The Children's Soviet and Others

DEAREST M —

The long blank months that have brought no letter from you have, I am afraid, been lonely ones for you, and maybe have not brought you mountain wanderings.

I had too much of the hot summer, too far from the river and the fields and the hills, to do much letter-writing, either, and I was secretly awfully let down by Russia. We were all so fearfully, so impregnably, American, and the Russian life we had contact with, and that formed the whole staple of conversation, was so petty-politician-y and corrupt, and so American, too.

Well, thank goodness, that is over, all but the after-effects, which hang on like the effect of reading vulgar stories. Anyhow, I’m quit of the crowd, have heaps of time to dream and be alone, and a tiny group where I alone hold sway. Is n’t it all fearfully egotistical? Certainly this group-life brings out that quality. But the net result of being marooned here, out of the sound of an automobile or a train-whistle or a dynamo, is wonderfully sweetening and heartening. I have come to love my fellow man again, to delight in the bulky shapes of the peasants and in their mild, half-protesting voices, to amuse myself pitting my brains against the rather rudimentary wiles of the local politicians, and fighting with the lust of battle against a wicked director of one of my Children’s Homes.

The days have grown prodigiously short and mostly are gray and threatening, with occasional wild wind-storms and rain or snow, and my imagination is busy with pictures of what the winter will be.

I have a jolly little house, with a big living-room, dining-room, and three fair-sized bedrooms. There are two great stoves, one on each side of the living-room, that turn a side each to a bedroom, and so, after a fashion, heat us all. The cook sleeps in the kitchen, as is proper. At present I and the giant interpreter, Dmetri, hold the fort with the cook.

I am having the most diverting difficulties with this letter. Opposite me at our little dining-table sits the sociable and beguiling Dmetri. It is the end of a long damp Sunday, and he has had little to do. Just some instructions to the would-be purchasers of our horses from the Aral Sea, a talk with the Communist leader, who came so prettily begging for costumes for the village theatre, and a few trade bargains, nails for flour, eggs for grits. So he is feeling very conversational and lures me from the path with stories of his capture by bandits and recapture by the Red Army, who almost shot him; for he had started out with a paper containing the army’s passwords for half a month, and how could he prove he had swallowed the paper when he was captured, and not sold it to the bandits?

‘My golly, I was scared. The frost came out all over me. But when the two weeks were over and they saw none of the bandits got in to our posts, then they trusted me and let me go.'

Now he is playing gay little ditties on his balalaika, that it ’s hard to shut one’s ears to. And he has crinkly hair that goes gold in the lamp-light, and gay blue eyes, a pointed, fresh face, and the joyous confidence of two-and-twenty.

In Canada he always had a crowd of girls, but here, since he was in jail he has lost interest. ‘That ’s all foolishness,’ he says, with a masterful American air and a high chin. ‘My uncle wanted to marry me to some girl, but I won’t think about such things till I’m an old man, till I ’m thirty.’

I suffer torments of anxiety lest he find life dull here, for he loves to dance and have a good time, and of course he never reads if he can do anything else, and my books are all over his years, if not over his head. And, you must know, he is terribly clever — figures and engines and horses and mechanical toys are nothing to him. He was the head of the office when he was in the

K—A—and had eleven men under him; and if he were at T—he would be the head of all the instructors, five of them. But he is very amiable with me, likes it better here than in T—. ‘If I stayed there, I’d get a swelled head. There’s too much work,’ he confided engagingly to me to-night. And he loves my calico pony and treats him like his son. When we drive out on the steppe together, he whirls the long lash of the whip and whistles through his teeth, and the pony scuttles till I almost fly out of the telega over the bumps.

DEAREST M —

To-day is Sunday. It is also the second day of the Yarmarka, the three days’ annual market of the village. Ever since Saturday morning the heavy wooden telegas have been rolling in behind the patient little cows, and are now lined up along the main street.

I was furiously beating the typewriter when the cook announced a Chuvash woman. A buxom form sidled in, almost as wide as she was long — a maiden of the primitive tribe, who still retain their own tongue and curious dress, and live apart in villages of their own.

