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. i found a place in a third-class carriage. opposite me was an old man with a grey beard. he attracted my attention by his courtesy. he gently prevented a woman with many bundles being turned out of the train by another muzhik. i asked him where he had come from. “eighty versts the other side of irkutsk,” he said. “i was sent there, and now after thirteen years i am returning home at the government’s expense. i was a convict.” “what were you sent there for?” i asked. “murder!” he answered softly. the other passengers asked him to tell his story. “it’s a long story,” he said. “tell it!” shouted the other passengers. his story was this. he had got drunk, set fire to a barn, and when the owner had interfered he killed him. he had served a sentence of two years’ hard labour and eleven years of exile. he was a gentle, humble creature, with a mild expression, and he looked like an apostle. he had no money, and lived on what the passengers gave him. i gave him a cigarette. he smoked a quarter of it, and said he would keep the rest for the journey, as he had still three hundred miles to travel. we arrived at moscow at 11 o’clock in the evening and found the town in darkness, save for a glimmer of oil[319] lamps. the next morning we woke up to find that russia had been given a charter which contained not a constitution, as many so rashly took for granted, but the promise of constitutional government.
i stayed at the h?tel dresden, which when i arrived was still without lamps or light of any kind, and the lift was not working.
the first thing which brought home to me that russia had been granted the promise of a constitution was this. i went to the big russian baths. somebody came in and asked for some soap, upon which the barber’s assistant, aged about ten, said, with the air of a hampden: “give the citizen some soap” (“daite grazhdaninu mwilo”). coming out of the baths i found the streets decorated with flags and everybody in a state of frantic and effervescing enthusiasm. i went to one of the big restaurants. there old men were embracing each other and drinking the first glass of vodka to free russia. after luncheon i went out into the theatre square. there is a fountain in it, which forms an excellent public platform. an orator mounted it and addressed the crowd. he began to read the emperor’s manifesto. then he said: “we are all too much used to the rascality of the autocracy to believe this; down with the autocracy!” the crowd, infuriated—they were evidently expecting an enthusiastic eulogy—cried: “down with you!” but instead of attacking the speaker who had aroused their indignation they ran away from him! it was a curious sight. the spectators on the pavement were seized with panic and ran too. the orator, seeing his speech had missed fire, changed his tone and said: “you have misunderstood me.” but what he had said was perfectly clear. this speaker was an ordinary hyde park orator. university professors spoke from the same platform. later in the afternoon a procession of students arrived opposite my hotel with red flags and collected outside the governor-general’s house. the governor-general appeared on the balcony and made a speech, in which he said that now there were no police he hoped that they would be able to keep order themselves. he asked them also to exchange the red flag, which was hanging on the lamp-post opposite the palace, for the national flag. one little student climbed like a monkey up the lamp-post and hung a national flag there, but did not remove the red flag. then the governor asked[320] them to sing the national anthem, which they did; and as they went away they sang the “marseillaise”:
“on peut très bien jouer ces deux airs à la fois
et cela fait un air qui fait sauver les rois!”
at one moment a cossack arrived, but an official came out of the house and told him he was not needed, upon which he went away, amidst the jeers, cheers, hoots, and whistling of the crowd. on the whole, the day passed off quietly. there were some tragic incidents: the death of a woman, the wounding of a student and a workman who tried to rescue the student from the prisoners’ van, and the shooting of a veterinary surgeon called bauman.
while i was standing on the steps of the hotel in the afternoon a woman rushed up frantically and said the black gang were coming. a student who came from a good family and who was standing by explained that the black gang were roughs who supported the autocracy. his hand, which was bandaged, had been severely hurt by a cossack, who had struck it with his whip, thinking he was about to make a disturbance. he came up to my room, and from the hotel window we had a good view of the crowd, which proceeded to
“attaquer la marseillaise en la
sur les cuivres, pendant que la flute soupire,
en mi bémol: ‘veillons an salut de l’empire!’”
that night i dined at the métropole restaurant, and a strange scene occurred. at the end of dinner the band played the “marseillaise,” and after it the national anthem. everybody stood up except one mild-looking man with spectacles, who went on calmly eating his dinner; upon which a man who was sitting at the other end of the room, rather drunk, rushed up to him and began to pull him about and drag him to his feet. he made a display of passive resistance, which proved effectual, and when he had finished his dinner he went away.
