Trapped in 'Black Russia' Part 12

_October._

_Darling ones:--_

There is the most careful avoidance of any official responsibility here in trying to find out where our pa.s.sports are, and who is to return them. We have already unraveled yards of red tape, and still there is no end. Of course, ever since Peter came he has followed a schedule of visits--one day to the English Consul; another day to the secret police, then to the Military Governor, the Civil Governor, the Chief of Staff, and back, in desperation, to the English Consul. There is an American Vice-Consul here, but he is wholly ineffectual, since he has not yet been officially received. His princ.i.p.al duty consists in distributing relief to the Polish refugees. Mr. Douglas, the English Consul, is our one hope, and he is untiring in his efforts to help us. If we ever get out, it will be due to him. The English Government is behind its representatives here in a way that the American State Department is not.

Partly, I suppose, this is because America has no treaty with Russia, on account of the Jew clause. At any rate, you might just as well be a Fiji Islander as an American, for all the consideration you get from officialdom.

Did I write you about the naturalized American Jew in the detention camp? He had come back to Galicia in the summer of 1914 to see his sister married. After the outbreak of the war, he was refused permission to leave the country, and when the wholesale clean-up started, he was deported with the others. The day I visited the detention camp he had just arrived, and, knowing we were Americans, he tried to secure our aid. He had managed to keep his American pa.s.sport, and brought it out to us to prove his naturalization and to strengthen his demand to be set free as an American citizen. The overseer, hearing his excited voice and seeing us examine a large sheet of paper, came up. He looked like a butcher, in his dirty-white linen coat, his legs planted apart, his hands fingering his short whip. The way in which he joined our group and made himself one with us, without so much as by your leave, was disturbing. The cool self-a.s.surance of even a petty Russian official is sinister. They are straw men to your reason, but hard facts if you b.u.mp up against them. Our curiosity flagged, conscious as we were all the time of his unblinking ferret-eyes on us, and we showed a certain alacrity to return the pa.s.sport to its rightful owner. When we were handing it back to the Jew, the overseer thrust out his hand and said, "Let me see it."

There was nothing for the Jew to do but hand it over. The overseer could not read a word of English, of course, but from the big red American seal he could recognize it as an official doc.u.ment.

Suddenly, he tore it in halves, and as the Jew tried to grab it out of his hands, he cuffed the Jew down, and continued deliberately to tear it into tiny bits.

"I am an American and that is my pa.s.sport," the Jew cried.

"That's what I think of an American pa.s.sport," the overseer replied, looking us over with incredible impudence as he walked away.

The rest of Russian officialdom must regard American rights in much the same way, since it is four months now that we have been detained.

I went to the headquarters of the secret police the other day with Mr.

Douglas. It is located in the opposite end of the town, down a quiet side street--an un.o.btrusive, one-storied brown house that gives the impression of trying to hide itself from people's notice. It is reached by a narrow, stone-flagged path, crowded in between two houses which block its view from the street. There are four windows in a row on the front facade, all with the curtains drawn. These four blind windows add to the secretive appearance. Over the front steps the yellowing leaves of a lime tree rustled in the wind and detached themselves one by one.

We rang the bell. While we waited, I was conscious of being watched, and, glancing up quickly, I saw the curtain at one of the windows fall back into place. The door opened a crack, and a white face with a long, thin nose, and horn-rimmed spectacles with smoky gla.s.s to hide the eyes, peered out at us furtively. Mr. Douglas handed the spy his card and the door was shut softly in our faces.

In about three minutes the door was opened again, and a gendarme in uniform ushered us into a long room thick with stale tobacco-smoke. He gave me a chair, and while we waited I looked about at the walls with the brightly colored portraits of the Czar and the Czarina and the royal family, and the ikon in one corner. "Give up all hope all ye who enter here."

The room was silent except for the scratch of pens on paper. The secret-service spies sat at long tables, writing laboriously, and smoking. They all wore civilian clothes, and I recognized most of them.

I had pa.s.sed them on the street or sat beside them in restaurants, and three had come with the chief to arrest us. I wondered what they were writing. Some one was being betrayed or ruined. That was how they lived.

I looked for the mark of their calling on them, but at first they appeared an ordinary crowd, pale, with a thick, unhealthy pallor, as though from an indoor life. Their suits were poor enough,--worn threadbare,--and their fingernails were dirty. Furtively they glanced up at me and examined me curiously, and then gave quick, frightened looks on either side to see if their comrades had observed their interest in me. What a mediocre, shabby crowd, with their low foreheads and dead-white skin and dirty linen, and, yes, the stamp on them that made them infamous! It was as though their profession affected them the way that living in a close, dark room would, stupefying and making them b.e.s.t.i.a.l.

And then the chief came in, accompanied by two spies with black portfolios under their arms. When he saw us, he grew white with anger.

He looked like a German, spurred and booted, with square head and jaw and steel-like eyes and compressed, cruel lips. He was the only well-dressed one in the crowd, but his livery was the same as theirs. He was their superior, that was all, and how I loathed him!

"He's angry because we were brought in here," Douglas whispered under his breath.

The chief turned his back on us.

The spies scribbled away furiously, their noses close to their paper, not daring to look up.

We were taken into another room, a small back room, bare except for a table and sofa and a tawdry ikon in the farthest corner. And there we waited fully fifteen minutes in absolute silence. How silent that house was, full of invisible horrors! The headquarters of the secret police--why shouldn't it be terrifying when you think of the men and women who have been brought here in secret, and their existence suddenly snapped off: secret arrest, secret trial, or no trial at all, and then a secret sending-off up north, out of the reach of the world! What strange abortions of life this Government brings forth! Is it curious that thinking men and women, who have lived apparently well-regulated lives, suddenly throw bombs at a minister in a railway station, or at an official as he drives to the palace in dress uniform, with jeweled decorations on his breast? I ran my hand over the faded sofa-covering, wondering who had sat there before me.

