows, and so close was the air of the room that it made me feel sick and faint.
“She never goes out,” said her husband. “She is not well enough.”
I believe there was a time in our grandmothers\' days when we too dreaded the fresh air.
And in this the town differed markedly from any Australian towns I have known. The double windows were all tight shut these warm July days, with all the cracks stopped up with cotton wool, with often decorations of coloured ribbons or paper wandering across the space between. Also there were very heavy shutters, and I thought these must be to shut out the winter storms, but M. Pauloff did not seem to think much of the winter storms, though he admitted they had some bad blizzards and regularly the thermometer went down below -40° Fahrenheit.
“No,” he said, “we shut them at night, at four in the winter and at nine in the summer. Leave them open you cannot.”
“But why?” I thought it was some device for keeping out still more air.
“There is danger,” said he—“danger from men.”
“Do they steal?” said I, surprised.
“And kill,” he added with conviction.
It seems that when the Japanese invaded Saghalien, the great island which lies opposite the mouth of the Amur, they liberated at least thirty thousand convicts, and they burnt the records so that no one could prove anything against them, and the majority of these convicts were unluckily not all suffering political prisoners, but criminals, many of them of the deepest dye. These first made Saghalien an unwholesome place to live in, but gradually they migrated to the mainland, and Nikolayeusk and other towns of Eastern Siberia are by no means safe places in consequence. Madame Schulmann told me that many a time men were killed in the open streets and that going back to her lodgings on the dark winter evenings she was very much afraid and always tried to do it in daylight.
Nikolayeusk is officially supposed to have thirteen thousand inhabitants, but really in the winter-time, says Mr Pauloff, they shrink to ten thousand, while in the summer they rise to over forty thousand, everybody coming for the fishing, the great salmon fisheries.
“Here is noting,” said he, “noting—only fish.”
And this remark he made at intervals. He could not reiterate it too often, as if he were warning me against expecting too much from this remote corner of the world. But indeed the fish interested me. The summer fishing was on while I was there, but that, it seems, is as nothing to the autumn fishing, when the fish rush into the wide river in solid blocks. The whole place then is given over to the fishing and the other trades that fishing calls into being to support it. All the summer the steamers coming down the river are crowded, and they bring great cargoes of timber; the wharves when I was there were covered with barrels and packing-cases containing, according to Mr Pauloff, “only air.” These were for the fish. And now, when the humble mackerel costs me at least ninepence or a shilling, I remember with longing the days when I used to see a man like a Chinaman, but not a Chinaman, a bamboo across his shoulder, and from each end a great fresh salmon slung, a salmon that was nearly as long as the bearer, and I could have bought the two for ten kopecks!
He that will not when he may!
But great as the trade was down the river, most eatables—groceries, flour and such-like things—came from Shanghai, and the ships that brought them took back wood to be made into furniture, and there was, when I was there, quite a flourishing trade in frozen meat with Australia, Nikolayeusk requiring about two hundred and forty thousand pounds in the year. In winter, of course, all the provisions are frozen; the milk is poured into basins, a stick is stuck in it and it freezes round it, so that a milk-seller instead of having a large can has an array of sticks on top of which is the milk frozen hard as a stone. Milk, meat, eggs, all provisions are frozen from October to May.
I do not know what Nikolayeusk is doing now war and revolution have reached it. At least they have brought it into touch with the outer world.
And having got so far I looked longingly out over the harbour and wondered whether I might not go to Saghalien.
Mr Pauloff laughed at my desires. If there was nothing to see in Nikolayeusk, there was less than nothing in Saghalien. It was dead. It never had been much and the Japanese invasion had killed it. Not that he harboured any animosity against the Japanese. Russians and Japanese, he declared, were on very friendly terms, and though they invaded Saghalien they did not disgrace their occupation by any atrocities. The Russian, everybody declared in Nikolayeusk, bridges the gulf between the white man and the yellow. Russian and Chinese peasants will work side by side in friendliest fashion; they will occupy the same boardinghouses; the Russian woman does not object to the Chinese as a husband, and the Russian takes a Chinese wife. Of course these are the peasant classes. The Russian authorities made very definite arrangements for keeping out Chinese from Siberia, as I saw presently when I went back up the river.