the outward aspect of the town during these days was strange. moscow was like a besieged city. many of the shops had great wooden shutters. some of the doors were marked with a large red cross. the distress, i was told, during the strike had been terrible. there was no light, no gas, no water; all the shops were shut; provisions and wood were scarce.[321] on the afternoon of 2nd november i went to see bauman’s funeral procession, which i witnessed from many parts of the town. it was an impressive sight. a hundred thousand men took part in it. the whole of the intelligentsia was in the streets or at the windows. the windows and balconies were crowded with people. order was perfect. there was not a hitch nor a scuffle. the men walking in the procession were students, doctors, workmen—people in various kinds of uniform. there were ambulances, with doctors dressed in white in them, in case there should be casualties. the men carried great red banners, and the coffin was covered with a scarlet pall. as they marched they sang in a low chant the “marseillaise,” “viechni pamiat,” and the “funeral march”[10] of the fighters for freedom. this last tune is most impressive. from a musician’s point of view it is, i am told, a bad tune; but then, as du maurier said, one should never listen to musicians on the subject of music any more than one should listen to wine merchants on the subject of wine. but it is the tune which to my mind exactly expressed the russian revolution, with its dogged melancholy and invincible passion. it was as befitting as the “marseillaise” (which, by the way, the russians sang in parts and slowly) was inappropriate. the “funeral march” had nothing defiant in it; but it is one of those tunes which, when sung by a multitude, makes the flesh creep; it is commonplace, if you will; and it expresses—as if by accident—the commonplaceness of all that is determined and unflinching, mingled with an accent of weary pathos. as it grew dark, torches were brought out, lighting up the red banners and the scarlet coffin of the unknown veterinary surgeon, who in a second, by a strange freak of chance, had become a hero, or rather a symbol; an emblem and a banner, and who was being carried to his last resting-place with a simplicity which eclipsed the pomp of royal funerals, and to the sound of a low song of tired but indefatigable sadness, stronger and more formidable than the p?ans which celebrate the triumphs of kings.
the impression left on my mind by this funeral was deep.[322] as i saw these hundred thousand men march past so quietly, so simply, in their bourgeois clothes, singing in careless, almost conversational, fashion, i seemed nevertheless to hear the “tramping of innumerable armies,” and to feel the breath of the—
“courage never to submit or yield,
and what is else not to be overcome.”
after bauman’s funeral, which had passed off without an incident, at eleven o’clock a number of students and doctors were shot in front of the university, as they were on their way home, by cossacks, who were stationed in the riding school, opposite the university. the cossacks fired without orders. they were incensed, as many of the troops were, by the display of red flags, and the processions.
the day after bauman’s funeral (3rd november) was the anniversary of the emperor’s accession, and all the “hooligans” of the city, who were now called the “black gang,” used the opportunity to make counter demonstrations under the ?gis of the national flag. the students did nothing; they were in no way aggressive; but the hooligans when they came across students beat them and in some cases killed them. the police did nothing; they seemed to have disappeared. these hooligans paraded the town in small groups, sometimes uniting, blocking the traffic, demanding money from well-dressed people, wounding students, and making themselves generally objectionable. when the police were appealed to they shrugged their shoulders and said: “liberty.” the hooligans demanded the release of the man who had killed bauman. “they have set free so many of their men,” they said, referring to the revolutionaries, “we want our man set free.” the town was in a state of anarchy; anybody could kill anyone else with impunity. in one of the biggest streets a hooligan came up to a man and asked him for money; he gave him ten kopecks. “is that all?” said the hooligan. “take that,” and he killed him with a finnish knife. i was myself stopped by a band on the twerskaia and asked politely to contribute to their fund—the fund of the “black gang”—which i did with considerable alacrity. students, or those whom they considered to be students in disguise, were the people they mostly attacked. the citizens of the town in general soon began to think that this state of things was intolerable, and vigorous representations[323] were made to the town duma that some steps should be taken to put an end to it. the hooligans broke the windows of the h?tel métropole and those of several shops. liberty meant to them doing as much damage as they pleased. this state of things lasted three days, and then it was stopped—utterly and completely stopped. a notice was published forbidding all demonstrations in the streets with flags. the police reappeared, and everything resumed its normal course. these bands of hooligans were small and easy to deal with. the disorders were unnecessary. but they did some good in one way: they brought home to everybody the necessity for order and the maintenance of order, and the plain fact that removal of the police meant anarchy.