The maiden explained with a wide grin that she had walked in from Ignashkin to exchange her costume for a waist and skirt. She pulled off the thick gray shawl that covered her head and shoulders, and displayed the dangling beads and coins that ornamented her curiously beaded and embroidered headband. She rattled the dozen or more strings of little coral and glass beads that hung around her neck, and showed the flat ornament on her chest, silver half-rubles and 20-kopek pieces sewed on a leather foundation, with an occasional suspender button to give the modern touch.

The dress beneath this splendor was worn and dirty, but still its barbariccheerfulness shone through the grime. It was a rough cotton bag with sleeves, and trimmed with bands and patches of Turkey-red calico, bits of the cheapest Western colored braids, and fine cross-stitch embroidery, all jumbled together in a mad confusion. A dirty apron covered the front, while from a handsome black broadcloth belt the inimitable Chuvash ‘tail’ hung down behind — an embroidered, tape-andbead-decorated piece, about eight inches long by four wide, flaring at the bottom and finished off with a long black woolen fringe. The tail is in reality the continuation of the decorative effect of the embroidered headscarf over which the beaded headdress is worn, and which ends in long streamers falling down the back to the waist.

To end the matter, we went to the warehouse to find the dress our friend had tramped eight versts in the mud and wind to get.

She was a long time making up her mind. She fingered the cotton-flannel of many sewing circles, and the serge. She said she would like to take all the things of which I was offering her the choice, and in the end drove an excellent bargain. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself at the end of the conversation laying in her capacious arms a fair sample of all the women’s clothing we had — a large, solid cottonflannel dress and an even larger gray waist (because I thought she needed something warm and practical), a blue-and-white shirtwaist (because she wanted something to dress up in), a red ribbon (because I was afraid she would realize how homely the practical gray waist was), and a small black serge skirt that we had earlier agreed was too small for her, but that she begged me in the end to throw in for the coral necklace.

‘A good thing, too,’ I said to the room at large; ‘now she will have some warm, sensible clothing for the winter.’

Out in the street I saw her hug her bundle, and the grin expanded in direct proportion to the distance between us. The bargain was concluded — no more need to school her face to an expression of sadness. If her loot was not of the dazzling brilliance she had expected of the Amerikanka, it would still overawe the inhabitants of darkened Ignashkin.

DEAREST M —

I have only newly come into my kingdom of three volosts, and am still full of the marvels thereof. When my gay little Chuvash pony came to me, I decided with his help to explore my new domain as fast as possible.

Sharp at nine o’clock on the 31st of October I started off, full of anticipation, with my stalwart interpreter at my side on the board seat of the telega, a bag of oats for the pony, buns, chocolate, sugar, tea, and a can of beans for ourselves, and wraps innumerable.

We had twelve versts to go in the teeth of a lashing wind, that was soon blowing pellets of stinging snow into our faces. The wide road was deeply rutted and frozen hard, so that we jolted and bumped in the springless telega, and the pony’s back expressed the bitterest protest against the violences of nature and the wrongheadedness of man, as he doggedly pulled us along. Snow clouds hung low, veiling the broad steppe and the low, plum-colored hills on our right.

It seemed an interminable distance, those cold eight miles.

At last, over the tree-tops we saw the church of E— looming white against the gray sky; and with a final scramble up a slippery slope, we rattled into the village.

The little frame house of the Village Soviet was dreary outside and in. In an inner room a number of men were gathered, sitting like stuffed birds, I thought, motionless and speechless on the bench under the window and at the bare table. This was the Village Soviet. They soberly made room for us on the bench, and we waited silently for the arrival of the president.

In a few minutes the president of the two village committees came in. He was a mild-eyed, kindly peasant of about thirty-five, in a high black Astrakan cap, dark overcoat, canvas trousers, low canvas shoes without shoestrings, and low rubbers.

My interpreter unfolded our business. The Quakers had been buying horses for the peasants and had assigned seven to E— if the village could give a list of seven men with families of five or more, who had once had a horse and now had none, and were among those who would starve this winter if they were not helped. The horse could be paid for during the next two years in work for the Quakers.

