August.

Darlingest Mother and Dad:

We were arrested four days ago and you will wonder why I keep on writing. It relieves my nerves. Ever since the revision Marie and I have gone over and over the same reasoning, trying to get at why we were arrested. To write it all out may help the restlessness and anxiety and yes the panicky fear that rises in my throat like nausea. Life is so terribly insecure. I feel as though I had been stripped naked and turned out into the streets, with no person or place to go to.

It was four o’clock, and we had just finished dinner. In an hour and a half we were leaving for Odessa. All our trunks and bags were packed, and our traveling suits brushed and pressed. Panna Lolla was crying at having to part from Janchu, and mending some stockings for him. He was asleep. Marie and I were sitting in our little salon, rejoicing that we should be in Bucharest in a few days where there was no war and we could speak French again. War blood-tracks on the snow, and cholera and typhus camps under a burning sun. To shut it out for one instant and pretend that the world was the way it used to be. What a heaven Bucharest seemed!

And suddenly the door of our apartment opened. Six men came into the room, two in uniform, the other four in plain clothes. It never occurred to me that they had anything to do with me. I thought they had mistaken the door. I looked at Marie questioningly. There was something peculiar about her face.

The four plain-clothes men stood awkwardly about the door which they had closed softly behind them. The two men with white cord loops across the breast of their uniforms went over to the table on the right and put down their black leather portfolios. They seemed to make themselves at home, and it angered me.

“What are these people doing here?” I asked Marie sharply.

She addressed the officer in Polish, and he answered curtly.

“It’s a revision,” she replied.

“A what?”

“A revision,” she repeated.

I remember that I consciously kept my body motionless, and said to myself, “There is nothing surprising in this. There is nothing surprising in this.” Everything had gone dark before my eyes. My heart seemed to stop beating.

Marie laughed and the sound of her cracking, high-pitched laugh came to me from far off.

The officer said something to her, and she stopped abruptly as though some one had clapped a hand over her mouth.

“What did he say?” I managed to articulate. My own language seemed to have deserted me.

“He says it is a matter for tears, not laughter.”

Her voice was sharp and anxious. I was relieved at the spite and vanity in his words. They made the situation more normal. I felt myself breathing again, and my stomach began to tremble uncontrollably.

I kept my eyes where they were, fighting for my self-control. So many terrifying thoughts were trying to penetrate my consciousness. I tried to shut out everything but my realization of what I was looking at. I kept my eyes glued on the officer’s boots; shiny black boots they were, that fitted him without a crease, with spurs fastened to the heels. I shall never forget the stiff, red striped trouser-legs and those shiny black boots that didn’t seem to belong on the body of a living man, but on the wooden form of some dummy.

Janchu began to cry from the bedroom, and Marie got up to go to him. Quickly a plain-clothes man with horn-rimmed spectacles slipped in between her and the door. The officer, who had now seated himself behind the table, raised his hand.

“Let no one leave the room,” he said in German.

“But my baby is crying,” Marie began.

“Let him cry!” And he busied himself pulling papers out of his portfolio.

Soon Janchu, seeing that no one paid any attention to him, toddled in and climbed into Marie’s lap. He sat there sucking his fingers and looking out at the roomful of strange men.

An army officer entered and spoke to the head of the secret service. He wore a dazzling, gold-braided uniform, and preened himself before us, looking at us curiously over his shoulder. When he had gone, the head told us that we were to have a personal examination in the salon of the pension.

A secret-service man escorted each of us, and we walked down the corridor, past the squad of soldiers with their bayonets, and into the salon, where we were delivered into the hands of two women spies. They undressed us, and we waited while our clothes were passed out to the secret-service men outside. Panna Lolla tried to twist herself up in the window curtains. Marie and I grew hysterical at her modesty, looking at her big, knobby feet and her fiery face, with her top-knot of disheveled red hair. We were given our clothes again, and went back to our apartment.

The rooms were in confusion. All our trunks and bags were emptied, one end of the carpet rolled back, the mattresses torn from the beds. The secret-service men were down on their knees before piles of clothes, going over the seams, emptying the pockets, unfolding handkerchiefs, tapping the heels of shoes; every scrap of paper was passed over to the chief, who tucked it into his portfolio. I watched him, hating his square, stolid body that filled out his uniform smoothly. His eyes were long and watchful like a cat’s, and his fair mustache was turned up at the ends, German fashion; in fact, there was something very German about his thick thighs and shaved head and official importance. As I have learned since, he is a German and the most hated man in Kiev for his pitiless persecution of all political offenders. They say he has sent more people to Siberia than any six of his predecessors. They also say every hand is against him, even to the spies’ in his own force.

