In such a place any complicated nursing was out of the question. The main duties of those who attempted to relieve the sick consisted in bringing warm clothes and covering to those who were in rags and shivering; soup to those who were faint and exhausted, and water to those who were crying for it; and during the first few days at San Stefano all the sick were crying for water, and crying for it all day and all night long. You could not go into any of the rooms without hearing a piteous chorus of “Doctor Effendi, Doctor Bey, sou, sou” (sou is the Turkish for water). Luckily the water supply was good. There was a clean spring not far from the school, and water mixed with disinfectant could be given to the sick. The sick and the well at first were crowded together absolutely indiscriminately. A man who had nothing the matter with him besides hunger and faintness would be next to a man who was already rigid and turning grey in the last comatose stage of cholera.

During the first week of this desperate state of things Miss Alt and Madame Schneider worked like slaves. They spent the whole day, and very often the whole night, in bringing clothes to the ragged, food to the hungry, and water to the thirsty. Mr. Frew managed the whole commissariat and the food supply, and he managed it with positive genius. He smoothed over difficulties, he razed obstacles, and in all the creaking joints of the difficult machinery he poured the inestimable oil of his cheerfulness, his good-humour, and his kindness. Major Ford acted with an equal energy in taking over the medical side of the school and in sorting from the heaped-up sick those who were less ill, and separating them from those who were dangerously ill; and in this task he had the help of Mr. Philip. This sounds a simple thing to say. It was in practice and in fact incredibly difficult. During the first days there were scarcely any orderlies at all and few soldiers, and it was a desperately slow and difficult task to get people carried from one place to another. One afternoon, which I shall never forget as long as I live, Major Ford undertook in one of the crowded rooms to shift temporarily all the sick from one side of the room to the other side of it, and while they were there to lay down a clean piece of oilcloth. This was immensely difficult. The patients, of course, were unwilling to move. First of all it had to be explained to them that the thing was not a game, and that it would be to their ultimate advantage; and then they had to be bribed from one side of the room to the other with baits of lemons and cigarettes. Nevertheless, Major Ford managed to do it and get down a clean piece of oilcloth. When one had spent the whole day in this place, and one had seen people like Miss Alt, Madame Schneider, Major Ford, and Mr. Frew working like slaves from morning till night, one still had the feeling nothing had been done at all compared with what remained undone, so overwhelming were the odds. And yet at the end of one week there was a vast change for the better in the whole situation.

Great as was the distress of the wretched victims, they were sublime in their resignation. They consented, like Job, in what was worse than dust and ashes, to the working of the Divine will. They most of them had military water-bottles; they used to implore to have these bottles filled; and when they were filled—thirsty as they were—they would not drink all the water, but they kept a little back in order to perform the ablutions which the Mohammedan religion ordains should accompany the prayers of the faithful. Even in their agony the Turks never lost one particle of their dignity, and never for one moment forgot their perfect manners. They died as they lived—like the Nature’s noblemen they are—always acknowledging every assistance; and when they refused a gift or an offer they put into the refusal the graciousness of an acceptance.

Only those who have been to Turkey can have any idea of the politeness, the innate politesse du cœur, of the Turk. One day when I was coming back from San Stefano on board a Turkish Government launch, and together with an English officer I was talking to the Turkish naval officer who was in command of the launch, the Englishman offered a cigarette to the Turkish officer. He accepted it and lit it. The Englishman then offered one to the officer’s younger brother, who was there also. “He does not smoke,” said the officer. Then he added, after a pause, “I do not either.” “He has lit and smoked the cigarette so as not to offend me,” said the Englishman aside to me. This is typical of the kind of politeness the Turks show. Equally polite were the soldiers who were dying of a horrible disease amidst awful conditions. They never forgot their manners. They were childlike and infinitely pathetic in their wants. One man in a tent where some of the convalescent were assembled cried out in Turkish his need—which was interpreted to me by a Greek. He wanted a candle, by which a man, he said, might tell stories to the others; for, he added, it was impossible for a story-teller to tell stories in the dark; the audience could not see his face. There was no candle in the place, but I am not ashamed to say that I stole a small lamp and gave it to this man to afford illumination to that story-telling. Another man wanted a lemon. There were then no lemons. The man produced a five-piastre piece (a franc, nearly a shilling). This was a large fortune to him, but he offered it to me if I could get him a lemon. One soldier refused either to eat or to drink. He would not touch either soup or milk or water or sour milk, which was the favourite dish of the soldiers there, and which, being a national dish of Turkey, could be supplied to them in great quantities. He kept on reiterating one word. It turned out to mean prune soup. He was hankering after prune soup. He wanted prune soup and nothing else. Another man wanted a pencil above all things, which was duly given him.