As we talked, the men in the room grouped themselves round us, and their eyes brightened. They were a sober lot, with thin faces under fur caps of many patterns, and they entered into the discussion with interest.

Finally one said, ‘You will not get many buyers. We cannot pay for a horse with work when we have no bread.’

Again we told the story of the bread that a man with a horse could earn hauling wood or food or repair materials for the community — so much they would work for food, so much to pay for the horse. It would not be hard to make a living and yet buy a horse.

‘We will send in the list to-morrow,’ said the president, after the little murmur of assent and noddings of the head subsided.

A school for E— was the next question. The Government has large plans for education, but they are not always practicable in the famine area. ‘In September,’ the president explained, ‘the department of education in B— sent a representative to start our school. But we were to be taxed 70 poods of grain [2520 pounds] for one teacher, besides having to furnish vegetables, fuel, and a room, and every child who attended school was to bring 2 poods [72 pounds] for books. The men who had no children said they would not pay, and the men with children could not possibly pay so much grain for every child. So we have no school.’

‘But don’t you want a school?’ I asked.

A man sitting beside me spoke up eagerly. He was broad-shouldered and wore a little yellow fur cap.

‘We are eight souls and four should go to school. There is not a pound of flour in the house and we are eating grass, but I would give all I have to send the children to school.'

‘If the Quakers fed your teacher all winter, could you feed her for the first month?’ I asked the president.

Yes, the village could do that.

‘And if you will raise a fund for books among yourselves, we will double it,’I went on.

Yes, they would do that, too.

‘I will call a meeting of the Soviet this evening and everyone will say what he will give,’ the president promised.

When the question of the school building came up, the president said, ‘In the summer Anna Antonina [the affectionate name by which my predecessor was known in her district] told us to start repairing the schoolhouse. But the Quakers could only pay for the work, by giving pyoks to the workers, and we had no materials and no money, so the work was not done. But if the school cannot be used, we will find a house. And we will heat it somehow, if you will pay the teacher. That is the great thing.’

‘Would you like to see the community work we are doing for our pyoks? ’ the president asked when everything had been arranged.

Now I had had great doubts about our projects for ‘work for pyoks,’ and I was very curious to see how the peasants were meeting the plan. All last winter, when starvation was acute, they had been given their month’s ration free, and also in the summer during the harvest work. Then had come two months of no pyoks, when they were living on the scanty harvest, or by working for the more fortunate. What did they think now of being suddenly required to dig or plough or make roads in return for their food ? To work, not even directly for the Quakers, but for the village, and under their own village authorities? Would they not refuse?

We went first to one of the ‘large’ houses of the village, a one-story frame house of four fair-sized rooms, which was to be occupied by a Children’s Home. Everything was ready for the children: three stoves made over, twenty new panes put in the windows, floors repaired, and the painted walls washed — all as community work.

From the Dietsky Dom we tramped against the driving wind to the open steppe beyond the town. Looking down into a hollow made by a spring stream, we saw a great crowd of workers, gray against the dull hillside, but for the red shawls of the women. They were making the community dam. Some were carrying loads of earth on little stretchers and dumping them on a mound of earth that reached across the bed of the stream; some were digging a little upstream with longhandled spades; some were arranging heaps of brush on the dam itself.

‘We began work two weeks ago,’ said the president. ‘The dam will catch the water in the spring and make a little lake for the cattle in the summer, and will run up the hollow there a long way.’

For some time we watched the unhurried but constant work. The men and women glanced at us from time to time, but did not stop. They were dressed in tawny brown shubas, — sheepskin coats with the wool inside, — and full swinging skirts to below the knee — men, women, and children. A dozen or more boys were at work, husky little urchins, from ten to fourteen years old, sent by widows and women who had no men to work for them and could not come themselves. ‘They will all go to school,’ the father of four said proudly, waving his hand at them; and they grinned at us, no doubt preferring to do ‘men’s’ work.

The dapper little assistant to the president had all the workers down in his book, with their attendance, two hundred souls, with fifty more cutting brush in the woods and hauling it in with cows. ‘We did not know if these men would be paid or not, for they have working cattle,’ the president explained; ‘but we mobilized them anyhow. A dam built only of earth would not last. But this one will last for fifty years and will make us remember the Quakers always.’ We explained that this work would be paid, too.

