Taking my bottle, I returned to my cabin. There I pitched it out through the porthole, sobered with an effort and said to myself:
‘I am like the Greek who fouled the toga of the Roman envoy, or like a jester in a holy place. This is my first contact with the greatest force in modern history, the Russian Revolution, and I come to it with vine leaves in my hair. It is easy to jest about these people, just as easy as it is to jest about Christ, or make fun of a child’s intellect. But it is obvious that these Bolshevik seafarers are apostles of Communism just as sincerely as Christ’s fishermen were apostles of Christianity. I must approach them with respect.’
Then I went on deck and walked about the ship and listened and I felt a mysterious influence crowding in upon me. It was not real, but the crystallisation of my thoughts, all I knew about this Revolution, all it had meant to me in my hot youth, when revolt is imperative and romantic, together with all it meant to the later development of my intellect, when reason, settling down to manhood, thinks calmly on a re-arrangement of man’s relation to the universe and to all that is still unknown of the universe.
I saw the ship riding in the darkness, with the red flag of Communism fluttering at her stern, not as a trader, going from shore to shore with goods, but as a courier, bringing this wild message of social salvation from the East to all the toiling masses of the world, as Christ’s apostles brought salvation to the slaves of Rome’s great Empire. Now I saw this ship in the abstract, as a real fragment of that terrifying phenomenon which has engrossed the mind of humanity for the past twelve years. It was all round me. I had stepped into it, almost as a fly is caught in a spider’s web, or as a foolish swimmer is gathered in a current of the sea, engulfed and carried headlong among the violent rumours of the deep.
The individuals I had met had also been engulfed and were carried along. That is why they looked like slaves, judging them from a European standpoint, whose criterion is the individual and not the mass. In this immense force, of which the ship was a unit, there were no individuals, just drops in an ocean, grains of sand in a desert, cogs in a machine. The crew was a Soviet. The ship was a machine. I felt humble, smaller infinitely than this force which surrounded me, just as infinitely as I felt superior to the individual Bolsheviks I had met. It was the mass of the Bolshevik machine that was terrifying in its power, encroaching on Europe like an outrageous colossus, rude, barbarous, yet beautiful, like a great mountain in the morning light.
As I watched and listened, the idea both attracted and repelled me. I love power whether in the individual or in the state. Rome, Britain, Genghiz Khan, Napoleon or Shakespeare, they are all equally beautiful. But I like to hold apart from a power greater than myself.
And then, standing alone there in the night, I said to myself:
‘I loathe the multitude, except as a spectacle to be watched, an ant-hill on the march, a horde of tribesmen moving across plains, a city’s mob in riot; all watched from a mound, or an upper window, or in the pages of a history book. I can only love this Revolution from afar, as a spectacle to be watched. I am an individual of Western Europe. I am proud of my individuality and proud of my intellect. For the first time, I realise that these people are come to overthrow us and are inventing specious philosophies in order that we may lay down our arms and allow ourselves to be overthrown without a struggle. Now they are looting our brains, looting our workshops for our inventions, looting our libraries and our universities and our museums for the revelations of our intellect. To-morrow they shall come with fire and sword to annihilate our power, when their barbaric strength has been harnessed to our knowledge and become unconquerable. I feel that Europe is doomed. Yet I will to remain with it and be destroyed rather than ally myself with this alien power, which has an alien, myriad-headed God, a clinging monster, belching smoke, made of steel, brutal, without the refined, singing beauty that can alone satisfy my soul/
I started. Somebody called out on the bridge in a strange language, a deep voice, full of power, menacing.
I almost fled to my cabin.
Chapter II
I Make Friends With The Crew
I Awoke late. Through the porthole I could hear the lashing of the sea against the ship’s sides. While I dressed I had to sway with the movement of the deck. That was good. I love the sea. My mind grew calm. The sea drove out the fears and melancholy speculations of the previous night. The revolution was no longer a monster, with a sickle in one hand and a hammer in the other, come to smash our statues and burn our libraries, and rip our pictures from their frames, and raze our cities and organise us all as human cogs in a machine of monastic regularity. Ho! The ancient sea! The same old sea that carried Agamemnon, Raleigh and myself, with the same utter indifference, an undying testimony to the unchangeability of nature and to man’s powerlessness to destroy the earth’s beauty. Ho! Ho! All fanaticism dies and does not even leave a stench on the salt sea's surface. There she rolls the same as ever.
