CHAPTER SEVEN
THAT NIGHT I left for the Highlands, and for the next four weeks I led a pleasant existence fishing in the Spey and shooting my grandmother’s grouse. As September approached, I experienced vague pangs of uneasiness. I had prepared my parents for the disappointment which I had assured them was bound to come. My pessimism did nothing to relieve their anxiety about my future. My grandmother, in particular, continued to regard me as a scapegrace, who had no right to the good things of life. If I took a second glass of port at dinner, I was sure to find her reproving eye fixed upon me. I lived in an atmosphere of apprehensive disapproval and, resigning myself to an inevitable return to rubber-planting and the East, I endeavoured to extract as much enjoyment as I could from these last opportunities of luxury in much the same spirit as a condemned man eats a hearty breakfast before his execution.
Then on September 2nd, that blessed day which saw my birth, I went into the neighbouring town to play a round of golf. As I was putting on the third green, I was disturbed by a wild yell. I looked up from my ball and saw my two young brothers careering on bicycles across the mountainous slopes of our Highland course. Norman, who was later to die gloriously at Loos, had disappeared into a ditch. His front wheel was buckled, but his face was radiant with excitement. He waved a paper triumphantly in the air.
“You’re in,” he gasped breathlessly. “You’re first!”
I took the paper from his hands. It was true. There it stood in black and white: first, R. H. Bruce Lockhart. I studied the cold marks sheet. I was first by seventeen marks. Fifty marks covered the first four candidates. I had done badly in German which was by far my best subject. I had qualified by one mark in the mathematical paper. I was second in law and first in political economy. I had collected thirty-five more marks in French than any other candidate. I had received ninety-nine marks out of a hundred for my French oral. The Pompadours had done it. I do not know if they are still alive. I never discovered even their Christian names. But for such damage as I have inflicted on the might, majesty and dominion of the British Empire in my official capacity, they—and they alone—must bear the full responsibility.
I abandoned my game and returned home to announce the glad tidings to my parents. They had recently celebrated their silver wedding, and most of my numerous relations had assembled in the neighbourhood for the event. Great, indeed, was my welcome. Never before or since have I felt so completely virtuous. An unstamped envelope, bearing the inscription “On His Majesty’s Service,” had wrought a lightning metamorphosis in my existence, and overnight I had passed from the ranks of the ne’er-do-weels into the Valhalla of heroes. My grandmother took me to her ample bosom and with the infallibility of the truly great announced firmly that she had always believed in my success. She sent for her bag. She sent for her spectacles. And, there and then, she wrote me out a cheque for one hundred pounds. Her example was contagious, and that afternoon I collected nearly two hundred pounds in tips. A few days later, with my winnings still intact, I left for London in order to enter upon my official duties at the Foreign Office.
In that year of grace the Foreign Office was a very different place from what it is to-day. Then it combined space with elegance and ease. Now it is a rabbit-warren overrun by bespectacled typists and serious-looking and rather badly dressed young men. In 1911 there were still elderly gentlemen who wrote fastidiously with quill-pens. A certain standard of penmanship and a minute attention to margins were still demanded from youthful draft-writers. Otherwise, it was a leisurely and not unpleasant existence, fortified by regular hours and an adequate luncheon interval. If the hours were longer than Palmerston’s comparison with the fountains of Trafalgar Square, “which played from ten to four,” they were not a weariness of the flesh. Nor were they devoted entirely to work. In the department to which I was attached desk-cricket flourished under the skilful guidance of Guy Locock, to-day the presiding genius of the Federation of British Industries.
The war and the industry of Lord Curzon have destroyed this calm backwater in the rushing river of life. The corridors, where one used to play football with the Resident-Clerks, are now lined with heavy cases of archives. Staffs have been doubled. Papers have accumulated to such an extent that the conscientious official has to work late into the night in order to complete his daily task. The Foreign Office now works longer hours than most business houses. It has become efficient and more democratic.
