Clare Sheridan

“ There are people in England who are indignant at my doing Lenin and Trotsky. There were people in Moscow who were horrified because I had done Churchill, and expressed a desire to do d’Annunzio, but as a portraitist I have nothing to do with politics; it is humanity that interests me, humanity with its force and its weakness, its ambitions and fears, its honesty and lack of scruples, its perfection and deformities. ”

“ There is nothing to do in this semi-American, semi-Mexican town. But the hotel is pure American, full of standardized American luxury. It seems wonderful. I ring the bell of my bedroom and ask the room service to send me a jug— (no a pitcher I have to call it, else they don’t understand) —a pitcher of lemonade. I don’t always want the lemonade but I love to see it when it comes. The glass jug is a real object of beauty—a work of art. It is full of sliced oranges, carmine cherries, ice and green leaved herb. It is a riot of color, a delight to the eye. ”

“ It turned the sky into the most perfect Valkyric background. When Dick asked me what the stars were like to touch: “Are they soft, or do they burn?” I had to tell him they were great big worlds like ours. Dick felt very small—we both did.
Whatever Mexico may or may not have in store for us, the journey alone is well worth while. The contrast after four bewildering months in New York is extreme. The peace and the beauty are reviving and one gets back one’s sense of judgment, which one is apt to lose in the crowd. ”

“ We arrived at Newcastle at midnight on the 19th. Steaming up the Tyne at night is wonderful, all the arc lights throwing into relief great machinery and construction. The activity and work looked colossal. How can Russia fight this iron industrialism? As soon as we had glided alongside the quay, and I had touched English soil once more, I was not left in doubt one moment as to the truth of Kameneff’s premonitions. ”

“ These hillsides in the dusk with their silhouettes of drilling towers, of palm trees and grass thatched bamboo huts, added to which the sickly smell of oil, have furnished palaces to men who once had nothing and diamond crowns to women, and given them the power of kings and queens. The mud and chaos, the breathless energy and human striving, have enriched men and women beyond all dream.
But today, the world being saturated in the blood of bankrupting war, the demand for oil has enormously subsided, nor can the price be paid. ”

“ After lunch Andrev fetched me, and an official showed us all over the Tsar’s palace. There were exquisite small rooms with vaulted ceilings and frescoed walls, from which it was evident that the stage scenery in the Russian operas had been copied. There were still traces of red bunting and appeals to the workers of the world to unite in the colossal room, over-decorated with gold, which was the Throne Room of the Romanoffs, and in which the Third International had its last meeting.
The modern apartments in the new wing are bad architecture and in bad taste, but everything is left undisturbed. ”

“ He is perfectly right, one’s desire for color depends entirely on one’s mood.
Now and then we stopped for a cup of tea, for a tune on the piano, for a breath of air, on the sunbathed balcony and Charlie with his wild hair standing on end, and his orange gown dazzling against the white wall of his moorish house, would either philosophise or impersonate. He told me that when he was a young man in London, he longed to know people, but that now he knew so many and he felt lonelier than ever, and it is no use, he said, for artists to hope to be anything else. ”

“ On the branches of the tree over my head there are clumps of white orchids, and a pair of wild green parrots shriek noisily in their flight. I have loved spring days in England, with their mist of bluebells in the woods, and brimstone butterflies the color of the primroses, but this seasonless country, that has never known frost, this Heaven of eternal Sunshine and riot of beauty, is almost too wonderful to enjoy. It is as if one had picked all the best things from every corner of the Earth and put them here, and made a composition picture. ”

“ It is such a contrast to almost every other sitter, who is restless, hurried and fidgety. Krassin is sphinx-like; he sits erect, his head up, and his pointed, bearded chin sticking defiantly out at an angle, and his mouth tightly shut. He has no smile like Kameneff, and his piercing eyes just looked at me impassively while I worked. It was rather uncanny.
Krassin is a Siberian. He explained to me that his father was a Government local official when he married his mother who was a peasant, and one of twenty-two children. He himself was the eldest of seven, and was brought up in Siberia. ”