I strolled towards the mess room in search of food and to continue my investigation of Bolshevik life. The room was empty. Through an open slide I could see a pretty wench washing dishes in the galley. Also a jolly cook or two, smoking cigarettes. I winked at the girl. She giggled and closed the slide. In a moment it opened again a little, and two wenches tried to get a look at me, the first one and her mate. Yes. Not only the sea is unchangeable but the women also, those blessed beings whose bodily comeliness makes them proof against the brooding fanaticism of man, the maker of gods.
A third woman came into the mess room with food for me. She was the mess room attendant, a peasant woman called Dunya. She was of the type that Tchehov loved to paint in such a melancholy fashion; but whether the type had been relieved of its melancholy by the death of Tchehov or by the Bolshevik Revolution or had never been melancholy, I swear I have rarely seen a woman worker of her class look more happy or good humoured. There was nothing of the servant in her. Neither was there anything of the arrogance of the freed servant. I hate servants, whether they are lords waiting on a king, or blowsy old harridans from the slums waiting on tiny city clerks. The whole race of those, who say ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ and ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ with awe in their voices and a crouch in their backs, is loathsome to me. Even those who shiver in servile ecstasy when they speak of the Prince, or of the Flag, or of the latest public hero.
Dunya was not good to look at. She had the high cheekbones of the Slav. Her face was pale and worn with toil. She was over forty and she had borne children. She had obviously worked from childhood. And she was a peasant, a child of the earth. She had lost the freshness of youth, that supple roundness which is the birthright of all things born of the earth, be they foals, or saplings, budding flowers, or girls at the period of their mating. And just as ageing trees become furrowed, scarred, rough to the touch, cumbersome in their swaying, poor in leafy ornaments, so had this woman become rough and devoid of comely beauty. Her beauty had sunk into her bones, to feed their shrivelling form. But she had dignity, as the old oak has dignity. Her smiling kindness was like the gesture of an old tree that sends out shoots from its stem. They die without bearing fruit, but they are a tribute to eternal beauty.
Dunya was the first real Russian peasant I had ever seen, although I had read a great deal about the Russian peasant and had almost come to believe that he was something essentially different from the rest of earth’s children. She convinced me that there was no difference between her and peasants of other countries. But there was a vast difference between her and the other Bolshevik citizens I had met on the ship. She did not have the ambition to better herself socially, to change her kerchief for a silly hat; to make all men and women equal, because she felt inferior to bourgeois women who had good perfume and rich clothes. Such, I believe, is the basis of Levelling; envy. She was content to be herself. That is why she was beautiful. What she had received from the earth sufficed her.
Perhaps, if I could speak to her freely in her own language, she would have horrified me by talking
about the liquidation of the peasant or some such drivel. But I greatly doubt it. She looked too happy to really want to change anything, or to worry herself with insane lusts for the reformation of mankind. Yet I saw a difference between her and our own peasants which made me see the real basis of Bolshevik power. The woman’s brow bore no trace of the fear that is constant in the faces of our peasants. Fear of God, fear of the lord, fear of the government, fear of the earth? She had somehow become free and she was aware of the fact. She feared neither me nor anybody else. She felt herself my equal and she felt herself the equal of the whole world. I could feel that, by the way she gave me food and moved about and bantered with the other girls while she served me.
And then I watched the other two girls and saw that I did not like them so well. They were city born, from Leningrad. They were young and pretty, but I could see greed and restless ambition in their eyes. Their goal was not constancy to the earth, but the beauty parlours of London and Paris brought to the Soviet cities as the spoils of victorious Communism. They smiled and giggled and were friendly, but for them I was not a human being, but a type of the enemy Their men were going to conquer. There was a hardness in their faces which I did not like. They were slaves of the new god, already become cogs in the Bolshevist machine.