I trembled to spring at him and claw him and ruffle his composure some way. Instead, I sat quietly, my hands folded, and watched the spies ransacking our clothes. I began to feel a sharp anxiety as to what they would find. It was all so mysterious. What were they looking for? At one moment it was ridiculous, and I felt like laughing at the whole affair; and then the next, the silence in which the search was conducted, the apparent dead-seriousness of the spies’ faces, the deliberation with which the chief turned the bits of paper over in his hands and scrutinized them and put them carefully away, struck me with a cold, sharp apprehension. I had the sensation of being on the very edge of a precipice. I felt as though the world were upside down and the most innocent thing could be turned against us. Every card and photograph I tried to catch a glimpse of before it went into the black portfolio. And suddenly I saw the letter about the Jewish detention camp, which I had forgotten all about. I saw the close lines of my writing, and it seemed as though the edge of the precipice crumbled and I went shooting down. A cold sweat broke out over me.

“But why are we arrested?” I heard Marie ask in German.

“Espionage,” the chief answered shortly.

“But that is ridiculous. We’re American citizens.”

No reply.

“Can we leave for Odessa to-night?”

No reply.

Marie stopped her questions.

“What money have you? Come here while I count it,” one of the spies said to me. He slipped me one hundred roubles on the sly, before turning the rest over to the chief. I held it openly in my hand, too dazed to know what to do with it, till he whispered to me to hide it. “You may want it, later,” he said.

“Frau Pierce will go with us,” the chief said, closing his portfolio; and I understood that the revision was finished. “Frau G can stay here under room-arrest, with her little boy.”

He spoke to no one in particular, but addressed the room at large, his face impassive, and his voice without an intonation. The spies stood in the midst of the tumbled clothes, watching us silently, ominously. Janchu now crept up into Marie’s lap again. As a matter of course, I went into the other room and changed into my traveling suit.

“May I take my toilet things?” I asked the chief.

“Ja.”

“You’d better make a bundle of bedclothes,” the spy who had given me the money whispered to me.

I rolled up two blankets and a pillow with his help.

“I’m ready,” I said. “May I send a few telegrams?”

“Certainly, certainly.” The chief’s manner suddenly became extremely courteous.

I wrote one to our Ambassador in Petrograd, one to Mr. Vopicka in Bucharest, one to the State Department in Washington, and one to Peter. I wrote Peter that I was delayed a few days. I was afraid that he might come on and be arrested, too. My hand did not tremble, though it struck me as very queer to see the words traced out on the paper almost magical. My imagination was racing, and I could see myself already being driven into one of those baggage cars bound for Tomsk.

“Keep your mind away from what is going to happen,” I said to myself. “You will have time enough to think in prison. Things are as they are. You are going to walk out of this room, just the way you’ve done a hundred times. Are you different now from what you’ve always been? Keep your mind on things you know are real.”

I tried to move accurately, as though a false move would disturb the balance of things so that I would walk out of the room on my hands like an acrobat.

Suddenly, the chief, who had been talking in a corner with the other man in uniform, wheeled about.

“Frau Pierce may stay here under room-arrest. Good-day.”

He clicked his heels together and bowed slightly. His spies clustered about him, and they left the room.

All at once my bones seemed to crumble and my flesh dissolve. I fell into a chair. Marie and I looked at each other. We began to laugh. “We mustn’t get hysterical,” we said, and kept on laughing.

The room was so dark that we looked like two shadows. Panna Lolla had come after Janchu and taken him into Count S ’s room. We imagined the excited curiosity of the rest of the pension.

“I’ll wager that woman was a spy, after all.”

“But why why should we have a revision?”

“Anyway, they couldn’t have found much. We’ll be set free in a few days,” Marie said.

“They found my letter about the Jews,” I replied.

“What letter? Oh, my dear, what did you say?”

“I forget. But everything I saw or heard, I think.”

We began to laugh again.

“Will they send our telegrams?” “Will Peter come on?” “What shall we do for money?”

The room was pitch-dark except for the electric light from the street. We heard the creak and rattle of the empty commissariat wagons returning from the barracks. We fell silent, feeling suddenly very tired and lethargic.

“Where is Janchu? It’s time for his supper,” Marie said, without moving.

I started out of the room to call him, and fell across a dark figure sitting in front of the door. He grunted and pushed me back into the room.

“I want Janchu,” I said in perfectly good English, while he closed the door in my face.

“There’s a spy outside our door,” I whispered to Marie.

Panna Lolla came in with Janchu and turned on the light.

“There’s a man outside our door, and two secret-service men at the pension door and two soldiers downstairs,” she whispered excitedly in one breath. “No one can leave the pension, and they take the name and address of every one who comes here. And that woman was a spy. Antosha saw the chief go into her room and heard them talking together. And she left when they did.”

