To the memory of R.F.

WARNING TO THE READER

The recorded history of Chinese civilization covers a period of four thousand years. The population of China is estimated at 450 millions. China is larger than Europe

The author of this book is twenty-six years old. He has spent, altogether, about seven months in China. He does not speak Chinese

FOREWORD

THIS BOOK IS a superficial account of an unsensational journey. My Warning to the Reader justifies, I think, its superficiality. It is easy to be dogmatic at a distance, and I dare say I could have made my half-baked conclusions on the major issues of the Far Eastern situation sound convincing. But it is one thing to bore your readers, another to mislead them; I did not like to run the risk of doing both. I have therefore kept the major issues in the background.

The book describes in some detail what I saw and what I did, and in considerably less detail what most other travellers have also seen and done. If it has any value at all, it is the light which it throws on the processes of travel – amateur travel – in parts of the interior, which, though not remote, are seldom visited.

On two occasions, I admit, I have attempted seriously to assess a politico-military situation, but only (a) because I thought I knew more about those particular situations than anyone else, and (b) because if they had not been explained certain sections of the book would have made nonsense. For the rest, I make no claim to be directly instructive. One cannot, it is true, travel through a country without finding out something about it; and the reader, following vicariously in my footsteps, may perhaps learn a little. But not much.

I owe debts of gratitude to more people than can conveniently be named, people of all degrees and many nationalities. He who befriends a traveller is not easily forgotten, and I am very grateful indeed to everyone who helped me on a long journey.

PETER FLEMING

London,

May 1934

NOTE. – Some of the material contained in this book has appeared in the columns of the Times, the Spectator and Life and Letters. My thanks are due to the editors of these journals for permission to reproduce it here in a different form.

PART ONE : MANCHUKUO

CHAPTER I

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

I ALWAYS READ (I know I have said this before) the Agony Column of the Times.

I was reading it now. It was June 2nd, 1933: a lovely day. English fields, bright, friendly, and chequered, streamed past the window of the Harwich boat-train. Above each cottage smoke rose in a slim pillar which wriggled slightly before vanishing into a hot blue sky. Cattle were converging on the shade of trees, swinging their tails against the early summer flies with a dreamy and elegant motion. Beside a stream an elderly man was putting up his rod in an atmosphere of consecration. Open cars ran cheerfully along the roads, full of golf-clubs and tennis-rackets and picnic-hampers. Gipsies were camped in a chalk-pit. A green woodpecker, its laughter inaudible to me, flew diagonally across a field. Two children played with puppies on a tiny lawn. Downs rose hazily in the distance. England was looking her best.

I, on the threshold of exile, found it expedient to ignore her. I turned to the Agony Column.

The Agony Column was apropos but not very encouraging, like the sermon on the last Sunday of term.

‘Because it is so uncertain as well as expensive, I must wait and trust.’ The advertiser was anonymous.

I put the paper down. Normally I would have speculated at some length on the circumstances which evoked this cri du cœur; to-day I was content to accept it merely as oracular guidance. We were in the same boat, the advertiser and I; as he (or possibly she) pointed out, we must wait and trust.

From my typewriter, on the rack opposite, a label dangled, swinging gently to and fro in a deprecating way. ‘‘PASSENGER TO MANCHULI’ said the label. I wished it would keep still. There was something pointed in such suave and regular oscillation; the legend acquired an ironical lilt. ‘Well, well!’ said the label, sceptical and patronizing. ‘Boys will be boys. …’

‘PASSENGER TO MANCHULI.’ Had there been anyone else in the carriage, and had he been able to decipher my block-capitals, and had he in addition been fairly good at geography and at international politics in the Far East, that label alone would have been enough (for he is clearly an exceptional chap) to assure him that my immediate future looked like being uncertain as well as expensive. For Manchuli is the junction, on the frontier between Russia and Manchuria, on the Trans-Siberian and the Chinese Eastern Railways; and the latter line had recently been announced as closed to traffic, its ownership being in dispute between Moscow and the Japanese-controlled government of Manchukuo. In short, on the evidence to hand my hypothetical fellow-passenger would have been warranted in assuming that I was either up to, or would come to, no good; or both.

With the possible exception of the Equator, everything begins somewhere. Too many of those too many who write about their travels plunge straight in medias res; their opening sentence informs us bluntly and dramatically that the prow (or bow) of the dhow grated on the sand, and they stepped lightly ashore.

No doubt they did. But why? With what excuse? What other and anterior steps had they taken? Was it boredom, business, or a broken heart that drove them so far afield? We have a right to know.

