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

"There is nobody there. To-day it is the day of rest. The offices are all shut."

The Englishman is staggered. I can positively see the thoughts flying through his mind.

Tuesday, the day of rest? By Jove, yes! there are no Sundays in Russia now, but they have a holiday every sixth day. Then why on earth couldn't they say so sooner? Of course the offices would be shut. Good God, what a country!

"I suppose I'd better try again to-morrow morning," he says angrily. "Unless you could ask the Exchange if they know the number of his private house?"

"You want to ask the telephone number of his house?"

"If they can give it to you."

"Ah. I can ask them, if you wish,"

He does wish.

A little boy with a shaven head and bare feet and carrying a small attaché-case, comes in and adds to the congestion.

The lift returns and the two French ladies, after a few passes as to which of them shall enter it first, get inside. Then they wait again while the lift-man looks for a singleton passenger. He may not take more than four people at a time, but is determined not to take less.

The Englishman is now leaning against the wall with his arms folded. Russia is growing on him, I can see it plainly.

"They ring his apartment," says Intourist. "They say there is no reply."

"He must be away."

"He is bee-zy, Or perhaps he is seek."

These are the favorite alternatives of Intourist when a telephone connection is unobtainable. They do not say that the number is engaged or the telephone out of order. They make the less impersonal suggestion that the owner of the required number is either busy—too busy presumably to answer his telephone calls—or that he is ill.

The Englishman says that he supposes he must wait till to-morrow. Already he seems to me to be wilting slightly.

As he moves away from the Intourist Bureau he stops and reads a notice informing him that excursions will start punctually at ten o'clock each morning and tourists must on no account be late. I wonder if he believes it?

Perhaps I have been here long enough, and ought to give up my chair to one of the numerous Comrades who are standing about doing nothing. I am not really waiting for anything in particular—only just waiting. But I should like to see somebody pay a little attention to the ancient in the fur cap. He has been waiting longer than anybody else and has probably got rooted to his minute fragment of the bench by this time.

Comrades come and Comrades go, the blonde in the office folds her arms on a table and lays her head upon them, the Englishman buys a copy of the Moscow Daily News and reads about abortion—at least I suppose he does, as the papers devote much more space to that than to any other subject—and the Comrade with the cigarette gets up and is followed by the Comrade in the blouse and skirt, who has been sitting next him all the time but with whom he has never exchanged word or look. But they go away arm-in-arm and are, no doubt, husband and wife in the sight of Stalin.

Other people drift in, and take their places, and wait. The old man comes out of his coma. He is going to demand attention, to insist upon doing whatever it is that he has come to do, and for which he has waited so interminably. Not at all. He picks up his fish, rises very slowly to his feet, and walks out again into the street. He came, apparently, for the express purpose of sitting and waiting, and for nothing else. How little he knows that he has supplied me with the title for this article.

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As my Russian visit draws to an end, I feel that the time has come for me to speak my mind about the Soviet Republic.

But to whom? My fellow-travelers all have opinions of their own which they regard, rightly or wrongly, as being of more value than mine. Most of them are pessimistic and declare that they don't ever want to come back again, and that the Crimea was lovely but the plugs in the hotels wouldn't pull, and Moscow was interesting but very depressing.

Some, on the other hand—like Mrs. Pansy Baker, the American communist—are wholly enthusiastic. (There is no juste milieu where the Soviet is concerned.) How splendid it all is, they cry, and how fine to see everybody busy, happy, and cared for. As for the institutions—the crèches, the schools, the public parks, and the prisons—all, without any qualification whatsoever, are perfect. Russia has nothing left to learn.

It would be idle to argue with them. For the matter of that, it is almost always idle to argue with anybody.

In Russia it is not only idle but practically impossible. One had thought of Russia, in one's out-of-date bourgeois way, as a country of tremendous discussions—of long evenings spent in splendid talk round the samovar—of abstract questions thrashed out between earnest thinkers. All that must have gone out with the Grand Dukes, the beautiful women, the borzois, the sables, and the diamonds.

The Comrades do not discuss; they assert. They contradict. They admit of no criticism whatever.

Nothing could be more difficult or, probably, more unprofitable, than to speak one's mind in Russia concerning one's impressions of Russia. But all the same, I shall try. After all, it's my turn. For weeks and weeks I have followed meekly in the wake of pert and rather aggressive young women, who have told me how vastly superior everything in the U.S.S.R. is to everything in my own Capitalistic country (where they have never set foot).

And although several of the guides have been neither pert nor aggressive, but very obliging and friendly, even they have smiled rather pityingly at any comment other than one of unqualified approval.

In fact, the U.S.S.R., like the Pope, is infallible, and whereas the Pope's claim has at least the dignity of some two thousand years of experience behind it, that of the U.S.S.R. has not.

I shall speak my mind before I leave the country. I am resolved upon it. And I shall have to do it fairly soon too. Odessa is my last stopping-place. A Russian boat is to take me to Constantinople in a week's time.

There is a very intelligent Russian in the hotel. He is a doctor and has lived for several years in the United States. I shall speak my mind to the Russian doctor.

We often sit at the same table for breakfast. Surely he would welcome an impartial discussion of the state of his country from an intelligent visitor?

"I shall be leaving next week, I am going to Turkey and then back to England. Everything I have seen in Russia has been most interesting."

This is not perhaps literally true—but then, so very few statements ever are. After the first fifty, for instance, none of the pictures of Lenin and Stalin was in the least interesting. But it will do, I think, to start the impartial discussion.

"You find Soviet Russia interesting? Yes, that is what everybody says,"

Well, it wasn't a very original opening. I see that now, and wish that I had thought of something new and brilliant instead.

"But," says the Russian doctor, "it is quite impossible for you to form any correct opinion of the country unless you knew it before the Revolution."

Then I've been wasting the whole of my time?

"No one can judge of the New Russia who did not know intimately, over a period of many years and from the inside, the Old Russia."

The only reply I can think of to this is Good God! and I do not make it aloud. But really, if I left home and children and country and spent months of discomfort in places I haven't liked, only to learn at the end of it all that none of my collected impressions are of any value whatever, it does seem rather discouraging. The Russian doctor is either unaware of or indifferent to the blow that he has dealt.