Mr Green gave me an envelope containing ten roubles. I would collect my allowance monthly. I should make careful use of it. The fares to the Polytechnic were about twenty kopeks a day, there and back. There might be opportunities to ‘make the allowance up to more’ in the future. I thanked him, put the money in my pocket next to Sergei Andreyovitch’s snuff box, and shook hands. Then I accompanied Mr Parrot, now clad in a maroon fur-trimmed greatcoat and top hat, to the ground floor. Here my bags were recovered and a cab called for us by the commissionaire. It was snowing. The hood of the cab was raised. It was already dark, but this part of the city was brilliantly lit. Once again I noticed that almost everyone in the street, civilian or military, wore some kind of uniform. We crossed a long bridge over the wide Great Neva, a forbidding stretch of ice. To my surprise I saw in the distance a tram apparently trundling over the surface of the river. Mr Parrot told me that it froze so hard it was possible to lay lines on the ice in the winter.
We entered an area much more crowded and familiar to me. I suppose it was poorer. Here were ordinary people, gas-lamps, open-fronted shops, crowded apartment buildings, stalls selling food, clothing, crockery, magazines, the smells of cooking, the sounds of street-musicians, children, quarrelling and laughter. There were flights of darkened steps, alleys, half-starved dogs. I was more nervous of the district than I might once have been: however, the street in which we found ourselves was fairly quiet and it was comforting to arrive at it. St Petersburg was not going to be an easy city, I thought, in which to find my feet. There were far wider gulfs between the classes. Even in Kiev, where there were many snobs, where poor people could find themselves driven from parks or certain streets, it had not been so bad. I was going to need all my confidence and might require the extra courage residing in my stolen snuff-box.
St Petersburg was to teach me much about the nature of wealth and poverty. Not only was it a city of extremes, it was a city of almost oriental decadence, of cruelty, of mindless authority. I was to realise why Tsar Nicholas was unpopular with so many middle-class people. The court was presided over by a crude, insane monk from Siberia who would come, just as in medieval times, to be murdered in cold blood by a group of aristocrats. They would poison him, shoot him and eventually push his body under the Neva’s ice to ensure he was dead. From Court to the meanest alley, the capital was rotten with superstition. Charm-sellers, occultists, mediums of every kind flourished. Their predictions filled columns in the most respectable newspapers. And all this in the twentieth century, when telephones and motor-cars and wireless sets and aeroplanes were in common use.
The ferocity of the Bolsheviks was the ferocity of a race of slaves. They had none of the instincts of civilised Europeans. They were savages into whose hands were placed terrible means of destruction and who were given the most sophisticated means of communication. Yet the Tsar himself and all his Court were probably scarcely more civilised or they would at least have had some intimation of their own fate. I blame the Tsar’s advisors, of course. Most of these were foreigners.
THE UNIFORM I would wear to the Institute was not as magnificent as some: just a simple student uniform of dark-grey serge with silver buttons, a cap with the badge of the Polytechnic. There was much to be said for the practise. It would mean that my limited store of clothes would last much longer and it would not become evident that I was relatively poor. Most of the boys studying at the Institute were of limited means; The rich men’s sons studied at various Military Academies where science and engineering were taught, or at the Science Academy itself. Their uniforms were correspondingly more splendid, with gold embossed buttons and braid. Even so we had uniforms for summer and winter, greatcoats, regulation issue gloves, boots, caps and so on. All these were supplied on the day after my arrival by the specialist tailor to whom Messrs Green and Brunman sent me. Mr Parrot was again my escort on a dark snowy day to the backstreets of the Moskovskaya quarter where the tailor had his huge establishment.
