At the next halt, three hours later, they met again in a similar way, and
the Russian expressed surprise that A.J. should be travelling so humbly. A.J.
answered, with a frankness he saw no reason to check, that he was doing
things as cheaply as possible because he had so little money. This led to
further questions and explanations, after which the Russian formally
presented his card, which showed him to be a certain Doctor Hamarin, of
Rostov-on-Don. He was, he said, the headmaster of a school there; his pupils
came from the best families in the district. If A.J. wished to earn a little
money and was not in any great hurry to return to England (for so much he had
gathered), why not consider taking a temporary post in Russia? And there and
then he offered him the job of English master in his school. A.J. thanked him
and said he would think it over; he thought it over, and at the next station
jumped eagerly to the platform, met Hamarin as before, and said he would
accept.
So he settled down at Rostov. It was a pleasantly prosperous city, with a
climate cold and invigorating in winter and mild as the French Riviera in
summer; it was also very much more cosmopolitan than most places of its size,
for, as the business capital of the Don Cossack country, it contained many
Jews, Armenians, Greeks and even small colonies of English, French, and
Germans. Picturesquely built, with many fine churches, it was interesting to
live in, though A.J. had no initial intention of staying in it for long. He
did, in fact, stay there for two years, which was about four times his
estimate. His work was simple—merely to teach English to the sons and
daughters of Rostov’s plutocratic rather than aristocratic families. He
made a successful teacher, which is to say that he did not need to work very
hard; he had plenty of leisure, and during holidays was able to take trips
into the Caucasus, the Crimea, and several times to Moscow and Petersburg..
With a natural aptitude for languages, he came to talk Russian without a
trace of foreign accent, besides picking up a working knowledge of Tartar,
Armenian, and various local dialects. He was moderately happy and only bored
now and again. A physical change became noticeable in him; he lost, rather
suddenly, the boyish undergraduate air that had surprised the other
war-correspondents when they had first seen him. He was liked by his pupils
and respected by their parents; he moved a little on the fringe of the
better-class town society, which was as high as a schoolmaster could well
expect. He soon found that his profession carried with it little dignity of
its own. During his first week at school the daughter of one of
Rostov’s wealthiest families, in sending up a very bad English
translation exercise, enclosed a ten-rouble note between the pages, clearly
assuming that it would ensure high marks.
At the close of his first year he saw in a literary paper that Sir Henry
Jergwin, the celebrated English critic, editor, and man of letters, had died
suddenly in London whilst replying to a toast at the annual dinner of a
literary society.
Hamarin pressed him to stay another year at Rostov, and he did so chiefly
because he could not think of anything else to do or anywhere else to go. It
was during this second year that he began to gain insight into the close
network of revolutionary activity that was spread throughout the entire
country. Even bourgeois Rostov had its secret clubs and government spies, and
there seemed to be an ever-widening gulf between the wealthier classes and
the workpeople. When occasionally he went into better-class houses to give
private English lessons he was often amazed at the way servants were bullied
by everyone, from the master of the house even down to the five-year-old baby
who had already learned whom he might kick and scratch with impunity. One
youth, the son of a wealthy mill-owner, went out of his way to explain.
“You see, they’re all thieves and rogues. We know it, and they
know we know it. They steal everything they can—they have no
loyalty—they lie to us a dozen times a day as a matter of course. Why
should we treat them any better than the scum that they are? It’s their
fault as much as ours.”
A.J. became quite friendly with this youth, who had travelled in Germany
and France, and looked at affairs from a somewhat wider standpoint than the
usual Rostov citizen. His name was Sergius Willenski, and he was destined for
the army. He had no illusions about the country or its people. “You
simply have to treat them like that,” he often said. “It’s
the only basis on which life becomes at all possible.”
“And yet,” A.J. answered, “I have met some of the most
charming folk among the common people—ignorant soldiers whom I would
certainly have trusted with my life.”
“A good job you didn’t. They may have been
charming—quite likely—but they were rogues, I’ll wager, and
would probably have killed you for a small bribe. Our people have no
morals—only a sort of good humour that impresses foreigners.”