But they seldom tell us. They may vouchsafe a few complacent references to what they call their Wanderlust. But chiefly they trade on an air of predestination; they are lordly, inscrutable, mysterious. Without so much as a Hey Presto! or a Houp La! they whisk us from their native land to their exotic destination; so that for the first few chapters the reader’s mind is full of extraneous and distracting surmises, as a proctor’s must be when he sees a chamber-pot crowning some ancient monument of the university. He overlooks the situation’s intrinsic interest, because he is passionately wondering how the situation was arrived at at all.

In this respect, if in no other, I intend to give the reader a square deal. As my label suggested, I had in my pocket a ticket to Manchuli. The reader will wonder why I had bought it.

Not, I can assure him, from any love of the place. Manchuli is a small, wind-swept village, lying in a vast, but naturally not less wind-swept plain. The population is Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian (Red and White). In the autumn of 1931 I was held up there for a day, and during that day I saw all that I wanted to see of Manchuli and of the network of shallow ditches which surrounds it, whether for the purpose of irrigation, sanitation, or defence I neither know nor care. In Manchuli, too, I read the greater part of The Pickwick Papers; but that, after all, one can do almost anywhere. Besides – as I say – I had done it. No; it would be idle and dishonest to pretend that Manchuli aroused in me any of the emotions that (for instance) Kentucky arouses in the saxophonist or Bognor Regis in the poster-artist. The ‘Come to Manchuli’ movement could count me out.

What was it, then, if not nostalgia? Simply this: that since the railway east of Manchuli was thought to be closed, to buy a ticket to, say, Harbin might well prove to be waste of money. With the minimum of luck – and I had the maximum¹ – one could get to Manchuli; and there, after all, one would find oneself on a frontier separating two nations whose citizens are neither universally efficient nor universally incorruptible. So it would be surprising indeed, however serious the railway situation, if one did not manage to penetrate further east.

But why penetrate further east? We come at last to the point.

I had in my pocket – or, to be strictly accurate, I thought I had in my pocket – a document addressed ‘To All Whom It May Concern’. (Luckily, for I had left it behind, it concerned nobody.) This document went on to say that I had been authorized to act as Special Correspondent to the Times in the Far East. I had acquired it in the following manner:

Two months before, I had gone to the Editor of the Times and informed him that the situation in China during the coming summer would be fraught with every conceivable kind of interest. (This was a howling lie; the situation in China during the summer of 1933 was as dull as ditchwater.) I was the man, I shamelessly implied, to tell the world about it; had I not been there before, and for nearly three months?

The Editor of the Times is a humane man. His first thought was for his colleagues. ‘If I turn him down,’ he said to himself, ‘he’ll go round pestering them. Then, when he finds that no reputable newspaper will give him an excuse for going to China, he’ll come back to me with some cock and bull theory about Ecuador being the Country of the Future. Much better get him out of the country at once.’

He did. I was duly commissioned to write a series of articles on China, each one more portentous and comprehensive than the last; they would be paid for at a generous rate. The Spectator advanced me £50. My publisher, a curiously gullible man, made good the necessary rest. To all these people who made it possible for me to pay my way I am very grateful.

That, then, is how I came to be on the Harwich boat-train, en route for Manchuli. I have presented my credentials. If the reader wants any further motivation, he can invent it for himself.

¹See the photograph facing page 66.

CHAPTER II

INTO RUSSIA

HOLLAND. ON THE Flushing platform tail draught-horses, rather like the draught-horses you see in Japan, help the porters with the luggage. The train pulls out and runs through the evening sunlight across a flat country partitioned with a symmetry so emphatic as to be rather charming. But the flatness is overdone; privacy and surprise – surely the two prime qualities in a civilized landscape – are almost wholly excluded. Holland looks rather dull to me.

But not to the two little Cockney girls in the next compartment, unaccountably bound for Berlin. In an exercise book they write down feverishly the name of each successive station. ‘Oo, look!’ cries one. ‘There’s a reel Dutchwoman!’ And by God she is right.

I dine with a pleasant young Englishman. He claims to know Warsaw, and we embark on a markedly one-sided discussion of the Upper Silesian Plebiscite of ’21. My mission, when revealed, awes him. ‘Manchuria!’ he exclaims. ‘But can you speak Russian, or Chinese, or Japanese?’ Alas, I cannot. ‘Then how will you manage?’ I say I do not know. He eyes me with respect; a desperate fellow, this, he is thinking. It is clear that he finds me Ouidan. I wish now that I had not told him where I am going.

