ussians would crowd to hear about strikes, wages, taxes and
hay! And then some more commonplace blood would be shed, the dyspeptic
professors would be put in office--and this was a modern revolution!

Was everything modern only big? Must I always have that feeling the
harbor used to give me?

"No!" I decided angrily. The fault didn't lie in me nor in Russia, but
in J. K. and the way he was writing. As I followed that blunt narrative
of his journey through cities and factory towns, into deep forests,
across snowy plains and through little hamlets half buried in snow and
filled with the starving families of the men who had gone to the war, I
tried to picture it all to myself--not as he described it, confound him,
but with all the beauty which must have been there. Ye Gods of the Road,
what a journey! What tremendous canvases teeming with life, such
strange, dramatic significant life! What a chance for a writer!

One night on a train whose fifth-class cars, cattle cars and nothing
more, were packed with wounded men from the front, out of one of those
traveling hells Joe had pulled a peasant boy half drunk, and by the
display of a bottle of vodka had enticed him into his own compartment in
a second-class car ahead. The boy's right arm was a loathsome sight,
festering from a neglected wound. Amputation was plainly a matter of
days. But it was not to forget that grim event that the boy had jumped
off at each little station to spend his few kopecks on vodka. No, he was
stolidly getting drunk because, as he confided to Joe, at dawn he would
come to his home town and there he knew he was going to tell twenty-six
wives that their men had been killed. He laboriously counted them off on
his fingers--each wife and each husband by their long, homely Russian
names. Then he burst into half-drunken sobs and pounded the window ledge
with his fist. It was the fist of his right arm, and the kid gave a
queer, sharp scream of pain.

If Voltaire had been there he would have come back and described that
peasant boy he'd seen in a way that would have gripped men's souls and
sent a great shudder over the world at war and what it meant to
mankind--while Joe was simply slapping it down like some hustling, keen
reporter.

"Look here, Joe; you make me sick!" I exploded at last. "You ought to
stick right here for months and work on this wonderful stuff you've got
till there's nothing left you can possibly do!"

"Be an artist, eh, a poet, a grea