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

I don't suppose she does. I see her grasp one child by the hand, and the husband takes the other, and they depart, without so much as a vestige of Mendelssohn's Wedding March to encourage them.

Peter, who collects information much more assiduously than I do, asks intelligent questions, and enters the answers in a little book, and the woman at the desk—I suppose she is the Registrar—is very obliging and only breaks off once or twice to divorce or marry a few people who drift in and out.

As I return to my hotel—by way of the Kremlin, the fir trees, the Mausoleum, and the Basil Cathedral—I reflect that Moscow, whether through its fault or my own, has a most depressing effect on me. I think it's partly the number of Comrades who walk the streets and throng the trams and stand in queues outside the shops and the cinemas, all looking rather drab and unwashed and solemn. And one has caught such depressing glimpses, through unshaded windows, of dormitories with beds packed like sardines. Besides, it is never exhilarating to see such quantities of wholesale destruction going on as is necessitated by the Soviet determination to make a completely new city of Moscow.

I quite see that wonders have been achieved in a very short time. I haven't any doubt that the condition of the workers before the Revolution was abominable beyond description. I haven't really any serious doubts that they are working toward a better state of things than they have ever known.

But I have a bourgeois longing to see gaily dressed shop windows, and perhaps gaily dressed people in the streets as well, and to see more individualism and less collectivism—and, in a word, there seems to me to be a total absence of fun in Moscow.

Beauty, there is. In some of the buildings that have survived, in the Ballet, in the Gallery of Western Art, in many of the theater productions. "Romeo and Juliet" was a beautiful production. So was "Eugene Onegin" at the Opera.

Probably I have come to Moscow in quite the wrong spirit. I am making the mistake of comparing its newly begun institutions—of which, God wot, I have seen plenty of examples—with similar institutions in England and in America. Absurd and unreasonable.

The Soviet institutions—clinics, welfare centers, schools, crèches, hospitals—are all working under difficulties and are all hampered by lack of experience and lack of appliances. (They handicap themselves still further by a cast-iron determination to accept no outside criticism whatever and by assuming that perfection has already been achieved, which is far from being the case.)

A recollection—inaccurate, as usual—comes to my mind of some uncivil aphorism of Dr. Johnson's about women writing books or pursuing any other intellectual avocation.

"It is like a dog that walks upon its hind legs, sir. We do not ask whether the thing be well or ill done. The wonder is that it should be done at all." I am sure that I had better remember about Dr. Johnson and the dog when I try to collect my impressions of Soviet Russia.

III

At eleven o'clock at night an American acquaintance of Peter's appears and suggests taking us to pay a call on a man who writes books—a Russian. He has said that he will be at home between twelve and one.

He isn't, and we all settle down in his kitchen—situated on the staircase, and which he shares with five other families in the same building—and wait for his arrival.

At a quarter to one he comes, bringing three friends—a woman and two men.

We all sit in the bed-sitting room and talk. There ought to be a samovar, but there isn't. Only a wireless. I think my ideas are out of date.

The conversation is about the law concerning abortion (naturally, for it is the most popular topic in Russia), the new Metro, a poet who has annoyed the Government by one of his poems and has been sent as a punishment to work at the construction of a new bridge across the Neva—where he will surely be of no use whatever—and the state of literature in England.

I do not join in this intelligently. For one thing, I am getting sleepy, and for another, nobody in Russia has ever heard of me as a writer—and wouldn't be interested if he had—as none of my works is political or sociological—so nobody refers to me. Just as I am thinking that with any luck nobody will notice it if I do go to sleep, my host abruptly inquires of me which writer of fiction is leading the younger school in England now? Which indeed?

I must think of a name, and I must try to think of one that will convey something to my hearers into the bargain.

I hope to combine a modicum of truth with a certain amount of diplomacy by saying: "Dreiser."

"Theodore Dreiser?"

"Theodore Dreiser," I repeat firmly, and I really think I have displayed great presence of mind, considering that I am more than half asleep.

"I meant," says my host, "which of the moderns . Theodore Dreiser is the literature of the grandmothers, yes?"

Not of any of the grandmothers I know, he isn't. But I don't say so. Theodore Dreiser and I retire together into the ranks of the grandmothers and are disinterred no more.

Only just before we go away, at three o'clock, the only other woman present asks me rather sharply if I have any silk stockings, aspirins, lip-sticks, cotton frocks, or nail-scissors to sell.

I suppose she thinks it's all I'm fit for—and I am disposed to agree with her, and make a rendezvous for next day, for her to come to my hotel and inspect my belongings.

Shortly afterward I say good-night to Peter at his door and continue on my way—Red Square, Kremlin, Mausoleum, fir trees, Basil Cathedral, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

IV

The Russian lady keeps her word. She much more than keeps it. She not only comes and buys everything that I want to sell, but swoops down on a large number of things that I don't want to sell, and says she'll take them as well. She opens my wardrobe and takes down my frocks, she lifts up the pillow on my bed by a sort of unerring instinct—like a water-diviner—and discloses my pajamas, and she looks inside my sponge-bag. (What can she possibly suppose that I am hiding inside my sponge-bag?)

"Look, I take this ink-bottle off of you as well, and if you have a fountain-pen I take that, and I take for my husband the blue frame (he will not want the photograph; besides it is your children, you will like to keep it) and for myself I take those things what I have already bought, and the red jumper, the pajamas, the two frocks. Have you any boiled sweets?"

No, I haven't any boiled sweets. And nothing will induce me to part with the safety ink-bottle or the blue frame or my only two frocks.

It takes a long while to convince the Russian lady that I really mean this, and I have eventually to concede the red jumper and the pajamas. She still looks so fixedly at the ink-bottle that I become unnerved, and distract her by an offer of meat-juice tablets—for her husband—and handkerchiefs and safety-pins for herself.

She buys them all and pays me in roubles on the spot. When I put the money away in my bag she says she will buy the bag, and when I hastily thrust the bag into my suitcase she says she will buy the suitcase.

I get her out of the room at last by giving her a lip-stick as a sort of bonus, like a pound of tea for a cash sale.

When, in the passage outside, I refer to our morning's work she says, "Hush Not so loud," and I realize that the whole transaction has been an illicit one and that Comrade Stalin would disapprove. We might perhaps even find ourselves, like the ill-conducted poet, constructing a new bridge across the Neva.

All the same, if I'd known what a shortage there is of pretty, brightly colored odds and ends in the Soviet Republic, I think I should have brought a great many more of them with me—and not only for the sake of turning a doubtfully honest rouble out of them either.