in spite of all this storm and stress the theatres were doing business as usual, and at the art theatre i saw a fine and moving performance of tchekov’s chaika and also of ibsen’s ghosts. on 7th november i went to see a new play by gorky, which was produced at the art theatre. it was called the children of the sun. it was the second night that it had been performed. m. stanislavsky, one of the chief actors of the troupe and the stage manager, gave me his place. the theatre was crammed. there is a scene in the play where a doctor, living in a russian village, and devoting his life to the welfare of the peasants, is suspected of having caused an outbreak of cholera. the infuriated peasants pursue the doctor and bash someone on the head. on the first night this scene reduced a part of the audience to hysterics. it was too “actual.” people said they saw enough of their friends killed in the streets without going to the play for such a sight. on the second night it was said that the offensive scene had been suppressed. i did not quite understand what had been eliminated. as i saw the scene it was played as follows: a roar is heard as of an angry crowd. then the doctor runs into a house and hides. the master of the house protests; a peasant flies at his throat and half strangles him until he is beaten on the head by another peasant who belongs to the house. the play was full of interesting moments, and was played with finished perfection. but gorky had not tchekov’s talent of representing on the stage the uneventful passage of time, the succession of the seemingly insignificant incidents of people’s everyday lives, chosen with such skill, depicted with such an instinct for mood and[324] atmosphere that the result is enthrallingly interesting. gorky’s plays have the faults and qualities of his stories. they are unequal, but contain moments of poignant interest and vividness.
the next night (8th november) i went to st. petersburg. there i saw spring-rice, dr. dillon, and heard fidelio at the opera. the young lions in the gallery did not realise that fidelio is a revolutionary opera and the complete expression of the “liberation movement” in germany.
a post office strike, followed by a strike of other unions, was going on, and one night while i was at the opéra bouffe, where the country girl was being given, the electric light went out. the performance continued all the same, the actors holding bedroom candles in their hands, while the auditorium remained in the dimmest of twilights.
i stayed in st. petersburg till the 21st of november, when i went to london. i travelled to the frontier with a japanese military attaché and a russian student. we three passengers had a curious conversation. the japanese gentleman rarely spoke, but he nodded civilly, and made a sneezing noise every now and then. the student talked of english literature with warm enthusiasm. his two favourite english modern authors were jerome k. jerome and oscar wilde. when i showed some surprise at this choice, he said i probably only thought of jerome as a comic author. i said that was the case. “then,” he said, “you have not read paul kelver, which is a masterpiece, a real human book—a great book.”
when we got out at the frontier the japanese officer wanted to fetch something but as there was no porter in sight, was loath to leave his bag. the student offered to keep watch over it, but the japanese would not trust him to do this, and stood by his bag till a porter arrived. the student was astonished and slightly hurt.
after i had stayed a little over a fortnight in london i went back first to st. petersburg, then to moscow.
i had not been two days in moscow before there was another strike. it began on wednesday, the 20th of december, punctually at midday. the lift ceased working in the hotel, the electric light was turned off, and i laid in a large store of books and cigarettes against coming events. the strike was said to be an answer to the summary proceedings of the government and its action in arresting leaders of the revolutionary[325] committee. its watchword was to be: “a constituent assembly based upon universal suffrage.” beyond the electric light going out, nothing happened on this day. on thursday, the 21st, most of the shops began to shut. the man who cleaned the boots in the hotel made the following remark: “i now understand that the people exercise great power.” i heard a shot fired somewhere from the hotel at nine o’clock in the evening. i asked the hall porter whether the theatres were open. he said they were shut, and added: “and who would dream of going to the theatre in these times of stress?”
