THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
I leave the Railway - The Town of Streitinsk - Russian Reckoning - "The Best Hotel" - A Siberian Night's Entertainment - Off to Blagovestchensk - The Admiral Tschachoff - Saloon Studies - How to Stop a Snorer - A Thousand Miles of Pretty Scenery
So it was at Streitinsk, exactly 4,055 miles east of Moscow, that I bade good-bye to the twin thread of steel, winding over hill and plain, called the Great Trans-Siberian Railway.
All along I had inquired whether at Streitinsk I would find a steamer to carry me down to the Amur that fringes Manchuria. Ignorance was everywhere. There wore steamers, but whether they ran once a day or once a month - a shrug of the shoulders!
Job's comforters pointed out there had been comparatively little rain for weeks, and the Shilka would be nothing more than a sandy gully.
When I got into Trans-Baikalia I was certain there must be a post connection, and imagined the railway officials could tell me.
No! They knew nothing. Also they were indifferent.
Fancy the station-master at King's Cross not knowing how long was the journey from London to Edinburgh! Yet at Irkutsk the chief of the railway could not say to a day how long it took the train to reach Streitinsk. Maybe three days; possibly four; he didn't think it could be more than five.
"Letters for Vladivostok, China, and Japan are going by my train; how are they taken on from Streitinsk?" I inquired.
"By water, I suppose, but don't know; I have never been there."
It was not till I reached Streitinsk itseelf that I learnt a post-boat went down stream once every five days. As luck would have it, a boat had gone the day before. So I had four days to wait in this dreary, bedraggled little town that stands like an ugly grey wart on a beautiful hillside.
Let me try to describe Streitinsk.
Along the banks of the Shilka stretch a higgledy-piggledy lot of shanties all unpainted, all with little dirty windows, and all with a yard that is more than ankle deep in cattle filth. There is usually a rude fence, but broken. The cows, poor thin brutes, and the pigs, ridge-backed, flabby, and bristled, wander anywhere.
On the roadway, which happened, because the weather is fine, to be a six-inch layer of dust instead of a foot-deep mass of slush, which it would become if it rained, come scampering a herd of Siberian ponies. You get to one side and shut your eyes while they skelter by. You hear strange yells. Slightly raising your eyelids you see, as in a fog, tawny jowled Tartars with huge sheepskin hats about their ears, the wool inside, and with great sheepskin coats, the wool also inside, riding sorry nags and whipping up the straggling ponies with long biting thongs.
At one spot, behind the string of shanties, is a square. There are big, blue-painted signboards with names on them, and now and then a board on which is painted, badly, a fur coat, or a plough, or a kettle, or a cabbage, or a lump of meat, and inside you know you win find clothing or agricultural implements or food.
The place seems deserted. But every now and then your attention is caught by a lady hurrying along in all the finery of Europe. Round the corner spins a Cossack officer, in a white linen jacket, but distinguishable by the yellow band round his cap, and the broad yellow stripe down his trousers, actually riding a bicycle!
Over the place, indeed, hangs a filthy Eastern slothfulness, rent every now and then with evidence of Western ideas. The shops, so dingy from outside, surprise you when once inside. They are big, full of commodities, generally have plenty of attendants, and not infrequently manv purchasers, chiefly, judging by their dress, from the far interior. These shops in so wretched a place amaze you till you remember that Streitinsk, like all other towns in Russia with railways and water communication, is the centre of trade for many hundreds of miles round.
A smile comes to your lips as you notice how the reckoning is done - with one of those little appliances of coloured beads on wires, with which the infant mind at home is beguiled into the first principles of arithmetic, by letrning that two blue and two yellow beads count four. The Russian cannot count without the instrument. Mental arithmetic is beyond him.
You buy something for sixty kopecks, and present a rouble in payment. He must clatter his beads backwards and forwards before discovering that the change is forty kopecks!
Siberia is truly the land of distances.
I met a man on the train who told me he had found much advantage since the railway ran near his home. He lived fifty miles from the nearest station.
