Page images
PDF
EPUB
[merged small][graphic]

There was a lot of conversation. Finally my interpreter whispers: "They think we're Jap spies." He wasn't laughing either

LARRY, OLD PAL:

W

Nice and White and Innocent

VLADIVOSTOK, March 17, 1921.

TELL, I'm up here in the far frozen north as far as you can go without putting on skates and hiring a dog team or a. flock of reindeers. And as a place to be from, Larry, it's not so bad.

Before I forget it, Larry, I'd like to make a few remarks about a Russian gas they got up here that they call vodka. This here vodka, Larry, is nice and white and looks pure and innocent, but oh, girls, it's a go-gettin' gas! You can do about 80 miles to a gal. and do it fast.

Out among the bourgeoisie-which is another way of saying the terrible people who've got more than one suit apiece and get their beards trimmed every six weeks-they fill up their tanks with this vodka gas just before they sit down to dinner. You take a little chip of toast with caviar in the left hand and with your sturdy right the shot of gas, and when you toss off the poison you bark-hah! and then before you open the intake valve you shove in this caviar and eat fast.

Boy! you can make any hill in the world on high with your emergency on after about nine of these courses. That, of course, is the fancy way of filling your tank. The plain way is to take it from the bottle-the same as baby's milk. But just as clothes don't make the man, Larry, so the style don't make the clock say cuckoo-it's the works inside the case. But she's a wonderful place, Larry, old pal. I am staying in a hotel here that could easily win the green running trunks. It took all the pull of the American consul, the American agent, and about 6,500 words of good American talk to break into this joint and get me a room, to start with. It's going to take a lot more fine work to get me out of here alive.

I guess except me everybody around this place is either a bandit or a Bolshevik or a boozer of some kind or other. It's worth your life to walk down this hall alone after nine o'clock.

But I'm starting to talk the language to them now. I've picked up one useful word already besides vodka -that's nitchevo, which means: "Oh, don't get excited, bo, it'll all come out in the wash!"

You should hear one of these little tateytates I have out here in the hall. A couple of big bruisers in long Cossack coats and curved swords and beards and all perfumed up like a livery stable stop me in the hall and maybe say something like this:

"Drostechy, cutchvitch, heres haw, siechas-troika Bolsheviki."

[ocr errors]

ee

By Frazier Hunt

Illustrated by C. Le Roy Baldridge

When the 'Stars and Stripes' lost its constant reader, Kaiser Wilhelm II," writes the staff cartoonist of that celebrated newspaper, "we decided to suspend publication.

"I went to the Far East for a change. I thought I was getting there ahead of the rush. But Frazier Hunt was there, on a writing assignment. And a million American salesmen were ahead of him.

"They say Hunt learned all about them after rooming with one in Peking. He woke up in the morning and found on the pincushion a carbon receipt for a complete reporter's outfit-typewriter, yellow paper, and one dozen green eyeshades-same to be delivered to his home at Alexis, Ill.

"Seriously," concluded Mr. Baldridge, "nobody has ever written a more truthful account of foreign trade as seen through the eyes of our men in the field who are building it"

I look 'em right back in the eye and say: "Nitchevo vodka-nitchevo!"

Then you ought to hear what they say. Well, this is a beautiful city here built on the sides of these hills with this wonderful bay curving around like a great silver saxophone-kinda poetic, eh, what? -but it strikes me that the old town is hot on a "Back to h-" movement. It's open season here the year around, and it's a frosty night when some Ruskey full of this Russian rum can't get himself a couple of Chinks or a innocent bystander or at the very least a Korean.

It's all sorts of a boarding-house-hash place up here now, Larry. They've got what they call a provisional government here in eastern Siberia, but it's provisional on about forty different things-the Reds and the Whites and the Pinks and the Greens and the Browns. The little Browns from Japan really run things, though. They've got thirty or forty

thousand troops around here, and what they can't think of doing to Siberia isn't worth Trotzky worrying about. The poor old provisional gov.-made up half of pale-pink Bolshevikis and half of nice white (there comes that hard word again) bourgeoisiehave to do just what they say or outsky they gosky. I can't say much about it because you got to have a Japanese visé on your passport or you can't move away from your own shadow up here and this letter might be opened and then some night all my troubles would just automatically end-I mean end with a automatic. And I want to live until spring.

