When the autumn came, I made another friend, who was to render me great services during my apprenticeship in Moscow. This was Michael Lykiardopoulos, the talented secretary of the Moscow Art Theatre. “Lyki” was a strange, lovable creature; one-third Greek, one-third Russian, and one-third English. His secretarial duties gave him a fixed salary. His real work in life was as a translator. He had real literary flair, an excellent Russian prose style, and a quite remarkable knowledge of eight or nine European languages. He knew most of the great writers of Europe and had translated their best works into Russian. It was through him that I first met H. G. Wells, Robert Ross, Lytton Strachey, Granville Barker, Gordon Craig, Aleister Crowley, not to mention numerous hangers-on of literature, who came to Moscow to worship at the shrine of Russian art. In his spare time he acted as ballet critic for one of the leading Moscow newspapers. He knew everyone in the literary, artistic, and dramatic world of Moscow, and, through him, many doors, which otherwise would have remained closed, were opened to me.
Poor “Lyki.” During the war he ran our propaganda department in Moscow under my supervision—and ran it very well. His temperament was far too volatile to give any value to his political judgment. A Russian defeat depressed him almost to the point of suicide. The smallest victory drove him to the other extreme. Towards the end of 1915, when he had made up his mind that Russia was irretrievably ruined, he made a hazardous journey on our behalf into Germany, travelling as a Greek tobacco merchant and bringing back with him a mass of valuable information and a new optimism. The revolution finally destroyed all his hopes, and before the Bolsheviks had made their coup d’état he withdrew to Stockholm and eventually to England. Like many Russian Liberals he became a violent reactionary and spent most of his energy in writing anti-Semitic articles for the English Press. He was a born journalist, living only for the day, but his loyalty and his kindness to his friends were wonderful, and of all my Russian friends (in spite of his mixed nationality I can never regard him as anything but Russian) he is the one whom I miss most. He died in London in 1924.
1 Grandmother.
CHAPTER THREE
AT THE END of my first year in Russia I returned to England to be married. Looking back on this experiment from a disappointing and disillusioned middle age, I find my conduct in the highest degree reprehensible. I had neither money nor position, and my prospects held out nothing more than a dreary and penurious career in the worst-paid service in the world. My wife was an Australian called Turner. Her grandfather had been the richest man in Queensland. On her father’s death misfortune had overtaken the estate, and her mother was unable to allow her more than a hundred or two a year. My wife herself, who was delicate, had been brought up in England and Switzerland. All her friends were rich or well to do. She herself had been used to a life of luxury. To ask a girl, who had been brought up in this way and who was then only twenty-one, to share with me a life of poverty in a semi-barbarous town like Moscow was an effrontery for which there is no excuse. It is a tribute to her courage that she was able to adapt herself so quickly to a situation which imposed so many hardships upon her. My marriage was a contract from which I alone reaped any benefit.
Had I taken stock of myself at that time, I should have seen a young man of twenty-five, broad-shouldered and broken-nosed, with a squat, stumpy figure and a ridiculous gait. The young man’s character was a curious mixture of Lockhart caution and asceticism and Macgregor recklessness and self-indulgence. Hitherto, the Macgregor had held the whip-hand over the Lockhart, and perhaps his chief failing had been an all-too-Celtic tendency to confound licentiousness with romanticism. Such accomplishments as he had—a good memory, a facility for languages, and a capacity for sudden bursts of hard work, were largely nullified by a lazy tolerance, which always sought the easiest way out of any difficulty, and by a fatal disposition to sacrifice the future for the cheap applause of the moment. In short, a still unformed and unattractive young man, whose self-consciousness at moments amounted almost to a disease. Had anyone told him that five years later he would be head of an important British Mission at a crucial moment in his country’s history, he would have smirked, put his head on one side, and blushed with modesty.