With always immense distances to cover, the Siberian has not yet realised the advantages of anything being near. I have already given one reason why the stations on the Trans-Siberian Railway are so far from the towns - the insufficiency of the bribes to the engineers to place them nearer - but another reason is that the Siberian doesn't appreciate the use of a station being only two miles off and not ten. To go ten miles takes longer time than to go two. But what is time? Nothing! The Eastern trait in his nature makes him heedless of time. The Britisher who wants something done now and not next week he regards as a foolish person, who gives himself a lot of trouble.
The post office at Streitinsk might be in the main square, approximately in the middle of the town. It isn't. It is two miles away up the river band. Each day in Streitinsk I had a walk through the place. I confess its sordidness weighed heavily. One was indeed right out of the world. There were no newspapers. No news ever came there.
I did not possess sufficient courage to fight against the inertia of the place. There was just the petty community, the trading, the tea-drinking, the eating, the sleeping all the year round - and nothing more. Every Russian town is the same. So when you see how each place must be a world to itself the surprise after all is not that the Russians have so little energy, but, indeed, that they have any.
A striking change, however, came over Streitinsk at night - at least, over my corner of it, "the best hotel." In the daytime it was just a barn with some gewgaws on the walls and imitation plants on the table to make a dining-room. So dilatory was everybody that if I could get a modest lunch of two courses in two hours I was fortunate.
But at about ten o'clock, when you would conceive such a drowsy, out-of-the-world place should be all abed, "the best hotel in Streitinsk" burst into rollicking uproar. The officers from barracks, the official engineers - those who have gilt buttons and green braid - the river officials, the post office and telegraph officials, officials of this, that, and the other, all in the uniform of their posts, tramped into the hotel, ordered meals, drank many glasses of vodki and many bottles of beer, and grew uproariously merry before the food was ready. There was a wheezy piano, and in front of it a brass-fingered instrument, which on the turning of a handle ripped tunes out of the old piano. Then came card-playing and more eating, and continued hand-turning by a boy. And this in a shed of an hotel with no handles on the doors, where your clothes-hook was a nail, and the gaps in the woodwork so open that you could easily see your neighbour going to bed. It was always four in the morning before quiet came.
I went to the boat office to book a berth on the post-packet. It was closed. The next day I went. It was open, but nobody inside. I waited one hour. At last in came a heavily whiskered man. Could I engage a place on the post-boat? He didn't know because he had not anything to do with it. But the manager would come in an hour or two if I would wait. I didn't wait, but went back in two hours.
Yes, there would be a boat the day after to-morrow, but he hadn't the tickets with him, and if I came tomorrow he would have them. On the morrow I went still again. Well, the boat was not in yet, but if it did come in, and all was well, it would leave on the following day. So I paid my thirty roubles (about £3), and secured a place to Blagovestchensk.
Having made up my mind there would be no boat, I was agreeably surprised to find on Monday morning, September 16th, the Admiral Tschchachoff had come in and would go out again in four hours. It was a long, shallow-draught, paddle steamer.
Every place was taken, and first and second passengers, chiefly officials, jostled one another in the passages. Third-class passengers, who had to be content with the deck, were left on the wharf till a signal was given - a crowd of coarse beings in all kinds of nondescript garb, Russians, Tartars, Chinese, bundles of clothes, with wizenod and grim old features peering out: a tattordemalion throng!
Presently came the post-bags, great leather sacks of whole cowhides fastened with heavy steel chains and locked. Half a dozen coolies staggered under each sack and pitched it into a hole on the main deck. All the bags having been put in, the hold was supposed to be fastened with a cord, and the cord scaled to a tablet. There were the marks of old scaling-wax on the tablet, but no sealing-wax was used during this voyage. But Nitchevo - "What did it matter?" as the Russians say.
When the siren shrieked for the deck passengers to come aboard, there was a scamper. Everybody was carrying bedding, bundles of clothing, chunks of bread, a jangling kettle, and often a big flapping-tailed dried fish which would slap the face of the next person.
The whole pack tried to get down the narrow gangway at once. The purser insisted on seeing tickets, but these were often stored away in the middle of a bundle for safety sake. It was a quaint scene.
