Trapped in 'Black Russia' Part 2

_Darlingest Mother and Dad:--_

Before dawn this morning I was wakened by a shuffling noise from the street. It was not soldiers marching. There was no rhythm to it. Marie and I went to the window and looked out.

Behind the dark points of the poplars, in the convent garden across the street, the sky was growing light. The birds were beginning to sing. The air was sweet and cool after the night. And down the hill was pa.s.sing a stream of people, guarded on either side by soldiers with bayonets. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes to look more closely, for there was something ominous in the snail's pace of the procession.

They were Jews, waxen-faced, their thin bodies bent with fatigue. Some had taken their shoes off, and limped along barefooted over the cobble-stones. Others would have fallen if their comrades had not held them up. Once or twice a man lurched out of the procession as though he was drunk or had suddenly gone blind, and a soldier cuffed him back into line again. Some of the women carried babies wrapped in their shawls.

There were older children dragging at the women's skirts. The men carried bundles knotted up in their clothes. They stumbled and pitched along, as if they had no control over their skinny bodies; as if after another step they would all suddenly collapse and fall down on their faces like a crowd of scarecrows with a strong wind behind them. Some had their eyes closed; others stared ahead with their faces like dirty gray masks, with huge bony noses and sunken eyes. The procession showed no sign of coming to an end. It crawled on and on, and a stench rose from it that poisoned the morning air. The sound of the shuffling feet seemed to fill the universe.

"Where are they going?"--I whispered to Marie.

"To the Detention Camp here. They come from Galicia, and Kiev is one of the stopping-places on their way to Siberia."

"Do they walk all the way here?"

"Usually. Let's shut the window and keep out the smell."

I went back to bed. I felt so safe, with Janchu sleeping in his crib in the corner. The creeping, submissive procession seemed a dream. It was incredible to think of only the wall of a house separating our security from those hundreds of fainting, persecuted Jews!

We are still here--waiting for our pa.s.sports to be returned. Of course no mail from you has been forwarded to me here, as Peter is hourly expecting me back. I am cut off from all I love most in the world. The Russian frontier takes on a new significance once you're inside it. I hope you don't forget me. Sometimes you seem millions of miles away--and then I look in my heart and find you there. I love you.

RUTH.

_July 25, 1915._

The Tchedesky Pension is full of Poles--refugees from Poland and the wooded Russian provinces.

Pan Tchedesky himself was formerly an enormously wealthy landowner near Kiev. He loves to tell how he drove through town behind six white horses. Gambling ruined him, and to pay his debts he sold one acre after another to the Jews, who cut down the timber and ruined the land. Of course, where there are no trees the rainfall is scarce. The crops dried up, and finally Pan Tchedesky and his wife and children were forced into the city. There remained enough of his former property to start a _pension_. The rooms are full of the remains of his splendor--heavy gilt mirrors, thick, flowered carpets, a Louis XVI set in the drawing-room, upholstered in faded blue brocade.

Pan Tchedesky is a memorial of his own life; a relic suggesting an earlier opulence. He is big-framed, but his flesh is shrunken, as though the wind of conceit were oozing out of him day by day. His cheeks and stomach hang flabbily. His blond mustache is getting thin and discloses his full, sensual lips. His hands are thick and soft, always stained with nicotine. He lives in constant terror of his wife, and all the pockets of his coats are burned full of holes from his hiding his cigarettes in them when he thinks he hears his wife coming. I have never seen her, but she is the invisible force that keeps the _pension_ running, and controls her husband by her knowledge of his past failures.

"My wife is an executive woman--very executive," he says, shaking his head sorrowfully.

The bills are made out by her. Occasionally he intercepts the maid carrying her back the money, and extracts enough to pay a small per cent of his I O U's, which allows him to continue gambling with his guests.

His moist, soft fingers tremble as he holds the cards, and he infuriates every one by his erratic bidding.

A guest slams his hand down on the table and calls Tchedesky a name.