This, I submit, is an accurate picture of myself as I was at the end of 1912. With marriage, however, my life changed, and I made a serious effort to conform to the conventionalities of my new state. The result was wholly beneficial. My night life was cast off, and a round of irksome social duties took its place. Intercourse with the British colony now became an obligation, and, as we were entertained, so we entertained in return. I found, however, a new zest for work. I continued my Russian studies and, until my wife learnt the language, I had to run the small flat we had taken, give orders to the servants, and superintend the household accounts. I read twice as much as when I was a bachelor. My knowledge of Russian was now tolerably good, and there was the whole field of Russian literature to explore. I began, too, to write for the English newspapers not so much from any internal urge as from necessity. The money was needed in order to supplement our scanty income, and after a little practice I found it not difficult to earn. I re-wrote and sold the short stories I had written in Malaya. I became a fairly regular contributor to the Morning Post and the Manchester Guardian, both of which newspapers were then interested in sketches of Russian life, and I found a ready home for more serious articles and even for short stories in the numerous British reviews which then flourished. These literary efforts were written under a pseudonym (in those days diplomatists and consuls were not allowed to write), but in my first year as a free-lance journalist I earned nearly £200, and by the time the war came and put a stop to these activities, I was making a steady twenty-five to thirty pounds a month.
Nor did marriage interfere with my Russian friendships. On the contrary, it extended them. “Lyki” was a constant visitor to our flat and requited our hospitality by bringing us into contact with the wide orbit of his own literary, journalistic, and artistic world. At the end of my first eighteen months in Russia I knew most of the leaders of the Moscow intelligentzia.
This contact, necessitating as it did the constant discussion of politics, gave me my first interest in foreign affairs. Through the Charnocks and other Englishmen connected with the cotton mills, I kept my finger on the pulse of industrial unrest. To complete my equipment as an intelligence officer there remained only the nobility, the merchants—and the British Embassy—to conquer. With the Embassy in St. Petersburg we had practically no contact. The German Consul-General might see his Ambassador once a month. French Consuls-General might reasonably hope to finish their careers as Ministers. But between the two British services there was an impassable gulf which has not been satisfactorily bridged to this day. Political reports from Moscow were not encouraged. Commercial queries were positively discouraged. In the archives of the Moscow Consulate there is—or was—a letter from a certain British Ambassador, which we used to pull out in moments of disgruntledness and which ran as follows: “Dear Mr. ——, Please remember that I am not here to be bothered with questions about trade.”
The inadequate equipment of the Moscow Consulate was not only a subject of grievance to the unfortunate Consular officers. It attracted the attention of British visitors, who were not slow to notice that, of all the Great Powers, Great Britain was the only one which was not represented by a Consulate-General. Invariably they expressed disgust, returned to England, and did nothing. There was one exception. One wintry afternoon in 1913, when I was alone in the Consulate, there was a ring at the door. I sprang to my feet and admitted an elderly, well-dressed man with a beard who handed me his card. His name was Tennant, and, although I did not realise it at the time, he was a relation of Mr. Asquith, who was then Prime Minister. I took him into our dingy little room.
“Can I see the Consul or the Vice-Consul?” he asked.
“The Consul is out,” I replied. “I am the Vice-Consul.”
He breathed heavily. The trudge up the
three flights of stone stairs had shaken his wind.
“Is this all the British Consulate?” he asked at last. I told him it was. His chest heaved. His eyes flashed. Then with a great growl came his comment:
“More like a water-closet than a Consulate.”
He invited me to lunch with him the next day. At luncheon he asked some pertinent questions. He made no promises, but, when he went away, I had a feeling that this time something was going to happen.
The weeks, however, passed into months, and gradually I abandoned hope. When the summer came, we shared a “dacha” with the Groves—a large, roomy wooden house at Kosino beside a lake where there were boats to row and pike and perch to catch. This risky experiment opened with a tragedy. My wife had bought a new toy—a pedigree French bulldog, called Pipo, who afterwards achieved immortality by being painted by Korovin. Naturally, she took him to the “dacha.” Although in the Moscow flat he was as good as gold, his first night in the country was a disaster. The train journey must have upset his delicate constitution, for in the middle of dinner he forgot himself in the most offensive sense, and the carpet, a new investment of the Grove family, was irreparably ruined. Men are singularly ineffective on these occasions, and for the rest of that meal Grove and I kept our eyes firmly glued to the table. In spite of this inauspicious overture, the “dacha” concert turned out better than might have been expected. By the morning Mrs. Grove’s very just anger had evaporated. With tearful eyes my wife begged for her dog. Pipo himself was profuse in his apologies. And Pipo remained.