the next day i drove with marie karlovna von kotz into the country to a village called chernaya, about twenty-five versts from moscow on the novgorod road, which before the days of railways was famous for its highway robberies and assaults on the rich merchants by the hooligans of that day. we drove in a big wooden sledge drawn by two horses, the coachman standing up all the while. we went to visit two old maids, who were peasants and lived in the village. one of them had got stranded in moscow, and, owing to the railway strike, was unable to go back again, and so we took her with us; otherwise she would have walked home. we started at 10.30 and arrived at 1.30. the road was absolutely still—a thick carpet of snow, upon which fresh flakes drifting in the fitful gusts of wind fell gently. looking at the drifting flakes which seemed to be tossed about in the air, the first old maid said that a man’s life was like a snowflake in the wind, and that she had never thought she would go home with us on her sister’s name-day.
when we arrived at the village we found a meal ready for us, which, although the fast of advent was being strictly observed and the food made with fasting butter, was far from jejune. it consisted of pies with rice and cabbage inside, and cold fish and tea and jam, and some vodka for me—the guest. the cottage consisted of one room and two very small ante-rooms—the walls, floors, and ceilings of plain deal. five or six rich ikons hung in the corner of the room, and a coloured oleograph of father john of kronstadt on one of the walls. a large stove heated the room. soon some guests arrived to congratulate old maid no. 2 on her name-day, and after a time the pope entered, blessed the room, and sat down to tea. we talked of the strike, and how quiet the country was,[326] and of the hooligans in the town. “no,” said the pope, with gravity, “we have our own hooligans.” a little later the village schoolmaster arrived, who looked about twenty years old, and was a little tiny man with a fresh face and gold-rimmed spectacles, with his wife, who, like the ?sthetic lady in gilbert and sullivan’s patience, was “massive.” i asked the pope if i could live unmolested in this village. he said: “yes; but if you want to work you won’t be quiet in this house, because your two hostesses chatter and drink tea all day and all night.” at three o’clock we thought we had better be starting home; it was getting dark, the snow was falling heavily. the old maids said we couldn’t possibly go. we should (1) lose our way; (2) be robbed by tramps; (3) be massacred by strikers on the railway line; (4) not be allowed to enter the town; (5) be attacked by hooligans when we reached the dark streets. we sent for vassili, the coachman, to consult with him. “can you find your way home?” we asked. “yes, i can,” he said. “shall we lose our way?” “we might lose our way—it happens,” he said slowly—“it happens times and again; but we might not—it often doesn’t happen.” “might we be attacked on the way?” “we might—it happens—they attack; but we might not—sometimes they don’t attack.” “are the horses tired?” “yes, the horses are tired.” “then we had better not go.” “the horses can go all right,” he said. then we thought we would stay; but vassili said that his master would curse him if he stayed unless we “added” something.
so we settled to stay, and the schoolmaster took us to see the village school, which was clean, roomy, and altogether an excellent home of learning. then he took us to a neighbouring factory which had not struck, and in which he presided over a night class for working men and women. from here we telephoned to moscow, and learned that everything was quiet in the city. i talked to one of the men in the factory about the strike. “it’s all very well for the young men,” one of them said; “they are hot-headed and like striking; but we have to starve for a month. that’s what it means.” then we went to the school neighbouring the factory where the night class was held. there were two rooms—one for men, presided over by the schoolmaster; and one for women, presided over by his wife. they had a lesson of two hours in reading, writing,[327] and arithmetic. the men came to be taught in separate batches, one batch coming one week, one another. this day there were five men and two boys and six women. the men were reading a story about a bear—rather a tedious tale. “yes, we are reading,” one of them said to me, “and we understand some of it.” that was, at any rate, consoling. they read to themselves first, then aloud in turn, standing up, and then they were asked to tell what they had read in their own words. they read haltingly, with difficulty grasping familiar words. they related fluently, except one man, who said he could remember nothing whatsoever about the doings of the bear. one little boy was doing with lightning rapidity those kinds of sums which, by giving you too many data and not enough—a superabundance of detail, leaving out the all that seems to be imperatively necessary—are to some minds peculiarly insoluble. the sum in question stated that a factory consisted of 770 hands—men, women, and children—and that the men received half as much again as the women, etc. that particular proportion of wages seems to exist in the arithmetic books of all countries, to the despair of the non-mathematical, and the little boy insisted on my following every step of his process of reckoning; but not even he with the wisdom and sympathy of babes succeeded in teaching me how to do that kind of sum. he afterwards wrote in a copybook pages of declensions of russian nouns and adjectives. here i found i could help him, and i saved him some trouble by dictating them to him; though every now and then we had some slight doubt and discussion about the genitive plural. in the women’s class, one girl explained to us, with tears in her eyes, how difficult it was for her to attend this class. her fellow-workers laughed at her for it, and at home they told her that a woman’s place was to be at work and not to meddle with books. those who attended this school showed that they were really anxious to learn, as the effort and self-sacrifice needed were great.