There is nothing like spring in the far north, Larry. Birds twitter, the grass turns green, the ice breaks up in the bay and floats out to sea-and then one warm morning the sweet young female things of Vladivostok gather down by the old swimming hole, and there and then in the sunlight go swimming just as Nature meant them to go swimming. So longsky,

LIGHTNINGOVITCH.

[merged small][ocr errors]

rubles I could sell a thousand Famlikars without leaving the city. But it looks like I won't be able to more than place an agency and a order for two or three, because they haven't anything to pay with.

Japanese yen is the one really stable currency here now, but to get a hold of enough of them to buy a monkey wrench with is like getting a hold of a case of prewar stuff back home. It takes a bushel basket full of rubles to even buy a meal; everybody up here is stoop-shouldered from carrying around street car fare. I can't help smiling, boss, when I think of those money changers on Broadway in N. Y. with their signs up:

Special Bargain

10,000 RUSSIAN RUBLES

Only $50 Cash. Rest Easy Payments

For $50 in U. S. currency I could buy two.shiploads of any one of the forty-three different kinds of rubles up here and I'd have a warehouseful left over.

Don't look to me like American business men can count on any big business coming out of Siberia until the political situation gets cleared up. Right now nobody knows whose country it is or what flag to fly on the Fourth of July. As long as the Japs are here and the Reds and Whites and Pinks and the rest of the colored parties are quarreling, I'd imagine

that a line of credit up to $2 would be about right. I have told the firm I am working with here that a draft on New York before the Famlikars leave Chicago will suit us fine. I'm handling them easy, though, boss, because some day when the skies clear up here Siberia will be crying for American goods. This is a great, rich country, but you mustn't hurry it.

Am going to do some demonstrating this coming week. This company here say Siberia is frozen up so much of the year that motorcycles might not be very popular. I'm going to show them that the old Famlikar will go anywhere and do anything that a regular car will. Leaving next week for China. L. CARTER.

DEAR MARY:

I

Yours,

VLADIVOSTOK, March 18, 1921.

WROTE you a letter on the Jap boat that brought me up here from Japan, but if it was anything like the weather was or like I was feeling, it was a pretty rough one.

It's a good thing you didn't have to go along with me on this trip, after all, Mary, because traveling up around this part of the world is for strong men only. Japan was all right, and some day when I get back and we are married and get sent around again I'll take you over there. But Vladivostok-I should say not.

The finest thing they got up here is samovars, and while there're not many left, on account of the American troops plucking all the ones that weren't nailed down when they left last year, I'm going to get you one if I have to steal it out of a old ladies' home.

The singing of the steaming samovar is the national anthem of Russia. And a samovar fight is the great indoor sport. You gather around the old tea urn and drink this boiling hot tea until you feel like you've done two hours in a Turkish bath. You're a amateur if you can't tuck away a half dozen glasses at the very least. Among the peasants and poorer people they don't put sugar in the glass, but have it cut up in lumps about as big as peas, and as they drink their tea they slip one of these sweet pills in their mouth. But the real trick is to pick up this boiling glass of tea with your bare fingers and inhale it without touching your lips to the glass.

I'd like to put a good Siberian peasant tea drinker up against a first-class Japanese rice eater and let them both try for the world's inhaling record-both for distance and noise. It'd be a wonderful international contest.

Love and kisses by the millions,

LIGHTNING.

SOMEWHERE IN SIBERIA, March 19, 1921.

DEAR LARRY:

Y

My interpreter and I drove out here in the country

yesterday, and to-day we're going to another village ten miles farther on, and then the next day we'll hit the snow-dust trail back to Vladivostok. "Say, man! I'm glad I came. This farmer's house where we're staying is a yell from start to finish. I wish I could get over to you all the rich stuff there is here.

It's a two-room log house, to start with-and the rest of it is stable. About two-thirds of the kitchen is taken up with a big, old-fashioned Dutch oven, about five feet high and made of bricks. There's a

Baldridge

space on top of this oven just about the size of a double bed-and this is where three of the seven kids sleep.

Over in another part of the kitchen, suspended from the ceiling about six feet from the floor, is a hanging shelf about the size of a bed. Two of the older boys sleep up there.

