Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/78

52 currents of Europe and America, still there were marks of culture and civilization advancing from the West. There were cigarettes and Singer sewingmachines, men whose limbs had been shot off by machine-guns, and two boys from the factorytowns with store-clothes and celluloid collars—ugly contrasts to the smocks and kaftans of the village.

One night standing before a neighbor's hut we were startled to hear thru the curtains a soft and modulated voice asking "Parlez-vous Français?" It was a pretty peasant girl raised in the village but with all the airs and graces which belong to a girl raised in a court. She had served in a French household in Petrograd and had come home to give birth to her child.

Thus in varied ways the outside world was filtering into the village stirring it from the slumber of centuries. Stories of big cities and of lands across the seas came by way of prisoners and soldiers, traders and zemstvo men. It resulted in a strange miscellany of ideas about foreign lands—a curious compound of facts and fancies. One time a grotesque half-fact about America was brought home to me pointedly and in an embarrassing manner.

We were at the supper table and I was explaining that in my note-book I was writing down all the customs and habits of the Russians that struck me as strange and peculiar.

"For example," I said, "instead of having individual dishes you eat out of one great common bowl.