we stayed till the end of the lesson, and then we went home, where an excellent supper of eggs, etc., was awaiting us. we found the two old maids and their first cousin, who told us she was about to go to law for a legacy of 100,000 roubles which had been left her, but which was disputed by a more distant relation on the mother’s side. we talked of lawsuits and politics and[328] miracles, and real and false faith-healers, till bedtime came. a bed was made for me alongside of the stove. made is the right word, for it was literally built up before my eyes. a sleeping-place was also made for the coachman on the floor of the small ante-room; then the rest of the company disappeared to sleep. i say disappeared, because i literally do not know where in this small interior there was room for them to sleep. they consisted of the two old maids, their niece and her little girl, aged three, and another little girl, aged seven. marie karlovna slept in the room, but the rest disappeared, i suppose on the top of the stove, only it seemed to reach the ceiling; somewhere they were, for the little girl, excited by the events of the day, sang snatches of song till a late hour in the night. the next morning, after i got up, the room was transformed from a bedroom into a dining-room and aired, breakfast was served, and at ten we started back again in the snow to moscow.
on the 23rd we arrived in the town at one o’clock. the streets of the suburbs seemed to be unusually still. marie karlovna said to me: “how quiet the streets are, but it seems to me an uncanny, evil quietness.” marie karlovna lived in the lobkovsky pereulok, and i had the day before sent my things from the hotel to an apartment in the adjoining street, the mwilnikov. when we arrived at the entrance of these streets, we found them blocked by a crowd and guarded by police and dragoons. we got through the other end of the street, and we were told that the night before fiedler’s school, which was a large building at the corner of these two streets, had been the scene of a revolutionary meeting; that the revolutionaries had been surrounded in this house, had refused to surrender, had thrown a bomb at an officer and killed him, had been fired at by artillery, and had surrendered after killing 1 officer and 5 men, with 17 casualties—15 wounded and 2 killed. all this had happened in my very street during my absence. an hour later we again heard a noise of guns, and an armed rising (some of the leaders of which, who were to have seized the governor-general of the town and set up a provisional government, had been arrested the night before in my street) had broken out in all parts of the town in spite of the arrests. a little later i saw a crowd of people on foot and in sledges flying in panic down the street shouting: “kazaki!” i heard and saw[329] nothing else of any interest during the day. there were crowds of people in the streets till nightfall.
on sunday, christmas eve, i drove to the h?tel dresden in the centre of moscow to see mamonov. the aspect of the town was extraordinary. the streets were full of people—flaneurs who were either walking about or gathered together in small or large groups at the street comers. distant, and sometimes quite near, sounds of firing were audible, and nobody seemed to care a scrap; they were everywhere talking, discussing, and laughing. imagine the difference between this and the scenes described in paris during the street fighting in ’32, ’48, and ’71.
