E. Delafield - The Collected Works of E. M. Delafield (Illustrated Edition)

Peter only replies, not unjustifiably, that to have no sense of time and no sense of direction seems to him a poor equipment with which to set up as a guide.

Sometimes we board a tram together. It is invariably bunged to the roof with pale, grimy, heavily built comrades, too tightly jammed together for strap-hanging to be necessary, or even possible. No one sits down. There are people sitting when one gets in, but I think it is because they have got wedged there and can't move.

On one occasion the Little Monster, startlingly and suddenly, says in my ear:

"A pregnant woman may go in the front part of the tram, where there is more room. It is a law."

I wonder whether she thinks I am going to make a fraudulent attempt to take advantage of this concession. But I don't. I remain where I am, leaning heavily on the shoulder of a man in a blouse, with somebody's portfolio digging into the small of my back, and an enormous female Comrade grasping my elbow with one hand and wiping the sweat off her face with the other.

I often think of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

The tram jerks and jolts and stops, and more people get in, and the Little Monster—who isn't more than five feet high—disappears from view altogether. This time I think of the House of Stone, in The Four Feathers and how those who fell down there never got up again. A mind well-stored with literary references is said to be a great comfort to the possessor. I think my references must be of the wrong kind.

Peter, who is a large young man and stands like the Rock of Gibraltar in the tram, is much more of a comfort to me than any number of literary references. He always knows when to get out, which I never do, and the guide seldom.

Getting out of the tram is a very tense and difficult business. Every inch of the way has to be fought for, and there is always a sporting chance that the tram will start again before the people in front of one will let one go through, or the people behind one have ceased to try to push past. I carry a bruise on one ankle for days, where one of the more impetuous Comrades gave me a vigorous kick, in order that I should get out of his way.

I ask Peter if he knew about the pregnant women going in the front of the tram, and he says Yes, but he doesn't see how they're to get there. Neither do I unless they confide their pretty secret to the conductor and he or she passes it on to all the comrades in the tram, and a way is cleared. (Like Charlotte Bronte when she went to a party, and everybody stood up and made way for her.)

"We might ask the Little Monster," Peter suggests. Any delicacy which either of us has ever possessed at home has long since left us. There are no inhibitions in Russia.

It is in a spirit of simple camaraderie that he and I and the Little Monster go together to a clinic for the welfare of mothers and babies—actually a most excellent institution, admirably organized—and are given much full and intelligent physiological information, with Lenin—aged three—looking benevolently down on us from the wall.

As there is practically no wall in Moscow from which I have not seen Lenin looking down—either as an infant or as an elderly man exhorting the workers (there is no intervening stage), I have ceased to notice him consciously; but on this occasion I prefer him to the other pictures with which the walls are covered.

I prefer him to the unwholesome-looking red and blue maps of the human organism. I prefer him to the things in bottles on a shelf. I prefer him, a thousand times, to the masterpiece which the woman doctor who is showing us round, has kept to the last.

"This tumor is one of the largest we have ever..." I say it is interesting—which I suppose it is, if I could bring myself to look at it, which I can't—and Peter says nothing. I think he is stunned. He is looking with a fixed, unnatural intensity at an artificial tomato, carrot, apple, and beetroot in a little case. Necessary items in the diet of infants, says the notice.

I think perhaps if one had seen all this—not the tumor, which can't be essential to anybody's education except a medical student's—but all the maps and photographs and measurements and the instructions—at a much earlier age, before one had grown squeamish and when one's curiosity was young and strong, it might have been a very good thing.

It does give vital information, and it does give it in a scientific, impersonal way, and it does stress the importance of bodily hygiene.

"Are school-children ever brought here to be taught physiological and biological facts?"

"Yes, often. They come in groups."

The last piece of information is superfluous. The Comrades, especially the school-children, go everywhere in groups. They are taught from the very beginning to lead the collective life.

Peter and I agree that the mother-and-babies Welfare Clinic is one of the best things we have seen in the Soviet Union, and that we approve of the visits there of the school-children—with a mental reservation excluding the tumor.

From the Clinic the Little Monster takes us—going first in the wrong direction but afterward recovering herself—to the Court of Marriages and Divorces. It consists of a desk in a little room, with a middle-aged woman in charge, and two plants that look like india-rubber-plants in pots in the doorway, each tied up with a pale, frail bow of papery white ribbon—like the ghosts of dead bridal decorations.

There are, as usual, Comrades sitting about and waiting, and the guide says that they have come either to register their marriage or to get a divorce. They all look to me equally unexhilarated, and nearly all of them are holding small children.

A young Russian is at the desk, and has said something, and it has been written down in a ledger, and he has, in his Russian way, settled down on to a hard-looking stool as if for life.

"He has just got a divorce," says the guide, and she asks him a great many questions about his private affairs and translates his answers. (I am, and always have been, thoroughly aghast at the way in which private individuals in Russia are turned inside-out for the benefit of tourists; but I am bound to say that they never seem to raise any objection.)

It seems that the young Russian is not pleased with his wife. She reproaches him, rather strangely, with spending his money on amusements and on presents for her. It makes her, she complains, into a slave. They quarrel. He has, without telling her anything about it, got a divorce. When she reproaches him this evening because he wishes to take her out to a cinema or a café, he will simply confront her with the fait accompli .

"It is very simple," says the Little Monster, looking unspeakably superior. She knows that in capitalist countries nothing, least of all divorce, is as simple as that.

"Are marriages equally simple?"

"Yes, they are. This couple with the two children have come to register their marriage."

The husband with the divorce smiles at us very amiably and makes way for the couple with the two children. Some people might think that it is a little late in the day for them to come and register their marriage. But the guide, after the usual questions and answers, is able to explain it all.

They have been eight years together. If they should get tired of each other and decide to separate it will be very much simpler to make arrangements for the welfare of the children if the marriage has been registered. So here they are.

The whole thing—barring the questions of the guide and her translations of the replies to us—takes about five minutes. We have witnessed a wedding in Moscow.

I wonder, sentimentally, whether the woman—who is sufficiently middle-aged to remember the old days—gives a thought to a new dress and music and flowers and a wedding party.