VIII “Noch Ist Polen Nicht Verloren”
It has always seemed to me wise to carry letters of introduction, especially when travelling to the East of Europe; often, too, I have found it still wiser to forget that I had them, for a letter of introduction sometimes blocks avenues of investigation, particularly when the problem in question involves the privileged or official classes.
This time in following the immigrant tide, I carried one letter which I was eager to deliver; it was given me by a personal friend in America and was to be presented to his mother-in-law in Poland. Not that I was overanxious to meet his mother-in-law, but because Polish women of the upper class are, as a rule, so superior to the men, so ready to talk and talk so well, that I promised myself a rather fruitful call. I did not meet the mother-in-law yet I was not disappointed.
Cracow looks dingy even to one who, like myself, is able to illuminate its sombre present in the light of its important if not glorious past. Coming, as I had come, by way of industrial German-Poland, with its glistening newness, from the policemen’s helmets to the weather-vane of the new Rathhaus; out of its tense atmosphere of whirring wheels within wheels; out of its geometrically correct parks and new and ever growing building additions, Cracow looked to me as if it had fallen off this revolving planet and settled itself “Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest”—wherever that may be.
The only thing that had grown since last I saw the city was its hatred of the Germans. On the doors of many stores on the Rinok were large placards, which, literally translated, read: “The gentlemen travellers from Germany, who wish to come in here to do business with us, are politely requested to stay out.”
Everything else looked the same, only more dingy; even the Austrian officers who loaf around Havelik’s restaurant seemed to have lost something of their newness; for braid and buttons, two of the component elements out of which Austrian officers are made, were tarnished and worn.
The Jews’ quarter seemed more hopeless and wretched than ever. On the Kazimir were the same haggling crowds in the same small stores, and the same shambling Jews in black, greasy cloaks. In front of the Jesuit church stood the same twelve apostles, and I regret to say that they were just as shabby-looking as their unbaptized brethren.
Cracow, the freest portion of divided Poland, is certainly as wretched looking as Warsaw, where liberty dare not lift her head, and it cannot compare with any of the cities of German-Poland where the Prussian gendarme is trying, at the point of the bayonet, to cram German speech down the unwilling throats of Polish children.
Why, I asked myself, should this shabbiness, this negligence, this “run-down-at-the-heel” appearance prevail in all the Slavic cities from Belgrade to St. Petersburg, and from Cracow to Irkutsk? Why should this be so of every place, except where the German has stepped in with his iron heel or where the Magyar or the Jew is trying to make of the Slav what he is not and does not care to be?
I was tempted to take the first train out of Cracow, so painful to me was this condition of affairs; for I admire the Slavs, although I think I know their weaknesses. But the first train did not go until midnight, and I had nearly eight long hours on my hands. Then I remembered my letter of introduction. I found it with my passport and letter of credit, and looked at it again, to assure myself that it was right. Yes, it was addressed to the Countess So & So, and all the way to the house, I pictured to myself my friend’s mother-in-law. She would be rather rotund, for Slavic women incline that way, especially during the full moon of life. She would have gray hair, dark complexion, and a rather pronounced down on the upper lip. That seems to be the tendency of the Polish woman as she grows older; perhaps because of her great vitality.
Beneath the portal of a so-called palace, which was pervaded by an incredibly strong smell of whitewash, I presented my card to the porter, who looked somewhat contemptuously at the German name it bore. After long waiting I was guided to the very top story of the house, through clouds of falling mortar and showers of broken brick. The building seemed to be in the possession of masons and plasterers, and the noise they were making was as confusing as the dirt and dust their destructive hands were creating.
Two surprises awaited me. The first was, that in spite of the fact that the roof was partly torn off, and confusion reigned supreme, that top story contained some of the most lavishly appointed apartments I have ever seen. Pictures, statuary, and bric-à-brac, created by Polish genius, costly vases, rare flowers, exquisite rugs and furniture; and everything in perfect taste. If Cracow without seemed dingy and dead, here it was brilliant and alive. Thus had I pictured my Slav at his best—imaginative, creative, revelling in the beautiful, lavish of colour, yet creating harmonies. Everything around me seemed to breathe out life, and here I could understand the “Noch ist Polen nicht Verloren,” although in the street I had been ready to sing a requiem for the nation.
A hundred questions passed through my brain; questions which I would ask the mother-in-law when she appeared. Then came my second surprise. As I sat there thrilled by contending emotions, the curtain opposite me was thrown back gracefully and quickly, not at all as if a short, stout mother-in-law were behind it—and my eyes fell upon one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. This again was Poland at her best, if not Poland typified. Her eyes were burningly eloquent, yet showed a hidden pathos; her features looked as if chiselled by a master’s hand, yet, in the background, the crude touch was faintly visible. The welcome accorded me was genuinely cordial, yet tinged by the proper reserve.
“How is it,” I asked, after some conversation, “that you don’t look like a mother-in-law, and that you speak English as if you came from Boston?”
“Because,” she said, with the sweetest smile, “I am as yet only a sister-in-law, and I do come from Boston. That is, I lived there for years after my parents were exiled from Poland. I came back here after my marriage.”
This, then, was my chance to ask all manner of questions about the Slavs in general and the Poles in particular, and have them answered in the light of a rather unique experience.
“Why is Cracow a dead city?” This was certainly a perfectly familiar American question, and I received a characteristic answer.
“It is dead because it is ‘crying over spilt milk.’ Nobody is regarded as a patriot unless he talks about our past glory and blames some one in general and the Germans in particular, for the loss of that glory. We might do great things if we would just do them. We have the vision and the talent; but we wear ourselves out, saying what a great people we are and how superior to all other human beings; yet we accomplish nothing. Look at this house of ours, and you see Poland in miniature. I don’t know just how old it is, my husband can tell you; but when it was built, the work was poorly done, and every year it has to be repaired from the bottom up. In America, it would have been torn down years ago, and a new house built, to suit the needs of the times. Instead of that, my husband is spending a fortune trying to make it a fit place to live in, and he never succeeds.