The other room is sort of a combination parlor, bedroom, and everything -except a bath. That's where they eat when there's company and where the old man and the old woman sleep with the youngest child - and they've got all the family portraits and postal cards and dodads on display in there.

It being about 45 below up here in the winter, the house only has one entrance, and that has a pair of heavy twin doors, one leading into a tiny entrance, and then a inside door. The windows are double and all the cracks are filled with cotton. You see, the game is to keep out any and all fresh air. This house had a wonderful record-they still had every little atom of the same precious ozone that was in there when "

"Can I write a letter?" I said. "Sure-write a book on Bolshevik atrocities," said the fellow that looked like the captain

the house was sealed up early in the fall. But it wasn't so bad when you got used to it. When I first stepped inside, of course it knocked me stiff for about nine counts, but when I came to and settled down I sort of liked it.

Same way with the meals. Along about dark the old lady brought out a bushel basket of soup and meat and sour cabbage, all cooked up together in one big bowl, and put it on the table, and alongside of it three or four hunks of heavy black bread that you could have used for paving bricks.

In front of each chair was a big wooden spoonand that was all. Well, I pulled up. I thought I'd hang back and pick up my eating cue from my host, but, I being the guest of honor, they all waited for So I lifted my ladle and dove into the melting pot. That was the signal. In three seconds the old ladles were flashing and battling for first place, and I'll bet $8 you could have heard the echoes of that eating match halfway across the Pacific.

me.

With the big bowl cleaned up, the old lady brought on the samovar and we had a tea-drinking tournament. I must say that for a man who never had any special training in the game and who three months ago was in the hospital with a broken leg and a

[ocr errors]

smashed reputation, I did pretty well. I worked my way through the preliminaries and was down to the last heat with the old man when I burned myself on a hot glass and withdrew. I'm thinking of putting old Itchivitch on the vaudeville stage.

After we'd finished off about three barrels of tea we got talking about the Bolsheys and the farmer soldiers up here, and the old man explained how they were some Bolos not so very far away and how they were going to keep on fighting the Japanese until they drove them out.

Pretty soon we all commenced to yawn, and the nice old lady of the house very hospitably offered me the choice of any of the sleeping places. She even suggested pulling the three young Itchivitches off the Dutch oven and giving me this, but I figured about the best place to roost undisturbed was the upper berth next the ceiling.

So, being pretty tired, we took off our heavy boots and coats and then swung up on the six-foot perch, and it wasn't very long until the fatigue and the excitement and the poison gas had put us to sleep. It must have been along about midnight, and I was dreaming that the old Famlikar was an airplane, and we were sailing over these Siberian hills and everything was going fine, when a big mountain suddenly looked up right in front of me. I tried to turn and get around it, but the old steering gears wouldn't work, so I jumped.

I mean I jumped. And when I came to the old man was rubbing snow in my hair and the old lady was feeding me homemade vodka with a wooden spoon. That Siberian hooch would have woke up a bird with the sleeping sickness.

Then they all insisted on pulling a couple of the kids down from the stove and giving me that place of honor. But not this child of the snows. I'd had enough of lofty sleeping. I took a nice clean spot over in the corner and curled up on mother floor. Soon as we get breakfast we're off to see another village and then home to Bloodyvostok.

[graphic]

LIGHTNING.

[blocks in formation]

Nara chose the pencil to interpret the message. "If your venture is to succeed," said Connor Lee, "it will tap twice"

[blocks in formation]

YOD knows why I wanted to talk with you," said Claveloux. "I suppose because something, new and unfelt before, entered into me tonight."

Nara misunderstood him, thinking that he was seeking

to express his fear that she

The Hands of Nara

had misinterpreted his impulse of warm friendship, the light kiss he had left upon her cheek, the sudden informality of their first association.

"It has done you no harm," she said. "I will be leaving this house before another three or four hours. And when I go the chasm between this house and me will open as wide as it was before my discovery as an impecunious refugee. All of value I shall take away will be this one experience with you. It came. It passed. And I am grateful."

He came toward her, losing possession of himself for a moment. He was a man in torment. He said: "Don't say that! I don't care who or what you are. I will not believe that you can treat it as nothing when you have lit this light and blown it out."