Now and then an excited Chinaman would declare his friend had gone ahead with both tickets, try to force a passage and then be hauled back by the pigtail.
When we wore at last off, I noticed we had in our wake a barge, a low-built thing with a sort of iron barred cage running the entire deck. It was a convict ship, in which prisoners for the dreary island of Saghalien on the east coast were taken down the Amur. There wore no prisoners on board, but the merchant company owning the Admiral Tschchachoff had a contract to haul the barge. So, occupied or unoccupied, up and down the Amur and Shilka was it continually tugged.
We first-class passengers wore a nice crowd. There was a general and his wife, who would not eat in the saloon, but "messed" in their own cabin. The wife was a stout, fussy little dame who know her position and put on airs, greatly to the amusement of my French and Russian lady acquaintances.
We each paid two and a half roubles a day for our food, which consisted of tea and bread and butter in the morning, a greasy meal at midday, tea and stale buns in the afternoon, and at seven a hot dish of sorts and more tea.
All the saloon passengers, save our general and his wife, fed together. The table was covered with oilcloth, rather ragged. At the midday meal there was brought a huge platter, on which, was generally a hash of meat and onions, undercooked peas and macaroni, and oil-smeared potatoes. Everybody helped him or herself with his or her own knife and fork. There were no salt-spoons, but a knife, greasy with meat fat, carried quite a lot of salt if stuck in the salt-cellar. If you wanted a second helping, you dived into the big plate with your knife and fork and fished out what you fancied.
There was none of the inconvenience of your serviette ring going astray, such as you usually have on English boats. There were no rings, but just sufficient serviettes to go round, and these were thrown in a bundle on the middle of the table. If you had made a mess by cleaning your fork at midday, you let somebody else have that serviette in the evening. And the somebody else didn't mind.
The oilcloth got rtther sticky at times because there were never any plates to put your bread and butter on, and only one knife for the whole company to butter their bread. When your neighbour talked to you he did so with his forearms spreading along the table, and his knife, and fork pointinr to the skylight. When you required bread it was not expected at all of you to take the first piece. You took up four or five pieces and helped yourself to the one you liked, and throw the rest back anyhow for the next person to maul. Then between the meals and the bringing of tea - you have tea with every meal in Siberia - everybody brought out a little wooden toothpick and picked and sucked their teeth for ten minutes. I've an idea some fastidious Britishers would think this rather disgusting.
But the crowd was very select and very official. That must not be forgotten. The most distinguished man at table was the colonel of a Tartar regiment - a drab-faced man with black, cropped whiskers and spectacles of black glass (for his eyes were weak) - who was on his way to Manchuria to civilise the heathen Chinese. He ate with his fingers and salivated after the manner of a Mexican cow-puncher.
Next to him was a lady proceeding to join her husband, a military man at Vladivostok. She smoked cigarettes incessantly, especially between the courses at meal-time. She threw the little cardboard cigarette stems about indiscriminately.
There was a fur merchant and his wife. He was a big man with rugged eyebrows, and a beard iron-streaked. He was most agreeable. The one word of English he knew was "porter," and after two days' acquaintance he said I was not like the other Britishers he had met, because I didn't get angry because there was no "porter" on board the ship. He put spoonfuls of strawberry jam into his tea, and insisted that I should join him. He had a great admiration for Britishers.
In the evenings, when it was dark and rain spat, I wore a mackintosh on deck. The pockets were so made that I can slip my hand behind a lapel and get at my trouser pocket without unbuttoning the front of the mackintosh. He was enthusiastic about this contrivance. He watched me bring out bunches of keys, and a penknife and kopecks, and had all the delight delight of a child seeing an ingenious trick. He tapped his beard, and said Britishers were clever people. His wife was a kindly old body, so kind that I had not the courage to raise objection when she handed me a piece of butter with her fingers.