As I left the mess room, the thought struck me that Dunya and the scores of millions of her brothers and sisters, the peasants of Russia, would also soon cease to be children of the earth. Into every village would come the red ensign with its sickle and hammer instead of the cross, making every soul convert to this great crusade for making all humanity free to better its social position, bringing ambition and envy and organisation, turning the whole mass of Soviet citizens into a machine for the liquidation of everything that is opposed to Communism. So were the peasants of England organised and destroyed, in the effort to make British all that was not British, in the effort to make even the pagan Zulu wear the dog-collar of British civilisation.
I went about among the crew, watching them at their work. They too were jolly lads. In some faces I saw the restless ambition of the pretty girls, a brooding envy. But in most faces I saw Dunya’s genial kindliness and sense of freedom. I was amazed to find that they were Conscious of their freedom, for I myself have worked on ships and I know how our seamen are conscious of their enslaved condition, how they bow down before a passenger. I saw them talk to their officers in a friendly fashion, as equals. Although there was no sign of inefficiency or of idleness, there was no harshness of command. Each person worked the ship as his own property, as the complement of his own being. Yet, instead of being pleased at this, I felt worried. I did not feel happy or comfortable, simply because I felt alien, or because I felt that they were not really free, that they were even less free than our enslaved seamen, that some mysterious power stood over them.
Suddenly I came upon the doctor, who introduced himself. We sat on a hatch and lit cigarettes.
‘Well!’ he said. ‘You like our ship? How do you like?’
‘Amazingly interesting,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I am glad. You are a writer, yes? The mate says you write books.’
‘Yes. I am a writer.’
‘Splendid. I also. I am very interested in all literature and art. It is for that, principally, we make revolution, to give everybody love of beauty. Good. I hope we shall be friends. Yes?’
‘I hope so indeed.’
I immediately liked him. His face was extremely intelligent. He had fine clear eyes and he looked one straight in the face, boldly. His lower lip was heavy and his jaw was good. His nose was short and stubby. He was obviously not of proletarian origin; probably a Jew, but of a type that was not at all Semitic. As he talked, I gathered that he had no sense of humour, that he was ambitious, strong-willed, interested in his own work as a scientist and in all the world as a greedy explorer. His voice was deep, but resonant and pleasant to hear.
‘I want to talk to you a great deal,’ he said, ‘in order to improve my English.’
I bowed, amazed at the simplicity with which he admitted that he intended making use of me. So typically Russian, even though it was probably Jewish! So have these Russians come among us for the past hundred years, as simple children, amusing us by their childish frankness and at the same time, gradually assimilating everything they could steal from us.
‘My position on this ship,’ he said, ‘is perhaps different from that of a doctor on your ships. Of course, I treat crew for sickness and even perform operations. I am proud because I cut off a finger in Hamburg very well. But I am also organiser and teacher.’
‘Really? What do you teach?’
Then he made use of a phrase that I was destined to hear perpetually in Soviet Russia. Striking his right palm into his left , he cried:
‘The situation is such.’
I learned later that as soon as a Soviet citizen begins his remarks with that phrase, he is not speaking but reciting something from ‘one of the Fathers’, be he Marx or Lenin or one of the lesser ones, like Engels, Bucharin, Radek, Rosa Luzem-bourg (not a father, of course, but a Holy Woman) Jean Juarez and others. In this instance, the doctor explained to me that it was his social duty to impart to the crew such knowledge about general culture as he possessed and which they did not possess. In this way, by the mutual co-operation of all citizens, all ignorance would be liquidated. Just as he meant to exploit me for my English, he was being exploited for his knowledge of the materia medica.
‘In your country,’ he said, ‘it is different? Yes?’