I lay all night, half asleep, half awake, hearing the street noises clearly through the open windows. I cried a little from exhaustion and nerves, and then controlled myself, for my head began to ache, and who knew what would happen the next day? I had to keep strength to meet something that was coming. I had no idea what it was, but the uncertainty of the future only made it more ominous and threatening. That letter In the darkness I saw the chief’s watchful, narrow eyes, and the horn-rimmed spectacles of the friendly spy, and the stuffed portfolio.

Later.

Nothing has happened yet. We have our meals brought to us by Antosha, who tries to comfort us with extra large pickled cucumbers and portions of sour cream. We are allowed to send Panna Lolla downtown for cigarettes and books from the circulating library. Thank Heaven for books! With our nerves stretched to the snapping-point and a pinwheel of thoughts everlastingly spinning round in our heads, I think we should go mad except for books. It is very hot, but my body is always cool and damp, because I can’t eat much, I suppose, and lie on a chaise longue motionless all day long. I can feel myself growing weak, and there is nothing to do but sit and wait.

Marie and I go over and over the whole thing, and finish at the point where we began. “But why?” We think it may be because Marie came to Bulgaria to visit me and brought me back here, and now we want to leave Russia together. The papers say that Bulgaria already has German officers over her troops. But I can’t believe it. She is too independent. They say that she will certainly go with the Central Powers. That, too, is inconceivable. Perhaps, however, if it is true, and already known by the Russian authorities, the secret service is suspicious of our going back there, and of Marie’s intention of sailing home from Dedeagatch, via Greece. What else could it be? How this uncertainty maddens us! Yet we are thankful for every day that passes and leaves us together. What will happen when they translate my letter? Boje moy! I hear a step outside the door, and my heart simply ceases to beat.

Pan Tchedesky to-day tiptoed into our room when the spy was having his lunch. He whispered to us that he had seen the English Consul, Mr. Douglas, and told him about our case. He begged us not to be discouraged, and to eat. He said that he almost wept when he saw our plates come back to the kitchen, untouched. How flabby and livid he looked, his vague, blurred eyes watery with tears! Yet we could have embraced him. He is the only person who has spoken to us.

The sun is golden on the old convent wall across the street. The convent is empty during the summer. Only the richest Court ladies send their daughters there to be educated, and the Dowager Empress visits them when she passes through Kiev. The trees in the garden are gold and green in the late afternoon sun. A little bell tinkles musically.

Below in the street some passing soldiers are singing. How fresh and strong and beautiful their untrained voices are. I wonder if they are off to the front, for each one carries a pack and a little tea-kettle swung on his back and a wooden spoon stuck along the side of his leg in his boot. Where will they be sent? Up north, to try and stem the German advance? To Riga? Where? The Germans are still advancing. Something is wrong somewhere. And still soldiers go to the front, singing. They are thrown into the breach. I can’t help but think of the fields of Russian dead, unburied. Who has a chance to bury the dead on a retreat? There is nothing “decent” in it. Yet they say the retreat is “orderly.” I wonder what that means?

At night when I try to sleep, I see the map of Russia as if it was printed on my eyeballs. It is so big and black with a thin red line of fire eating into it. America seems millions of miles away. I wish I could touch you just for a minute. If I could only feel your arms about me for one moment. The only way is not to think beyond this room and this minute.

RUTH.

August.

Dearests:

Peter is here. Last night, about nine o’clock the door opened and he rushed into the room. I got to my feet on impulse, and then tried to brace myself and control my disordered reason, for, of course, I believed myself delirious. He stopped by the door long enough to throw down his suitcase, and in that instant I struggled fiercely to disbelieve my eyes. I was fighting myself. My legs trembled. But when I fell, his arms were around me, supporting me.

“Is it you? Is it you?” I don’t know whether I said the words out loud or not, but I remember feeling the muscle in Peter’s shoulder and wondering if I could have gone out of my head as much as that.

“What on earth has happened to you two?” he said at last.

“Let me sit down,” I said, feeling suddenly very sick and faint, and a black spot in front of my eyes expanded all at once and shut out the swaying room.

“Why didn’t you come to Bucharest?” he asked again.

“How white and thin you are. Isn’t he, Marie?” I observed, the blackness gone from my eyes.

“Please answer me. What is the matter? You both look sick.”

“We are under arrest for espionage,” Marie and I suddenly burst out in chorus, and we both began talking as fast and as loud as we could.

“That’s all right. I’ll fix things for you,” Peter reassured us when we stopped at last, out of breath. I suddenly wanted to hide him so they wouldn’t get him as well as ourselves. He was so self-confident. What did he know of how things happened over here? He was talking and acting like a rational human being, which was sure proof he was in no position to cope with the Russian Secret Service. I felt a frantic desire to get him out of the room and make him promise that on no account would he admit he knew us.

“You must go at once,” I whispered. “There’s a spy at the door. If he sees you, they’ll arrest you, too. Please go, go at once.” And I tried to push him away.