Tchedesky's whitish, livid cheeks shake, and his lips open uncertainly.

But he must be discreet. He does not dare offend his guests, for he wants to play with them again, and he must not let his wife know that he is gambling. So he begs pardon in a whisper.

There is a pretty maid in the _pension_ called Antosha. She has light, frowzy hair, and a round, full figure. The other maids are jealous of her. When she dresses up to wait on the table at dinner at three o'clock, she wears a cheap pink silk waist and long gilt earrings, and two or three little rings with blue and red stones. Her wages are fifteen roubles a month. One day I saw Tchedesky kissing her on the neck. Very white and shaken, he came to me afterwards and begged me to say nothing about it to any one.

He has terrible scenes with his wife, who is hysterical and grows rigid.

He stays up with her all night and uses it as an excuse to get a morphine injection for his own nervousness next day. He is quite courteous and frankly loves women and food and money. I feel as though, if I poked my finger into him, he would burst like a rotten potato.

There is the Morowski family from near Cracow. Pan Morowski's brother is in the Austrian Chamber of Deputies, but he and his family are Russian subjects. They have been here in Kiev for some months now. For seven days he and his eldest daughter remained while the Russians and Austrians fought for their farm. The rest of the family had been sent into Kiev, but these two had hoped that by staying they might preserve their farm from being plundered and burned. The Austrians had sacked their neighbors' houses. The Austrian officers' wives had followed in the wake of the army and had taken the linen from the closets, and the ball-gowns, and the silver--even the pictures off the walls.

Lovely weather it was. The girl said you would hardly realize there was war, sometimes. The gardener would go out and straighten the trampled flowers. The carts of wounded would pa.s.s regularly, stopping occasionally for water or tea. They would say the fighting had pa.s.sed on. And then, suddenly, the crack and boom would approach again, shaking the house walls--the little uncurling puffs of smoke against the blue sky--the gray-blue uniformed Austrians hurrying past in retreat. No carts of wounded any more. There was too much hurry to bother about the wounded.

Russians in possession again, and Russian instead of Austrian officers quartered at their house. How much more polite the Russians were--so much more gallant and kind-hearted! They didn't treat you as though you were a servant--"Do this. Do that." They brought some of their wounded to the farm, and Miss Morowski helped nurse them.

But at last the father and daughter had been obliged to leave with the Russians. How furious the Russians had been--so depressed and discouraged when the order came to retreat. There had been no fighting round there for several days, and suddenly the news came that the whole army was retreating. Why? They said there was no ammunition. So the father and daughter left their property in the care of the gardener and his wife, who were too old to move. How terrible it had been to abandon this ground that so many Russians had died to win! No ammunition.

Waste--mismanagement--graft.

Those in Petrograd should think more of their country and less of their own pockets. The unquestioning courage of the simple Russian soldiers!

Every one ready to die--and yet nothing to back them up. It was disheartening.

"The Russians gave us a place in a cart, and we left in utter confusion--soldiers, motor-cars, cattle, wounded, with the Austrian cannon rumbling behind us."

"Were you frightened?" I asked. We were speaking French together.

"Not so frightened as sad. I was leaving my home. All my life I had spent there excepting for a few weeks in the winter when mother used to take us to Cracow for the b.a.l.l.s. I hated to leave my beautiful party dresses hanging up in the closets. I know some Austrian woman will wear them. And I can't bear to think of our house burned! We have had such jolly times there, hunting and riding and visiting the neighbors. You don't know life on a Polish estate, do you? I can tell you there is nothing so charming in the world."

Pan Morowski is a handsome, full-blooded man, and plays bridge all day either in the _pension_ drawing-room or at the club.

His wife is small and nervous, and you can see that her main object in life is to marry off her daughters well. She has three daughters, pretty, fresh girls, who are fond of reading, and perfectly willing to read only what their brothers permit them. Every day I run across one or two of them in the circulating library in the town, and always try to get them to take out a forbidden book. They are convinced that Bourget has sounded the depths of feminine psychology. "Isn't it mean!" they cry. "If only our brothers would let us read more of his wonderful books!"