In my day it had a highly developed sense of its own superiority. It was a home of mandarins, holding itself superbly aloof from the more plebeian departments of Whitehall. The Treasury was admitted to some degree of equality. After all, the allowances of even ambassadors were subjected to Treasury control. We are justly famed for our sense of the practical. I have yet to meet the Englishman who is not prepared to put his social pride in his pocket if by this action his pocket will benefit. The Board of Trade, on the other hand, was regarded in much the same light as the Shooting Eight at a public school—as a home for bug-shooters. Junior vice-consuls, whose main function is the fostering of British trade abroad, were, therefore, looked upon as unnecessary intruders. Their social position in the office was a kind of purgatory suspended between the Heaven of the First Division and the Hell of the Second.
In those days the procedure with regard to a junior vice-consul was as follows: before proceeding to a foreign post he was required to spend three months in the Consular and Commercial departments of the Foreign Office. Except for the fact that it gave me an opportunity to know some of the clerks in the office, it was sheer waste of time. In view of the official attitude towards trade, these two departments were the most inefficient in the Foreign Office. The senior clerks, who ran them, were men who had lost all ambition and who had abandoned hope of further promotion. They were the last stepping-stones to honourable retirement and a pension.
As head of the new list of vice-consuls, I was sent for my period of probation to the Consular Department. My “chief” was Lord Dufferin—a kind and generous man, who smoked countless cigarettes and who looked—and, indeed, was—a sick man. His only exaction from his subordinates was neatness, his only passion—red ink. My first fortnight in the office was sheer misery comparable only with one’s first fortnight at a public school. Nobody spoke to me. Every day at eleven I made my appearance, dressed in the stiffest of white collars and the regulation short black coat and striped trousers. I minuted a few letters from distressed British subjects abroad. Occasionally, I wrote a draft demanding the repayment of sums advanced by British consuls to stranded seamen. Once I had a minor thrill. A letter arrived addressed to His Majesty, and beginning with the words “My dear King.” It was from a young English girl of seventeen who had taken a post with a Russian landowner in the Volga district. She was miles from any railway station, and her employer was making love to her in a particularly violent and disgusting manner. This pathetic cry from the wilderness was given to me to answer, and my gorge rose with indignant emotion. I wrote a strong minute which was approved with commendable despatch. The telegraph wires were set in motion. The intervention of His Majesty’s Ambassador was requested, and within thirty-six hours the little lady was set free and despatched at government expense to her home in Ireland. For the first time I had put my finger on the Empire’s pulse. I had tasted power and felt duly elated.
On the whole, however, there was little to do, and I was left severely alone. Every day I lunched alone at the “Ship.” I could not share my meals with Kaye, my consular colleague in the department, as we had alternate luncheon hours. Occasionally, in the corridors I passed the silently great and greatly silent figures of the Foreign Office hierarchy. Furtively, I studied their gait and their mannerisms: the long, raking stride of Sir Edward Grey, the automatic energy of Sir Eyre Crowe, the graceful elegance of Sir Ian Malcolm, and the ponderous roll of Sir Victor Wellesley. They were, however, vague and awe-inspiring shadows in my existence, and they gave me a proper sense of my own insignificance.
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p; Gradually, as I came to know Guy Locock better, my lot improved. We lunched together. With Sir George Buchanan and Harold Nicolson he was one of the few Wellingtonians in the Foreign Office. As my brothers were playing for Marlborough, I took him to see the Wellington v. Marlborough “rugger” match. We played golf together. I was admitted to desk cricket and became an expert. From him I learnt the historical gossip of the office—wondrous tales of the practical jokes of Lord Bertie and of other stalwarts of bygone days. In return, with my weakness for self-revelation, I told him the story of my life. Our friendship progressed so rapidly that within a few weeks I was able to induce him to listen to the Eastern sketches which I had written and which English editors had been foolish enough to refuse. Doubtless, he found the performance more amusing than the writing of consular minutes.