At that minute a whistle blew and the crowd came streaming toward us. The president reminded them that they used to get their pyoks for nothing, and that some of them had not believed this was Quaker work and would entitle them to pyoks. Now the Quakers had come and promised pyoks to all who worked.

As we turned to go, two cows appeared over the top of the slope with a heavy wood-telega and load of brush. Down they slid, and at the bottom the driver cleverly overturned the wagon. The last we saw was the branches being laid for the next layer of the dam, and the digging and carrying going on as before.

‘We must work hard,’ the president said; ‘for the snow will come in December, and then I do not know what work there will be. If we do not have help, we shall starve as we did last winter. Some of the men are eating grass now. This dam will take two months to build, and we are working every day.’

‘That will be food for four months,’ I said; ‘for we only ask half a month’s work for a month’s pyok. You can be sure of food until the end of February. We shall have to find new work for the three months until the harvest.’

‘Is there anything the women can do?’ he asked wistfully. ‘Many of them must stay at home with their children and cannot do this work.’

‘We are getting wool for them to spin,’ I replied, but faintly, for I did not know where wool enough for even one village would come from.

At this minute the man who so wanted the school caught up with us. He was waving a willow switch. ‘We shall plant trees all along the dam,’ he cried. ’Just put them in the earth and they will grow.’

A vision of a quiet lake, edged with willows swam before my eyes, gratifying an ambition born of the shadeless summer just past — an ambition that we should leave trees on the Russian steppe as a reminder of the days we had passed in it.

Only, as we dragged through the homeward road, now heavy with mud, some little phrases of the president would stick in my memory to mar my satisfaction in the Quaker dam: ‘I am twice a president and have no shoes. . . . It is hard to work without shoes and warm clothing.’ And I had to remember his canvas shoes and the bast shoes of the workers at the dam.

DEABEST M —

I do not know if Children’s Home No. 77 was always as it has been during the last fourteen clays of constantly expecting to move away to E—. The Director says there is no other home as clean as his. I can only chronicle what I have seen.

My first visit to the home was on a cold October Friday.

The court was full of the noise of children’s voices. It was incredibly dirty, and was full of a sharp smell of steam and cooking. Around the square mud stove in the shed, half a dozen children were busily engaged. One stood on a stool, and was pushing a thick stick into a steaming bowl. From his movements and from the smell in the court, I took it that he was boiling clothes; but a closer look showed that it was potatoes he was prodding. A big, elderly woman was washing clothes in the corner.

The children dropped their work and crowded round me. They were ragged and dirty and startlingly dressed in underwear, with an occasional pair of trousers or a sweater, and they shivered with cold as we talked. There were more clothes in the storeroom, they told me, but the woman who had charge of their clothing had gone to S— for the Quaker food, and had taken the key to the storeroom with her. The Director was in E—, looking at their new house.

We went indoors to the warm kitchen. It was swarming with children. As I drew out some ancient nuts and candy, a half-dozen heads popped over the top of the mud stove and pairs of intense eyes peered through the crack between the stove and the wall of the next room.

It came near to being a riot over the beggarly plateful of good things I was passing. In a minute all pretense had been abandoned of sitting on the benches or at the table; the big ones wore hustling the little, and half a dozen hands would have been in the plate at once but that I intervened, shocked at the exhibition. A little girl then came masterfully forward to second my efforts, kept tab on the wriggling mass of thirty or forty youngsters, and pointed out the candidates for the last bits. She had snapping black eyes, round pink cheeks, and the stature of eleven years, but her execution pointed to maturer years.

It was not possible to stay long in the stifling atmosphere of the kitchen, and I was revolted to see the nutshells finding their way instantly to the newly washed floor. If a little treat destroyed the one virtue, and that a transitory one enough, of the one livable room, it was time the fairy godmother withdrew.

With a smothered ‘Gosvidania,’ I made for the door. In the unsavory court I met the Director.

