Nelka Part 5

General Oliver invited Mrs. Wadsworth to take the trip with him and she in turn asked Nelka to come along.

This was a most unusual, interesting and difficult trip, especially for women. It lasted six weeks. The first three weeks General Oliver took part in the trip with a whole squadron of cavalry. Then he left and the rest of the three weeks only a small party continued through the Navajo Indian Reservation to the Rainbow Bridge in Utah. This party consisted of only two officers, several enlisted men, one Indian guide, Nelka and her aunt. All on horseback and pack mules carrying supplies. They covered unmapped territory over the most rough and difficult terrain, which often was dangerous. Even one horse was lost when it fell over a cliff and had to be shot because of injuries. They slept on the ground, froze during the cold nights while the heat of the day was always around a hundred, and on one occasion reached 139 degrees. A great many very interesting pictures were taken during this trip. Nelka always remained under the spell of this trip and the beauty of the untouched wilderness, but at the same time had some unpleasant impressions of the awesome country. Also it lasted longer than she had expected and she was anxious to get home.

Only that year her aunt Martha had given Nelka a poodle puppy, Tibi, which Nelka left with her aunt Susie in Cazenovia. She was worried about the puppy all during her trip.

Incidentally, this Tibi played a very important, and sad role in the life of Nelka. The dog, because she was always with Nelka and because of this close relations.h.i.+p, developed a very high degree of understanding and companions.h.i.+p with Nelka. This mutual understanding resulted in a very deep attachment between Nelka and Tibi, and Nelka certainly developed a very unusual love for this Tibi, whom she always took with her back and forth between Europe and America and kept always with her--except on the occasions when she was obliged to leave her for short periods. I knew Tibi for she also had been left by Nelka with me and my mother in the country on one or two occasions when I took care of her.

Here are some of the impressions that Nelka gathered from this western trip and which she gave in her letters to her aunt Susie:

Utah 1910.

"The Navajo Mountains and the Natural Bridge were, to me, terrible. I can never give you a complete description of it, but, aside from the other difficulties and trials, it impressed one as the most G.o.dless place conceivable. I don't see how anyone can keep any religion in the canyon in which the bridge is--such a ma.s.s of turbulent, ruthless rock, all dark red--hopeless, shapeless chaos. It all looked just as if there had been a smash up yesterday. No beyond, no nothing, nothing alive, nothing dead, every step of the way almost impa.s.sable and the feeling that every minute more rock could come smas.h.i.+ng down.

On the way there Mr. Whiterill, our guide, fell over with his horse when it was impossible to keep balance. He got loose, the horse fell over backwards several times, broke its neck, slid down sheer rock and fell about 50 feet over a cliff, the sound was awful."

"Mr. Heidekooper and I went down to the bottom of the canyon and lay back on the rocks with our feet in a pool. I closed my eyes and tried to forget these crus.h.i.+ng walls."

"There was a question of moving the sleeping blankets to get out of a scorpion patch, but we finally stayed where we were. I refused to mount my horse firmly and flatly until we got out of the worst part of the canyon, so I walked 12 miles when I had to pick every step on sharp stones. On the way back, Pat's horse went head over heels down another steep place but was not killed. Still a few miles further my horse slipped going over a huge ma.s.s of rock as smooth as an egg and about the same shape and everyone thought he was about to be hurled to instant death, when by a miracle he screwed around, got himself up and caught his footing again. My mental agony had been so great that I had not a bodily sensation. I took my blanket, rolled up in it and went to sleep by some trees under some branches and a log. We came over the rocks where one misstep would have sent the horses to the bottom. No place even to spread his four feet before the next step.

My heart was in my mouth most of the time. I don't know what impression you might get from my letter. I have seen the most beautiful sunsets, but there are more essential elements than these to live in peace and the limits of what I can do now are very marked.

I am wound up to the last degree. There are lovely Indians here."

Kianis Canyon 1910.

"We arrived here in the rain; the pack train with the lunch miles behind and a waste of thistles to sit on, but it cleared up soon after and everything got settled. There are two very nice dogs along--Kobis and Terry. Terry belongs to Mr. S. and has his ears cut to the roots. I need not insist upon what I feel for both the dog and the man."

Canion de Ch.e.l.ley, August 1910.

"This country is too wonderful for words. It is the place--the only way to live. I wish you could see it and I wish you loved it as I do.