This literary entertainment, provided of course during office hours, led to a strange turn in my fortunes. In the ordinary course of events, after completing my six weeks in the Consular Department, I should have been transferred to the Commercial Department, where I should have come under the tutelage of Sir Algernon Law, a fierce disciplinarian, of whom every youngster stood in awe. There had been, however, a change in my own department. Lord Dufferin had fallen ill and had been replaced temporarily by Don Gregory, who was then a junior assistant. In the meantime the Agadir crisis had broken out, and, as the political departments were working at high pressure, our staff had been reduced in order to provide extra help. One afternoon, as I was reading a particularly touching tale of a Catholic missionary in the East to Guy Locock, Don Gregory came into the room. The word “Catholic” must have caught his ear.
“What’s this?” he said in his pleasant, rather fussy manner.
Guy explained.
“We have a literary genius in the office,” he said. “He’s reading us a story about a Catholic missionary.”
Gregory took my manuscript. The next day he asked me to dinner. I met Mrs. Gregory and liked her. I talked about my life in the East and gave her more manuscripts to read, I presented her with a couple of Japanese portraits which I had bought in Japan and about which I had written a sentimental sketch. Within a few days I was asked to dine again. My position in the office changed. Gregory gave me more work to do. I became, in short, his private secretary. Then one day he sent for me.
“We are very short-handed,” he said. “You will gain nothing by going to the Commercial Department or by going abroad too soon. I can arrange for you to stay here for a bit to help us out. When the time comes for you to go abroad, I shall see that you will lose nothing by this arrangement in the selection of your post.”
Of course I accepted. I was then still an Episcopalian, although my sympathies with Roman Catholicism were already strong. This, however, was enough. The generous, warmhearted Don liked Catholics. What was more important he seemed to like me, and I owe him the full measure of my gratitude. As a departmental official he had few equals, and from him I learnt much that was to benefit me in future years. He put me wise about official life abroad. He told me much about Rumania, where he had been en poste, and about Poland, in whose fate he was deeply interested. He greatly stimulated my interest in Russia, which even then he realised was to be the storm-centre of Europe. Then, one evening about Christmas time, he summoned me to his room and showed me a despatch. It was an intimation from our Ambassador in St. Petersburg announcing that the Russian Government had approved my appointment as British Vice-Consul in Moscow.
“You will have to leave in a fortnight,” he said with a smile.
Moscow! Like a flash the Russia of Seton Merriman—the only Russia I knew—passed before my eyes. Adventure, danger, romance photographed themselves in my mind. But one thought dominated everything. Moscow was Europe. It was only three days away from home. Six weeks ago, but for my luckless Eastern manuscripts, it was a thousand to one that like all new vice-consuls I should have been sent to Colon or Panama, or, at the best, to Chicago or Pittsburg. Gratefully I faltered out my thanks, and that night I left the office for good to rush home to tell the good news to my parents and to prepare for my departure.
There was to be one more adventure before I left. My father and mother gave a farewell dance for me. It was attended by all my—or rather their—friends in the neighbourhood. One house-party, which turned up in full force, brought with it a beautiful Australian girl, whom I had never seen before. I succumbed at once. I had only a fortnight in which to press my suit. In ten days we were engaged. Early in the New Year I left for Russia and she returned to Australia. We were married during my first leave the following year.
BOOK II
THE MOSCOW PAGEANT
“PEOPLE PASS. One has eyes. One sees them.”
From the French.
CHAPTER ONE
MY ARRIVAL IN Moscow coincided with the visit of the British Parliamentary Delegation, which, on the invitation of the Russian Government, had descended upon St. Petersburg and Moscow in that January of 1912. It was an imposing body, headed by the Speaker of the House of Commons. Lord Ampthill, Lord Derby, and Lord Weardale represented the Peers, General Sir James Wolfe Murray the Army, Lord Charles Beresford the Navy, and four Bishops the Church. There were many others, and altogether the delegation was about eighty strong. Attached to it in the capacity of interpreter was the inimitable and indispensable Maurice Baring. By the time it had reached Moscow, several of its members had fallen by the way and had returned home. The hospitality of St. Petersburg had been too much for them. Now the remaining Parliamentarians had to face the far greater ordeal of Muscovite hospitality—an ordeal which I was to share to the full.
