Читаем Byzantium Endures полностью

Being in the saloon and unable to join the occupants depressed me. I returned to my carriage, where an old lady dressed all in black took a fancy to me. She began to tell me how she was the widow of a certain general killed in the war with Japan.

She spoke in the slightly Frenchified accents of St Petersburg. I was soon able to catch the sound and reproduce it. She decided I was well-educated, a well-bred boy. She shared some of her chocolates with me. She asked where I was bound. I told her Kiev. I was to go on almost immediately to St Petersburg. She said I should come to see her and wrote down an address in a small notebook. The other travellers in the carriage were a high-ranking military man who said nothing, studied maps, read The Voice of Russia, and sometimes left to go to the saloon-car to smoke a cigar; a theatrical, rather haughty, young woman who claimed she acted in Moscow and was soon to tour the provinces. She smelled of the same perfume as Mademoiselle Cornelius, whom I still remembered with great pleasure. This actress had none of that lady’s character; she was a typical, neurotic Moscow ‘beauty’. I doubt if she was an actress at all. Probably a general’s mistress, travelling separately to avoid scandal. Her brocades and furs had the look of trophies rather than familiar clothing.

The snow did not stop. It became dark quite soon and the gas was lit in the carriages. So comfortable and warm was the train that I was more and more reluctant to have the journey end. I hoped for delays on the line, some minor disaster which would extend the adventure for another day at least. Lunch came and went, and dinner. I talked to my old lady, telling her of my ideas, my plans, my expectations of ‘doing good for Russia’. She said I would love Peter, ‘It is really Russian there, not like this awful province. This is a land of Jews. They are impossible to avoid.’

Feelingly, I agreed with her.

‘But in St Petersburg,’ she said, ‘there you will find the embodiment of all that is best in Russia.’

The actress claimed that Moscow was ‘more Russian’ than the capital. There were too many Europeans in Peter. The place had been founded by a Tsar who had looked to Germany for inspiration. See, she said, where that had got us. Attacked by the very people we had courted, to whom we had shown hospitality. Half the Royal Family was German. They were the scourge of the Earth. She wished she could remain in Moscow all her life. No socialists there. No nihilists. No assassins. There were no Jews and no Germans, either. It was a true Slav city, not some imitation Berlin or Paris.

The old lady listened with amusement. Her husband had been just such a radical. A Pan-Slavist who wished to turn his back on Western Europe. ‘But Western Europe will not turn her back on us, my dear.’

‘No, indeed!’ said the actress. ‘She comes towards us with hands extended. With a knife in one fist and a sword in the other. We should have expelled all foreigners years ago. Including those who call themselves Russians.’ This was a reference to our ‘German Empress’ and a number of nobles in St Petersburg who were of German origin and still had German names. Even some of the generals at the front and the ministers in the Duma were of recent German ancestry, including the prime minister. There were plenty of rumours of German traitors working against Russia from within: a tendency, especially in Moscow, to put the blame for our military failures on corruption in the capital: a suspicion that the Court had no real interest in the progress of the War, that the Tsar might be inclined to negotiate a peace at any time. I make this clear to show how bad morale was. Russia had never started a major war. We had never wanted to go to war; Germany had attacked us. As a result of this, almost the whole of the civilised world was now in arms. Although I felt more patriotic than many at this time, I could understand why they were so aggrieved. It could be argued to this day that Germany, who gave the world Karl Marx, prepared the ground in which Marx’s pernicious doctrines could flourish. Many believe the German race the creator of the terror and chaos which is our twentieth century. I do not agree with this depiction. The Germans were very kind to me in the thirties, by and large.