Sometimes, in the evening, we sit out on the balcony, and the Morowski boys come in to talk to us.

"Aren't you ashamed to treat your sisters in this Oriental way?" I ask.

"The less they know till after they've married, the better for them. A young girl should be pure in every thought." And then they begin to make love to us.

There are two brothers who have taken refuge in the Tchedesky _pension_, with a collection of servants. Their house was burned under their eyes, and their property is now in the Austrians' hands. The eldest brother, Count S----, is very handsome and aristocratic, with a cherished gray mustache carefully twisted upward, and soft, brown eyes, which he uses with advantage. Evidently the Romantic poets influenced his youth, and he has found the melancholy Byronic traditions the most effective for his ends, since he continues the att.i.tude.

"He is very sad," his brother whispers a dozen times a day. "Of course his experiences these past months have been frightful for one of his nature. I am not so sensitive. But _he_ has always been this way.

Sometimes I'm afraid. Our other brother died insane."

Count S---- affects to believe that the Germans can do anything.

"They are devils! What can we do against them?" he cries at dinner, combing his mustache with the little tortoise-sh.e.l.l comb he carries in his vest.

He never forgets his soda tablets after eating.

His younger brother is round and red-faced, with twinkly blue eyes. He limps, and follows his elder brother round like a faithful dog. The slightest thing amuses him. Indeed, he laughs at nothing at all. He kept the books on his brother's estates and he brought them with him in his flight. They are his pride and joy. Sometimes he brings them into the drawing-room after supper, with photographs of the property. There are pictures of boar hunts, and huntsmen on horseback, with wolf-hounds in the snow, and the tenants merry-making and the house and different sections of the property, and the horses and dogs and cattle. I look at them night after night. They love to live over again their life in telling me about it.

Among the servants with the S---- brothers is an old woman, a kindly, slack one, who rarely goes out, but observes the pa.s.sing life from her windows. She wears a short, loose wrapper and petticoat, and scuffs about in list slippers.

Then there is a young girl with shy eyes and quiet, womanlike actions.

We often see her peeking through a crack in the door when Janchu is naughty.

And then there is Sigmund, a sly, goody-goody child of six or seven, whom the old woman treats like a son, and whom the eldest S---- brother has adopted as his heir. He plays with Janchu. The brothers adore him and take him to Koupietsky Park, and watch him when he plays in the _pension_ garden. We have heard that he is Count S----'s illegitimate child, and that the old woman is his mother. It seems quite probable when you think of the life on a big Polish estate--the loneliness, etc.

These three people live together in one room. The samovar is always boiling and some one is always drinking tea there. The brothers share an adjoining room, but they are usually with those in there, who const.i.tute all that remains of their former habits.

Pan A---- lives in the _pension_, too. I am told that he is typical of a certain kind of Pole. He is a turfman, with carefully brushed side-whiskers dyed coal-black, and hawk-like eyes. He wears check suits, and cravats with a little diamond horse-pin. His legs are bowed like a jockey's. He was the overseer of a big Polish estate and has made a fortune by cards and horses. His stable is famous. He has raced from Petrograd to London. Now, of course, his horses have been requisitioned, and he lives by his cards. Cards are a serious business to him. He will not play in a room where he is apt to be interrupted. Occasionally, his wife, a hard-faced woman with tight lips, comes to the _pension_, between the visits she makes to friends in the country. Pan A---- pays no attention to her except to treat her with an exaggerated politeness at table; and she, on her side, concentrates on the young men in the _pension_. After dinner he always hands her a cigarette first, out of his ma.s.sive gold case, encrusted with arms and monograms and jewels.

"It's curious, is it not?" he says, handing me the case. "My friends have put on their arms and monograms and mounted the jewels as souvenirs."