THE METROPOLIS OF THE NORTHEAST

Vladivostock, on nearer approach, unlike many towns, carries out its more distant promise. It is not a trim and finished town, but it is one of strong outlines, and evidently built for a great future. Its chief buildings are substantial. The town looks as though it had come to stay. To be sure, the new outlet which Russia has obtained through eastern China to the sea at Port Arthur will rob Vladivostock of its unique importance as Russia’s only open door on the Pacific, but her glory as the great natural port of Siberia, with a limitless country of vast resources behind her, can never be taken away. The huge ice-breaker which crunches up the harbor ice in winter with its sharp iron beak is a complete success, and it is no longer an ice-bound port for even three months of the year. The winter, though long, is not unusually severe, and the mercury, I am told, seldom or never sinks so low as it does in Boston or New York.

No sooner had we stepped on shore than we were treated to our first disillusionment concerning Russia and the Russians. We had heard much about the terrors of the Russian custom-house. We expected to have our baggage overhauled from turret to foundation-stone, and the feminine member of our party had pictured to herself a swarthy Cossack with sword and cutlass making hay of her feminine belongings, while he searched for dutiable goods. But our Chinese sampan-man landed us at the pier, and no customs officer appeared upon the scene. We waited, but he did not come. We inquired in two or three different languages for the custom-house, but no one knew what we meant. We wandered up and down the pier looking for some building that resembled the familiar office where duties are collected, but could find none. At length, having fully satisfied our consciences, we boldly loaded our _impedimenta_ into a drosky, and told the driver to take it to the Hôtel du Pacifique. This he successfully accomplished, and no officer of the law appeared to disturb our peace of mind, or to look into the innocent recesses of our trunks.

So far as I know we were subjected to no surveillance of any sort. We came and went as we pleased. We minded our own business, and every one else minded his. There seemed to be no such inspection of newly arrived strangers as one is often conscious of in Germany. And yet, here we were in autocratic Russia, and, more than that, in Siberia, the land of the exile and the prisoner--the land around whose name has clustered every synonym for oppression and cruelty.

I am inclined to think that what I have been told by an acute observer is very true, and that Russia is much more autocratic and inquisitorial on paper than in reality. Her laws are severe and may be enforced if needs must, but their iron hand is seldom felt by the well-disposed. There is much theoretical restriction, and much practical liberty.

The hotels of Vladivostock are not to be indiscriminately commended. When Baedeker writes his inevitable guide-book about Siberia he will not mark them with his familiar *, unless they greatly improve upon their present condition. It should be said, however, that the best one was recently destroyed by fire, and the chief one that still remains is probably suffering from lack of competition. The table was very good, and the chief fault was that the rooms and halls were dark and dirty, and clean linen was a scarce and precious article. One sheet for each bed seemed to be the full allowance, and one small towel for three people was apparently thought to be an ample supply. When one of our party righteously complained that her towel had evidently done duty before, the Japanese chambermaid, who did the English for the hotel, replied that it was _impossible_ to get another; it was not to be had. There was not a clean towel in the hotel. After much importunity, however, she was induced to loan a long, clean scarf from her own bureau to serve as a towel.

However, this was a minor matter. We reminded ourselves that we were in Siberia, and on the eastern edge of Siberia at that. Who could expect all the amenities of civilization? We were no sooner established in our hotel for the day than I sallied out to seek the governor of Vladivostock and of this whole eastern province, to whom I fortunately had a letter from the Russian minister of Japan.

Well was it that I found the governor armed with these credentials, as the sequel will show in another chapter. Governor Tchitchagoff received me with the utmost courtesy. The letter from the minister to Japan acted like an open sesame to his kindly attentions, and he at once despatched a secretary to secure berths on the train which left the next day for Khabaroffsk, and sent another to telegraph to Khabaroffsk to hold a state-room on the Amour River steamer for Blagovestchensk, as he knew the berths were in great demand. At the same time he gave me a letter to the chief of police in Khabaroffsk. While waiting for the preparation of this letter by his secretary he showed me a map of the vast province of Primorskaia, of which he is governor, a province which extends for two thousand miles up the shores of the Pacific, clear away to the North Pole, embracing Kamchatka and the famous Saghalien Island north of Japan, to which are banished the worst of Russian convicts.

Governor of Vladivostock and Primorskaia]

Governor Tchitchagoff is a man of commanding presence, but most urbane and gentlemanly, a trait which he shares with most Russians of the better class, so far as my observation goes. There is a certain courtly simplicity about them, free from all arrogance and brusqueness, which is the very essence of high breeding. The governor speaks fluently French and German, and English with a little hesitation. This, again, is a type of the educated Russian of the better class, who is usually a famous linguist.