Won't you bring Tibi and the boys and stay here? Oh, Oh, there is nothing to say."

Gonado 1910.

"I get up at 5 and see the sunrise and generally take the things in before everything gets astir. We have breakfast at 6, 6:30 and start our marches at 7. It was so cold one night I got up at 4:30 and made up the camp fire. My face is dark brick and painful but I think I had too much cold cream fry and I have stopped. The heat of the sun is great. Wednesday we crossed the 'Painted Desert' which was even more beautiful than the canion and camped at a kind of oasis on a little lake and were able to have a swim--though the desert was full of rattle snakes and the lake full of lizards."

"I walked off and got lost almost 4 hours. They had the whole troop out looking for me, and the trumpeters blowing for over an hour.

There was no moon and I had decided to spend the night where I was by a cactus, when I saw a light in the dim distance and finally Captain McCoy found me. It gave me a vivid sense of how misleading the flatness of the desert can be. When Captain McCoy found me he could not see me ten feet away and I think it was chiefly the white dog he had with him that found me. I had had to take off both shoes and stockings about two hours before as the mud was so heavy I could not raise my feet and it was raining part of the time. Every place where the Indians live in their natural mud huts it is clean and inoffensive. As soon as there is a sign of a real house, or what you call civilization, there is dirt, smells, refuse heaps and flies--and of all the sights in my life, bar none, the washstand in Mr. Hubble's store, with wet newspaper, stagnant slop jar, dirty tooth brush, filthy basin, sloppy soap--all humming with flies--is the worst I have ever seen and the most stomach turning. There is some freak from Boston in a checkered suit and goggles who walks around with some ideas for Indian betterment. I think they have reached the highest pitch in the fact that they do not scalp him! I had coffee, oatmeal and bacon all out of one bowl. I drink water that looks like bean soup and never use a fork and a spoon at the same meal. Sand and cinders or charcoal flavor everything, and I have fished olives out of the sand where they had fallen and eaten them with perfect satisfaction. Materially this certainly is the way to live.

Spiritually some s.h.i.+fting might improve it."

Back from the trip and into civilization, Nelka again was restless and discontented with her surroundings. Again she longed for Europe and especially Russia.

Her little dog Tibi became of primary importance in Nelka's life.

Despite her love for animals, Nelka admits that up to that time she had no special attachment or deep affection for dogs. Dogs were just something you had around you; they were part of everyday life, but that was about all. But with Tibi, Nelka's affection for her grew and grew, and they became unusually attached to each other. Like all dogs who are constantly with a person, they develop a great maturity and intelligence. Tibi did just that. She was a very highly developed animal, as I remember her well.

The winter of 1910-1911 Nelka spent again with her aunt Martha in Was.h.i.+ngton. Her aunt had a large house and was in the social whirl of the capital. Dinners, b.a.l.l.s, the White House, the Emba.s.sies--but all this meant little to Nelka and she felt the futility of all that activity, its artificiality and uselessness. Irritated and longing for a change she once again returned to Russia, and once again went back to the Kaufman community.

Her feeling for dogs and animals in general was becoming more and more p.r.o.nounced--thanks in part to her close a.s.sociation with Tibi.

In one of her letters to her aunt Susie written in 1911, she writes:

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I do not love humanity in the ma.s.s. I don't admire it. I feel sorry for the unenlightened and suffering but I think there are only a few in the world who 'vindicate,' as Uncle Herbert says, their right to exist. If there was for one moment in my heart what I feel for dogs, cats, horses and animals in general, I would be a real sister of charity. It is a perfectly distinct expansion and impulse and a real longing to help and joy in it that I do not feel in the face of suffering humanity. You can explain it any way. If all these crippled numberless that I have seen all these days had been maimed dogs, I don't know what I would have done. There is something in human nature that is so contemptible and poor that I can't feel the same way."

St. Petersburg 1911.

"How can you keep your faith in humanity? I think it is all so weak and not beautiful, and life as it goes somehow such an outrageous fizzle. Why are there such beautiful things, conceptions, possibilities only to be ruined by fatal microbes this human nature puts into it? Life only in yearning; Death to crown realization; peace only in oblivion. What for? And even the power of renounciation has to be fought for."

She was working at that time in the Kaufman community but was to go to Montenegro for a hospital reorganization. This did not come about.