I complained of the filth in the court. The Director replied he could do nothing, the Ispolkom would not clean it for him. It was not a matter for the Government, I insisted, but one of the daily life of the home. He replied with unruffled calm that they were leaving soon; that he could do nothing with the children — they were forty, he was only one. He had the highest standards, but even depriving them of their dinners did no good. As for the lack of clothing, it was wash-day and all their clothes were in the wash; it had been warm until recently; and the clothes were being saved. He seemed not to notice the little girl standing beside us, shivering and chattering with cold so as to interfere with the conversation. As for her, so deeply was her curiosity gratified by what she heard, that I doubt if she was conscious, either, of her sufferings.

In my indignation I turned my back on the Director and walked off, he trailing behind blaming the Ispolkom.

Two days later my luncheon was interrupted by a message that one of the staff of No. 77 was leaving, and the Director would not let her take her Quaker clothes with her. Pleased to baulk the rascality of the Director, I sent him a note asking that the woman be given her clothing.

It was not a quarter of an hour before the Director stood before me, and in an excited stream of Russian laid before me and my interpreter the case — thieving, discovery, dismissal.

‘Who discovered the theft of the blankets?’ I asked suspiciously.

‘The children,’ he replied. ‘They found one blanket under the porch, and when they accused her and demanded the second back, it appeared the next day.’

There was nothing for it but to abandon my rashly taken position, although the Director’s radiant satisfaction at my recantation caused me uneasiness.

The following day was market day, and while I was engaged in the congenial occupation of exchanging clothing for some quaint finery from one of the Chuvash villages, a little whirlwind blew in my warehouse door — the discharged laundress crying that she knew nothing of the blankets, and on either side of her, like jailers, two animated little girls from the home, my black-eyed friend and another a few inches taller.

‘I am the President of the Children’s Committee,’ she announced. ‘She is an officer, too,’ indicating the other youngster. Then of the prisoner, ‘She stole our clothes.’

The woman grunted angrily, and for a while words whistled among the piles of clothing. But the Committee held its ground and was convincing as the Director could not be. In the end, my interpreter took a hand. Looking down from his six-foot eminence at the midgets, he said gravely, for me, —

‘The Quakers leave the matter in the hands of the Children’s Committee and the Director.’

The President nodded briskly; and seizing the luckless laundress by the sleeves, the children marched her off. To-day I had my third meeting with the home. The lady who had gone to S— with the key that cold October day appeared, asking for clothing for the children, and blankets now that the nights were so cold.

Grimly I accompanied her to the home.

The children grinned amiably at me and crowded about in their dirty underwear and ragged trousers. I noted mentally that it was not washday.

‘We will go first to the warehouse and look at the clothes you have,’ I announced, ‘and without the children, please.’

Sadly they fell back, and we went in alone.

In the storeroom, among the potatoes and turnips, were three painted wooden chests, such as are dear to the Russian heart. Out of these came an array of warm, new underwear and a smaller amount of outer clothing —• enough, I indignantly reflected, to have dressed every child in the home decently. In the corner, in the dirt, were some unpleasant-looking bundles. Quelling my squeamishness and that of the unfortunate gospitalnitza, I inspected the soiled clothes, while the Director shifted from one foot to the other in the doorway, and listened with what command of countenance he could to my frank comments on the housekeeping of the home, and to my repeated questions why the garments were unworn and the children cold.

It appeared that some garments were too large and some were too thin. These I gathered up in a large bundle to take back. The Quakers had no clothing to be laid away in chests, I explained. I would give the proper size.

‘Now may I see the children?’ I asked, as we returned to the house; a superfluous request, as they swarmed out to meet us.

Then began one of the strangest dress parades the world has seen. The children stood before me in groups, the biggest first, and showed me without hesitation the rags they were wearing, their misshapen bodies showing plainly through the almost total lack of clothing.

‘Why has not this boy one of those warm shirts you tell me are too large?’ I demanded on behalf of one of the big boys.

‘He has a vest,’ the ‘matron’ replied; and so, to be sure, he had — thin back, no sleeves, and all.

‘Would you like a shirt?’ I asked him, and watched him pull it over his head, grinning.

