The Greatest Works of E. M. Delafield (Illustrated Edition). E. M. Delafield

      The Provincial Lady in Moscow

       Table of Contents

      Tourists in all the Intourist hotels in all the principal towns of Soviet Russia exchange the same fragments of conversation.

      "Have you done Moscow yet?"

      "No, I'm going there to-morrow night. I came in by Odessa. I've done Kharkov and Rostov and Kiev."

      "Ah, then you're going out by sea from Leningrad. Unless you're flying from Moscow?"

      "No, I shall be going by sea. Have you done Odessa and the south?"

      "No, I've done the Caucasus. You should do the Caucasus. What is Odessa like?"

      "Odessa is delightful. The hotel at Rostov was good except for the cockroaches. The food was bad at Kharkov.'

      "Ah, there was a Frenchman here yesterday who had just come from Kharkov, and he said the food wasn't good."

      And at this gratifying coincidence everybody looks pleased.

      Sometimes it is a little like the survivors of a shipwreck meeting on a fragment of desert island.

      "Are you still all right for soap?"

      "Yes, I shall just last out till Kiev. What about you?"

      "Oh, I'm all right. I brought a great deal. But my ink is pretty low."

      "There's an American lady who can let you have ink. She gave me some in Leningrad and she's coming on here. She had safety-pins too."

      "How marvelous! Perhaps she'd like some soda-mints or aspirins. I have heaps of those."

      "I dare say. Or Keatings. Or perhaps you could lend her a book."

      People part at Moscow and meet again, sometimes most unwillingly, at Yalta. They ask one another how they have been getting on, and if they met the French astronomer and the English journalist and the noisy young Finns with the portable gramophone. Those who met at Leningrad, and were in the same train coming from Moscow, and parted gracefully at Tillls only to be once more confronted with one another at Gorki, are bound by some unwritten law to sit at the same table for meals. At first, I often wondered whether they really like to do this, or if they just feel obliged to do it for old sake's sake. Later on I fall under the same spell, and the question is answered.

      In Moscow I meet Peter—but not as one meets stray French astronomers and English journalists and gramophone-playing Finns. It is a meeting that was arranged—incredibly, as it now seems—in Bloomsbury, some four months ago. I have had the name of his hotel and the dates when he expects to be there in my diary ever since I left England.

      His dates have been altered—so have mine—all knowledge of him is denied at the Metropole Hotel, where he ought to be—and Intourist tells me: (1) That there are no letters for me and no messages, (2) That if there were I couldn't have them because it is a Day of Rest.

      It is anything but a Day of Rest for me, whatever it may be for Moscow.

      I have traveled all night, and walked about looking for Peter half the day, and I have not yet got used to having my luncheon between three and five o'clock in the afternoon, and the hotel to which I have been sent is on one side of the Red Square—which no trams traverse—and everything else in Moscow is on the other side.

      All the same, the Red Square is very beautiful, and they are quite right to allow no trams there. In the evening I walk across it once more, and admire the huge walls and towers of the Kremlin and the long row of fir-trees against the gray stone and the pure, beautiful lines of the Lenin Mausoleum, perfectly placed before the great fort, and the strange, Byzantine domes and whorls and minarets of the ancient Basil Cathedral.

      Sentinels with fixed bayonets guard the Mausoleum, and there are long, long queues of people—they must number hundreds—waiting to pass inside. From the top of the Kremlin flutters the red flag, and from somewhere beneath it a light strikes upward, so that the brave scarlet color shows as plainly against the clear evening sky as it did in the morning sunlight.

      One walks across the Red Square more safely than anywhere else in Moscow. Not as regards one's feminine virtue (that, I think, would be safe anywhere in Russia, were I a quarter of my present age and as alluring as Venus), but simply as regards life and limb.

      Everywhere else the traffic is shattering, and the comrades, running for their lives in every direction—as well they may—are a menace. So are the trams, which bucket along on uneven rails and draw up with a slow jerk which gives a misleading impression altogether. One feels that here are deliberate, rather uncertain trams, that may very likely require a good strong push from somebody before starting at all.

      And on the contrary, hardly have they stopped and hardly have hundreds of Comrades fought their way out of them than a bell clangs and they start off again, leaving hundreds more biting and kicking and pushing their way inside, hanging on the step and very often being violently shoved off it again.

      The tram-question—one of the less picturesque and endearing characteristics of the new regime—is complicated in Moscow by the reconstructions that are going on everywhere. Whole streets are lying more or less inside-out, caverns yawn in the middle of roads, scaffolding suddenly blocks up pavements, and irrelevant-seeming pyramids of earth and loose stones and rubble rise up in quite unexpected places.

      The trams do their gallant best, and often remind me of the story of Jules Verne in which the driver of a passenger-train negotiated a precipice by previously going