With Pipo we had one more adventure, which might have ended disastrously for him and which for us had unpleasant consequences. Close to the lake there was a holy pool, where pilgrims from far and wide used to bathe in the hope of being cured of various diseases. One evening, when my wife was out walking, she passed the pool and with a natural modesty hurried away from the mass of naked bodies which sought relief from its stagnant waters. Pipo, however, was a gregarious animal and in a minute he was splashing wildly among the pilgrims. There was a shriek from the pool. At first my wife thought the bathers were playing with the dog, and she continued placidly on her way. Then the shriek grew into an angry roar, and the dog came tearing down the path with twenty naked figures in hot pursuit. My wife picked up her skirts and ran. Fortunately, the “dacha” was close at hand. Fortunately, too, I was at home. For five minutes I harangued the nudities from the “dacha” steps, and in the end my argument, backed by silver roubles, prevailed. More roubles had to be expended on the priest for the re-purification of the waters, and altogether the adventure was more costly than amusing. At first, too, I was afraid lest the outraged bathers might wreak their vengeance on the dog, and for some days Pipo had to be kept on a chain. In this, however, I did the Russians an injustice. Having made their peace, they bore no malice, and, as in future nothing would induce the dog to approach within a hundred yards of Siloam, no harm resulted.
Three years later economic duress forced us to sell him. He was a valuable dog, and he went to a millionaire’s house. What his ultimate fate was I do not know. He was an aristocrat and must, therefore, have hated revolutions. I fear that, like Gorky’s Great Dane, he may have been eaten by a starving population.
That summer, too, Sir Henry Wilson visited Moscow, and I dined with him and Colonel Knox, our military attaché, at the Hermitage. Even in those days Sir Henry was fully alive to the dangers of the European situation and had summed up all the possibilities in his far-seeing mind. In considering the relative strength of the European Powers, he had worked out all his facts to the smallest detail. In his opinion the French army was fully equal to the German. If ever it came to war, the Russian army would be the extra weight which would load the scales overwhelmingly in France’s favour. Sir Henry was not the only expert whose judgments were to be rudely shattered by the tornado of 1914.
At the beginning of July came the repercussion to the Tennant visit. It came, too, in the form of what Fleet Street calls a bombshell. Moscow was elevated to a Consulate-General with a largely increased office allowance. The Groves were transferred to Warsaw, and Charles Clive Bayley, formerly H.M. Consul at New York and a scion of a family famous in Indian history, was appointed to reign in their stead. I shed a sympathetic tear over the departure of the Groves (they had been very kind to us) and with new hopes and new ambitions made ready to welcome my new chief.
CHAPTER FOUR
CHARLES CLIVE BAYLEY was then in his fifty-second year. He was a big, florid man with pouches under his eyes. The eyes could both twinkle and flash. Such hair as he had left was fair. His body was rather too heavy for his legs and, when he coughed or laughed, the veins stood out on his forehead. As he always laughed at his own stories, of which he had an inexhaustible fund (in two years I never heard him repeat himself once), I was in constant apprehension lest he should die of apoplexy. He wore an eyeglass and had a presence and a proper sense of his own importance.
He could speak neither French nor German. But he had served for ten years under Sir Thomas Sanderson in New York and knew all there was to know about running a Consular office. He combined what the Americans call “drive” with dignity, and no man could take liberties with him.