I wish that I had not told him, because the false values which other people put upon one’s activities are disconcerting. My own sense of proportion I regard as impregnably established. In the light of it, a journey to Manchuria is a perfectly normal undertaking: nothing to get excited about. But the world at large persists in maintaining a set of values which the simplification of travel, and the general standardization of most forms of external experience, have long rendered obsolete. The far cry has still an embarrassingly romantic lilt, and distance lends an enchantment which is in fact no longer hers to lend.

When we said good night, the young man wished me luck on My Adventures. I was afraid he would.

An atmosphere, congenial to me, of racketeering pervaded Berlin. Dark stories of the concentration camps, rumours of plots and feuds among the great ones, and an inexhaustible supply of jokes at the expense of Hitler were exchanged: but only when the waiter had withdrawn out of ear-shot. One looked instinctively for swastikas on the pats of butter.

I lunched with Wheeler-Bennett, Knickerbocker, and Duranty (on his way back to Moscow after a holiday), and concealed with only a partial success my ignorance of all European and most other politics. There was also present an American film-star, full of the ardours and endurances of Greenland, where he had been making a picture in a climate so unkind that two imported polar bears had died of exposure, martyrs to their art. He will linger in the memory by virtue of having told me the longest story about an operation that I have ever heard.

After an abortive attempt to get myself inoculated, I left for Moscow on the night train.

A legend, blazoned in Russian across an arch through which the train passes to cross the Polish frontier, informs you that ‘The Revolution Breaks Down All Barriers’. The truth of this is not immediately apparent.

The Customs House at Niegoreloje is decorated with large mural paintings, in which the devotees of agriculture and industry, curiously combining a tubular physique with an air of ecstasy, are portrayed in the discharge of their varied and onerous duties. ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ is inscribed in gold letters and four languages round the walls. The second sentence of this now immortal exhortation – ‘You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains’ – is omitted; it would represent, my 1931 diary notes, ‘a highly conservative estimate of one’s potential losses in that place’.

However, I got my scanty luggage through the customs without loss, if not without delay. The officials moved about their business, as they had moved two years ago, with a mystic and inconsequent air. Russia has never, I imagine, been very good at bureaucracy. To-day her functionaries, gravely inconvenienced by a newly acquired civic conscience, fall unhappily between two stools; on the one hand their fatalistic instincts bid them muddle through and cook the accounts at the end of the month, on the other the ideals of an exact and Prussian efficiency, forcefully inculcated from above, spur them on to higher things. By nature introspective and self-critical, the average Russian official is painfully aware that he was not born to fill up forms – or not, at any rate, to fill them up correctly. He is a kind of Hamlet, and in his relations with the traveller will veer unpredictably from the dogmatic to the perplexed, from the apologetic to the menacing. He is often likeable, but never, in any circumstances, expeditious.

My brother Ian, recently returned from Moscow where he had been acting as Reuter’s Special Correspondent during the trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers, had given me, by way of a talisman, a photostat copy of a letter he had received from Stalin. Stalin corresponds seldom with foreigners, and the sight of his signature, negligently disposed on top of a suitcase otherwise undistinguished in its contents, aroused in the officials a child-like wonder. Their awe was turned to glee when they found an album containing photographs of an aboriginal tribe in Central Brazil. Had I really taken them? Indeed? They were really very good, most interesting. … Even the Bolsheviks, it seemed, were travel-snobs.

I parted with the officials on the most friendly terms, but with a slightly uneasy conscience, for I had 200 roubles in my pocket. They came, like Stalin’s letter, from my brother Ian, and they were contraband.

Now here we come to the question of what is called The Exchange. It is a question which I shall never understand. I yearn to do so. I would give anything to be able to write, or even to read, an article on ‘The Future of the Franc’ or ‘The Peseta: Whither?’ But I know I never shall.

In Russia the Exchange is a particularly unreal and complex bogey, and I will not here attempt to explain the difference between gold roubles and black roubles, for I do not know what it is, nor why it should exist. The only thing I am quite sure about is that if you are caught importing roubles into the country you are arrested; and that, on the other hand, if you change your foreign money at the official rate you don’t get anything like as many roubles as you ought to. (The ten shillings which I changed at Niegoreloje, to allay suspicion, would not have covered the tip to my porter, had I employed a porter.) So the most economical, if not the most prudent policy is to smuggle roubles in. Ian’s 200 saw me across Russia.

There exists, of course, a most exact and comprehensive set of regulations designed to prevent this sort of thing. You have to declare all the money you have with you when you enter Russia, and when you leave it you are supposed to show up receipts proving that you have spent a certain sum (it used to be twenty roubles) every day. It sounds fairly water-tight on paper. But the Russians, as I say, have never been very good at bureaucracy, and on neither of my journeys across their country have I seen these regulations effectively enforced. Rouble-running would appear to be a likely career for a young man, with few risks and plenty of room at the top.