But the more I thought of it the more determined I was not to go back till I had gone as far east as I possibly could go. The Russian Volunteer fleet I found called at Alexandrovsk regularly during the months the sea was open, making Nikolayeusk its most northern port of call. I could go by the steamer going down and be picked up by the one coming north. It would give me a couple of days in the island, and Mr Pauloff was of opinion that a couple of days would be far too long.
But the John Cockerill was going back and Buchanan and I must find another roof and a resting-place. According to the inhabitants, it would not be safe to sleep in the streets, and I had conceived a distinct distaste for the hotel. But the Erivan lay in the stream and to that we transferred ourselves and our belongings, where the mate spoke English with a strong Glasgow accent and the steward had a smattering. It was only a smattering, however. I had had a very early lunch and no afternoon tea, so when I got on board at six in the evening I was decidedly hungry and demanded food, or rather when food might be expected. The steward was in a dilemma. It was distinctly too early for dinner, he considered, and too late for tea. He scratched his head.
“Lunch!” said he triumphantly, and ushered me into the saloon, where hung large photographs of the Tsar, the Tsarina and the good-looking little Tsarevitch. In the corner was an ikon, St Nicolas, I think, who protects sailors. And there at six o\'clock in the evening I meekly sat down to luncheon all by myself.
Lying there I had a lovely view of the town. At night, like Vladivostok, it lay like a ring of diamonds along the shore of the river; and in the daytime the softly rounded green hills, the grey-blue sky and the grey-blue sea with the little white wavelets, and the little town just a line between the green and the blue, with the spires and domes of the churches and other public buildings, green and blue and red and white, made a view that was worth coming so far to see. There were ships in the bay too—not very big ships; but a ship always has an attraction: it has come from the unknown; it is about to go into the unknown—and as I sat on deck there came to me the mate with the Scots accent and explained all about the ships in sight.
The place was a fort and they were going to make it a great harbour, to fill it up till the great ships should lie along the shore. It will take a good time, for we lay a long way out, but he never doubted the possibility; and meantime the goods come to the ships in the lighters in which they have already come down the river, and they are worked by labourers getting, according to the mate, twelve shillings a day.
“Dey carry near as much as we do,” said he.
Then there were other ships: a ship for fish, summer fish, for Japan, sealers for the rookeries, and ships loading timber for Kamseatkha. I thought I would like to emulate my brother and go there, and the Russky mate thought it would be quite possible, only very uncomfortable. It would take three months, said he, and it was rather late in the season now. Besides, these ships load themselves so with timber that there is only a narrow space on deck to walk on, and they are packed with passengers, mostly labourers, going up for the short summer season.
My old trouble, want of air, followed me on board the Erivan. On deck it was cool, at night the thermometer registered about 55° Fahrenheit, but in my cabin Buehanan and I gasped with the thermometer at over 90°, and that with the port, a very small one, open. That stuffiness was horrible. The bathroom looked like a boiler with a tightfitting iron door right amidships, and having looked at it I had not the courage to shut myself in and take a bath. It seemed as if it would be burying myself alive. As it was, sleep down below I could not, and I used to steal up on deck and with plenty of rugs and cushions lay myself out along the seats and sleep in the fresh air; but a seat really does leave something to be desired in the way of luxury.
But the early mornings were delightful. The first faint light showed a mist hanging over the green hills marking out their outlines, green and blue and grey; then it was all grey mist; but to the east was the crimson of the dawn, and we left our moorings early one morning and steamed into that crimson. The sun rose among silver and grey clouds, and rose again and again as we passed along the river and the mountains hid him from sight. There were long streaks of ............