On my arrival at the Brest Station I was met by Montgomery Grove, my new chief. He was in full uniform and was just dashing off to the ballet for the gala performance in honour of the British visitors. Instructing the porter how to deal with my luggage, he whisked me into a sleigh, drove me to the Metro-pole Hotel, pushed a bundle of invitation cards into my hand, and, depositing me with the hall porter, rushed away to keep his engagement.
A little bewildered but full of curiosity I proceeded to examine my new surroundings. The hotel was full to overflowing, and the room reserved for me was on the top floor. Most of my neighbours were women, gaudily painted and gaudily dressed, who, after discovering by exhaustive telephone inquiries both my innocence and my modest purse, lost all interest in this new arrival. In any case, even had they so wished, Vice-Consuls could not compete with the Russian merchants of those days.
As I walked through the hall to the restaurant, my first impressions were of steaming furs, fat women and big sleek men; of attractive servility in the underlings and of good-natured ostentation on the part of the clients; of great wealth and crude coarseness, and yet a coarseness sufficiently exotic to dispel repulsion. I had entered into a kingdom where money was the only God. Yet the God of roubles was more lavish, more spendthrift, less harsh, than the God of dollars.
The restaurant itself was a blaze of light and colour. The long high room was surrounded by a balcony on all sides. Along the balcony were gaily lit windows and doors opening into the private rooms—known in Russia as “kabinets”—where, hidden from prying eyes, dissolute youth and debauched old age trafficked roubles and champagne for gipsy songs and gipsy love. I do my beloved gipsies a wrong. Their morals were better than most people’s. They kept themselves for themselves. The mercenary love, to which I refer, was Austrian, or Polish, or Jewish.
The restaurant itself was a maze of small tables. It was crowded by officers in badly cut uniforms, Russian merchants with scented beards, German commercial travellers with sallow complexions and close-cropped heads. And at every table a woman, at every table champagne—bad champagne at twenty-five shillings a bottle. At the hotel end of the room was a high balustraded dais, where an orchestra, resplendent in red coats, crashed out a Viennese waltz with a frenzy which drowned the popping of corks and the clatter of dishes and finally by its increasing furore subdued the conversation. And in a l
ittle pulpit all for himself, the Mephistophelian figure of Konchik—Konchik, the leader of the orchestra, Konchik the prince of cabaret violinists, Konchik—by that strange law of Nature which decrees that every leader in Russia shall be foreign—the Czech.
As I drank my first glass of vodka and for the first time ate caviare as it should be eaten—on a warm “kalatch”1—I realised I was in a new world, in which primitiveness and decadence lived side by side. Had an eldritch soothsayer appeared before me and foretold that seven years later I should again be sitting in that hall, that I should be alone, divorced from all my friends and surrounded by Bolsheviks, that in the place where Konchik was now playing Trotsky would be denouncing the Allies in my presence, I should have laughed her to scorn. Yet it was here that in 1918, as the guest of Trotsky, I was to attend my first meeting of the Bolshevist Central Executive Committee and that I was to shake hands for the first and only time with Stalin.
At that moment, however, all my thoughts were fixed on Konchik. The tumultuous wave of the “Blue Danube” had died down. From a “kabinet” had come a command for “I do not speak to you”—that song once sung by Panina, the greatest of all gipsies. At its plaintive minor chords the room hushed, while Konchik, his eyes almost lost in his fat face, made his violin croon and sob and finally fade away in a whisper of despair and unrequited love.
Poor Konchik. The last time I saw him was four years ago in Prague. He was playing in a small restaurant frequented by soulless diplomatists and stolid Czech bourgeois. His savings had been engulfed in the revolution. His last possession was his violin. The mention of Russia brought tears to his eyes.
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