The gratitude of these poor people to anyone who did any little thing for them was immense. “Allah will restore to you everything you have done for us a hundredfold,” they would say. Or again: “You are more than a doctor to us; you are a friend.” One day Mr. Philip brought some flowers to the sick soldiers. Their delight knew no bounds. The Turks love flowers. They treasured them. They even sacrificed their water-bottles—and every drop of water was precious to them—to keep the flowers fresh a little longer.

The curious resignation of the Turkish character used often to be manifest in a striking way, in little matters. Here is an instance which struck me. When lemons or cigarettes, or indeed anything else, were distributed to the patients, one cigarette or one lemon, as the case might be, was given to each man all round the room. Sometimes a patient would ask for two, and his demand used to arouse the indignation of his fellow-patients, which they often expressed in violent terms. Nevertheless, he would persist in his demand, and would keep on saying: “Give me two, Doctor, give me two”; and finally one of the Turkish orderlies present would nod his head and say: “Yes, give him two”; and then he would be given two, and the other patients, instead of grumbling, would acquiesce in the fait accompli and say: “Yes, yes, give him two.” It was curious that they never dreamt of all of them asking for two of any one thing; but the importunate were acknowledged to be privileged, if they were sufficiently importunate. One morning, when lemons were being distributed to the soldiers, each man receiving a lemon apiece, one, who like the rest wore a fez, said in a whisper to the distributor: “δῶσέ μοι δύο εἶμαι Χριστιανός” (“Give me two. I am a Christian”). There were several Greeks among the sick, and I regret to say that when they were given shirts they frequently sold them to their neighbours, and then appeared naked the next day and asked for another.

Miss Alt’s plan was to give to all who asked—the undeserving as well as the deserving—and the plan worked out quite well in the long run, for, as she said, they were none of them too well off.

After the first few days the Turkish medical authorities took steps in the matter of the Greek school. During the first week of the work there, a British unit of the Turkish Red Crescent arrived from England under the sound direction of Dr. Baines, and a further recruit joined the helpers in the person of Lady Westmacott, who brought with her an energetic, clever and untiring Russian doctor. Although it was impossible to persuade any of the owners of the houses at San Stefano to allow them to be used as hospitals, a house was found for Dr. Baines’ unit. He soon set up a lot of tents, withdrew from the overcrowded school a number of the patients, and was able to do excellent work. But he received this house for himself and his staff on the express condition that no sick of any kind whatsoever, and not even the owner’s father, should be allowed to go into it. Later on, a unit of the Egyptian Red Crescent arrived, with a staff of German doctors and an Englishman. Wooden barracks were built for them in the plain outside the Greek school, fronting the sea.