CHAPTER III

THE MIRAGE OF MOSCOW

‘L’EUROPE EST FINIE’, the little attendant had said when we crossed the Polish frontier into Russia; and so, it seemed, was June. Grey skies and a cold wind did nothing to enhance the attractions of Moscow.

Moscow is a depressing place. To me its atmosphere is somehow suggestive of servants’ bedrooms. The analogy, however, is not one which I am qualified to pursue.

Public opinion in England is sharply divided on the subject of Russia. On the one hand you have the crusty majority, who believe it to be a hell on earth; on the other you have the half-baked minority who believe it to be a terrestrial paradise in the making. Both cling to their opinions with the tenacity, respectively, of the die-hard and the fanatic. Both are hopelessly wrong.

And who shall blame them? You cannot give a just verdict without considering all the evidence; and in Great Britain, unfortunately, there is only a tithe of evidence to hand. Our leading newspaper¹ continues to report the affairs of the largest country in the world through a correspondent posted outside its frontiers, so that its Russian news has much the same degree of interest and reliability as would distinguish a running commentary on a prize-fight at the Albert Hall if it were broadcast from the steps of the Albert Memorial. America, however (sometimes) misty with sentiment in her eyes, gets a fuller and less distorted picture of Russia than we do, because American newspapers print more and better Russian news than ours; it may be that their attitude would be less commendably detached if the Pacific Ocean were not so conveniently wide, but at least they have not made themselves ridiculous by first prejudging, and then to all intents and purposes ignoring, a political, cultural, and economic experiment launched on an unprecedented scale.

In England authorities on Russia are about as numerous as authorities on Mars, and the knowledge of the former is about as exact and as comprehensive as the knowledge of the latter. Funnily enough, it is much the same in Russia. Outside the Kremlin, where a handful of men, presumably able and partly Jewish, control (on paper) the destinies of the far-flung Soviet Republics, hardly anyone in Russia knows what is going on there, or why. They know, of course, what is supposed to be going on there. Education and propaganda – in Russia, as elsewhere, the two are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate – are at their disposal in large quantities; they are stuffed with information, but starved of the truth. They can study history, but only history as Lenin would have liked it to have happened. They can learn about the present, but only as much about it as Stalin thinks advisable. Their home news, as a matter of fact, is concerned almost as much with the future as with the present; their newspapers announce ten projects to every one achievement. It is remarkable what a great deal is perpetually on the point of being done in Russia.

I have no wish to mock the Five Year Plan, or any of its progeny. All human endeavour is in some degree laughable, and the most gallant enterprises are often also, in their inception, the most comic. To the hasty and hot-blooded critics of Soviet Russia – to that monstrous regiment of clubmen for whom all Muscovy is peopled by a race of bullies (whom they call ‘Bolos’) equipped by Mr. Punch’s cartoonist with knouts and bombs – I would recommend a ‘Let the dog see the rabbit’ attitude as being both wise and fair. To the Russians I would suggest that it is about time they produced the rabbit.

No one can travel, however perfunctorily, in Russia without appreciating the magnitude of the task she has taken on. That portentous experiment is not, as is widely supposed, primarily political and economic; it is primarily psychological. Here you have a people almost none of whose national characteristics can be held likely to contribute in any way towards the success of a project like the Five Year Plan. Most of them are by nature inefficient, irresponsible, and feckless. The enormous practical difficulties involved in rationalizing and industrializing Russia – the backwardness of the people, the country’s lack of communications and capital – are minor obstacles compared with the fundamental components of the national character and outlook. Can the Russian peasant be galvanized into something approaching robot-hood? Can he, on the crest of a wave of enthusiasm or at the point of a G.P.U. pistol, slough off his native apathy, his charming but hopeless inconsequence, and turn go-getter?

It appears that, for a time and partially, he can. Prusso-American ideals of drive and efficiency have proved infectious. Progress has been made. A nation proverbially composed of dreamers has shown itself capable of toeing the line, biting the bullet, and punching the clock. Too often, alas, it has been the wrong line, the wrong bullet, the wrong clock. But the intention behind the gesture was sound, even if the gesture went astray.

Will the gesture survive as a habit? Will the Russians transform themselves into robots? The visitor to Moscow wonders. But he wonders less and less. The bath in his hotel is out of commission. The lavatory is under repair. The lift does not work. The service is awful. The telephone exchange is impossible. Only one match in three strikes. …

Eventually he stops wondering altogether.

I regret to say that I am extremely bad at sight-seeing. My regret, I would add, is sincere. This is not often the case.