“You poor things,” he said, laughing. “There’s no need to be frightened like this. Of course I won’t go. Why should they arrest me?”

“Why should they have arrested us? Oh, you don’t know.” My teeth were chattering.

“Now, look here,” he said seriously. “You’ve been alone and scared, and I’m sure you haven’t eaten anything for days. Now, don’t think about this any more. I’ll get you out in no time. Have you a cigarette, anybody?”

I sat back, and my body stopped shaking. Everything seemed very still. I had the distinct thought, “What is to come, will come,” and I drew a deep breath that seemed to come from my toes. It was enough Peter was here, after all.

We talked till three in the morning. Peter had gone to Bucharest to meet us, and when we didn’t arrive, he took the first train to Kiev. I began to believe in his bodily presence. Before he left to go back to his hotel, I had regained my conviction he was a match for even the Russian Secret Service.

Can you imagine how we feel to-day? We go tottering round the room, taking things up and putting them down again, in a nervous anxiety to do something. We chirp the rag-times popular in America two years ago. We feel as though we were just recovering from a sickness, with a pleasant bodily weakness like a convalescent’s in the springtime. Peter brought me a bunch of red roses when he came over this morning. I am writing this while he is seeing Mr. Douglas, the English Consul.

So much love to you from

RUTH.

September.

Darlingest ones:

It has been three weeks since our arrest, and to-day is the first time we have been allowed to leave the room and go outdoors. We are still under house-arrest, but we can go out in the garden, while two soldiers guard the entrance. Isn’t it ludicrous? A gendarme came last night and announced with ponderous importance that we were to be permitted the liberty of the garden if we gave our word of honor not to try to escape. We signed two red-sealed documents, and so we can go into the garden while two soldiers with bayonets look to it that we don’t go any farther.

Peter had to bully me into leaving my room this afternoon. I didn’t want to get healthy. I had grown so used to the proportions of our rooms I hated to make the effort to adjust myself to any others. But Peter came back from his daily round of visits to the English Consul, and the Army Headquarters, and the office of Kiev’s civil governor, and produced from his coat-pocket a rubber ball. We were to play ball out in the garden, he said. So, after some persuasion Marie and I went out into the garden with him. How weak I was. My legs trembled going downstairs, and I was exhausted when I reached the benches in the garden.

Janchu, seeing us, ran up joyfully and took his mother by the hand. “This is my mother,” he said in Polish, looking around proudly at the other children who were playing there.

Every one looked at us curiously. A head appeared at every window in the big stone apartment house. I saw the two women spies who had undressed us. They were evidently employed as servants in some family, for one was ironing and the other fixing a roast for the oven. They, too, looked out at us. I felt hot and indignant and, yes, ashamed as though I had been guilty. I wanted to hide. I felt inadequate to life. People were too much for me. People people, the living and the dead. What a weight of life! I could hardly control my tears. Weakness, I suppose, for the soles of my feet and my fingertips hurt me as though my nerves were bared to the touch.

I looked up over the garden-wall. The tree-tops were yellow. While we had been locked in our room, the season had changed. Autumn was upon us. I shivered. There was a lavender mist over the city dimming the radiance of the gold and silver church domes. How beautiful Kiev was! The church-bells were so mellow-toned; and the children’s shrill laughter and cries as they played in the garden. But it tired me. Every impression seemed to bruise me.

Peter bought some little Polish cakes, and we had hot tea to cheer us up three and four glasses of tea.

Good-night. Sometimes, when I think of you, I don’t see all of you, but instead a particular gesture, or I hear an inflection of voice that is too familiar to be borne. Now I see mother’s hands and they are beautiful.

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 “Onegin,” 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.

“It goes out of my hands to-night. I shall hand it with a report to the Chief of the General Staff.”

“When shall I hear from them?”

“They will let you know as soon as possible. It’s unfortunate you should have written it. Otherwise, I could have settled the matter myself. As it is, it is a matter for the military authorities. Of course, such a letter written in the war zone, at a time like this ” He stopped himself. “Good-night. Good-night.” He clicked his heels and bowed himself out of the room.

“Ouf!” we all said.

“Mrs. Pierce, promise me you won’t put your pen to paper again while you are in Russia,” the English Consul said, smiling.

“But isn’t it ridiculous absurd disgusting!” I said.

“People are sent to Siberia for less,” the Consul said. “But don’t be frightened, Mrs. Pierce. It will come out all right.”

“Of course. But when?”

“Seichas,” he replied, smiling.

“Seichas.” How I hate the expression. “Peter, you’d better cable for some more money. Heaven knows when we’ll get out now,” I said.

Peter sends love too. We are hungry for news from you, and we picture greedily the piles of letters we shall find waiting for us in Bulgaria. I try not to be anxious about you But I wake up at night and this silence of months is like a dead weight on my heart.

RUTH.