What was more important he had private means and was prepared to spend his own money on maintaining his position as Consul-General. He took a large flat for himself in the most fashionable street in Moscow and leased an adequate office for the Consulate-General on the first floor of a new house close at hand. He engaged an experienced clerk, two typists and a general factotum and commissionaire called Alexander Nechaeff, who, as a former Russian civil servant, knew every shortcut, legal and illegal, through the red-tape maze of Russian bureaucracy. In the eyes both of the Russians and of our Consular colleagues we acquired a new prestige. Alexander saw to that. He at once invested Bayley with the title of an Excellency, and within a month of his arrival every department, both civil and military, in Moscow knew through the agency of the devoted Alexander that the new British Consul-General was a man whose favour was worth courting and whose wrath was vastly to be feared. On occasions Alexander overplayed his hand and, when we caught him using the Consular seal in order to further his own personal ends, Bayley exploded. It required all my tact and all my pleading to prevent the old scoundrel’s immediate dismissal. A man, who at a minute’s notice could wangle a visa after office hours or a sleeping berth to St. Petersburg, when the Wagon-Lits office had been sold out for days, was not to be lightly discarded, and in the end Bayley relented.
Both in the office and outside it Bayley did his best to live up to the rôle for which the wily Alexander had cast him. All his life he had done himself well, and he knew how to entertain others. His wife, who was born a Ricardo, backed him up to the best of her ability. She was a kind, little woman, very shy and very English, but very hospitable and always willing to put herself out to promote her husband’s interests. The Russians sat up and took notice. They ate the Bayley dinners. They liked the Bayley cocktails which I imagine he was the first man to introduce into Moscow. Almost they were prepared to take him at Alexander’s estimate.
A few rays of this new glory were reflected on me. In the office Bayley drove me hard. Speaking no languages, he was dependent on my services for much of his information. On the other hand, he taught me how to run an office, how to handle all kinds and conditions of men, and how to coax or bully the various departments of the Foreign Office at home, “If you can’t get things by asking politely, you must make yourself a nuisance,” he used to say. He lived up to his own precepts, “kow-towing” to no man, and, if necessity arose, making himself a nuisance both to the Foreign Office and to the Embassy. To my astonishment I discovered that, by taking a high hand, he enhanced his own reputation. His stock rose. He went to St. Petersburg to see the Ambassador and came back with a mandate to inspect the other Consulates in Russia. In spite of a “peppery” temper (as a young man he had been on the Gold Coast and had acquired a liver) he was
a splendid chief, and such merits as I ever possessed as a Consular Officer I owe entirely to his training. Outside the office he was like a father to me, and I was never separated from him. At his house I met scores of people, whom otherwise I should never have known, and whose friendship was afterwards to be of the greatest service to me during the war. Under Bayley’s tutelage I developed from a shy and ignorant youngster into a self-reliant and tolerably efficient administrator.
In the spring of 1914 I had an amusing experience, while I was in charge of the Consulate-General during one of Bayley’s tours of inspection. One Saturday afternoon I was summoned to the telephone by the Pristaff1 of the Tverskoi district. Two Englishmen—a naval doctor and a Chief Petty Officer—had been arrested for shop-lifting. I put on my coat and hurried round to the Pristaff’s house. The Pristaff—a bullet-headed, pimply-faced man with a military moustache, was polite but obdurate. The two men were under lock and key. They had been caught red-handed. He was having tea in his private apartment, when I called, and did not seem to relish my intrusion. At my request, however, he sent for the protocol and read it to me. On their own showing the two men had been sent out from the Tyne on a warship, which was being delivered to China, and, having completed their mission, were returning to England via the Trans-Siberian. During the four hours’ stop in Moscow they had gone into a shop, had picked out some handkerchiefs, some socks, and a birch-wood cigarette case, and had put the goods in their pocket. Then, just as they were about to produce the money to pay for them, they had been seized by a shop detective. It was not a very plausible story. The evidence of the shop detective and of the policeman who had been called in to make the arrest was damning. The detective swore that he had watched the petty officer slip the cigarette case into his pocket with all the skill of a professional thief.
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