26 January.—­A day’s march nearer home!  This is the Feast of St. Nina.  There is always a feast or a fete here.  People walk about the streets, they give each other rich cakes, and work a little less than usual.

This hotel still keeps its cripples.  Prince Murat sits on his little chair on the landing.  Prince Tschelikoff has his heart all wrong; there is the man with one leg.

Now Mlle. Lepnakoff, the singer, Musaloff, in his red coat, and some heavy Generals are here.  We have the same food every day.

[Page Heading:  ENFORCED IDLENESS]

Perhaps I was pretty near having a breakdown when I came abroad, and the enforced idleness of this life may have been Providential (all my hair was falling out, and my eyes were very bad, and the war was wearing me down rather); but to sit in an hotel bedroom or to potter over trifles in sitting-rooms seems a poor sort of way of passing one’s time.  To rest has always seemed to me very hard work.  I can’t even go to bed without a pile of papers beside me to work at during the night or in the early morning!

When the power of writing leaves me, as it does fitfully and without warning, I have a feeling of loneliness, which helps to convince me of what I have always felt, that this power comes from outside, and can only be explained psychically.  I asked a great writer once if he ever experienced the feeling I had of being “left,” and he told me that sometimes during the time of desolation he had seriously contemplated suicide.

30 January.—­I got a telephone message from Mr. Bevan last night.  He says Baku is too horrible, and there is no news of the cars.  People are telling me now that if instead of cars we had given money, we should have been feted and decorated and extolled to the skies; but then, where would the money have gone?  Last week the two richest Armenian merchants in this town were arrested for cheating the soldiers out of thousands of yards of stuff for their coats.  A Government official could easily be found to say that the cloth had been received, and meanwhile what has the soldier to cover him in the trenches?

Armenians are certainly an odious set of people, and their ingratitude is equalled by their meanness and greed.  Mr. Hills, who is doing the Armenian relief work here, pays all his own expenses, and he can’t get a truck to take his things to the refugees without paying for it, while he is often asked the question, “Why can’t you leave these things alone?” Now that Mrs. Wynne has left I am asked the same question about her.  Russia can “break” one very successfully.

The weather has turned cold, and there is tearing wind and snow.

1 February.—­“No,” says I to myself, in a supremely virtuous manner, “I shall not be beaten by this enervating existence here.  I’ll do something—­if it’s only sewing a seam.”

So out came needles and cotton and mending and hemming, but, would it be believed, I am afflicted with two “doigts blancs” (festered fingers), and have to wear bandages, which prevent my doing even the mildest seam.  Oddly enough, this “maladie” is a sort of epidemic here.  The fact is, the dust is full of microbes, and no one is too well nourished.