To glory in – even to admit – a proficiency at sightseeing is, to-day, to court the charge not so much of eccentricity as of affectation. In a world which is being sucked inexorably into the maelstrom of standardization – in a concentric labyrinth of which all the paths are beaten – the sophisticated traveller is at pains to parade his independence of the herd. ‘Of course,’ he says, in a deprecating tone which underlines his latent arrogance, ‘it’s very obscure – it’s not at all the sort of place that foreigners go to’, or ‘I’m afraid we didn’t do any of the right things; we just poked about on our own, in the native quarter. It’s so much less tiring …’ In his feverish anxiety to be different, he eschews the temples and the tombs, the cathedrals and the palaces – all the honourable and enduring landmarks for which the place is justly famous. He would not be seen dead on the Bridge of Sighs; to gaze on the Pyramids seems to him as unpardonable as to blow on his tea.

But I am not like him. I have an honest, conscientious desire to do those right things; right up to the moment of my departure I go on fully intending to do them. But I am lazy – lazy, and also wholly lacking in either an historical sense or the ability to appreciate architecture. The eyes of Boswell, that man of feeling, once filled with tears of spontaneous emotion at the mere mention of the Great Wall of China. I am not like that. The sight of any edifice, however imposing, however drenched (as they say in Stratford-on-Avon) with historical associations, merely embarrasses me. It stimulates my powers of self-criticism. Why does that even flow of dates and names which the guide is reeling off mean nothing at all to me? How comes it that I am still, after all these years, unable to distinguish with certainty between an ogive and a reredos? And who the hell was Henry the Fowler?

I gape dutifully, but without pleasure, without profit.

So in Moscow, though I stayed there four days, or nearly twice the length of time considered necessary by those intending to write a book on Modern Russia, I saw none of the things that I should have seen. I can only tell you what Moscow looks like to the uninitiated.

The reality falls midway between the pictures drawn by the Morning Post on the one hand and the Intourist travel agency on the other. Moscow is a drab, but not a desolate city. At first you are surprised by its ramshackle and untidy air; then you realize that this is a symptom not so much of decay as of reconstruction. A great many buildings are half pulled down, a great many others half put up. Of the completed new ones there are probably fewer than you had supposed. Those futuristic, those tortuously embattled blocks of flats which photograph so well, are rare exceptions to an architecturally unimpressive rule. The streets are dull and forbidding, and their surfaces are bad. There is an atmosphere of rather ill-co-ordinated and precarious improvisation, such as pervades the wings of a theatre.

The people you will find oddly colourless and oddly likeable. Their curiosities are limited by their fatalism, and the stranger discovers with gratitude that he is not stared at. That agonizing sense of singularity which afflicts (for instance) the Englishman who carries gloves and a rolled-up umbrella through the streets of New York does not attend his wanderings in Moscow. He is far better dressed than anyone he meets; he is clearly that rarity, a bourgeois. But nobody takes much notice of him; he is not made to feel a freak and an intruder.

The people of Moscow are neither well nor picturesquely dressed. Apart from the blouse, which is quite often worn by the men, their clothes are conventionally, though ineptly, cut in the standard European style. In the centre of the town at any rate, there are no rags, no bare feet, no human skeletons. The streets are perpetually crowded, but the crowd is nondescript and unexciting. It drifts, chattering in a subdued way, and forms readily into patient queues at the tram-halts and outside the co-operative stores. In its eyes you can read no very explicit hope, and only occasionally despair. It is a phlegmatic, philosophical crowd. No doubt it needs to be.

One of the most curious things about modern Russia is the startling and universal ugliness of the women. Bolshevism appears to be incompatible with beauty. Across the frontier you will find the night-clubs of Harbin and Shanghai packed with the most ravishing creatures, all Russian, and mostly (by their own account) Romanoff. But in Moscow you search for a pretty, for even a passable face in vain. It is impossible not to admire the sagacity of their rulers, who have decreed that among Soviet citizens the married state is not to be looked on as a permanence. I do not see how it could be.

Even in the theatres you will draw blank. The Russian actress takes her art seriously. Years of intensive training are considered necessary to qualify her for a leading role, and our ingénues, who are in electric lights before they are out of their teens, have no counterpart in Russia. Moscow salutes no stars under the age of thirty; most of them are much more.

There is another curious thing about Soviet Russia, and that is how bad she is at window-dressing. I use the words figuratively, for the fault goes deeper than the Moscow shop windows.