Hard words were said about the Turkish medical authorities with regard to this matter; and it is, of course, easy for people who know nothing about the local conditions and the local difficulties to pass sweeping judgments. On the whole, I was told by competent authorities, the Turkish Red Crescent did exceedingly well in dealing with the wounded and the sick in the large field of their operations. But an epidemic of cholera such as that which I have described seemed to paralyse them. It took the Turks unprepared. Steps were taken, but tardily; and to Western minds the procedure seemed incredibly and criminally slow; yet in the East it is impossible to do things in a hurry, and if you try to hustle, you will find that there will be less speed in the long run. If you consider all these things, the Turkish medical authorities, and especially the Turkish doctor in charge at San Stefano, did their best when once they started to work. But when the appalling situation arose at San Stefano, when the cholera victims were lying like flies on the railway embankment, they took no steps to face the situation until they were stimulated to do so by the example of Miss Alt and Madame Schneider and the pressure of foreign opinion. This was partly due to the fatalism of their outlook, to the resignation of their temperament, and partly to the disorder which was rife throughout their military organisation. As to San Stefano, which is the small area I had the opportunity of observing personally, had it not been for the spontaneous efforts of Miss Alt, Madame Schneider, and Mr. Frew, the Turkish and Greek soldiers who were shut up in the cholera camp, without any possibility of egress, would have died of hunger and thirst. It must be remembered, as I have said before, that among the cholera patients there were a great number of soldiers who were suffering simply and solely from exhaustion and starvation.

After the arrival of the British unit of the Red Crescent, and that of the Egyptian Red Crescent, matters were got into shape at San Stefano, and there was no longer need of volunteers. The worst cases had died. Those who had been suffering from exhaustion and starvation recovered and were sent home. Those who had mild attacks of cholera and dysentery became convalescent, and were moved into the tents. Rooms were cleared out for the worst cases, and it was possible to introduce beds, and to clear up matters. What was at the beginning an ante-chamber to Hell was later, I believe, converted into a clean hospital with all the necessary appliances and attendants.

That this was done was due to the initial enterprise of Miss Alt and Madame Schneider. They were the leading spirits and the soul of this undertaking. Their work was untiring and incessant. To have seen Miss Alt at work was a rare privilege. Impervious to disgust, but saturated with pity, overflowing with love and radiating charity, she threaded her way, bowed with age and with silvered hair, like a good angel or a kind fairy, from tent to tent, from room to room, laden with gifts; unconscious of the filth, disdainful of the stench, blind to the hideous sights, she went her way, giving with both hands, helping with her arms, cheering with her speech, and healing with her smile. Miss Alt came to San Stefano like an angel to Hell, and she could have said, like Beatrice:

“Io son fatta da Dio, sua mercè, tale,
Che la vostra miseria non mi tange,
Nè fiamma d’ esto incendio non m’ assale.”

CHAPTER XXIV
THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA

From 1912 until the summer of 1914 I spent the greater part of the year in Russia. I was no longer doing journalistic work, but I was still writing books on Russian life and literature. The longer I stayed in Russia, the more deeply I felt the fascination of the country and the people. In one of his books Gogol has a passage apostrophising his country from exile, and asking her the secret of her fascination. “What is,” he says, “the inscrutable power which lies hidden in you? Why does your aching, melancholy song echo forever in my ears? Russia, what do you want of me? What is there between you and me?”

The question has often been repeated, not only by Russians in exile, but by foreigners who have lived in Russia, and I have often found myself asking it. The country has little obvious glamour and attraction. In Russia, as Gogol says, the wonders of Nature are not made more wonderful by man; there are no spots where Nature, art, and time combine to take the heart with beauty; where association, and even decay are indistinguishably mingled; and Nature is not only beautiful but picturesque; where time has worked magic on man’s handiwork, and history has left behind a host of phantoms.

There are many such places in France and in England, in Italy, Spain, and Greece, but not in Russia. Russia is a country of colonists, where life has been a perpetual struggle against the inclemency of the climate, and where the political history is the record of a desperate battle against adverse circumstances. Russia’s oldest city was sacked and burnt just at the moment when it was beginning to flourish; her first capital was destroyed by fire in 1812; her second capital dates from the seventeenth century; stone houses are rare in the country, and the wooden houses are frequently destroyed by fire. It is a country of long winters and fierce summers, of rolling plains, uninterrupted by mountains and unvariegated by valleys.