Suddenly the chief came into the room, closing the door carefully behind him. He was quite calm again.

"What do you want?" He looked at Douglas.

Douglas explained how anxious we were to get out of Russia, how we had insufficient money for cold weather, how my husband's business called for his immediate presence, and so forth, all of which we had gone over at least three times a week since my arrest, and all of which was a matter of complete indifference to the secret police. They had failed to find any proof of espionage, which was their charge against us, and my letter, their only evidence, had been pa.s.sed on and was snarled up somewhere in official red-tape. Now they washed their hands of me.

"We can do nothing. It is out of our hands." He was extremely courteous, speaking German for my benefit. "It is unfortunate that Frau Pierce should have written the letter. I was obliged to send it on to the General Staff. You should have a reply soon."

There was nothing more to be said. Douglas was conciliatory, almost ingratiating. My nerves gave way.

"A reply soon!" I burst out. "I'm sick of waiting. If we have the liberty of the city, surely there can't be anything very serious against us. It's an outrage keeping our pa.s.sports. I'm an American and I demand them." I was almost crying.

"You must demand them through your Amba.s.sador, meine Frau."

I knew that he knew we had been telegraphing him since our arrest and my impotence made me speechless with rage. Douglas took advantage of my condition to beat a hasty retreat.

As we were going through the doorway, the chief said carelessly, "By the way, how did you happen to find this house?"

"I have been here before," Douglas replied.

"Thank you. I was only curious."

I could feel the spies' eyes on my back as we went down the path.

"Mrs. Pierce--Mrs. Pierce, you must not lose your temper that way."

"I don't care!" I cried. "I had no way to express what I felt."

"I know," Douglas agreed thoughtfully.

We hailed a droshky and got in.

"I have a friend--a Pole," said Douglas. "For no reason except that he was a Pole, they made a _revision_ at his house, and among other things took away every calling card they found. They made a _revision_ then on each one of those people whose names they found. Though they found nothing incriminating in his possession, they make him report every day at the police headquarters. A year ago he was a giant in strength. Now he is a sick man. The uselessness of it. Nothing was found against him, and yet he is followed and watched. What are they driving at? They are wearing him to the bone with their persecution." He shrugged his shoulders and laughed suddenly. "Come, Mrs. Pierce, you can do nothing against them. But let me tell you what I will give you. It is a German helmet that a friend of mine brought from the Riga front. You can put it in your room and blow beans at it!"

_October._

"Pa.s.sports--pa.s.sports, who's got the pa.s.sports?" It's like a game--or _la recherche de l'absolu_. And it isn't as though you could hop into a cab and make the round of visits on the General Staff, Civil Governor, and the rest, all in one day, or even all in a week. Nothing so efficient and simple as that. What is an official without an anteroom?

As well imagine a soldier without a uniform. And the importance of the official is instantly seen by the crowd waiting on him. Soldiers and Jews and patient, un.o.btrusive women in black wait at police headquarters; generals and ladies of quality crowd the anteroom of the General Staff. For days the faces vary only slightly when you enter and take your accustomed place. Patient, dull faces that light with momentary expectation on the opening of a door, and relapse into depression and tragic immobility when the aide walks through the anteroom without admitting any one to the inner office.

I gained admittance to the Military Governor the other day. He is the successor of that over-cautious governor who moved all his household goods during the German advance, and was then relieved of office. His palace, set back from the street behind a tall iron fence, is guarded by soldiers with bayonets, and secret-service men. I laughed, recognizing my old friends the spies.

Upstairs, the Governor was just saying good-bye to Bobrinsky, former Governor of Galicia, and we stood to one side as they came out of an inner office, bowing and making compliments to each other. Gold braid and decorations! These days the military have their innings, to be sure!

I wonder how many stupid years of barrack-life go to make up one of these men? Or perhaps so much gold braid is paid for in other ways.

The Governor was an old man, carefully preserved. His uniform was padded, but his legs, thin and insecure, gave him away, and his standing collar, though it came up to his ears, failed to hide his scrawny neck where the flesh was caving in. He wore his gray beard trimmed to a point, and inside his beaklike nose was a quant.i.ty of grayish-yellow hair which made a very disagreeable impression on me. All the time I was speaking he examined his nails. When he raised his eyes finally, to reply, I noticed how lifeless and indifferent they were, and glazed by age. I could see the bones of his face move under the skin as he talked, especially two little round bones, like b.a.l.l.s, close to his ears.

"I have nothing to do with the case. It has been referred to the General Staff, I believe. You will have to wait for the course of events."

He turned his back, went over to the window, and began to play with a curtain-ta.s.sel. An aide bowed me to the door.

Outside, the anteroom was crowded with supplicants. It was his reception hour. The murmur of whispered conversations stopped when we appeared.

Every one rose, pressing forward to reach the aide. Some held out soiled bits of paper; others talked in loud, explanatory voices, as though hoping by sheer noise to pierce the crust of official attention. But the aide took no more notice than if they had been crowding sheep. He pushed through them and escorted me to the head of the staircase. Down I went, boiling with rage.

_Dearest Mother and Dad:--_

I am just back from the General Staff, where the mysterious rotation of the official wheel landed me unexpectedly into the very sanctum sanctorum of the Chief of the Staff, and to see him I had to wait only five hours with Mr. Douglas in the anteroom! Mr. Douglas has just left me to go to his club, exhausted, ready to devour pounds of Moscow sausages, so he said.