The Intourist guide hovers about, talking a great deal and looking anxious.
"If you like, they will keep and have develop' and send after you."
"That'll be very expensive, won't it?"
The guide shrugs her shoulders. We all know that it will be very expensive—and very uncertain into the bargain.
"Better let them go," advises the Englishwoman.
Her husband supports her, though he adds sternly that the principle of the thing is all wrong from start to finish.
The college boy, muttering that it's disgraceful, decides to let the films go. Twelve views of the Crimea scenery are lost for ever to the United States of America.
Nobody else's luggage yields anything sensational.
IV
Mine is the last to be examined, owing to the qualms of sickness which keep on breaking over me and preventing me from moving.
Perhaps I am, after all, starting one of the illnesses against which I was solemnly inoculated before leaving England. I suppose inoculations wear off after a time?
If it's smallpox they won't let me leave the country.
Say nothing about it.
I would rather die at sea than in Russia.
"What is this?"
"A book."
"It is a book you got in Russia?"
Obviously, it is a book I got in Russia. It is a large album with Russian text, containing some beautiful reproductions of the pictures in the gallery of Western Art at Moscow.
As it is large and heavy I have packed it in the bottom of my suitcase, and from thence it is extracted—with a bad effect on all the layers of things above it.
The conscientious Customs official looks through every single page of it. I do not know what he expects to find hidden between them. Perhaps he just likes pictures.
My other books get off lightly—so do my clothes. My letter-case is turned inside out, my very small diary severely scrutinized, upside down.
I am asked to open my hand-bag.
What shall I do if they suggest searching me?
They do not.
They repack my suitcase, quite obligingly, and shut it up again—the heavy Russian album is now on the top of my clothes instead of underneath them—and I have passed the Customs.
"Can I go through to the boat now?"
"You must wait a little," says the guide kindly. "You are tired, yes?"
I am, in my own opinion, at the point of death—but I do not say so.
"It's rather hot in here."
"There are many people."
The Comrades certainly do look numerous as they crowd round the long, dirty wooden counter on which their belongings are now being opened and examined.
The guide keeps on looking at me—no doubt I am pale green by now—and I feel I ought to distract her attention.
Would this be a good opportunity for speaking my mind, for the first and last time, in the Soviet Republic? It must be now or never.
Quite suddenly a crisis supervenes between the Customs officials and a middle-aged and rather battered-looking Comrade. He shouts, and they shout, he tries to get out at the far door that leads to where the boat is lying, and is prevented.
"What is the matter?"
"His passport is not in order. He cannot leave."
"Poor man!"
"He is upset because his family, they will have to go."
"Without him?"
"He cannot go. His passport is not in order."
"But they'll stay behind with him, won't they?"
"No, they will have to go. It is all arranged."
How very dreadful this is...The unfortunate Comrade with the defective passport is now in tears on our side of the counter and his family on the other—two women, a little boy, a baby, and the grandmother whom I mistook for a bundle.
They say good-by, in a very spectacular way, across the counter, though I think there is really no reason why they should not all be on the same side.
"When will he be able to join them?"
"I cannot say."
"I think it would be far better if they all waited together till his papers have been put in order."
"No," says the guide. "They cannot. They have given up their room. There is nowhere for them to be now except the ship."
And I realize that what she says is quite true.
The Swedish astronomers look disturbed, and say "Poor things!" and the college boy gives it as his considered opinion that Russia is not a free country, no, sir, it is not.
The unfortunate family are saying good-by again, and the baby is being handed to and fro across the counter repeatedly. It makes me, if possible, feel dizzier than before and I can watch them no longer.
The far door has been opened. I go out—manuscript and all—along the dock and up the gangway and onto the waiting boat.
I am off the soil of Soviet Russia.
In the very next berth to ours lies the Jan Rudzutak, in which I sailed from London Docks to Leningrad months and months ago.
Time and the hour, I think sententiously, ride through the roughest day. And on the whole, I have found it a fairly rough day.
But it ends on a note of unforeseen brightness.
The Comrade whom I left in such trouble among the officials is, at the eleventh hour, after all allowed to sail. He is hustled up the gangway and into the steerage and all his family receive him with cries and screams, and the baby is again bandied about from hand to hand.
"But how did he get through if his passport wasn't in order?"
"Definitely, by bribery," says the English traveler.
He brings forward no particular evidence to support this statement, and I shall never know whether it is really true or not. But I think that most probably it is.
So I go down to my dirty little cabin and retrieve my manuscript and find it less damaged than I expected, and ask a steward if I can have a little brandy to restore me (but none comes), and have every intention of going on deck to see the last of Soviet Russia, but find, after all, that I can't stir and must remain, ignominiously prone, until I feel better.
The ship has begun to move. The journey away from Russia has started.
In a few minutes I think I shall be asleep, although a Russian loud-speaker is blaring jazz somewhere on deck, and a group of Comrades, apparently exactly outside the porthole, is discussing the Government's new suggestion of making abortion illegal—just as it is in capitalist countries.
I wish I had spoken my mind, just once, in the U.S.S.R. Even though I know that nobody would have paid any attention to it, and even though it occurs to me to wonder whether I am absolutely certain of what my mind really is, concerning the new Russia.
THE END
The Provincial Lady in Wartime (1940)
Dedication
AFFECTIONATELY