A.J. went to the Willenskis’ twice a week to teach English to the
two girls, aged fifteen and seventeen respectively. Neither learned anything,
except in the dullest and least intelligent way; neither considered that life
held any possible future except a successful marriage. The older girl would
have flirted with him if he had been inclined for the diversion. The younger
girl was the prettier, but had a ferocious temper. She boasted that she had
once maimed for life a man who had come to the house to polish the floors. It
was his custom to take off one of his shoes and tie a polishing cloth round
his stockinged foot so that he could polish without stooping. The girl, then
aged eleven, had flown into a temper because he had accidentally disturbed
some toy of hers; she had seized a heavy silver samovar and dropped it on to
his foot, breaking several bones. “And it wasn’t at all a bad
thing for him,” she told A.J., “because father pays him something
every now and then and he doesn’t have to polish the floors for
it.”
A.J. sometimes went to parties at the Willenskis’ house; monsieur
and madame (as they liked to be called) were hospitable, and refrained from
treating him as they would have done a native teacher. Once he met
Willenski’s brother, who was a publisher in Petersburg. Anton
Willenski, well known to all the Russian reading public, took considerable
interest in the young Englishman and, after an hour’s conversation,
offered him a post in his own Petersburg office. “You are far too good
a scholar to be teaching in a little place like Rostov,” he said. The
post offered was that of English translator and proof-reader, and the salary
double that which Hamarin paid. A.J. mentioned his contract at the school,
but Willenski said: “Oh, never mind that—I’ll deal with
Hamarin,” and he did, though A.J. could only guess how.
So A.J. left Rostov and went to Petersburg. That was in 1907, when he was
twenty-seven. The change from the provincial atmosphere to the liveliness and
culture of the capital was immeasurably welcome to him. The gaiety of the
theatres and cafés, the fine shops on the Nevsky, the splendour of the
Cathedral and of the Winter Palace, all pleased the eye of the impressionable
youth whose job left him leisure for thinking and observing. He had been to
Petersburg before, but to see it as a visitor had been vastly different from
living in it. His rooms were across the river in the Viborg district; from
his windows he could see, at sunset, the Gulf of Finland bathed in saffron
splendour, and there was something of everlasting melancholy in that pageant
of sky and water ushering in the silver northern night. Before he had been
long in Petersburg he received other impressions—the glitter of Cossack
bayonets and scarlet imperial uniforms, and in the darker background, the
huge scowling mass of misery and corruption through which revolutionary
currents ran like threads of doom. It was fascinating to watch those
ever-changing scenes of barbaric magnificence and sordid degradation—to
cheer the imperial sleigh as it swept over the snow-bound boulevards, to gaze
on the weekly batches of manacled prisoners marching to the railway station
en route for the Ural convict-mines, to see the crowds of wild-eyed strikers
surging around the mills of the new industrialism. His work at
Willenski’s office was easy; he had to superintend the translation of
English works into Russian and to give them final proof-reading. It was also
expected that he should make suggestions for new translations, and it was
over this branch of his work that, after a successful and enjoyable year, he
came to sudden grief. At his recommendation a certain English novel had been
translated, printed, published, and sent to the shops; it was selling quite
well when all at once the police authorities detected or pretended to detect
in it some thinly-veiled allusions to the private life of the Emperor.
Willenski was thus put in a most awkward position, since he supplied
text-books to the government schools and had a strictly orthodox reputation
to keep up; his only chance of escaping business ruin and perhaps personal
imprisonment was by laying the entire blame on his subordinate. As he told
A.J. quite frankly: “It just can’t be helped. They won’t do
anything to you, as you’re English. If you were Russian they’d
probably send you to Siberia—as it is, they can only cancel your
permit.”
So Willenski made a great show of dismissing with ignominy a subordinate
who had disgracefully let him down, and managed, by such strategy, to escape
with a severe warning so far as he himself was concerned. As for A.J., he
received a polite note from police headquarters informing him that he must
leave Russia within a week.
