I have lost count of time.  I just wait from day to day, hoping someone will come and take me away, though I am now getting so weak I don’t suppose I can travel.

One wonders whether there can be a Providence in all this disappointment.  I think not.  I just made a great mistake coming out here, and I have suffered for it.  Ye gods, what a winter it has been—­disillusioning, dull, hideously and achingly disappointing!

[Page Heading:  MEMORIES OF HOME]

It is too odd to think that until the war came I was the happiest woman in the world.  It is too funny to think of my house in London, which people say is the only “salon”—­a small “salon,” indeed!  But I can hardly believe now in my crowds of friends, my devoted servants, my pleasant work, the daily budget of letters and invitations, and the press notices in their pink slips.  Then the big lectures and the applause—­the shouts when I come in.  The joy, almost the intoxication of life, has been mine.

Of course, I ought to have turned back at Petrograd!  But I thought all my work was before me, and in Russia one can’t go about alone without knowing the way and the language of the people.  Permits are difficult, nothing is possible unless one is attached to a body.  And now I have reached the end—­Persia!  And there is no earthly use for us, and there are no roads.

CHAPTER V

THE LAST JOURNEY

My car turned up at Hamadan on March 9th, and on the 13th I said good-bye to my friends at the Consulate, and left the place with a Tartar prince, who cleared his throat from the bottom of his soul, and spat luxuriously all the time.  The mud was beyond anything that one could imagine.  There was a sea of it everywhere, and men waded knee-deep in slush.  My poor car floundered bravely and bumped heavily, till at last it could move no more.  Two wheels were sunk far past the hubs, and the step of the car was under mud.

The Tartar prince hailed a horse from some men and flung himself across it, and then rode off through the thick sea of mud to find help to move the car.  His methods were simple.  He came up behind men, and clouted them over the head, or beat them with a stick, and drove them in front of him.  Sometimes he took out a revolver and fired over the men’s heads, making them jump; but nothing makes them really work.  We pushed on for a mile or two, and then stuck again.  This time there were no men near, and the prince walked on to collect some soldiers at the next station.  It was a wicked, blowy day, and I crept into a wrecked “camion” and sheltered there, and ate some lunch and slept a little.  I wasn’t feeling a bit well.

That night we only made twenty miles, and then we put up at a little rest-house, where the woman had ten children.  They all had colds, and coughed all the time.  She promised supper at 8 o’clock, but kept us waiting till 10 p.m., and then a terrible repast of batter appeared in a big tin dish, and everyone except me ate it, and everyone drank my wine.  Then six children and their parents lay in one tiny room, and I and a nurse occupied the hot supper-room, and thus we lay until the cold morning came, and I felt very ill.