But the charm is there. It is felt by people of different nationalities and races; it is difficult, if you live in Russia, to escape it, and once you have felt it, you will never be quite free from it. The melancholy song, which Gogol says wanders from sea to sea over the length and breadth of the land, will echo in your heart and haunt the corner of your brain. It is impossible to analyse charm, for if charm could be analysed it would cease to exist; and it is difficult to define the character of places where beauty makes so little instantaneous appeal, and where there is no playground of romance, and few ghosts of poetry and of history.

Turgeniev’s descriptions of the country give an idea of this peculiar magic. For instance, the story of the summer night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogy tales; or the description of that other July evening, when out of the twilight, a long way off on the plain, a child’s voice is heard calling: “Antropka—a—a,” and Antropka answers: “Wha—a—a—a—a—at?” and far away out of the immensity comes the answering voice: “Come ho—ome, because daddy wants to whip you.”

Those who travel in their arm-chair will meet in Turgeniev with glimpses, episodes, pictures, incidents, sayings and doings, touches of human nature, phases of landscape, shades of atmosphere, which contain the secret and the charm of Russia. All who have travelled in Russia not only recognise the truth of his pictures, but agree that the incidents which he records with incomparable art are a common experience to those who have eyes to see. The picturesque peculiar to countries rich in historical traditions is absent in Russia; but beauty is not absent, and it is often all the more striking from its lack of obviousness.

This was brought home to me strongly in the summer of 1913. I was staying in a small wooden house in Central Russia, not far from a railway, but isolated from other houses, and at a fair distance from a village. The harvest was nearly done. The heat was sweltering. The country was parched and dry. The walls and ceilings were black with flies. One had no wish to venture out of doors until the evening.

The small garden of the house, gay with asters and sweet-peas, was surrounded by birch trees, with here and there a fir tree in their midst. Opposite the little house, a broad pathway, flanked on each side by a row of tall birch trees, led to the margin of the garden, which ended in a steep grass slope, and a valley, or a wooded dip; and beyond it, on the same level as the garden, there was a pathway half hidden by trees; so that from the house, if you looked straight in front of you, you saw a broad path, with birch trees on each side of it, forming a proscenium for a wooded distance; and if anybody walked along the pathway on the farther side of the dip, although you saw no road, you could see the figures in outline against the sky, as though they were walking across the back of a stage.

Just as the cool of the evening began to fall, out of the distance came a rhythmical song, ending on a note that seemed to last for ever, piercingly clear and clean. The music came a little nearer, and one could distinguish first a solo chanting a phrase, and then a chorus taking it up, and finally, solo and chorus became one, and reached a climax on a high note, which grew purer and stronger, and more and more long drawn-out, without any seeming effort, until it died away.

The tone of the voices was so high, so pure, and at the same time so peculiar, strong and rare, that it was difficult at first to tell whether the voices were tenors, sopranos, or boyish trebles. They were unlike, both in range and quality, the voices of women one usually heard in Russian villages. The music drew nearer, and it filled the air with a majestic calm. Presently, in the distance, beyond the dip between the trees, and in the middle of the natural stage made by the garden, I saw, against the sky, figures of women walking slowly in the sunset, and singing as they walked, carrying their scythes and their wooden rakes with them; and once again the phrase began and was repeated by the chorus; and once again chorus and solo melted together in a high and long-drawn-out note, which seemed to swell like the sound of a clarion, to grow purer, more single, stronger and fuller, till it ended suddenly, sharply, as a frieze ends. The song seemed to proclaim rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour accomplished. It was like a hymn of praise, a broad benediction, a grace sung for the end of the day: the end of the summer, the end of the harvest. It expressed the spirit of the breathless August evening.

The women walked past slowly and disappeared into the trees once more. The glimpse lasted only a moment, but it was enough to start a long train of thought and to call up pictures of rites, ritual, and custom; of rustic worship and rural festival, of Pagan ceremonies older than the gods.

