Out there in the silver twilight of the white night she lay, a forest of flaming church steeples and giant factory chimneys, rising vaguely from the marshes. I pressed my face closer to the dust-crusted windowpane and searched the flying landscape.
There on the edge of the East she waited for us, strange, mysterious, inscrutable, compelling—a candle drawing us on from the ends of the earth like so many fluttering moths.
Twelve long, hot, dusty days the Trans-Siberian Express had been crawling toward her,—crawling like a snake across flower-strewn steppe and velvet forest,—the one unclean thing upon this new-born world of spring.
I glanced at my wrist-watch—it was twenty minutes past two on a morning in early June of the year 1917. Here we were, despite war and revolution, peeping into Peter’s “Window” only four hours behind schedule.
Involuntarily I breathed a tiny sigh of disappointment. Nothing, nothing, had happened. Even the dreary, desolate Siberian wastes had failed to live up to their promise. Six thousand versts of emerald meadows, cut with shimmering china-blue waterways, stretched behind us. Six thousand versts of meadows, covered with a mist of wild flowers—pink, mauve, and flaming yellow—and broken frequently with deep woods, where silver birches played like sunshine against the shadowed background of dusky pines—that was Siberia.
At every log station, with its red flags and its row of poplars, a crowd of front-bound soldiers, in worn, dun-colored uniforms, tried to board the train, only to settle peacefully back to more interminable hours of waiting when the Committee of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, traveling with us, had explained the necessity.
Occasionally in the night we were suddenly awakened, when the door of our compartment was thrown open by a guard searching for an escaped Austrian prisoner. Otherwise, the monotony of our journey had remained unbroken.
Well, it was done. Ten minutes more, and Petrograd would open the door of a new world to us. I glanced down the car at a row of passionate faces flattened against the windows, while hungry eyes drank deep of once familiar scenes. They were home-bound exiles, these companions of mine, going back to a land whose door had long been closed in their faces. Home! Every click of the wheels carried me farther and farther away from that scrap of earth on the other side of the world which I called home.
My mind wandered back to that sunny day, two months before, when through a mist of tears I had watched the hills of California disappear behind the Golden Gate. How blithely I had come away! Blithely, because I knew that mine was a land where the latch-string was always out, and I could go back again at a moment’s choosing.
I tried to think what it must be to be coming home to the land of the bolted door, to the land of the black scowl—the land that had suddenly thrown down its bars and turned a friendly, smiling face and open arms toward the lonely outcasts.
My eyes wandered to the vestibule, where a Siberian soldier sat upon his kit-bag, a tin can with a bunch of dead lilies-of-the-valley held tightly in his two hands. For ten days and ten nights he had sat there, his big, round, brown eyes looking out across the great spaces, resignation and the infinite patience of these people of the East and the North reflected in his face. Home for him was done up in that little bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, long since dead. Every day I had passed him on my way to the dining-car, and my body ached with vicarious weariness as I saw him uncomplainingly sitting and dreaming over the faded lilies. He and I, of all the passengers, were the only ones who were not going home.
My musings were suddenly cut short. The Trans-Siberian Express, train de luxe of the longest railroad in the world, was slipping quietly to its place beside a deserted platform. A clean-cut young Englishman, on his way to be married in Petrograd, adjusted his coat collar the final time, and patted his hat to see that it was placed at the proper angle. Then he put his head out of the window to receive the first welcoming smile of the sweetheart he had not seen for a year. He drew his head in again, surprise, pain, embarrassment mingled on his fine, boyish face. She was not there.
Farther down the aisle, Count Tolstoy, son of the great Tolstoy, returning from America, lifted his window and searched the vacant platform for the face of his wife. He, too, turned back disappointed. Petrograd was as unaware of us as though we had been so many ghosts flitting invisibly through the air. Petrograd was entirely engrossed in its own very important affairs. Even the station-master had failed to take cognizance of our coming. In the absence of porters, we trucked our own baggage; and we had to wake up the guard to unlock the door and let us through.
Outside, the big circle was flooded with the light of the white night. My eyes focused for a moment on Trubetskoy’s squat, heavy, powerful granite man on horseback, Alexander III,—symbol of departed Romanoffs, symbol of dead Russia,—then wandered about in dazed bewilderment.
The cobblestones were dotted with men and women gathered in groups and talking in high-pitched, excited voices, eyes blazing and arms waving: students, peasants, soldiers, workmen, pouring a torrent of words into the night.
“What is the matter? Is it another revolution?” I asked breathlessly.
“No,” some one answered, “nothing is happening. They are just talking. It has been like this ever since March.”
