Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/227

Rh his whip, the sleigh slewing fearfully from side to side while Kuntz and I clung desperately to our seats and begged him to stop.

We told him that Buffalo Bill at his best never did better—but not to do it again. He plied us with incessant questions about the West while we tried to get him to talk about Russia. But in vain. The Russian Revolution was in eclipse. The deeds done in his books with glaring paper covers were so much more blood-stirring and important than those done in the streets of Petrograd.

Not all indifference to the Revolution was so picturesque. The energies of multitudes were absorbed by routine, and the sheer details of finding food and clothes. Others sordidly saw in the Revolution their chance for loot and laziness. They had toiled like slaves, now they would loaf like lords. The Revolution meant to them not freedom for work but freedom from work. They lounged all day on the corners, their sole contribution to the new order being to spit the husks of sun-flower seeds on the pavement. Soldiers became "State boarders," doing nothing in return for the food, clothes and lodging they got from the government. The nights they spent in card playing, their days in sleeping. Instead of drilling they became hawkers peddling rubbers, cigarettes and gew-gaws in the streets.

There was venal criminal indifference, too, to the interests of the Revolution. In positions deserted by the intelligentsia, adventurers and careerists saw