One has always imagined that the Russians, though never much good at putting things through, always had a talent for carrying things off. A talent for carrying things off implies a capacity for making a good impression on the superficial observer, and that capacity underlies the great and increasingly important art of salesmanship. Now the rulers of Russia to-day – the men of real power – have almost all got Jewish blood in them, and who make good salesmen if it is not the Jews? It is, I repeat, a curious thing that the Russians should be so bad at window-dressing.

For they are bad. It requires an effort to look into the Moscow shop-windows. Those piles of wooden cheeses, that dummy ham, the cake on which the icing is enamel – surely they might be displayed to better advantage round the inevitable bust of Lenin? Surely that imposing frontage of plate glass, disfigured though it is by a long crack clumsily patched with plaster, need not reveal an array of goods quite so fly-blown, quite so unprepossessing? …

Across the street a big new building is nearing completion. Above its roof a huge red banner floats proudly on the breeze: or did so float a month ago, when they first hoisted it. Alas, it was made of inferior material; the winds have eroded the stuff, and the flag is now a shoddy and a listless fringe upon the naked pole. One more gesture has missed fire. …

The Kremlin, castellated and cupolaed with dentifricial abandon, has the splendid, compelling assurance of a strong place which is also a beautiful one. From the river bank opposite one admires its crouching outlines unreservedly. But why, oh why, does the clock which crowns a central tower announce the time as 12.15 when it is really half-past five? Why do they never carry things off?

I do not know the answer to that question.

¹Its policy, I should add, is in part dictated by the attitude of the Soviet authorities, who, though not hostile, are high-handed.

CHAPTER IV

DRAMA

NOTHING VERY MEMORABLE happened to me in Moscow.

My stay coincided with the closing days of an international drama festival. Some of the delegates were staying at my hotel, and I used to look forward immensely to breakfast, when they could be heard discussing whatever play it was that they had seen the night before. The play almost always had a monosyllabic but arresting title, like Blood, or Mud, or Youth, or Rust. The conversation about it used to go something like this:

An American Lady With Teeth: Well, Professor, wasn’t last night a wonderful experience?

The Professor (a tall, thin, mild Englishman with very short trousers): It was certainly a most – er – unusual piece.

Young Mr. Schultz (in a rasping voice): The lighting was bum.

(Mr. Schultz is a very dapper few from Columbia University. He once had a one-act play performed in Watertown, N.J., and is inclined to be Olympian with the others. He sits at a little table by himself, pretending to read a novel in Russian.)

Miss Possey (a very intellectual girl from Leeds): It wasn’t the lighting so much as the cyclorama. One would have thought Boguslavsky would have got further than the cyclorama.

The Swiss Delegate (a human enigma): Yes? No?

Helen (the Professor’s daughter. Fearfully keen, but a little out of her depth): Which was the cyclorama? The old woman with a wheelbarrow? I didn’t like her. I thought she was just silly. I mean, there didn’t seem to be any …

Young Mr. Schultz (aggressively oracular): The cyclorama is a permanent concave backcloth, on which the light-values …

The American Lady (who disapproves of Young Mr. Schultz): But the emotional calibre of that play! It left me quite limp. Didn’t it you, Miss Possey?

Miss Possey (who is made of sterner stuff): Frankly, no. I found the symbolism overstated.

The Professor: My egg is bad. Oh, dear.

Helen: Never mind, father. We’ll get another one.

The Swiss Delegate (in a burst of self-revelation): The works of Shakey-speare! I love them greatly!

(This bourgeois admission creates an awkward silence. The Swiss Delegate glances round him like a hunted thing, blushing.)

The Professor (coming to his rescue): I confess I was a little puzzled, last night, as to what exactly was the significance of the young sculptor.

The American Lady: But surely that was obvious enough. He stood for – well, for sculpture …

Helen (brightly): And for youth, too, don’t you think?

Miss Possey: I fancy there was rather more to it than that. The young sculptor seemed to me to be the playwright’s answer to the whole question of what should be the place, what should be the function, of the plastic arts of a community absorbed in the process of industrializing itself. The young sculptor’s failure came when he threw those fish out of the window; and his failure surely symbolized the failure of the plastic arts to justify …

Young Mr. Schultz (with gloomy satisfaction): He wasn’t a sculptor. He was a geologist.

(While all are rejoicing at the discomfiture of Miss Possey the Swiss Delegate leans over to the Professor and says, in a stage whisper of the utmost urgency: ‘You have some toilet paper, please? Yes? No?’ The meeting breaks up.)