“ In the orchard on the steep grassy hill behind the house the children climbed a cherry tree, and Dick brought me greenleafed branches hanging with ripe sweet cherries. After lunch we walked up the road to see the view from the top of the hill. There is a sort of Colony at Croton, and every other house is inhabited by someone one knows, or who knows the other. All work-worn journalists, artists and Bohemians generally, who come there with their children for a rest. The houses have no gardens, the grass grows long and the rose bushes are weed tangled. ”

“ The Bolshevik is a new phenomenon, but the anti-Bolshevik is merely history repeating itself. We read of the same condition of mind in England after the Napoleonic wars; the same fear of French Revolutionary ideas, and same action and reactions.
Yet, if people would only realise it, Revolutions are not caused by propaganda, nor by plots. In Russia the Revolution failed every time it was organised. ”

“ The Soviet system does not do it to spite them, or because it enjoys their discomfiture. Only peace with the world can ameliorate their sufferings, and Russia is not at war with the world, the world is at war with Russia. ”

“ During the first part of our journey we passed through a chaotic riot of tropical vegetation. Everything grew everywhere, under giant trees were dense bushes, and on the tree trunks and branches grew countless other species of plant, as though a gardener had grafted one onto another in profuse experiment. There were banana, cocoanut, coffee, maize and so many new and bright-colored flowers that I was bewildered. There is not a flower or a fruit of any color or shape that any Futurist could invent, that does not grow in Mexico. ”

“ Driven from the cafeteria into the night, we motored fast and aimless, talking as we drove, talking, never ceasing, until we could drive no more. Our road led down a hill, straight like the road of the Nazarene swine, into the sea, and so we stopped; a great long white line of breakers confronted us, we left the car, and stood for a moment undecidedly. Then a long seaside bench came crawling past me. I thought for a moment that I was in madland. I remembered in a flash the sham village, the illusions of filmland, still so near me. Really one should not be surprised by anything any more. ”

“ A motor met us at Ryde and took us to his house, seven miles. On arrival we flung ourselves down in the sun on the grass of the tennis-court. And after tea, as we lay full length on rugs, our heads leaning on the grassy bank behind us, and the sun gradually sinking lower and lower, Kameneff for over an hour told us the history of the Russian Revolution. ”

“ Some day perhaps, when there is time to stop to take a breath a few individualities will be allowed to live among the standardized—at present those few slip off abroad, and live there! But I am not complaining, I am only wondering why with all its restrictions, I like living in it better than I like living in the freest country on earth—England!
On Sunday night I had one of the great surprises of my life. It will be as memorable as any of the big events that have come to me. ”

“ They cry with our sorrows, they laugh with our joys. But Russia seems numb. I wonder if it has always been so or whether the people have lived through years of such horror that they have become insensible to pain.
Happily no salute was fired. The last time the machine guns rattled at a burial I heard them in my studio, which is just the other side of the wall. On that occasion the old porter who takes care of me at the Kremlin told me that his wife nearly died of heart failure—she thought the “Whites” had come. Probably it affects other jumpy people in the same way. ”

“ And then, in spite of his emotional, enthusiastic temperament, with a soundness of judgment that surprised me, he said: “Don’t get lost on the path of propaganda. Live your life of an artist ... the other goes on—always.”
One can see, in the sadness of the eyes—which the humor of his smile cannot dispel—that the man has suffered—has known things we do not dream. Has striven, hoped and aimed. Has reached his goal, yet he is not content. He feels there is more to do, and see, and know, more to attain. He believes in work and in producing always the best of one’s effort. ”

“ Alexinsky says in his “Modern Russia”: “Seek for the cause of Revolution neither in the ardent propaganda of the Revolutionists—nor in the bad qualities of monarchs and their advisers, but in the deep and silent operation of certain forces, which lead new social classes{202} upon the stage of history.” It is futile to waste hate upon these forces, or to call them Lenin and Trotsky, when really it is the law of evolution and change that is demonstrating in certain parts of the earth. ”