Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/89

Rh I went with Yanishev upon many of his missionary journeys thru the Russian towns and cities. From the skilled artisans in the textile-center of Ivanovo, we ranged thru all ranks of the proletarians down to the slum of the thieves in Moscow, immortalized in Maxim Gorky's The Night Asylum. But always the thoughts of Yanishev were going back to the villages.

Six months later I said good-bye to him at the Fourth Soviet Congress in Moscow. Clinging to his arm was a woman of seventy, very withered and bent. Yanishev introduced her reverently as his "teacher." Beyond the confines of Russia or outside the working-classes her name was quite unknown. But to the young rebels among the workers and peasants her name was everything. With them she had shared hardship, pain and prison. The long years of toil and hunger had left her white and feeble, an object inspiring pity until one saw her eyes. In them were still the fires which had kindled the spirits of scores of young men like Yanishev and sent them out as flaming apostles of the Social Revolution. For the Revolution she had given her life, but had hardly dared dream that she would see it.

Now it had come and she was sitting among her own, with hands clasped in the hand of her young disciple. True, industry was in ruin, the Germans were at the gates, and hunger and cold walked thru the city, yet as she sat in the ancient Hall of