I myself was not, except vicariously, involved in the drama festival. But I did go to one play. It was at the Kamerny Theatre, which has a reputation for sophistication, and at which, two years ago, I saw a farcical comedy called Sirocco, which owed nothing save its title (and that unintentionally) to Noel Coward. The interior decoration of the theatre recalls the gun-turret of a battleship. This time the play was Negro, a translation-cum-adaptation of Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, a production of which in London, rendered memorable by the performance of Mr. Paul Robeson and Miss Flora Robson, I had reviewed a few weeks before. The play is, of course, concerned with the Colour Bar.

I suppose that Soviet Russia has always suffered from persecution-mania. If you defy the world there is some justification for believing that the world’s hand is against you. The consciousness of this inconvenient circumstance was very much alive when I was in Moscow; people were more sensitive to criticism, and much more sensitive to ridicule, than they had been two years ago. (This was particularly so in the case of the Metro-Vickers trial.) One could almost foresee the growth of an officially sponsored feeling of self-pity (this, of course, would not affect the outlook of the majority of the population, who have lived on nothing else for years.) However that may be, it was to this growing sense of unjust oppression that I attributed the important place occupied by the negro in Russia’s cultural sympathies.

Negro had been an established favourite for several months; and I was told that attendance at a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin formed part of the curriculum of Leningrad school-children. As a play, All God’s Chillun misses greatness; it is short, violent, staccato, and its execution lacks that measure of artistic detachment which would have enabled the author to do justice to his theme. The Russian production was interesting and effective; it was amusing to note the points on which it diverged, for ideological reasons, from the original.

The most noticeable difference was that in Moscow every scene was preceded by a song: or rather by two songs, sung respectively by a bourgeois (easily recognizable as such from his habit of wearing a tail coat, a straw hat, and a Leander tie) and by a negro. They were popular songs, but so allotted, that, while the bourgeois always sang about the good time he was having, the negro seemed to be concerned entirely with the tremendous amount of work he had on hand. Within the scenes themselves there were few important alterations, though the negro’s struggle to make good in spite of capitalist oppression was given a more specifically class-significance than the American author intended, and there were several interpolated hits at the Salvation Army, which, for some mysterious reason, was very unpopular in Russia at the time. For me, the most striking departure from precedent was that, when the negro married the girl, they descended the church steps to the strains of Annie Laurie.

The chief actor, in Mr. Paul Robeson’s part (there were no negroes in the cast), gave a very creditable performance in a quieter and more naturalistic key than is usually to be met with in the Russian theatre, where ‘straight’ acting too often betrays the fantasticating influence of the ballet. On the technical side Moscow had London beat; expressionistic devices vividly conveyed the jarring rhythm of the New York streets, where most of the action takes place, to heighten the emotional tension. The production was a very skilful and sensitive piece of work.

The audience struck me as being rather more restive than is usual in Moscow, and during one of the graver scenes there appeared to be a small animal, possibly a rat, at large in the dress-circle. But as to that I could not say for certain.

My impressions of Moscow, as here set down, are fragmentary and superficial. They are not intended to be anything else. In the course of my life I have spent eight days in that city. I should do both you and myself a disservice by treating it otherwise than sketchily.

Besides, on my last visit I never really got to grips with Moscow. Between me and the numerous and fascinating problems of modern Russia there loomed the figure of a man I have never seen. For four days he dominated my life. His name was Jimmie Mattern, and he was engaged on a solo flight round the world.

He had landed at Moscow a day or two before I arrived, the wings of his plane under their coating of ice profusely speckled with the autographs of admirers. With the minimum of delay he had flown on eastward.

There is no one more inconsiderate than your spectacular aviator. The American correspondents, whose duty it was to keep the world informed of Mr. Mattern’s progress, all agreed that he was a delightful man, but they wished fervently that it had never occurred to him to fly round the world alone. For them his inconvenient gallantry meant all-night sessions at the telephone, waiting for a call to announce his arrival at Omsk, his departure from Tomsk: it meant a constant va et vient between the hotel and the censor’s office in the Narkomendal: it meant a perpetual angling, through distant and unreliable agents, for a Personal Statement from the young hero, who was a man of few words and seldom more than semi-conscious when he landed.

Living with the journalists in the hotel, I, too, became infected with the spirit of this vicarious chase. Perhaps out of an instinctive sympathy for my haggard and unshaven colleagues, I allowed the flier to corner my curiosities. The teeming millions of Russia were obscured by a single – or more properly a ‘lone’ – Texan, whose whereabouts were unpredictable and whose continued existence was constantly in doubt. My catechisms about the Five Year Plan and the food-supply were indefinitely shelved. I asked no questions about current ideology; no one would have had time to answer them if I had.

