Читать книгу The Red Reign. The True Story of an Adventurous Year in Russia онлайн

14 страница из 93

Moscow barricades

neighbor—he of the lavish tip—said, sotto voce: “Take two of my bags along with yours.” The meaning of this was not at the moment clear to me, but I meekly complied with the request, and ingenuously submitted the stranger’s grips to the checking officials as if they were my own. Had the man been an absolute stranger I might not have followed his directions so readily, but he was the same man who had showed me how to carry my book so as to escape detection.

Not till the train had actually left the Wirballen station did the man come to claim his luggage. Then he lingered to talk awhile and we became friendly to the point of confidence. Darkness had settled deeply down over the outside world before he left my compartment, and we were running across wide, open fields occasionally broken by forests of fir, into which the engine belched bright sparks from the soft sticks that in Russia are burned instead of coal. My companion watched the sparks scattering against the trees and settling on either side of our steel pathway, and made some allusion to the sparks of liberty that even then were scattering across all Russia, settling around and in every town and village from the Baltic Sea to the waters of the Orient. The man’s eyes flashed, hardly less bright than the darting flecks of flame outside the window. He found a sympathetic listener, and it was then we warmed toward each other and he told me the contents of the bags that I, so innocently, had smuggled safely into the country. They contained hand-grenade models, phials of high explosives and several innocent Browning revolvers. I cannot say that I regretted then, or have I since, this, my first humble service to the revolution.