He felt this as a rather considerable blow, for in the first place he was
sorry to have brought so much trouble on Willenski, whom he had grown to
like; and besides, he had his own problems to solve. He did not wish to
return to England. He had no idea of anything that he could do if he did
return; he had no specialist qualifications except a knowledge of Russian,
which would be hardly as useful in London as was a knowledge of English in
Petersburg. Journalism was hopeless; he could realise now, over the
perspective of several years, what a complete failure he had been in Fleet
Street. Teaching, of which he had had some experience, would be impossible in
any good English school owing to his poor degree, while as for the other
professions, he neither inclined towards them nor had any hope that they
would incline towards him.
Beyond even this he had grown to like Petersburg. He had lived in it now
for over a year, had seen it in all its climatic moods; and now it was April
again and the sledge-roads on the frozen Neva would soon be closing for the
thaw. The prospect of summer had been alluring to him more than he had
realised; he had been looking forward to many a swim at Peterhof and many an
excursion into the flower-decked woods that fringed the city on so many
sides.
His permitted week expired on Easter Tuesday and on Easter Eve he strolled
rather sadly along the Nevski and watched the quaint and fascinating
ceremonial. Thousands of poor work-people had brought their Easter suppers to
be blest, and the priests were walking quickly amongst the crowds sprinkling
the holy water out of large buckets. The food was set out on glistening white
napkins on which stood also lighted tapers, and there was a fairy-like charm
in that panorama of flickering lights, vestmented priests, and rapt, upturned
faces. A.J. had seen it all the previous year, but it held additional
poignancy now that it seemed almost the last impression he would have of the
city. He was observing it with rather more than a sight-seer’s interest
when a well- dressed man in expensive furs, who happened to be pushed against
him by the pressure of the crowd, made some polite remark about the beauty of
the scene. A.J. answered appropriately and conversation followed. The man was
middle-aged and from his speech a person of culture. He was not, A.J. judged,
an Orthodox believer, but he showed a keen sympathy and understanding of the
religious motive, and was obviously as fascinated by the spectacle as A.J.
himself.
The two, indeed, soon found that they had a great many common ideas and
interests, and talked for perhaps a quarter of an hour before the stranger
said: “Excuse my curiosity, but I’m just wondering if
you’re Russian. It isn’t the accent that betrays
you—don’t think that—merely a way of looking at things that
one doesn’t often find in this country. At a venture I should guess you
French.”
“You’d be wrong,” answered A.J., smiling.
“I’m English.”
“Are you, by Jove?” responded the other, dropping the Russian
language with sudden fervour. “That’s odd, because so am I. My
name’s Stanfield.”
“Mine’s Fothergill.”
They talked now with even greater relish, and though Stanfield did not say
who he was, A.J. surmised that he had some connection with the British
Embassy. They, discussed all kinds of things during the whole four-mile walk
down the Nevski and back, after which Stanfield said: “Did you ever go
to midnight Mass at St. Isaac’s?” A.J. shook his head, and the
other continued: “You ought to—it’s really worth seeing. If
you’ve nothing else on this evening we might go together.”
They did, and the experience was one that A.J. was sure he would never
forget. They arrived at the church about eleven, when the building was
already thronged and in almost total darkness. Under the dome stood a
catafalque on which lay an open coffin containing a painted representation of
the dead Christ. Thousands of unlighted candles marked the form of the vast
interior, and Stanfield explained that they were all linked with threads of
gun-cotton. There was no light anywhere save from a few tall candles round
the bier.
Soon the members of the diplomatic corps arrived, gorgeously uniformed and
decorated, and took up their allotted positions, while black-robed priests
began the mournful singing of the Office for the Dead. Then followed an
elaborate ritual in which the priests pretended to search in vain for the
Body. Despite its touch of theatricalism the miming was deeply impressive.
Then sharply, on the first stroke of midnight, the marvellous climax arrived;
the chief priest cried loudly—’Christ is risen!’ while the
gun-cotton, being fired, touched into gradual flame the thousands of candles.
Simultaneously cannon crashed out from the neighbouring fortress, and the
choir, led by the clergy (no longer in black but in their richest cloth of
gold), broke out into the triumphant cadences of the Easter Hymn. The sudden
transference from gloom to dazzling brilliance and from silence to deafening
jubilation stirred emotions that were almost breath-taking.