As another verse of what sounded like a primeval harvest hymn began, the brief glimpse of the reapers, erect and majestic in the dress of toil, and laden with the instruments of the harvest, the high quality of the singing:

“The undisturbed song of pure concent,”

made the place into a temple of august and sacred calm in the quiet light of the evening. The sacerdotal figures that passed by, diminutive in the distance, belonged to an archaic vase or frieze. The music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be the initiation into an immemorial secret, into some remote mystery—who knows?—perhaps the mystery of Eleusis, or into still older secrecies of which Eleusis was the far-distant offspring. A window had been opened on to another phase of time, on to another and a brighter world; older than Virgil, older than Romulus, older than Demeter—a world where the spring, the summer, and the autumn, harvest-time, and sowing, the gathering of fruits and the vintage, were the gods; and through this window came a gleam from the golden age, a breath from the morning and the springtide of mankind.

When I say that the singing called up thoughts of Greece, the thing is less fantastic than it seems. In the first place, in the songs of the Russian peasants, the Greek modes are still in use: the Dorian, the hypo-Dorian, the Lydian, the hypo-Phrygian. “La musique, telle qu’elle était pratiquée en Russie au moyen age” (writes M. Soubier in his History of Russian Music), “tenait à la tradition des religions et des mœurs païennes.” And in the secular as well as in the ecclesiastical music of Russia there is an element of influence which is purely Hellenic. It turned out that the particular singers I heard on that evening were not local, but a guild of women reapers who had come from the government of Tula to work during the harvest. Their singing, although the form and kind of song were familiar to me, was different in quality from any that I had heard before; and the impression made by it unforgettable.

Nature in Russia is, broadly speaking, monotonous and uniform, but this does not mean that beauty is rare. Not only magic moments occur in the most unpromising surroundings, but beauty is to be found in Russian nature and Russian landscape at all times and all seasons in many shapes.

For instance: a long drive in the evening twilight at harvest-time, over the immense hedgeless rolling plains, through stretches of golden wheat and rye, variegated with millet, still green and not yet turned to the bronze colour it takes later; when you drive for miles over monotonous and yet ever-varying fields, and when you see, in the distance, the cranes, settling for a moment, and then flying off into space.

Later in the twilight, continents of dove-coloured clouds float in the east, the west is tinged with the dusty afterglow of the sunset; and the half-reaped corn and the spaces of stubble are burnished and glow in the heat; and smouldering fires of weeds burn here and there; and as you reach a homestead, you will perhaps see by the threshing-machine, a crowd of dark men and women still at their work; and in the glow from the flame of a wooden fire, in the shadow of the dusk, the smoke of the engine and the dust of the chaff, they have a Rembrandt-like power; the feeling of space, breadth, and air and immensity grows upon one; the earth seems to grow larger, the sky to grow deeper, and the spirit is lifted, stretched, and magnified.

Russian poets have celebrated more frequently the spring and winter—the brief spring which arrives so suddenly after the melting of the snows, with the intense green of the birch-trees, the uncrumpling fern; woods carpeted with lilies of the valley; the lilac bushes, the nightingale, and later the briar, which flowers in profusion; and the winter: the long drives in a sledge under a leaden sky to the tinkle of monotonous bells; a whistling blizzard with its demons, that lead the horses astray in the night; transparent woods black against an immense whiteness; or covered with snow and frozen, an enchanted fabric against the stainless blue; or, when after a night of thaw, the brown branches emerge once more covered with airy threads and sparkling drops of dew.

The sunset and twilight of the winter evening after the first snow had fallen in December used to be most beautiful. The new moon, like a little sail on a cold sea, tinged with a blush as it reached the earth, flooded the snow with light, and added to its purity; the snow had a blue glint in it and showed up the wooden houses, the red roofs, the farm implements in a bold relief; so that all these prosaic objects of everyday life assumed a strange largeness and darkness as they loomed between the earth and the sky.