"I cannot understand you, Dr. Claveloux. I only know that you are a man used to restraint, and now you have burst upon me with a passionate flood of words. I am confused. Why do you reproach me? Why do you speak of my blowing something out?"

He dropped his hands for a moment as if a weakness suddenly had possessed him. He said: "I will tell you, Nara Alexieff."

"Tell me what?" she asked.

"That I had faith in you. It was pure faith. I never accepted any mere faith before."

The sound of these words faded off into silence. She heard nothing, saw nothing. She even closed her eyes so that she might be alone with this thought. She could not speak. She moved her lips as one who drinks in a long draft of life, content with faith alone. "Look at me!" he commanded.

As she looked his eyes grew cold, the lines about

By Richard Washburn Child

Illustrated by W. T. Benda

Drake, Columbus, and all the other old explorers were looked upon as crazy in their day because they persisted in hunting for what they couldn't prove existed. What do you think about spiritualism, anyway? Connor Lee said to Nara: "It is not so easy to dismiss the unknown." Is the explorer in that realm--not the fortune-telling charlatan, but the clear-minded, analytical searcher after truth-merely adventuring in a circle for lack of a compass to detect his error in reasoning, or is he "a hound on

the scent of a startling truth"?

his mouth grew hard. He waved something aside with his hand as if some kind of madness could be dismissed now by a last impatient gesture.

"It is natural that I feel something more than resentment," he said slowly.

HE realized at this moment for the first time that

She had received in her soul, her mind, and her

body a love of this man, which appeared the ultimate purpose of Destiny and would never be paralleled in conviction during life.

"Not resentment because I have done as I said I would?" Nara asked him. "Not because I am going to find my own life? If I were violent in my ex

pression of determination to do that, it was only because I felt a sweep of hatred of Vanessa. And I do not really hate her."

"You must hate her," said Claveloux. "She took him." "Him?"

"Adam Pine. This man you said was nothing to you. Why did you tell that lie?"

Nara stepped back as if his words had done her physical violence. Her lips were parted for breaths which came faster and faster as she realized the import of his words.

"I told you the truth."

He swung his body away as if it were painful to look upon her. After a moment he laughed unpleasantly, scoffing and bitter.

"Why, Emma came for me! She said she had told you that Pine was here-with Mrs. Yates. Somehow I understood her meaning-just as you did. So you came. You must have expected something to happen to your lover."

She stared, unable to speak, filling with rage, and being filled with an aching, impotent grief as one who hears news of death. She tried to say to herself that this man before her required kindness and not anger. But the passion of resentment swamped everything else.

"You have nothing to say, of course," said Claveloux bitterly. "I might have known! He modeled your hands. He denied it-or half denied it. And you, too, wanted to avoid the subject. Of course you would. Those hours together-in his studiowith a man like Pine!"

"You believe that!" she exclaimed, her voice trembling. "You believe I could have taken you into my life as I have and yet have lied to you-that I loved this man and then denied it! Is this the faith you pretend you can have?"

He said: "Don't! Don't! It is so useless. Of course no one does what you have done without a cause. I suppose I should be impressed by the fact that anyone who is so badly balanced is a danger

[merged small][graphic]

and may always be a danger to somebody. But somehow it was the deceit-"

He stopped, and for a moment the tenderness came for a last flicker of light in his eyes. "Somehow that was the thing which tore up pretty fine things in me-like a ripping of a knife!"

HE

E stopped again, and after a moment held out
his hand. "Give it to me," he said sternly.
"Give you what?"

"The gun. Curiously enough, I saw it down there in your room-just before we left. I didn't know." She tried to speak.

"No use!" he said, pointing. "I saw it there in the pocket of your dress. Your passion of jealousy is gone. You can understand now that a doctora laboratory man-is trained in observation. While the others were half in hysterics, I looked for all I could see. I saw the weight of it tugging down your skirt. I looked as you passed me, and I saw the weapon itself. It is there now. Look! In your pocket."

Nara did not look; she clenched her hands. She tried to believe that none of his words were real. She could deny and she could prove her denial. A word from Emma would release the truth. She merely tightened her lips.

"Give me the thing," Claveloux said.

