Part 14

RUTH.

September.

Dearests:--

Every day now we go out into the garden. We play ball and play tag in the wind to get warm.

There is a private hospital at one end of our apartment house, supported by a wealthy Polish woman. Two or three times a week she visits the patients, young officers who go out into the garden with her and kiss her hand and talk and flirt. She sits on a garden-bench surrounded by her young men, a big woman in black, with a long black veil, talking vivaciously, using her hands in quick, expressive gestures, patting their cheeks, leaning forward to give their hands an impulsive squeeze. When she laughs, which is often, the black line of a mustache on her upper lip makes the white of her teeth whiter still. The days when she isn't there, the convalescents flirt with the nurses. There is nothing horrible about this hospital. The patients are only slightly wounded, and wear becoming bathrobes when they lounge round.

The window-ledges of the rooms are gay with flowers. Almost always a phonograph is going, "Carmen," or "Onégin," or "Pagliacci." Sometimes, Peter and I one-step to the music on the pavement outside, and the officers and nurses crowd to the windows and clap and cry, "Encore!" Often, after sundown, when the children have gone indoors, and we go out for a walk before dinner, we see a patient with a bandage around his head, perhaps, but both arms well enough to be clasping a pretty nurse in them. They laugh and we laugh. There is no cynicism about it. It's bigger than that, it seems to me.

Into the garden come many street musicians. They play and sing, and showers of kopecks rain down from the windows. Two little girls came a few days ago. They were Tziganes, barefooted, with gay petticoats and flowered shawls and dangling earrings. Their dark hair was short and curly. One of the children played a balalaika and sang in a broken, mournful voice that did not at all belong to her age. The other--who wore the prettiest dress, yellow, with a green and purple shawl--danced like a little marionette on a string, not an expression in her pointed, brown face, but every now and then accelerating the pace of her dance, and giving sharp, high cries. Then, suddenly, they stopped in the middle of a measure, and held out their aprons for money. A window on the ground floor opened and a very pretty woman leaned out. I have seen her many times. She is Polish, the daughter of a concierge, and now the mistress of a young Cossack, who is leaving shortly for the front. She has heavy, pale-yellow hair, wound around her head in thick braids, and she wears pearls, opaque like her skin. She beckoned the little girls into her room. They went eagerly. Soon I heard them singing there.

When we were with Dr. ----, from the Red Cross hospital this afternoon, a soldier came up to us and saluted. He was a miserable-looking creature, in a uniform too big for him. His face was unshaven, his beard gray and sparse, and his eyes red and blinking and full of pain. He slouched away again in a moment, his eyes staring down at the sidewalk under his feet.

"What did he want?" I asked.

"He wants brandy. He's leaving for the front to-morrow, and he asked me to write out a doctor's prescription so he could get a little brandy. Poor fellow. It was impossible, of course, but I'd have done it gladly. He said he'd been wounded and discharged, and had to go back to the front and leave his family, helpless, again. The second time must be so much worse than the first. You know what it's like out there."

RUTH.

September.

Darlingest ones:--

At last I have heard from the letter about the Jewish detention camp. The English Consul came to our rooms yesterday afternoon and said he was to act as interpreter for the head of the secret police. I was to be ready to answer his questions about eight o'clock that night. He told me to keep my temper and say as little as possible.

Shortly before eight the Consul and the chief came round together. We all sat down. I was quite calm. So often I had created my own terror of this moment that when it came I met it with relief. I even felt a sense of superiority over the chief of the secret service. I don't know why, I'm sure. Perhaps because I was no longer afraid of him. It was as though I had stuck my head under a pump of ice-cold water. I felt very clear-headed. I had a curious feeling that things were as they were and nothing I could say could change them.

"Are you a Jew?" he asked me first.

"No."

"Is your mother or father Jewish?"

"No. There is no Jewish blood in our family." I thought of Dad's Quakerism and smiled. I wondered what he would have said if he had been there.

"Then why have you such sympathy for them?" He looked at me narrowly, as though he had me there.

"Because they are suffering."

"Tck." He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in the most skeptical fashion.

He took up my letter, translated into Russian, and went through it. The whole thing was a farce. I answered the questions he asked me, but they didn't get us anywhere. Of course, everything I knew about the Jewish detention camp I had written in my letter. All I could do was to repeat what I had said there. And when he asked questions like, "Who said five old men had been killed along the way?" or, "How did you know throwing the bodies into the Dnieper had brought cholera into Kiev this summer?" I could only reply, "I was told it." "Who told you?" "I forget."

When he got up to go he said:--

"This letter makes your case a very serious one. Of course, we can't have such things as that published about us. Have you ever written before?"

I said, "No."

"You aren't reporting for any journal?"

I assured him it was only a letter I had written my mother and father.