HOLLAND. ON THE Flushing platform tail draught-horses, rather like the draught-horses you see in Japan, help the porters with the luggage. The train pulls out and runs through the evening sunlight across a flat country partitioned with a symmetry so emphatic as to be rather charming. But the flatness is overdone; privacy and surprise – surely the two prime qualities in a civilized landscape – are almost wholly excluded. Holland looks rather dull to me.
But not to the two little Cockney girls in the next compartment, unaccountably bound for Berlin. In an exercise book they write down feverishly the name of each successive station. ‘Oo, look!’ cries one. ‘There’s a reel Dutchwoman!’ And by God she is right.
I dine with a pleasant young Englishman. He claims to know Warsaw, and we embark on a markedly one-sided discussion of the Upper Silesian Plebiscite of ’21. My mission, when revealed, awes him. ‘Manchuria!’ he exclaims. ‘But can you speak Russian, or Chinese, or Japanese?’ Alas, I cannot. ‘Then how will you manage?’ I say I do not know. He eyes me with respect; a desperate fellow, this, he is thinking. It is clear that he finds me Ouidan. I wish now that I had not told him where I am going.
I wish that I had not told him, because the false values which other people put upon one’s activities are disconcerting. My own sense of proportion I regard as impregnably established. In the light of it, a journey to Manchuria is a perfectly normal undertaking: nothing to get excited about. But the world at large persists in maintaining a set of values which the simplification of travel, and the general standardization of most forms of external experience, have long rendered obsolete. The far cry has still an embarrassingly romantic lilt, and distance lends an enchantment which is in fact no longer hers to lend.
When we said good night, the young man wished me luck on My Adventures. I was afraid he would.
An atmosphere, congenial to me, of racketeering pervaded Berlin. Dark stories of the concentration camps, rumours of plots and feuds among the great ones, and an inexhaustible supply of jokes at the expense of Hitler were exchanged: but only when the waiter had withdrawn out of ear-shot. One looked instinctively for swastikas on the pats of butter.
I lunched with Wheeler-Bennett, Knickerbocker, and Duranty (on his way back to Moscow after a holiday), and concealed with only a partial success my ignorance of all European and most other politics. There was also present an American film-star, full of the ardours and endurances of Greenland, where he had been making a picture in a climate so unkind that two imported polar bears had died of exposure, martyrs to their art. He will linger in the memory by virtue of having told me the longest story about an operation that I have ever heard.
After an abortive attempt to get myself inoculated, I left for Moscow on the night train.
A legend, blazoned in Russian across an arch through which the train passes to cross the Polish frontier, informs you that ‘The Revolution Breaks Down All Barriers’. The truth of this is not immediately apparent.
The Customs House at Niegoreloje is decorated with large mural paintings, in which the devotees of agriculture and industry, curiously combining a tubular physique with an air of ecstasy, are portrayed in the discharge of their varied and onerous duties. ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ is inscribed in gold letters and four languages round the walls. The second sentence of this now immortal exhortation – ‘You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains’ – is omitted; it would represent, my 1931 diary notes, ‘a highly conservative estimate of one’s potential losses in that place’.
However, I got my scanty luggage through the customs without loss, if not without delay. The officials moved about their business, as they had moved two years ago, with a mystic and inconsequent air. Russia has never, I imagine, been very good at bureaucracy. To-day her functionaries, gravely inconvenienced by a newly acquired civic conscience, fall unhappily between two stools; on the one hand their fatalistic instincts bid them muddle through and cook the accounts at the end of the month, on the other the ideals of an exact and Prussian efficiency, forcefully inculcated from above, spur them on to higher things. By nature introspective and self-critical, the average Russian official is painfully aware that he was not born to fill up forms – or not, at any rate, to fill them up correctly. He is a kind of Hamlet, and in his relations with the traveller will veer unpredictably from the dogmatic to the perplexed, from the apologetic to the menacing. He is often likeable, but never, in any circumstances, expeditious.
My brother Ian, recently returned from Moscow where he had been acting as Reuter’s Special Correspondent during the trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers, had given me, by way of a talisman, a photostat copy of a letter he had received from Stalin. Stalin corresponds seldom with foreigners, and the sight of his signature, negligently disposed on top of a suitcase otherwise undistinguished in its contents, aroused in the officials a child-like wonder. Their awe was turned to glee when they found an album containing photographs of an aboriginal tribe in Central Brazil. Had I really taken them? Indeed? They were really very good, most interesting. … Even the Bolsheviks, it seemed, were travel-snobs.
I parted with the officials on the most friendly terms, but with a slightly uneasy conscience, for I had 200 roubles in my pocket. They came, like Stalin’s letter, from my brother Ian, and they were contraband.
Now here we come to the question of what is called The Exchange. It is a question which I shall never understand. I yearn to do so. I would give anything to be able to write, or even to read, an article on ‘The Future of the Franc’ or ‘The Peseta: Whither?’ But I know I never shall.
In Russia the Exchange is a particularly unreal and complex bogey, and I will not here attempt to explain the difference between gold roubles and black roubles, for I do not know what it is, nor why it should exist. The only thing I am quite sure about is that if you are caught importing roubles into the country you are arrested; and that, on the other hand, if you change your foreign money at the official rate you don’t get anything like as many roubles as you ought to. (The ten shillings which I changed at Niegoreloje, to allay suspicion, would not have covered the tip to my porter, had I employed a porter.) So the most economical, if not the most prudent policy is to smuggle roubles in. Ian’s 200 saw me across Russia.
There exists, of course, a most exact and comprehensive set of regulations designed to prevent this sort of thing. You have to declare all the money you have with you when you enter Russia, and when you leave it you are supposed to show up receipts proving that you have spent a certain sum (it used to be twenty roubles) every day. It sounds fairly water-tight on paper. But the Russians, as I say, have never been very good at bureaucracy, and on neither of my journeys across their country have I seen these regulations effectively enforced. Rouble-running would appear to be a likely career for a young man, with few risks and plenty of room at the top.