If she had shown it to him, he would have seen at once that it was not the weapon which even now was there on the edge of the broken mantelpiece in her garret room. Hers had a pearl handle. If he had demanded it with a powerful, authoritative command, she might have obeyed him. Instead he said after a moment: "It is just as well. Take it when you go. I shall say nothing."

"I am innocent

She looked straight into his eyes. of everything you suspect," she said in a low voice. She was tempted to say: "Go ask the others," but a sudden flood of anger and pride drowned the impulse., He looked at her pityingly.

"I am innocent," she repeated. "I am innocent." Claveloux's stern face did not move; it might have been carved out of rock. "I shall say nothing to anyone," he said without parting his lips. "You fool!" she burst forth. "Scientist! Mate

rialist! Fool! It is your kind who have made the world grow cold! You let your head tell your heart that it is a liar. It was your heart and mine which were the guardians of the eternal springs of truth. You have crushed them both!"

"I only seek reality," he had said sneeringly, and, dropping his chin, strode to the door.

She was impelled to call out to him, pleading, using his first name because it almost sprang from her. She heard the ghost of that exclamation on her own trembling lips: "Emlen, Emlen!"

Then suddenly she felt all the pain of her long fight with grief, ruin, suffering, loneliness. The world had turned a monstrous face toward her. She would have borne the pain without bitterness had the world's face been less sordid, less cruel, less horrible in its jibbering hate and avarice and ignorance. And now suddenly, as Claveloux turned for a moment, his countenance appeared to be the face of the world.

"I never want to see you again!" she said to it. He closed the door, leaving, it seemed, this sentence from her dry throat within the room. He had gone. She hated him. But she felt the warm tears at the corners of her lips and knew that something fundamental in her loved him more than any human being could be loved again. . . .

Now

TOW, lying upon her couch in the garret on this golden spring morning, she felt the tears well up into her eyes once more. "Life must be lived," she said aloud, and put her bare feet into a pair of slippers of leather which once had been bright scarlet. Having started to dress, she stopped once to seize a pencil and sketch upon the wall a pattern which had suggested itself to her as useful to her work of designing for the braid and trimming company around on the avenue. She had been forced back to that daily labor to obtain enough money to pay the rent of the garret and buy her meals. Her fingers had half finished a little scroll of dragon flies when she turned suddenly. Some one had knocked half timidly at her door.

"Please wait a moment," she called.

She walked across the wide creaking boards, bare except for a few rag mats, to the chair where Dr.

Claveloux had sat before the little hearth when he had come there. A long robe of soft blue brocade lined with flame-colored silk, a relic once worn by some Japanese actor, now hung upon the chair arm, and, snatching it up, she put it on.

"Who is it?" she said, half drawing the bolt. "I have come."

If the devil had stood outside, he would have spoken so. Nara, however, unlocked the door and said:

"You are early, Mr. Connor Lee. It has been long since I have seen you."

"Not since the night the great doctor sat in yonder chair," replied the strange old visitor. "And I have come as Milton said, with 'a mind not to be The mind is its own changed by place or time. place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.'"

H

E came into the room, a figure not lacking in either dignity or power. He was shaved closely, so that his face, ruddy and apoplectic, nevertheless was a little blue and purple about his chin and judicial lips. His black coat, which once had worn longer tails, had been trimmed down by some basement tailor so that, closely buttoned around the waist, it stuck out behind like a ballet dancer's skirt, giving its aged wearer at once the appearance of dandyism and of absurdity. A wreath of snow-white hair, still rested like laurel upon the sheen of his baldness.

He stopped suddenly, assuming with quick motions and by the flexibility of features the posture and the expression of one who, walking in the gutters, has come upon a golden ring set with large precious gems. "Ah, Miss Alexieff!" he said. "Were I ten, twenty, thirty years younger I would fall upon my knees at your feet."

"You would give me cause to tell you, as I tell you now," she replied, "that I am quite pressed for time. I am going to work."

He appeared to be much offended. "I am most regretful," he said in a stiff and courtly manner. "I present my respects and my apologies, and will never again intrude."

Nara hesitated as he moved toward the door. She said: "You spoke of some errand?" (Cont'd on p. 20)

[graphic]

"Take my wrist," said Connor Lee. "Misdirection will not avail. Greater forces than you dream exist will guide my hand"

But Look
at

Their Hands!