Lastly, there was my stable-companion, the man with whom I shared a cabin, an inspector of schools. Most of his time was spent lying on his back smoking cigarettes and drinking Crimean wine. At night-time he snored with the snort of a tugboat. I can't sleep with a snorer. So when he snored I whistled "Annie Laurie," as shrill as I could. Whistling is the one thing that stops a snorer without any show of offensiveness. So whenever my gentleman snored I began with the air describing the picturesqueness of Maxwelton's braes, which made him twist and half wake, and gave me an opportunity to doze before he started again.
I have used the phrase "stable-companion." I've known cleaner stables than our cabin. You can get used to many things in time, but when the first night I felt things dropping on my neck and crawling on my cheek, and making excursions along my arm, I struck a light and found the place swarming with cockroaches.
My companion laughed and exclaimed, "Nitchevo!"
"Nitchevo be hanged!" I muttered, and I packed up my belongings, walked the deck for several hours, and then caught furtive snatches of sleep on four chairs I arranged in the dining saloon.
The second- and third-class passengers had no dining saloon. They just "pigged it," and after my account of how the élite on board fed you may get a ittle idea of what that "pigging it" was like.
There was a stove for common use under one of the hatches, and a great cauldron of water always on the boil There were no regular meal hours, except that there was no eating, as far as I could see, between midnight and four in the morning. The second-class passengers had cabins, but the third-class folk slept on deck with overturned kettles and chunks of bread and bits of dried fish strewn round.
So away went the Admiral Tschchachoff down the Shilka river till it joined the Argun river, and thenceforth the stream was the Amur, Russia on the left bank and Manchuria on the right. Scant villages wore on the Russian bank, a few huts, and a church.
The vessel swung round with her nose up-stream, the anchor was thrown overboard, and there were halts of an hour while a gang of coolies scurried on shore and brought together logs of timber for fuelling purposes. The native women came with bread for sale, and tousle-headed moudjiks sat and blinked and laughed at the boat.
The rivers wound through a thousand miles of pretty scenery, neither grand nor majestic, but just pretty. The hills billowed. They were all wooded, and as autumn had set in, the larch and the birch were only green in sheltered hollows. On the crests they were a mass of burnished gold, with here and there a splash of deep crimson, as though the sun had given them a hurried kiss in passing. Sometimes, when there was depth, the water swirled beneath scarped and grey rock, with mosses and flowers in the crevices.
The sun always set in a purple haze, making the river a sheet of claret. Then a biting chillness sent one downstairs to hunt out a heavy coat. Night was born with a rich blueness, and the pale crescent of a moon came up from behind the China hills, but sank in an hour.
We overtook great rifts of tied timber, a hundred yards along, floating on the stream, and kept in mid-channel by three giant oars at each end. Often there was a hut erected, and in front of it could be seen a woman cooking the evening meal.
The Shilka and Amur are shallow rivers, studded with islands and sand-banks. In places the stream is half a mile wide, and yet the navigable channel often not a hundred yards.
So always in the prow were standing two men, one port and one starboard, pitching poles into the water and shouting the depth. "Five feet; six feet; seven feet; four feet and a half; five feet," the day and night through.
All along were posts, white on the Russian side red on the Chinese, and the vessel zig-zagged from one to the other, for that way lay the channel. At night the indications were white and red lamps. Eerie were these little oil lamps, fringing for hundreds of miles the low countries of Russia and China, and pencilling the stream with their rays.
We would go for half a day and never see a hut. But occasionally we would notice, clinging to the shore, a slim, paddle-propelled "dug-out" boat - such as our prehistoric ancestors used, and which we put in museums when we find them in swamps - and in it would be the lamplighter. Each man attends to about six lamps. What lonely lives these men must lead!
But the Amur is notorious for its fogs. Stalking up the river came white wraiths. With imagination sufficient you could think them lost souls wandering in the dusk. Soon they became embodied into a thick clammy cloud. Then the Admiral Tschchachoff sought the bank, the anchor was let loose, and there we stayed, a little bundle of humanity hid on a river in the far mysterious East, till morning broke, when the sun swallowed the mist and we moved Pacific-wards.
Chapter XV: The Black Crime of Blagovestchensk
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