She wrote:

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I am undergoing the greatest disappointment at this moment. I was to be sent to Montenegro to establish a Red Cross sisterhood and overhaul the hospital, and to be given five sisters to take with me I as the head--so interesting--and in the part of the world which has always attracted me to the utmost, ever since I was in Sofia. And after it was all arranged and I was simply reveling in every detail, Baroness Ixkull decided that it was simply impossible to take Tibi."

St. Petersburg 1911.

"One doesn't love anything any more, religion, country, art. The only thing is to have one's interest outside of oneself--and to be very busy. I can hardly believe, at least I wonder, at myself being able to do so many things I dislike--getting up every day so early, no walks with Tibi, sleeping between five and six hours, often only four, and yet I enjoy everything--ice cream is a festival, a moment to sew a treat, and bed heaven."

"But oh, all these sick people--so depressing and gives one such an impression of superfluity of the human species. Everything, everything so beautiful except humanity--and not only man himself--dirty and unenchanting--but the instrument of hideousness all around."

Again Nelka was showing the restlessness because of the attachments to the two sides of the ocean--Russia and America--and the impossibility to satisfy entirely one or the other, or both. From Russia she wrote:

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I wish I could be in America and eliminate from my personal horizon the people and things which make me boil over in spite of myself.

Dear Poodie, I wish you could really know what I feel and mean. I think if in recent years you had been in contact with the peace and simplicity of Europe in general, you would see what makes me shrivel with most Americans, because I am not above and beyond it as you are.

America may stand for freedom, but it has an unimanc.i.p.ated soul and there is a perpetual affectation, a caution, a suspicion, a lack of independence that does simply petrify life and crush feeling. You may say it is a small world, I don't know, but it is everywhere I meet."

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I have at last decided that my life must remain unsettled, undecided; it is too late to settle it except by sheer will, and that is too stupid. Real ties exist in different centers--one must obey both; it is utterly indifferent to me what external aspect my life takes, because it is also too late."

(She was then 32 years old)

St. Petersburg 1911.

"I hope to be in America at intervals and often. You and Pats are more to me than anything else and I have the greatest love for Poodihaven (Cazenovia), but I cannot a.s.sociate with outsiders sufficiently to fill my life. I want to beat them all and I don't want to hear them talk."

At this time, I think, she was going through a very difficult period of uncertainty in her life, which is reflected in her letters written at that time:

"If I did not care for Americans and if I did not have a great deal of sentiment and a.s.sociations, ties and memories in America, it would be so easy to leave it alone and not think about it. But I know I am both. I know how strongly attached I am to both sides and I only deplore the difference among people in the world. But when I think of even those others that I care for, I know that we are strangers. My heart does not beat with any puritanical sentiment--so there. If I am attracted to some puritanical offspring--some representative of the progressing (?) new world, it is like being in love with a marble statue."

"I don't know why I write all this, but how impossible life is. I think it really is a most devilish arrangement. No peace except in utter renounciation. And must one struggle through a peppery sequence of years just to know this?"

"Baroness Ixkull is going to give me perfectly new sisters to train and I am going to make them march like pokers, copy every record each time they make a spot and count all the linen every two weeks. As they will not have been in any other ward, they cannot make any comparisons or complain."

"I know, Poodie, that you would like some things here very much--the simplicity of everything and the independence of people. I think it is only possible with a recognized aristocracy when people do not have to explain themselves and are established. I have met a few such nice people, of course to hardly know them, but one feels one knows them at once because there is a recognition of being of one world and one knows beforehand that one shares the same feelings towards most things. For instance, they may not know me personally but the fact that Papa was in the service, was Gentillomme de la Chambre (Court t.i.tle), was educated at the Lycee, defines a type, defines in a certain manner his daughter, if only externally. Then knowing that Mama was American, the whole thing is clear in a natural way. My wanting to be here is understood--my attachment to America is understood."

St. Petersburg 1911.

"My life here is so full in one sense that it seems much more than a few months since I was in America. Life seems very, very short in comparison with the wide conception of possibilities which gives the zest to youth. Everything seems so partial and the total is so hard to realize. To keep tranquility with the increase of perception and understanding means renounciation as far as I can see. It must be a great privilege to work and pursue one's greatest convictions--to act what one feels sure of--this is in many ways adjustment to circ.u.mstances. Please G.o.d that there may be some good in it."