And well I remember that old Russia, although I was very young when I crossed her wilderness of land. We left our home on the Chinese hill, after the night when I heard the temple bell strike for the last time, and we set out for America. Ordinarily, or had we been an ordinary family, we would have gone to Shanghai and taken a ship across the Pacific Ocean. But my mother suffered from a peculiarly virulent and incurable form of seasickness, and since she had during the years developed a tendency to a heart weakness, the doctor decided that she could not face the month of constant sickness which such a journey involved. Moreover, she wanted me to see Europe. She loved Switzerland and France and Italy and England, and she wanted to visit Holland again, whence her own ancestors had come. I think that she had some idea, too, of inducting me into my country for the four years of college by taking me first through the continent of Europe which had produced the new nation. At any rate, she bought a trunkful of books on Europe and we began reading them together the very day we left our Chinese home and settled ourselves in our tiny cabins on a Jardine-Matheson steamer going up the Yangtse River to Hankow, where we would then take the train for Peking, and Harbin in Manchuria. With European art and music we were already fairly familiar, for from the time we were young children our mother had supplied us with reproductions of famous paintings, and with biographies, suited to our ages, of great artists and composers. We had learned to play Bach and Mendelssohn, Handel and Beethoven on our little English-made Moutrie piano, sent from Shanghai, and upon which we practiced faithfully, if not always willingly, under her supervision.
Our preparation now for Europe was far more serious. My mother was an inspired if uneven teacher. She illuminated by her own enthusiasm any subject in which she was interested, and if she were not interested, she skipped shamelessly and openly. For Europe we could scarcely have had a better teacher. Her own appreciation, not only of art and music but also of history, communicated itself to me, and long before we reached Europe I had quite clearly in mind the differences among the peoples, their characteristics and their achievements. In addition, my mother described to me many of the beautiful places she remembered from her former visits, and I could scarcely wait to see them with my own eyes. Germany she scorned for some reason unknown to me, but my father supplied something for this lack, since he spoke German perfectly, among his other languages, and his religious studies had given him a perspective quite different from my mother’s. Then, too, his own ancestral origins were in southern Germany. In the year 1760, three brothers, his ancestors, the sons of a well-known German scholar, decided to leave their home and the company of men like themselves in order that they could have religious and academic freedom in America. Their father was willing, but required each of them first to have a trade, wisely declaring that a university education would be worth nothing to them in a wilderness. Within a few years after their arrival in the new country the War of Independence began and at least one of them achieved some fame as an aide to George Washington, although he was taken prisoner at Fort Washington, in Pennsylvania. The family traditions were strong in their later home in Virginia, and when my father was growing up there, German was still spoken as a second language in the family.
Looking back, I find that my memories of China grow suddenly dim on that day when we left our compound on the hill and this must have been because my mind was already turned toward Europe and my own country. At any rate, I remember amazingly little of the long train journey northward, and even of our stay in Peking, a city I learned later to know well and to love very much. I did find a deep interest in The Forbidden City, for my impressions of the Old Empress, that dominating figure of my childhood, had remained vivid. The Imperial Family, now weak and inconsequential, were still in residence, and of the famous Summer Palace we could see only the outside, the pagoda beautifully set against the hills. But it is all vague, very vague, and my true memories of Peking came decades later, in another world, and then The Forbidden City was open to any tourist, the doors swinging and the beautiful rooms empty, and the Summer Palace was a picnic place for pleasure seekers.
Harbin, our first stop in Manchuria after we left Peking, was not interesting, being but the familiar medley of a crossroads town, a mixture of peoples and buildings, and I remember only odd and outlandish bits, such as a Mongol camel driver walking briskly at the head of his caravan of dingy camels, and he was remarkable to me because as he walked he was knitting with two long bamboo needles, and his yarn was strands of raw wool which he pulled out from the loose mat of the grey and hairy coat which the camel behind him was shedding. The garment looked like a long wide scarf, although how it could be worn I do not know, except by a man who slept and ate with his camels, for the reek of the camel is eternal, and not to be removed by the best of washings. In the First World War a group of patriotic American ladies in Kuling knitted vests for soldiers in Europe and the only plentiful and cheap wool was that spun from camel hair, and although it was carded and spun and done up nicely in skeins, the smell of camel was still in it and so strong that my mother held her nose and dropped all the yarn into a pail of strong carbolic solution to soak for a day or two. When it was taken out and dried, the camel reek was still there, triumphant over the carbolic, and I remembered it from the knitting Mongol.
Once in Russia itself, my memories grow suddenly strong and clear. The background is vast, endless days of train travel across a flat wooded country, the trees of birch and pine, a weary dreary monotone, with very little change except the intervals, once or twice a day, when we stopped at a station for food and water. Then descending from the train I stared at the strange, wild-looking people, as different from the Chinese as they were from the Europeans I was to meet later. I had seen poverty in China and starvation in famine times and I was later to see poverty in my own country in city slums and in southern towns but never had I, nor have I since, seen poverty to equal that of pre-revolutionary Russia. I saw the poverty, although I was also to see the vast wealth of the nobles and the priests, but at first I thought all Russians were like the savage hungry people in the country, peasants and villagers clad in skins with the fur turned inside and filthy with crusts of aged dirt. Besotted ignorance was on the faces of these poor people, and a terrible despair, as though it was beyond their memory or their imagination that anyone had ever cared for them or ever could care for them, so that all they could think of was a little coarse food to stuff into their empty mouths. Yet they had their feelings, these wretched ones. They embraced one another, a man seizing his friend warmly in his arms and smacking kisses on his cheeks, and they talked with rough voices and laughed loudly in a childlike eager fashion.
I remember my father looking very sober indeed and saying to my mother, “Carie, this can’t last. There’ll be a revolution here within the next ten years — mark my words! People can’t live like this and look like this without an explosion ahead.”
When we reached Moscow we saw a different Russia. Here were plenty of poor people, too, but there were also rich and well-fed ones, wearing handsome furs and satins and English woolens. They rode in carriages or hired droshkies and they talked in French as easily as in Russian, and many of them lived in France or Italy, but especially in France, for most of every year. Moscow was a handsome city, far more interesting to me than Saint Petersburg, but what impressed me, and perhaps depressed me, were the vast cathedrals, those palaces wherein the priests were the ruling princes. The lights, the gold and the silver, the immense and cavernous groined ceilings and in the naves the gilded images and jewelled icons, the smouldering incense and the thousands of candles, were in terrifying contrast to the ceaseless stream of poor people who came in to pray, their sad faces brooding and yearning. And what really broke the heart was the worship of the relics, the bits of dead saints, the fingerbone, the wisp of hair, the fragment of dried skin, which the ignorant pressed to their lips. It made me weep because it was so hopeless, the prayers lost and all the suffering still there. No wonder that a day was to come when the people turned in frightful anger even against the priests. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”