What I used to enjoy more than anything in Russia were the summer afternoons on the river near Sosnofka, where the flat banks were covered with oak-trees, ash, willow, and thick undergrowth; and where every now and then, perch rose to the surface to catch flies, and the kingfishers skimmed over the surface from reach to reach. Sometimes I used to take a boat and row past islands of rushes, and a network of water-lilies, to where the river broadened; and I reached a great sheet of water flanked by a weir and a mill. The trees were reflected in the glassy surface, and nothing broke the stillness but the grumbling of the mill and the cries of the children bathing.

Near the village, all through the summer night (this was in June 1914), I used to hear song answering song, and the brisk rhythm of the accordion; or the interminable humming, buzzing burden of the three-stringed balalaika; verse succeeded verse of an apparently tireless song, and the end of each verse seemed to beget another and give a keener zest to the next; and the song waxed faster and madder, as if the singer were intoxicated by the sound of his own music.

But the peculiar manifestations of the beauty of nature in a flat and uniform country are not enough to account for the fascination of Russia. Beauty is a part of it, but it is not all. Against these things in the other scale you had to put dirt, squalor, misery, slovenliness, disorder, and the uninspiring wooden provincial towns, the dusty or sodden roads, the frequent grey skies, the long and heavy sameness.

The advocatus diaboli had a strong case. He could have drawn up a powerful indictment, not only against the political conditions, and the arbitrary and uncertain administration, but also against the character of the people; he could mention the moral laxity, the extravagant self-indulgence, the lack of control, the jealousy which hounded any kind of superiority; and looked with suspicion on all that was original or distinguished; the dead level of mediocrity; the stereotyped bureaucratic pattern which you could not escape from. The Russians, he would say, had all the faults of the Orient without any of its austerer virtues; Russia, he would say, was a nation of ineffectual rebels under the direction of a band of corrupt and time-serving officials. The indictment was true, but however glaring the faults which Russian moralists, satirists, and politicians used so frequently and so loudly to deplore, the faults that used to make foreigners in Russia so angry at times, they seemed to me the negative results of positive qualities so valuable as to outweigh them altogether.

During my stays in Russia I saw some of the worst as well as some of the best aspects of the country and its people. The net result of all I saw and all I experienced was the sense of an overpowering charm in the country, an indescribable fascination in the people. The charm was partly due to the country itself, partly to the manner of life lived there, and partly to the nature of the people. The qualities that did exist, and whose benefit I experienced, seemed to me the most precious of all qualities; the virtues the most important of all virtues; the glimpses of beauty the rarest in kind; the songs and the music the most haunting and most heart-searching; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity nearest to God.

This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the Russian soul is filled with a human Christian charity which is warmer in kind and intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater simplicity and sincerity, than is to be met with in any other people; it was the existence of this quality behind everything else which gave charm to Russian life (however squalid the circumstances might be), poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity to its religion, manners, intercourse, music, singing, verse, art, acting—in a word to its art, its life, and its faith.

Never did I realise this so much as one day when I was driving on a cold and damp December evening in St. Petersburg in a cab. It was dark, and I was driving along the quays from one end of the town to the other. For a long time I drove in silence, but after a while I happened to make some remark to the cabman about the weather. He answered gloomily that the weather was bad and so was everything else too. For some time we drove on in silence, and then in answer to some other stray remark or question of mine he said he had been unlucky that day in the matter of a fine. It was a trivial point, but somehow or other my interest was aroused, and I got him to tell me the story, which was a case of bad luck and nothing serious; but when he had told it, he gave such a profound sigh that I asked whether it was that which was still weighing upon him. Then he said “No,” and slowly began to tell me a story of a great catastrophe which had just befallen him. He possessed a little land, and a cottage in the country, not far from St. Petersburg. His house had been burnt. It was true the house was insured, but the insurance was not sufficient to make an appreciable difference. He had two sons; one went to school, and the other had some employment in the provinces. The catastrophe of the fire had upset everything. All his belongings had perished. He could no longer send his boy to school. His second son, in the country, had written to say he was engaged to be married, and had asked his consent, advice, and approval. “He has written twice,” said the cabman, “and I keep silence (i ya molchu). What can I answer?” I cannot give any idea of the strength, simplicity, and poignancy of the tale as it came, hammered out slowly, with pauses between each sentence, with a dignity of utterance and a purity of idiom which used to be the precious privilege of the poor in Russia. The words came as if torn out from the bottom of his heart. He made no complaint; there was no grievance, no whine in the story. He stated the bald facts with a simplicity which was overwhelming. In spite of all, his faith in God and his consent to the will of Providence was unshaken, certain, and sublime.

