A Writer's Notebook (54 page)

The Democratic Convention began to sit today at the Alexandrevsky Theatre. It was representative of the working classes and it might be presumed that these delegates from all parts of Russia fairly well typified the classes they were sent by. Scanning their faces, it struck me that on the whole it was a peasant type of countenance; of course there were a great many Jews, with alert, wary eyes, and I suppose that among the vast number (there were nearly two thousand persons in the theatre) there were many rogues; but on the whole I had the impression not of degenerate, but rather of backward, loutish people: they had ignorant faces, and a vacuous look. The narrowness, the obstinacy, the uncouthness of peasants; and notwithstanding the collars and jackets of some, the uniforms of others, I felt they were very near to the slow-moving tillers of the soil. They listened to the speeches with apathy. The speeches were very long. The meeting, timed to begin at four, began in point of fact at five and continued till nearly midnight. Only five speeches were made in all those hours and each speech was of about the same length. The orators spoke with great fluency, but with a monotonous fervour; they were tremendously in earnest and they did not attempt to lighten their speeches with story or with jest; they did not even give the mind the relief of a plain fact, but confined themselves to generalisation and exhortation; every speech was in effect a peroration. There was once a professor of law who said to his students: “When you're fighting a case, if you have the facts on your side hammer
them into the jury, and if you have the law on your side hammer it into the judge.” “But if you have neither the facts nor the law?” asked one of his listeners. “Then hammer hell into the table,” answered the professor. These orators were hammering hell into the table all the time. But they were not impressive. You might see just such men addressing the meeting of the Radical candidate for a constituency in the South of London. Chernov, who is spoken of as the evil genius of the revolution, a man who is feared on all sides and is supposed to have enormous influence, was a man without force or personality; rather short, with thick, coarse features and a shock of grey hair. He had the look of a socialist orator in any part of the world, and he spoke at inordinate length, with wearisome emphasis. Tsesetelli, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke clearly and to the point, but in an undistinguished manner; it was the very ordinary speech of a very ordinary man. It is amazing that such mediocre persons should be in control of this vast empire, and I asked myself what it was in them that had raised them from the anonymous crowd whom they seemed to excel neither in character, force nor intelligence.

The only real enthusiasm aroused in the meeting was by Kerensky. I was curious to see the man who in so short a time has achieved a position of such fame and power; and here again I was puzzled, for strength is the one thing he obviously has not. I could not understand how his enemies could see in him Napoleonic designs. There is more of Saint-Just in him than of Bonaparte. He was seated in the middle of the imperial box when the chairman called upon him to speak, and he walked along the central aisle of the theatre to the stage. He was dressed in khaki and accompanied by two A.D.Cs. He was somewhat stouter than I had expected, clean-shaven, his hair cut
en brosse;
but what struck me most was his colour. One often reads of people being green in the face with fright and I had always thought it an invention of novelists. But that is exactly what he was. He walked quickly, and
having reached the stage walked round the table at which the Council sat and shook hands with each of the delegates in turn. He gave a quick, spasmodic shake, and his face remained set in an anxious immobility. He had a strangely hunted look. He was obviously very nervous. It was a hazardous moment for him, because accusations had been freely made against him of complicity in the adventure of General Kornilov, and the Bolsheviks who had called the meeting together were hostile; it was notorious that this gathering might decide his fate, and if the extremists found themselves in a majority it was supposed that they would call upon him to resign in their favour. It was not known what he intended to do then; but the general impression was that he would refuse, remove his government to G.H.Q. and, leaving Petrograd to the Bolsheviks, rule the country with the help of the army. He began his speech by asking for what amounted to a vote of confidence. He spoke for an hour, fluently, without notes, amid constant interruptions. He was extremely emotional. There was a passage over the orchestra which led on to the stage, and down this he walked every now and then till he stood practically among the audience as though he sought to appeal to each man personally. His appeal was to the heart and not to the mind. The applause grew more frequent and the interruptions were more impatiently resented. The people seemed to feel that here was a sincere and upright man, and if he made mistakes they were honest. His voice was not attractive and he spoke at one pitch, without modulation; there was no light and shade in his oratory, and, I should have said, nothing to inspire. His only power seemed to be his seriousness and his disinterestedness. He finished, shook hands quickly with the delegates round the table and returned to his box amid thunderous cheers. He said a few more words from his box in answer to the applause and soon left the theatre. He had won the day.