“But it’s the middle of the night,” I said. “It’s nearly morning. Something must be wrong.”
“They talk all day and all night, all the time,” my informant continued. “In the old days, you know, they were not allowed to talk, and now that the dam is broken, the flood of language never stops.”
One lone and dilapidated carriage, drawn by a bored and weary looking horse, with head framed in a high wooden collar, stood at the curb. A Russian came through the door, and shouted, apparently into the air, a single magic word: “Izvostchik!”
A perambulating feather-bed in voluminous folds of blue broadcloth detached itself from the nearest crowd, swept its broadcloth train majestically over the sidewalk, and mounted the box. The carriage rattled away, the linguistically accomplished Russian and all his bags stowed neatly within. I watched this achievement with undisguised admiration and envy, blankly wondering what I should do next.
A fellow traveler, a Swedish girl on her way home from Japan to be married to an English officer, joined me. Behind her waddled the stout and pleasing person of the Finnish missionary who with her “many luggages” had shared my compartment from Harbin.
We held a consultation. Here we were, all utterly alone at half-past two in the morning, in this great, strange city which talked on and on without even a glance in our direction. Our telegrams to friends were probably traveling in the mail-bags on the same train or coming along on next week’s express.
A young Russian officer came gallantly to the rescue.
“I telegraphed for a room—you ladies can have that,” he said; and, turning to me: “If you will stay and mind the luggage, we will go uptown and see about it.”
The last thing in the world I wanted to do at that moment was to stay and mind the luggage. The station was hot, close, and dirty. Soldiers—weary brown men in worn uniforms, unwashed and unshaven—asleep on their kit-bags or curled up on the floor in their overcoats, lay so thick that you had to pick your way carefully. I was tired of places that were close and dirty. I longed to be out in those strange, wide streets, so full of people with so many things to say that the days were not long enough. Politeness set a seal upon desire. My friends promised to be back in twenty minutes, so I returned to the stuffy waiting-room, and the odd assortment of bags and bundles for which I was to be responsible.
There was a clock on the wall, and the minute-hand slowly made its way around the dial. An hour passed—it was half-past three. Still no sign of the Russian gallant. The minute-hand began another journey.
Once for a few seconds I forgot the minute-hand. The waiter from the dining-car, who had grown more and more stepmotherly in the distribution of portions as the journey progressed, entered the room. He walked to the corner where half a dozen bundles of soiled table linen were stacked, and, glancing about to see that no one was looking, he swiftly untied them. From the center of each he took a fifty-pound sack of white flour. It was no longer difficult to explain the sparkling stones from the Ural Mountains appearing on the hands of the dining-car crew as the train pulled out of Vyatka, or difficult to believe the stories of the five-hundred-ruble game in progress in the dining-car of evenings. Flour in Petrograd was scarcer than Ural brilliants and far more highly priced.
At a quarter to five my friends returned. There was not a room to be had in Petrograd, they said. The Hotel Europe was crowded. At the France they were sleeping in the sitting-rooms. The Astoria, which had been the best hotel in town, was occupied by the military, and no civilians were allowed.
The Russian suggested that we stay where we were until the populace began to wake up,—about ten o’clock,—then consult our respective consuls. Nothing on earth could have induced me at that moment to spend five seconds longer in the fetid atmosphere of that station. Five hours was a prospect I refused even to contemplate.
The guard was once more asleep and the door locked. I made my way through a labyrinth of baggage-rooms to an opening on a side street. The same groups of men were still excitedly talking, and here and there along the curb a peasant woman, with a market-basket of hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, lemons, or sunflower seeds, offered her wares.
I paused at the corner and speculated as to which road to take. The Nevsky Prospect, famous as the Champs Elysées, the Strand, and Fifth Avenue, though I knew it not for itself at the moment, stretched wide before me in one direction. To my left was another street only slightly narrower, and flanked on either side by towering buildings, large enough to house a world of little people like myself. Surely, in all those great masses of wood and stucco and stone, there was some little corner where I could put my weary head. I walked in a daze, peering up at the strange painted signs. If it had been a overcoat, a cheese, or a pair of boots for which I had been searching, it would have been quite simple; for the little shops were profusely covered with frightful paintings of all these things, designed for people who, like myself, could not read.
Three blocks from the station I came upon a huge ornate gray building, rambling around three sides of a court. There was an air of elegance about the place, and on one of the doors was a small brass sign, which looked as though it might be designed for people who could read. I picked out the letters one by one, trying frantically to remember whether the English r was the Russian p or vice versa. The building had the look of a hotel. It might as easily have been a theater, or a palace, or the police-station, for all the intelligence those strange letters conveyed to me.