This happened in 1911. I have forgotten the details; but I knew I had been face to face with a human soul, stripped and naked, and a human soul in the grip of a tragedy. This experience, which brought one in touch with the divine, is one which, I think, could only in such circumstances occur in Russia. I wrote this in the year 1913 when I was summing up my impressions on Russian life, and trying to analyse the nature of the fascination the country had for me. When I had finished, I echoed the words which R. L. Stevenson once addressed to a French novelist: “J’ai beau admirer les autres de toute ma force, c’est avec vous que je me complais à vivre.”

In the spring of 1914 I went back to Russia for the last time before the war. I spent over a month by myself at Sosnofka, writing a book, an outline of Russian literature, and bathing every afternoon in the river where the sweetbriar grew on the banks by the willows, and the kingfisher used every now and then to dart across the oily-looking water.

It was a wonderful spring. The nightingales sang all day long in the garden; and all night long people were singing in the village. Nature was steeped in beauty and calm. It was a month of accidental retreat before tremendous events and the changing of the world.

I knew nothing of public events, but I was suddenly seized with the desire to go home. I debated whether to go or not. I had finished my book, but as I meant to come back to Russia in August it seemed perhaps foolish to go. I thought I would leave it to chance. I decided to take the Sortes Shakespearianæ. I opened a volume at random, and my pencil fell on the phrase: “Pack and be gone” (Comedy of Errors, iii. 2, 158). I waited another day and repeated the experiment. My pencil again fell on the same line. Then I settled to go. I started one evening, and in the morning when I arrived at the Friedrichsstrasse Station at Berlin, I saw in the newspapers the news of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke. I might have said: “Incipit vita nova,” but I didn’t. I didn’t even think it. I was merely conscious of a small cloud on an otherwise stainless sky.

FOOTNOTES

[1]

“Libre, je rends visite à la terre, aux étoiles;
Sur la Tamise en feu je suis ces blanches voiles.”
Les Enfants d’Édouard, Act III. Sc. 1. Casimir Delavigne.

[2] It is by Thackeray.

[3] I have looked up the reference and miraculously found it. My memory after thirty-three years is correct. The phrase occurs in Xenophon’s Anabasis, Book II. v. 27.

[4] When he died at Sofia, he was canonized as a national hero, and his head now appears on some of the Bulgarian postage stamps.

[5]

“Non vides, quanto moveas periclo,
Pyrrhe, Gaetulæ catulos leaenæ?”
Horace, Odes, Book III. Ode XX.

[6] I don’t know the correct spelling of this word and it is not in the dictionary.

[7] Or “Spinnen.”

[8] There is nothing remarkable in the verse, but as a piece of dramatic action the speech was supremely effective.

[9] Théodore de Banville apropos of this performance, said about Sarah Bernhardt: “Elle a reçu la qualité d’être toujours, et quoi qu’elle veuille faire, absolument et inconsciemment lyrique.” Prophetic words!

[10] By a strange irony of fate, this tune, which the revolutionaries have made their own, was originally an official tune, composed probably by some obscure military bandmaster, and played at the funerals of officers and high officials. It became afterwards the national anthem of the Bolsheviks.

[11] i.e. K.D.’s—constitution in Russian beginning with a “K.”

[12] 17th August, battle of Liaoyang.

[13] A palace and a park in the neighbourhood belonged to the Duchess of Edinburgh, whose name was Marie Alexandrovna.

[14] Incorrect Russian, meaning “There is not, good.”

[15] A. C. Swinburne.

INDEX