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort, but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained, and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

Savinkov was sitting in a tavern drinking a cup of tea when a peasant came up to him and said: “Where shall I find God?” He was more than a little drunk. Savinkov looked at him with a grave face, but with smiling eyes. “In your heart, my brother,” he answered. The peasant said nothing for a time as the answer sank into his fuddled brain. “Then what shall I do with my life?” he said. Savinkov replied with another question. “How old are you?” The peasant seemed doubtful and he shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Forty,” he said, a little uncertainly. “That is a safe age to trust to one's instincts,” said Savinkov. “You are strong and healthy. Do the work you know how to do; and for the rest trust to your inclinations. I know nothing else.” The peasant stood solidly on his two feet, with soft, kind eyes fixed on Savinkov; he rubbed his beard; then he made a low bow and went slowly away.

Savinkov. He appears to be a man of between forty and fifty, of medium height, slender, with a somewhat bald head; his features are ordinary, and his eyes are small and hard and set rather closely together. One can imagine that at times they would be very cruel. He was neatly dressed; he wore a stand-up collar, a quiet tie with a pin in it, a frock-coat and patent leather boots. He had the prosperous look of a lawyer. There was nothing violent in his appearance. He gave me
the impression of a cultivated man, somewhat commonplace but not without a certain distinction. He was quiet, reserved and modest. It was not till he began to talk that I saw anything remarkable in him. He spoke in Russian and in excellent French, idiomatic and correct except for an occasional error in gender; he spoke slowly as though he were thinking out what he said, but it was clear that he possessed an admirable power of finding the exact words to express his ideas. His voice was soft and pleasant, his enunciation extremely clear. I had never heard such a captivating talker. He was grave when the subject needed gravity, humorous when there was occasion for it; there was such a reasonableness in what he said that it was impossible not to be affected; he was exquisitely persuasive; but the deliberation of his speech, the impressive restraint of his manner, suggested a determined will which made his ruthlessness comprehensible. I had come across no one who filled me with so great a sense of confidence.

He told me one or two curious anecdotes.

After the battle of July eighteenth when the Russian troops were shamefully defeated, Kerensky, who with him had watched their flight, asked him to come for a drive with him in his car. Savinkov, who was then Minister of War, thinking he wished to confer with him about means to repair the disaster, got into the car and they started. But Kerensky said nothing. He sat as one cowed and despairing. He opened his mouth only to make a hackneyed quotation from a second-rate poet; Savinkov could hardly believe his ears. What on earth was the connection between this sentimental line and the tragedy of their country? He concluded: “It was characteristic of this man without education that he should comfort himself with such a bad poet.” An incident somewhat similar took place at the fall of Tarnopol; Savinkov, seeing the Russian troops flee precipitately, hurried to Kornilov to tell him what was happening. Kornilov betrayed not the smallest emotion; his answer came directly, without hesitation: “Shoot them.” The
way in which Savinkov told the story showed that here he recognised with rejoicing a man of a spirit equal to his own.

Another anecdote. He was returning from the front with Kerensky, and at the station, on their arrival at Petrograd, a telegram was handed to the Premier. He glanced at it and passed it to Savinkov with the words: “Will you see about this?” It was the request of a woman for mercy on behalf of her son, a soldier condemned to be shot for desertion. Now the matter was no business of Savinkov's, who had had nothing to do with the sentence and who had not the prerogative of mercy; Kerensky gave him the telegram in order to rid himself of a responsibility he dreaded. Savinkov finished: “And the curious thing is that Kerensky never referred to the matter again; he never ventured to ask me what I had done.”

He described Kerensky as a man of words, not of acts, a vain man who would not suffer disagreement and so surrounded himself with sycophants, a man of morbid verbosity, who would make speeches
en tête à tête
with his ministers, who would make speeches to his aide-de-camp driving in a motor with him, a man of small education and of limited imagination, a man tired out and neurotic. “If he had had imagination,” he said, “he would surely not have installed himself with his womenkind in the Winter Palace.”