‘Why has this little girl no skirt?’ And I pointed out a little thing wrapped in a jacket.

‘She has a petticoat,’ and there it was, at least half-way down to her bare knees. One nine-year-old boy’s thin arm showed through a long tear in his flimsy top shirt. They were economizing on him, so that he would have something to wear when they moved. A short lecture followed on the Quaker idea that it was better economy to keep the children decently dressed and to save them from catching cold, than to make a fine appearance on entering E—.

The moral atmosphere was fast getting as thick as the air in the kitchen, when I bethought me of the request for blankets and the four new blankets I had seen lying in the storeroom, also the rows of little wooden beds, each with its blanket, in the dormitory.

‘Where do the children sleep?’ I inquired.

‘ Here.’

‘Here, on the floor?’ I asked faintly, looking round the small kitchen filled with the long table, the benches, and the stove.

‘Yes; at night they bring in their blankets. It is too cold in the bedrooms.’

A brief inspection revealed the deadly chill in the rest of the house and a broken pane in one of the bedroom windows. No use to ask Russians to sleep in that temperature, with no matter how many blankets. Whatever I did, the children would go on sleeping as they were, until they moved.

Heartsick, I was ready to go. Then a thought struck me.

‘Where is the Children’s Committee?’ I asked; and, radiant with importance, the three little girls stepped out.

I looked at them with intense seriousness. ‘The Quakers are trying to do their best for you,’ I said. ‘They want you to have good food and clothes enough. But are n’t you ashamed to be so dirty ? You have a soviet of your own and still you live like this. Why have n’t you a boy on the committee to keep the yard clean? [Whispering in the serious ranks.] It is a disgrace, and the Director says he can’t do anything about it. [Floods of confirmation from the Director in the doorway.]

‘We hold the Director responsible for everything,’ I went on, with a severe look into the dishonest blue eyes, ‘but he cannot do much unless the children work with him. [The audience was sober now, almost to tears, and the round, clipped heads, the bulging famine-stomachs, the flapping drawers of the boys and the transparent dresses and spindly legs of the girls, were going to make me cry or laugh in about a minute.] ‘If I go home and see what I can find for you, will you try to keep things nicer?’

The chorus of assent almost swept me out of the room.

As the Director accompanied me to the street, he asked solicitously where I objected to the dirt.

‘Everywhere,’ I replied succintly.

‘And will the staff receive blankets?’ he went on, as if, now that the good conduct prizes were being given, it was time the most distinguished got theirs.

‘I shall visit you in your new home,’ I replied pleasantly. ‘If I am better satisfied there than I am here, we can talk of such things then.’

In the afternoon I had another visit at my warehouse. The Committee, very pink-cheeked, would like to have the clothing I had promised. And might they please have back the underwear trimmed with lace? It was the prettiest they had ever seen, and someone had cried when it was taken away. No, indeed, it was not too thin, as the matron had said. The children had never seen the clothes that the Quakers had given. They had been locked up at once. Now that the Committee knew just what was being given, everything would be better.

Gravely they advised about sizes and gave numbers. No boy would get a sweater, they explained, who had other warm clothes, or unless, as I suggested, he had cold work, like gardening. Indeed, they would take care of the things.

And was the Director to have one of the blankets, when the children received theirs? the President asked, with careful justice.

‘Yes, give him one,’ I said in a burst of forgiveness and, perhaps, of malice at the thought of my old enemy getting his blanket at the hands of his youthful soviet. Surely they were a forgiving lot, and it was not for me to be behind in generosity.

Suddenly the strain was over, and we began to laugh and be natural.

At the door three radiant grins rewarded me for my labors.

‘Thank you! thank you. Ochen blagariu — bolshe, bolshe sposiba!’ And they plunged into the street, their arms full of woolen stockings, dresses, and four little pairs of trousers — my whole store.

I did not like to think of the disappointed faces of the boys who must go on fetching the wood and working in the gardens in a simple pair of underdrawers and French-heeled lady’s shoes. But —

‘ Bog daiout,' as the peasants say, ‘it is as God gives’; and if He does not give trousers in large sizes, then let us be thankful He does give underwear.