By Stanley Frost and
Natalie De Bogory

What congressmen who argue and legislate about immigration really need is a week at Ellis Island. The tide of aliens is flowing. Statistics still call them "laborers." But they are not. The authors of this article have made for Collier's a close survey and a forecast of what the new kind of immigrants mean to our industrial and social life

13

[graphic]

I

T used to cost no more than $30, sometimes as little as $10, for an immigrant to get from Hamburg to Chicago. Now it costs around $130 for one to get no farther than New York. That extra $100 on the price of a steerage ticket has caused one of the most profound changes in years in the raw materials of America's present and future. This is the story of that $100.

For many generations our immigration problem has centered around a single factor-the husky ignorance that made up the overwhelming bulk of our immigration. That husky ignorance, coming at the rate of a million a year, male and female, tilled our farmlands, did the heaviest, dirtiest, and most dangerous work around our factories and construction camps, washed and broke the dishes in our kitchen, and nursed our babies. It also brought its disadvantages; it was given to violent crime, it cut the wages of our own workers, and it milked the country of hundreds of millions of dollars a year to send back to the old countries. It settled in indigestible masses which stubbornly refused to become American in ideas and often even in language, and finally it furnished the majority of the recruits for the revolutionary movements that have disturbed us.

This condition has been so unchanging that we have come to take it for granted, and use it in our thinking as if it were as settled a thing as the rule of three. When the war revealed that there were many aliens of various races who held a divided loy

The Spaniard has joined the Italian as the only hard-handed worker now coming to the United States

Underwood & Underwood

during the war, by unemployment and labor's fear of the reappearance of an army of wage cutters, by the danger from foreign revolutionaries, and by a dread of having brought here anything that will tend to mix us farther in European affairs. On the other hand, manufacturers, farmers, and housewives all need help, many of them even during the present period of unemployment, and when normal times return there will be a big labor shortage. Prospective employers of all kinds are looking to immigration to fill the gaps. In addition, the elements in our population which consciously remain alien are anxious for immigration to strengthen them in their attempts to use America for the benefit of their foreign interests.

All these fears and desires have found spokesmen, and the spokesmen are all using the same old arguments. The recent debates in Washington were the same as those in many pre

alty, or even a hostile one, it stirred the question of vious Congresses, the propaganda published is the
assimilation, but did not change the fundamentals
of the problem.

The stoppage of immigration during the war gave us a little rest from trying to settle how much and what kind of alien population we wanted, but with the armistice the flood began anew. These are the figures for aliens passed through Ellis Island in the first three months of this year: January, 56,465; February, 34,595; March, 43,114.

The figures for January are the heaviest that have ever been recorded for that month.

So the problem is again with us; in fact, it seems to be more acute than ever, for the animosities it arouses are fanned by memories of alien enemies

same, the whole discussion has proceeded on the
theory that the immigration now coming is just
what it always has been. No one seems to have
thought it important that it now costs fifteen times
as much to be an immigrant as it did only a few
years ago.

Yet anyone who visits Ellis Island can see the dif-
ference for himself. Very few who have not been
there in the past year or so have anything like an
accurate idea of what our present immigration
problem is. It is worth the trip, too, for this prob-
lem will be very much in the foreground these com-
ing months, and facts will be needed. The present
immigration bill, limiting immigration from each

HIS one fact in itself has forced a tremendous change. Added to it are passport regulations, government restrictions, and other factors which have together put up an immense filter between us and Europe. It effectively bars out the husky ignoramus, unless outside help is given. So to-day there is hardly more than a trace of the old-time immigration. Where once the laborer was in the vast majority in every steerage, now he is but one of many other workers. In his place have come other types, bringing with them new problems and new dangers, and offering new kinds of contribution to our social organism.

Strangely enough, this change does not appear in the statistics. The entries at Ellis Island show about the same classes as before, and the long lines that file past repeat the word "laborer" in twenty languages.

This unvarying occupation would be a mystery or a miracle if the immigrant were as untutored as he looks. But hardly a man or woman comes to an inspector's desk who has not been schooled as to just what answer shall be given to every question. There is a vast organization, several organizations, feeding the immigrants into the steerages, and

« PreviousContinue »