A “master”—now one of the most dangerous words to use in Russia, because it is the most natural!
“Do you mean—a ‘Tsar’?” I queried, hesitatingly. But Uncle Egor merely shrugged his shoulders. He had said his say.
That night I slept on the rickety wooden bedstead side by side with Uncle Egor and covered with the same coverlets and quilts. There were long whisperings between him and my Finnish guide before we retired, for early in the morning we were going on to Petrograd, and arrangements had to be made to drive to the nearest station by devious routes so as not to be stopped on the way. I was nearly asleep when Uncle Egor clambered in by my side.
It was long before dawn when we rose and prepared to set out. Uncle Egor, one of his daughters, the Finn, and I made up the party. To evade patrols we drove by byways and across fields. Uncle Egor was taking his daughter to try to smuggle a can of milk into the city. What he himself was going to do I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.
We arrived at the station at four in the morning, and here I parted from my Finnish guide, who was returning with the sledge. He positively refused to take any reward for the service he had rendered me.
Our train, the only train of the day, was due to start at six, and the station and platform were as busy as a hive. While the young woman got tickets we tried to find places. Every coach appeared to be packed, and the platform was teeming with peasants with sacks on their backs and milk-cans concealed in bundles in their hands. Failing to get into a boxcar or third-class coach, where with the crush it would have been warmer, we tried the only second-class car on the train, which we found was not yet full up. Eventually there were fourteen people in the compartment intended for six.
At length the train rumbled off. Wedged in tight between Uncle Egor and his daughter, I sat and shivered. The train was searched by Red guards on the journey, and it was found that quite half the supposed cans of “milk” carried by the peasants were packed to the brim with matches! There was no end of a tumult as the guards came round. Some people jumped out of the windows and fled. Others hid under the train till the compartment had been searched and were then hauled in again through the windows by willing hands from inside.
The Bolshevist Government, you see, had laid a special embargo on matches, as on many things of public use, with the result that they were almost unobtainable. So that when you did get them from “sackmen,” as the people were called who smuggled provisions into the city in bags and sacks, instead of paying one copeck per box, which was what they used to cost, you paid just one thousand times as much—ten roubles, and felt glad at that. The design, of course, was to share such necessities equally amongst the populace, but the Soviet departments were so incompetent and corrupt, and so strangled by bureaucratic administration, that nothing, or very little, ever got distributed, and the persecuted “sackmen” were hailed as benefactors.
At one moment during the journey one of the other peasants bent over to Uncle Egor, and, glancing at me, asked him in an undertone “if his companion had come from ‘over there’ ”—which meant over the frontier; in reply to which Uncle Egor gave him a tremendous kick, which explained everything, and no more was said.
I had one nasty moment when the train was searched. Despite mishaps I still clung to the little parcel of shoes for Maria. As they were tied round my waist I did not lose them even when I tumbled into the stream. Some people got up when the searchers came, but having no milk-can or sack I moved into the corner and sat on the parcel. When the soldier told me to shift along to let him see what was in the corner I sat the shoes along with me, so that both places looked empty. It was lucky he did not make me get up, for new shoes could only have come from “over there.”
At nine we reached the straggling buildings of the Okhta Station, the scene of my flight with Mrs. Marsh in December, and there I saw a most extraordinary spectacle—the attempted prevention of sackmen from entering the city.
As we stood pushing in the corridor waiting for the crowd in front of us to get out, I heard Uncle Egor and his daughter conversing rapidly in low tones.
“I’ll make a dash for it,” whispered his daughter.
“Good,” he replied in the same tone. “We’ll meet at Nadya’s.”
The moment we stepped on to the platform Uncle Egor’s daughter vanished under the railroad coach, and that was the last I ever saw of her. At each end of the platform stood a string of armed guards, waiting for the onslaught of passengers, who flew in all directions as they surged from the train. How shall I describe the scene of unutterable pandemonium that ensued! The soldiers dashed at the fleeing crowds, brutally seized single individuals, generally women, who were least able to defend themselves, and tore the sacks off their backs and out of their arms. Shrill cries, shrieks, and howls rent the air. Between the coaches and on the outskirts of the station you could see lucky ones who had escaped gesticulating frantically to unlucky
