THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. M. DELAFIELD (Illustrated Edition). E. M. Delafield
of a passenger-train negotiated a precipice by previously going full steam ahead and causing the train to jump the chasm. The trams too do something like that, but even so they have to make colossal detours, and every few days their route is, without any warning, altered, because the old route has become impassable.
In Leningrad there were hardly any cars. In Moscow there are a great many, and they all go hell-for-leather and make a point of sounding their horns only at the very last minute when the lives of the walking comrades positively hang by a thread.
In Moscow, as in Leningrad, people throng the streets. They keep on walking; they are like Felix the Cat. The Intourist guides, as usual, point out how purposeful they all are, how they walk with an object. One guide, more honest or less well-trained than the others, tells me that the housing shortage is very acute, and so perhaps it is more agreeable to spend one's free time in the street rather than in the home. A kind of Scylla or Charybdis.
These grim impressions dawn upon me little by little as I cross the Red Square, for perhaps the fourth time in twenty-four hours, to make another assault on the Metropole and Peter.
To my own unbounded astonishment, I am successful. There is a note from Peter. It has, I have no doubt, been there all along. It says that he is at the National Hotel. Have I got to cross the Red Square all over again? It is very beautiful, but I don't seem to care about crossing it again just yet.
I haven't got to. The National Hotel is only a few hundred yards from the Metropole.
If Peter and I were in London I should not run, like an excited hare, up four flights of stairs to his bedroom. Old friends as we are, I shouldn't scream aloud with joy at the sight of him, nor he at the sight of me. In Moscow, however, we do all these things. We behave, in a word, almost like two foreigners.
And we talk and we talk and we talk.
Our impressions of Soviet Russia, most fortunately, coincide. We have had identical experiences with fleas, guides, indiscreet indulgence in Russian bread, and the non-arrival of letters from home.
We offer each other soap, biscuits, Bromo, and soda-mints. It is almost like two Eastern potentates exchanging gifts, especially when Peter generously says that I shall have his clothes-brush when he leaves—I forgot to pack mine—and I, in return, gracefully offer to wash his pocket handkerchiefs when I do my own. And I stay and have supper with him—at about eleven p.m.—and at one o'clock in the morning cross the Red Square once more.
My bedroom window overlooks the river. I am pleased about it until I notice that a particularly zealous form of reconstruction is taking place on the bank, and that Comrades in vast numbers are operating a huge drill. They are a night-shift, and a kind of mieux de fa mort overtakes them at two in the morning, when they evolve a special series of noises, indicative of terrific energy. Then it all dies away and the next shift doesn't begin till seven o'clock.
II
Peter is under the auspices of an organization which takes an interest in literary tourists and the organization is very kind to him, and gives him theater tickets and special facilities and a guide all to himself. These benefits he shares with me.
I am secretly terrified of the guide, who is youngish and very tough and has a swivel eye. She has lived in the United States and says that she once hiked from Denver, Colorado, to California. It can't have been half as exhausting as hiking from one end of Moscow to the other, which is our daily achievement.
We visit museums and picture galleries and crèches and factories and schools and clinics. We see, at a rough estimate, a hundred thousand busts of Lenin and ninety thousand pictures of Stalin.
The guide has a curious habit of leading us briskly along over the cobbles, round such bits of reconstruction as lie in our way, for some time, and then abruptly stopping while she asks a passer-by the way to wherever she is taking us. This always turns out to be in some quite opposite direction to the one in which we are going. All is à refaire, and we turn round and begin all over again.
The result, not unnaturally, is that we always arrive late for our appointments.
"The Little Monster has no sense of time," says Peter—this being the endearing sobriquet by which he refers to the guide.
"And she evidently hasn't any bump of locality at all. Some people haven't," I say—having the best of reasons for knowing what I'm talking about.
Peter only replies, not unjustifiably, that to have no sense of time and no sense of direction seems to him a poor equipment with which to set up as a guide.
Sometimes we board a tram together. It is invariably bunged to the roof with pale, grimy, heavily built comrades, too tightly jammed together for strap-hanging to be necessary, or even possible. No one sits down. There are people sitting when one gets in, but I think it is because they have got wedged there and can't move.
On one occasion the Little Monster, startlingly and suddenly, says in my ear:
"A pregnant woman may go in the front part of the tram, where there is more room. It is a law."
I wonder whether she thinks I am going to make a fraudulent attempt to take advantage of this concession. But I don't. I remain where I am, leaning heavily on the shoulder of a man in a blouse, with somebody's portfolio digging into the small of my back, and an enormous female Comrade grasping my elbow with one hand and wiping the sweat off her face with the other.
I often think of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
The tram jerks and jolts and stops, and more people get in, and the Little Monster—who isn't more than five feet high—disappears from view altogether. This time I think of the House of Stone, in The Four Feathers and how those who fell down there never got up again. A mind well-stored with literary references is said to be a great comfort to the possessor. I think my references must be of the wrong kind.
Peter, who is a large young man and stands like the Rock of Gibraltar in the tram, is much more of a comfort to me than any number of literary references. He always knows when to get out, which I never do, and the guide seldom.
Getting out of the tram is a very tense and difficult business. Every inch of the way has to be fought for, and there is always a sporting chance that the tram will start again before the people in front of one will let one go through, or the people behind one have ceased to try to push past. I carry a bruise on one ankle for days, where one of the more impetuous Comrades gave me a vigorous kick, in order that I should get out of his way.
I ask Peter if he knew about the pregnant women going in the front of the tram, and he says Yes, but he doesn't see how they're to get there. Neither do I unless they confide their pretty secret to the conductor and he or she passes it on to all the comrades in the tram, and a way is cleared. (Like Charlotte Bronte when she went to a party, and everybody stood up and made way for her.)
"We might ask the Little Monster," Peter suggests. Any delicacy which either of us has ever possessed at home has long since left us. There are no inhibitions in Russia.
It is in a spirit of simple camaraderie that he and I and the Little Monster go together to a clinic for the welfare of mothers and babies—actually a most excellent institution, admirably organized—and are given much full and intelligent physiological information, with Lenin—aged three—looking benevolently down on us from the wall.
As there is practically no wall in Moscow from which I have not seen Lenin looking down—either as an infant or as an elderly man exhorting the workers (there is no intervening stage), I have ceased to notice him consciously; but on this occasion I prefer him to the other pictures with which the walls are covered.
I prefer him to the unwholesome-looking red and blue maps of the human organism. I prefer him to the things in bottles on a shelf. I prefer him, a thousand times, to the masterpiece which the woman doctor who is showing us round, has kept to the last.
"This tumor is one of the largest we have ever..." I say it is interesting—which I suppose it is, if I could bring myself to look at it, which I can't—and Peter says nothing. I