“Yet that is the thing he enjoys. He can scold the workmen half the year for dragging their task along, and the other half year he scolds them for having done their work so poorly.
“You Americans enjoy being comfortable, we Poles enjoy being miserable. If the Polish men had half the energy of the American men, we would indeed be a great people, and Cracow would be a city worthy of our pride in it.”
I am not sure that I am recording the Countess’ exact words, for to see her talk was such an æsthetic pleasure, that I must have forgotten much of what she said; but I give the substance of her words.
“See what America is doing for our peasants!” she continued.
“They go there lazy and shiftless, they come back thrifty and industrious, and are rapidly taking the places of our decayed nobility. When they come back, they have what we Slavs have always lacked—initiative. I wish we could export to you all our stock of Counts.”
I suggested that she might try it as a business venture; for they would bring a good price in our matrimonial market.
“Oh, no!” she replied. “We would want them back. They have talent and devotion; they need only to learn to work, and America is the world’s great boss.”
At this point in the conversation the Count entered the room. The Countess had told me that her home was the type of Poland; she had not told me what I soon discovered, that her husband was the typical Pole, both physically and mentally.
He was a small man with unmistakable Polish features, which looked well worn; for being a Polish nobleman, he had travelled through life swiftly and indulgently. After scarcely five minutes’ conversation, he began talking about the sufferings of the Poles, and what they would do if it were not for those wicked Germans.
Then followed what was as nearly a family jar as I care to witness. My hostess opened wide her beautiful eyes, and, in most forceful Polish, gave her liege lord a piece of her mind.
“I am tired of your tirades against the Germans. I don’t admire their methodical ways, myself; but they are doing things.
“Go out of Cracow to the border and look across, and you will see order on that side and disorder on this. Step into a German train; it is clean and efficiently managed, while our cars, from the first-class to the third, are dirty and ill-lighted and the trains go by fits and starts.
“Go to the German towns, and you will find business flourishing; while ours stagnates. They don’t neglect art, either. Their music may be slower than ours, but it is art; their paintings may not be as brilliant as ours, but they are as artistic. Go to work! Do something worth while! Build from the foundations! Develop some backbone, some character, do better than the Germans, and then you may call them names!”
The sensitive nostrils of the husband grew wider and contracted again. He was furiously angry; but facing him was his Americanized wife, and he knew that “Discretion was the better part of valour”; so he permitted his anger to cool while he nervously bit the ends of his moustache.
“Yes,” he said, ignoring the Countess’ outburst; “there is a great future for us Slavs when we all get together. We were in Prague this summer, at the Slavic Congress, and everything between us was so harmonious that I have great hopes of a Slav Confederation. Then we will crush our German oppressors. What do you think of it?”
I analyzed the situation thus: “As yet, the Slavs lack racial consciousness. Each group, no matter how small, thinks itself different from the other, and often superior to it. Not only are they divided by small historic dissimilarities, but religious differences have obscured racial unity to such a degree that I have but little hope that their racial consciousness will soon ripen into tangible results.
“In the great game of politics, the Slav has given his soul as a pawn, with which popes and patriarchs have gambled. Poland’s national life has been lost, not so much by corruption from within, as because the Pole was used as a tool by the Roman Curia in the game of world politics she was playing, and playing unscrupulously.”
Ah! It was good to see the Countess’ dark eyes dancing from pleasure, while I thus analyzed the situation. I continued:
“The Slav either lacks sane pride in his race, or he has an overbearing conceit; he is either easily crushed, or he crushes, ruthlessly. Look at this daily paper. In Dalmatia, the Serbs break the windows of the Italians, and tramp madly through the streets proclaiming their superiority over the Latins. In Laibach, the Slovene does the same thing to the Germans. Tears down German business signs, shoots, and is shot in turn. In Prague, the Czechs are constantly bombarding the houses of the Germans, until martial law has to be declared. All this, to the detriment of the development of a rational, racial pride.
“And these same boisterous, roistering Slavs, to-morrow will cringe before their Magyar and German masters.
“Another thing is in the way,” I hastened to add; for I saw that my host was eager to talk: “The Slavs lack collective wisdom. Where there are three thinking Slavs, there are always three quarrels. People who wish to rule must learn to act wisely together; yet in the history of the Slavs this collective wisdom, this inability of one group to acknowledge the equality of the other, has been their greatest lack.
“The Russian revolution failed, even as the Polish revolution failed, and as the Czechs’ will fail, because they lack collective wisdom. It will take at least a hundred years,” I concluded prophetically, “before you Slavs will confederate.”
My host laughed nervously. “You are a false prophet. It will come in a decade. We will flow together like small rivers into a great stream. We Poles, of course, being the most cultured, the most civilized, and the best prepared to play the leading rôle, will be the stream into which all these lesser rivers will flow. In the great overture of Slavic union, the Pole will play the leading part.”
To reason with such a man was futile; so I drank my tea and looked at the beautiful lady opposite me, in whom the practical American and the idealistic Pole were so harmoniously blended. Perhaps in her person she was a prophecy of the great day to come.
The Count talked incessantly about Poland, its past, its powers, its enemies; but I was not listening.
From my silence he thought he had convinced me, and as I rose to go, he asked: “Have you not changed your mind about its taking a hundred years to federate the Slavs?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I have changed my mind. It will take two hundred years; unless”—and I looked at my fair hostess—“you bring back many more such Polish women from America.”