‘Not quite,’ I said, ‘except that different types engage in the work of liquidating ignorance and lack of culture. Among us, certainly, doctors on board trading vessels do not engage in the liquidation of ignorance. They mostly engage in the consumption of liquid. Maiden ladies assume the work of liquidating ignorance, by the establishment of village clubs, sewing circles, societies for the preservation of the virtue of the young person, societies for the supply of medical knowledge to slum women and such things.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But such organisations are bourgeois. They are meant to keep the working class enslaved.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Of course. I also retain my contact with shore. I write scenarios for film. Now I write scenario dealing with the Five Year Plan. You have heard of Five Year Plan? It is for industrialisation of Soviet Union. Now all films must deal with Five Year Plan. This ship is also Five Year Plan. We all give thirty-five per cent of our wages to the Five Year Plan. Also you will find crisis of alimentation in Soviet Union. All food is exported in order to buy machines for Plan. Cigarettes also. In three years it shall be complete, because we decide already to finish Five Year Plan in four years.’
‘Marvellous,’ I said. ‘Are all the crew eager for this, for giving their wages and for liquidating their ignorance and for industrialisation?’
‘Oh! Yes,’ he said lightly. ‘Already great work had been done. This motor ship is one of five made by workers of Leningrad. Also fifteen are laid down at Leningrad. In five years we shall have big fleet. And so on in all industries. But I am fear that capitalists make war before then. They do not wish Soviet Union to get strong.’
‘I should think not,’ I said.
He talked on and simply carried me off the hatch by his enthusiasm, so that I wanted to jump up at once and liquidate something, or at least make a ship or a Five Year Plan. He awed me by the number of Liquidating Societies to which he belonged. He awed me still more by the revelation that over one hundred and thirty million people were organised under the domination of men like himself, going somewhere. What a weapon! One hundred and thirty million simple and ignorant people organised under the control of a couple of million people with a Religious Idea. Never before had the world known such a phenomenon. I tried to explain that to him, but he gently waved aside my ideas.
‘Mister!’ he said. ‘The situation is such. We are planning not for such a thing, to make great world pow
er, but for proletarian revolution in all the world. We wish abolish bourgeois class. Then all world is free. All men and women equal. All men and women have culture and beauty and knowledge. No more hunger. No more anarchy. So? You understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I understand.’
Why argue with him? It is both foolish and immoral to argue with a man who has a religion. Neither would it pay me at this stage of my journey to begin arguments. Indeed, I agreed with his programme, not because it was going to make the world free, but because it had power behind it and in it. But for myself? I would not submit to such a world power. My ancestors never submitted to the English, who are more akin to me than the Russians. Sitting on the hatch beside the enthusiastic doctor, I felt like saying:
‘I’d rather disembowel myself like a Jap than be a cog in your machine, ordered about by some duffer I despise.’
While we talked, several members of the crew joined us. They treated the doctor absolutely as an equal. They looked at me with the curiosity of peasants into whose village a stranger has come to rest for an hour. Using the doctor as an interpreter, they asked me questions about conditions on our ships. They laughed when my answers were translated. They could not understand how our sailors could submit to such inhuman treatment.
Most of them were boys who had never seen the sea until a few months before. They were all healthy. They looked well fed and happy. In a few hours they had washed down the ship, working very hard. Now they were having a ‘smoko’. Some of the engine room crew were there also and I was impressed by the change machinery had made in their condition. The old coal-using stokehold was gone, that earthly hell I knew of old. Now there was oil. The engine room crew was just as happy and as healthy as the deck crew. I envied them all their brotherly happiness, their confidence, their hope for the future, the eagerness in their faces. Yet I did not belong. When they heard I had been a sailor, they asked me to work on their ship. The captain would get me a job. Perhaps I could teach them something. Soon they were joking with me and making indecent remarks about my person, delighted at discovering that I was not really a bourgeois but a comrade. And just as I felt a sense of solidarity with Dunya, so did I feel at one with them. They were of the same earth as myself. They had no religion no more than I had. They had no bee in their bonnet. They rejoiced in the same healthy things as myself, women, drink, fighting, eating, work. But over them also I felt the ruling power. What?
I Went to Russia Page 2