Europe—Whither Bound? - Stephen Graham

Скачать книгу

home, to live, to exist. The door-keeper smokes a cigar; the first clerk makes eyes at the women applicants, the girl clerks suck sweets, the Consulate clock runs on, and you pay hundreds of German marks each for the upkeep of the business.

      The Poles, or indeed, the British, or the Americans, for we are all tarred by the same brush, might take a lesson from the Czecho-Slovaks, who have at Vienna a bureau which will get your passport visa and your railway ticket for you, and reserve you a room in a hotel in Prague without any fee. The enlightened Government of this new republic understands that that is the best propaganda for their country which can be done. Not that Czecho-Slovakia does not charge for a visa and charge for permission to go out of the country. At Cheb I nearly missed my train whilst an official was weighing up in his mind how much he should charge for allowing me to go through without a visa.

      Another aspect of the passport trouble in Europe is local nationalism which at Budapest takes the form of insisting on asking you questions in Hungarian and refusing to understand any other tongue. As you have to spend hours with the police in the Magyar capital before you obtain permission to stay there and again before you obtain permission to go away, this is peculiarly distressing.

      Under such circumstances is it surprising that there is stagnation of peoples in Europe? This stagnation is great, and it is noticeable in almost every great city of the continent. It is a rich time for the hotel-keepers. There is scarcely a capital in Europe where you can reckon on finding a room without trouble. The following experiences are symptomatic enough: at Rome I visited about twenty hotels; shut out for the night, got into a "strange place" about three a.m.; Stuttgart, out all night; Sofia, visited all hotels, all full, slept in guard-room of town-patrol; Sofia, second time, shared a room with an officer; Vienna, toured city in a cab and found nothing; Warsaw, spent nine hours going from hotel to hotel, got a room for a thousand-mark tip. In Constantinople you can find cases of three families in one apartment. Wherever you go you are going to have adventures in finding a room, unless you are an officer or a member of an Allied Commission, or belong to the Red Cross or Starving Children's Fund, or some organization that has facilities for looking out for itself.

      Poor old Europe! She was more of a unity in the days when we were "an armed camp." We have broken the power of militarism. There has been a revolution in Russia. A British statesman in the House of Commons, in 1917, said it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. Some millions of young men died before Armistice Day, 1918. Since then there has been great work clearing away barbed-wire entanglements along the old front. But it seems to be a nightmare task: entanglements multiply upon us faster than we can clear the old ones away. You cannot get across Europe because of the obstructions: you cannot circulate.

       Table of Contents

      II. FROM CONSTANTINOPLE (I)

      It has been a bleak early spring with snow on the uplands of Thrace. For those who travel from Paris to Constantinople on that Western moving shuttle, the Orient Express, there would be nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly—except in that the more comfortable we are, the more we demand and the more we grumble. But if you travel by the ordinary unheated train, where even the first-class carriages are more or less bereft of glass and have the windows loosely boarded up with bits of old packing-cases, you taste something of the persistent northern wind which blows down sleet and rain from the Black Sea, from Russia, as it were Russian unhappiness it was blowing down.

      You arrive at Sofia at midnight in torrents of rain. You take a cab and visit every hotel, large or small, in the Bulgarian capital, and are refused. People are already sleeping three or four in a room, sleeping in outhouses and bath-rooms, refugee Bulgars from the lost Bulgar territories, refugee Turks, refugee Russians. You return to the station and it is closed for the night, and you have a wordy discussion with the eternal cabman as to whether you shall pay a hundred or two hundred francs—Bulgarian francs or levas which are, however, worth a bare three-farthings each to-day. You find shelter in a wayside café which is half café, half guard-house for the town patrol. Soldiers are stretched out snoring on the floor. Five levas to sit up, ten to lie down! By that time of night you are fain to lie down.

      A dreary journey on to Philippopolis and Svilengrad, with the wind lashing the train, lashing it all the way to the Chataldja lines and the zone of Allied control. Eight passport examinations, eight examinations of your baggage, plentiful two, three, and four-hour stops, a land of ruined railway stations and bare hills, and only late on the second evening after Sofia do you creep into the imperial city.

      It is Stamboul at night, agleam with lights, running with mud, flocking with dense crowds. You change some money to piastres at a small booth, and your pocket is at once picked—a common experience. The Pera tram is so crowded that you escape being asked for a fare, which is fortunate, seeing that you have no Turkish money. So across the wonderful bridge on which all the nations of the world are seen walking, up to the so-called pleasant heights of Pera and its hotels and palaces. Here for a dirty little room one pays more than in a first-class hotel in New York. You are fortunate if you find even that soon. A Greek-owned hotel. You scan the names of the occupants—they are of all nationalities of Europe. Russians and Armenians seem most to abound. There appears to be a Scotsman among them, a Mr. Fraser, but he is a Scot resident in Smyrna and smokes a narghile every evening after supper. The lounge of the hotel looks like a crèche for the children of refugees. But couples are seen here on the couches interested only in themselves, and a long-haired Russian is at the piano playing Scriabine devotedly and with deep concentration, as if the boisterousness of the children were unheard.

      Constantinople has five times as many people as it can house, a city now of appalling unhappiness and misery, and of a concomitant luxury and waste. A scene at night: two children, a boy and a girl, lie huddled together on the pavement sleeping whilst the rain beats down upon them. The crowd keeps passing, keeps passing, and some step over them, many glance questioningly downward, but all pass on. No one stops. I stood at a corner and watched. Then I walked up to the children and wakened them and tried to make them speak. But they stared with their pale faces and said nothing. At a neighbouring pastry-cook's I bought two cakes and brought them to them, and stirred them up to take them, which they did eagerly, each grasping tightly a cake in the little hand. I stopped a Russian woman who was hesitating as she passed. "There are many," said she. "It is quite common. You see plenty babies lying in the rain. When you come? You come off a ship? … The only way to help them is give them piastres." I did that, and by that time a little crowd had gathered and every one began to fret and give a little money to them. So the crowd changed its mind, and the children began to have little sheaves of paper-money in their hands. And still they lay in the rain and no one could take them in.

      The Russians have got Constantinople at last. It is an irony of Fate. There are a hundred thousand of them there, the best blood of Russia, and the most charming and delightful people in Europe in themselves, though now almost entirely destitute of means. A large Russian army without arms is not very far away, and a Russian generalissimo without power stays in his yacht at Galata. The great city has been outwardly transformed by the Russians who seem at first to have taken over all the business and to have dispossessed innumerable Turks and Greeks. Russian is the predominant language; all the best restaurants and many of the shops seem to be Russian, and Russian pedlars in scores cry their wares in the streets. Greek and Turkish business is modest and retiring, but everything Russian is advertised by large artistic signs. The gleaming lights of innumerable "Lotto Parlours" catch the eye, you pass with the rolling crowd into the cabaret, the music-hall, the theatre, the café, the restaurant, the book-shop—all Russian. You see the establishments of Russian doctors, lawyers, dentists, dancing-masters. In an improvised wooden hut you see a celebrated portrait-painter sitting, ready to paint you whilst you wait or execute commissions of any kind. The restaurants all have Russian names and sometimes refer back to business left behind in Russia—the restaurant "Birzha" from Rostof, "Kievsky Ugolok" from Kiev, "Veliky Moskovsky Kruzhok," the "Yar," and the like. These are very tastefully arranged and the cooking is excellent, being under the supervision of celebrated Russian chefs. Thus at the "Kievsky

Скачать книгу