I escaped one afternoon from that atmosphere of tense but disillusioned expectancy to visit one of the Moscow broadcasting stations. It is housed in the Telegraph Bureau, a sufficiently impressive building, but the offices and studios have a slatternly and aimless air, in this respect contrasting unfavourably with the B.B.C., whose interior suggests a cross between a liner and a lunatic asylum, both very up-to-date. I was treated with the greatest kindness, a short fat girl translating for me in French while a female official explained the principles on which their programmes are constructed.

They sounded rather dreary programmes, beginning at six in the morning with physical jerks and continuing, all through the day, to try and do you good in one form or another. There is a children’s hour, and an hour for the Red Army. The big men in the Government seldom broadcast. There are no licences, and no check on the number of receiving sets, though listeners are supposed to pay a nominal subscription. They receive thousands of letters, all of which are answered, the best verbally at the microphone … And what did my countrymen think of their broadcasts in English?

The question took me off my guard. I forgot how sensitive these earnest people were. I said I was afraid we didn’t take their English broadcasts very seriously.

I was not forgiven.

CHAPTER V

TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS

EVERYONE IS A romantic, though in some the romanticism is of a perverted and paradoxical kind. And for a romantic it is, after all, something to stand in the sunlight beside the Trans-Siberian Express with the casually proprietorial air of the passenger, and to reflect that that long raking chain of steel and wood and glass is to go swinging and clattering out of the West into the East, carrying you with it. The metals curve glinting into the distance, a slender bridge between two different worlds. In eight days you will be in Manchuria. Eight days of solid travel: none of those spectacular but unrevealing leaps and bounds which the aeroplane, that agent of superficiality, to-day makes possible. The arrogance of the hard-bitten descends on you. You recall your friends in England, whom only the prospect of shooting grouse can reconcile to eight hours in the train without complaint. Eight hours indeed … You smile contemptuously.

Besides, the dignity, or at least the glamour of trains has lately been enhanced. Shanghai Express, Rome Express, Stamboul Train – these and others have successfully exploited its potentialities as a setting for adventure and romance. In fiction, drama, and the films there has been a firmer tone in Wagons Lits than ever since the early days of Oppenheim. Complacently you weigh your chances of a foreign countess, the secret emissary of a Certain Power, her corsage stuffed with documents of the first political importance. Will anyone mistake you for No. 37, whose real name no one knows, and who is practically always in a train, being ‘whirled’ somewhere? You have an intoxicating vision of drugged liqueurs, rifled dispatch-cases, lights suddenly extinguished, and door-handles turning slowly under the bright eye of an automatic. …

You have this vision, at least, if you have not been that way before. I had. For me there were no thrills of discovery and anticipation. One hears of time standing still; in my case it took two paces smartly to the rear. As I settled down in my compartment, and the train pulled out through shoddy suburbs into a country clothed in birch and fir, the unreal rhythm of train-life was resumed as though it had never been broken. The nondescript smell of the upholstery, the unrelenting rattle of our progress, the tall glass of weak tea in its metal holder, the unshaven jowls and fatuous but friendly smile of the little attendant who brought it – all these unmemorable components of a former routine, suddenly resurrected, blotted out the interim between this journey and the last. The inconsequent comedy of two years, with the drab or coloured places, the cities and the forests, where it had been played, became for a moment as though it had never been. This small, timeless, moving cell I recognized as my home and my doom. I felt as if I had always been on the Trans-Siberian Express.

The dining-car was certainly unchanged. On each table there still ceremoniously stood two opulent black bottles of some unthinkable wine, false pledges of conviviality. They were never opened, and rarely dusted. They may contain ink, they may contain the elixir of life. I do not know. I doubt if anyone does.

Lavish but faded paper frills still clustered coyly round the pots of paper flowers, from whose sad petals the dust of two continents perpetually threatened the specific gravity of the soup. The lengthy and trilingual menu had not been revised; 75 per cent of the dishes were still apocryphal, all the prices were exorbitant. The cruet, as before, was of interest rather to the geologist than to the gourmet. Coal dust from the Donetz Basin, tiny flakes of granite from the Urals, sand whipped by the wind all the way from the Gobi Desert – what a fascinating story that salt-cellar could have told under the microscope! Nor was there anything different about the attendants. They still sat in huddled cabal at the far end of the car, conversing in low and disillusioned tones, while the chef du train, a potent gnome-like man, played on his abacus a slow significant tattoo. Their surliness went no deeper than the grime upon their faces; they were always ready to be amused by one’s struggles with the language or the cooking. Sign-language they interpreted with more eagerness than apprehension: as when my desire for a hard-boiled egg – no easy request, when you come to think of it, to make in pantomime – was fulfilled, three-quarters of an hour after it had been expressed, by the appearance of a whole roast fowl.

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