people went about their business just as usual. if there was a barricade they drove round it. the cabmen never dreamt of not going anywhere, although one of them said to me that it was most alarming. moreover, an insuperable curiosity seemed to lead them to go and look where things were happening. several were killed in this way. on the other hand, at the slightest approach of troops they ran in panic like hares, although the troops did not do the passers-by any mischief. two or three times i was walking in the streets when dragoons galloped past, and came to no harm. we heard shots all the time, and met the same groups of people and passed two barricades. the barricades were mostly not like those of the faubourg st. antoine, but small impediments made of branches and an overturned sledge; they were put there to annoy and wear out the troops and not to stand siege. the revolutionaries adopted a guerilla street warfare. they fired or threw bombs and rapidly dispersed; they made some attempts to seize the nikolayev railway station, but in all cases they were repulsed. the attitude of the man in the street was curious; sometimes he was indignant with the strikers, sometimes indignant with the government. if you asked a person of revolutionary sympathies he told you that sympathy was entirely with the revolution; if you asked a person of moderate principles, he told you that the “people” were indignant with the strikers; but the attitude of the average man in the street seemed to me one of sceptical indifference in spite of all—in spite of trade ceasing, houses being fired at, and the hospitals being full to overflowing of dead and wounded. the fact was that disorders had lost their first power of creating an impression; they had become an everyday occurrence.
[330]
here are various remarks i heard. one man, a commissionaire, asked whether i thought it was right to fire on the revolutionaries. i hesitated, gathering my thoughts to explain that i thought that they thoroughly deserved it since they began it, but that the government nevertheless had brought it about by their dilatoriness. (this is exactly what i thought.) misunderstanding my hesitation, he said: “surely you, a foreigner, need not mind saying what you think, and you know it is wrong.” (this was curious, because these people—commissionaires, porters, etc.—were often reactionary.) a cabman said to me: “who do you think will get the best of it?” i said: “i don’t know; what do you think?” “nothing will come of it,” he said. “there will still be rich people like you and poor people like me; and whether the government is in the hands of the chinovniks or the students is all one and the same.” another man, a porter, an ex-soldier, said it was awful. you couldn’t go anywhere or drive anywhere without risking being killed. soldiers came back from the war and were killed in the streets. a bullet came, and then the man was done for. another man, a kind of railway employee, said that the russians had no stamina; that the poles would never give in, but the russians would directly. mamonov, who was fond of paradox, said to me that he hoped all the fanatics would be shot, and that then the government would be upset. a policeman was guarding the street which led to the hotel. i asked if i could pass. “how could i not let a barine with whom i am acquainted pass?” he said. then a baker’s boy came up with a tray of rolls on his head, also asking to pass—to go to the hotel. after some discussion the policeman let him go, but suddenly said: “or are you a rascal?” then i asked him what he thought of it all. he said: “we fire as little as possible. they are fools.” the wealthier and educated classes were either intensely sympathetic or violently indignant with the revolutionaries; the lower classes were sceptically resigned or indifferent—“things are bad; nothing will come of it for us.”
at midnight the windows of our house had been shaken by the firing of guns somewhere near; but on christmas morning (not the russian christmas) one could get about. i drove down one of the principal streets, the kuznetski most, into another large street, the neglinii proiesd (as if it were down[331] bond street into piccadilly), when suddenly in a flash all the cabs began to drive fast up the street. my cabman went on. he was inquisitive. we saw nothing. he shouted to another cabman, asking him what was the matter. no answer. we went a little farther down, when along the neglinii proiesd we saw a patrol and guns advancing. “go back,” shouted one of the soldiers, waving his rifle—and away we went. later, i believe there was firing there. farther along we met more patrols and ambulances. the shops were not only shut but boarded up.
next day i walked to the nikolayev station in the afternoon. it was from there that the trains went to st. petersburg. the trains were running then, but how the passengers started i didn’t know, for it was impossible to get near the station. cabs were galloping away from it, and the square in front of it had been cleared by cossacks. i think it was attacked that afternoon. i walked into the riask station, which was next door. it was a scene of desolation; empty trains, stacked-up luggage, third-class passengers encamped in the waiting-room. there was a perpetual noise of firing. the town was under martial law. nobody was allowed to be out of doors after nine o’clock under penalty of three months’ imprisonment or a 3000 roubles fine. householders were made responsible for people firing out of their windows.
on the morning of 27th december there was considerable movement and traffic in the streets; the small shops and the tobacconists were open. firing was still going on. they said a factory was being attacked. the troops who were supposed to be disaffected proved loyal. the one way to make them loyal was to throw bombs at them. the policemen were then armed with rifles and bayonets. a cabman said to me: “there is an illness abroad—we are sick; it will pass—but god remains.” i agreed with him.