Moreover, the governor is a Cossack, a name which, in my ignorance, I had hitherto associated largely with frontier troopers of the Buffalo Bill order. I confess my stupid misconception with contrition of spirit. Thus again came a happy disillusion concerning Russia and the Russians. This interview with the governor set my mind at rest in regard to any danger of losing the steamer on the first stage of our long river journey, for I knew that the word of General Tchitchagoff was as the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. He is the virtual czar of all this Eastern land. It was exceedingly necessary that we should incur no long delays, as a most important engagement awaited me in London within forty-four days. I had already cabled “London screaming,” which meant, according to the cable code, that I would be in London on the Fourth of July (a most appropriate cable word for the date in question), and there were very few days to spare over the shortest time on record. Mail steamers on the Amour River start on their various stages only once in five days, and it would not do to miss connections at the outset.

But now, with easy minds, we set out to “do” the town. It does not take long to exhaust its glories, for it is a new town, in the raw, half-baked stage of its existence, with most of its glories in the future. But these are evident enough to make up for any present deficiencies. Vladivostock is credited, in the latest published statistics, with about 29,000 inhabitants, but it is now said to have 40,000, chiefly Russians, Chinese, and Coreans, with a sprinkling of Japanese, Germans, French, Italians, English, and a very few Americans. It is a remarkably cosmopolitan little city to be found on the banks of an almost arctic sea, and it exhibits all the life and picturesqueness of a little cosmopolis. Russian droskies go flying about the streets in every direction, as though their occupants were pressed for the last second of time, and would be eternally too late unless they arrived somewhere within less than five minutes. Most harum-scarum, reckless drivers apparently are the drosky men. Their horses are given a loose rein, and they go flying down-hill at breakneck speed, over the rough roads, and galloping up the next incline with never a check on their mad career. The appearance of reckless haste is further increased by the fact that always one horse and often two horses are hitched to the vehicle outside the shafts, by loose ropes or leather thongs. These horses often pull away from the wheel-horse within the shafts so far as the harness will let them, and they dance and prance and gallop while he trots at full speed, and the drosky goes rattlety-bang over the stones and into the holes and over the “thank-ye-marms” in a way that the Russians seem to like, but which tires the patience and, let us hope, improves the liver of the foreign passengers.

Besides the drosky, the streets are full of another peculiarly Russian vehicle, the isvodschik, which resembles a small boat set on long poles, somewhat after the fashion of the body of a buckboard. This is used to carry luggage, and, in many parts of the country, passengers as well, who pile into it until it looks like a peasant’s cart in Naples or a Chinese wheelbarrow in Shanghai. The Chinese wheelbarrow is not wanting in Vladivostock either, and its familiar squeak is heard on every hand. Vladivostock, indeed, must be the paradise of the Celestial, for here he gets a wage of a rouble and a half a day, which is something like ten times the pay he would receive in his native land. Moreover, there seems to be unlimited work for him in grading and paving the streets, carrying brick and mortar, rowing the sampans, building the railways, and doing the other drudgery of a new colony. The Corean, in his dirty white garments and padded pillow-cushion shoes, is not far behind him in numbers, and competes for the manual work of this new country with his Chinese cousin on the same terms.

Vladivostock consists of one chief street, running up-hill and down-dale, with various branches climbing the hills on every side. The chief sights are easily done, as I have said, for they consist of a few fine stores and public buildings, a beautiful Greek church with its graceful domes, and a triumphal arch in honor of the visit of the czarewitch, a few years ago, when the first spadeful of earth, in breaking the eastern end of the new Siberian railway, was turned by the royal visitor.

But Vladivostock’s chief glories do not lie in her public or private buildings, or in the great fortresses which command the city and harbor, but in the magnificent scenery that greets the eye on every hand. Few cities in all the world are more beautiful for situation. The Amour Bay, on one side, and the Bay of Ussuri, on the other, clasp the city in their kind embrace, and constantly lave its feet with gentle ripples. Noble hills stretch off landwards, and from the main hill-tops within the city limits one gets glimpses of sea and shore and mountain and valley of surpassing loveliness. In view of the long journey to which we were looking forward, the railway station, prosaic as it is, was the most interesting building in all Vladivostock. Over its doorway is printed, in old Russian characters, a legend which may well stir the blood as we think of all that it means. It reads as follows:

VLADIVOSTOCK TO PETERSBURG 9877 VERSTS.

We were to begin to measure off these versts on the morrow.