The books were duly purchased and hidden in the luggage, and as they approached the Russian frontier, the two conspirators tied the thick, paper-bound volumes beneath their coats, like life preservers, around their chests and middles, with heavy twine. There was an awful moment at the customhouse when police guards in full uniform, with long sabers hanging from their belts, came down the line “frisking” everyone by vigorous slaps. By the grace of God they were fortunately spared this ordeal, possibly on account of the contrast between their more or less respectable appearance and that of the muzhiks, small merchants, gypsies, and other assorted riffraff who had piled their belongings on the long benches of the customhouse.
On reaching Moscow, they made contact with Chekhov. He was a friend of Willard’s but scarcely known outside Russia at that time. They gave Chekhov the contraband volumes for Tolstoy “in the dark of the moon”, and he subsequently delivered them via the “underground railway”.
For the rest of their trip, I can’t do better than hand Wood the microphone. He tells it well.
Willard had some business with the American Consul in Moscow, and before starting for Siberia we went to see him. We found him in an old dark, dirty office on a second floor, sitting at a roll-top desk over which hung his framed credentials, ornamented with a screaming American eagle and covered with flyspecks. He was apparently Teutonic and could neither speak nor understand English. How he communicated with Washington, if he ever did, was a mystery. Willard had a letter from our Ambassador in Berlin to the Ambassador in St. Petersburg, and hoped for an opportunity to have a word or two with Czar Nicholas. What we got, in deep, guttural disapproval, was:
“Who are you, that you should ask to see THE — GREAT — WHITE — CZAR!”
It was a purely rhetorical question, and we did not press the point. I spent most of my time lugging my forty pounds of camera, tripod, and dry plates around — occasionally also making water-color sketches, frequently pestered by formidable gendarmes. When they were too suspicious or belligerent, I displayed Prince Hilkorff’s letter. We went to St. Petersburg first, and then to Moscow.
From Moscow to Nizhni Novgorod and the Fair was a night’s trip. As we had unlimited transportation free, we spent a week shuttling back and forth between the two cities, saving hotel bills by sleeping on the night express, the Kourierski. The first-class compartment for two had a single wide seat extending from the window to the wall of the narrow corridor. By raising the back, which was hinged to the wall, and then fastening two bolts, we had an excellent upper and lower berth.
We finally got off for Siberia on the Moscow night express to Chelyabinsk, just beyond the Ural mountains, where the then new trans-Siberian line started. We got along well and economically living on trains in Russia. We had our teapots and blankets and were able to buy food at a cost of about half a ruble (twenty-five cents) a day. We lived chiefly on fruit and “meat balls” as we called them — a hash of meat, chicken, and whatnot, enclosed in dough and fried in deep lard. One of them made a meal, and they cost only about five cents apiece, hot from the pot at every railway station. With plenty of fruit, it made a not too badly balanced diet, and we thrived on it. Also, across the tracks, at every railroad station, there was a huge brass samovar, the size of a barrel. At each stop it was charged upon by a crowd of men and women armed with teapots. Hot water was free, and there was always a “free for all” around the samovar. Willard and I formed a “De Land wedge” (football in the nineties), with the help of two or three men we’d met on the train, and went through the crowd like a snowplow through a drift.
At one point in the first stage of the trip, we had an opportunity to leave the train and travel by river for a day or so — on the Volga between Syzran, as I recall it, and Samara. We steamed all day in the bright sunshine, through a flat country, drawing up late at night against a few boards laid on the bank which served as a wharf. It was pitch dark and the single small oil lantern disclosed a pool of ankle-deep, soft mud beyond the makeshift wharf, through which we waded to the road where vehicles awaited us. They were primitive carts or chariots, with wide and shallow wicker baskets half full of straw swung between the high wheels. We piled in with our legs hanging over the edges, and were off at a gallop with shouting and cracking of whips, across the steppes, in total darkness…
At Chelyabinsk we got aboard a trans-Siberian construction train, and had a compartment in a first-class coach which carried construction engineers. The road wasn’t yet open for passengers. These trains ran at irregular intervals, perhaps one a week, and made only about twenty miles an hour over rails that had been merely spiked to crossties that lay in the sand. The stone ballast hadn’t yet been put down. Most of the stations were merely shanties where the telegraph operator lived. The whole job was going to cost over $175,000,000.
Omsk was the first large town we reached. The train was to remain there four days, and we wanted to live aboard her, but the guards and crew (small blame to them) insisted on locking it up for the period. Forced out, we took a room in the Hotel Moscow, where we had to sleep, with our own blankets, on bare mattresses, since sheets and blankets were not supplied. Russian travelers in those days were in the habit of carrying their own bed linen. The mattress was infested with bugs, and our first night was a horror. We brushed the bugs to the floor, but they kept crawling back. Then we put saucers filled with kerosene under the legs of the bed. Then the bugs climbed the wall to the ceiling and began dive bombing us. Next morning we went down to the station, exhibiting our tortured hides — and the letter from Prince Hilkorff — saying we knew His Highness wouldn’t want protégés of his to be eaten alive and begging permission to sleep in the locked train. They took pity on us, and we spent a delightful three days in Omsk, walking, riding in the “haycart” cabs, and swimming in the Irtish.
Willard was writing for American newspapers, and in one of the old clippings, this paragraph occurs.
Except in simplest transactions, the language was a stumbling block. My vocabulary was painfully limited, and Rob could say nothing at all in Russian. When my words gave out, we resorted to pictures which Rob drew with his clever pencil. They spoke with a greater eloquence than words. After he had drawn what we wanted, I would present the sketch to the person with whom we were dealing, and pointing to it, say, “You can?” The man looked sometimes as if he thought we wanted to sell the sketch and were hoping he’d make a bid on it. But as a general thing we were understood, and got what we wanted.
There were no paved streets in the town and the dust kicked up by the galloping horses and the bouncing wash- basket chariots they drew was terrific. We preferred long drives out over the open fields and prairies. We sang and shouted. We were “American Indians” who knew no better, and nobody cared or stopped us.
A few more days in the creaking, creeping train brought us to Tomsk, where we were sitting at a long table alone in the taproom, drinking vodka, when the door opened suddenly, and looking around we saw a man framed against the darkness of the night. He stared at us for a moment. Then suddenly both he and Willard exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” It was an old friend of Willard’s, a journalist who’d been doing Siberia from the opposite direction. He’d left Vladivostok many weeks before, coming partly by train, as the road was under construction from both terminals, then by horses. He told us the three hundred miles at the eastern end was finished and in operation. We drank vodka until nearly dawn and staggered up to bed. He was gone when we got up next day.