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

It is evident that enormous progress is being made all over the country in civilization, and that the coming generation is to have a fair chance of acquiring health, and education and a limited amount of culture. (Limited, because everything is forbidden that is not directly in sympathy with Communist ideals, and because no society from which individualism is excluded can ever hope to produce creative artists.)

Perhaps it is inevitable that a country which has fought its way from centuries of tyranny and ignorance through bloody civil war, into the throes of a colossal rebirth should meet criticism with this blind, aggressive self-assertion. All the same, it is very far from prejudicing one in favor of the Soviet system to find so many of its exponents without humor, without manners, and without imagination.

III

I am leaving Russia. I sail from Odessa for Istanbul to-night. I have still not spoken my mind.

In defiance of repeated instructions from Intourist—and also from many of my fellow-travelers—to the effect that "tips are neither expected nor required in the Soviet Union," I have tipped several of the hotel servants, and they have accepted my offerings without the slightest demur.

I have said good-by to Intourist, and they to me, without very much abandon on either side.

I have packed. I have spent hours and hours debating within myself the best means of taking out of Russia a thirty-thousand-word manuscript containing my impressions of my travels. Sometimes I think that the general atmosphere of intrigue and mystery, so characteristic of the country, has quite gone to my head, and that there is in reality no reason at all why I shouldn't pack the manuscript in the ordinary way, among spongebags and pajamas. At other times—mostly in the middle of the night, when judgments always tend to become melodramatic—I see the Customs officials seizing the manuscript, and the police seizing me, and each of us being taken away in different directions. And I wonder how I shall be able to explain the position to my publishers.

I have asked advice twice—which is a grave mistake because each adviser says something quite different. Both, however, are agreed that the Customs officials are a great deal more interested in books, papers, manuscripts, and films than in any other form of contraband. This interest is manifested not only when one enters the country but, even more actively, when one leaves it.

Finally, I am decided by the frightful story of an American journalist in the Odessa Hotel who tells me that he once wrote half a novel while he was in Russia and put it in his suitcase to take to America, only to have to part with it at the Customs.

"They said they'd have to look through it," he disconsolately remarks. "That was eighteen months ago, and I guess they're still looking."

"Was it about Russia?"

"No. It was about night life in New York."

"Did you tell them that?"

"Sure I did. But they couldn't any of them read English, so they took it away to find someone who could."

I think of my own manuscript, entirely written in pencil, and feel that it may well take a very long while indeed before any persons are found who can read it. And when they do, they almost certainly won't like it.

"If you've written anything at all that you want to take home with you," says the American journalist significantly, "just carry it under your coat or somewhere. You'll find it saves a very great deal of time."

I think he is right.

He is less right when he adds: "It's only for a few minutes after all."

In my experience of Russia nothing is ever done there in the space of a few minutes.

With an agreeable feeling that I am being like someone in a novel all about international gangs, I lock the door of my bedroom and proceed to wedge the manuscript against my spine, under my elastic belt.

It is agony. I shall never endure it for five minutes, let alone five hours. I remove the hard cover of the manuscript, find quite another part of my spine, and try again. Bad, but endurable.

If I put on my loose coat now I shall be much too hot, but I defy anybody to notice anything abnormal in my back view.

Besides, I shall face them all the time, and look them straight in the eyes with that directness of gaze which is well known to be the outward sign of utter rectitude of spirit.

The least agreeable of the guides has been given the task of seeing off the departing tourists. There are only six of us: two Swedish astronomers, who came to see the eclipse of the sun, an elderly English couple, a young American college boy, and myself.

We drive down to the docks. I see the last of the beautiful crescent of houses above the sea-front, the last of the two-hundred steps down to the Black Sea, the last of Karl Marx preening himself on the pedestal originally occupied by the (probably better-looking) statue of the Empress Catherine, the last of the town that I have liked best of all those I have visited in the U.S.S.R.

I have no regrets. If I had any I shouldn't be in a position to indulge in them, partly because I am preoccupied by the displeasing thought that if I get much hotter most of my manuscript will probably become blurred and undecipherable, and partly because I feel ill.

Either the black bread, the salad-grown in a drain?—or the drinking-water has chosen this inconvenient moment for taking its toll of me.

If I faint—and I feel as though, between the heat, my coat, and my indisposition, I certainly shall—someone will have the brilliant idea of loosening my clothes, and the manuscript will fall out, and I shall come to under a strong police guard...

I do not faint. Instead, I get out of the car with everybody else, and we all go into a shed on the docks and the inevitable wait begins, and goes on, and goes on, and goes on.

A great number of rather dégommés -looking Comrades are scattered about the long shed, all engaged in their usual occupation of waiting. Their luggage includes bedding, little hand-carts, bundles of wraps (one of which startles me by suddenly turning out to be an old woman), bags, boxes, and the customary mysterious portfolios.

Some of the Comrades eat dried fish. Some of them sleep. Almost all of them cough and spit.

"I wonder what we're waiting for," says the elderly Englishwoman.

She can't have been very long in Russia.

But the guide—as usual—has her answer.

"They are not yet ready," she says.

"The Customs officers?"

"They are busy."

As there are none of them in sight, the guide can't possibly know if they're busy or not. She just says it automatically. I admire the spirit of the elderly Englishwoman who replies at once that they ought to be busy over our luggage, not over anything else.

The guide, for once, has nothing to say, and we all continue to await the pleasure of the Customs officials.

(By this time most of my penciled records must have come off on my back.)

A little baby, swaddled to the eyebrows in shawls, screams and howls from behind its mullings—as well it may. Nobody unwraps it or takes much notice.

Nobody seems to be taking much notice of anything. We are all sunk in fatalistic apathy. It is an atmosphere that seems very characteristic of a Russian gathering. Even when the officials at last crawl in, one at a time, from an inner office, nobody is in the least excited.

One or two of the people nearest the counter heave their luggage on to it and then turn aside in a dejected way, as though knowing that nothing is really going to happen yet, and ashamed of their own misguided impetuosity.

Only the elderly English couple, stalwart and determined, march up with their solid, respectable-looking suitcases and take up their stand in front of the counter. The guards at Waterloo probably looked like that, only with better effect; for the French are more impressionable than the Soviet Comrades, by a very long way.